My husband

For me its the pandering and inability to say the truth out loud. We know this sort of thinking leads to eg Rotherham etc because of being scared of racism accusations. And now tw in Prisons because of fear of transphobia. If they can say things like it's wrong to say only women have a cervix what else do they fundamentally misunderstand? How can they make law and uphold justice if they are deluded?

I don’t think you can change his point of view, which I suspect is what most people in this country think (Fundamentally I think your DH is correct)

I agree with him - I vote based on a whole bunch of issues with climate and economy and support for the disadvantaged near the top. and Labour are far better on all of those.

I also don't think the tories are doing anything about women's rights out of a solid principle that women's rights matter. they just think it is part of the culture wars and is a way to annoy Labour. Most of them would be happy to ignore women / put us back in the kitchen if they could. So I wouldn't trust them on this matter or anything else.

Please don’t vote Tory - they are simply the worst

I don't want women to be called "womb havers" or whatever but if you think that's an issue on a par with climate change or the collapse of health and social care in this country then frankly you've lost all perspective.

A lot of people think that way, as we see in discussions here all the time. And of course whenever you have a bunch of poor choices, it is very tricky to balance what is more important.

But to some extent I think it comes down to people who see these policies in terms of a bunch of discrete policies, and those who seem them more as a systematic whole.

For me there are a few systems implicated with these policies. One is that we know they are creating these complex legal fictions, that they are building upon more and more, and which will become the basis for more policies. I think the idea of basing these complex policy systems on things which we know are objectively untrue can only lead to disaster. There aren't many other policy areas that look quite so cracked in that way to me - in most cases I look at sets of policies about things like economics or the environment and think different groups have elements of the truth or arguable interpretations of reality.

There's the point that we can see in places that have made the legal changes Labour is talking about, it has become completely impossible to even discuss many of these problems.

A huge issue for me is that gender ideology is part of a larger anti-democratic way of thinking, and part of a type of identity politics that believes in hierarchical power games and that enforcing equality of outcome among groups (The right groups anyway) through the machinations of the state, is a good idea. In that I can't separate it from the authoritarianism we saw more and more openly during the pandemic, the interference in scientific inquiry on politically contentious topics, or larger problems in education, among other things.

Still can’t vote for Keir, he just keeps digging that hole.

Your husband has not grasped that one male in a women's space makes it mixed sex, and so destroys it.

Or that, as a man, he has no conception of why that matters so much. If a decent man, he will accept that the decision on whether it does isn't his.

Over to him.

It boggles my mind that there are people who will vote for the devious, self serving, dishonest and plain cruel Tories, on a single issue.

They've destroyed education, health, social care and absolutely everything that any woman should care about and which affects their lives and those of all those they love. And then there's climate change...

They're evil, and them claiming to know what a woman is, is I'm afraid, nowhere near enough for me to vote for them

I agree with your DH.

I agree but don't you think the Tories have showed themselves to be equally stupid and dishonest?

I am considering spoiling my paper but then I feel bad about wasting my vote.
I don't know what to do.

Your husband is entitled to vote for who he wants based on whatever issues he likes.

If you believe that "knowing what a woman is" is worth sending female asylum seekers to Rwanda for then crack on and vote Tory.

Personally I don't think any party is good for women's rights. I don't understand why people think that the Tories are given that they are currently in power while women's rights are being eroded.

For me this is the biggie. It's not just the potential damage of this one policy (bad as it is) but the potential damage of people that stupid or dishonest running the country.

Keir Starmer thinks 1 in 1000 women have a penis. For me this makes him as credible as the Monster Raving Loony party.

I wish the Labour party would really resolve this issue in a way that fully respects the rights of women. If they don't and people are going to vote Tory instead then we are going to be stuck with the outcome of Tory policies for another 4 years and the country will be on its knees.

One woman just one being negatively affected by trans rights is one too many and it is already more than one.

Tell him to make sure transwomen are welcomed and supported in the male single sex spaces where they belong.

Such a pity the Women's Equality Party think anyone can be a woman. Although , under the quaintly Medieval FPTP system , they'd never get an MP elected anyway.

A Women's Rights Party here in Ireland might fare better. They'd surely get lots of 2nd preferences from women across the political spectrum?

Is it cos he wants to share changing rooms/bathrooms with little girls?
That's what i'd be asking. Any bloke that doesn't have any care about women and girls being forced to share facilities, needs to be having a very deep think about the roll on effects to everything else and if women and girls are too scared to fully participate in society, nothing else matters much.

I also think in a way he is right. Women's rights and a party that can actually define what a women is and that doesn't want to erase our rights is hugely important to me, but not at the expense of everything else. There is nothing that could make me vote for the conservatives. I couldn't live with myself if I voted for a party who care so little for everyone but themselves, who will treat people so cruelty and with such disdain. As a pp has said, if they win again I think they could actually destroy our country.

I'm with your husband on this one. I don't think it's a tiny part, but it is only a part of their overall policies.

Personally, I think that another 5 years of the tories will utterly destroy our future prospects, and so I will vote for whoever (within reason) will get them out.

Aside from their positions on gender / sex, I mostly align with labour, so I will happily vote for them, while continually working to get them to change their position on this issue, whether that be by protesting, writing to my MP, supporting Gender Critical groups financially etc.

I'm male, so while this is an important issue for me, it's not the only important issue for me. I wouldn't suppose to change my DP's mind on who to votefor , that's up to her, and I wouldn't expect her to tell me who to vote for (although she's less gender critical than me)

Well, he is entitled to vote however he wants. What he should not be doing is trying to minimise your concerns and your views, and therefore, discouraging you to vote for who you want.

If you have discussed women's rights regarding this issue, and he is not seeing it then there's very little chance that you will persuade him to come round to your views. Not yet, not ever maybe.

@MyriadOfTravels

Climate change, the right to protests, human rights, the economy?
Now that scares the hell of me re women. Because we will be the first to suffer from it. We already are.

This 100%

I care about changing room issues and all that related to trans stuff.

However, none of it will matter a tinkers when we end up with another pandemic as we didn’t do anything about climate change. Which next time could be 10% fatality, then there will be economic collapse at risk on an already shaky economy and nobody will be accessing changing rooms as we’ll all be either stuck at home or dead. Well done humans 👏

When women's terminology and words are taken away so that there is no longer any simple way to describe the group which consists of adult female human beings almost all feminist work becomes incredibly difficult and some impossible.

When we become uterus-havers, vulva people, wombcarriers, menstruators etc., the word 'woman' has been appropriated and colonised and given some new meaning we are not even allowed to inquire about. We have been stripped of our embodied identities, the ones we need to fight for our shared political issues, to organise under.

So no, this does not affect only a tiny percentage of people, but a whole sex class, the one which is currently bearing all the negative consequences of trans demands .

For once women put yourself first!

The environment is far and away the most important issue. It’s existential.

It's 1% - 2.7% that are trans (plus the percent of chancing men who are "at it") but the impact is on 51% of the population. Also a small percentage of men who won't like unisex everything.
1 TW in each sport ruins that sport for women. 1 in the news every so often in a changing room affects how women and girls feel accessing those changing rooms.
1 in a female prison has all the female prisoners on edge and a few abused.
1 boy in the girls changing area at school impacts all the girls there - whether they say it or not.
The impact of this couple of percent of men is huge in terms of the damage they can do and the number of women then altering their own behaviour in prefer to try stay safe.