Janice Turner thanks the LibDems

Janice Turner has really changed gears with this article. After reading it, nobody can be in any doubt about the seriousness of the issue. It can still be very dangerous to be openly critical of gender ideology, though, at work and among friends. However, politicians don't have that excuse!

I'm fairly sure after speaking to her that my Labour MP 'gets it' - but she is just another coward, sticks to the party line and I'm not giving her my vote.

Just had a look again at the article and the comments are on fire. Hundreds of men and women commenting with lots of them evidently coming to this for the first time. Finally the message is getting through with people actually understanding the issues - and the Lib Dems come out of it terribly.
Thank you Jo Swinson indeed.

Dh has been looking at the LibDem manifesto, and as far as he can see, their only mention of LGBTQ+ policies is in the section on promoting human rights and equality around the world

From the Lib Dem manifesto, under the heading "Our Plan for Freedom, Rights and Equality"

● Complete reform of the Gender Recognition Act to remove the requirement for medical reports, scrap the fee and recognise non-binary gender identities.
● Introduce an ‘X’ gender option on passports and extend equality law to cover gender identity and expression.
● Ensure accurate population data on sexual orientation and gender identity by including a question on LGBT+ status within the 2021 Census

● Complete the introduction of equal marriage, by:
– Removing the spousal veto.
– Allowing those marriages that were dissolved solely due to the Gender Recognition process to be retrospectively restored.

I'm not spoiling my ballot and voting for the least bad party on this issue.

To come back to the point about human rights - in academia, there are lots of human rights sceptics and human rights critics. If the Essex historian who has smeared other scholars as transphobes before they even had a chance to present their research knew anything about her subject, she would realise that invoking 'human rights' no longer has quite the cachet it once had.

" Zanahoria, this tells you everything you need to know about this academic’s contempt for freedom of speech"

I don't care how many degrees she has, the woman is a plain fool.

Don't hold your breath servalan7. I wrote to the Lib Dem candidate here two weeks ago explaining why they were at risk of losing my vote: endorsement of men in women's single sex spaces, spousal consent, and one other issue. I kept it concise. Didn't hear a dickybird back. This is also a marginal.

I expect I'm now on a list.

How do you tell which is which?

If we could tell then there would be no idiots with male violence globally.

This thread has been helpful, I'm emailing all the PPC in my constituency about women's rights. But with the Lib Dems I'm just going to explain why I will never vote for them. I'm in a marginal and will vote according to the replies I get.

They use gender instead of sex throughout the whole darn thing -- 'tackle bullying on the basis of gender, sexuality,
gender identity, or gender expression' ; 'gender pay gap' ; 'discriminated against on the basis of their gender, race, age, sexuality, gender identity, or religion'.

Maybe they mean something different by 'gender' and 'gender identity'. Maybe they use it instead of sex to be polite, or possibly to make it much harder to tell what they are talking about. Who knows?

There will be, of course, a very tiny number of individuals who will seek to exploit this to behave as violent criminals towards women and you need a separate route for these people.

Why do you need a "route" for violent criminals at all? Why is the answer in those cases not simply "no" regardless of how woke you are?

.. a prime example of how to hide something you don’t want people to examine in any detail

Isn’t that interesting? Because that’s one of tactics explicitly identified in the Denton report and referenced in Janice Turner’s article. This is how this lobby operates. Deliberately secretive. Policies by stealth

Once in power, a party would then have an oven-ready trans legislation programme. Ideally, says the report, because gender identity remains “a more difficult issue to win public support for” it should be shrouded by a “veil of protection” afforded by “more popular reforms”: notably in Ireland, where self-ID was bundled in with same-sex marriage

Dh has been looking at the LibDem manifesto, and as far as he can see, their only mention of LGBTQ+ policies is in the section on promoting human rights and equality around the world - which many people will not spend time reading it because foreign policy may be of less importance to voters than domestic policy and Brexit.

Dh used to be a compliance manager, and he says that this is a prime example of how to hide something you don’t want people to examine in any detail.

