Full Council Chaos. Bristol City Council refusing to implement single sex services

[LoudDeer]

Last night at the full council meeting women asking questions about BCC's refusal to implement the law was met with heckling from the gallery and a nonsensical word salad from council officials.

Somehow the number of questions, and goodness knows what other personal details, was leaked from within the Council offices and fed to far left activists who put out a call for attendance online. At least 100 turned up and abused and harrassed members of the public while they were speaking. At one point they were shouting at a questioners to sit down. No action was taken by council officials to maintain order.

As they left, women were met with heckling, chanting and shouting outside the building from more far left activists. The atmosphere was intimidating and abusive.

Please note, the Council agenda that evening held an item on a city wide commitment to ending VAWG. Harrassment and abuse was happening right in front of them and they not only initiated this spectacle but supported it.

Women are not safe in Bristol.

I was there last night too.

most of the audio of disruption has been cut from the YouTube but if you watch from roughly around 29 mins you will get the gist. Including the awful response from the councilllor and her knowing smile and glances to the TRAs.

The way TRAs treated women was appalling and no one from the Council addressed it.

Sorry I should have mentioned I used to work in the leisure centre and I had to sort out a complaint at least once a week from a woman in the ladies changing rooms you objected to young boys being in there. I would
then frequently have to go and tell the mother that in future her son had to change in tbe men’s and the normal response was “no, that’s too dangerous”.

Yes, you are right you could have male,
female and family but it would cost you more to go swimming because it would require higher staffing levels.

First of all, Bristol Council needs to be sued. A lot. And now. That's the only thing that will stop this, because they seem determined to flout the law.

Secondly, can I just mention something that I have noticed gathering pace on many FWR threads recently: the use of "far left" to describe everything we don't like. To me, this is not helpful and is not accurate. The Communist Party in the UK accepts the biological fact of women, and yet is "far left."

Labelling everything you don't like, such as activists shouting women down at a council meeting, "far left" is, to my mind, as unhelpful, inaccurate, and lazy as TRAs calling all women who believe in biological reality "right wing." If we're not careful, it's going to become something that everyone says because it's an easy go-to. And before you know it, THAT is what we will spend our time arguing about with the derailers on these threads, rather than the important issues. And you know those derailers gotta derail!

What happened at the council meeting doesn't seem to me to have anything at all to do with politics, left or right. It was, and is, nothing more or less than authoritarianism. Shutting people up and intimidating people because you don't like what they are saying, or the fact that they have the right in law to say it, is authoritarianism and thuggery. And that can be right or left. Let's not be lazy in how we call it out.

My local leisure centre has a mixed sex ‘changing village’ all cubicles, no communal/open plan changing spaces, there are 3 family rooms, 1 big ‘club ‘ room used for the swimming club and school swimming classes, then it’s just lockers and cubicles. The cubicles are open top with huge gaps at bottom and top, very very very easy to look under or over as evidenced many times while I’ve been there by teen boys climbing on the bench and ‘surprising’ the teenage girls in who are trying to get changed. It would be remarkably easy to poke a phone under or over the door and record unsuspecting women getting changed. The showers are the same, individual cubicles but open top with gaps at bottom and top.

Just watched a few minutes of the relevant material.

Somebody needs to explain to the muppet who identifies as Councillor Edwards that the code has been available for them to look at for some time now, and the law was clarified 15 months ago. She needs to explain why the council is so lamentably tardy in acting.

She can also explain, while she’s at it, why Bristol council have been ignoring women’s dignity and disrespecting them, if those are values the council holds so dear.

I know! The law was clarified from that point on last year, and the draft code has been available for months and has now been laid. She knows that.

She didn’t answer the specific question about whether they’ve taken legal advice, either.

Welcome to councils run by the Green Party. Absolute fuckwits

one of the people who has been questioning the council very closely on the failure dp follow the law is their former head of legal service who knows full well they are not complying

Major design flaw!

I think that is far more common than what I describe. But it is possible witb good design to make it safe.

