Giant tortoises restored to Galápagos island nearly 200 years after they were wiped out. #biodiversity www.bbc.com/news/article...

I think my many followers are sick of me repeating myself so I'm just going to retweet this whenever something ghoulish happens to trans people in the UK: consider saying something. It's important and easy.

My grandfather, Brigadier George Mansford, died on Thursday. His time was up, but I have been thinking about his remarkable life. Here is a photo of him in Korea, waiting for the barber in the YMCA hut. www.rslaustralia.org/latest-news/...

Last I checked neither Poland nor Hungary have created special torts of trans-inclusive toilet and changing room provision. The UK, alongside Kansas and Texas and a few other red states, is leading the world here.

If the aim was evidence based policy rather than policy based evidence then regardless of doing an RCT a differences in differences study would be commissioned comparing outcomes between UK and other countries thag haven't banned trans affirming care.

At this stage, I feel fairly confident in saying that the NHS/national health agencies have been taken over by dangerously anti-scientific cranks and that it will probably take at least a generation (and several changes of government) to fully wash them out.

Genuinely not sure most cis people understand how severe a trans rights crisis this is. If you are openly trans you face discrimination and daily humiliation. If you are not openly trans you risk being fired if your workplace finds out. That's a huge blackmail vulnerability.

Judge Holden after he walks back into the bar from the outhouse and starts dancing.

From me: The architect of the Robodebt scheme, who was told it was unlawful even as he delivered it for the government, is still employed in the public service, now at the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions. And in a senior governance and risk role. www.crikey.com.au/2026/02/20/r...

I saw someone the other day say if the Equality Act were repealed in the UK the courts would just resurrect it from common law principles. That's a new one to me. Absolutely cooked.

Popper was mid jestergooning when Wittsgenstein came and spiked his Cortisol levels with a poker 😭 Is Ignoring the anti-realists while munting and mogging philosophical problems more useful than LW chadfishing in the Moral Sciences Club?

I told some of my final year students about the "ex-gay" movement (they would regularly come and speak at my highschool), and they had never heard of it. It is remarkable how much progress we have made. But I have realized the progress is fragile.

Without being too dismissive of these results, which I find quite depressing. I'd love to see some well designed polling that's more granular. For e.g. polling on whether businesses and sports associations should be permitted to be trans inclusive.

The Sex Matters/EHRC interpretation of the Equality Act comes awfully close to making it just like the "Bathroom Bounty" Bill they tried to pass in Kansas--it creates a private claim for any individual who shares a bathroom with a trans person.

I'm going to use this as an opportunity to tell you all that recordings of Luce, Suppes and Tversky's seminal lectures on measurement theory are free on YouTube! youtu.be/BoiFo3MA0mc?...

I am going to share some early thoughts on the GLP v EHRC decision. I don't want to pretend to have any authority but I value my conservations with the rest of you on here. I might add to this thread later. 🧵

Just putting it out there that "biological sex" interpretation of r. 25(4) of the workplace regulations is absurd. A trans woman who is breastfeeding should be able to qualify as a "nursing mother" for the purpose of the regulations.

"Gossip" is one of the many things that Goodwin v UK was about. Many aspects of Swift J's reasoning were thoughtful but this is not one of them.

Based on what I know of the hearing, I would guess that even if Swift J finds the update to have been unlawful it will be on very narrow grounds: that the EqA is fact sensitive, and does not enact a "bright line" rule of the sort claimed by the EHRC/Sex Matters ..

Australian Census on University Staff Wellbeing results are out. Every uni recorded scores indicating high/very high psych risk. And in news surprising no one, "only senior execs and deans rated their workplaces as medium or low risk while all other staff groups reported high-risk conditions."

Beyond grim. A truly vile regime.

As a student and young scholar it was pretty damn confronting to read the screeds of 90s and 00s scholarship coming out in pretty decent US journals from very senior tenured profs that I as a gay man was a biological mistake. And straight colleagues didn't get it.

