Emma Watson is still trending, so let me point out that identifying as female does NOT make males less likely to be predators.

In fact, the US Bureau of Prisons says 48.47% of male inmates who identify as women are sex offenders, although only 11% of all male prisoners are.

when i think abt how fucked up wait times are for trans people getting medical care, i often think about my own experience in comparison. im a cis woman who naturally produces a lot of testosterone.
at 19-20 i went to the GP for sth completely unrelated, he looked at my face 1/

... or rather he looked at my facial hair and basically said I wanted to see a gynecologist to make sure all was normal. i had a gyno appointment within 6 weeks, she ordered bloods and a scan to check for cysts, i saw her back 3 weeks later and she put me on androcur 2/

now, the only issue i have from high T, since i don't have cysts, is bad skin, greasy hair, and a bit of self consciousness about my neck beard that is easily treated with wax. but in under 3 months i had hormonal treatment for a problem i didn't know I even had before! 3/

What androcur does is it's basically a hormone blocker for testosterone.
in cis women it's prescribed alongside the pill bc getting pregnant while on it is bad (or at least they don't know what it'd do)
it's also given to cis men to prevent/help with prostate cancer iirc 4/

a few years later i accompanied a friend to a trans support group & learned that it's the exact hormone blocker they give to trans women at the beginning of their transition (or in some cases the only meds they get bc some endocrinologists refuse to give HRT) 5/

"Twitter does not lend itself to nuance or subtlety, but legislative proposals and clinical best practice are ill-served by simplistic sloganeering.
So, let me optimistically use Twitter to try to unpack the conflicting views on the govt's conversion therapy bill. 1/20

Apologies in advance for another epic thread, but hopefully this will underscore that differences of opinion on the wisdom of the proposed conversion therapy legislation are not a case of "pure, cold-eyed evil" (thanks Philip Pullman) versus enlightened progressives. 2/20

Those questioning the bill have immersed themselves in the detail: consultation documents, multiple reference studies, a range of responses pro & contra, the interim Cass Review. Before you dismiss them, do them the honour of a similar breadth of research. 3/20

The first thing to understand is that people with qualms about the transgender aspect of the bill are not "in favour of conversion therapy". (Sigh - this should be obvious, but Twitter loves a cheap insult, so it needs saying.) 4/20

A vital question to ask is whether the term "conversion therapy" is even applicable in this context, but to answer that we need to address a more fundamental problem: what did the original proposals mean by "being transgender". 5/20

God help me, but I’ve made a Twitter because I can’t deal with “TERFs” and their ilk for another minute. My daughter has happily lived her life as trans for years. At first I felt so relieved seeing her finally at peace. In the last year, I do not recognise the same person.

I did not notice, but I learned she was avoiding public bathrooms. Running straight to the toilet after a car journey, shopping trip, university. When I notice and ask why, she’s scared of being “clocked” and confronted by “TERFs”. She is going HOURS at university without peeing.

My daughter is in her second to last year of studying medicine. She has a smaller frame than her (cisgendered) sister and refuses to join any sports clubs out of fear of being confronted and harassed. She fears meeting someone in a club and having to out herself or being accused

Of deception. I watch her neglect her studies and scroll through social media, where I find GROWN WOMEN my age telling her she is a fetishist, a pervert, a creep. It devastates her. Nobody knows of her trans status, and nobody ever will. She is now utterly ashamed of herself.

I now have to watch my daughter, after years of misery and a brief period of freedom, endure the same things other minorities like gay people endured in the 1980s. “Turn off your phone” I’ve told her, as any mother would. She says it’s bigger than that and it is.

@tofuecken @jan_knes Sobald #Selbstbestimmungsgesetz im Sport erlaubt sind kommt es zu einem überproportionalen Erfolg durch biologisch männliche Trans Frauen gegenüber biologischen Frauen, bei ausbleibendem Erfolg von trans Männern. Das wird in Deutschland/anderen Sportarten/Ligen auch mehr kommen.

Many have been focused on the 500 win he stole, but I haven't seen anyone do an analysis of the *total* impact of Lia Thomas competing at the NCAA championships.

So I will attempt to do one here.

Please add to this if you have additional points.
1/13

-Emma Weyant cheated out of the 500 national champion title
-Emma Weyant, Erica Sullivan and Brooke Ford cheated out of the 500 trophy and podium spot they earned.
2/13

-Evie Pfeifer cheated out of a 500 podium spot and trophy.
-Tylor Mathieu cheated out of the 500 championship finals.
-Reka Gyorgy cheated out of the 500 consolation finals.
3/13

-Reilly Tiltmann cheated out of the 200 championship finals.
-Ekaterina Nikonova cheated out of the 200 consolation finals.
-Isabel Ivey cheated out of the 100 championship finals.
4/13

-Chloe Stepanek cheated out of the 100 consolation final
-19 NCAA Div 1 women's swim programs definitely ranked illegitimately lower. Thomas scored ALL of Penn's NCAA championship points. ALL of them.
5/13

1/20 🧵

I have been hearing more frequently the narrative that women's sport apparently exists as a 'protected category' so that women can win (because on this account without it no woman will ever win again)

This is: a) *not* the reason why women's sport exists as a category,

2/20

and b) it is *not* true that women will never win again.

