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Support accurate birth certificates for trans and non-binary people

Content note: suicide, transphobia

I’d wanted to get this done a lot earlier, but we bought a house in the middle of lockdown and that has a tendency to throw every other plan out the window. It’s definitely not perfect and I apologise for anything I’ve missed or messed up on.

The important bit: there’s just one day left to submit on the very concisely named Inquiry into Supplementary Order Paper 59 on the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Bill.

This SOP would allow people to change the sex/gender marker on their birth certificate without having to go through the current Family Court process.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a really positive step, and of course it’s being dogpiled by transphobes who claim to love women’s rights but really just want to make trans people disappear.

My submission is below. You can also check out the submission from Gender Minorities Aotearoa. And make your own here. As with the conversion practices ban, you don’t have to write a lot. You don’t have to share your darkest traumas. You can simply say you support the GMA submission, and leave it at that, if you want.

Select Committee submissions aren’t an opinion poll – it doesn’t necessarily make a difference if there’s more subs on one side of the issue than the other. But having a broad range of voices and arguments makes it easier for the Committee to consider what needs to change.

13 September 2021

To the Governance and Administration Committee

Submission on the Inquiry into Supplementary Order Paper 59 on the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Bill

Kia ora koutou

My name is Stephanie Rodgers. I am a feminist, Pākehā, mother and public servant from Wellington, and I write in support of the amendments to the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Bill.

The status quo hurts people

Although I am cisgender (my gender identity matches the sex I was assigned as birth), I have a personal interest in this legislation. The night I graduated from university with my Honours degree, a friend of mine took his own life. He was a young trans man who struggled hugely with a lack of acceptance from people in his life including his employer, who persistently misgendered him, used the wrong name for him and refused to see him as the man he was.

A few years earlier, his friends at university had put together the money for him to change his name legally, as a birthday present. I think we all cried when he opened the envelope and realised what was inside.

Even at his funeral he was mis-named and mis-gendered by others.

I don’t think this legislation would have been enough, on its own, to save my friend’s life. Not having a birth certificate that reflected who he was, was only one of the obstacles our society put in his way and in the way of many other trans and non-binary people, that prevented him from just being able to live his life as himself. It is in some ways trivial. But it is also hugely significant because it represents who you were from the day you were born. It might have helped. I’ll never know.

Having accurate identity documents is something cis people (people whose gender matches the sex we were assigned at birth) get to take for granted. For people like my friend, it was just another massive straw on the camel’s back.

The Human Right’s Commission’s PRISM report found:

Youth12 data for suicide rates supported [the findings of the Counting Ourselves report], showing 37% of trans participants had attempted suicide at some point; more than twice the rate reported by same or both-sex attracted young people.

Trans, non-binary and intersex people are whānau, but they are made to feel like they cannot be themselves, or will never be accepted by society as themselves, by processes like the current Family Court procedure for updating their own birth certificate.

The current process is onerous and inconsistent

At present, people who want to change the sex on their birth certificate must go through a Family Court process including providing proof of having undergone medical treatment. There are several reasons this is unfair:

  • Many trans and non-binary people do not seek or want to undergo medical treatment. They may not experience the kinds of dysphoria that can be treated or alleviate with surgery or hormonal treatments. This doesn’t change the fact that their birth certificate is inaccurate.
  • If they do seek medical treatment, they may face long waiting times or even a complete inability to access those treatments in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite increased funding provided in the last term of government, the Ministry of Health’s Gender Affirming Surgery Service reported just last month that there were 295 referrals for a first specialist assessment on their active waiting list, but only five surgeries performed in 2020 and eight in 2021. It is cruel to make people wait to update their documents until they have undergone surgery which at current rates could take decades through our public health service.
  • Finally, this process is inconsistent with the far simpler statutory declaration required to change gender markers on driver licences and passports. Aligning these processes is logical, especially given that birth certificates are potentially the least commonly used of the three.

There are also practical, potentially harmful implications of the current process. Having a driver licence and passport that say one thing, and a birth certificate that says another, presents a risk of a person being outed – revealed as trans or non-binary – against their will. We know that trans and non-binary people are at a serious and real risk of violence when they are outed. The PRISM report released by the Human Rights Commission in 2020 stated:

Multiple comprehensive reviews show that people with a diverse sexual orientation and gender identity experience a higher risk of physical and sexual violence than the general population. In most cases, the person’s sexual orientation or gender identity was a factor in the perpetration of the abuse.

