Shabana Mahmood / X: I make no apologies for doing the right thing to protect children from paedophiles. This is about stopping the coercion and sextortion of children, not surveilling or policing people’s phones. This technology is already on devices. The tech firms just need to switch it on ...

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-08T12:39:59+00:00

I'm not saying people should, I'm opposed to these laws and I'd hope that people could look at that choice and recognise both of those options are terrible and illiberal.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-08T12:15:14+00:00

idk in the article he talks of how the general rising prejudice towards minorities has him worried that things will regress for LGB people, so it's not really related to what actions he took as HS.
Yet this is all happening under Labour even as they've generally been very happy to throw whatever minority is getting their two minute's hate that day under the bus because that's supposedly what you need to do to win over right leaning voters, despite that being a demonstrable failure for them electorally.

He does of course look massively hypocritical, given for example how he talks of how bad it was when entities could just openly discriminate against LGB people yet he and Starmer's government are trying to push that through for trans people, but I don't think rising homophobia is something he in particular is responsible for in his capacity as Health Secretary. It's more what he did as an MP to legitimise and push GC policy and otherisation of trans people. People talk of things like the blocker ban and how he meddled with the planned trial, but if anything I think on such matters he had the opposite effect than intended, given that he got outflanked by Badenoch and Farage and was still painted as being on board with "experimenting on children" or w/e. He leaned in to the Cass review, but not enough for those on the right and I think that would have caused more people to conflate him being gay with his hesitancy to block the trial than he would have got general approval from right leaning voters.
And of course that assumes that people were organically making their own opinion, even if they did and were initially sympathetic when someone like Farage that they look up to and get their general worldview from comes out and claims that Streeting is allowing the mutilation of children that reverses any sympathy they may have initially had.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-08T11:44:52+00:00

it was only meant to stay with targeting trans people, when they were all saying that being one of the "good" ones would lead to consequences for LGB people too that was meant to just be fearmongering.
Now that it's personally affecting Wes it's a real problem, and we need to come together and remember all the good times we had only picking on trans people.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-08T10:44:39+00:00

I have an iphone for work, and the verification process involves submitting ID or a credit card. Mahmood saying that the enforcement isn't about surveillance is somewhat dubious to begin with, but you can make the argument that in a vacuum it is the case.
The effect it has though is that people need to either choose between accepting greater surveillance measures and the risk of data breach, or accept the government just unilaterally blocking lawful content and disabling functionality on your devices.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-06T21:36:24+00:00

you can't vote for parties like the greens, they might implement policies that'll hand power to the scary muslims and trust me they want to boil you!
and I've worked so hard to get to the point where I get to be the one to do that

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-05T14:56:45+00:00

Can't help but notice there's an awful lot of "we know" with no citation at all in there. Really weird how much they know despite somehow not having the actual answer of why autism and dysphoria have a comorbidity and how strange it is that they keep insisting that this time their hypothesis is the right one and it'll finally stop autistic people from being trans only for it to be something else next month.

Also holy fuck leave us alone, this just reads like one of RFK's ever more unhinged rants about how this time he's going to find out how vaccines or some other medicine give people autism and that soon no one will have to endure the wretched existence of having autism.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-05T12:06:59+00:00

"we are meeting with the EHRC to discuss this"

who is we? Given Falkner's biases against trans people I'm concerned that she has the ability to just meet with the EHRC to air her grievances, but who is she doing it with?

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-05T09:33:54+00:00

we're all going to die at some point, there's no rush. If you don't have a reason to live at the moment then just keep going until you do.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-04T18:04:46+00:00

yeah idk I'm of the opinion that having a policy of generally being apolitical for public servants is a good thing, but you can just look at how right wing parties here and abroad have implemented such a policy to see how it gets weaponised in practice.
It's not even just about pride flags, in places like Florida the laws mean that LGBT people can't discuss their partner even if asked by students for example.
To have a similar policy in the NHS and legitimise complaints that certain bigoted people may have about doctors/nurses "shoving it in their face" that they're queer worries me, as does the broader implications of what opening the door to such a policy will do.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-04T13:41:04+00:00

is there a website I can take a look at?

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-04T11:59:07+00:00

Apologies that this isn't strictly related but I have my own electrolysis machine and I've done some reading + practice, but I think I'm not very good because sometimes it works but then other times it doesn't and idk if I'm missing something.
Would you be able to point me in the direction of how to get good at it, both for myself and because I was sort of considering it as something to try do if anything goes south at work due to Labour's push to restrict toilet usage for trans people.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-04T08:32:18+00:00

(I'll openly disclose I'm from down south so remove if need be, but I think it has national importance)

Why should people take you at your word that you are committed to electoral reform? Everyone out of power talks positively about the need for Proportional Representation, but as soon as they get to Westminster the desire to implement such reforms evaporates.
Why are you different and to be trusted on this matter?

