2009: Harriet Harman is squeamish about trans women and so lets the Equality Act get drafted in a sloppy and ambiguous way.
2010: The coalition government passes it and can’t be arsed to read the damned thing, despite trans people (and I was one of them) waving frantically at MPs and senior civil servants.
A decade of dominoes fall…
2025: “I know he was goosestepping past the water cooler yelling ‘Heil Hitler’, but the courts have decided that the Equality Act means we can’t fire him.”
Oh, here’s another fun “ticking time bomb that trans people were ignored about”.
The UK’s same sex marriage legislation modifies the gender recognition act with what came to be known as the “spousal veto”. The rationale, in the act, for this necessarily implies that a same sex marriage is worth less than a mixed sex one.
I want it on record that I, and several other trans people, spent much of 2011 and 2012 frantically warning cis gay MPs and Lords about this, and they did not do a damned fucking thing other than brush us off.
So it’s sitting there, an unexploded bomb against same sex marriage in legislation, waiting for some TERF to set a legal precedent in some fucked up way that will ruin marriage for same sex couples in the UK, the same way they’ve now made it basically impossible to fire raging bigots because of wiggle room in the equality act.
And I know that self interest is insufficient to overcome squick about trans people, but that’s not on us.
THEY WERE WARNED.
... show more
Oh, here’s another fun “ticking time bomb that trans people were ignored about”.
The UK’s same sex marriage legislation modifies the gender recognition act with what came to be known as the “spousal veto”. The rationale, in the act, for this necessarily implies that a same sex marriage is worth less than a mixed sex one.
I want it on record that I, and several other trans people, spent much of 2011 and 2012 frantically warning cis gay MPs and Lords about this, and they did not do a damned fucking thing other than brush us off.
So it’s sitting there, an unexploded bomb against same sex marriage in legislation, waiting for some TERF to set a legal precedent in some fucked up way that will ruin marriage for same sex couples in the UK, the same way they’ve now made it basically impossible to fire raging bigots because of wiggle room in the equality act.
And I know that self interest is insufficient to overcome squick about trans people, but that’s not on us.
Well here in baboon-butt red Utah a small minded white ass bigot just helped get a law passed forbidding trans people from using any restroom in a public building that doesn't conform to the sex they were assigned on their birth certificate.
This without any proof that trans people are in any way doing anything harmful in bathrooms other than - well, using them to go to the bathroom.
I'm gay myself, but when I go to a restroom I go there to pee or poop. That's it. And I expect to be left alone and have privacy. But who keeps wanting to get into our drawers and check out our junk? It's the straight bigots out there.
In most cases where I've felt threatened in public bathrooms it was by leering straight guys, not by anyone on our "side of the fence."
Anyway I don't envy the white "perfect" human who gets the job of checking out the sex designation on other people's birth certificates whenever they use a public restroom.
I read through the amendment to the GRA at legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/… but the understanding I took away from that is that the Spousal Consent provisions that are the subject of that amendment apply exactly the same to heterosexual marriages as they do to homosexual ones: the text just uses the term "protected marriage". I don't think it matters which piece of legislation that schedule happened to ride with, the schedule itself applies only to the GRA 2004 and doesn't distinguish types of marriage. IANAL though, of course.
You did mention however that the worrying bit comes from the rationale, which I unfortunately didn't find. Nonetheless, if it's in the rationale but not in the law, then does it matter?
An Act to make provision for the marriage of same sex couples in England and Wales, about gender change by married persons and civil partners, about consular functions in relation to marriage, for the marriage of armed forces personnel overseas, for …
@Kim Vandry Consider the context. There was no such thing as a “homosexual marriage” when this was enacted. In theory it applies equally NOW but as passed it was “protecting” the poor long suffering wives (and it was them, not the husbands, because I was in the room when the civil servant who drafted it said that she imagined what she would want and wrote that) of trans women from becoming “legally gay”.
Oh definitely! I have no trouble believing those were the people in the room, forming the momentum behind those changes. Largely that'll have just been due to the dominant demographic at the time of who was transitioning at an age old enough to be likely to have spouses who could get upset.