The 'progressive' left in all it's glory, Bristol really are the perfect example of dystopian leadership, the other councillors of the other parties who are allowing this to go on should also be ashamed of themselves. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good (men) people to do nothing”

I blame the grunts in Bristol for voting for them. Well done to the women who keep standing up to this obnoxious behaviour, and yes someone should sue the midwits into oblivion. 😤

My town built a new leisure centre several decades ago. It had a changing village. The cubicles had gaps, if you stood on the bench you could see into the next cubicle. After it had been open a few weeks every single partition had a small hole bored into it. Women tried to block them up with whatever was to hand; tissue, chewing gum. They were always reopened. Fortunately this was in the days before camera 'phones. They eventually labelled different blocks male and female, but as they were all in the same big room it was confusing and I doubt it was enforced. Voyeurism was essentially designed in.

I wouldn't say boo to a goose back then so, to my eternal regret, I never complained. No idea what's going on there now.

It looks like the vast majority of councillors there were Green.

It was appalling, intimidating and the chair of the meeting had.no authority over the situation.
The councillor answering women's questions was playing up for the mob she had invited.
The data breach is very serious. Have they given mentally ill men Women's home addresses?

They’ll have had a month by the September meeting. Tick tock. No more excuses.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5554647-ehrc-code-on-single-sex-spaces-comes-into-force-on-5th-august-2026?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

People need to focus on how this ideology from the get go has been enforced by thugs, bullies, the intolerant, and those unable to function in a democratic society. All enabled by the hard of thinking alongside a handful of predators.

They're a minority but a scary and intimidating minority. And yes, they need to be taken to court if they're unwilling to abide by the laws of the land and uphold the social contract.

Appalling. Denying women access to democracy and fostering violence against them. Please tell me there’s a way to put the people responsible on trial. This is utterly unacceptable.

Good point. She was just interested in shoe-horning in her fawning TRA soundbite.

I wonder if, when they were editing out the sound of the threatening rainbow mob, if they paused for just a moment to consider the implications of this. I wonder if, when someone suggested that and authorised it, when the time was taken to go through the recording and do the edit, whether the word 'censorship' was mentioned at all? Or 'propaganda'?

Why don't they want it to be heard? What does that tell them?

You have a point. They were trans rights activists not necessarily far left.

Agree.

I think the prioritisation of men's preferences over women's needs and the socially conservative imposition of gendered identities is fundamentally right wing.

VAWG. The mistake many people make is to think this is about violence to our kind of women. It isn't. It's about violence to the women with dicks. If you weren't born with one, you are of no significance.

Did any of the women trying to ask questions film the proceedings ?
Are their videos available ?

If so, it is worth sharing them
(see also Kath of WRN cornering Julia Gillard)

If not, I can best suggest getting women to ask questions at every meeting of every committee of Bristol City Council

• whether they adhere to the Public Sector Equality Duty
• whether they protect their employees in accordance with the 1992 Workplace regs
• whether they plan to fully comply with the EA2010 and the EHRC guidance
• if not, which other laws do they consider optional

the questions will need to be relevant to the agenda items, but it can be done.

It's also all very consumerist- all those flags and lanyards and badges and blahajs, not to mention the drugs and surgery - and, for all its talk of "the community" very individualistic. It's not left wing. I'm getting really TIRED of explaining that.
ETA - not tired of explaining it here so much as in other places.

And yet the ‘progressive left’ have rolled it into the Omnicause.

It’s firmly part of the ‘progressive grab bag’ of acceptable causes and opinions all left-wingers are encouraged to espouse as a job lot, without troubling themselves to apply any critical thinking on.

It’s misogyny given a left-wing veneer of championing the supposed under-dog.

Of course, there’s also a huge amount of misogyny on the right, too. But the push to erode women’s rights in Bristol comes firmly from the left.

No matter which side it comes from, it’s a pretty extremist position to attempt to roll back women’s rights, I would have thought. And it needs to be identified as such.