I did explain I was talking about gender ID rather than leaving him completely at sea! (Hats off to anyone who can actually remember precisely what they said in a conversation.)

we had a lib dem canvasser on the door step yesterday. I (politely) sent him off with a flea in his ear. He did not know what to say about the self ID issue

I've just had one too.
Him: 'I'm wondering if our candidate can count on your vote. Our policy on Brexit is that it will be very damaging...'

Me: 'I agree, and you would have had my vote if it wasn't for your manifesto policy on self-identification.'

He said 'Ooh, well, that's something I don't know anything about. I expect it's up to the individual.'

I said, 'But it's in your manifesto and Jo Swinson was talking about it on the radio this week.'

Him: 'Not something I've heard of, really, but I'm too old for all that sort of thing, I suppose. [He was probably in his 60s] Is that sort of a thing among young people, then?'

Me: 'Have you really not heard about it even though it's in your manifesto? I'm genuinely worried about normalizing something that can be so damaging. It's led to radical surgery for at least two very young people I know, because everyone tells them they can change sex if they want to. [Him: 'Now, what a shame that is, oh dear!'] And it's led to mixed-sex changing rooms, and to gender neutral toilets everywhere at my son's university.'

Him: 'Oh, now, I wouldn't like that, so embarrassing if you walk in on a lady, like I did at the [XX]--'

Me: 'Me too, and I think it's worse than embarrassing, it's actually cruel to take single-sex facilities away from teenage girls, don't you think? Right, shall we talk about Brexit and climate change? But if you could feed some of that back to your party...'

I'm abbreviating somewhat! I think I said 'manifesto' several more times and rambled about Jo Swinson quite a lot.

Poor chap regretted knocking.

There are some great comments on Janice’s article, too.

and also maybe too little critical examination of the whole model of human rights

Goosefoot, that’s an excellent point. The current environment in which people are expected to meekly accept assertions without any challenge or debate is suffocating freedom of speech and thought. Also, the failure to grasp the inevitable unintended consequences of ‘good’ intentions when they become policy. Accusing someone of bigotry, no matter how fatuous and inaccurate, has become an effective way of silencing any dissent. The entire paradigm which has created this environment needs to be rigorously challenged

What they don't do is argue for "no debate" or no platforming.

So, while appreciate there are people who as you say try and make the argument, I think it's becoming less common with all kinds of things, including abortion, SSM, and other areas.

More and more, this "no debate" approach is becoming the go-to. here in Canada we seem to be on the forefront of much of this, and abortion in particular has in the last few years been a particular example, where the history of the law has actually be rewritten by not only activists but people in government, in order to try to simply sidestep any questions, even about areas where there are real differences of opinion. All of the political parties here, except the Conservatives, no will allow no one to run as an MP if they even tolerate questions in these areas. It's a concerted attempt to shut down any discussion before it even begins. The same thing happened here in the SSM debate when legalisation was being discussed - it was presented as a right, therefor no debate - including debate about whether it was a right. Totally arguing in a circle.

This is a technique that is infecting all areas of public discussion, everyone with apolitical agenda is now trying to present it as a rights issue.

LangCleg, that is exactly how I feel. I may be in the polling booth some time as I try to decide whether to spoil my vote by scrawling Woman isn't a Feeling with a sharpie or actually, unthinkably, vote Tory because the Tories do seem to have been reading Janice Turner and the Telegraph and the Spectator and they seem to realise this is a vote-loser.

This is one of the most important elections to be held during my lifetime and there is no one I can vote for with good conscience. Do I vote Tory in the hope that they'll turn their backs on self-ID and in doing so vote for further misery for millions, or do I vote Labour and then fight for the rest of my life for the right to exist as a GC woman?

And for raising again at the end the astronomic rise in trans-identifying teens and young people. It is not progressive or liberating to medically alter people who don't conform to stereotypes

I've just returned from a Christmas arts & craft market. I ended up purchasing a lovely, hand made 'super woman' dressing up outfit for my 5 year old granddaughter. The stall holder, a youngish American Mum, mentioned her 6 year old son twirling around, at home, in the superwoman skirt. I couldn't resist - and said:

ME: "It's great that boys can wear skirts without thinking they're girls"....

