Sex Matters (Threadreader)
"Thank you for all the kind appreciation of our live tweeting of #MayaAppeal today (including offers of Veuve Cliquot). What we'd like best of all is if you'd head over to our website and sign up to the campaign.
And please talk to your friends, relatives and colleagues. Here's our 'elevator pitch' in thread form.
Sex matters to everyone. Girls and women need privacy from boys and men - in school and public toilets; in changing rooms at swimming pools, gyms and clothes shops.
Girls and women need to be able to ask for intimate healthcare procedures to be carried out by female doctors and nurses. Women in prison or under arrest need to be sure that if they are subjected to an intimate search, it will be carried out by a woman.
Women fleeing male violence need women-only spaces to feel safe. It’s neither safe nor fair to expect women to play sports against people with larger, stronger, faster male bodies.
It’s neither safe nor fair to imprison vulnerable women with male-bodied criminals. And even though female people pose little threat to men and boys, male people also deserve privacy and dignity when they are undressing and washing: single-sex spaces matter to everyone.
Male bodies are different from female bodies. So sex matters in medicine. Drugs work differently in men and women. Diseases occur at different rates and have different symptoms for men and women. Women need to be screened for cervical cancer; men for prostate cancer.
Inviting “people with a cervix” or “people with a prostate” for screening may cause men and women who have learning disabilities or who don't have English as their first language to miss out on crucial healthcare.
This should all be obvious. But some campaigners for trans rights want male-bodied people who identify as women to be treated as women in every single respect, even when that undermines the safety, privacy and dignity of women and girls.
These campaigners have been astonishingly successful. Rapists are being held in women’s prisons. Police forces are saying that any male police officer who identifies as a woman is entitled to carry out intimate searches of female suspects.
Hospitals are refusing to guarantee same-sex care on request, even for intimate procedures. Schools and workplaces are making their toilets unisex in breach of legal requirements.
People who argue against all this are being slurred as bigots, bullied on social media, doxxed, hounded out of their jobs and even physically assaulted.
Sex Matters is a new organisation that is fighting back on behalf of everyone. It is not affiliated with any political party or position. It’s neither left nor right, neither socialist nor conservative. It’s for people of both sexes, all ages, and all religions or none.
It simply seeks to establish that sex matters in rules, laws, policies, language and culture, and to make it possible for people to say so without risk to their jobs and livelihoods.
There’s a lot of work to be done. We need to lobby for clarity on sex in law and institutions. We need to talk to MPs and peers, regulators, civil servants, public bodies, charities, employers, schools and universities.
We need to produce research, guidance and analysis to counter the flood of misinformation from trans activist organisations.
We need to support and mobilise ordinary people to speak up.
We need to hold organisations accountable: we need to write letters, make freedom of information requests, bring or support legal challenges.
Will you join us? Please go to sex-matters.org and sign up."
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Solidarity 