The Scottish Govt, having had a bloody nose over the GRR Bill, is taking a different route this time, letting Westminster introduce a Conversion Practices Bill first. We'll be responding to this call for evidence and we're ready for when @scotgov announces its own bill too.

We are relieved that @Hilary_Cass and @YvetteCooperMP have taken notice of this breach of safeguarding and the law. Hormones harm patients when not used in line with biological need.
Cross sex hormones are dangerous and must stop 🛑
telegraph.co.uk/gift/1aee0d83e…

A measured viewpoint. This is what we need to see when law makers are considering proposed legislation. Clear thinking, setting aside preconceptions in order to examine what is before them, rather than validating what people think is being proposed.

Thank you @dsnorthnorth 🙏

The government simply has to engage with this criticism of the draft Conversion Practices Bill from former DPP Lord Ken Macdonald, reported in The Telegraph

And here's @LesbianLabour & @LabourLGB calling on @UKLabour government "not to leave it to the Right to stand up for those most harmed by this Bill: women and children, lesbians and gays"
labourlist.org/2026/11/letter…
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Scroll down for the letter to @LabourList from @anne_seex with words of advice for Minister @simonlightwood.
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labourlist.org/2026/11/letter…

🧵Three responses to Minister @simonlightwood's piece on the draft Conversion Practices Bill have now been published by @LabourList.
Here's @dsnorthnorth MP expressing the hope & expectation that the Joint Committee will hear from "parents’ groups, clinicians...religious leadthey were wrongly encouraged to identify as transgender & were ultimately harmed by it."
"Lightwood argues that the threshold for prosecution is high, but there are no thresholds in the Bill. This impinges Article 6 of the Convention on Human Rights"
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labourlist.org/2026/11/the-dr…

Living in Scotland? Feeling a bit overwhelmed with consultations and thinking to give this one a miss as the bill won't apply here? We suggest you think again. If the bill passes into law in England & Wales, @scotgov won't be far behind in bringing similar legislation forward.

"Lord Macdonald said it appeared that this latest bill was being used as a “Trojan Horse”.
“I think there is a lobby pushing hard for this bill, which is the same lobby that wanted to argue in favour of self ID & the rights of trans women – biological males – to use women’s spaces...
The lobby that lost those arguments is now using this as a way to try to achieve some of what they wanted to achieve by the back door."
“If the minister can’t explain what it is that’s presently lawful that the bill is going to make unlawful, that that means there’s a serious problem with the bill, frankly”

We hope that our govt will give up claiming "Nothing to see here", and will now require the committee scrutinising the draft bill to fully address all the legitimate issues which @KenMacdonaldKC & so many of us are raising.`
telegraph.co.uk/gift/b7220a0e9…

It's OK for @LGBTLabour to disagree with @akuareindorf and @KishwerFalkner's careful analysis. But their response contains no analysis of their own, and no counter-argument, just unsubstantiated assertions and allegations. It should be dismissed by @UKLabour.

It feels wrong to say "happy 50th" to a service you would rather did not need to exist.

But, in this imperfect world, we desperately need @RCCGlasgow & the amazing women who set it up.

So, our thanks to Rosemary & her first team as well as Isabelle, Claudia and all the others who have followed to support women at the most horrific times in their lives.

We are in awe and we thank you. heraldscotland.com/news/26706582.…

Woman of the Day and one of the most celebrated war correspondents of her day Martha Gellhorn, born in OTD in 1908 in St Louis, was nearly a Not-The-WOTD. She persuaded public sector workers to break windows to make a point — well, I am a taxpayer after all — but it was a just nly woman to land at Normandy on D-Day.

Martha’s suffragist mother took her eight year old daughter to a rally in St Louis in 1916 where 7,000 women in yellow sashes lined the delegates’ route to the Democratic Party’s National Convention. The number of states in favour of votes for women were represented by those wearing white and the rest by those in grey and black. Martha represented the future woman voter. Guess how many were dressed in white? Seven.

She went to France in 1930 to work at the United Press Bureau in Paris as a foreign correspondent but was fired after reporting sexual harassment. I’d say that thankfully after nearly a century later, this kind of thing doesn’t happen any more but you’d know I was being sarky.

I could tell you how in 1936 in Key West, Martha met a heavy-drinking womanising author and journalist with a couple of divorces behind him and they travelled to Barcelona to report on the Spanish Civil War, but even though she married him in 1940, his only value is that during this period, she found her niche: war correspondent.

“I followed the war wherever I could reach it.”

I could also tell you how Martha reported on the rise of the Nazis and how, lacking the official press credentials needed to witness the Normandy landings, she impersonated a stretcher bearer, hid in a hospital ship bathroom till it reached Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944, and waded ashore to collect casualties and assist medical teams.