MUM: " But even if he wanted to be a girl that'd be fine, so long as he was happy".....

ME: " Surely not if it involved hormones and surgery"

MUM: " Why not, so longs as he was happy"

ME: " I don't think that would really make him happy"

Awkward silence.....it was just a Christmas craft fair after all....

But I so wanted to add that a 6 year old is not old enough to realise the consequences of such 'desires' and actions, and that it would be a failure of adult and parental responsibility to permit or encourage this.

What a mess we have got ourselves into...when loving parents think giving hormones and puberty blockers to children is as harmless as dressing up as superwoman.

Tracey Loughran, a historian and dean in the Essex University humanities department said: “This speaker is part of the anti-trans platform. Free speech is one thing, but trans rights are human rights and we shouldn’t be debating human rights." uh why shouldn't we debating human rights? Its an important issue, we have to argue out exactly what rights people have and what they do not have.

I have noticed this time and again, this claim that something is a rights issue, and therefor it must be accepted as presented (presented by whom, that doesn't matter!). It goes beyond this issue, I've seen it in debates about all kinds of questions.

In many cases I have come to the conclusion the people spouting this believe it - they believe that it is the case that anything that is a "right" cannot conflict with other "rights" so there is simply nothing to talk about. All the rights fit together neatly because they have a sense of rights as a naturalistic system with a kind of higher level metaphysical rightness behind them. It's like a cut-rate materialists version of Catholic natural law, without the nuance.
Because these people implicitly accept this idea, often without ever really thinking about it, they believe and behave as if the only task is to figure out what rights each person or group really has, to put them into law, and then it will all fit together in an easy, simple, and natural way.
They additionally seem to believe that once these laws are made, they will work without affecting the behaviour of people in general or causing institutional or systemic issues. There will always be individual criminal types to be dealt with but basically people will never use rights to try and create hierarchies or develop a power base.

I think it points to limits many people have in their understanding of systemic behaviours, institutional behaviours, and also maybe too little critical examination of the whole model of human rights. The latter is something that kids are taught, from early years, as basic, fundamentally true, not to be contested. They generally do not understand that it is a construct, what it is meant to represent, what it's limitations might be, or even how it came to be developed. All things which help us make judgements about how to use the model in a sensible and effective way.

if you're going to major on it, why not provide the foot soldiers with some guidance on how to deal with the WTFs they're inevitably going to come across on the doorstep Jo?

I think it’s because the entire agenda is shrouded in secrecy. So the party apparatchiks are relying on nobody asking. Because most of the public don’t know

If you ask me, they're just the useful idiots. This is about way more than genderism

Lang, I have been trying to understand who is the figurehead and what is the motive but it eludes me. I certainly think there’s a bunch of useful idiots. Many of them are politicians. But where you and I will disagree is that I think the fertile environment which has enabled this fricking outrageous regulatory, institutional capture has come from the left. This is a battle where freedom versus the end game of ‘equality’ The left are on the wrong side. But hey Lang, you and I might disagree about politics and I respect your position, but we’re on the same side in this!

Lang, you know what I find so shocking? This is absolutely nothing whatsoever like a grass roots movement. It is nothing like a social change movement. Like the suffragettes. It is a deliberately secretive lobby which had immediate access to the people in the upper echelons of power. Civil servants, politicians, charities, state sector, private sector. And all of it done with zero media or public scrutiny. It’s unbelievable

Yep. And transactivists may well be crowing currently because it's suiting them. If you ask me, they're just the useful idiots. This is about way more than genderism. If we don't look out, neo-feudalism is just around the corner. Cheerled by fools who think they're of the left.

Fab powerful post LangCleg - thank you for articulating it so clearly.

There are some very good comments under the Times article as well.

but I cannot bring myself to vote for a party that is willing to throw women under the bus AND expect women to cheer them while they do it

Kit, the arrogance is absolutely incredible. There is something so regressive and conformist about the sex stereotypes being peddled by this lobby.