But there's clearly a massive gap between being upset and inventing the preposterous and homophobic notion of "legally gay"!
@Kim Vandry Well, that’s what they did, and the gay parliamentarians we told didn’t do anything to change it (some actually “accidentally” left the room when votes were happening), so you know, when this unexploded landmine eventually explodes … told you so.
@Kim Vandry To a degree. If there’s doubt about the meaning of a bit of law it’s sometimes permissible to look into what Parliament’s intention was to resolve the question.
@chiffchaff FWIW I adapted to mine so much the only time they're weird is if I do it deliberately. (Unless I'm looking down from on top of a mountain or something).
@Sion [main] @Sesquipedality @kæt Most things I do requiring near work can be done in the lower parts of the lenses. This doesn’t work so well for looking closely at fine print at awkward angles, like the RA dial on my telescope.
@sesquipedality My optician mentioned the existence of trifocals, apparently used by electricians, plumbers, etc, which become "close work" again at the top.
When I was working at Royal Mail I put my (reading) glasses on a string, but they got very bashed when I was wheeling trolleys round, etc, rather than reading addresses. In the end I left them on for walking short distances, but that wasn't good for my sense of balance. Luckily the glasses survived being bashed quite well.
@sesquipedality @chiffchaff A few years ago my optician (who kept telling me that my monitor should be placed low so that I had to look down at it) persuaded me to try varifocals. After a couple of weeks I took them back as I didn't get on with them at all, and had them replaced with monofocals. And I ignored his dreadful 'advice' about monitor placement.
UK employment law some time ago set a precedent that trans-hostile beliefs were protected in a workplace environment.
So I'm doing the Cassandra thing again, where once again we warned the rest of you that if you didn't push back, the shit flung at us would start hitting other groups.
Programmers: we are utterly Anglo centric. We work in English and only think about English. We require English naming conventions in name and address fields.
Also programmers: YOUR USE OF AN APOSTROPHE WAS ENTIRELY UNEXPECTED!
I hate that TERFs have taken phrases like, "women and girls", "suffrage", and "equity" and made them into the feminist equivalent of countries with "democratic republic" in their names.
@arroz in nearly 30 years of ignoring letters, we did actually get an inspector once. Was really nice and apologetic, actually, and seemed delighted and surprised we didn't try murder them. I'm sure plenty are arseholes, though.
It’s the “we can apply to court for a search warrant” that particularly irks me. Yes, and I could apply to court to get a search warrant for your knicker drawer. Not getting it though, am I?
@Ryan Frame the thing is, everything in that letter is a lie. They send them to all properties without a licence, but they imply that they have powers that they don’t have, and they pretty much never follow up.
If they ever actually send anyone, you just tell them to go away.
You know, we should really invest in this licensing scheme in the US. So much more opportunity for swatting with no-knock raids. Seems like a no brainer politically.
@joshie 🏳️🌈 They have no procedure for keeping track of people who have contacted them so the only thing that stops the letters is a TV licence. Or possibly a harassment lawsuit. Dunno if anyone has tried that.
Pretty sure I got badly glutted earlier. Immune system throwing a shitfit, joints sore, and my breath stinks. Have calmed it a bit with acetylcysteine, but just gonna have to ride it out. 😞
Reading the sentencing remarks. The girl, Scarlett Jenkinson, appears ti be using this whole procedure as a way to build her “brand” as a serial killer for the instagram generation.
that seems like a mistake, if she branded herself as Defender Of The Wymen she would be celebrated by the terfs and Starmer would argue Sunak’s not doing enough by merely pardonning her and not giving her a CBE
Not pointing at any specifics here, but once upon a time there was a political party, and it talked great words about the values it stood for. It had a constitution about how its policy was decided, democratically, by its members. It said what its values were as they pertained to workers rights and individual liberty.
And it was all lies, because ultimately its constitution meant nothing. It gave the illusion of democracy, but what the party did was ultimately decided by three people over drinks one evening in HQ. Its professed values about how individuals should be empowered, and workers protected, turned out to be the exact opposite of how it behaved when it conducted its own business.
