Debate happening in House of Commons: Victoria Atkins on fire

I know my long-serving Labour MP personally. They have held various middle-ranking but key positions in the party. I was astonished to hear that barring KS's occasional constituency visits where he poses with my MP and then races off, they had never been permitted to meet or talk to Starmer, let alone had access to even a brief one-to-one. Apparently he is as inaccessible as Corbyn, who was notoriously reclusive and spent a lot of time holed up in his office refusing to talk to anyone outside his protective cadre of supporters.

When you seek to deny or downplay the evidence in front of you, for ideological or emotioanl reasons, then you are more and more prone to reaching out for, and seeking comfort in, the most outlandish and batshit places in order to maintain your delusion.

On the BBC's shocking failures to report on Cass/WPATH, etc, I just looked up which Minister is responsible for it.

Lucy Frazer is Sec of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

I'm going to write to ask her to look into the BBC and institutional capture, and their reporting on gender and gender ideology.

https://members.parliament.uk/member/4517/contact

But have we been deliberately defiant as well as disrespectful women?[1] Are we approaching Northern?[2]

[1] Good Morning with IW and KJK:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/3378698-Disrespectful-Woman-Posie-P-on-This-Morning

[2] Northern women according to Meg John Barker:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/3339137-BACP-Gender-Sexual-and-Relationship-Diversity-by-Dr-Meg-John-Barker

Meg John believes northern women are more aggressive than southern women and: 'It is important not to assume, for example, that being a woman necessarily involves being able to bear children, or having XX sex chromosomes, or breasts."

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/3951849-Meg-John-Barker

I complained to the BBC about their coverage and copied it to Victoria Atkins

Dear Ms Atkins

I watched the debate on Monday with interest and relief. For the last ten years I have been increasingly concerned and horrified at the treatment of gender distressed children at the Tavistock GIDS clinic. The Cass report shone a light on the horrific practices at that place, and was very clear on how gender identity ideology has captured a number of our national institutions. Thank you for your incisive and passionate part in the parliamentary proceedings. I am not a Conservative supporter or voter, but I admire you for this.
However, the reason for this email is that, when I looked and listened the next morning, there was no mention of it whatsoever on the BBC (Mishal Husain mentioned Cass briefly in another context on Today, and it may have got brief coverage late in the evening on the 15th, but that was it). Surely something this important should have been all over the BBC? Instead, the website front page featured an article on dormice ladders in Gloucestershire.
I am a natural supporter of the BBC, especially Radio 4. But I understand that it is the most egregious example of ideological capture of institutions (BBC Scotland especially), with a very high proportion of transpeople working there.
Until our national broadcaster can report honestly on these issues, this problem will not go away. I have copied my complaint to the BBC below.

With many thanks

Yesterday evening a historic debate took place in which both Government and Opposition agreed on the findings of the Cass Report and its implications for NHS services. It was made very clear by both sides that children had suffered dreadful harms at the hands of a service captured by ideology, and that these practices - the administration of life changing medications and surgeries to children, with no evidence for their effectiveness (and indeed some evidence for their ineffectiveness) - should stop immediately. The debate was lengthy and well-informed, and involves thousands of children and their families. Yet there was absolutely no coverage of this on the BBC website (I looked in all the relevant sections), or on the morning radio programmes! Is the BBC itself so captured that it simply can’t bring itself to report on these issues? I will copy this complaint to Victoria Atkins, and also your response to it.

As the thread is about Parliamentary debate on the subject, I thought this thread appropriate. Rosie Duffield has called Starmer out on his cowardice.

https://archive.ph/9bLnf

ROSIE DUFFIELD MP: Where was Keir Starmer when I was being bullied and threatened by the trans lobby - and, worse, my colleagues in the Labour Party?

'To the many women, blanked, sidelined, dismissed by male leaders when exposing this for years... As male leaders take applause, praise and credit for simply listening to an expert and finally reading the room... Perhaps less moral cowardice now? No apologies to those 'investigated', reprimanded, passed over, bullied, deselected...'

I was furious. Furious that so many children had been harmed, furious for women — and men — who had tried in vain to get people to listen and, yes, furious for myself.

I joined politics to put the needs of my constituents first. When Keir became leader, he promised we would always be able to approach him.

But nothing could be further from the truth. The leader of the Labour Party has almost no personal contact with his backbenchers. The last message I sent to Keir, practically begging for support, was ignored.

