83 Comments

I'm looking forward to when Glinner's Twitter is back on Twitter.

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A tit talking about bras.

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Lol 😂

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I could have kept my bra on all those times I had to take it off during a bra fitting? Who knew? Well, Ade did obviously. Shame none of the fitters in my 55+ years of bra wearing did.

Maybe Ade doesn't actually understand what a bra fitting is? Being a man and all.

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Defending his mates - the would be male bra fitters M&S might recruit to please the alphabet soup

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The LGBTM&S+ Community.

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I'm sorry, what is M&S?

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Marks & Spencer. A British High Street department store and brand that used to be a bit of a British Institution and had a nice food hall too and often a café. It was often the key store in a town's shopping area. It was the place you got your undies and socks from, a place to get a sandwich on your way through, your staples and reliable clothing, with a known level of quality. It had a bra-fitting service. Middle market but aspiring to be a cut above etc. They've had husky-voiced women narrating their adverts 'this isn't any carrot, this is an M&S carrot' etc. They have at times tried to 'revamp' themselves and got utterly lost. They really pissed off a lot of their regular and older customers, who spent a lot, by going all 'gender neutral' and making changing rooms open to 'anyone who identifies as a woman'. They've employed trans identified men who declare them a fantastic employer. Then they went down the pan and closed many stores - helping along the death of many town centre locations that then didn't have the footfall so other stores and services suffered.

Younger people maybe grew out of shopping there and other retailers like Top Shop were aimed at the younger market. Then retailing got very odd, online, and bizarrely cheap. Then Primark came along and did clothing for a lot cheaper and quality seemed less important as it was so cheap. Did I say cheap?

I still have hand-me-down M&S clothing from the 70s and 80s when it was well made (and classic to some extent).

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Thanks for taking the time to write this reply - I was just going to comment 'shop'. 😄

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Ah yes, but it's so much more! It's an insight into our psyche too...shhh don't tell anyone. I still can't pass the empty store in my home town without a gulp. It seems a bit indicative now of lots of hollowed out places.

It struck me that someone from the US, unfamiliar with our towns and High Streets may not realise the horror, the horror of some man giving women advice on the sacred female art of bra-fitting...in M&S of all places. It sums up quite a lot. You can burn our houses but you're not coming for my bras and multipack pants. Right, off to have a cup of tea to calm down ;-)

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These days when someone asks me would I like tea, my reaction is I do not like the T. 😄

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😂 Very funny! Thanks for describing it to me. It sounds very much like Dayton's Department Store here in Minnesota (based in Minneapolis), which went through a very similar cycle of being a beloved, offering-everything, high-quality, statewide Institution to being bought by Marshall Field (Chicago-based), then going through what the rest of retail has gone through, being bought by Macy's (quality going downhill), closing a lot of stores, etc. It makes me sad too, to go by a former store. Its 12-story "headquarters" was an anchor point in downtown Mpls. for about a century. Now it's condos and offices.

They had a bra-fitting service too. 😊 And I do recognize the horror of the man giving advice on that. 🤮

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Yes, it's an excellent response. A very good precis on how a traditional and reliable British institution made a massive misjudgement and alienated its main customer base. You'd have thought a retailer that began in the Victorian period would have got the hang of what to do and not do.

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Victor/Victoria.

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Marks and Spencer store. Well respected - now woke 😕

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M & S clothing attracted only the finest clothes moths.

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They posted quite a hefty loss just recently.

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Yeah, I mean to think all these years I’ve been doing it wrong. Obviously not a very good woman.

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One thing I've learned over the past few years with all the trans stuff is that I've been womaning wrong FOREVER. I mean, hardly ever paint my nails, my legs & pits are hairy, I don't simper and giggle. The lessons must have passed me by.

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I don't think any of that matters any more. After reading 5 Things to Know to Make Your Feminism Trans-Inclusive, I understand womanhood now. As they say "There's no it's, ands or buts about it. A woman's gender identity is her innermost concept of being".

That's entirely meaningless, obviously, but it's what allows 'women' with a very masculine demeanor and attitude, along with a full set of cock and balls to steamroller their way into spaces created by or for women. And when women facilitate and support this, and attack women who don't, they make it clear that their understanding of feminism is zero. They need to find a more appropriate word, placatism, for example.

Feminist thinking developed out of the way men treat women, circumscribing our lives, denying us the rights and freedoms they have, and seeing us as something they can use. Early feminists challenged this and created their own definitions and purpose, etc. Whilst there are men who appreciate what feminism is and support its objectives and want to see an end to anti woman prejudice, it can only be from an external perspective - they can observe and listen. Just as white people can observe and listen to black people and how they experience racism and prejudice. But they don't know what it 'feels' like because there is no innermost concept of blackness, not in the individual here and now, or culturally and historically.

The very idea trivialises what racism means and the harm it does to people. It can't be accessed externally, just as womanness or anti woman prejudice can't. The belief that it can is indulgent, conceited and narcissistic. Since when did these characteristics become something good?

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Agreed, it was certainly news to me!

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I wonder if he keeps his trousers on when going for new ones?

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tries everything - shirts, ties, shoes, even - on top of existing ones

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He tucks his jumpers in his trousers.

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Is it fashionable now? Not a good look for most people

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Shies is a muck better example! Thank you 😁😉

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thanks Graham, if you could just publish these at a time when it’s acceptable to start drinking that would be great. cheers.

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Trans pride cocktails (emphasis on the cock).

https://vegarecepten.com/en/trans-pride-cocktail-recipe/

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Where do you find this stuff ! Give me a pint any day (without the colours)

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I just thought to myself what's the last thing VN would want to drink. 😄

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🤣

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🤣very true.