And for a long time, it didn’t matter, because times were, at least in the party’s part of the world, relatively benign.
But when the bogeymen came to tear apart everything the people had taken for granted, to the cheers of a baying mob, all the words of the hypocrites meant nothing. They expected others to play by the rules that they themselves ignored.
And so
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Not pointing at any specifics here, but once upon a time there was a political party, and it talked great words about the values it stood for. It had a constitution about how its policy was decided, democratically, by its members. It said what its values were as they pertained to workers rights and individual liberty.
And it was all lies, because ultimately its constitution meant nothing. It gave the illusion of democracy, but what the party did was ultimately decided by three people over drinks one evening in HQ. Its professed values about how individuals should be empowered, and workers protected, turned out to be the exact opposite of how it behaved when it conducted its own business.
And for a long time, it didn’t matter, because times were, at least in the party’s part of the world, relatively benign.
But when the bogeymen came to tear apart everything the people had taken for granted, to the cheers of a baying mob, all the words of the hypocrites meant nothing. They expected others to play by the rules that they themselves ignored.
And so they were utterly unequal to the task of fighting the monsters.
And the tragic thing is, I could be talking about any number of different political parties in any number of western democracies, and everything I wrote above would still apply.
At this point, the British court system is actively transphobic, acting as the judicial arm of a state that seeks to eradicate trans people, especially women.
When the law is unjust, it must be ignored. Resist transphobia.
It is disappointing to see the Open University back down in the face of obvious justice denied.
I suspect actual judges might have applied the law. Employment tribunals are generally one Employment Judge (not a very senior member of the judiciary) and two lay members, one from an employer's organisation and one from a trade union.
Agreed, but you need to appeal the right cases. I suspect Phoenix is not the right case cos of various facts. I hear the OU had pretty good trans lawyers on their team. Appeal wouldn't just be £200k+, low-success-chance, but endless time and ongoing stress for the OU witnesses & staff.
Forstater's appeal success means Forstater is now binding and the TERFs are super smug about it. That employer had shite policies which left the door open for legal awfulness.
@pdcawley I grieve for my UK friends. We have plenty of dysfunction and scary crap in the states but at least we’ve managed to undo some of it the last four years.
@petealexharris @ajlanes Interestingly Phoenix was in the Times last week moaning about how no ex-colleagues from OU have talked to her (I don't think anyone likes her, funnily enough).
Phoenix also whined that the GC Research Network has run out of oomph and blames "TRAs" & OU of course, but not herself for being the only one obsessively bigoted enough to care, not doing the work from new job cos it was prob only ever a "do thing to get challenged & initiate legal action for".
I haven't seen any sensible trans-clued people's review of it and I'm wary of the Guardian for hosting/promoting transphobia/transphobes.
It's a shitty 150 page read. I don't know how you can force people to be nice to you when you're an obsessive bigot. Open letters about uni stuff happen ALL the time. ET said the letter writers did it to get at Phoenix not the GCRN but they barely knew Phoenix so that's an Assumption...
I've had a quick read but given I am an OU law student, I don't particularly want to stick my head above the parapet with a proper analysis as the VC's statement has made me worried about backlash. And as you say it's 150 pages so LONG. Generally, the impression was of a tribunal that did not understand academic politics and was quick to believe every allegation made even without any evidence to back it up. (See, for example, paragraph 85)
There was also a strong undercurrent that the tribunal believed in forced work in an academic context (e.g. paragraph 56, which stated the OU should have compelled academic staff to organise a conference promioting aims they did not believe in) and had misunderstood the law. (E.g. 560)
I don't think the judgement would necessarily stand an appeal. But the OU are likely worried about cost and reputational risk against an extremely well-funded opponent with extensive backing from right-wing media. Nevertheless, the statement from the VC was clearly panicked and unnecessarily obsequious towards transphobic views.
I think that's a fair overview. I'm not even a law student, just a disability-law nerd.
