JKR - language

But no matter how late to the party you are, the idea that men can be women because some women have a condition affecting their ovaries, a body part only women have, is just so asinine. It literally makes no sense. It cannot be a good faith argument. Nobody ever had a woman say to them, "I have PCOS" and responded "Oh, so you're a man, you'd better start using the gents".

@ThatCyanCat - they are still saying it because people are joining this issue late in the game. "Gender neutral toilets in your house" will inevitably follow.

I know it's bloody annoying to be retracing footsteps from years back. Buit I keep thinking, each of us entered this at our own pace for our reasons or prompts. The women of FWR were generous with their knowledge and expertise so I in turn of FWR to have more patience than comes naturally.

Of course, if it's in bad faith or disingenuous, sod all that.

Fuck me, people are STILL saying men can be women because some women have the exclusively female condition of PCOS or choose a butch aesthetic?

You know, this is why you lost. You controlled all the institutions, you silenced dissent, and you still fucking lost because this is your argument. Some women have an ovarian condition, or choose to have short hair and no makeup, and therefore men are women. Listen to yourself. Nobody believes it, including you. We know you aren't capable of shame, but jeez, aren't you embarrassed?

Indeed. The 'gender' movement needs to stop trying to claim women with PCOS are 'intersex', too.

And:

Firstly, it's not about toilets, it's about women having any right to any singe sex provisions and rights

But even then, no one is going to prosecute any individual for being in the wrong toilet. All this performative hand wringing about toilet police and 6 foot bearded transmen is total fantasy because the EA legislation applies to employers and service providers not individuals.

A trans person who decides their desire to be in the opposite sex space is more important than the fact they know they should not be there is no breaking any law, unless it's part of a wider pattern of harassment and nuisance. However, the organisation responsible for providing that resource may find themselves on the wrong end of a discrimination lawsuit if they are claiming to provide a single sex resource but not in fact making a genuine attempt to do so, and so it is very much in the interests of these organisations to find workable solutions.

This with gigantic great big bells on.

As a woman with PCOS please stop ‘defending’ me, it’s really fucking insulting and completely inaccurate, I’ve never had any issues with people being able to identify me as a woman, my testosterone level while high have never come close to the lowest level that would be considered normal range for a man, because that would be medically impossible. Women with PCOS are not in any way, shape or form male or male-like.

BTW like @Waitwhat23i too have PCOS [waves to Wait]. I have short hair. I’m moderately tall for a woman. I can’t remember the last time I wore a dress and my voice is pretty low-pitched. Yet mysteriously no-one in any real life situation in my adult life has ever thought I was anything other than a woman for so much as a nanosecond. Is this some strange occult power or is it simply that we humans are pretty good at correctly identifying the sex of other humans?

No, YOU are trying, quite cyncically and deliberately, to turn women against women.

You are suddenly so super hand wringly concerned about a handful of women who might - might - be momentarily embarassed in the ladies, yet you don't give a shit about the thousands, maybe millions of women who are far more distressed at the idea of being told they are a subset of people who "identify as women" as as such should have no moral or legal right to differentiate or distance themselves, socially or phsyically, from men who claim to be women ever, for any reason.

Not because they have been raped
Not because they don't like being stared at or touched
Not because they want to talk about their female body and embodied experiences and needs
Not because they are sick of men dominating and reframing their experiences and their voices
Not because they want to learn without being patronised or laughed about
Not because they want to look for understanding with people who have similar experiences
Not because their religion tells them they must (no I don't believe their religion is right about that, but I also recognise that if you make it impossible for a woman to do things without alienating herself within her social network, she just stops doing those things. Banning what such women need to go out into the world doesn't free them, it just stops them going out.)

I am so sick of women who have only discovered their concern for female people when someone finally said No to colonising men.

Did the cocktail nights in the Mended Drum ever take off or were the Scumble Martinis a bit of a misstep?

I've always thought it would be interesting if the Librarian did some tours of the Library. Price - a banana each patron.

