Anyone else left wing and gender critical?

Also - those 'voting for their daughters' had better hope that their daughters never need the kinds of services that the Tories are cutting funding to.

I don’t get this ‘tories are better with women’s rights’ ? How so ? They’ve not done anything yet to rectify the situation and neither have labour. But the conservatives are somehow to be trusted but labour aren’t ? All these changes have happened under a 12 year plus Tory administration - the transwomen in female prisons, the transwomen being admitted to domestic abuse groups, transwomen participating in female sports but labour bad. It really doesn’t make sense and I’m starting to think that some of these posters are in posting bad faith.

I agree with a pp that you appear to be describing mainly social liberalism rather than left-wing economics. I'm pretty far left economically and GC, but not particularly liberal. I've never had a political home (at least amongst parties that actually stand in my constituency - I used to be involved with a far left party, but they were too small to stand candidates in most areas). The only mainstream party I've ever voted for is Labour, wouldn't ever consider Tory or Lib Dem; most often I've spoiled my ballot.

This is exactly how I feel. I have had several arguments about this, for agreeing with right wing commentators like Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson etc on this issue. I agree on this issue and not others. It’s not hard to understand, it’s so childish to think that because I agree on one thing I agree with them on everything. Yet there are always accusations and concerns, “Don’t you care how it looks?!”

No. I don’t care at all. I don’t care one bit if people extrapolate my agreement on the sky being blue to think it means I agree with everything else a person is saying. I know what I think, I know what I believe, and I won’t be cowed into not saying I agree with something because of the optics to people who are looking for any opportunity to discredit us. Why should I keep them happy? They don’t get to dictate to me what I stand up and believe in, and it’s pointless trying because they will just move onto the next thing to try.

Of course I am!

A few allies I know are Conservative (in the UK - really important distinction! UK Conservative is probably fairly similar to US Democrats) But they are allies because they believe in freedom of speech and because they are intelligent enough to be offended by the mangling of truth that trans ideology requires.

Many of my friends are left wing and gender critical. They view gender as the way in which women (and to a lesser extent men) are oppressed. Gender flourishes under capitalism. It is no coincidence that large companies & institutions have found it so easy to back gender ideology. It leaves the patriarchy fully intact whilst creating consumers and medical patients out of the myriad of different identities requiring authentic expression.

Left wing politics in the UK was built upon an understanding of class analysis and materialism. That Labour & Green have been taken in by this hyper individualist movement that forces one to utter an untruth is a travesty.

It is also an absolute gift for our pathetic Conservative government in the UK, and more worryingly, the religious nutjob right wing in the US.

LW and GC here. How can you fight for a better society when you can’t even talk about material reality? Sadly the left just seems to break up into smaller and smaller warring factions. We need a decent opposition and we don’t have one.

You did see JK Rowling's lunch pictures, I would say that the most vocal proponents of GC in this country (couple of exceptions) are leftwing. It doesn't surprise me at all because from the 1960s onwards identity politics discourse in the West was a leftist/liberal discourse. It was about tearing down all sorts of essentialising stereotypes. Sometimes that is misunderstood, even on here, with some arguing that identity politics led to this state of things.

In fact, at one stage, many men who transitioned and were in the press were often from quite conservative backgrounds and therefore had a rigid idea of what 'being a woman' was.

By far the biggest surprise is that some of the discourse on the left around gender identity doesn't see the consequences of what is being argued in terms of a return to sex stereotyping. I'm actually fully in favour of the gender fluidity side of things and young people experimenting with their sexuality and identifying with different constructs of masculine and femininity. But believing in innate gender identity is just not anything I have believed for 30 years.

I also notice a common message is that that older women should shut up. Even though the young woman who are so dismissive will one day, if they're lucky, be old themselves. And a definite sense that motherhood is something to be dismissed as boring and conventional, and if you do it you should feel slightly ashamed of your 'cis-hetero- normativeness.'

Agree with this completely. I'm 34 btw! Cannot stand the vile misogyny of Karen memes.

@Pluvia well put, I agree with everything you've said.

I'm really sick of all the tories=evil labour=good stuff that gets spouted. I'm not convinced I would be much better off under a Labour government anyway. But the foremost political issue for me is women's rights and bizarrely, Tories are better with regards to this right now.

I get really angry that this seems to be an issue which is driving many to vote Tory.
Each to their own, but I can't understand the logic of thinking Tories are in any way good on this issue when the last 12 years have happened on their watch.

I do agree that so much of this has happened on their watch. They have made awful mistakes on this. But it's what happens next that I'm concerned with. Comments from BJ, RS and SJ are encouraging. I want them to follow through and take real action now. There is a chance they will, whereas Labour don't care about GC views, women's sport, safe spaces or safeguarding children. I would rather take a chance and vote Tory based on this issue and what they will do going forward than vote Labour, knowing exactly what they will do.

Wish I'd written that!

For those of us who live in safe Labour seats it's the only way we can send a message. My hope is that Labour will see their vote dip (or probably not, if all the people so angry about party gate vote Labour) and start to realise that women aren't happy.

I'm over that Labour = good, Tories = evil scum (or vice versa) tribalism. It's that blind tribalism that has got us (and the US) into the state we're in.

I'm uninterested in retrospective finger-pointing. The only thing that matters is that we are in this mess and have to find a way out of it. Pointing to the Tories and saying 'they did it' isn't useful. They are the only party that is clear that sex is immutable and have taken steps to ensure that some of the institutional capture has been tackled.

For reference, I have been a Labour Party member and have canvassed for Labour for the last three general elections. I won't be voting Labour later today.

Completely left wing in every other way. I feel like the grouping of GC feminists with conservatives is a kind of gaslighting, not reflected in the women I see speaking up at all, and in fact the so-called progressives who bleat about 'transmisogyny' and other thought crimes are the most rigid of all when it comes to gender roles, internalised misogyny, ageism and so on.

I also notice a common message is that that older women should shut up. Even though the young woman who are so dismissive will one day, if they're lucky, be old themselves. And a definite sense that motherhood is something to be dismissed as boring and conventional, and if you do it you should feel slightly ashamed of your 'cis-hetero- normativeness.'

The whole thing fucks me off no end.

Left wing, GC and politically homeless here. I think there’s been some clutching at straws going on on these boards sometimes. The Tories are not safe on this issue and haven’t actually done or changed anything legally to protect women.

They’re happy to give GC soundbites (which is a start obviously) but they have made no actual changes despite their massive House of Commons majority since 2019. The Tories have been in power since 2010 (including for a short time with the Lib Dems) so they’ve had 12 years to sort something out.

I couldn’t give a fuck if Boris johnson dsays he ‘knows what a woman is’, he’s not prepared to do something about it legally, so his views aren’t helping us.
I don’t think I can forgive Labour for being so unrelentingly sexist on this issue, it’s really alienated me from the current crop.

100%. While the Tories cut the kinds of resources and services so necessary for 'our daughters' they quite happily speak nicely to GC feminists but do not put their money where their mouths are.

Where is gender criticality and protecting women's integrity as women, dignity and spaces in their manifesto/policy statements and what have they pledged to do about this?

Maybe women who have supported the Labour Party feel incredibly betrayed by them throwing women under the bus?

I was surprised at the number of feminist 'life long' labour voters who were voting conservative at the next GE because 'a message needed to be sent to the labour party'. I was pretty incredulous to be honest. Every post about forthcoming GEs had feminists falling over themselves to tell us how they were voting tory for the first time in their lives because 'Boris knows what a woman is.'

I don't think we even have mainstream left or right wing parties in the UK. We have a Centre Left and a Centre Right party dominating the scene. Our European neighbours have much stronger full-on rightwing parties, winning seats and applying pressure (remember Farage has failed to become an MP multiple times).