I don't think you can appeal mis-facts in a judgment if you just a rando witness and not sure even if you're Claimant/Respondent.
I wonder how much was cis white lady tears by Phoenix getting sympathy from the ET panel and the OU witnesses being perceived as unsympathetic cos they didn't cry (I know one of them, they're fucking livid). It becomes a DARVO.
@NatalyaD @ajlanes Well yeah it was obviously exactly that. What research was expected to come out of it?
Intellectual enquiry can be into new understandings of things, or the psychology of why people hold to their views, but it can't simply seek to re-affirm a mainstream view. That's not research in any meaningful sense.
Only imagine my surprise that someone who doesn't understand that turned out not to handle robust criticism well and became unpopular with her colleagues.
@petealexharris @ajlanes Phoenix is whining that in criminology there's ~300 academics in the field (seems an under count) and she's been ostracised by them.
That's cos most criminologists follow the Actual Evidence not some "I get to wave my trauma to be a bigot" like Phoenix did. Also there are already prison policies (not always followed) which Phoenix-and-friends (there's a disturbing children's TV prog title) never talk about either.
My Fediverse app of choice, @Mona app is gradually decaying so it copes less and less well with Friendica. I’ve coped with it being unable to parse notifications on my phone for a while but it’s stopped being able to do it on the desktop either. I asked them about this problem a while back and they said it was Friendica emitting notifications in the wrong form. I lack the cutlery to investigate further so… anyone suggest a good Fediverse client for iOS and MacOS that works nicely with Friendica?
Building out an IoT VLAN with an OpenWRT RPi functioning as a VLAN bridge (via a single Ethernet port).
Getting mDNS proxying working was a PITA. Everything you can Google is out of date, so you have to poke round a bit. Firewall rules take some getting right too, especially if the bridge isn’t also your internet gateway (it’s not).
Still, it’s working, and I’m quite pleased. Can’t AirPlay across it yet, but that’s a project for later.
Sarah's Theory of Modern Politics: When we were young, some of us liked to build sandcastles. Others liked to kick them over.
The Republicans, UKIP/Tories, AfD, Chega, and so on, are the people who kicked sandcastles over, asking for the votes of people who kicked sandcastles over.
"We have to kick over your sandcastle so we can sell the beach to our friend's sandcastle company, and you'll be able to buy ready-made sandcastles from them instead. We're only laughing and pointing at you because you haven't worked out how much better that market-based solution is for your sandcastle enjoyment."
Yup. Approximately 20-25% of the population are permanently fuelled by hate and a desire for revenge on a world that they imagine has always treated them unfairly. But, dangerously, in the present era their ranks are swelled by those whom the world has genuinely treated unfairly. The selfish ultra-rich are unwittingly creating a powder keg. They won’t care until it blows up.
Imagine being Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or Boris Johnson. You have more money than you know what to do with. You could literally afford to go to whatever paradise you want and spend the days of your one life doing whatever you please.
They came so tantalisingly close to having more fulfilling and carefree lives than 99.99% of humans who have ever lived, but instead they want the masses to fear and adore them.
And they are utterly miserable, because nothing will fill the void, and the more they try, the more they debase themselves in front of billions, and the people they most need to respect them probably think they’re losers.
Idiots. Fools. Losers.
Musk is the worst of them. Read some Iain M Banks books, didn’t understand any of then, decided to save the world by becoming a solar power and electric vehicle magnate with space colonies.
But instead he is approaching old age as the proprietor of a bankrupt nazi chat room, and none of his kids will speak to him.
How can you have so many advantages and yet fuck up so amazingly completely?
I wonder whether one day we will look back on these people and know that, as well as being shitty as people, they also didn't have anywhere near as much actual money as they claimed; that it was mostly a shell game.
His wealth isn't enough for a personal space program, but it's enough he's free from ever having to worry about money again as long as he doesn't waste it on crap like super yachts. Now he has multiple homes across the world and spends his time travelling and enjoying himself. That's a much more mature approach and I would wager he's far, far happier than Elon Musk will ever be.