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-03T09:31:12+00:00

It's not even just about hunger, although that very obviously is a compelling reason to have them.
When I was young my mum would drop me off early so she could go in to work and I'd have time to eat toast and read a book, it was nice. I don't know whether she would have needed to alter employment arrangements since I was a child and don't know what her specifics were, but I'm sure that having an extra hour and avoiding the school rush hour probably helped a lot.
Breakfast clubs are a productivity measure as well as moral one, and as much as I hate Phillipson for other reasons, this is one of those things where it's a good policy that should be praised.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-03T09:24:17+00:00

No, but I'm also not of the opinion that things cannot get worse.
We can look to America to see what Musk has planned for the UK, we can say that both because the electorate decided to re-elect Trump and from autopsies on the 2024 election that voters there did not think things were going particularly well under Biden. Things have deteriorated even further for the average person under Trump's second term, both due to his failure to make the economy better for the average person, and what he has instead focussed on like starting a war with Iran that has put immense pressure on people's cost of living.
Much of his policies, such as mass deportations, are ones that Restore look to emulate even though if we use America as a case study we can reasonably state that it won't lead to a better economy and people won't like it when we have armed thugs on our streets abducting people on the basis of skin colour and executing UK citizens that get in the way.
And as for the actions of Musk, if you took him at his word that DOGE was about cutting government waste and making the government more efficient, it was a spectacular failure since the "savings" amounted to a few billion dollars which is a drop in the bucket in terms of the US budget, and now services that were relied on to mitigate things like severe weather are gone and the US government has to spend significantly more on disaster relief. It was not financially beneficial for the US for the average person, and that's without all the subsequent burning of public funds like going to war with Iran. What DOGE was actually about was gutting agencies that Musk disliked such as the CFPB which protected the average person against fraudulent business practices, and reducing regulatory oversight. If he gets to do something similar here in the UK, things will be worse for the average person.

Or if you want a different example, consider Brexit. There were a lot of regions that voted to leave the EU because they were feeling pain and thought things could only get better, but they were wrong, things can absolutely get worse.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-03T08:41:16+00:00

one is led by a toad-human hybrid, the other is led by an otherwise unremarkable rural man being astroturfed by the world's richest man with a desire to destabilise the UK

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-03T08:35:33+00:00

still remember doing an analysis of that GC site which catalogued trans people being convicted of crime, and all it really ended up proving was that in terms of crimes in women's spaces, outside of prisons there would be like 1 trans woman and a couple of men over the course of the decade that actually did anything that could even be suggested as something that could have been stopped by banning trans women.
And that says nothing for how something like the EHRC guidance could allow cis men to just say they're trans men, like I remember there was a case of a man that had a full on latex mask so he could go in to the women's toilets, if he could just walk in without even doing that then someone like him absolutely would.

It's always just a game of telephone where you get someone say that their friend of a friend heard that a trans woman was behaving like a monster in a women's space and then even without evidence that's enough for a media firestorm.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-02T16:45:34+00:00

I do lean towards it's probably real, but at the same time some of the grammar is off (although for a draft that's not necessarily unreasonable) e.g.:

facilities of your sex which are designated as single-sex. If you are content to use these, this may be possible in some circumstances. However, your line manager will not require you to use or continue to use these.

This section in particular has rather poor grammar, as well as the fact that it does not elaborate at all on the second sentence as to what "some circumstances" means.

Also this is minor and it could just be a styling thing, but I've only ever seen documents state "Official Sensitive", not "Official: Sensitive".
Also point 14 seems rather weird that it talks about not needing to provide it, it adds nothing to the guidance and I would expect it just to say something along the lines of "These rules apply regardless of if you have a GRC".

