At last, a union standing up for women. Bravo, Scottish Tenants Union!

[ArabellaScott]

From their new crowdfunder:

'The STO was founded over one hundred years ago at the end of the first world war by working class women, to represent their communities. Today we exist to do just that, representing the majority of Scots who live in public housing schemes and fighting for those who want to.

Crowdfunding Appeal: Help Us Build a Women-Led Tenants Union
Donate today to protect single-sex spaces, stop cancel culture, and empower working-class women.

---

The Crisis of Our Institutions, Set Up To Defend Working Class People.
Scotland’s unions have abandoned women.

• Unison, Unite, and the STUC have all made coded statements attacking nurse Sandy Peggie, a feminist campaigner who dared to defend single-sex services for vulnerable women.
• Living Rent—which calls itself “Scotland’s tenants union”—now prioritises gender ideology over tenants. They endorsed decriminalising brothels and smeared gender critical housing activists like Ellenor Hutson and Laura Jones as “transphobes” for opposing landlord collusion. As a direct result of this, half a dozen working class women were hounded out of the organisation, and a male staffer, Nick Durie, was constructively dismissed for privately holding gender critical views.
• Single-sex homeless shelters are vanishing, and vital women’s aid and rape crisis centres are pressured to allow trans identified males, while unions lecture women about “inclusivity” instead of safety.

This is not solidarity—it’s betrayal.'

Continues:

'- Zero tolerance for sectarianism: No witch hunts, no cancel culture. We work with anyone and any group who will uphold that principle, and advance tenants rights and agency.

• Pro-women, pro-equality: We defend all protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010—especially women and girls. Women are bearing the brunt of decades of austerity. We seek to be a voice for women in housing schemes, who have been ignored, their struggles mocked by fashionable falsehoods, and government alike.
• No Greens/Labour/SNP/etc ties: We work for tenants, not politicians.

---

Join Us
Donate now to help us:
🔹 Protect single-sex spaces
🔹 Stop cancel culture targeting feminists
🔹 Rebuild working-class women’s power

Every £50 funds a training session for housing scheme leaders. Every £500 helps us fight a demolition order.'

Website: https://sto.scot/about

Wow Arabella this is a great achievement! Who can join this union? I'm in an organisation completely captured, funded by Scottish government and our unions are either unison or unite (I left unison and I'm not joining unite, no point). I want to join one that would actually help women and girls but being part of civil service (albeit not directly Scot.gov) I am struggling. Just keeping my head down at work but I'd love to join a union that actually defends our rights. This is brilliant but appears to be housing only. I'll donate to them though. Every little helps...

'Membership is open to all public housing tenants and right to buy owners who support our aims.'

It's a bloody great message to the other unions. Puts them to shame.

Wow! They're clear about their support for actual women and they're not afraid to say the words working class! It really does put the others to shame.

And it puts the bloody Labour Party to shame as well.

I seem to have missed a great chunk of the crowdfunder text earlier when I C&P'd on my phone. It's also worth reading:

'The STO Difference *We are the Scottish Tenants Organisation (STO)—a secular, working-class union founded on the legacy of Helen Crawford (suffragette and housing activist) and Mary Barbour (leader of the 1915 Glasgow Rent Strikes).

What We Stand For

1️⃣ Women’s Safety First: We demand single-sex homeless shelters, changing rooms, and prisons. No exceptions.
2️⃣ No Cancel Culture: Our constitution bans witch hunts. When Sandy Peggie was smeared, we stood with her—unlike Unison, Unite, and the STUC.
3️⃣ Housing Schemes, Not Ideology:

We organise working-class women. It’s typically working class women over 50 who are the political backbone of Scotland’s estates.

--- Why We Need Your Help The liberal-left establishment has failed women:

• Unison & Unite: Let gender ideologues hijack their agendas, abandoning working-class women in housing schemes.
• STUC: Called feminists like Sandy Peggie “an international onslaught” for defending single-sex spaces, after Scottish Labour changed its stance in light of her case.
• Living Rent: Protected bullies who threatened Ellenor Hutson’s family, and defended posting images of Laura Jones’ home address to threaten violence and intimidate her for opposing the demolition of 600 social homes. Purged working class women for holding gender critical and feminist views.

The STO is different. We’ve already:
✅ Fought Wheatley Group, no compromise, from demolishing 600 social homes in the Wyndford.
✅ Won heating bill rebates for tenants amid the cost-of-living crisis.
✅ Exposed collusion between councils, landlords, and woke unions.

--- What Your Donation Funds

We’re hiring a full-time female organiser to:

1. Launch campaigns for single-sex accommodation, in women’s aid, rape crisis, and support our campaign.

2. Train working-class women in housing schemes to lead tenant committees. 3. Hold Scottish unions accountable for abandoning women.

1. Build a truly independent tenants movement, and never a mouthpiece for a political party or fashionable ideology.

Donated! I can't join sadly but I will be supporting them. Fantastic.

This is the stuff of dreams.

good for them

Well done them.

It's alarming that we live in a time when a service that does not loudly and proudly focus their women's service around male users is so rare that it's a brave and fairly unique thing to do.

Women's services that loudly prioritise men users are everywhere, two a penny, but ones like this are few and far between, and I'm sure like the gym the other week, will very soon be under attack. Since apparently those men, like a two year old, need everything all the time or will scream.