I suspect the advantages are part of the problem. They make it hard to see how tough it is for everyone else to do things, and that is easily translated into blaming them for being useless.
I've recently been doing some cognitive behavioural therapy care of the NHS, with a particular emphasis on activation (getting up and doing things) and self esteem. The last session is this coming Thursday. I think it's been net beneficial, in the sense that it's given me space to talk about things and think about things, and acquire a few more tools to manage my mind.
And the past week or so working for Hughes Hall to understand their Linux and database systems has been a big boost; it's clear that I'm actually pretty damn good at doing this kind of stuff and people seem impressed as if I'm working some kind of deep magic. And yet somehow when I'm sitting here alone it all feels like some kind of illusion in the face of that sense of stuckness and uselessness and yearning. Which I know is lies. I can effect change, I am capaable, I am cared about.
Could all be hormones. My tits are aching with another growth spurt.
Finally got myself an official Pi 5 power supply, so hopefully the thing won't just randomly die under load any more.
Raspberry Pi Foundation love making videos about their "not invented here" approach to power supplies, but guys, you actually suck at it and your continued inability to implement USB C Power Delivery (and PoE) sensibly is getting fucking old.
USB C has this annoying rule that the downstream has to ask for power before the upstream provides anything above 100mA.
The workaround that I used with RPi4 was, I'd use some noname Chinese 3A USB 2 charger — USB 2 doesn't really know or care about this particular rule, the cheap chargers just provide 5V at whatever amperage they can put out — and an USB A <–> USB C cable to connect that 5V 3A to the RPi.
Because of the recent developments at the Raspberry Foundation, I don't think I'll be getting any RPi5:s, so I can't test it myself, but I think odds are good that this approach still works.
oooohhh but if we implement USB-PD and use anything >5V then we would have to add another voltage regulation stage and ooooohhh woe is me
i understand their "lets not add cost for a feature only 2% of users might actually want" philiosphy, but yeah no fuck off pi foundation. power delivery is not one of those things worth saving 12 cents a board on
@joshie 🏳️🌈 Particularly because it ONLY works with their PSU. It will boot up massively degraded from anything else, but at less capability than a Pi 4 (like, it will disable USB boot and if you force enable it, it will randomly die from lack of power).
And don't get me started on the PoE hats that scream and function as heaters when the pi shuts down.
I'm sure the person who wrote this caption wasn't thinking of it this way, BUT:
That truck is stuck directly under the main fan blades of a high-bypass turbofan engine, which function essentially as a ducted propeller. They get rotated by a turbine in the jet exhaust and generate much more thrust than the escaping exhaust gasses themselves.
Propeller is a specific thing in aviation, and that doesn’t include turbofans. It does include turboprops, which is why they have “prop” in the name, and not “fan”.
I wasn’t on Usenet back then, as I was still in elementary school rather than university. But I heard the story later in the 90s. On the radio. I guess that last part makes me old after all.
Was on Usenet (rec.aviation mostly) through most of the second half of the 80s. Left the job that gave me that access in 1990 and had only limited (and pay-per-minute phone call) access for a few years (CIX and Compuserve, don't remember the order) so just used email a bit until a few years later and came back to a very different Internet.
This is not the future we thought we were building in the 90s tech industry. We thought we were going to help people. What we built could have been used to help people, but it’s not. It’s being used as a misery amplifier on a massive scale.
It's pretty frustrating for me. I twigged to the Californian Ideology pretty early; pointed out often that anything which empowered the grass roots also empowered the powerful, if they were smart enough to leverage it. Which they were. I saw no evidence people were actually using the net to do the empowering things they said they wanted to do, but people were too happy to roll their dice on dotcom payouts. I got a career out of it so at one level I guess I shouldn't complain.
@FeralRobots I was 21 and being "on the grid" meant using payphone, realistically. The internet at that point was pre google, and the idea of just being able to use a satellite navigation system, text messaging and email when out and about seemed utterly transformative.
> I pay a small fortune to streaming services and there’s nothing fucking on.
