BBC presenter launches new trans visibility campaign

[IwantToRetire]

Dr Ronx Ikharia’s ‘Safe With Me’ initiative invites allies to wear a yellow badge with bold black text, signalling to trans+ individuals that they are safe to approach, especially when using public toilets or navigating other gendered spaces.

Launched by Dr Ronx – a Black, non-binary, transmasculine emergency doctor and BBC presenter – the campaign responds to the Suprememe Court's judgment that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers strictly to biological sex, a decision that campaigners say has heightened fear within trans+ communities.

Dr Ronx said: “I have often been kicked out of toilets because people don’t know where to place me. But when I’m with someone, it happens less.

“This badge is about making allyship visible. It’s non-confrontational. It’s a signal to a trans+ person that they can come up to you and feel safe doing so.”

Dr Ronx is best known for presenting on the BBC’s Operation Ouch! and The Unshockable Dr Ronx, where they combine medical expertise with youth-focused storytelling.

Off-screen, the Hackney-native works on the frontline at Homerton Hospital while strongly advocating for inclusive healthcare and increasing representation for marginalised young people.

Continues at https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/news/23072025-bbc-presenter-launches-new-trans-visibility-campaign

I wish they'd make their mind up whether public toilets are 'just a place to pee so why all the moral panic you frumpy, boring bitches?' or whether they are places literally more dangerous than throwing a bar mitzvah in Tora Bora. Pick one!

I’m not saying this in an unkind way but her claims sound quite extreme and possibly like the claims of someone with some sort of serious paranoia. Her mental health problems seem to be progressing - her ‘identity’ has got more niche over the last couple of years and if I remember correctly she also had an elective double mastectomy. I wish she would step out of the public eye for a while and get proper help instead of presenting herself as some sort of influence to kids.

Dr Ronx is a full-on nutjob. I blame her for the absurd gender woo-woo that the Van Tulleken doctors sometimes come out with - though I suppose they're just as liable to come out with it off their own bat.

According to a Torygraph article that was quoted on FB, there will be yellow badges given out at schools to the Be Kind kids who will escort trans kids to the loos of their preference.

I just thought - why instead can't you give them to the boys, who can then safely escort trans-identified boys to the male loos and ensure they're not hassled in there?

You forgot Queer. I mean this person is practically the entire bloody alphabet all on their own.

I suspect this person is going for 'shades of holocaust star'. TRAs do so love to co-opt the actual suffering of other groups.

*Apologies, I missed that this was twigged before your comment. 🫣

If I were a kid in school and the badges were given out to everyone *, mine would get accidentally flushed down the toilet. Appropriately enough.

*I bet some schools would do that, to "avoid any stigma" to the be-kind kids.

Oh dear. You're not expecting any of the three Cs - cogency, coherence, consistency - are you?

Here's another for you:

Trans people pass, you can't tell who is trans by looking and you shouldn't try to out them by forcing them to self-declare.
And -
Trans Visibility. Badges to be worn by service humans to encourage trans people to out themselves.

🤪

They’ve been much more sensible in their latest bbc radio 4 series.

women and their distinct needs are talked about without any silly language

Actually Zoe podcasts have become much better too.

I'm GC and don't support these badges or bbc presenters not being impartial on hot topics

But the comment about SC judgement being guidance not law - the judgement related to women on public boards, so is binding precedenton that issue. In the judgement SC commented that sex applies to toilets, changing rooms, hostels etc but that wasn't the issue being determined in that particular case, so these were obiter comments ie persuasive but not binding. Some would describe that as guidance

That's why peggie tribunal still proceeding, despite all of us knowing fine well what sex means / what sex we are.... let's hope that'll put the issue to bed

No problem

I suspect that differentiation* *and positioning their product from other TRA badges was a factor too.

The Supreme Court ruling determined the meaning of sex in the Equality Act. If you're claiming that they have said the meaning of sex in the Equality Act is different when applied to public boards from the way it is defined in other situations, can you state where in the judgment it states that?

Here's the link for you.

https://supremecourt.uk/uploads/uksc_2024_0042_judgment_aea6c48cee.pdf

It begins:

1. This appeal is concerned with establishing the correct interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 (“the EA 2010”) which seeks to give statutory protection to people who are at risk of suffering from unlawful discrimination

The SC has no function to issue guidance.

Its a decision that the word woman in the Act means female person.

So now any time a judge is dealing with a case which involved that Act and the word woman they
• may only include female people with in the meaning of the PC /Act
• must not include male people
• may also exclude some sub-class of women

The tribunal continues because her employer continues to try justify why the staff involved did what they did all the while showing they employ staff who will either lie under Oath or are not qualified to be employed in their roles.

I don't agree that these comments were obiter.

It states in the judgment that the definition of sex has to be consistent everywhere it is used in the Act. It is unworkable to have a fluid definition which changes depending on the context.

So yes, whilst the question being asked was about the definition of sex for the purposes of female quotas on boards, the judgment confirmed that sex means biological sex in this context and also in every other context in the Act.

