AIBU To Remind Everyone That Self ID Was A Tory Policy?

[TooBigForMyBoots]

I've seen so many posts over the past few years with people urging us to vote Tory because at least the Conservatives know what a woman is.🙄

This is nonsense for the following reasons:

1. The Tories introduced Self ID under Theresa May's GRA Reform and Penny Mordaunt championed it.
2. Tory MPs have reported women to the police for retweeting AHF posts and tweets by JKR.
3. Trans contagion amongst teens happened under the Tory government.
4. Trans women in women's spaces such as hospitals and prisons and Girl Guides happened under the Tory government.
5. Rape in hospital that isn't considered "rape" because there was no man present? Tory government.
6. It's a Trojan Horse. Bridgend Tories won the seat with a small majority. Their Tory MP, once safely in his seat announced that he was trans and intended to become a woman. I am gutted for any GC/feminist voters who held their nose and voted Conservative only to end up with Jamie Wallace.
7. In the latest leadership race, Penny TWAW Mordaunt nearly became our new prime minister. Few (if any)Tories gave a fuck about her well documented TWAW stance.
8. 1 week after Starmer refused to answer "what is a woman?", PM Boris Johnson did the same. This was not publicised to anywhere near the same extent.

So some Tories know what a woman is.
Some Tories don't.
Most don't give a shit about women or their rights either way, they're just happy to use us in their culture wars.🤷‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤷‍♀️

@ReneBumsWombats, if you want an example of the ‘absolutism’ I’m talking about, then see the above exchange (and apologies for the typos and malapropisms, my posts are simultaneous with childcare)

Thank you @thedancingbear. Although this thread didn't quite escape the pile-on, I knew it would happen and did it anyway.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Different people have different priorities, but you seem mealy offended that for some people women’s rights is a higher priority than the cost of living.

You are then using this to suggest others are wrong to disagree with your own priorities.

We get it, women’s rights matter less to you than letting men into women’s spaces. I find this abhorrent, but you do what works for you.

Nuanced conversation? You are openly deriding women who are unhappy at their rights being taken away to pander to men with a fetish. You don’t get to peddle that sort of crap and then complain at the time of responses.

This is on Aibu, you know.

do you want me to hang onto that shovel for you?

care passionately about women. I want them to be able to feed themselves and their daughters, and to heat their homes.

Bollocks do you. You are openly talking down to any who care more about women’s rights than about your own personal hobby-horse.

This is how it always goes, they just descend into abuse

Forced birther views are surprisingly even across the house. Self Id is not and currently the Tories are the only party which doesn't have it as policy and which doesn't bully and harass any women who don't comply.

Try asking some of the women evicted from the Labour in recent years for refusing to comply with the removal of sex as a protected characteristic and deny biology. It is not accepting of a range of views from women any more.

Tory MPs have reported women to the police for retweeting the AHF definition and JKR. Resulting in them being suspended from their jobs, arrested and questioned by the police and sacked.

The Torries have no problem bullying and harassing women as their record shows.

Sorry but for me TWAW and policy moves have generally been good

Even if you frame it as a choice between womens rights and the cost of living crisis not everyone thinks that Labour have the right approach to that either.

tribunemag.co.uk/2022/06/labour-party-rishi-sunak-treasury-obr-budget-cost-of-living

Hopefully the Tribune is sufficiently left wing enough not to be considered a mouthpiece for Tory propaganda.

i don’t want to sound facetious, or to speak for others. but if you spoke to these parents and said ‘we can give you enough money to feed your kids, but in exchange you may bump into a trans woman at the swimming baths’ then my suspicion is they would bite your hands off

The only reason this is an either/or situation is because Labour refuse to respect women's rights and boundaries, hell they won't even speak to women. This is an issue of their making.

well, yes and no. I would dispute ‘only’. The fact that labour are a busted flush on women’s rights would be less of a problem if the tories hadn’t fucked the country so comprehensively in every other sense. whatever their policy failings, they’ve not been in power for over a decade

A great many women have been reported, doxxed and had their jobs threatened by Labour MPs and activists.

You evaded my point. How many Tory women MPs and key activists have been forced out of the party for wrongthink on biology?

The Labour party under Corbyn took a sharp switch back to authoritarianism of the type I've not seen since before Kinnock did battle with Militant. Its still not close to being a broad church again which can tolerate a range of left to centre left views and a range of views on issues which are not even right/left issues, however hard ideologist try to make it so.
The idea that these authoritarians give a toss about anything except ideology is for the birds.

Which Labour MPs have been involved in doxxing women and threatening their jobs (I assume you have a list with links?)

Theresa May announced it as policy when she was PM.

The Tory party failing IMO has been it's destruction of women's rights in the twelve years they've been in government.

The country isn’t “fucked”. Try not to judge the nation from your own circle, you are not representative.

The Tory party failing IMO has been it's destruction of women's rights in the twelve years they've been in government.

How would another party making self ID law help?

You didn't answer my question earlier in the thread.

If creeping self ID under the Tories has been a disaster then what does it tell us about the parties who would still like to make it law? What does it say about their attitude to women's rights?

