How can we prevent the trans issue from being a gift to the right wing?

Hmm I'd agree with a lot of the above @RebelliousCow . With a large caveat : where us this conservatism of which you speak ?

Conservatives believe in the precautionary principle surely - first do no harm. Tories stopped taking precautions - in every sense - a long time ago. Since Thatchers landslide in 1983 they seem to have become addicted to a sort of politics of chaos or continuous revolution.

Interspersed with forlorn calls to 'bring back the old values!' They could do worse than electing a pragmatic moderate One Nation Tory leader next time. But I fear the temptation to veer towards the crazy will be too strong.

But it talked about biological women - and transwomen very clearly arent biological women. I can see you might find there are people legally classed as women, but if that's a legal fiction and they reference single sex spaces for biological women surely that doesn't include people who are biologically male?

We have women with female birth certificates, female passports and female markers on their nhs records.

We have men with female birth certificates, female passports and female markers on their nhs records and we have to be kind and call these men woman with she/her pronouns.

But its ok, because the intention is that sse is for the first group only, not including the second.

How can a service provide differentiate between a woman with female id and a man with female id?

Look forward to some well-researched informative posts that show how Labour would be a good thing for the UK.

I am not on Labour's side (I have no idea at the moment who to vote for), but here's what the major political parties are saying about their policies:

Labour
Instead of policies, they are pushing 'missions,' presumably so their ideas can't be stolen prior to a GE.

• Secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 (work together + create more jobs)
• Making Britain a clean energy superpower (invest in infrastructure)
• Building an NHS fit for the future (says 'reform' but they skirt the details)
• Making Britain’s streets safe (Halve serious violent crime and raise confidence in the police and criminal justice system to its highest levels, within a decade.)
• Breaking down the barriers to opportunity at every stage (reform childcare + education).

Conservatives
They have 5 priorities. As they are in power, we can see how they are doing in real-time, so to speak. I think they are struggling on all five - for example, the national debt was 85% in 2019, and it's now at 100.1%, as of May 2023. Priority 5 has generated a lot of headlines and swearwords from me.

• Halve inflation
• Grow the economy
• Reduce debt
• Cut waiting lists
• Stop the boats

SNP
Another party of Government; I would be interested to hear from Scottish voters about their record and likely chances at the next GE. They are going through a period of change at the moment, with leadership positions open for voting at their national conference. These are their top five policies from the 2021 election.

1. Hold a post-pandemic independence referendum to put Scotland’s future firmly into Scotland’s hands – not Boris Johnson’s.
2. Deliver at least a 4% pay rise for NHS staff – the biggest in the history of devolution, giving a frontline NHS nurse an average pay rise of over £1,200 a year.
3. 100,000 more affordable homes with at least 70% for social rent, on top of the 96,750 new homes we’ve already delivered right across Scotland.
4. Create a National Care Service, abolishing charges for non-residential care and introducing a National Wage for carers.
5. Universal free school meals for all primary pupils, with free breakfast and lunch for all classes, all year round.

Lib Dems
Added because they may be a coalition partner after the next GE in some shape or form. No policies that I can see, but a lot of campaigns and it's worth noting they are active at a local level. These are their top five.

• Cut energy bills
• Stop sewage dumping
• Support proportional representation (PR voting)
• Burglary Response Guarantee (police to visit and investigate all burglaries)
• Offer a GP guarantee (24 if urgent/1 week for standard care)

Greens
It's worth noting that the Greens are a coalition partner with the SNP but Scottish Greens have split with UK Greens. I cannot find any current policies.
https://greenparty.org.uk/

Amazing. Posters on here blaming women AGAIN for everything.

Message received loud and clear - Women put up and shut up.

But it talked about biological women - and transwomen very clearly arent biological women. I can see you might find there are people legally classed as women, but if that's a legal fiction and they reference single sex spaces for biological women surely that doesn't include people who are biologically male?

I just really, really wonder why labour hates women so much?

It would be so easy for them NOT to lose the vote of left leaning women but instead they prefer to remove women's rights in favour of males and see nothing amiss in 'transing' children.

They are not a party I can even contemplate voting for, they don't do reality.

Labour is not going to do a U turn on Self Id. The leadership team meets regularly with Stonewall and Iain Anderson has recently moved to Labour from across the chamber. The reason he did this was so that he could further Stonewall's aims from the Labour benches when in power.

People are deluded if they think Starmer will ditch this manifesto commitment - and if you vote Labour he will take that as being part of the " consensus" he says he is trying to build around this issue.

@Augend23 What you are missing is that if you make it easy for anyone to be become a woman legally there are no single sex spaces left to "protect". We more or less have that now with people thinking it is currently the law that they have tolt any man in. It is not the law yet but Labour want to make it law while pretending they are not.

The medical profession have been brainwashed, only the increasing number of detransitioners wanting to sue will change that.

Meanwhile the stories can talk the talk - but DO very little. They can issue guidance to schools NOW saying they must protect the rights of the majority not to participate in a fantasy, they can make it far clearer that hate "crimes" are just that and nothing to do with someone who takes offence at reality. They have allowed this mess and they are not clearing it up.

I dont have to choose between 2 steaming piles of shit, 2 lots of liars, 2 leaders who may be more competent than their predecessors but who can not control their party - I can refuse them the legitimacy of voting for either.

I need to see real recognition from the labour party that trans activism is homophobic and mysogynisitc and that women need real safe spaces, I need to see action not words from the stories.

Oh, don’t forget, Labour do have one clear policy! Their hate campaign against children in private schools. An odd choice of flagship policy: stoking hate and division and making schoolchildren a political football. It won’t end well.