“Everyone was violently busy on that crowded, dangerous shore…We walked with the utmost care between the narrowly placed white tape lines that marked the mine-cleared path, and headed for a tent marked with a red cross…Everyone agreed that the beach was a stinker, and that it would be a great pleasure to get the hell out of here sometime.”

But this is about Martha becoming a Federal Emergency Relief Administration investigator in 1934, travelling around the USA to file eyewitness reports about the grim conditions in which people were living.

She found a corrupt contractor exploiting relief workers (jobless small farmers and ranchers) on a FERA project in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He had them shovelling dirt pointlessly from one place to another, then collected the shovels, threw them in the lake, and pocketed a commission on an order for replacements. The workers were left idle and unpaid and had to submit to a humiliating means test for direct relief.⁠

It wasn’t the first such instance. Martha was ready to resign in protest but what she didn’t know was that her boss at FERA had been sending her eyewitness reports painstakingly documenting abuses to Eleanor Roosevelt. He urged her to go and speak to the First Lady. This deeply impressive woman invited her to dinner at the White House, told her husband to listen up, and persuaded Martha to keep going.

I confess that every time I learn something new about Eleanor Roosevelt and the many, many ways she found to support other women, it just reinforces my deep respect for her.

Martha went back to Idaho, bought the men a beer and persuaded a few to break the windows of the local FERA office at night so that Washington would investigate their grievances. The FBI saw the damage as a possible communist uprising and questioned the men, who admitted that she had suggested it. The contractor was arrested for fraud, the men got their tools and work back, but Martha was branded a “dangerous Communist”, recalled to Washington and fired from FERA. She shrugged it off as “an honourable discharge”.

When Eleanor Roosevelt learned that Martha had been fired and the FBI were so hostile towards her, she invited her to come and live at the White House till she found her feet. Martha helped Eleanor with her correspondence and the “My Day” column.

Martha was one of the first journalists to report from Dachau when it was liberated by American troops in April 1945 and she covered the liberation of Paris, but that was the year her husband tried to block her career. He wanted a stay-at-home wife. She didn’t want to stay at home. After he refused to help her secure a press pass to return to the USA from Germany by plane in 1945, she was left with no choice but to board a ship laden with explosives. It was the last straw.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolled for him. She divorced him that year.

After WW2, she covered every major theatre of war for over fifty years: Vietnam, the Arab/Israeli conflict, the American invasion of Panama. The only reason she didn’t report on the Balkan conflict in the 1980s is because she was nearly blind by then. She died in London at the age of 89.

To the end, Martha refused to be remembered merely as some bloke’s wife.

“I was a writer before I met him, and I have been a writer for 45 years since. Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life?”

.@HadleyFreeman:
“GBH, coercive control, child abuse, homophobic hate speech: these are already criminal acts. Which would make this bill seem rather redundant until you read on and you realise that the bill is, in fact, a bait and switch”
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thetimes.com/comment/column…

Off to @M_Star_Online conference in Glasgow today. The importance of trade union organising. Looking forward to a good discussion.

"It has never made sense for T to be tacked on to LGB: one is about sexuality; the other is a homophobic & misogynistic movement which argues men who feel feminine are women, & women who feel butch are men. This is why this bill is so self-contradictory: it claims to be preventibut the real conversion therapy is transgenderism"
thetimes.com/article/20cad6…

Shared with you by a Times subscriber.

Enjoy this article for free.

thetimes.com/comment/column…

Helpful collection of comments by @UKLabour MPs opposed to the proposed conversion practices bill. We need all Labour MPs to engage with what the bill actually says; there will be many more who will oppose once they fully understand its implications.

Decent Labour MPs can see the draft conversion bill is not what it says on the tin.

Huge respect and admiration to Tonia for speaking out on this draconian and deeply sinister legislation.

Thank you @UKLabour parliamentarians @PreetKGillMP @HayteratLords @ToniaAntoniazzi @steveyemm @MauriceGlasman & @gstringermp for speaking out here on behalf of your colleagues & millions of Lab voters concerned about the Draft Conversion Practices Ban Bill
telegraph.co.uk/gift/5d88a34f9…

These are the ‘gaps’ as I understand them. Why do we think it’s a good idea to extend coercive control in this way? Why do we think it’s a good idea to have one single act constitute criminal harassment? Why should something be a ‘communication offence’ if it simply conveys an These are not in my view ‘gaps’ in the law but a recognition of the necessary limits of the criminal law. Those who will get swept up are parents, exercising lawful and necessary parental responsibility.