Category: Uncategorized
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The Goldilocks Zone

This is a road-map of the “sex-based rights v gender-identity” conversation that’s raging out there… What? Oh – apparently, a lot of people haven’t really had that conversation yet, beyond a few comments on stories in the press. Okay sisters, we have a job to do… Otherwise known as the “Circumstellar Habitable Zone”, there is…
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The met office told me to do it

I feel a bit of a fool. Our house has never, to my knowledge, been flooded. It sits on a hill that runs in places at a 45 degree angle down to the town. Nevertheless I’ve spent the last hour taking precious things off bottom shelves and shoving them into higher shelves and now everything…
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To a good man

You know that cry, “It’s not all men”? Actually, it is all men. I know it, and I know you can’t entirely solve it – not alone, anyway, and men aren’t brought up to be good at thinking together. It would help if more men could get their heads round exactly what it is they…
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Left, right and left behind

This article is, ultimately, about the row about ‘drag’ (!) which I think offers a good opportunity to think about the left/right confusion in the women’s campaign… Is ‘queer theory’ left wing? Is ‘gender critical’ theory right wing? How many people are sufficiently academic, sufficiently fond of critical reading and sufficiently practiced in critical thinking…
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How the gender identity industry broke society

This is a companion piece to an article I published a couple of days ago. It’s here, if you’d like to read it first… People didn’t mean to destroy the atmosphere by building a life that depended on the petrol engine. People didn’t mean to create the slave-driving gig-economy by pressurising each other to join…
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How the Gender Identity Industry Broke Politics

Before the world went mad, when I was still Vice-Chair of a Labour CLP, and active with my union, and had a seat on the committee of my favourite lefty group, I started hearing really weird things about sex and gender, including being told by a couple of therapist friends I knew that they were…
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Not the Forde Report

When I was out and about in Wales, one of the things I enjoyed was taking photos of any Welsh language signs and posters, so I could check out the meaning later, and learn some new words. I took this one by accident because I didn’t know Splott was a name, so wondered what a…
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Two more reasons to celebrate Mo Farah

I nearly didn’t write a blog about Mo Farah. I nearly settled for a Facebook comment… … That’s because – well, he’s famous already, it’s a headline story already, so it doesn’t need one more telling from me – but then I realised there’s something missing from most of the big media stories. Yes, we…
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Macy Days and UK Ways

Or: What’s with ‘the hostage video’? Look what happened – first, we had a clear and refreshing statement, made by an adult women, voluntarily discussing ‘The Issue’ on a show she presumably volunteered to go on. She seems quite relaxed, and happy to chat on volatile issues like the US flag, and what a woman…
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Find the human – then find some more humans

Avanti Lentemente (forward, slowly) This is the story of a train ticket. It is quite long but it contains a big welfare issue (actually, the biggest welfare issue) and a potential time-saver (actually, a life saver) for humans everywhere. One day back in June, I turned up at Penrith station with the intention of getting…