A Woman Saying No!
Update 600. Welcome To Terf Month. #BeMorePorcupine.
So we have got to Update 600 !!!! 🎈🎉🥳
Thanks to all my subscribers for their support.
As I mentioned in my post about Terf Month, we are starting our Terf Month ( to counteract Queer Month) a bit early and we will be featuring great speeches on the theme of women’s rights. Please keep those suggestions coming in. Please send a link if you can.
And to start us off it really had to be the young woman I call The Unknown Soldier of Melbourne Let Women Speak ( I think nobody knows who she is …still). What a speech!
Thanks to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
Australia - Larping Man Of The Year!
Feminist Legal Clinic reports ( I think the reference to ‘transgender woman’ is because FLC are quoting the Daily Mail):
Transgender woman is handed ‘Woman of the Year’ award by Australian state MP (20 May)
An Australian ‘Woman of the Year’ award has become the subject of furious backlash because the winner was not born female.Transgender woman Brianna Skinner was named the 2025 Sydney Local Woman of the Year this week.
Source: Transgender woman is handed ‘Woman of the Year’ award by Australian state MP | Daily Mail Online
New Zealand - Indoctrination Of Children
Leah Panapa on The Platform interviews Penny Marie of Let Kids Be Kids about the cancellation of a ‘Lil Gay Out’ event scheduled for a school by the Inside Out group. The school claimed that they had received threats from ‘gender critical’ campaigners though there was no evidence of this. Excellent interview.
The For Women Scotland Judgment - The Aftermath
A petition has started calling for the use of sex based language in all government health programmes.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/716553
I drew attention to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s draft guidance which is out to consultation here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/thought-crime-the-lucy-connolly-appeal
I am still reading through it and will report back in due course.
Kellie-Jay Keen comments on this very strongly here:
EDI Jester has also commented very strongly on the matter:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-164021836
Feminist Legal Clinic reports:
Labour to ban transgender women from all-female shortlists (21 May)
Labour will ban transgender women from all-women shortlists after the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of a woman, The Times has learnt.
The party’s ruling body will vote on Tuesday on measures to scrap rules that allowed its positive action schemes to be operated on the basis of self-identification, as Britain’s equality regulator is expected to say lavatories, changing rooms and shelters should be run on the basis of biological sex.
Separately, a report prepared for Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) said that it was “not legally defensible to continue to apply [positive action] measures on a basis other than relating [to] individuals who were biological women at birth only”.
The report said the Supreme Court judgment affected who could attend Labour’s women’s conference, who could stand for the role of women’s officer and sex or gender quotas.
The committee also said that putting on this year’s women’s conference would come with additional security risks, given the attention on the judgment, and would be likely to attract protests. It said there was a “significant risk of legal challenge” and there would also be a “political risk” that it could overshadow the rest of Labour’s national conference. The report therefore recommended it be postponed.
Maya Forstater, the chief executive of the charity Sex Matters, said it was “good news that the Labour Party NEC is being urged to accept that women and men are, and always have been, two biological sexes”
She said: “This basic truth must be acknowledged and implemented within the infrastructure of the Labour Party. However, the suggestion that the right thing to do is to postpone the women’s conference rather than simply running the event as it was always intended to be — for women — is simply outrageous.”
She added: “There would be no good reason to postpone the planned conference just because it is for women, as defined in the Equality Act. This is direct discrimination against women in the Labour Party.”
Source: Labour to ban transgender women from all-female shortlists
https://feministlegal.org/labour-to-ban-transgender-women-from-all-female-shortlists-the-times-uk/
EDI Jester has something to say about all of this ( all thoughts gratefully received):
On her substack, Small Revolutions, Every Day Rachel Hewitt, starting with the Custody of Infants Act 1839, reports on men subverting legislation that was intended to advance women’s rights.
To Keep Women Safe, Legislators must Assume the Worst - not the Best - of Men
History has shown us, time and time again, that men jump at the chance to wield the law as a weapon against women
May 14, 2025
In the UK, we are in the midst of impassioned legal debates, in which the benefits of certain options for one group are being weighed against the attendant risks for other groups.
The Assisted Dying Bill - which yesterday passed its first stage in Scotland, and which will be debated again in England tomorrow - is welcomed by campaign groups such as My Death, My Decision, who argue that ‘terminally ill adults [should be allowed] to make the compassionate choice to end their lives on their own terms.’ However, opponents argue that the Bill has ‘insufficient safeguards to protect some of the most marginalised in society, particularly women subjected to gender-based violence and abuse by a partner,’ and, if passed into law, could become ‘a new tool to harm vulnerable women.’