This is the important question. I have seen Kier Starmer on TV being asked if he includes male-bodied transwomen as women when he talks about protecting women’s single sex spaces, and he was very clear that his answer is yes he does.

So, Labour have very clearly stated that they will protect women’s single sex spaces AND have also clearly stated that men who identify as women must be allowed into all women’s single sex spaces. This is a fudge: they’re basically saying to biological women “Calm down dear, of course you can still have women’s toilets / rape centres” and simultaneously saying to transwomen “Don’t worry, you can go anywhere biological women go.”

If Labour have done a u-turn of what Kier Starmer said on tv only a few months ago, they’re going to have to be much much clearer about that. At the moment this looks like a fudge designed to trick biological women into voting Labour. If Labour clearly safeguard women’s spaces and services for biological women ONLY (and stop fake science and brainwashing being taught in schools) then they are welcome to have my vote. Until then it’s Sunak for me.

I also want it made very clear - as the Conservatives are trying to do - that people can’t be forced to use the preferred pronouns of transpeople. At the moment people in the UK have been fired, expelled and arrested for using accurate sex-based pronouns instead of agreeing to say whatever transpeople tell them to say. The police are captured by transactivists, the NHS is also captured, I won’t vote in a captured Government too.

This is a time for clarity, not a patronising political fudge.

This is on Labour to fix

Kier Starmer has turned the Labour party into a centre right party - that is pretty much indistinguishable from the toroies on everything except its commitment to Gender Self ID.

There are going to be a very large number of angry and disappointed people should they expect some big left wing revolution should Labour get in.

The Conservatives have voewed to immediately repeal gender Self Id should they get in.

Interesting

My friends discuss how the Left ( I'm a former Labour Party member/Leftie/radical activist) thinks it can dictate everything, and that if there is any push-back they resort to calling it a " right wing manufactured culture war".

So predicatble. Naive student politics - which is failing to see the situation from a macro level. Once you zoom out ( rather than zoom in, as you are doing) - you can see the patterns at play.

Moral self righteousness just fuels the flames.

The Conservatives, the most successful party in UK political history, are Centre Right. Nothing like the US right, or the right wing parties in many European countries (Marine Le Pen nearly won ffs!). The likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Jacob Rees-Mogg can become MPs in certain areas, but neither are ever going to be PM. They represent the most extreme that the British public are willing to go either way.

The Spanish socialists in were split apart by the vote on Gender Self ID -it was far more controversial for many Left wingers than it would appear to be here.
The Conservatives have voewed to immediately repeal gender Self Id should they get in. If it goes to another vote, I suspect many Vox voters will vote for the mainstream conservatives.

Being conservative is not something to be ashamed of. Conservatism recognises that there is nothing to be gained from rqdical change which seeks to over-throw the norms and customs that have developed for good reason. Change, at it most workable, has to be incremental.

I say this a natural radical, who in my younger years regularly over-threw all previous conditions - but then discovered that each time I did that i had to start all over again. and build an enitirely new structure from scratch......often having to reconstruct that which I'd carelessly over-thrown.

I'd go as far as saying that conservatism is the new radicalsim. It is the zeitgeist - hence the shift in european politics.

..and it is certainly not something that women concerned about their rights and protections should bother themselves with.

The reason things are moving towards the right is a natural response and a re-balancing away from the excessive cultural changes that have been forced on to people. This was inevitable. You cannot force or push drastic change withoit people pushing back.

There is nothing that can be done about this. It is an inevitable part of the natural cycle.

It's never a huge difference one way or the other in the US, and what with different states voting different ways, I'm not sure that tells us a lot in itself.

What's more interesting I think is the loss of fairly traditional voting groups for the Democrats: what appears to me like an increase in people who feel a little like homeless Labour voters in the UK, people who would have considered themselves traditional liberals and voted Democrat - maybe they still are, but they are conflicted; and also things like the exodus of people from states like California to Idaho and Texas.

You are right that making predictions about the black vote is speculative at the moment, but there seems to be a real movement of black conservatives in the poplular media who are gaining momentum, and in a lot of ways they seem to represent the "average" values of that population better. I think there's a real possibility they could break out.

At which point the Dems have lost Catholics, the working class, rural people in the South, Hispanics, and then the black vote, all of which they have considered "theirs" in the living past. That seems to me like a very bad trajectory and at some point it will start to pinch.

We've only been doing this for 20 years. How much longer until they listen?
Also it's not rocket science, it should never have got off the ground, let alone be an issue now. I just cant vote for a party that has ignored me for two decades about something so simple.
I cant make them see the issues, those issues are staring us in the face, except labour, green. Lib dem. I'm not their mummy, I shouldnt have to hold their hand and walk them through.
I'm done sending emails and either getting screeds back comparing to gay right or nothing.

Yes, this absolutely.

I’m economically left wing and socially liberal with no-one to vote for.

Gender ideology is regressive and authoritarian. The idea that having this view makes me alt right is laughable.

Yes the European electorate are pushing back against trans ideology and in some cases unfortunately the rainbow is being seen as a threatening symbol so LGB rights are also losing support.

show labour up for danger to safeguarding and women's rights that they are?
They don't need help for that! Remind me again, who is the only mainstream party in the UK who has never elected a woman leader?

There are policians on all side who understand the women rights issues and safeguarding failures of male gender demands. There are policians who dont understand and some on all side who are actively trying to remove womens rights and safeguarding.

The difference between the parties is that the conservatives allow discussion and differences of opinion, labour much less so.

I honestly think both sunak and starmer are in the clueless idiot group.

Maybe the tories will be brilliant in opposition on this issue and show labour up for danger to safeguarding and womens rights that they are?