No, we really won’t and we never have. I’m not sure why you - or the rather incoherent woman on this video - object to enhanced rights for trans men. Perhaps you could explain?

😂 You're all doing a great job. And well done, Stanley, bless him!

Vimes, Gaspode and the others are always a delight to see. Why is there no DeathOfRats here? I always felt that was a username someone ought to have.

Post and Mint continue to thrive.

Stanley's stamp collection is now one of the Top 20 Must See attractions according to Time Out Ankh-Morpork. We're all very proud.

She mocked the absurd idea that asexual people are oppressed^ & we need a day to… feck knows what the point of it is meant to be, frankly.

She is probably also - rightly! - treating the redefinition of asexual to include “people who maybe aren’t very keen on sex” as an absolute nonsense. It is unusual to genuinely not experience sexual attraction - in my case, it’s related to my autism - but it really doesn’t impact my life to any significant degree. Other than that I now get second-hand cringe from eejits wafting about with flags & claiming we are an oppressed minority because we don’t have any interest in sex. Or indeed, because we’re not at it like rabbits/need an emotional bond to even consider having sex/whatever other nonsense people claim makes them asexuals [who willing have sex when they feel like it].

I absolutely advocate for the thorough mocking of that kind of self-indulgent twaddle. It is crass beyond belief to even venture that the A experience the same oppression as the LGB, or even that our experiences are similar. People assuming I am straight & simply happen to be happily single is just grand. It causes zero harm; ditto people asking me out - or indeed flirting with me, unless we are counting the harm to their egos when I simply don’t register that’s what they’re doing.

Not all minority groups need days/flags/charities etc etc. Rowling was criticising attention-seeking; not the fact that some people are asexual - & I am all for her criticising away, not least because the “I’m asexual but I have sex Because Reasons” crew actually ARE a problem for asexuals, because they create the expectation that asexual people are in fact interested in sex.

^ “Happy International Fake Oppression Day to everyone who wants complete strangers to know they don't fancy a shag.” [Accompanied by an image including following text: “International Asexuality Day
April 6th
Asexuality is where a person experiences little to no sexual attraction. Asexual people can form deep emotional connections & relationships but don't experience sexual attraction in the same way as others.
switchboard
connecting you to LGBTQ+ support”] (JKR 1217 06/06/25)

The social contract was key. To put it simply, the past tolerance and smooth functioning of single-sex services relied on trust and mutual respect. This movement removed both.

PS

How are the Post and Mint etc. going? Hope all's running smoothly. Did you know Vimes and a few others hang around here too, sometimes?

You're absolutely bonkers to think women will need to prove we're women. We are women and as such will be the only ones to use women's facilities. Good on JKR for standing firm on this

Bless your presumably very young heart.

Gender non-conforming women, women with facial hair and butch women have always been welcome in women's spaces and always will be. We older generation who lived through the 80s aren't impressed by all the pontificating and posturing that suddenly no one can distinguish sex and gender. Annie Lennox and Grace Jones were doing that 40 odd years ago.

Access to toilets etc has been by social contract. We don't need inspections or checks, we just need everyone to behave reasonably.

If transwomen feel uncomfortable in male spaces, they should campaign for more acceptance by their brothers and wider awareness. Co-opting women's spaces is not a reasonable thing to do, it's misogynistic as hell.

"Make the women budge up and accept some men because men are awful"... No fucking thank you.

When I'm out now I look at people and think male or female? How do I know? I honestly couldn't describe in words how I know how that's a man and that's a woman. I just do. I remember the feminine, long haired man in the women's changing rooms at centre parks. I didn't know how to challenge him, but I did know he was a man.

And that means you also don't know how vulnerable they are themselves - and there are vulnerable people caught up in this. In that context, my finding it amusing is also uncomfortable, but sometimes it feels like the only rational response (or is, in part, a coping mechanism in response to a degree of dogmatism I actually find quite frightening).