Living Rent: Protected bullies who threatened Ellenor Hutson’s family, and defended posting images of Laura Jones’ home address to threaten violence and intimidate her for opposing the demolition of 600 social homes. Purged working class women for holding gender critical and feminist views.

Fucking Hell! Surely that's passed the line into criminality?

At last! A union with a backbone and a firm focus on the actual oppressed class. Great stuff.

That's an inspiring read . Good luck to them.

For those looking for a Union that believes in free speech please have a look at Affinity Trade Union.

This is a recent newsletter; https://workaffinity.co.uk/employers-must-respect-the-law-on-freedom-of-expression/

I have been in Unison and UCU in the past, both were quite useless and much more expensive than Affinity. I have spoken to them twice, quick to answer the phone and very helpful/knowledgable.

Agree that it is great that they have made such a pro (biological) women stand, as most Tenant Unions are pretty captured.

But a Tenant Union is in no way similar to a work place union.

But definitely is you are a renter find out if there is a local tenants unions, many of which include private renters which means individual renters from scam landlords can group together to tackle problems whether rent rises, lack or repairs or particularly for women pressure of sex for rent.

Stumbled on this coincidentally today:

https://petitions.parliament.scot/petitions/PE2147

The Scottish Parliament | Pàrlamaid na h-Alba
Petitions
Under considerationPE2147: Create more women-only homeless accommodation that protects and meets the specific needs of women
Calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to reform homeless services in Scotland and ensure services protect women from sexual assault and exploitation by increasing funding and supporting the creation of more women-only homeless accommodation.
Background information
Increasing numbers of women are placed in unsuitable hotel/bed and breakfast accommodation, where there is a ratio of 14 men to 1 woman.
There is a clear lack of safeguarding in emergency temporary accommodation in general, but very little attention has been paid to the specific challenges faced by women who are stuck in the homeless system. Women are particularly at risk in mixed-sex emergency accommodation, and the hotels are notorious, with increased reports of rapes and sexual assaults.
We need secure women-only halfway accommodation that meets the specific needs of women with the objective of rapidly placing them in permanent social housing.
As part of the Glasgow Times “End the Homeless Hotel Shame” campaign, and with official figures suggesting that the number of families living in homeless hotels and B&Bs quadrupled in 2024, we support calls for more emphasis to be placed on the affordable housing supply budget.'

Great work!

Beautiful to see. This bunch seem like they've got their heads screwed on. I hope they hold firm if there's any pushback.

Just been on their website. Anybody can donate. I did.

It's not just women's rights, they're doing loads of good work, including working to get mould sorted, which is a big problem in lots of housing.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I haven’t seen a union statement this good and this clear outside historic documents for years. Will donate.

Honestly, Ig, I'm so heartened by this group.

Bittersweet as three tower blocks in Glasgow's Wyndford are to be demolished this Sunday- I think this involved the Wheatley Group developers mentioned. Mixed feelings. There were issues with the buildings, but also a lot of fondness. I knew lots of people who lived in them and loved them.

I found this thread by chance (I'm writing an essay on the collusion of unions in enforcing gender ideology, and it came up in a search). I don't post here often as I'm a dad, altho my wife, unlimiteddilutingjuice does. This is who I am (https://wingsoverscotland.com/on-the-frontline-of-the-gender-wars/). However as the national organiser for the STO I was really pleased to see our campaign picked up.

Tomorrow our exec member and lead campaigner Laura Jones is visiting the Welcome organisation in Belfast, who provide women only emergency accommodation (https://www.homelessbelfast.org), to see how we can in the here and now tackle the surging number of rapes, sexual assaults and murders women are facing as a result of homelessness due to the deepening of the housing emergency (https://uk.news.yahoo.com/homeless-women-raped-assaulted-dingy-033000444.html).

From our union's perspective this is exactly why the single sex exemption of the Equality Act is so important. When I worked for Living Rent I was repeatedly told the biggest growth in homelessness was "trans people" (It's really not!) and expected to indulge or even parrot this nonsense despite being privy to the statistics for 20+ years working in homelessness. Reality really matters for solidarity. I think this is why ideological capture is so dangerous for union organisations, because it creates utterly warped priorities.

Here is Laura explaining why we are putting this campaign at the forefront of our work: s

We know that the impact of austerity has been most keenly felt by women. Having worked in homelessness and campaigned on tenants issues for 20+ years I have seen the stark change from what was typically more of a problem for single adult men shift to women, often with their bairns in tow, as even the bank of mum and dad and sofa surfing options run out as people's incomes have fallen so starkly.

There's a lot to change in Scotland. As the OP pointed out the country's largest social landlord is currently in the midst of a mass public housing demolition campaign. We fought for a year to have the affordable housing supply programme, cut by over £200million restored. We won (https://x.com/TenantsScottish/status/1864729236637982946/video/1), but this really isn't a period where we can afford to allow these kinds of stupid things to continue.

We would always welcome more people to join with us in our belief in both biological reality, and our fight for safer, better accommodation and community for women and families. We know from our organising that it is women that build our solidarity and leadership in our housing schemes. I've seen that first hand in hundreds of battles across the country, so I'm really heartened to see this thread. It was women (all suffragettes in fact) who founded our union, after their struggles for housing justice during WW1. We like to remember that. To borrow the phrase from the OP, bravo!

For some reason that link to X didn't work, so here it is again: https://x.com/TenantsScottish/status/1864729236637982946

Brilliant work, thank you!