@Channel4News are totally missing the point here. The report should be focusing on the utter failure of the RCN and other unions to support women and their sex based rights and sex realist beliefs and how this week’s lawfare cases highlight that. ⬇️ If you still think the unions have women’s backs, just look at the court lists this week. Today in Edinburgh, Norma Austin Hart and Alison Ann-Dowling are bringing a judicial review against Community because the union’s Gender Equality Strategy treats “women and non-binary people” as one group, even after the @ForWomenScot Supreme Court judgment said sex in the Equality Act means biological sex. Norma and Alison tried the proper route first, raising the policy internally and waiting for the leadership to listen and say that they were threatened with discipline instead. So two lifelong trade unionists are now asking a judge to do the job their union would not. Meanwhile in Dundee, Sandie Peggie is in the middle of a high profile 7 day hearing against the RCN, the union she paid into for 30 years. After she objected to a man in the women’s changing room, Sandie says the RCN failed to support her and treated her beliefs as the problem. Her three brilliant witnesses including from @ScotLesbians and @mbmpolicy helped to explain the horrifying degree of institutional capture. These are not isolated cases. @Fiona44444, a lifelong PCS activist and retired Scottish Government civil servant, is taking her own union to tribunal after she says it sidelined her for the same beliefs. Stephanie Pratt, an NHS biomedical scientist, is doing the same against Unite. These women were the members unions used to boast about: loyal, long-serving, the ones who turned up, paid the subs and expected representation when it counted. That is what makes this so bleak, because the organisations built to protect workers with the least power, often women on part-time hours, second jobs and lower grades, have left those same women to hire lawyers. This weekend makes the point even sharper. @unisontheunion , with @ASLEFunion , @USDAW and the @MusiciansUnion, is boycotting Labour’s women’s conference in Liverpool because the main hall is restricted to women as a sex, in line with the Supreme Court. @Unison says that runs counter to its policy on “trans equality”. So the largest union in the country would rather stay away from a women’s conference than accept that “woman” means female. The established unions are entirely captured so women are resorting to lawfare and setting up their own unions when they only wanted the old ones to do their job. Hence the Darlington nurses had to found the @DarlingtonUnion , co-founded by Bethany Hutchison, now its president and a witness in Sandie’s Dundee case. In sport, @sharrond62 and @TracyEdwardsMBE had to set up the Women’s Sports Union. Unions were supposed to be the shield for people who could not fight alone. Watch this week and ask who that shield is for now.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ I doubt Channel 4 will bother though. You can follow both hearings this week on @tribunaltweets and @tribunaltweets2 – at Dundee, Scotland