It would be interesting to see if anyone seeking to challenge this is ever granted leave to appeal to the Supreme Court on the question of the definition of sex again.

No idea but I posted an extract from July 25 BMJ news item that has quotation from Denton person re: SC and FWS.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379820-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-42?reply=145945481&

That's a bit of a non comment really, sounds like they are just trying to stay relevant.

There are different issues

A) What the Board allowed to happen

Where the SC ruling is relevant

B) What will happened after BU was asked to leave the womans changing room.

BU being a woman or not has zero relevance.
The staff involved have proved they failed on Natural Justice grounds and will have breached their own HR policy (even assuming the policy (i have not read it) is written by someone with the professional competence level of their DEI staff).

To me, anyone flying the flag that they are 'safe' to be around is a person very much to be avoided.

I think this whole thing where young people from what are deemed marginalized groups are told that if they feel discriminated against, or they feel some kind of racist animus, then it is really there, is so dangerous.

Because it's completely common and normal for young people in particular to feel a very heightened self-conciousness and worry that other people are in some way leaving them out, making fun of them, etc.

I remember very vividly a teen and even in my early 20s thinking that another person's look or comment was meaningful and pointed. Thankfully the people around, my parents and teachers, told me that was usually not the case and was more often related to my worries about what others would think of me.

All of which I now know to be true. But imagine if you are always being told at say, age 16, that when you suspect a comment might be a dig or have a double meaning, or people are being weird because of you, it's true, or that whatever you are feeling really reflects others thoughts - how could you not go a little nuts?

I've had several experiences which confirm that, yes, people can and do "perceive" hostility that isn't actually there; and that if they are primed to expect it, they are far more likely to interpret words or incidents as deliberately malicious. Which is why I don't like amateur pop-psychologising of individuals or of groups, and am dead against all this '"if you felt it was a hate incident then it was a hate incident". Nobody's subjective assumptions should be treated as gospel truth, no matter who they are.

One of the things I most appreciate about Joyce is the extreme care she takes in in her choice of words to be clear, precise and well calibrated. Throughout the trans debate she's reserved her strongest language for child safeguarding and in this article she's deployed it:

“This campaign is a safeguarding catastrophe. Asking children to approach adult strangers and take responsibility for their safety in toilet facilities puts children at obvious and serious risk.

“As for adults wearing ‘safe with me’ badges that children are supposed to believe, it’s hard to think of a more irresponsible idea.

“‘Safe’ isn’t something a person can identify as, and adult strangers who signal to children that they are ‘safe’ are a safeguarding red flag.

“Any organisation involved in distributing these badges is either extremely naive or is willing to undermine safeguarding. Dr Ronx is a well-known children’s entertainer, and her responsibility for the campaign raises serious questions.

“We will be raising this campaign as a safeguarding issue with Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary.”

The most depressing part of researching toilet safety are the cases involving children. It happens in toilets the most public of places. The youngest is younger than school age when his mum let him go to the men’s on his own in a big name high street supermarket. There are so many other cases involving men leading girls into toilets often in very public places.

The ones I know about are from FOIs or newspaper and court reports. This will be a fraction of what goes on.

This is why there needs to be an exemption on mums taking their young sons into single sex toilets and vice versa. It’s also why a reason for private unisex toilet shouldn’t be so that an opposite sex adult can go to the toilet with a child.

Many years ago, I had a colleague who complained about a junior who didn’t give him eye contact or a smile after he cracked what he perceived to be a witticism.

I responded that if he thought he was being funny then it was tasteless. The upshot of our conversation was that he had never noticed that she was blind. Despite the guide dog and the briefing about maintaining the standard layout of the office. And her fairly large assistive technology.

She had lost a substantial amount of her vision at a very young age. She’d not been socialised into men’s expectations about smiling etc.

A long way to say that grown people can and do get things spectacularly wrong. I think he still thought that she was being withholding and there was nothing fundamentally wrong with his expectations. (Yes, we did cover his attitude to junior people and women but I was mostly covering the eye contact issue. )

I keep seeing this, and it's not correct. The SC was asked to define 'sex' where it appears in the Act, and that is what they did. They provided worked examples of the consequences for S158/9 (positive action), schedule 3 (single-sex services), and schedule 16 (clubs and associations). None of this was obiter.

They did not comment on the 1992 workplace regulations because they are not covered by Schedule 3, which relates to service providers, not employers.

There is a whole other conversation yet to be had about the meaning of sex outwith the Act, and the interaction between the Act, the 1992 regulations, and case law such as Croft v Royal Mail.

Breaching the basic principles of safeguarding children seems to be a feature of all this, not a bug. As this supposedly trained medical doctor shows, involving children in a fetish for breaching boundaries is built into the ideology. As is the repeated sharing of age inappropriate issues with children, the mangling of language pretending that men are really women, the porn soaked literature written for children by dodgy adults. All in the name of inclusivity and all enabled via coercive control, allegations of bigotry and threats made against anyone who points all this out.

No more. Parents and responsible adults MUST speak out every time they see this. No more "be kind", no more ignoring our fundamental responsibility to keep children safe.