“we've also been sarcastic, deliberately disrespectful and really quite rude.”

To sum up: scathing.

@ArabellaScott to be fair, on occasion we've also been sarcastic, deliberately disrespectful and really quite rude. But those worst limits of our "toxicity" tend to be the starting point for a huge number of TRAs, and the ramp up to intimidation and violence is so widespread it's essentially taken for granted.

@OvaHere at 18.50
Great post, totally agree 👏

And also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

Argument to moderation (Latin: argumentum ad temperantiam)—also known as the false compromise, argument from middle ground, fallacy of gray, middle ground fallacy, or golden mean fallacy[1]—is the fallacy that the truth is always in the middle of two opposites.[2] It does not necessarily suggest that an argument for the middle solution or for a compromise is always fallacious, but rather applies primarily in cases where such a position is ill-informed, unfeasible, or impossible, or where an argument is incorrectly made that a position is correct simply because it is in the middle.[3][4]

An example of an argument to moderation would be considering two statements about the colour of the sky on Earth during the day – one claiming, correctly, that the sky is blue, and another claiming that it is yellow – and incorrectly concluding that the sky is the intermediate colour, green.[5]

Did Jackie Green take overdoses and make suicide attempts because of the bullying directed at him as a young effeminate boy, or because he wanted to be a girl? It's never made plain.

Basically the reason Birmingham Cityh Council has gone bankrupt is because they were advised to get rid of a layer of middle management related to bin men that was contrary to Equal pay legislation, UNITE (Who else) refused to negotiate, took all the bin men out on strike,which resulted in the council being subject to so many equal pay claims they are now bankrupted by it. I am a Labour voter, but yes, the Left have always been anti women. Good for making the tea and doing the campaigning donkey work, but not for anything else.. Its no surprise when the unions and members pick the leaders, they never pick a woman.

Aha! Not false equivalence, it's that! False balance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

I just skimmed the first few pages and there are questions from a couple of mums of gender distressed girls and an autistic adult woman expressing her concern for the large number of autistic teen girls identifying as trans.

Plus every variation of ‘what is a woman’ you could possibly imagine!

I pulled up this 2016 article for a question on a different thread and thought I would put it here while I’m posting - The Mail was laying out our concerns re: GIDS and shonky private hormone peddlers 8 years ago. It’s absolutely maddening that it’s taken this long for parliament to listen.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3973036/Jackie-Green-heart-controversy-children-young-nine-given-drugs-change-sex.html

Victoria Atkins has got a good grip. She is a highly effective woman, as opposed to a highly opportunistic one. So she has something imo that other Tory women do not have. I have no idea if she will in line to lose her seat.

@TheClogLady - thank you for this - will have a look

@Snowypeaks

You weren't responding to me, but I benefitted from it anyway.

@Snowypeaks

“That's not what bothsidesism means.

Anyway, let's not bother arguing about it. Agree to disagree, as they say.”

I’m grateful to you for this; it caused me to look up the definition 😊

She was totally forewarned - she even did a Mumsnet webchat back in 2022:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/mumsnet_live_events/4468388-Webchat-about-women-mums-in-politics-with-Stella-Creasy-and-Caroline-Nokes-1st-February

The questions are very Mumsnetty (and I don’t mean about biscuits!)

Has there been anything from the Tory GI contingent? I can only think of Mordant and Nokes off the top of my head.

Ah Novara, that bastion of journalism where one of their writers has just had to issue a grovelling Twitter apology for calling JKR a holocaust denier…

I think I’m right in saying that Rory Stewart has said previously he thinks Victoria Atkins is a potential future Tory leader. At least he is/was from the centre of the party so she’s less likely to be a Liz Truss-esque nightmare!

Absolutely

It's not a cop-out; it's an outright lie.

Yes

It's not a cop-out; it's an outright lie. A false equivalence.

I was just typing out a post to say that, and then scrolled down to see you already had.

Completely agree.

My MP, Stella McCreasy, can't claim she wasn't forewarned, i raised concerns about the conversion bill and the high numbers of young girls, with complex needs/issues presenting with gender distress, alongside the safeguarding abuses of medical transition pathways, and i never received any acknowledgement or reply. And yet there is concern expressed yesterday for some of her scared constituents. I am relieved they may just have had the luckiest of escapes. Strikes me this is now the perfect time for lawsuits for gross medical malpractice and irreversible damage to be lodged.