Something that John Gardner once said to me, which has stuck with me, is that if you think someone who you respect has views that are bigoted and intolerant, then it it precisely out of respect for them that you should tell them that their views are bigoted and intolerant.

I feel the need to say that I think that the editors were right to publish this. (Personally, I would have insisted on more inclusive language.) But they should also disclose Michael's former associations with Sex Matters and Policy Exchange.

I gave a paper yesterday in which I argued that the interpretation of sex terms in law is no different from the interpretation of other classifications like "potato product" or "milk". None of them have a "true essence". www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Also, it's been over two decades since Goodwin, and by all indications the Council of Europe has *not* gotten more conservative on this issue since then, quite the contrary.

This is what Goodwin said about "biological" accounts of sex in law. For Foran's argument to work, the Court would have to accept some kind of "biological sex" account, and that is something that they cast doubt on in Goodwin.

Very unexpected and welcome news! QUT will become the new custodian of Meanjin, Australia's most eminent literary journal, bringing the publication back to Brisbane. www.qut.edu.au/about/meanjin

It says something about our current predicament that the US has a cultural class that can produce the Bad Bunny half-time time show and a political class that can produce the Turning Point USA half-time show.

They haven't used this language, but something like the idea of "sex rejection" is the basis of the Sex Matters/EHRC interpretation of the Equality Act. If you don't like something trans people are doing, you can just say you are banning all people, equally, on the basis of their sex.

Love the way transphobes seem unable to discuss intersex athletes without also misgendering them and implying they are cheats.

I think when people talk about prison policy (with respect to trans people or otherwise), they often overlook the serious harms associated with social deprivation. Isolating prisoners from other people is something that we should be extremely unwilling to do.

I am genuinely really pleased that Sussex under Sasha Roseneil has decided to fight this decision when many other VCs would have simply given in. The OfS decision is such a dangerous precedent for the sector

In this piece for the New York Review of Books, I explain how today’s anti-trans agenda doesn’t just target trans people—it quietly (mostly quietly) dismantles the legal foundations that protect cis women from discrimination. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Why is a double mastectomy different than a nose job like actually

I hadn’t known this. Two men who were accused of sexual abuse on the Shitty Media Men document that I created back in 2017 reached out to Michael Wolff for help as they looked to sue me, and Wolf forwarded their concerns to Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein offered to help. www.jmail.world/thread/EFTA0...

It's not the primary argument but the Scottish Ministers raise the possibility of a declaration of incompatibility in the latest FWS judicial review www.gov.scot/binaries/con...

Incredible story

Has anyone commented on how saturated the Epstein emails seem to be with evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology crankery?

Leah is easily one of the best public law minds in the country, what a fantastic appointment by the @ukcla.bsky.social editorial team!

I think the designation "degenerating research programme" should be used only very sparingly for research programmes that are clearly degenerating, like originalism.

Can anyone recommend a good summary of the WASPI thing?

Based on what Stephenson has said publicly, it is hard to be too hopeful about this.

The deadline for the 2026 Formal Ethics Conference in Buffalo has just been extended to Feb. 16th. Consider submitting, and spread the word! philevents.org/event/show/1...

Obviously this is a setback but I think it's important not to let it discredit the concept of building a long, extremely narrow glass city in the middle of the desert. www.ft.com/content/036b...

As of 2019, the policy in England and Wales was that someone in this man's position would have to show that his genitals, chromosomes and gonads were congruent and the opposite to the sex on his birth certificate in order to correct it. Otherwise he would need to apply for a GRC.

Apart from nut allergies and cigarettes, which are the only examples I've seen cass and co-authors offer, can anyone give me an example of another medication that is banned on the basis of a "precautionary principle" for u16s? People really ought to think about where this is going.

Trans people have 'sex-based rights' too. That's what P v S (1996), And Goodwin (2002) were about, let alone Bostock. They have the right to change sex, or (if you can't bring yourself to say it) to change *all* of the sex characteristics they can change (including the toilets they use).

I am suspicious of hate speech laws, and these changes are too rushed to be sure of their impact. But so long as we have defamation laws we should have commensurate provisions for defamation of protected groups. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...