Another case in which benefits to one group are being weighed against detriments to another is last month’s ruling of the UK’s Supreme Court, who clarified that the word ‘woman’, as used in the 2010 Equality Act, refers to biological women and not gender identity. This ruling clarifies that it is legal (but not compulsory) for services such as domestic violence refuges to exclude people who were not born female. Many of the ruling’s opponents argue that the ruling was ‘unnecessary’ and harms potentially significant numbers of trans women in the name of what they claim to be a very low risk to women: that a small minority of predatory men will claim to be women in order to access spaces (such as refuges, or prison and hospital wards) in which biological women are vulnerable.
Campaigners in favour of the Assisted Dying Bill and campaigners against the Supreme Court ruling both use a similar language of compassion in order to defend groups that are undoubtedly vulnerable: the terminally ill, and trans people in need of support after sexual violence. But some of those campaigners rarely express similar compassion for the people, most of whom are women, who would be rendered at risk of men’s deadly abuse by the passing of a badly drafted Assisted Dying Bill, or by the overturning of the Supreme Court ruling.
Rachel concludes:
It is time to do away with the argument that it is ‘vanishingly rare’ that men exploit legislation in order to harm women. It is not. History shows that, time and time again, misogynist men are swift, devious and committed in their exploitation of legal loopholes to hurt both individual women and large demographic groups of often marginalised and vulnerable women. Instead of claiming that such exploitation never happens, I would rather that those opponents of the Supreme Court ruling and those supporters of the Assisted Dying Bill who rely on such arguments - and not all do - were, instead, honest and admit that, when weighing up the benefits of their preferred legal options versus the harms to women that would certainly result, they simply feel that women are less important. For anyone who wishes to keep women and girls safe, however, it is imperative to fight for legislation that assumes the worst - not the best - of men.
The full piece is here:
https://rachelhewitt.substack.com/p/to-keep-women-safe-legislators-must
Free Lucy Connolly
I reported on Lucy’s failed appeal to the Court of Appeal here:
Andrew Doyle has now reported on this shocking judgment on his substack here:
Free Lucy Connolly
No citizen should be in prison for offensive tweets.
May 21, 2025
In what has become an emblematic case of the UK’s betrayal of free speech, Lucy Connolly has now lost her appeal for early release. This mother and childminder had posted an offensive tweet in the direct aftermath of the Southport murders, in which a psychopath brutally attacked children with a knife at a yoga class. She had believed the false claim that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker, and written online that she had no objection to people burning down hotels where immigrants were residing.
The tweet was taken as evidence that Connolly had intended to ‘stir up racial hatred’ and incite violence during the febrile climate of the summer riots. It had been deleted within hours, no violence occurred as a result, and yet she was sentenced to 31 months in prison. Given that the severity of Connolly’s sentence was doubtless related to unofficial government pressure on the judiciary, many have made the case that Connolly is a political prisoner.
For all our shared revulsion at the tweet, we must remember that we are still talking here about words, not actions. It was completely right that Philip Prescott, a man who attacked a mosque as part of a mob during the riots, was sentenced to 28 months in jail. But Connolly has received an even longer sentence having committed no acts of violence at all. Many rapists and paedophiles have been treated far more leniently. I know of no sound argument that could possibility justify this state of affairs. It is the very definition of two-tier justice.
The full piece is here:
Women’s Rights Network - Red Flag Campaign
In the wake of the For Women Scotland judgment, the Women’s Rights Network have launched their Red Flag Campaign against mixed sex changing rooms.
Terf News Round Up
Comprehensive and detailed round up of Terf News from the States and also from around the world from Lila Jones on the substack Woman: Adult Human Female.
I particularly enjoyed ( in relation to the Supreme Court judgment):
Imagine that! Sex means biological sex. Gender means zippo. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. Nyet. Ciao. Goodbye. Auf Wiedersehen. Catch ya later.
https://wahf.substack.com/p/april-9-15-maine-rep-speaks-up-for?r=7ogxh&triedRedirect=true
Let Women Speak
There are two LWS rallies this weekend! My wife and I can’t make those but will be at the General Medical Council one. If any readers attend one or both of this weekend’s events, please let us have a report back. Full details are here:
https://www.letwomenspeak.org/events
Flower Show
My wife and I went to the Chelsea Flower Show yesterday ( for readers outside the UK, the biggest and most famous flower show here) and had a great day, albeit we spent most of our lunch break discussing the ins and outs of the Lucy Connolly case!! We are reclaiming the Chelsea Show for the hoi polloi 🤣
Here are some photos 😊
Endpieces
Since this is Update 600 I am joining in.
From Liz
From Tenaciously
From Dusty
#BeMorePorcupine
#LeaveKidsAlone
#AdultHumanFemale
#LetWomenSpeak
#FreeLucyConnolly
#KeepOnKeepingOn
#HoldTheLine
#KeepOnTerfing
#NeverSurrender
#NeverForget
#TruthWillTriumph
Taking it to the transtapo. We shall not be moved.
Fantastic. What a formidable speech