Unions threatening strike action if males with a trans identity not allowed access to female toilets.

Maybe it’s time for women to strike.

Turnout in PCS elections is so comically low that I'd forgotten Serwotka was no longer GS.

PCS has a concentrated form of the problem you get in some other public sector unions, where there are some very good people at branch level, but the leadership are fixated on their image as a Very Left Wing Union, and they're more interested in performatively supporting the Current Thing than doing the basic stuff around pay and conditions.

I'm entitled to join FDA, and sometimes think about it, but I'm not convinced FDA has a membership pitch beyond "we're not as barking as PCS".

If not Hush icake may have been referring to Gnarl

It's a daily mail article which doesn't tells you that it's highly likely not to be accurate.

A headline stating that a union is supporting one if it's membera is unlikely to create clicks

I agree. Definitely same vibes! And what @spannasaurus said, about how they were defeated.

So the pressing issues calling for a motion to strike are:

1. Opposing the SC ruling as it prevents trans members from accessing their work place.

OK let's hope it goes all the way and Saorsa get lots of mainstream screen time.

I had a guess upthread. I was thinking of the episode 'Hush'.

Even that framing buys into making it sound poor men and enables them.

In actual fact, is the Prime Minister aware that the largest union for civil servants is considering strike action over men being required to respect women's rights, protections and equalities in law?

Too much of this is about 'what men aren't allowed' and not about the actual desire is to do something no decent man would have done to women in the first place. It's like a mugger whining about being made to hand back the mobile phone they just snatched off someone. If they are going to strike for male supremacism and subordination of women then they can bloody well be honest about it.

Ah, cool, was scratching my head!

Is this?

Can I just check - Unions are going to strike over the right for men to access women's loos? Honestly honestly?

It's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm struggling to think what character it could be though.

What is BtVS? Hints are fine!

So to be clear: the civil service union wants to strike to demand that, in contravention of the law, males be given access to female toilets.
Gosh that's certainly some hill to die on.

I suppose we can be grateful that the UK left haven't adopted the American/Canadian/Australian practice of starting all their meetings with land acknowledgments.

Yet.

And those characters were defeated by a woman finding her voice and speaking up

That guy is burned into my memory.

"James Jackson, Sacramento, he/him"

He said it every time he had a complaint and there were many 😂

Chatter, whispering, gendered language, applause, aggressive scents 😂
Don't talk to cops.
Dont talk to anyone without credentials
It was never ending.

I think there's an element of what Helen Joyce has described about the chilling effect of having one parent of a trans-identified child in a workplace, even if the child is an adult.

I've seen this myself, where you have a lovely bloke who everyone respects, whose daughter is now identifying as his son, he gets very evangelical about the whole thing, and nobody wants to upset him.

I imagine it's the trans parents who are pushing for the denunciations of Cass.

Appealing to parents perhaps?

Yep - against my better judgement but unfortunately our employers' behaviour has been so hideous that our union (local branch) is desperately needed right now. They are a lot more effective on their own than UCU national and have already won local disputes.

But I'm reliably informed that there are a lot more GC employees around than you might think. Some of my colleagues, I'm pleased to say, did sign the leter in support of Kathleen Stock, although interestingly enough all the signatories were on the cusp of retirement or have now left on the VS scheme. Those not able to leave because of the changing HE climate have for understandable reasons not signed.

But even in our captured union/HE system I would confidently predict that there is no way would they achieve a 50% turn out over this. Aside from anything else people have strike fatigue and have already lost a fortune.

I'm still open-mouthed over the images posted by our incompetent GC, who was initially elected on the mandate that she would stand up for women's rights. Just awful - and an embarrassment to the lot of us.

@teawamutu that's a difficult one. My own branch is quite sensible, but we are a small group and not factionalised, iyswim. So it's easier to be open with one another as we are collegiate rather than confrontational.

The Union is dominated by the high membership big departments of DWP and HMRC, and they are very factionalised, with each faction always seeking control and it can be very confrontational. There are GC women out there because I've seen them speak at conference, but overall the activists are very left wing and seem to have adopted this as a very important left-wing issue. Those women are a lot braver than me.

The glimmer of hope I see is that in my local Labour party, members who once were ultra loyal to the TRA cause have figuratively turned on a sixpence, and you'd think they'd never supported it. So I wonder how much of this support was skin deep.

Well, two fingers to that!

What do we want? Free kit kits!
When do we want them? NOW!

I doubt if such a strike would be legal, any more than one to be allowed to take Kit Kats from the canteen, without paying.

Slightly off topic but why are all these unions also bringing the Cass review into it? (mentioned in article re PCS, and also commented on by UCU).

The Cass review relates to evidence-based children's healthcare.

Presumably not many union members are children??