Did Keir Starmer just say

They are absolutely tying themselves in knots because they can't grasp, apparently, that if you want to protect single-sex spaces you can't simultaneously make it easier to get a GRC, if you also believe that a GRC entitles you to enter the single-sex spaces of the opposite sex. They've had a long time to get their act together over this, but they haven't done it, either because they're too stupid or because they have decided it's not sufficiently important.

To quote from Victoria Smith on Twitter:

It's kind of funny to see Labour wading in, all mature, to solve "the culture wars". Feminists worked out years ago trans activists will not accept compromise of any kind. They also pointed out this was creating an open goal for the right.

It would have been a lot easier to manage this if you'd listened to feminists back when self ID was Tory policy and the UK was one of the only countries with a predominantly left-wing, pro-feminist and pro-LGB response to the problem.

But no, you thought we were stupid. Silly older women, clutching their pearls, making up problems that didn't exist. All that work, research, writing, speaking ignored because we can't possibly have anything important to say.

https://x.com/glosswitch/status/1805335079067034040

I think about this saved SS a lot. It haunts me & never more so than the run up to this election.

See my above post about social expectations of women and girls.

DD has described going to the women's loos at university, finding a large pissed male student in a skirt there, and rapidly reversing out hoping he wouldn't see her and pursue her, because then she would be the one criticised for transphobia. They have those twee little signs up specifically telling women not to have thoughts or feelings about this, as the large male person there 'knows their identity better than you do'.

As she says, how the fuck is that fair?

There are lots of incidences of rapes and assaults and deaths in public toilets. It’s a difficult issue that I try not to highlight the individual cases too much for obvious reasons. There have been girls, boys and women (able bodied and disabled) followed or pushed into fully enclosed toilets. These can be toilets leading directly into very public places such as shopping centres and train stations.

The problem is privacy (because of mixed sex) has taken priority over safety.

I spoke to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission who gave me an incident form and told me to fill it in after October when I could prove that a death or sexual assault was because the new toilet design had prevented that person being rescued in time (!). So I have to wait for the inevitable. There’s enough evidence out there already. What’s the point of having defibrillators outside the public toilet when the person collapsed is hidden from view a few metres away. It’s common sense safeguarding.

I agree it will take a big incident (maybe multiple deaths like a fire evacuation gone wrong, or a famous person dying/assaulted) before people start to listen. But it’s happening now in mixed sex toilets that are fully enclosed. It’s just that at the moment many of the single sex ones aren’t. Yet.

It's ingrained into society that women are/should be self sacrificing. Everybody's mother, everybody's caretaker, givers not takers so on and so forth.

Only defective women would deny a man something he says he wants, he says makes his life easier, happier, more pleasurable.

Nice, kind women always say yes and budge over even if it makes their lives more difficult and uncomfortable. Nice, non defective women do this with good grace and a smile on their face.

Theres a difference between the practicalities of stopping men entering womens and girls toilets and potential governments ministers tell the public that a subsection of men have the right to be there.

Given that she knows that convicted rapists have been given GRC, she is lying about the safeguarding standards. She is also not being truthful about only allowing men with a GRC in, unless labour are proposing to force men with a GRC to carry proof when they enter womens spaces.

Is it weird that they can't see it? They can't see their own patriarchy?

I've always assumed that those with attitudes like this know full well what they're doing, that they're favouring males irrespective of the harm it does females.

Is it truly so ingrained that it's invisible? How is it starkly obvious to so many of us yet many men and even some women seem oblivious?

Yes it's this.

Something a man wants must always count for more than anything a woman or girl might need.

It's really not that dissimilar to regimes that Labour would hypocritically say are regressive for women - regimes where a single man's word is worth more in law than the word of several women put together.

I don't think they care. Ultimately they think that discriminating against all men to allow women dignity, privacy and safety is too high a price to pay. The argument will always be "we can't discriminate against all men/TW because of a few bad apples".

Yes, if sexually assaulting pre-teen girls at knifepoint doesn't do it then what will? Even deaths may not bother them.

Nobody cares, do they? Not even some female politicians. I'm finding that really difficult to deal with. How can I be so unimportant to them, that my basic civil right to be safe in normal society is now a deeply bigoted thing to ask for?

And in psychiatric units and hospitals.

And all those other countless incidents where women and girls feel unsafe, creeped on and scared that we don't hear about. The only incidents that make it to the press, such as the NHS nurses, is when women come together and whistleblow usually at great cost to themselves.

And a little girl in a supermarket Ladies’.

There have already been attacks. But because they happened to females in prisons, it doesn’t seem to count.

I predict that it's going to take attacks on females by males, perhaps even deaths, in "single sex spaces reserved for females" to make anyone give a stuff about women and the havoc these policies have wreaked on our lives.

Even after that, I don't think it'll make any difference. Politicians and police etc, bleat and commiserate and sympathise about violence against women and girls being awful (wring hands, thoughts and prayers, always in our thoughts, blah blah blah) but nobody actually does a thing to help.

I'd actually accuse our current authorities of DELIBERATELY making the world more dangerous and hostile for women and children. I'm actually kind of convinced now that there is absolutely no way they can be unaware of the consequences. They just don't care.

I don't think there's any going back now. I wasn't expecting a comfortable old age with only a State pension, but I'm actually scared of how things are going to pan out.

Will we ever go back to how things were, though? Aren't unisex toilets commonplace in many city-centre pubs and bars these day's?

Not to mention that lots of providers have already made everything unisex, to save money, get trans-inclusive cred, and avoid legal action/death threats.

The guy sat between them, his face was a picture.

Phillipson did say one true and useful thing, that we don't (can't) police toilets. No, we can't ask to see a grc and we don't want to see their genitals. But there's one check that's always worked - male puberty = big strong body type, 99.9% likely male genitals: potential danger! Female puberty = different, vulnerable body type: danger level low. We can do this with our naked eyes. She is living in lala land and the other two people in that interview looked understandably gobsmacked. Kafkaesque.

though KS the lawyer never mentioned Annex B which has precluded that in the past. They do not say how they would actually protect these spaces or reinstate them though.

Yes if KS genuinely wants single-sex accommodation in hospitals he will need to deal with Annex B and I imagine the chances of him doing this are next to Zero.

You can tell she's lying, because three times she couldn't come up to the bloody point. She's trying to make it sound better.

Firstly, there is no huge process to go through. Helen webberley will diagnose you over the bloody phone.

Secondly, she's not explaining how this works. Is she really going to tell transwomen they have to flash a birth certificate, or a GRC, before they can enter a woman's toilet??

And if that is the case, (I'm snorting with derision here), does she not think that other men, primarily predators, are just going to go ahead and get one!

Honestly. They Haven't. Bloody. Listened.

Their arguments are like Swiss cheese. It's like Transactivism 101.

So 'gone through the process' means having a GRC? But as nobody can ask to see one, the difference is moot, surely? It's good to have this distinction between 'safe spaces' and 'single-sex spaces' finally teased out. And it is indeed as Mumsnetters have always suspected.