It really is. I don't like the word hysterical, because of the obvious connotations, but videos like that really do come across as such. I don't know what the psychological processes are, but can't help but think there'll be an overlap with the fervour of religious indoctrination, the Cultural Revolution, the Red Scare etc. - periods of mass anxiety and catastrophising in the absence of sufficient supporting evidence. And I guess now, as then, proponents will cover the full spectrum of evangelical believers through to cynical opportunists. Maybe one of the most disorientating aspects of such videos is being unsure which is which - or rather, given that there's an actual spectrum here, where the speaker sits on it.

You could fill a stadium with 100,000 people and correctly sex all of them. Maybe a handful of people would be a bit tricky, but not after getting them to talk and move around. A four year old child could do it with reasonable accuracy FFS.

The idea that all of a sudden women with things like PCOS - who have always existed, to use a commonly trotted out line - will be “turned on” is delusional nonsense.

That’s an excellent point.

Nobody would have been unsure whether Boy George, Marilyn, Annie Lennox or Grace Jones was in the right toilet.

Ooh yes, I’d like to hear more about this. Do a video to camera about it!

”So I have a friend, she has PCOS, she totally looks really manly because of it, you know? Whiskers on her chin. I worry people will ask her if she’s a man which will be totally mean. So I asked her about how she feels about the fact people might mistake her for a man and I haven’t heard back, I’ll let you know what she says when she gets back to me.”

I watched part of the video. The dismissive, accusatory tone - 'those people' and 'do you know what you've done?' or similar was rather unpleasant, but despite that, I have to say, it made me smile.

Maddy, I don't know how old you are, but how on earth do you think things worked in, for example, the 80s, 90s and 00s (in which, perhaps not co-incidentally, gender non-conforming women and men were, arguably, far more common - females with short hair, and males with nail varnish and make-up)? None of the dystopian nonsense this video envisages was the case then, and there's no reason there should be such now.

One thing, and one thing only has changed between then and now, and that is the re-conception of what it means to be a woman by those such as this video-maker and yourself. Back then, the social consensus that there are 2 sexes and that 99.99% of the time we can all tell the difference between them, meant toilet use was perfectly straightforward. Better still, that same consensus about sex enabled greater acceptance of gender non-conformity, with an understanding that both sexes could present as more/less masculine/feminine, and this wouldn't affect the spaces they'd use. Lastly, the collective confidence in that consensus enabled a far more relaxed attitude towards variation in outward appearance, meaning that people were often more chilled than they are now about a minority of outliers - those with DSDs and transwomen - using the spaces they felt were best for them.

Back when these spaces were accepted as being there to accommodate a physical body type, there was no confusion or uncertainty. It's activists like you that have insisted on a re-evaluation of who should/shouldn't be denied entry based on arbitrary values best described as the outward appearance of masculinity and femininity (values previously seen as nebulous and regressive) that have brought about this situation.

To accuse women who are seeking to re-establish the straightforward, fully-functioning status quo of earlier years as encouraging policing of external appearance (in some comical dystopian vision of inspectors and paperwork, what's more) is ironic beyond belief.

You did this to yourselves.

Some days I find it infuriating - today, it honestly feels genuinely funny.

April 1990, married women in the UK were recognised as autonomous, independent entities by HMRC. Their income was no longer treated as their husband’s income.
October 1991 (in England), it was established that rape within marriage is unlawful.
Less than 15 years later, debates in the House of Lords accurately anticipated the consequences for women if the GRA were to pass. Nonetheless, it did.

From women sloughing off some of the last vestiges of being property and existing as a recognisable class with legal autonomy, to being socially and (il)legally reclassified as no more than a feeling. Less than 15 years if GRA 2004 is your marker. Less than 20 years if it’s the clash with EqA 2010.
Adjust the timelines for women in Scotland, Wales, and NI.

JKR is sex realist and a pro-woman activist. We are this far into the 21st century and somehow it’s still necessary to argue the case for this after a negligible respite in historical terms.

She mocked the idea that 'asexuality' is an oppressed category who need to 'come out' and have a day to celebrate them. As did most of the uk population.