Zoe Williams on Wes Streeting

Bios where, @DrBlackbird ?

It is so hard for me to understand how intelligent people lose all brain cells on this topic in their haste to #bekind.

Ahh. Starmer’s wife bio still says two children, a son and a daughter, whilst Starmer says two boys. This really is indicative of his thinking.

He would not make a point of saying ’two boys’, he’d stick with ‘two children’, if he was neutral. He’s a lawyer and a politician fgs, he chooses his words v carefully. So fuck me, it appears that he’s prepared to call his daughter his son going by that interview clip, short of it being a sign of early onset dementia, which means he actually believes in this GI or his wife does.

My heart absolutely sinks. That is such terrible news for women and young people and all the soft back pedalling is to simply win the election.

To me, the fact that they've realised that this stuff doesn't win elections is the important part.

Kier Starmer, Wes Streeting etc don't have any skin in the game here. They don't actually care about pro-trans stuff, they just thought it was a vote winner. Now they're realising it's not, they'll just try their best to quietly ignore it for the next 5 years.

Politicians aren't the ones setting the narrative on this, they're just reacting.

I think it’s clear what Starmer actually thinks if you listen carefully to his words. He’s saying stuff about eg safe spaces (not single-sex spaces) and women’s rights (and some women have a penis). He’s not making statements which appear to placate the TRA’s while actually saying things which support women.

im really hoping for something more concrete before 4/7,

Heh at this 😏

Oh dear, Zoe! 😬

Screenshot

I do still worry about Anneliese Dodds statements and Lisa Nandy. If Starmer does have a trans identifying child, along with Stephen Kinnock even if he doesn't believe in the TWAW mantra he is going to find it difficult as a parent to reverse Labour policy on this and keep the peace at home. He's probably having a tricky time trying to convince his daughter that being trans is not the way forward. If he has a child who has been totally brainwashed any public pronouncements will be hurtful to her. On the other hand he needs to acknowledge the truth and support women. It's a case where maybe the family situation is tying his hands. Of course, if and when she comes through this phase he may have first hand experience to use to fight the promotion of it all in schools.

Yeah. Did anybody get a screenshot?

Looks like she's deleted it?

So, he's actively helped to get women expelled from Labour over their 'gc' views.

He STILL hasn't bloody apologised.

'Madigan then embarked on a witch hunt to eject the women trying to protect their sex-based rights from the Labour Party. He created a covert Facebook group called ‘Labour Against Transphobia’. Members of this group were asked to name women in the party they deemed to be 'transphobic' and supply evidence of their supposed crimes. The information was then fed to Labour Party officials with the aim of having the accused members expelled.'

'The resulting hit-list of over 30 women included several prominent feminist names, Linda Bellos and Stephanie Davies Arai among them. Two of the women featured, Jennifer James (who was crowd-funding a legal challenge to Labour’s policy allowing trans-identified males on to women-only shortlists) and Venice Allan, were suspended from the party.'

Actually this article may be more informative:

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/sorry-wes-streeting-this-isnt-good

I can't forget that Streeting was in this group:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3144285-Labour-Against-Transphobia-Facebook-group

Do you think they do?
I think most politicians don't care much about women instinctively and didn't see any penalties to pissing them off (or even notice that they were getting pissed off).
It's like ordering paying your bills: you pay the rent / mortgage first when you are going to run out of money because you don't want to be evicted.
Paying the bill of goodwill with women was far down the list because they didn't notice that women controlled something that they could cut off.
Now they're noticing. The penalties are coming into focus.
That's all. They are hoping to sort of distribute the goodwill around and not get cut off by anyone.
who knows how this will eventually pan out if / when they get power.

I don't know, because they think it's some sort of compromise that allows them to keep everyone happy?
I am not saying they are pro-woman. I am saying they don't have deeply held convictions

If that's the case then why do they keep banging on about making self ID 'less dehumanising'?

I can understand the unwillingness of some posters to trust anything that the Labour party say on this issue, but I am a bit puzzled by the idea that "after the election they can do what they want and then they'll show their true colours!" because I don't believe they have pro TRA true colours, or any true colours at all on this issue. I don't think that most politicians (of all parties) have true deeply held convictions on this which they would allow to override political expediency. I think the actual question is not "but what do they really want to do, and what would they do if they had power?" but more "what will political expediency persuade them to do in the short, medium and long term; and by extension what can women do to make it really uncomfortable for them to throw us under the bus with no blow back"

on that last point- MASSIVE props to the women who have done stuff already that have made it FAR more uncomfortable than it used to be, to blatantly not give a shit about us

Poor.

he was added to a Facebook group. Is there any evidence he took part in it? I imagine being added to a group called ‘labour against transphobia’ and being busy etc he might just have let it slide and not ever looked at it. Remember the heyday of Facebook groups? I was in LOADS

The Labour Party has historically been the party that stood up for the working class and other vulnerable minorities. They weren’t the government who implemented section 28 and slated single mothers and benefit claimants. So I guess it was natural to get behind another minority that like it not was ridiculed and discriminated against. Obviously the tide turned and TRAs are as vocal and misogynistic now as old style homophobes back in the day. I kind of understand Starmer’s reluctance to go full GC because of the whole labour supporting the underdog schtick but now it’s become far too one sided. The tories on the other hand are just doing it for political point scoring and that horrible bloody nasty streak they have. Again I’m well aware that Labour has its nasty zealots but not to the same degree and they are less cunning at concealing it.

It could just be the rage about losing an argument when you don’t know why you think what you do and don’t have any evidence for it.

Strongly agree. A pure tantrum, basically.

ResisterRex · Today 10:49

If WS never believed TWAW then what was the Facebook group about?

Perhaps I'm a cynic, but it seems that he wanted to burnish his right on credentials and show that he was 100% on message. He has other principles, if you don't like the ones he has.

We often expect people to think clearly, but the truth is that we mostly take an instinctive position and then argue to justify it. And we are very good at finding supportive arguments, and ignoring inconvenient evidence. I don't for a moment believe that Streeting or Starmer really think that a man can become fully a woman, but their culture tells them that they can't be unkind to transgender people so they have to go along with the ideology as far as they can. So Starmer said it's not right to say only women have a cervix because, I think, he felt it was morally wrong to say it, not because he was stupid enough to believe it.