This demonstrates why it can be a matter of personal safety for a person’s documents, including birth certificate, passport and driver’s licence, match who they are and how they present themselves to the world.

Youth, parents and migrants also deserve to be included

Parents

Some trans people do not come out or transition until well into their adult lives, and may have gotten married, or had children, before they felt able to live as their true selves. This can mean they have additional documents such as their child’s birth certificate which reflect inaccurate information about who they are (e.g. listing them as a child’s mother rather than their father.)

The BDMRR Bill already allows for parents to be able to request that their child’s birth record include information relating to their marriage or civil union after child’s birth. It should also allow parents to request that their identifier be changed, e.g. from “mother” to “father”, if that parent has transitioned, come out, or otherwise changed how they identify as a parent. As with a person’s own birth certificate, it is important these things reflect reality, and avoids the risk of someone being outed, if their child’s birth certificate accurately represents their parent’s gender.

It should also allow people to update their marriage or civil union certificates with accurate name and gender information.

Youth

The current wording of the Bill requires applicants aged 15 and younger to have a guardian make the application on their behalf, together with a letter of support from a qualified third person.

Unfortunately, many young trans and non-binary people are not in the care of guardians who are supportive of their true gender identity.

Young people are already able to make many other significant decisions on their own behalf, if they can demonstrate an understanding of the implications and consequences of those decisions, and the law should be consistent here. Amending this process to require support from either a guardian or qualified third person would be fairer.

People with identity documents issued in other countries

The Bill does not allow for overseas-born people to change the sex marker on their existing birth certificate. For many people, it is simply not possible, and could be very dangerous, to return to their country of birth and attempt to get their birth certificate corrected. However, the Bill does allow for the government to issue name change certificates for people whose proof-of-name documentation is from overseas. It seems fair and easy enough to expand this to include the option to issue a document recognising a change of gender or sex marker as well.

Sex and gender are not simple matters

Finally, I am aware many submissions to the Committee will insist that biological sex is a clear-cut binary of male vs female, defined by chromosomes, genitalia or whether a person’s body produces sperm or ova, and that birth certificates represent some kind of definitive evidence, carved in stone, of such matters. These submissions are grounded in ideology, not scientific reality, certainly not in compassion for trans and non-binary people, and I urge the Committee to treat them as such.

As a cis woman, a feminist and a mother, I want to state as strongly as possible that all this Bill does is give people, who experience huge amounts of discrimination and marginalization, the simple dignity of a birth certificate that reflects who they are.

It is not a passport into women’s bathrooms (and I am more concerned about those who want to peer into people’s pants to check what’s there before they pee, than whether the person in the next cubicle is trans). It is not a denial of “biological” reality. We are all wonderfully complex, varied beings and our lives should never be defined or limited by the shape of our genitals or whether we can get pregnant.

Trans and non-binary people have existed in every human culture in history, facing greater or lesser prejudice. We have an opportunity to demonstrate that Aotearoa New Zealand is on the “lesser” end of that spectrum. As a bonus, we will save time and Family Court resources by removing an unnecessary and onerous process from its ambit.

I do not wish to appear before the Committee.

Stephanie Rodgers

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Baby talk 6: and then, the good news

Read the full Baby Talk series

Content note: infertility, pregnancy

I hate curtain patterns that don’t repeat in a nice orderly fashion. Something about them makes my brain twitch, and I don’t like to think how much of my life I’ve spent staring at drapes (or wallpaper) trying to find the nice clean border where everything starts all over again.

It feels like I should draw some deep-and-meaningful lesson from that but I can’t think what it is.

The curtains in the little rooms – more like cubicles – in the old Fertility Associates office in Wellington did not repeat. They were an obnoxious mess of green and blue and orange and yellow, squares and swirls and stripes, and oh, what a relief for my brain it was to have that chaotic vomit to focus on instead of what was ahead: our second embryo transfer, with the spare, frozen blastocyst from our first round of egg harvesting.

The clinic was busy that day and I could hear parts of murmured conversations in the neighbouring cubicles. It felt very isolating, and not just because I was on my own for this one. The thing is, you and every other person in there is in exactly the same boat – nobody else in the world knows as well as they do what you’re going through at that exact moment – but you’re separated, by literal walls and also social ones. This isn’t a waiting room where you make eye contact and smile at other people, much less strike up a conversation. You don’t know what stage they’re at – what news they’re here to hear – but you know exactly what the worst case scenario is.

The clinic is obviously aware of this dynamic, so there’s a sign on the cubicle wall for their Facebook group. Here, it says, here’s a safe place to make those connections. We never joined. I don’t like sharing my grief in the moment (she says, on her public blog), I don’t even know how to contain it within myself, it just felt too hard to push it onto others or have theirs pushed onto me.

Once again, it was a quick, clean procedure. Almost too much so. There’s nothing big and scary like sedation or a waiting period to focus your anxiety, so it all goes onto the next week-and-a-bit waiting for the next pregnancy test; and in my case, on work. I was at Parliament while we went through this, and our second transfer happened at the end of July; only six weeks before Parliament dissolved and I lost every scrap of job security.

They say there’s never a good time to have a baby, but I still feel like we chose a particularly terrible one;* on the other hand, it wasn’t a choice. It was a need.

And then the results came in.

And we won the lottery.

I’d spent the whole month, since our first transfer failed, telling myself over and over that someone has to beat the odds. That’s the ironic thing about what I mentioned in the last post, about the idea that every infertility story has a happy ending. When you’re going through it, it feels like everyone you talk to has an unhappy ending. Or tried and tried and tried and tried again and maybe, finally, through sheer force of will and luck and persistence, it happened.

I don’t think I know anyone who got as lucky as we did.

J was home when I got the phone call, so he found out almost as soon as I did; and in true J fashion, his first question was whether there was something performative he was supposed to do. I told him jewellery, or a car.

It was the happiest day of my life, and yet … it’s the same story I feel I’ve told already. Every bit of success on this path just opens up more avenues for failure and anxiety. This blood test was good. But there was another only days away. Three weeks after that, the “early scan”. More appointments in the diary to get good news, or the worst.

I just assumed these early days are when there’s the highest risk of losing a pregnancy. But no one ever said it. I guess you don’t need one more thing to worry about.

Probably the worst bit was having to keep up the damn pessaries. I was looking forward to having clean underwear again.

And on top of all that we had J’s contract at work ending, the election another week closer, and at some point we had thought about moving house before we had a baby, and …. how???

I’m almost happier now, reflecting back, than I was on that day. Because now I’m free of those worries (found plenty of new ones, have no fear). I know that the Wednesday blood test will be strong again, and the early scan will be the first time I see my baby’s heart beating, and everything, everything will work out. Hindsight is great like that.

~

*Four days after the pregnancy test, four cases of COVID-19 were found in Auckland, which went into a level 3 lockdown, the rest of the country to level 2. Great timing, like I said.

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Mother’s Day

(Content note: infertility, mental health, motherhood)

My first post about our ~parenting journey~ is here.

Mother’s Day has never been the most problematic artificially-hyped-to-sell-stuff-parental-celebration holiday for me. I grew up ~without a father~ (he bailed; his loss) so it was always the unthinking way we/marketing departments assume that everyone has A Dad to celebrate, and the consequent erasure of dudes who play an amazing role in kids’ lives, which irked me on an annual basis.

But once we’d started trying to have a baby, and the years of it just-not-happening ticked over, Mother’s Day took on a more personal impact. I wanted to be a mum, and it felt further and further away every year, which was only added to by the doom-and-gloom messages that are constantly around about Women’s Fertility Crashing And Burning Further And Further Every Day You Age Past 35 27 23 18 your own birth.

(This cropped up again last week when TVNZ Breakfast were doing a series of stories on infertility, which were really important but also managed to screen each morning at exactly the time I was feeding the baby and trying to find something to watch on TV. Here’s the thing: the “at 35 your fertility dies” trope is not exactly scientific and we need to have way better conversations about why people actually delay having kids – even if you don’t have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for fertility treatment.)

A part of me assumed I would just never be a mother. Even once we had the resources to do IVF, the odds felt too great. If the grand narrative of my life was going to go one way, it just felt far more likely I’d end up with She Desperately Wanted Children But Could Not Conceive than the Hallmark/Lifetime/TLC movie After Years And Against All Odds, A Miracle.

I’ve had anxiety and depression all of my adult life, so the horrible little voices at the back of my brain telling me I’m doomed are so familiar it’s almost comfortable. And they just got louder every time the TV filled with images of blissful mums-and-bubs and saccharine time lapses of The Most Important Relationship You’ll Ever Have.

(Shout out to the current Pandora jewellery campaign for casting a mother and daughter so close in age appearance that I still can’t quite parse the timeline of your ads!)

Often it felt like a grand signal from the universe to just give up. Because the odds are so against you. Because the obstacles are so real and so high. Because if it doesn’t happen – especially after putting yourself through the ordeal of IVF – haven’t you just wasted years, and money, that could have gone to something better, something more productive?

(I still haven’t even begun to unpack the way my brain obsesses about “productivity”.)

I have many friends who did exactly this. Drew the line in the sand and said, enough. But always with a huge amount of sorrow. That was why we struck that deal with ourselves: three rounds. Enough to say we tried, we gave it our best shot, but it wasn’t meant to be and let’s now focus on what the rest of our lives look like without children.

I honestly don’t know right now if I would have been able to stick to it, or how long it would have taken me to let go, if I could even let go. I didn’t have to find out. We got very, very lucky.

So this year, I celebrate my first Mother’s Day. But not just that: it’s my mother’s first Mother’s Day as a grandmother. My grandmother’s first Mother’s Day as a great-grandmother. As horribly commercial and transparent as it is, that feels very important. At the same time, it brings up everything I’ve been through not just over the past year, but all the years of trying before that, and all the years of wanting and hoping before we could even try. I’m an only child: if I didn’t have a baby, my mother would never be a grandmother. I’m the eldest of my cousins and none of them seem to be interested in having kids any time soon: would we ever have gotten that gorgeous four-generations-in-one-photo?

(And again: let’s talk about how saddling young people with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, in order to get jobs with no long-term security or career path, while housing prices skyrocket, might have the teensiest impact on why millennials and zoomers keep Putting Off Having Children, yeah?)

It should feel like a happy ending. It does. But at the same time I don’t know when I’ll ever stop being just a little bit in mourning for all the grief and stress and painful, painful absence that this day represented for me for so long.

So this one goes to all the people who are still there. Who want to be mums, and can’t for whatever reason, and have to deal with the unthinking assumptions of our culture not just on this day but every other day of the year. It sucks. It doesn’t necessarily get better. I know there’s nothing that can really soothe that hurt because even holding onto hope feels like self-harm sometimes. Look after yourself.

I wrote the above a few days ago. Today, Michelle Duff published an incredibly important article about the Corrections department’s practice of shackling and handcuffing prisoners as they are giving birth, or breastfeeding.

It was probably a mistake to read that on my phone, with baby in arms, right after a feed.

Like I said on Twitter: everyone involved in this – the officers in the room, their direct supervisors, their direct supervisors, and anyone else who had knowledge of this and did nothing to stop it – needs to be fired, possibly into the sun.

It is simply unacceptable that we keep getting these stories coming out of Corrections. It is simply unacceptable that Corrections, and its Minister depending on where we are in the media cycle of any given scandal, thinks they can treat the public like marks who’ll swallow any horror if it has the phrase “security concerns” slapped on it.

This practice is against Corrections’ own stated policy and yet, AND YET,

Children’s Commissioner OPCAT inspectors found prison officers had varying interpretations of when prisoners were “pregnant” or “giving birth”.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

The officers involved in these situations are either ignorant of the basics of their own jobs, or know they’re doing the wrong thing. Either way, they have no place holding those jobs. And their senior leaders, including Kelvin Davis as the Minister responsible, need to stop pretending there’s some third option where oopsie, well-meaning people with the best of intentions just accidentally did a human rights violation oh well let’s commission another review to tell us what we already know: Corrections is not fit for purpose. It is not keeping New Zealanders safe by repeatedly and deliberately brutalising prisoners and lying about it to the public. It is not delivering care to the people it laughably euphemises as such. When pregnant, labouring people are shackled like animals and bullied in their most sensitive moments, Corrections is actively undermining any chance for those people and their families to rehabilitate, to build positive relationships, to feel like they can be a part of our communities.

This cannot be reformed without drastic and immediate action. Call it some kind of transformation rooted in kindness and strengthening the Māori-Crown partnership.

So, Kelvin?

Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis was not available for an interview.

Oh.

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A year ago today

Read the full Baby Talk series

(Content note: infertility, IVF, fatphobia)

A year ago today, my partner and I “properly” began the journey to become parents. We’d been on the path for a very long time: first trying, and trying, and trying, and failing, then trying to get help, and facing some pretty gross obstacles to that; and finally being in a position to overcome those (with money, which tells you how unnecessary those obstacles were in the first place) and then having incredible good luck and at long last, after wanting and hoping and waiting and longing, just over a month ago, she arrived. Our baby. The tiny helpless bean who has completely turned our lives upside down. (Sorry, spoiler alert: this one has a happy ending.)

Of course, I wrote it all down. Even the bits I don’t even want to look at, myself, because they’re too raw. But there are parts I do want to share, and thus my blog is getting resurrected because I’m too much of an old school millennial to do Substack even if they weren’t currently tanking as a platform after pandering to transphobes.

(Yes, even in the posts about how much I love my baby, there will always be politics. You know where you are, right?)

As for the timing: I couldn’t bring myself to post this stuff earlier, unlike my good mate Dave who had the incredible courage-slash-lack-of-filter to write about his and Kim’s journey as it was happening. On top of all the other layers of anxiety we were going through, it just felt like it would be unlucky; or at the very least, it might force us to reveal things we weren’t ready to, even if just by the lack of posting at a critical moment.

But she’s here now, and she’s as close to perfect as she needs to be, and even though I still have that fretful voice in the back of my mind telling me not to count my baby chicken even though she’s already hatched, I think it’s the right time to start pulling all these scattered drafts and notes together – not to mention an essential outlet for my brain as I’m at home on paid parental leave, desperately trying to work out what my life looks like now I’m a mother, and feel almost incapable of considering myself having any other role in the world.

So here’s (most of) what I wrote after that first “proper” consultation – the one where you go to Fertility Associates with a lot of money and say “help us make a baby”. With a few editorial comments from Stephanie-Of-The-Future.

The first consultation is like an infomercial which demands your most intimate details. But wait, if you throw in even MORE money we can take time-lapse photos of the embryo to make sure its legs are on properly. And there are lots of options for freezing the eggs we HARVEST OUT OF YOUR BODY after an unspecified course of drugs and scans that get right up ya.

And all of that costs more money on top of the money you’re already putting in. And will it increase your chances of success? Those chances which are already worse than a coin flip? I could see the value for people who know they have specific genetic conditions, who have already tried and failed a few times – but when it’s your first turn on the carousel it feels like cynical upselling, and in a way, it hurts that early relationship with your doctor, because they’re not just there for you, y’know?

J hates every bit of it and I can’t really blame him. He’s “the problem”. The reason we couldn’t just make a baby the fun way.

And this never stopped being incredibly difficult for both of us.

And the money. Everyone says oh there’ll never be a good time to spend all this money – whether you have to have All The Medical Assistance or even if it just pops out of its own accord, babies are expensive – but it’s so difficult to pull the trigger when maybe if we just wait until THIS contract renews or THIS job offer arrives or THIS chunk of the mortgage is paid off … and of course the Clock Is Ticking and that stupid dotted line on that stupid fucking Probability Of Success Based On Age of Woman graph keeps edging down and down and down.

I will always wish we’d been able to do this sooner. I will always wish that we were in a situation to do it again, to consider having a second baby. What I can tell myself – now, in 2021, with my actual baby coma’d out in the living room after a healthy feed – is that things happen for a reason and if things had happened differently maybe we wouldn’t be here at all.

I’m the problem too, of course. The Aging Woman who didn’t chop her leg off five years ago to qualify for public funding – because that would have been fine, you see. It’s not actually relevant how big my belly is, it makes no difference to the chances of success. BMI is literally just picking one variable – fatness – out of the hat in order to “ration” public healthcare. The best bit is it’s completely fucking racist but our society is so comfortable with openly hating fat people we can get away with pretending it’s not a hatred fundamentally rooted in racism, classism, and body-hating white supremacy.

I could have lost a limb in a terrible accident and the health system would say oh okay, you’re obviously Healthy Enough to have a baby on us.

I could have starved myself, vomited every meal, taken amphetamines, and it would have meant we could have a baby, sooner, and cheaper, and without anyone questioning how it happened – because losing weight when you’re fat is Always A Good Thing.

Jarrod interrupted the doctor to say that I’m a pole dance teacher. I was annoyed. I don’t need to fucking prove my fitness to her. It wouldn’t matter if I’d just won a marathon. Fertility Associates are getting the money one way or the other.

So this is going to be a pretty major theme. Our health system, wonderful and public as it is (except for GP appointments and many prescriptions and don’t start me on access to contraception and abortion services even AFTER we supposedly decriminalized) uses the unscientific quackery that is BMI to ration access to fertility services, which is baseless, harmful and transparently racist. This was not our first visit to Fertility Associates, not even the fifth – this was just the first one where we were allowed to progress past the basic tests into actually doing something towards making a baby.

Because despite being the picture of health – perfect blood pressure, non-smoker, and, yes, being literally paid to perform and teach pole dancing and being able to bust out twelve burpees in a minute at one particularly energetic cardio class – my weight, alone, divorced of context or nuance was the reason we couldn’t get public assistance for our infertility. The only advice? Lose weight.

But how? It’s a post for another day, but let me simply assert a simple fact at this point: diets don’t work. Not predictably, not sustainably, not healthily. And not if you call them “lifestyle changes” or pretend that counting “points” isn’t the same as counting “calories”. And even if they did, I want to be really clear: no one at the District Health Board (adios) or the Ministry of Health was going to check how I lost the weight, if I did.

And that’s why I wrote that, a year ago: I could have lost a limb and as far as a health system, using BMI to ration services, is concerned, that would have been enough to get public funding for our IVF. The numbers have nothing to do with health or probability of success or anything except using our society’s hatred of fat people as an excuse to cut costs.

So.

That was a whole extra mindf*ck to take going into a process which already carried so much emotional and psychological baggage. With such low odds of success regardless of my dress size. And we knew so many people who had gone through it, and failed, and failed again and again, and seen the toll it took. So I just had to keep reminding myself, as we left the clinic that day filled with a mixture of hope and dread:

Three rounds. That’s the deal. Even though we probably can’t get the lootbox deal (pay for three rounds now, and get a refund if they all fail – or lose it all if you succeed first time). I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I don’t even want to be doing it now.

And that’s why I waited a year to write this. Because there’s been a lot of strife and plenty of tears but at the end of the road, we got her.

If you like this post, feel free to spot me a virtual coffee.

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What we do

With the horrible, tragic case of Grace Millane in the news, we’ve been talking a lot about what women do – and what we shouldn’t have to – to be safe in our country. So I wrote on Twitter:

My mum wants me to text her when I’ve gotten on the bus. My coworker says she’ll stay up until I let her know I’m home safe when we share a taxi. I message my partner to say where I am and what time I expect to be home when I go out.

I make eye contact with security cameras. I still carry my keys between my fingers and find excuses to turn my head when someone’s walking behind me so they don’t realise I’m looking at them and listen to hear if they speed up when I speed up.

I’m nearly 35 and I’ve spent my life knowing that these things are, at the same time, what I must do to keep safe, yet will not keep me safe. That I’m considered ~crazy~ for doing them and yet will be asked why I didn’t when something happens.

I have no pithy call to action tonight, just a lot of sadness.

And many people responded, women and men. I wanted to record those responses here.

I did this just two nights ago texting my husband to tell him I had to walk 5 minutes alone to my car after an event. Held my keys in my hand. Let him know when I’d made it safely.

I do all of these things regularly.

My daughter rings me and talks to me as she walks to her car.

I always ring my husband and he talks to me until I am in the car.

Currently awake waiting for wifes next location update. Tautoko.

I do exactly the same things.

It’s better to hold your keys like you would a knife than have them between your fingers. Its what I do

I’m 60 and the streets are no safer for women than they were when I was in my teens and the police still tell women how to stay safe and to watch out for each other, rather than direct a campaign at the men who attack women, and tell their mates to watch out and stop them.

I still do these things. I was taught them in my late teens . I am over 60 . I should feel safe. I still think zbout where and how I park the car. So it is lit at night . That I am not trapped between the car and a wall or fence when I open the door .

That the house is completely locked at night. That the curtains are drawn

Same here, always phone hubby when I leave work on a late shift, speak to him until I get on the bus and always have my phone ready and my keys out! Hate it! I’d love the freedom to go running after work in the dark but it’s just not safe…how is that right or fair?

These things are so ingrained that I didn’t actually even realise I do them, but I do. And you’re right, these actions are unlikely to stop me being hurt by someone with intent. I’m over it not being understood that women experience this world in a different way to men. It sucks.

I do this with my mum as well – no matter what time of night it is, she’ll always answer too.

There’s an effect on freedom. My wife calls when she’s waiting at the bus stop late at night… I worry about my female flat mate who works late in the city centre and walks home. They’ve very different lenses to experiencing public life than mine and it ain’t right.

How fucking sick is this. Our intimate partners know we will call but it isn’t something we discuss.