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GC side are a broad church but you're pushing our boundaries here ,you lightweight........

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And the winner of this year's Lovely Ladydicks Competition is...!

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Went for a bra fitting at M&S 2 months ago. Whilst waiting for the fitter a middle-aged man with a 12-year-old son approached and asked whether he could use the fitting room (located behind the women's lingerie department). Without even thinking I said "NO..go to the changing room behind men's trousers over there". To be fair to the man I think he was OK, just a bit lost. And the changing room was marked "Changing Room", not "Ladies or Women's Changing Room". I am sure he and his boy would have been as embarrassed as the ladies stripping down to their waist. Most of the cubicles had wooded doors...but gaps underneath and at the top. I was put into what was obviously a disabled cubicle - wide entrance and curtain, again gaps at the bottom and top. I felt uncomfortable. Of course, I should have realised that I could try on bras over bras! Thank you, Aiden, for this enlightened. suggestion. In 50 years of bra wearing this has never occurred to me.

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In fairness, it's easy to get lost in a lingerie department, just ask Ted and Dougal.

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bwhahahaha, that's a good one! Wonder if that's one of the scenes/songs in The Father Ted Musical?

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The pinnacle of mansplaining -- being an expert in bra fittings!

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So now we don't have to be subjected to being perved on with our boobs fully out, we only have to get perved on when wearing ill-fitting bras we can't try on properly because we are trying to avert the male gaze. Three cheers for progress, eh? Thanks Aiden!

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Derry (Trans)Girls.

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Unwary Girls

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Underweary Girls would definitely pull in the viewers.

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Overweary is what I am starting to feel about it all. Hurry up Health Sec (who even is he/she) Educ Sec (ditto), Kemi.

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Evan Urquart is a piece of work. I remember when she was writing under her old name on Slate. She started calling herself a man around the same time Mallory Ortberg did. Mallory Ortberg is now Daniel Lavery, Grace Lavery’s wife. All of a sudden Slate became unreadable

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Ladyboy in red, is dancing with me cheek to cheek. 🎶🎶🎶

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That photo of the chubby ‘trans’ ‘woman’ winning the beauty pageant will be deemed iconic when the ‘Gender’ War is studied by future historians. Like a holograph, it contains everything about the matter. A man (estrogenically chubby?) unfairly takes prize from a woman. Women, handmaidens all, express cult-capture delight with the theft. Exaggerated applause and delight for the Big Lie. And regressive ‘gender’ stereotype is elevated to unwarranted heights of so-called progression. (A beauty contest for god’s sake). Everything about the photo is a lie. He is not a woman. He is not the most beautiful in the room. And deep down, the applauding women cannot possibly be deliriously happy. It’s all facade (just like the ‘winner’s’ makeup) -- in obeisance to the ‘Trans’ Cult.

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I noticed for years that a certain type of left leaning woman seems to be relieved with gender identity because she can pander to men as she’s been taught to do, and still be a virtuous leftist woman

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wow, that's convoluted! Guess the cult has provided cover for all sorts of formerly socially suppressed behaviour --homophobia, misogyny, paedophilia, fetish, handmaiden syndrome etc,

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Is Owen Jones still looking for an adult human female, who will rent out her womb, so he can be a ' father' to a child???

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God forbid he finds one! The thought of that child man as a father is horrific.

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Any game where you play a transwoman trying to pass? 😄

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To all those men pretending-to-be-women, let’s use those projected and immortal words of their Defender in Chief, Aiden Comerford: “It’s all just some sick fantasy you have”.

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Did Brian eat another contestant? He is fascinatingly unappealing squeezed into that red ensemble. And I don't want to know what he has up his sleeves. When did they change the rules? Does he still want World Peace?

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I've not played Overboard yet. If I'm remembering correctly, it sounds like the plot of Kay Mellor's Girlfriends a few years ago where it turns out Phyllis Logan has pushed her husband overboard while on a cruise. There is some mention made of her character's delayed state pension. I was wishing Kay had used it to emphasise how the 2011 Pension Act affected women born 53/54 which made these women who were in the same class at school reach State Pension Age in 6 different years (2015, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20) at ages ranging from 62 years 8 months to 66 years.

The Pensions ages had to be equalised but can you imagine the outcry if they had tried to do this to men?

Anyway that wee chunk of misogyny is absolutely nothing compared to this erasure of women as a sex class and the mass abuse of children.

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The pension thing affected women differently from men?

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The 1995 act affected the women, and then the 2011 act added to it. My husband was born Jan 1954 and his school friends born in autumn 1953 retired at 65 but my husband retired at 65 and 3 months, and my brother at 65 and 5 months despite only being 11 days younger (11 days equaled another 2 months delay). So men were affected, just not as much as the women for whom it seemed they’d never reach pension age as the goal post kept moving further and further away!

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Sounds similar to the US. It used to be that full retirement age was 65 for everybody. I don't know when it changed, but now it gets older and older. I think some people who are young now will have to be 69 or 70 to get full retirement and they're worried that there won't be enough money in the fund to pay them. Our Congress just needs to make a pretty simple change in the social security laws to fix it, but they are always deadlocked (Republicans and Democrats).

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Can't believe you featured part of my tweet exchange with Aidan Comerford!

That isn't even the best thing I got him to say. Where can I email more screenshots to?!

@DrFletchington

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Reply to one of the substack emails!

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Done! There's some gold in there. I don't know how he'll come back from it.

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