This narrative is profoundly paternalistic and keeps women small.

3/20

Let's unpack this a little:

A. Women's sport exists as a category because the dominance of men athletes was threatened by women competing.

We see this over and over again in the history of sport...

4/20

Exhibit A1: Figure Skating

1902: Madge Syers enters the World Champs and comes 2nd (no rule preventing her, though no woman has ever entered before)

1903: Women banned from World Champs

1905: Segregated women's category

5/20

Exhibit A2: Skeet Shooting

1992 Barcelona: Zhang Shang wins the Gold Medal. The event had always been an open event (no gendered categories)

1996 Atlanta: women banned from shooting

2000 Sydney: Segregated women's category, fewer targets for women

@janeclarejones That's why second wave feminism is cancer

1/

I will talk about this topic again, because I think it is important. There are people who are not gender critical, but who are also against gender identity ideology.

2/

The thing is, their reasons why they are against it are different from the reasons why gender critical people are against it.

3/

Gender critical people are against gender identity ideology, because they believe gender is a set of harmful social stereotypes which are especially harmful to women.

4)

Gender identity ideology reinforces the stereotypes. Instead of challenging the stereotypes and changing the society, gender identity ideology wants people to fit into gender boxes by changing their bodies.

5)

It leaves the whole gender system intact.

🧵for @Keir_Starmer who sorely needs it.
1. The GRA introduced in UK law the possibility of changing one's *legal* sex and get a GRC, by dint of which one can be considered the acquired sex in those situations where sex *as confirmed by birth certificate* is relevant.

@bananagirl_kb Bonjour, here is your unroll: https://t.co/EMOKLcadKE Have a good day. 🤖

Now onto The Ottomans — @MarcDavidBaer1 in conversation with @DalrympleWill about Marc’s excellent new book

For more, listen to the @historyhit #NotJustTheTudors podcast interview with Marc by @sixteenthCgirl here:

Hello All!

As some of you might know I am the buyer for the largest bookstore in the country and a Russia/Eastern Europe watcher. Sitting on the convergence of these two interests of mine, I feel it would be a good idea to share a few books about the situation in 🇺🇦 🇷🇺

To make things a bit easy of course, all of the below should be available for purchase in the UK and bear in mind if you’re based outside UK, there might be different editions etc. Please take your business to your local bookstore or waterstones, don’t give money to big bad A!

Firstly, Ukraine. 🇺🇦
Probably the most commonly found book in British bookshops is ‘The Gates of Europe’ by @SPlokhy who is one of the most popular Ukraine scholars in the West, a professor at Harvard and director of Harvard Ukraine Inst. You’ll see his books come up again

Next up is ‘The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation’ by prof. Andrew Wilson of the @UCLSSEES . Great general history of the country. Bear in mind it’s from 2015 though so omits the most recent events.

Another bestseller here is ‘Borderland’ by Anna Reid who was the Kiev correspondent for The Economist 1993-1995. This is an updated version of the 1997 book. I’ve read it pre-update so cannot be sure of how up-to-date it is, but I loved it. Some shops even shelve this as travel

A crash introduction to the ethnopolitical situation in Ukraine 🧵

People know that Ukraine is divided to Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking areas. That's correct. And yet, people assume that political allegiances match up with ethnoligustic ones. That's wrong.

First, how do we define Ukrainian and Russian-speaking zones? If Russian-speaking zone = where ppl predominantly converse in Russian, it's far bigger than that. In February 2014 I was on Maidan, lived, slept there. Everyone I met spoke Russian, except for one woman from Ternopol

That's a very important fact. There are indeed some clearly divided countries like Belgium. Dutch-speaking, rich, conservative Flanders and French-speaking, poor, left-wing Wallonia. Here political divisions match up with ethnolinguistic ones. But not in Ukraine

Almost everyone I met on Maidan spoke Russian among themselves. Many spoke very poor or no Ukrainian. And yet, they strongly identified as Ukrainians. Because ethnic identity and political allegiance in case of such mixed up areas as Eastern Europe are simply matters of choice

There is indeed a political division between the East and the West. As shown on this electoral map - yellow voted for pro-Russian Yanukovich, blue - for Timoshenko. And yet, many 'blue' regions are largely or predominantly Russian speaking. Language =/= identity or allegiance

You will hear the argument that, if LT doesn’t win a race, this shows that LT’s participation is fair. Joanna Harper has a version of this: what we are after is ‘meaningful competition’ and we have that if the outcome is uncertain... (Thread) 1/

...Both these views are, bluntly, wrong. They misunderstand the nature of sporting fairness. Here’s why: (this is going to be a bit philosophical).
The standard work on fairness is John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971 (2nd ed. 1999) ... 2/

...The crucial distinction that we need is on pp. 73- 76, of the 2nd edn. between, otoh *imperfect/perfect* procedural justice and, otoh, *pure* procedural justice... 3/

...Two examples: First, a murder trial, second a Lottery. Start with the murder trial. This is fair *in some sense* if the defendant is found guilty if he did it, and found not guilty if he didn’t do it. Call this ‘outcome fairness’ 4/

...But it is fair *in another sense* if the rules concerning evidence are followed, witnesses are not coerced, the jury does not look up previous accusations on the internet etc. Call this ‘process fairness.’ ...5/