A trans pool player is challenging her ban from the sport in court. This case will be one of the first real tests of how the Supreme Court ruling plays out in practice for trans people in sport. independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho…

We’re proud to launch the UoL Women in Sport Society! #XX

Darlington nurses and Sandie

And no mate, feminism isn't about your desire for "equality". It's about defending our rights and protections in the face of men who seek to undermine them while shaming women who have the courage to speak up. Men like *you*.

Danny La Rue was a female impersonator. Barry Humphries played Dame Edna as a comedy character. Les Dawson & Roy Barraclough played Cissie & Ada as comedic tributes to the women of their times. Kenny Everett played Cupid Stunt as an OTT American starlet character. Again not drag. Hinge & Bracket were old-school musical vaudevillians. Harris Milstead (Divine) was a character actor & part-time drag queen, whose act wanted to be taken seriously. Lily Savage (Paul O’Grady) was an old-school drag queen, whose act was based on the tough women he grew up with. Regina Fong (Reg Bundy) was another old-school vaudevillian, whose act was camp, very funny & inventive, relying on repetition of a routine that the audience would know & emulate. They’d join in. None of these performers exhibited a deep-rooted loathing for women, & yet are now tarred with the same brush as modern day “drag queens”. You CANNOT compare these artistes with the talentless, runway, slut-dropping, sashaying wannabes, that people refer to as “drag queens” today, many of whom lampoon & degrade women in deeply misogynistic ways. (See Ru Paul’s Drag Race). They are not the same thing. Style-wise, they have much more in common with the various Houses (LaBeija, ‘68, Corey, ‘72, Xtravaganza ‘82, Ninja, ‘82, Ebony ‘78) & the Tea Dances & later the Ballroom Dances of New York, where gay men would dress up & “throw shade”. Learn the difference.

Yesterday we marched with women for women. Across the country and in parts of Europe women and men came together for one simple purpose, to ask @bphillipsonMP @Keir_Starmer to follow the law. #OneYearLater

There is no Woman of the Day today. Instead, I want to explain why I do what I do. No one really knows who first said, “History is written by the victors” but I’d bet you any odds it was a man. Think of your schooldays and count the number of times you learned about the roles played by women in shaping history, other than regnant Queens and perhaps Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale. Yet women lived, worked, networked, debated, campaigned, organised, invented things and built them too - but you’d never know this if your lessons, like mine, were confined to history books. For a practical example, just look around you. Fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, ironing board, home security system, call waiting system, car heater and windscreen wipers, even the very first computer algorithm: all invented by women. Are you surprised? Confined to the house, denied access to higher education, barred from engineering, denied entry to all branches of science and the professions for centuries, those bright analytical minds turned their attention to their immediate surroundings and saw what was needed to free them from domestic drudgery. In return, history ignored women’s achievements, glossed over them or consigned them to dusty footnotes. If all else failed, their work was credited to - or stolen by - men, the phenomenon known as the Matilda Effect, first identified by feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1870. In 1993, it was named for her by historian Margaret Rossiter who said, “It is important to note early that women’s historically subordinate ‘place’ in science was not a coincidence and was not due to any lack of merit on their part. It was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.” Once you see it, you cannot unsee it - the Matilda Effect is everywhere - but now substitute ‘history’ for ‘science’. The proposition still stands. What I try to do is to pierce holes in that camouflage by writing about the almost-invisible women of history who overcame manmade barriers and changed the world. As a Second Wave feminist, I thought we’d won all the big battles, that it was just a matter of mopping up the resisters and dragging them into the 20th century. I did my bit to redress the balance in an overwhelmingly male environment, but how had I managed to miss the barefaced theft of our words, our spaces and services, our sports? How had we suddenly been reduced to a walking collection of body parts? It was a wake-up call. Once I saw, I couldn’t unsee the terrible damage being done to girls and young women who did not conform to the offensive sexist stereotypes being imposed on them by men who mimic women and their inane female cheerleaders. It made me fearful for non-conforming girls: tomboys. They need to see strong women as role models, women who don’t care about performing femininity, women who defy convention and do things their way. If you can see it, you can be it. So I went digging around in those dusty footnotes, found a little gold and started from there. I found thrilling tales of women who were inventive, resourceful and brave. Then I started sharing what I found more widely, tied to the calendar as Women of the Day. How do I find them? Often by pure chance. I go looking for one woman, spot a couple more names along the way - women whose stories really resonate with me - and file them away for the right time. Women’s history had been right under my nose the whole time. I just hadn’t realised that you needed to dig a little. The rather unexpected bonus was that in giving them a voice, I found mine. I am a conspicuously law-abiding woman, a former prison governor, and if you had told me when I retired that one day, I’d be standing outside a police station in protest at the hounding of gender critical women and singing “Go catch some rapists” to the tune of Guantanamera, I’d have advised you to seek immediate medical attention for the effects of the bump to your head. But here I am, telling women’s stories, and behind the scenes, pursuing a second career as a women’s rights activist. I won’t ever fall asleep at the wheel again. Tomorrow, I’m off to Cardiff with my Women of Wessex sisters, to protest about @bphillipsonmp’s inexplicable decision to delay laying the EHRC Code of Practice before Parliament — and make no mistake about it. It IS a decision; one that is causing real harm and damage to the rights of women and the protection of children. Some of you come for the occasional stories of women in history hiding in plain sight, but I hope you stay because you care about fairness and safety for women. For now, I leave you with this thought from the 1949 memoirs of Somerset suffragette Nelly Crocker (1872-1962): “Modern young women seem unaware of the price paid for their political and social emancipation, and modern historians have greatly ignored the struggle”.

📣 Announcement: Here are some of the amazing speakers at the London #OneYearLater protest: Jo Brew will be speaking about the #SupremeCourtRuling from an international perspective @WDI_UK Stephanie Davies-Arai will be talking about the impact on schools and children @cwknews

That book clearly needs an update: