Woman's Hour - Gender Recognition Act; Susie Dent; Artificial Intelligence for online shopping

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

Some reports suggest the government won’t now go ahead with the reform of the Gender Recognition Act. If true, this means that people won’t be able to self-declare their gender. What will this mean for the wider debate? Jane speaks to Helen Belcher, co-founder of Trans Media Watch and chair of the national LGBT charity Consortium, and Joan Smith, Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board and author of ‘Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists’.Susie Dent is a lexicographer, etymologist and linguist. She has appeared in Dictionary Corner on Channel 4's 'Countdown' since 1992, and can also be seen on 8 out of 10 Cats does Countdown, or ‘Catsdown’ as she calls it. She can also be heard alongside Gyles Brandreth on the award-nominated podcast Something Rhymes With Purple. She joins Jane to talk about how her love of words began with shampoo bottles, her research into modern tribes, 90s rap music lyrics and the meaning of cacoethes.For the past month Woman's Hour has been celebrating women who get things done – the Troupers. Today it’s the turn of Preethi Manuel who talks about the life of her daughter, fostering, and her role in campaigning for disabled children to have access to mainstream education.Non-essential retail shops are beginning to reopen, but will we actually want to go back? New technology is using artificial intelligence to make the experience of online shopping more fulfilling and more personalised. BBC Click reporter Lara Lewington tells Jane more.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey and thank you for downloading the Woman's Hour podcast from Tuesday 16th June 2020. My guests this morning include the lexicographer and linguist, she's brilliant, she's Susie Dent and she's on Woman's Hour today. We'll also talk about shopping and whether artificial intelligence, AI, is helping to make shopping for clothes that little bit easier. That's an intriguing development. We'll hear more about that a little later in the programme. First of all,

we hear over the weekend, certainly if you believe the leaked reports to certain newspapers, that the government is not going to go ahead with plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act. This means that people will not be allowed to self-declare their legal gender. Last week, you won't have escaped the fact that the author J.K. Rowling returned to a debate that many do call toxic. J.K. Rowling said she herself was a survivor of domestic violence and declared that biological sex matters. I want trans women to be safe, she said. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. Now, I should say that story is still being covered by many of the newspapers. If you look at the Daily Mail today, there is a headline,

Now it's JK and the book publisher's staff revolt. Some people at Hachette who publish her books are threatening to down tools, we're told, in a row over her views on gender. We also hear today that trans activists and non-binary people have written a public letter in support of JK Rowling. After the Sun newspaper published a front page interview with her former husband. So support for her there. They continue to disagree with what she said about trans people, but nevertheless, they support her as a survivor of domestic abuse. Also in the papers today, the fact that this is in the Sun, in fact, her books are filling the top six positions in Amazon's fiction chart. So in spite of all this, people love her books and will continue to buy them, it would seem.

Let's talk to Helen Belcher, co-founder of Transmedia Watch. She's chair of the National LGBT Charity Consortium and she has stood for the Liberal Democrats in various elections. We'll also have a word later with Joan Smith, chair of the Mayor of London's Violence Against Women and Girls Board. Now how this is going to work is that I will talk to Helen and then I will talk to Joan. I hope you'll listen to everything that's said to both interviewees this morning and then you can pitch in too on email via our website

and on social media at BBC Women's Hour. So welcome, first of all, to Helen Belcher. Good morning to you, Helen. Morning, Jane. Now, tell me why abandoning the Gender Recognition Act, why abandoning reform of the GRA, you think is a bad thing to do, the wrong thing to do? Well, it's not about abandoning the Gender Recognition Act. The Gender Recognition Act was something that was given to us.

The issue is the impact of what the government's proposals for protecting single-sex spaces is. If you look at the, I mean, you've talked about the reports in various newspapers, they're talking about adding protections in to prevent people with male anatomy going into women's single sex spaces, going to loos, going to changing rooms and so on. That's the issue because how do you police it? My reaction when I read that piece, we've had years of this, was to sit on my loo in the bathroom in floods of tears for five minutes googling how to seek asylum in Ireland. My wife, when she found out about it, she asked how it was going to be

policed. Effectively, it's genital licences. She was so appalled and she wrote to 80 of her friends and within three hours, about half of them had written to their MPs about it. All right. I absolutely understand how passionately you feel about this. And there are many people listening who are as passionate as you. Some of them on your side of the debate. Others will profoundly disagree, of course. But I feel we've got too detailed too soon here. So let's just go back a little bit, if you don't mind, because we've got time this morning. And it's so important that we explore this properly and fairly.

What we're talking about are the leaks to certain newspapers that the government has this government, Boris Johnson's government, is going to rail back on the reform of the Gender Recognition Act, which will mean that people will not be able to self-declare their gender. Why do you believe that is the wrong move? It's what it enables in terms of the toxicity around the whole debate. And actually, the rollback of the Gender Recognition Act, as I say, is not the main thing. It wasn't the main thing we wanted. The main thing we want is to be allowed to live our lives in peace and having genital inspections or being prevented from using women's single-sex spaces to live our lives just do what every other woman does in there

is you know it's such an assault on our basic rights there was talk earlier in other places about a urinary leash placed on women because public toilets weren't open. That would be applied to trans women. You look at domestic violence. Trans people are subject to enormous amounts of domestic violence. If those centres are closed to us, where are we supposed to go? It's not about legal gender. It's about how we're supposed to live our lives. Do you acknowledge that some women and girls are very concerned about this yes and i think that i think i think it's wrong because i think the whole narrative has been built uh peddling on fears and building on those fears you reference

jk rowling i wrote to jk row Rowling the other day and I sympathized. You know, I said it was really sad that she had been abused. And I can you know, I was I actually did sign the letter condemning the son for putting her abuser on the front page. My name wasn't included. But what you've got is a pile on of fear upon fear. And you end up with all sorts of really, really weird positions. And where it ends up is what we've been saying for years, is that this whole debate starts to put women in danger. That's the problem. The narrative builds. You can identify trans women somehow. They may have a penis. They're in there for sexual gratification you could be the object of their sexual violence but that's all predicated on the idea that trans women are deceptive men right and if you build if

you change that understanding suddenly you end up with a completely different position at the heart of all this and i i don't doubt very much of what you said, and many people listening will absolutely agree with me on that, that they feel the suffering that you and many others have been through. And pile on is probably the right term for some of the wretched stuff that goes around when we talk about these issues. At the heart of what J.K. Rowling said last week was that her biological sex, the reality of it, had made her vulnerable to a very particular form of violence. That's undeniable, isn't it? But I'm also subject to the same particular forms of violence. In what sense? I am equally likely to be raped.

OK, that's where it boils down to. You mentioned that I stood in general elections. No prizes for second place, it's a shame. In the last election, I had a prominent anti-reformer stand up in front of about 100 people and accuse me of being found guilty of a criminal offence. She said that a court had found me to be a liar. Now, I've never been in a court on any charge like that, let alone being found guilty. But what she then did was she videoed that and that video was then distributed on a number of Facebook pages around the constituency. Somebody else posted a video of me campaigning onto a local Facebook page. And the first comment from a different woman was, but he's a man. And lower down the same post that accused me of being deceptive. So apparently, I should declare that I'm trans whenever I speak at anything. That is a low level form of abuse. Every time I appear on media, there is abuse in my social media feed. I block most of lot of it, let's be honest, is directed at women.

Not all trans people agree with you, Helen. Debbie Hayton is a trans woman who's written about this. I've got a quote from her here. Trans people have been taking and women have been yielding and that cannot go on indefinitely, Debbie writes. What do you say about that? Not all women wanted the vote. Doesn't mean it's right. So where do we go from here?

Those people who just hate the hatred, hate those pylons, hate the vitriol. How can we establish a proper and civilised conversation about where we go from here, Helen? We need to re-establish trust. And I think part of the problem is, we were saying that Gender Recognition Act reform is nothing to do with these single-sex spaces. And if you read the Sunday Times piece, for example, it makes it very clear that in order to put the protections in, they would need to change the laws, the very same laws

that we said would need to be changed to protect those spaces in the way that they wanted. So, and the other side has been twisting it around and manipulating things and saying, oh no, the Gender Recognition Act would allow self-declaration. Self-declaration already exists for the terms of the Equality Act. And what this government is now thinking about doing is weakening the Equality Act, making the Equality Act. And what this government is now thinking about doing is weakening the Equality Act, making the Equality Act exclude trans women from certain things. That is not equality. We don't have a Secretary of State for equalities anymore. We seem to have a Secretary of State for inequalities. Are you referring there to Liz Truss? Yes. Yeah. Okay. I've really enjoyed

talking to you, Helen. Thank you very much for coming on the programme. We appreciate it. Let's bring in Joan Smith. Joan, good morning to you. Good morning. Can I just say I'm speaking in a personal capacity and not on behalf of the Mayor's Committee? Right. No, let's make that very clear. Okay. Thank you. And we really appreciate you coming on as well. We are going to have a proper civilised conversation here and people can take part at BBC Women's Hour on Twitter or you can email the programme via our website. Let's talk about the reality of Helen's experience. Some of it, some of the stuff directed at trans women is absolutely vile, isn't it? That is undeniable.

Yes, but that's a very typically emotional take on how to have a conversation about this. So if we step back for a moment and look at what's actually happened, there are two issues here. One is the proposed reform to the gender, the GRA, the Gender Recognition Act of 2004. And I think what's happened here is that people have finally realised that trans people, some trans people, not all, were making an unreasonable demand. So they were asking for total deregulation of the process of legal identification, legal recognition of people changing sex.

So the state regulates all kinds of things. I can't just buy a car, go out and drive on the road without taking a test. IVF is regulated, so is the adoption process. There are good reasons for all of that. And there is a regulatory system that covers gender recognition certificates. And at the moment, you have to show that you've lived in your new sex for two years, intend to go on doing so, and you have to get a diagnosis of gender

dysphoria from two doctors now that seems to be perfectly reasonable it allows people to get a new birth certificate that process won't change it still exists what we were worried about was the idea that women a man it's usually a man that we're talking about in these circumstances because there's no great there's no great clamor for men to great clamour for trans men to be able to use men's toilets. What we were talking about was the fact that it would allow a man to wake up one morning to say, I am a woman and apply for a new birth certificate, which would say that he was born female and erased his past. And that actually attacks the entire category of woman. It becomes just a feeling in someone's head. There are some people who feel that,

I mean, Helen said it herself, that high emotion on both sides of this, we know. But is there not too much emphasis on toilets? The notion that every woman entering a public toilet, potentially there could be somebody with a penis waiting to attack them. I mean, I've used public toilets for 55 years. Honestly, how often does that happen?

It's not just about toilets. It's about a whole series of women-only spaces. And the other part of what the government seems to be intending to do, and Liz Truss has actually said this, is that she wants to strengthen the guidance that goes along with the Equality Act 2010, because that act does allow situations where some people might feel vulnerable to have single-sex faces, and that includes places like refuges, hospital wards, as well as toilets. But what's happened in the last three or four years

is that there's been such a torrent of emotion on the side generated by trans activists that people are now afraid to come out and say they want those spaces. And some brands, some high street brands, some councils have actually been frightened into not applying those exemptions. So I think that that is very welcome. But I think there's a larger point here which needs to be said, which is that I have been studying, reporting and writing about violence against women for decades, going all the way back to,

you know, the Yorkshire Ripper case. Violence against women is committed by men. Violence against trans women is committed by men. There's been a really terrible move here to suggest that somehow feminists, because we disagree with some trans activists, not all trans people, are somehow responsible for the violence against them. And that was thrown at J.K. Rowling last week. And that's not acceptable. I think it must be quite unusual for you to be on the same side potentially as a Boris Johnson conservative government and are you a little bit concerned that this the conversation we've had this morning is in

some ways we've fallen into exactly what the government wanted us to do we're having this debate it's a distraction from everything else some might say that is going badly wrong for the government right now absolutely and I'm certainly not a fan of this government. However, what I would say is that the reason that we are welcoming something which is going to be done by a government that a lot of us profoundly disagree with is that we've had so little support from the other parties. What happened during the Labour leadership election

was really dismaying and frightening. The Lib Dems have been really bad on this too. What do you mean by really bad on this? So during the leadership election in the Labour Party, there was an obscure trans rights organisation put out a ten-point pledge and asked all the candidates to sign it. And one of those pledges me, one of those pledges was about expelling women from the party who don't believe that trans women are women. And

that is actually an opinion. And in a civilised society, we would be able to talk about that. It's not saying that they should be discriminated against. And in fact, I would argue, and a lot of trans women argue too, that we need third spaces where trans women feel safe. And we support the fact that they have all these protections in law. Transphobia, attacks on trans people because they're trans, is actually a hate crime in this country. Misogyny is not. No, I mean, no one is suggesting that anybody should attack anybody.

I mean, we all, we both, everybody agrees with that. But Helen's point that she simply feels so wretched about all this, or she has been made to feel so wretched, that she and her wife are thinking of leaving the country. But this can't,

that's not where we want to be, is it? No, but I can tell you something else, which is that a huge number of women, of people in this country, have been really worried and upset and frightened by this debate. I myself think twice about coming on Women's Hour to talk about it because I know the kind of abuse and threats that feminists have had. And it's actually one of those rare occasions where I think to myself, can I put up with the kind of reaction that's going to be? I don't think I've ever known a moment when I've

seen such rank misogyny directed against women who actually believe and support trans people. And this, I suppose, gets to the heart of, for me, I suspect many of our listeners are very interested in this without, it frankly probably wouldn our listeners are very interested in this. It frankly probably wouldn't touch their daily lives very often. And at the moment, most people are up against it on so many levels. I mean, if you heard a tenth of the 10 o'clock news this morning, you'll know just how many challenges face most people right now. What are people supposed to think about how to approach all this in their daily lives? I think a lot of people will be bewildered by it because what Helen and I have been talking about is really quite a technical change to an act of parliament from 19 from 2004 that a lot of people won't even know about or understand. And yes, exactly. But the point is that when you see, when I see women like J.K. Rowling,

like my really good friend Julie Bindle, being attacked and smeared for years all over the place because they're simply taking issue with an opinion, then I think we have to stand up and speak. I suppose what I'm asking you is, how do we behave responsibly here? Because we want to keep these conversations going. We don't want trans women to feel vulnerable or wretched or

feel like leaving the country. Equally, a lot of people listening to this programme in particular will feel that women and girls have had to fight very hard for their spaces out there, for their safety. Well, what we need is a respectful debate. And it's really interesting that I was willing to have a debate with Helen this morning. She was not willing to debate with me. She didn't feel, I mean, Helen is now not here to defend herself. She didn't feel able, I guess, Joan, is the truth. And for the same reason, she feels vulnerable in the same way that you do.

And by the way, it's awful that you would have to have doubts about appearing on this programme to discuss this issue. That's not right either. have seized this conversation and they've filled it with such a huge amount of emotion that it's become a kind of test of whether you have the right views or not. And this word transphobe and this awful abbreviation TERF is thrown out. It's a silencing mechanism. I chaired the Penwriters in Prison Committee for years. I see the weapons that are used to stop people speaking about contentious subjects. And that's what's happened in this country. And what's really important is the trans women and trans men haven't lost any rights that they had last week. They're still protected

in law. They can't be discriminated against at work. They have, as I said, they're protected by hate crime legislation. They haven't lost anything. All we're doing is saying, and we've been saying to the government for a long time, hold off on this change in the Gender Recognition Act. And that does not actually impact on a huge number of people's lives. And it certainly doesn't open trans women to violence. Well, certainly nobody would want that. Thank you. I really appreciate you coming on, Joan. Thank you very much indeed. That is Joan Smith speaking, as she made clear at the start there,

in an entirely personal capacity. Many people will recognise Joan as being a feminist campaigner of longstanding. We're grateful to her and to Helen Belcher for appearing on the programme today. I really want you now, having heard all that, to contact us. Let us know what you think via

email. I know we've got a stack just been brought in to me. We'll include as many as we can in the podcast a little later. And I should say at this point, how grateful we are to all of you for downloading the podcast, the BBC Women's Hour podcast, doing really well in lockdown. And we're grateful to you for being a part of that. Get your thoughts to us as soon as you can and we'll include them in the podcast later. Now, how about a nice chat with Susie Dent. Welcome, Susie Dent, how are you? Morning, Jane. I'm very well, thank you. Good. Lexicographer and linguist and, of course, how long have you been on Dictionary Corner on Countdown? Since the 1990s. That can't be right. Yes, forever. Well, I first sat in the corner, absolutely terrified, in 1992.

But there were quite a few of us at that point. So we rotated in the corner. And I'm sure there are some people who long for those days when, you know, they don't have to see me every day. Oh, but you obviously made it your own. How did you do that? Well, it wasn't my decision, I have to say.

I was on with Richard Whiteley and Carol Vorderman, and they very much wanted to create a sort of full-time team. So I genuinely, I'm not being modest here, I was there at the right time. And it was perfect for me. I had a young child and it meant I could be at home a little bit more. So it worked out well. All right. Now, you are someone who you just love words. And I think I remember as a kid, if I couldn't read anything else, I'd be reading the back of the Cornflakes packet.

And that was also you, wasn't it, really? I'm so glad you said that, because people think I'm very weird when I start reading the label on a ketchup bottle. I'm exceptionally weird. So we're both weird. Go on. Yes, definitely. gone yes definitely um yes um famously one of one of my earliest memories is reading what must have been the most boring ingredients on a shampoo bottle um in the bath but also looking at the different scripts saying that one of them may have been Cyrillic or Arabic and just thinking wow I really want to decode that and um so yes it's a words found me pretty early on. And then, you know, vocabulary books were my literature of choice.

Literally, I would just dive into them. And it wasn't for any particular end in mind. I just got lost in that world. And were you a linguist? Yes. So early on, somebody at school, you were thought of as being good at languages. I think so. I think I just found German,

which was my first love and remains one of my biggest passions. I think I found that at exactly the right time. I had a brilliant teacher. Everything was, I'm not a very logical person, actually, but everything was sort of written down, which I think I've realised the written word for me is very important. I find immersion in just oral language quite hard unless I can actually see things in print. And yes, and I was, you know, other subjects were, didn't like me quite so much. And so that became my world. So French and German is what I did for a long time. But why German? Oh, Jane, it's just the most beautiful language in the world. And I know that flies in the face of, you know, every general assumption about the language, but it's so lyrical it's so deep I think um the writer Goethe said

that French was like a park and English was of course like a beautiful country garden but German was this dense forest that you just get lost in and as I'm a dendrophile tree lover that just kind of fits me perfectly because it's just I don't really know where to start I mean it's vocabulary is amongst the richest in the world and also it's like lego isn't it you can just build up linguistic pylons for for um German and it's it all sounds perfect and makes sense to me so English I actually discovered quite late in the day only when I was working at Oxford University Press and then started looking into English etymology and the origins of words. And then again, I got lost. So for the age old row about how standards are, they're falling. Everybody's languages,

everybody's speaking in a horrible way and I don't like it and I can't bear it. This has been going on for as long as we've all been speaking and writing, presumably. Yes. Every single age has thought that the golden age of English was in the past. So when Shakespeare was coming up with words like laughable, he was laughed at because everyone said, no, no, it should be laugh-attable, what you're talking about. And Keats loved to create verbs out of nouns, something we hate today to this this you know to just all the time we're saying this is a horrible american supersizing um but we've always always done it um and by the way everything that we tend to lay at the feet of north america actually probably was ours to begin

with of course shakespeare used honor without the u and he used ise quite often or at least his compositors did and um yeah just just so many things that we blame the Americans on. We used to call autumn fall. We used to call pavement sidewalks. Hang on a second. Did we? We called autumn fall. I love that because people are going to hate me

by the end of this interview, but it used to be the fall of the leaf and the spring was the spring of the leaf, which I think is quite poetic. And then the Normans, of course, changed all that. And we had 1066 and all this French came flooding in and we took on the French Lausanne or a kind of Anglo-Norman hybrid of it. And yeah, and that's why we got the way they use language or throw it out there? What would you say about that? Yes, I think so. Certainly, the language surrounding men and women has been totally different.

I mean, if you just look through a historical dictionary, you'll prove to yourself that our words are entirely predicated on male power so we're often the subject of the male gaze or the subordinates if you think about a governor that's a man with a kind of dominion whereas a governess is someone of low social status who looks after children um you know you've got bachelor and spinster bachelor is quite cool the spinster had to spin for a living because she had no man to help her um you know earn money you've got courtier and courtesan master and mistress i mean you know it goes all the way back and actually during your discussion i was thinking about um i'd seen both sides of the argument actually have been called you know hysterical and that actually ironically it goes back to the greek for womb which also gave us hysterectomy, because hysteria has been put down to a woman's menstrual cycle and, you know, disturbance of the uterus. So the kind of

move to reinterpret the language surrounding all of this, I think language is actually probably struggling to keep up. But it's important that it does. Anyone who loves words, and I think a lot of people will come into that category if they're regular Radio 4 listeners, I do recommend the podcast you do with Giles Brandreth, which is Something Rhymes with Purple. Oh, thank you. I was listening to an episode yesterday which was about cabby language. I don't even remember that.

But can you just remind the listeners what black cab drivers call Broadcasting House? Oh, Broadcasting House. Now, that is either the tripe shop or the gasworks. I think it's the tripe shop. It's the tripe shop. Yes. I had some great times sitting in the back of a cab listening to all of these um including with a couple of the very few

women drivers actually of black cabs um you know and how they'd sort of experienced um what was an exclusively a man's world for a very long time but yeah that that i love i love their um their vocabulary you know bilker is somebody who runs off without paying. They have quite a lot of those. A cock and hen is a man and woman in the back of the cab. The gas works actually is the houses of parliament, I think. But they have this tribal lexicon that nobody else can penetrate. And that's the whole idea of it.

And it's banter, but it's also steeped in history. It's brilliant. Well, on behalf of the BBC, I think I'd embrace tripe. That's fine. The tripe factory or tripe towers? Was it tripe towers? That's right. I, on behalf of the BBC, I think I'd embrace tripe. That's fine. The tripe factory or tripe towers? Was it tripe towers? That's right. I think it was, yes, and tripe shop as well.

Tripe shop. Yes, sorry. Yes. Susie, absolutely lovely to talk to you. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Jane. The tripe shop, how dare they. Our dog at home used to love a bit of tripe.

Right, let's celebrate a woman who is a volunteer and a truly brilliant person who has done a lot of good in her time. It is the turn today of Preeti Manuel. Now, Preeti has been campaigning for the rights of disabled children to access mainstream education. Her daughter, Zara, utterly changed her life, as you're about to hear. And Preeti was nominated by her friend Rahila Gupta, who we hear from first. If cheerfulness can bring a community together, lift its spirits and bounce it forward, then Preeti is that person. Despite her difficult circumstances as a single mum to beautiful Zara, who had cerebral palsy and died at 22. She was quick to help anyone in need. Through her courageous battles,

she laid the ground for disabled children to be included in mainstream schools. My daughter was born with cerebral palsy. I was told by paediatricians and consultants that I couldn't take her home because she didn't feed orally. One of them even went as far as to say that she wouldn't live for more than six months. It was tough. I was a single parent and my fairly strict Christian family had abandoned me because I had my daughter out of wedlock.

And here I was in hospital where the prognosis was really poor. And when somebody said to me, quite a senior person, get on with the rest of your life because it will be harder for you if you bond with your child, I was totally devastated. How old were you at this point? I was 30. And I'd really longed for a child of my own. And the day I was told I was pregnant was really the most exhilarating day of my entire life. And of course, I adored this baby of mine. And I thought, how can I not have a family with her? I was fortunate because I had these little helpers along the way in life. In hospital was one of the senior nurses. She taught me how to do the tube feeding. So gradually, little by

little, I was able to take her home. I'd take her home for the day and bring her back in the evening. And I had a lovely circle of friends who kept me going. But many days I found myself in my nightdress in the evening. I wouldn't have had the chance to change clothes from the previous night. Love was right at the heart of it. I just adored my daughter. Tell me about Zara was a beautiful person it seemed for us because she was non-verbal she found such wonderful ways to express herself it was her laughter

it was her eyes used to smile all the time she had these big dark eyes and the joy with which she welcomed everybody into her house. She was the centre of her house. Everything revolved around her. And you did bond, and you did develop a close relationship and a life together. I think later on I learned this, that, you know,

this is the sentence that is placed on disabled babies because of the lack of understanding that this child too has a right to be in this life. It was a huge fight to get my daughter into a mainstream school. And the local authority was saying someone who is severely disabled, like my daughter, must go to a special school and I'm saying you know if you put all children who cannot communicate in one room how will they learn from each other it was eventually an organization called DAN direct action network of disabled activists who became involved and they just had a sit-in they organized a sit-in at the education office of the council and they refused to leave and they said until this child Zara has a place at a local school we're not leaving and she made friends

particularly with young people I mean she had a friend called Gemma who in the early days used to fight to push her in her wheelchair. And there were others in her school, for example, who used to fight to go in the lift with her. It's just because she had a joyous presence around her. She loved life. Sadly, I lost my daughter in 2010. But the surprising thing was, and this really is the mystery of life, I think,

that my daughter and myself were so close, it was as if we were in love all the time. And I thank the universe for it because some of the best days of my life were lived with her. And do you think that the process, the very difficult process you went through of struggling to get her into mainstream education do you think it changed things for other children in her position locally i would say it definitely did on a national level my daughter was one of the case histories which led to the 2001 SEN and Disability Act that paved the way for more children to go into mainstream schools. But at the same time, parents up and down the country

are still fighting similar battles because of this view that, you know, one education system is okay for certain children and it's not okay for other children. Of course, we all learn from each other too. When Zahra died, you were told that you'd have to move. Well, firstly, when I had my daughter, I owned my own apartment in London. But sadly, I had to give it up because it was on first floor and it was split level and there were so many stairs and I couldn't manage. So I had to give that up. And we eventually found ourselves homeless because I couldn't

work. I'd run out of money to pay the rent. And my daughter was without to school so she was at home full time and we struggled this way until we eventually were offered accessible accommodation but then sadly when I lost her I couldn't maintain that place so I made a decision and it was risky I decided to up and go up north to Leeds which is where I am now I work as a foster carer mainly I fostered about nine children currently I'm a foster carer to an asylum seeking teenager and this teenager had to flee Iraq because it wasn't safe for him there. So at the age of 16, he was forced to make a treacherous journey. And he arrived in the UK just hoping for nothing except somewhere safe. He's doing so well.

Someone who never had the chance to attend school in his entire life is attending college. He's studying English, maths. He only spoke Surani when he arrived. And now we can have a conversation in English. I am so proud of what this young person has achieved. My daughter had so much joy. It was like a fountain, you know. It was like, I want to carry that with me and I want to share that. A brilliant woman, Preeti Manuel, and our thanks to her friend Rahila Gupta

who told us about her. She is one of our troopers, a volunteer that we've been celebrating. We've been celebrating volunteers over the course of the last couple of months. Now, the shops were open yesterday, the so-called non-essential stores. Let's talk to Lara Lewington, a reporter for the tech show BBC Click. Lara, what we wanted to investigate was whether or not AI is going to make shopping easier for those of us who find clothes a bit tricky to fit or to make sure that they're the right clothes for us to wear.

So what can you tell us about AI and how it's impacting on the way we buy clothes? Hi, Jane. Well, yes, we are hoping that the future could make it a lot easier to buy clothes online with fewer returns because returns are a massive issue for the retailers, as well as a huge annoyance for us. And especially at the moment when returning items involves a huge socially distant queue at the post office, you really don't want to have to do it. So some of the technology that we've been looking at hopes to overcome that. Now, I carried out a bit of an experiment with a company called Zkit Software. Now, the way this works is when you're skimming through clothes, you're looking

at a catalogue of items from any store. Usually, you're looking at various models who generally probably don't look that much like you. Well, steady. You don't know that, Laura, but carry on. They're going to look like some people, but often they don't. So this technology allows us to put a photograph of ourselves in all the clothes that we look at. So the way this works is it's actually Israeli military technology that's been repurposed by this company. Well, hang on. You say that and alarm bells might well be going off with how much are we giving away here and to whom? OK, well, let me explain to you how it works. You take a photo of yourself. You follow their instructions to do that straight on. The website will break down that image into 80,000 parts. It'll do the same to each item of clothing

and from there rebuild a picture of you wearing each item. So you're then presented with a picture of what you would look like in it. So if you skim through a catalogue of clothes you can see hundreds or thousands of images of clothes with you wearing them. And this will mean, potentially, that we'll only buy the clothes we want and that properly fit us, and loads of clothes sent back via a post office, which could be crowded, won't end up in landfill. Indeed. Well, look, the hope is that there will be less returns.

At the moment, a lot of clothes that are returned are being quarantined, so that's an extra issue right now. But with this technology, the aim is, and I've tested it, and I have to say that the results were pretty incredible. So your body is mapped in the same way that land would be mapped. So even though you're only looking at a 2D image straight on, behind the scenes, they have something that's more like a 3D image. So when you look at yourself in the clothes it really has every detail of your body shape in the items so you're more likely to choose things that either suit you better or fit you better than just the items that would catch your eye when you see them on somebody else all right um what about the quality of the cloth though because that often i've got stuff I've ordered stuff um and I haven't liked

the feel of it or the you know the way it the way it seems that's also quite important isn't it? Yes and you are absolutely spot on with that so I looked at a dress online saw exactly how it fitted ordered it and compared virtual me to real me now I, I looked pretty identical, but the fabric felt pretty horrible. Now, admittedly, it was a dress that was reduced to 20 quid. So I shouldn't have expected the earth. But the bigger problem was as soon as I opened the packaging, glitter went absolutely everywhere. And my entire bathroom and floor were completely covered in glitter. Now, they're the things that this app can't help you with right now. And of course, that's a big problem with online shopping anyway. Thank you very much, Lara. AI, not a solution to everything, it turns out. Lara Lewington from BBC Click, which is the BBC's tech show, and she was

just discussing artificial intelligence and how, in some ways, it may be about to help us with our online shopping, but it isn't, as she illustrated there, the answer to all of our online shopping troubles. I've had a variable experience of that over lockdown. And actually, I've got quite a bit of stuff I need to take back to the shops now that I can go into them again. But it's interesting, isn't it? Since we haven't been able to buy stuff,

I have actually slightly lost interest in the acquisition of stuff and perhaps I'm not alone. And of course, we actually need people to go out and spend money if they have it at the moment, don't we? Right, there is no getting away from the fact that we have a lot of emails to get through and they are mostly about our first conversation this morning with Helen Belcher and then Joan Smith.

Now, I haven't had time to put them into any kind of order or to group them in any way so I'm just going to read some and I'm just being absolutely transparent with you. This is how it's going to roll. This is from a listener, we don't need to mention anyone's name. I think it's unfair that people who have no personal experience of what it's like to be trans have any say on what trans people can or cannot do. My 14-year-old trans daughter is the kindest and most socially conscious person I know. The idea of her having to use a man's toilet fills me with dread. She poses no more danger to others than other women. In fact, probably less so. Now to another listener who says she found it difficult to listen to this morning's programme and says she is 32 and she wants to emphasise that she is separate from J.K. Rowling's generation. She describes herself as a cis heterosexual woman.

Many of my friends have worked for feminist or women-centric organisations and safe spaces for women. I am all for a celebration of womanhood and all that is female in all its many forms. There is no one size fits all. But this should never be at the exclusion of our trans sisters. We need to stop focusing on the trans and start focusing on the woman. Trans people have been excluded by all groups. Feminists and women should have a better understanding of this than men, which we should use to welcome trans women into our spaces.

And let's be honest, for most people, this will remain an abstract debate, a kind of dinner party conversation. It will not be something they will ever have to consider. From another listener, I have a 23-year-old trans woman as a grandchild, and I am surprised that few people make the connection between the move to a feminine identity and the rejection of stereotypical gender roles. In the case of trans women, a rejection, surely, of any kind of toxic masculinity. The idea that my granddaughter may, by an erosion of her current rights, be subject to intimidation or, in the extreme, be forced to use male toilets,

fills me with horror, says that listener. Here's another email. Why is one oppressed group allowed to define the lives of another oppressed group? As a lesbian, I feel betrayed by Stonewall and the LGBT community. And I don't understand why trans women's feelings of safety trump my right and other women's right to feel safe. There needs to be a third way, a safe space for trans women and a women-only space. I also object to the label cis woman. A press group should choose their own names, not have them foisted on them by another group. Another listener writes, well done for keeping

the debate civilised. Sadly, I think an extreme group is trying the age-old trick of silencing and intimidating women through threats of violence and actual violence. Their twisting of any debate at all, wielding phrases such as transphobia and trans exclusion is clever and it causes an intergenerational problem. My young adult children hear the word exclusion and immediately feel that I have views that represent everything we ironically have encouraged in them. I have a pretty tough skin, but it's better to stay off Twitter on this subject. Another email. Self-identification.

It works on the assumption that everyone is acting in good faith. It only needs one or two bad actors to cause great harm to other individuals. It has already happened in a prison. Imagine being a victim of sexual violence and being in a women's prison. You're locked in a cell with somebody who owns a penis. Why are people not concerned about this?

OK, I think I'm right in saying that you don't share a cell in a women's prison. I'm pretty certain that is the case, but we will check up on that. They're all anonymous this morning, the emails. I have a trans teenager and thank God for Gap Clothing, which has unisex changing rooms where they can try on jeans and no one bats an eyelid. I'm also a feminist and I believe that battered natal women are entitled to refuges where only other natal women are allowed. I see the argument of trans women and their pain at the suggestion that they shouldn't be allowed in natal female spaces but that has to be balanced against the pain of the vast numbers of women who've been assaulted by men for centuries

and will continue to be assaulted by them. Dear Jane and team, fascinating listening this morning. If I cast my mind back 30 years, the same argument was used against allowing lesbians into all female spaces, e.g. public toilets. I think this argument is being used to divert from the real issue of trans people's daily experience of abuse and discrimination. Thank you for that. As a trans woman, says another correspondent who regularly listens to Woman's Hour, I need to say

how annoyed I am at the amount of time devoted to allowing trans activists rant about their supposed rights in relation to public toilets. The amount of time people should be spending in public toilets is so small that who cares which one you can use? In any event, it's usually much easier to find a free cubicle in the men's, and I've known cis women make the same judgement at busy times. Of course there should be spaces where those who haven't lived male privilege are free from it. And if anything, I'd go further than the so-called TERFs and

exclude anybody socialized as male at any time in their lives from women's safe spaces. I tell you what, at the moment, you can't find a public toilet, can you? Regardless of where you stand on all this, because as we've discussed on the programme before, they're not open. My 24-year-old daughter and I have been talking about this, says another listener. We see varying versions around us of what it is to be female. Neither of us is so-called girly-girly, for example, and we're both over six foot tall. Yet we both feel comfortable in our skins as women. We cannot imagine how awful it must be to feel that the essence of who you are is not represented

by the body that contains you. We know that deciding to do something about it is not an easy choice. The idea that somebody born as a man would decide to live as a woman in order to access women's spaces and perpetrate some kind of attack or fraud upon women seems to us to be so unlikely as to be absurd. Let's just end with this from a listener who says, it seems strange to me as the mother of a trans man that all this publicity tends to surround trans women. Among young transgender people, there actually are more female to male transitions now. That is absolutely true. Yet in the media, you would think it was mostly male to female. I certainly don't feel threatened by the idea of trans women in public toilets.

It doesn't even enter my head. And I feel that the fear of that is verging on paranoia. What was more horrific to me was being with my trans male child and seeing them go into the men's public toilets just from the repulse factor in my mind. But apparently trans men can be shouted at by women if they use women's public toilets. Maybe that's the experience of one mother of a trans man. Just to go back to, I made a reference to whether or not you would have to share a room in a women's prison and Anna, who's the producer today, has looked at, this is information provided to first-time prisoners by the Prison Reform Trust. And the information in this case says you may have to share a room with other people. There you go.

Often this will be with one other person, but some prisons do have dormitories, which might be shared with more. You are allowed to speak to staff if you're concerned about this or you don't feel safe. If you are not convicted, so on remand, you should not have to share with convicted prisoners. So that's the information provided by the Prison Reform Trust. Now, Susie Dent. Everybody likes Susie Dent. On

that, the nation is agreed. You were talking to Susie Dent, says Tricia. Please do thank her for her contribution. German is a glorious language. Not mine, but I still think and dream in it. What a joy to hear another woman speak so well and so passionately about it, says Tricia. Yes, I have an extraordinarily low level of achievement in German, an O level, grade C. And in fact, my German teacher died very recently and I was fortunately moved before lockdown, able to attend her funeral because she was she didn't succeed terribly well in teaching me German. But she's one of those teachers you don't forget. So it's good to remember teachers who've made an impact, isn't it? Thank you for talking to Susie Dent, says Richard. She is the exact opposite of Dr. Johnson's rather deprecatory definition of a lexicographer as a harmless

drudge. More, please. More Susie, the nation cries. And from another Richard, what a delight to find Susie Dent on Woman's Hour. I listen to Woman's Hour a lot as it's on at the right time of day. And I watch Countdown a lot as it's easy to take in under lockdown. There's just something Is that niche? I don't know. I'm sort of with him. Am I with him? I don't know. Jane writes, in northern Cyprus. I'm also teaching my eight-year-old granddaughter French on WhatsApp during lockdown. I didn't know that we used sidewalk before the Americans. It must have gone over with the pilgrim fathers and mothers. Were they all men? Surely not. And fall for autumn makes perfect sense. We Anglophiles are just a little bit prejudiced sometimes about our cousins

over the pond. I usually raise a smile at family reunions, asking if people know where a word comes from. The special needs class I taught last year all knew that if I asked them from which ancient language this new word came from, the answer would probably be Latin, Hebrew or Greek. Hey, what's wrong with that? I want to correct apostrophes, teach the difference between your and your, and generally love anything to do with words. Long live language, writes Jane.

Her surname is Jane Plant, and that means children in Welsh, she says. Wow, Plant means children in Welsh. That's absolutely fascinating. I remember that Garvey, which is my surname, I think, well it is an Irish surname, I know that much, and I think it means rough. Let's leave it there. Jenny is here tomorrow. Thank you very much

for engaging with us this morning. Not the easiest of conversations, but one's I think, or the first conversation today, one well worth having and something we need to have. Jenny's here tomorrow, as I say. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake.

No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.