I don't think any of them can claim not to know about the problems it causes and it's hardly as if women have been silent on the issue. Are they just not listening or do they just not care.

I don't expect you to answer this time either.

You clearly hate the Tories, you can vote for whoever you like (I'm not typically a Tory voter either) but criticising them on this issue when other parties actually want to make self ID law is strange. It's not as of there aren't plenty of things to find fault with that other parties are actually not guilty of.

You appear to have selectively or superficially informed yourself on the topic but it's not important enough for you to made the effort to really understand the bigger picture and wider implications.

And yet...

You have made multiple threads on this one issue and each time you ignore all the information you have previously been given and make the same points, why?

The OP and others are not "ignoring the information", they are giving a different viewpoint on the same information. There's a few posters jumping on the OP here for hating the Tories/not understanding the issue properly and some of the replies here are pretty unpleasant and personal.

The irony here is that most posters want the same thing - single sex services where required and better outcomes for women and society in general. Some posters are being very absolutist about how that can be achieved, which is just as offputting to me as the "no debate" stance.

There's a lot more to be done across all parts of the political spectrum before women's rights are where they need to be. It's not uncalled for to point out how the current party of government have contributed to (and in some cases been solely responsible for) all of the difficulties women are currently facing.

“Try asking some of the women evicted from the Labour in recent years for refusing to comply with the removal of sex as a protected characteristic and deny biology.”

‘Evicted”? I’m aware of women who have resigned from Labour over this issue.

OP is ignoring the detailed information given about the history of the current situation and ignoring inconvenient questions. I'm not convinced the OP has researched the topic thoroughly or if they have they have selected the information which suits them. OP is free to hate the conservative party, it's hardly as if they haven't given cause for many people to feel that way but it's choosing this issue which doesn't make sense.

What is the OP hoping to achieve here? Is the intention to encourage people to punish the Conservatives, for not acting quickly, by not voting for them and vote, instead, for a party that will actually make things worse. The Conservatives are the only party not planning to introduce self ID and are taking steps to address the issue of organisations changing their policies, "to get ahead of the law", as advised by Stonewall. If you are going to post a thread (or several on the same subject) then it's not unreasonable for people to ask questions and to draw attention to the fact you seem to be avoiding providing any answers.

A number of posters have commented that some of us have an absolutist position on single sex spaces but have not offered any details about what they understand that absolutist position to mean. Nuance and compromise happended in 2004 with the GRA and now in 2022 we have people claiming anyone can be a man/woman just because the say so and women are being raped in what should be single sex spaces. I'd suggest the compromise experiment hasn't worked.

There is no point in being anything other than absolutist about single sex spaces, the minute any male, however they identify, enters a female space it stops being a single sex space and becomes a mixed sex space. Plenty of people have tried to avoid this truth and every time they do it makes me think they would happily throw women under the bus just to appear reasonable. It is not reasonable to demand 50% of the population makes compromises on their privacy, safety and dignity to accommodate a tiny proportion of people and in the process expose women to threats from people who would abuse the law for nefarious reasons.

I won't speak for others, but for me the absolutism isn't about single sex spaces, but rather who/how we engage in the debate. I see absolutism about certain political parties, I.e. "they can't protect women if they can't define them". To me that is an absolutist position, and not a very helpful one because it closes down an entire route of engagement. I also think that there are some aspects of protecting/enhancing women's lives that can happen regardless of one's position on self-ID, whether that's improved women's health care, increased rates of rape/dv conviction,etc.

I don't think women should have to compromise on their dignity or safety within this debate. But we probably will have to negotiate in good faith with people that hold fundamentally different views, as many have always done. For me this means leaving enough wiggle room for major political parties and other organisations to amend their views, rather than writing them off. I also appreciate that this is a very uncomfortable thing to do given that many of these groups have unfairly derided women as bigots in the recent past for defending their rights. But it's more important to me that we get to the right outcome, not that we "win the argument".

@FOJN, how many times do I have to say it? I'm not telling people to vote for any party. There is no election for another couple of years.🤷‍♀️

It's OK for citizens of a democratic country to criticise the government.

All parties have been asleep at the wheel on this issue. The way I see it, the Tories are starting to blink groggily out of the window and look at some of the road signs, whilst Labour/Lib Dems/Greens snore comfortably on.

i don’t want to sound facetious, or to speak for others. but if you spoke to these parents and said ‘we can give you enough money to feed your kids, but in exchange you may bump into a trans woman at the swimming baths’ then my suspicion is they would bite your hands off

Just imagine thinking this is a winning argument. Of course people who are hungry now are going to care less about other issues than the immediate problems they face.

The most marginalised and vulnerable women are being told to sit down and shut up. If self ID comes in, women will still face the same poverty issues as before, and in addition no single sex spaces or facilities at.
Its not just swimming baths; its the changing rooms.
And its hospital wards.
Psychiatric wards.
Prisons and bail hostels.
Domestic abuse centres.
Rape crisis support.
Homeless shelters.

Women are not taking anything away from food banks. We aren't the ones breaking equality laws, or forcing schoolgirls to use mixed sex toilets.