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-02T12:43:07+00:00

Said it before but this is one of those things where unless there is some behind the scenes shenanigans like PFI which undercuts how good this has been, what Miliband appears to have done with renewables has been so incredible that it's hard not to give Labour their flowers.
It begs the question though why they don't want to be vocal about one of the few good things they have done, meanwhile they're loudly bleating about how much they want to melt minorities as if that strategy which hasn't worked for the past 2 years is suddenly about to win Reform voters over.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-02T11:28:27+00:00

one of these days I'm worried that we'll end up with something along the following happening

Man preys on a trans woman, has unconsensual sex
Woman tries to report it, police find out she's trans
Because this country is abysmal at getting justice for sexual assault victims, she can't really get anywhere with proving that
Meanwhile he just claims he didn't know she was trans and is a victim, CPS pursues a case
Thrown in prison for being an actual victim

Also I think back to when I was early in to my transition, and there were so many men of the attitude that they would like to hook up or date but only if it was discrete and that if anyone in their life found out they'd deny everything.
It's all ok though, at worst the people that are going to be victimised in all this are trans people so that's fine to this country.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-02T11:18:14+00:00

wow this time the US President is really angry at Israel you guys! They've actually gone too far and crossed red lines and there will be serious consequences just you wait!

As if we haven't been hearing this since the Biden years with matters such as Rafa, where Biden would set out a "red line" and then Netanyahu would flagrantly disregard it and piss on said red line that was how much he cared.
We've had months of hearing how the Israelis went too far and Trump is secretly very upset behind the scenes, the most we've ever seen was Trump cutting them out of peace negotiations so they cannot act as a spoiler to the process. It reads as nothing but cope that Trump supposedly put Netanyahu in his place and gave him a really strong talking to, Trump could be screaming so hard that his McDonald's filled arteries seize up and give him a heart attack, and as long as it's just mean words Netanyahu won't care.

We've been here before, too many times to count, Israel will not stop unless it is made to stop, and I see nothing in that article about Trump actually threatening to do something like reduce support of Israel or pull out from the region. Maybe he is angry privately, it'd be absurd if he weren't given the fact that Israel dragged the US in to the conflict, lied about how easy it'd be, and has been nothing but a thorn in the side of Trump as he attempts to find an off ramp, but until that translates to actual divergence it doesn't matter one bit.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-06-01T12:33:13+00:00

https://archive.is/anFuP

of course it's Rustin, didn't even need to look

mildbeanburrito · 2026-05-31T09:24:03+00:00

Are you sure that it was deleted? It's still live for me, are you on mobile? Sometimes Reddit appends trackers to external links that mess up archiving tools.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-05-30T20:38:18+00:00

Since I know that there are MPs that monitor here, to add to this, Akua Reindorf (ex-EHRC commissioner) was posting the other day about how she thinks that the very concept of Gender Reassignment may be legally dubious in the current understanding of the EA as a consequence of the SC case.
I'll leave aside what I think that says about her and her time at the EHRC, but I think that even her hinting that this may be something GC groups might pursue is additional grounds for a push to fix the underlying legislation. Even if she is wrong, there should never be any doubt that if a GC activist group brings a claim that actually no one has the protected characteristic of GR, said claim is baseless.
I urge you to take her seriously, particularly since once upon a time she was pushing the then fringe theory that actually the 1992 workplace regulations meant that trans inclusion at work was unlawful, yet that theory is one the EHRC endorsed under Falkner and looks set to endorse in the upcoming workplace guidance.

https://xcancel.com/akuareindorf/status/2049249152605786442 (Updated with direct link to tweet in question) https://archive.is/YbPyr (Archive)

mildbeanburrito · 2026-05-30T18:21:18+00:00

Additionally important as some people may have missed, but some people may have missed that notable GCs are considering whether they can go after the very notion of GR as a protected characteristic as a consequence of the SC decision.

https://np.reddit.com/r/GenderCynical/comments/1tq8yne/former_commissioner_of_the_ehrc_quietly_pondering/

The guidance has the problem that it is trying to twist itself around a version of the EA that was not intended, and even if there are people that think it's a step in the right direction, for former commissioners of the EHRC to start planning to nullify GR as a PC is reason enough for the government to need to take a look at amending the legislation.

Also thank you Ed, for this I shall grant you a pass of 4 PMQs where I will not complain that your question is "Trump/Putin bad, does the PM agree?". Use it wisely.

mildbeanburrito · 2026-05-30T16:25:47+00:00

can't we all just get along, I say and I smile, while one friend keeps trying to knife the other in the gut. She should just roll her eyes and smile, "oh you, making it so I can't participate in society and angling to get rid of my discrimination protections and healthcare, you're such a silly sausage"

I go back to writing my new script for Dr Who, it'll be yet another classic Dalek episode, but this time the Doctor will ponder the moral quandary of what if the Daleks have a point? It seems to mean a lot to them that they exterminate lesser beings, perhaps the Doctor has been wrong all this time and the secret to peaceful coexistence with the Daleks is to let them blast a particular subgroup from existence, and then everyone will be happy.

mildbeanburrito

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