I feel your frustration. Having said that, I've been enjoying New Amsterdam over the past few days. Plus I finally gave Star Trek Prodigy another go and it wasn't bad. Aspects of it were pretty good.
Things I've enjoyed recently: Slow Horses on Apple Fargo s5 on Prime Percy Jackson on Disney Kin and The Tourist on iplayer True Detective s4 just started this week and looks very promising
Sarah Brown
in reply to Sarah Brown • •Oh, here’s another fun “ticking time bomb that trans people were ignored about”.
The UK’s same sex marriage legislation modifies the gender recognition act with what came to be known as the “spousal veto”. The rationale, in the act, for this necessarily implies that a same sex marriage is worth less than a mixed sex one.
I want it on record that I, and several other trans people, spent much of 2011 and 2012 frantically warning cis gay MPs and Lords about this, and they did not do a damned fucking thing other than brush us off.
So it’s sitting there, an unexploded bomb against same sex marriage in legislation, waiting for some TERF to set a legal precedent in some fucked up way that will ruin marriage for same sex couples in the UK, the same way they’ve now made it basically impossible to fire raging bigots because of wiggle room in the equality act.
And I know that self interest is insufficient to overcome squick about trans people, but that’s not on us.
THEY WERE WARNED.
... show moreOh, here’s another fun “ticking time bomb that trans people were ignored about”.
The UK’s same sex marriage legislation modifies the gender recognition act with what came to be known as the “spousal veto”. The rationale, in the act, for this necessarily implies that a same sex marriage is worth less than a mixed sex one.
I want it on record that I, and several other trans people, spent much of 2011 and 2012 frantically warning cis gay MPs and Lords about this, and they did not do a damned fucking thing other than brush us off.
So it’s sitting there, an unexploded bomb against same sex marriage in legislation, waiting for some TERF to set a legal precedent in some fucked up way that will ruin marriage for same sex couples in the UK, the same way they’ve now made it basically impossible to fire raging bigots because of wiggle room in the equality act.
And I know that self interest is insufficient to overcome squick about trans people, but that’s not on us.
THEY WERE WARNED.
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tygerprints
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Well here in baboon-butt red Utah a small minded white ass bigot just helped get a law passed forbidding trans people from using any restroom in a public building that doesn't conform to the sex they were assigned on their birth certificate.
This without any proof that trans people are in any way doing anything harmful in bathrooms other than - well, using them to go to the bathroom.
I'm gay myself, but when I go to a restroom I go there to pee or poop. That's it. And I expect to be left alone and have privacy. But who keeps wanting to get into our drawers and check out our junk? It's the straight bigots out there.
In most cases where I've felt threatened in public bathrooms it was by leering straight guys, not by anyone on our "side of the fence."
Anyway I don't envy the white "perfect" human who gets the job of checking out the sex designation on other people's birth certificates whenever they use a public restroom.
Kim Vandry
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Thanks for the info, I didn't know about this.
I read through the amendment to the GRA at legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/… but the understanding I took away from that is that the Spousal Consent provisions that are the subject of that amendment apply exactly the same to heterosexual marriages as they do to homosexual ones: the text just uses the term "protected marriage". I don't think it matters which piece of legislation that schedule happened to ride with, the schedule itself applies only to the GRA 2004 and doesn't distinguish types of marriage. IANAL though, of course.
You did mention however that the worrying bit comes from the rationale, which I unfortunately didn't find. Nonetheless, if it's in the rationale but not in the law, then does it matter?
Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013
www.legislation.gov.ukSarah Brown
in reply to Kim Vandry • •Kim Vandry
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Oh definitely! I have no trouble believing those were the people in the room, forming the momentum behind those changes. Largely that'll have just been due to the dominant demographic at the time of who was transitioning at an age old enough to be likely to have spouses who could get upset.
But there's clearly a massive gap between being upset and inventing the preposterous and homophobic notion of "legally gay"!
Sarah Brown
in reply to Kim Vandry • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Kim Vandry • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • •Alexandra Lanes likes this.