Marine Le Pen is described as right wing because of her social politics in terms of nationalism; her economic policies in the recent election were more lefty than anything Corbyn dared suggest (something like no income tax for those under 30, early retirement for those who started work at 16).

I'm not even sure the labels right/left mean much anymore. Tomorrow I'll be voting Communist/SDP if there's an option, or spoiling my ballot. I wish the greens would grow the fuck up so I could vote for them again.

I think this is a very balanced and wise post. I get really angry that this seems to be an issue which is driving many to vote Tory.
Each to their own, but I can't understand the logic of thinking Tories are in any way good on this issue when the last 12 years have happened on their watch.

At base my view is I'd rather have eg Refuges which permit males via self-id than have no Refuges at all, and at heart that is the difference between Labour and Tory to me.

I agree that rights are hard won and easily lost. To give just one example, our right to peaceful protest has just been restricted, with barely a murmur from the media.

I’ve always voted Lib Dem or Green in general elections, but if there was one tomorrow, I’d have to spoil a paper. Labour won’t stand up for women’s rights and our Tory MP is awful even by Tory standards.

I’d rather not vote Tory, locally or nationally (particularly as my otherwise apparently sensible local Tory MP happens to be full on TWAW), but I have daughters.

Rights are hard won - look at how long it took to open the vote to women, or to decriminalise homosexuality - and once lost they’ll be even harder to reinstate. I’m rarely a single issue voter, but blocking Self ID and any further degradation of womens rights is so important that it, for me, overrides almost anything else.

Solidarity. I'm exactly the same. Strange times!

I am left leaning and GC. I'm also surprised to hear that you think most of the GC voices on FWR are not left leaning OP. I read threads saying that women are politically homeless (as am I).

I agree with ChopinBoard's diagram above. I certainly see myself in that position now.

I have never voted anything other than labour in general elections. I see the threat to vote Tory as more of a protest vote than an actual agreement with Tory policies.

YetAnotherSpartacus expressed pretty much exactly how I feel upthread.

I am a lifelong lefty rad fem, voted Labour (despite their long tradition of sexism and misogyny), was a party member (no longer) and voting is very important to me.

No party of the left stands up for women, but I could never bring myself to vote Tory because of my views on class and disadvantage in particular. It makes me both sad and angry that I feel I have no choice but to spoil my ballot (I've already postal voted). I resent that I am politically homeless.

Yes, I fully agree with KenDodd's opening post, plus the one by YetAnotherSpartacus at 9:10 today.

But I have been to the counts of the last two GE's and the intervening District Councils, and knowing what a woman was didn't seem to feature in the spoilt ballots. There were a lot of 'they are all wankers', and such like. The TWAW movement seems to have become much more prominent in the last three years. Why?

For me, as second wave feminist of the early seventies, I have only recently become fully appraised of the issue. I used to think that all Transwomen were of the James/Jan Morris type i.e. men who had undergone surgery. I really only began to take notice when I saw people who had completed in sport as men, (because that is what they are), suddenly deciding that they'd have a go as women.

Now reading MN I have found that all the left and leftish political parties have been captured by the TWAW brigade, and organisations like Girl Guides have got themselves into a complete mess over this issue.

This to me is another manifestation of the feminist battle that we have to fight. In the seventies it was equal opportunities and pay, now --well I am not sure - but there needs to be a strong position that there are only two sexes, that women still need to fight for their rights. Forget the bekind nonsense, it didn't get us anywhere last time.

I am annoyed by the political parties stance on this, but won't ever vote Tory - look at their policies before thinking that they support women.

I don't talk to friends about it but I'm getting the impression most of them are also GC. In fact I've only ever met anyone one person IRL who believes TWAW.

I must say that reading this thread, I really do get the sense that trying to persuade people that "GC" doesn't simply mean "anti-TWAW" is a lost cause...

That seems to be a clear shift over the last two years. Two years ago, people using the term "GC" did generally know what it meant, but there are now enough people on-board the "anti-TWAW" train who've picked it up that the meaning's been somewhat lost.