Yesterday our chair @hollowood_zoe asked @LibDems conference in a trans debate: "In 2026, are women allowed rights? Rights to dignity. Rights to safety. Rights to say no." Conference resoundingly voted 'no' thus deciding that women were second class citizens. 🧵

I haven't yet entirely forgotten the absolute shame of voting Jo Swinson and getting the Tories but I was trying. As a woman, the party is making it impossible for me to come back, having left the SNP over this issue, and I am now politically homeless.

"But the councillor Mark Johnston, from Reigate in Surrey, said the motion would distract the party from the “realism” needed to ensure Nigel Farage did not become PM: “That realism means accepting the supreme court determination last year is unassailable. “Are we going back to our constituencies to prepare for government, or are we going back to our bedrooms to prepare for irrelevance?” Zoe Hollowood, a party activist, said the party should accept the supreme court ruling: “If we pass this motion, we are telling women we think they are second-class citizens … This policy is totally out of touch with both public sentiment and public priorities.” Coverage of Brighton Debate in @guardian theguardian.com/politics/202…

I can unequivocally explain to the @NHS why phalloplasty/metoidioplasty is not necessary for mental health. In fact it’s very bad for mental health. Short term satisfaction is not a good measure. Objective measures such as suicidality, psychiatric care, unemployment and housing are better. Please read @daniel_h_james piece on this

When trying to reach normal people about the scandal occurring in gender clinics, the biggest problem we all face is that the truth about WPATH is simply too insane for the average person to believe. Most people find it impossible to accept that an entire field of medicine could be fueled by ideology and guided by fanatics. So they write us off as conspiracy theorists. My second essay in @Genspect’s REPATH series tells the story of those crucial years in the late 1990s and early 2000s when trans activists captured WPATH and how that paved the way for the scandal of gender affirming care.

It’s increasingly clear that whether you’re right-wing or left-wing matters less than something more fundamental: whether you believe reality should shape policy, or reality should be made to bend around ideology. Gender ideology has exposed that divide starkly. On one side are those willing to disregard science, facts and even the evidence of their own eyes in service of an identitarian belief system. On the other are those of us who still think reality has to be the starting point. Among that second group, of course, there will be disagreements - over how to run the economy, how much to spend on public services, what constitutes an acceptable level of immigration. Little things like that. But underneath all of it is the bigger question: reality. How can those of us who believe in common sense vote for politicians who ask us to accept a worldview built on ideological assertions and the demands of vocal minorities? How can those of us who genuinely believe in equality support policies that subordinate women’s sex-based rights to the claims of males who identify as women? How can anyone call it safeguarding to allow biological males into changing rooms used by girls? Or call it compassion to remove the healthy breasts of a teenage girl while telling her she can become a boy? This is the deeper divide. Macroeconomic policy be damned. Before any of that, we have to decide whether politics remains anchored in material reality - or whether we collectively agree to pretend reality is something we can simply redefine.

@Channel4News are totally missing the point here. The report should be focusing on the utter failure of the RCN and other unions to support women and their sex based rights and sex realist beliefs and how this week’s lawfare cases highlight that. ⬇️ If you still think the unions have women’s backs, just look at the court lists this week. Today in Edinburgh, Norma Austin Hart and Alison Ann-Dowling are bringing a judicial review against Community because the union’s Gender Equality Strategy treats “women and non-binary people” as one group, even after the @ForWomenScot Supreme Court judgment said sex in the Equality Act means biological sex. Norma and Alison tried the proper route first, raising the policy internally and waiting for the leadership to listen and say that they were threatened with discipline instead. So two lifelong trade unionists are now asking a judge to do the job their union would not. Meanwhile in Dundee, Sandie Peggie is in the middle of a high profile 7 day hearing against the RCN, the union she paid into for 30 years. After she objected to a man in the women’s changing room, Sandie says the RCN failed to support her and treated her beliefs as the problem. Her three brilliant witnesses including from @ScotLesbians and @mbmpolicy helped to explain the horrifying degree of institutional capture. These are not isolated cases. @Fiona44444, a lifelong PCS activist and retired Scottish Government civil servant, is taking her own union to tribunal after she says it sidelined her for the same beliefs. Stephanie Pratt, an NHS biomedical scientist, is doing the same against Unite. These women were the members unions used to boast about: loyal, long-serving, the ones who turned up, paid the subs and expected representation when it counted. That is what makes this so bleak, because the organisations built to protect workers with the least power, often women on part-time hours, second jobs and lower grades, have left those same women to hire lawyers. This weekend makes the point even sharper. @unisontheunion , with @ASLEFunion , @USDAW and the @MusiciansUnion, is boycotting Labour’s women’s conference in Liverpool because the main hall is restricted to women as a sex, in line with the Supreme Court. @Unison says that runs counter to its policy on “trans equality”. So the largest union in the country would rather stay away from a women’s conference than accept that “woman” means female. The established unions are entirely captured so women are resorting to lawfare and setting up their own unions when they only wanted the old ones to do their job. Hence the Darlington nurses had to found the @DarlingtonUnion , co-founded by Bethany Hutchison, now its president and a witness in Sandie’s Dundee case. In sport, @sharrond62 and @TracyEdwardsMBE had to set up the Women’s Sports Union. Unions were supposed to be the shield for people who could not fight alone. Watch this week and ask who that shield is for now.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ I doubt Channel 4 will bother though. You can follow both hearings this week on @tribunaltweets and @tribunaltweets2

Phew! In today's Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, the SNP's Equalities' Minister took a VERY long time not to really answer my two questions. Watch this space on their proposed Human Rights Bill, as I shall be doing just that. Very closely.

And finally, the letter I sent to the then RCN Scotland director when I resigned, which was referenced in my evidence today. medium.com/@l.n.mackenzie/le…

I would like a lot of people to read this letter in full. Lisa was entirely discreet while this was happening, as instructed by RCN, so Kath and I knew nothing and couldn’t offer her any support. Read and absorb, as a “how not to” of management. FAO @IsntWorkingPod

The Darlington nurses case could cost the NHS *over £1.5m*. NHS Fife’s legal costs in the Sandie Peggie case had already exceeded *£400,000* — and that wasn’t the final bill. So what does nearly *£2 MILLION* represent in NHS care? Over the next few days, we’ll show you. @NHSEngland @NHSResolution @DHSCgovuk @SexMattersOrg @JournalismSEEN @NHSScotland @NHSWales @ScotGovHealth @WGHealthandCare

Zoe Hollowood stood up in her own party conference and said what too many politicians are frightened to say: women’s privacy, dignity and safety still matter. While Sir Ed Davey’s Lib Dems voted to challenge the Supreme Court settlement, Hollowood faced down her own leadership and refused to be bullied into silence. The law is the law. Women should not have to fight the same battle in every workplace and every tribunal. And politics needs more women with Hollowood’s courage.

Our chair put in a late shift last night on Talk TV with @virtualash. They discussed the speech at conference on "trans rights" taking the party "backwards" as "a land grab for women's rights" plus the "stranglehold" the trans lobby has in the party on this issue. Clipped here: