We need to talk about Labour

Corbyn has completely positioned himself to blame Stella Creasy and Dawn Butler for when self-ID goes south with the voters.

He has said nothing since the Marr interview, in which he was cornered and said "It is the position of the party..."

If he genuinely believed that it was a vote-winner, he'd be talking about it.

He'll say that all the senior women in the party were all for it, and since he is such a big supporter of women's rights, he trusted their judgement.

Call me cynical.

Sorry for being so negative. I guess I'm still at the 'fuck the fuck off you fucker' stage of the breakup.

Trying to be more constructive.... I personally think the best, if not the only hope of a change would be if someone in the party to were to break ranks - MP or senior official, female or male but as big a hitter as possible. If someone like that were to come out as gender critical then I think others would follow suit (for all kinds of reasons but we can't be too choosy). Then I think things might just get interesting.

No idea if that's even likely though, or who.

I think Jeremy Corbin does get it, which is why he won't debate it. He knows there no argument, just emotional anecdotes.

Tommy Robinson's petition has got 45000 over night and ours has taken weeks to get to 11,340. I despair. The authorities are adopting self id no questions asked.
It sickens me as to what labour have become and has made me question democracy as a process. The very reason I supported magic grandpa was I believed he would make the party MORE democratic. No one is trustworthy is the message for me. The left is as bad or worse than the right. I have become nihilistic overnight. I never trusted politicians but made this exception. I don't know how this will end-we might be fighting this stupid playground level (sex segregation is nobrainer)rights battle a hundred years from now. Because we're not going anywhere and neither are the TRA. And the MRA behind them. What I do feel is that this will become the miner's strike for the labour party. Yes tories have been re-elected since but they lost the hearts of large swathes of people and ruling has become a lot more tenuous for them- you could even account brexit to that at a stretch. I wish I had more confidence in common sense prevailing but the history of mankind is not encouraging. When you see what has happened to Amnesty and their support for legalising prostitution. The South Poverty Action Committee's condemnation of 'terfs' and Hands Across The Aisle. The takeover of LGB. Today on news YET ANOTHER report of aid workers exchanging food for sex from women and children in their care. And yet no danger from men with penises changing-and-room-sharing with women

I think the baroness includes transwomen in the term women...

I agree Flo. Such dangerous (for women) self-serving, virtue-signalling, patronising (to trans people AND women) utter nonsense.

I mean, it’s almost as if people in Labour do actually know that self-identification, is not a trustworthy indicator
But that just makes it even worse for me - the fact that they know it's nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that, but they'll still vote it through. They can piss right off.

We do need to talk about Labour.

So I see Baroness Chakrabarti, the shadow attorney general no less, is using the power of the word ‘self ID’ in an interesting way in the media today.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44286055

’Labour has challenged Theresa May to show she really is a feminist by backing reform of Northern Ireland's strict abortion law.

Shadow Attorney General Shami Chakrabarti said women in Northern Ireland "have been let down by privileged women and men for too long".

^She said the PM was a "self-identifying feminist" and "the test of feminists is whether they stick up for all women".
Following Ireland's historic vote, the PM has been urged to liberalise NI law.’^

It’s interesting to read this quote if you replace the word ‘feminist’ with ‘woman’ and then compare that to labour’s policy on legal gender self ID which takes self-identification extremely seriously

I mean, it’s almost as if people in Labour do actually know that self-identification, is not a trustworthy indicator, of being that thing (Nor of supporting the others within that category that you have just nominated yourself to...?)

I am disappointed, I really hoped that sense would prevail. I first voted Labour in 1979 (that worked well) and always since.

I sometimes feel as though I have spent all my bloody life campaigning about something or other. I never ever thought that in 2018 I would still need to be campaigning for women, and women's spaces. I thought that battle was long won. Fucking men, they give us a little peek at what we might have, then snatch it away. A bit like Jim Bowen on Bullseye 'Here's what you could have won'. Well this time I am not going to walk away thinking 'well what would we have done with a speedboat in the middle of Birmingham'. Sell the speedboat and pocket the money! Sorry, off on a tangent.

I'm afraid the time for talking is over as far as I'm concerned. It's a bit like coming out of a bad relationship: six months ago I was still desperately clutching at the slightest sign of hope; now I'm wondering what I ever saw in the fucker.

remove other outdated language such as ‘transsexual’.

HUH?! So what's the word we must use now? This is getting silly.

Ive always voted labour. What changed my mind about labour was brexit. I was disgusted by how the remain vote disregarded the working class. We were pretty much told to shut up about immigration and told we were racist. it was never about race. it was about competing for jobs which in my eyes was a very capitalistic idea and I could not understand how competing for jobs was good for the working class. Especially in northern working class deindustrialised communities. It made it worse. Its like being told to put up with being shit on all over again. After WW2 it was different, we had loans and jobs for new towns and infrastructure, now its just capitalism disguised as diversity, whilst the working class are competing for service jobs, with people who will work for less. I'm sad about politics right now. The last labour manifesto centred the middle class. Student tuition fees, if you are skint (and vulnerable)gets you full funding. If your parents earn more, vote labour, Labour will scrap it. It sickens me as to what labour have become and has made me question democracy as a process. Was Labour ever there for the poor? or were they there to make the poor fight for a
new version of social control, where the poor would still be poor. Just end up with new leaders controlling them

Darn, I was hoping this was going to be an interesting thread about childbirth. Probably a better use of everyone's time, TBH.

They will get very tired and frustrated is we start saying outright adult human female every time we would otherwise say woman.
The transgender advocates got really pissy when we started saying female instead of woman. When we refused to stop they proceeded to appropriate female to describe males.
In the interest of clarity I suppose we have no choice but to be explicit.

I am assuming the worst.

Me too.

I honestly don’t know if the bigger problem with Labour is these policies, or the fact that their polling numbers are still far too low to win an election, even against the most useless government of all time. Obv they are two sides of the same coin, but what I mean is I don’t know if I’m more concerned that they will get in, or that they won’t

I truly hope Labour lose the next election and any after that so long as they continue to have dangerous idiots like Corbyn and McDonnell in charge and the simply dangerous Momentum dictating policy.

This for me gets to the nub of the problem. Describing abortion as a women's rights issue is 'transphobic'. We no longer have a word for adult females, apart from the derogatory 'cis women' which immediately foregrounds trans issues. That makes it impossible to campaign for 'women's rights' as a concept. We can only campaign on individual issues that affect natal women, without using the word 'woman' in case of causing offence

Exactly. We need a collective word for us as a group. How about 'women'?

A fantastic victory for women's rights - Corbyn.

This for me gets to the nub of the problem. Describing abortion as a women's rights issue is 'transphobic'. We no longer have a word for adult females, apart from the derogatory 'cis women' which immediately foregrounds trans issues. That makes it impossible to campaign for 'women's rights' as a concept. We can only campaign on individual issues that affect natal women, without using the word 'woman' in case of causing offence.

That is where things are heading.