Letter to Pippa Heylings, LibDem MP for South Cambs
May. 22nd, 2026 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnrI'm writing to you as one of your constituents. I am a non-trans woman, who believes that trans women are also women. I'm sure you've had a lot of emails about this today. No doubt the LibDems are working on a reply which I would be happy to see, but I'd also appreciate your own thoughts.
Yesterday the government finally revealed the new updated EHRC Guidance to the Equality Act. There are updates to several areas, but the ones I want to talk about are those affecting trans people.
There is an attempt to say that gender reassignment is still a protected characteristic, but the vast majority of the changes are about how service providers and others are now not only able to, but *expected* to exclude trans people from the places which match their lived gender, or in some cases also from places which match their official sex at birth.
I know you have lovely trans colleagues who you were campaigning with in Cambridge recently. I know you don't think Yannifer should be expected to use the men's toilets. But according to this guidance we are all expected to treat her as a man from now on, and we are asked to believe that this has always been the legal reality of the Equality Act, and that previous guidance was merely mistaken in ever having said otherwise.
Trans people with GRCs have sworn an oath that they intend to live their lives going forward in their acquired gender, and if this guidance is accepted then they will no longer be able to do so.
The guidance itself even accepts that there is no way for any of us to adequately prove to someone who asks whether we are in fact trans or not. I could be refused service if someone *thinks* I am trans, and does not believe me when I say that I am not.
I am not surprised to see this guidance, because it has been clear for some time that this has been coming. I am still shocked and appalled that the government is just going ahead with it.
Please can I ask you to speak up. Speak up for trans people. Speak up for clubs and services which wish to remain trans inclusive. Speak up for other women, who will experience harassment because they are suspected of being trans, but even more so for trans people who will experience increased harassment and fear too. Speak up for those who are now excluded from taking part in sport, even if their clubs and leagues welcome them.
The government could legislate to change this, to change the Equality Act to mean when it had always been understood to mean. They choose not to. I hope you and the LibDems can choose better.
Yours sincerely,
Eleanor Blair
Great Shelford, Cambridge, CB22
25 years
May. 22nd, 2026 03:14 pmrmc28In January, I passed my 25-year anniversary of working at the University and was sent a nice email from my head of department. I've just been invited to a "celebration event" with the Vice Chancellor and a bunch of other colleagues also reaching the 25-year milestone. Regrettably it is right in the middle of my next hockey camp in Hull, which I booked a couple of months ago, and which I am much more interested in attending.
I have dutifully filled in the RSVP form to say I won't be there, and answered some optional questions about my time at the University (presumably for use in promotion of the recognition event).
Back in 2001 I was only going to stay a few years ...
today in movement
May. 21st, 2026 11:24 pmkaberettPilates on the terrace: delightful, except that every time I stopped weighing the mat down with my personal body (due to, for example, lifting up a limb to wave it around) the wind started folding it back up under me.
Pilates more generally: realised today that in addition to normally doing clam and hip stretches at the end of Pilates, and the current Hip Trouble having started after a couple of weeks of not managing that part of the routine because I was only getting as far as doing my bare minimum get-on-the-mat-and-breathe... a whole bunch of the movements incorporate, essentially, sciatic nerve glides. There's another entry to the list of But What Has Pilates Ever Done For Us...
Meanwhile I am out of routine and therefore also eating less protein than I've been managing upcountry, and o have just for the first time since the initial DOMS wound up with post-gym soreness. I have a horrid feeling that my medium term future might contain protein powder; in the short term, dinner was heavy on eggs and tofu.
And, regarding DOMS, last night's "... huh" was about the (extent of) overlap of symptoms and progression with those of post-exertional malaise. This is not yet a fully-formed thought, but it's definitely trying to be a thought. (As part of the theme of "a whole bunch of the experiences of disabled people around embodiment actually do form a continuum with those of the temporarily able bodied, and so do management strategies".)
some good things!
May. 20th, 2026 11:05 pmkaberett- Saw the goldfinch(es) again on my way home from gym + shop.
- Birthday cake continues to exist :)
- For five glorious minutes I was one of only two people in the gym (and the other one was very quiet, so it's just as well that other people showed up as I was starting to deadlift, really).
- Vanity: ( Read more... ).
- There are lots and lots of wildflower verges on my various perambulations and I cannot emphasise enough how much I am enjoying having ready access to both the hedges covered in sea pinks and patches of long grass mingled with poppies and (multiple colours of!) cornflowers and Margeriten.
Prompted by death of Felicity Lott
May. 20th, 2026 11:42 amchickenfeethttps://operaramblings.blog/2026/05/20/turn-of-the-screw-in-aldeburgh/
some good things
May. 19th, 2026 10:51 pmkaberett- Today in birds: choughs, stonechats, the flock of goldfinches, cormorants, and infinite gulls and jackdaws and crows.
- Nerve glides continue to sound like bullshit but they are also actually and immediately helping with the mistake that is the sciatic nerve, so that's cheering.
- Finished the current puzzle! Less the one missing piece. Absolute nonsense, would almost certainly happily do again. The thing about it, right, is that it has lots of textures and internal edges, so it was often very easy to put a big patch together and very hard to work out where it actually went. (Shocking nobody, I was much less into the landscapes and figures in the middle of the big platters...)
- Made it down to the beach multiple times, both at approximately low tide and approximately high tide. Spent some quality time watching the waves. V good.
- Sleepy pile with A remains extremely good. <3
(no subject)
May. 19th, 2026 04:43 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
apod_feed
Spiral galaxy NGC 3169 looks to be unraveling like a ball of cosmic
Beers and cheeses
May. 18th, 2026 11:35 pmrmc28Beer festival this evening, I had three cheeses on the platter:
- Cornish Yarg
- Pecorino
- Mayfield (a swiss cheese, excellently tasty, a+ would eat again)
I also had four different 0.5% beers, all them also vegan[1], of which the standout was Mash Gang's Lesser Evil, a chocolate cherry stout with a lovely complex set of flavours to it. (I have already ordered some cans for home consumption ...)
Honourable mention goes to Heaps Normal's Half Day Hazy, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Infinite Session's Infinite IPA and Hepworth's Aztec were fine but I didn't love them.
Others I particularly want to try this week from the no-alcohol list
- Moon Rabbit by Tartarus, a vanilla stout (vg)
- Milk Stout by Nirvana
- IPA also by Nirvana
- Hazy Galaxy by Vinohradský
- Goram IPA Zero by Butcombe
- Faith IPA by Northern Monk
- Bold IPA by Queer Brewing
- Juicy AF: Mango Pale by Only With Love, what it says on the tin (vg)
- Tropical AF by Kasteel
- Nillis by La Trappe
[1] I am not vegan but I sometimes drink with people who are, and the intersection of vegan and no-alcohol beers is not large
vital functions
May. 17th, 2026 10:54 pmkaberettCelebrating. My 36th birthday! In low-key but very pleasant fashion.
Reading. I have made Some progress on Your Inner Fish (Neil Shubin), but alas not enough to actually finish it before the loan autoreturned to the library (and there is a queue, so I have put it back on hold, sigh). I had got up to the teeth. Leaving aside some towering indignation on behalf of zoos and aquaria everywhere (not everything in these settings is Bilaterian! not all Bilaterians have a head and two eyes!!! this is a terrible introduction to phylogeny!!!!!) I am having a good time with this one. In brief: palaeontologist specialising in fossil fish unexpectedly ends up in charge of medical students' first-year human anatomy course, and has Opinions.
Watching. Richie's Brooklyn Gym, a ten-minute documentary short about the gym Casey Johnston joined when she first started lifting weights.
Playing. Working on a puzzle that I am enjoying way more than I expected to, which is a delight.
Cooking. A quiche, this evening, with spelt flour, which I overdid a bit but oh well; and, yesterday, The Familial Celebratory Cake. :)
Eating. PURPLE ASPARAGUS. Raspberries. My mother's moussaka. Birthday cake. Bonus cake from Gweek Village Stores. A Gear Farm pasty.
Growing. The lemongrass has survived being potted up! And the poblano is flowering enthusiastically. :)
Observing. A nuthatch, we are pretty sure, at the Cornish Seal Sanctuary! In addition to the puffins and The Regulars Various, we did get to meet Hot Cross Bun, who is not quite ready for release yet but is getting very close to it. We got to see seal behaviour we had never previously observed (Attie, up in a rehab pool to keep Banana(rama) company while she stabilises on her anti-seizure meds, apparently really likes sunbathing belly-up with only her head underwater; and two of the residents were PORPOISING enthusiastically!!!). Sea pinks; Wundklee; CHOUGHS.
The Incandescent, Emily Tesh
May. 16th, 2026 02:33 pmemperorI enjoyed the way magic was woven into an English boarding school, and how nicely Tesh captures (and satirizes) the nature of institutional life. I like a competent protagonist, too, and Dr Walden is very competent, and pleasingly keen on the merits of education. I almost (but not quite) always understood the choices she was making. The plot works well, and throws up some surprises, but comes together pretty well in the end; although the motivation for Mark's behaviour is never really explained (nor is why we the readers are more aware of the red flags than Dr Walden is). I also appreciated the exploration of the ethics of demons and how magicians interact with them.
I enjoyed this a lot.
(no subject)
May. 16th, 2026 05:30 amapod_feed
Comet R3 PanSTARRS might be best remembered as an Orion comet.