Starmer, JKR, what's most important to most women?

[PupInAPram]

In my more than 60 years, decades of being a single working parent, many experiences of being on the bones of my arse, Labour Party policies have made huge beneficial differences in my day-to-day life. Worrying if there is a man in the next toilet or feeling uncomfortable with a trans woman has literally never been on my radar. If I'm making a decision about voting for the politician who can bring about the greatest good for the greatest number, it's Starmer every time. I wish JKR would just pipe down.

I totally agree with this.

I understand wanting to vote for Labour, despite this, for lots of reasons, but let's not be quiet about their stance on this issue.

When I trained in my profession that works with children, during a safeguarding lecture the professor said….In this room there will be at least 1 person who has deliberately chosen this career to get access to children to sexually abuse them.

The reality is that when TRA claim that there is hysteria about Transwomen having access to womens and girls spaces there is no acknowledgment of the fact that among the transwomen who ‘just want to go about their lives’ there will be those who are using their ‘gender identity’ to access women and girls to do harm.

So what do we do with this knowledge? What have we done in the past? Of course we can not illuminate risk but we can do what is within our powers to reduce it. This means protecting same sex spaces for all women, but especially those most vulnerable such as prisoners.

However, there is another argument. This idea that women do not know or do not feel uncomfortable when a TW is in their space does not actually stand up to research. Women are biologically designed to identify the sexes, regardless of whether a man has had his dick lobbed off, women know they are men. So what do with do with this? Do we force down our discomfort? Do we put first the tiny minority because of their feelings?

I’ve been in toilets with an obvious TW. It was a two cubical very small toilet. I felt incredibly uncomfortable but carried on as normal as to do anything else would have drawn attention to me, which also felt unsafe because I was at a university in a professional capacity and I was genuinely fearful that if there was a ‘scene’ my career would be impacted (and this followed my DH being made redundant so I was the only earner). Do my feelings not count? Does my right to going to the toilet in peace not count?

So @PupInAPram please do not dismiss what women are saying about this issue. Do not minimise it and try to make them feel guilty because some women to centre it as the basis of their election decision. We do not do this on any other topic so why do it with this?

How many false equivalences?!!

Can you tell me what it ‘feels like’ to be a woman?

Am I supposed to be wearing a skirt, high heels? Am I not allowed to watch the football?

My experience of being a woman, will be vastly different to Zara Tindall or Taylor Swift, but we are all woman.

She could pipe down, look. But no, she has to be Woman Who Will Not Wheesht.

Someone comes on here to use misogynistic language to tell another woman to be quiet. How very progressive.

I would have been with you a few years ago, but as so many of these men have tried to gaslight us into cheering them on as actual women, I'm inclined to think 'men in dresses' is the blunt truth telling they need.

You are right. I apologise. I was assuming the language of those I'm opposing and that was rude.

It's. Not. About. Trans. Issues.

Its. About. Women's. Rights.

Can't see sex? Can't see sexism.

Can't define sex or you replace it with gender? Homosexuals lose their legal protections.

YANBU to say that a specific issue is of no interest/importance to you.
YABU to suggest that someone else "pipes down" about it. Besides, I think JKR would be extremely easy to avoid - just block her on Twitter.

Male nurses can and do provide intimate care for female patients.

The male rapist concerned identified as a "trans woman". It is deemed bigoted not to agree that any man is a "trans woman" if he says he is.That's self ID.

The problem is there is no difference in the sexual assault rates between "trans women" (men who identify as women) and other men, I'm afraid.

How do you propose we tell the difference between 'real' transwomen and what you claim are "men who are pretending to be transwomen?"

Do you really not understand why single sex spaces and services were fought for and why we have them? Really? It's just it seems kind of historically and factually illiterate not to be aware of this.

We need to recognise that sex and gender are different – as the Equality Act does. We will make sure that nothing in our modernised gender recognition process would override the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act. Put simply, this means that there will always be places where it is reasonable for biological women only to have access. Labour will defend those spaces, providing legal clarity for the providers of single-sex services.

WE do recognise that sex and gender are different ? That's the whole point of the debate , one is immutable and the other is a social construct. If they genuinely mean what they are saying in the above paragraph, why is it difficult for Starmer to say it out loud ?

I’m 61 and I think the Labour Party is appalling. I was a lifelong Labour voter and involved in many lefty causes.

My daughter’s Labour MP (Dawn Butler) thinks babies are born without a sex! That pervert MP Clive something agreed that a man, a vile creepy man should force an innocent baby to suck pus from his nipples. Women are called dinosaurs by Labour for not giving up their rights. MPs saying violent rapist men should be in women’s prisons.

I do not agree with transing under 18s (or under 25s). I do not think men should enter women’s same sex spaces. We are actually fighting for the ownership of the word ‘woman’. My workplace a UK civil service office threatens us with the sack if we dare to utter a word against the trans cult.

Starmer on TV the other day, grudgingly said when forced, that women have vaginas blah blah and immediately started going on about Brianna’s murder and blamed women who dared to stand up for their sex for the toxic debate.

Fuck them. I have been poor, unable to put food on the table and worn clothes and shoes with holes, but I would live like that again rather than being forced to accept predatory porn sick men in women’s spaces.

At the age of 60 I’m guessing you don’t have young children and therefore don’t have to worry about them getting caught up in all this crap then OP? This whole gender thing is spreading like wildfire at the moment. It’s like a cult. It certainly won’t be any better under Labour,

Worrying if there is a man in the next toilet or feeling uncomfortable with a trans woman has literally never been on my radar.

how stupid can you be to reduce the safety, privacy and dignity of women and girls down to this?

do some reading up about it FGS

But not when the patient has expressly requested otherwise

I'm happy she's spoken out too, and I agree with her.

I will still vote Labour, though, but I hope that they take note of her words and know that they are in danger of losing support from a great many women who agree with her. I happen to think that the conservatives are worse overall, but that doesn't mean I trust Labour on this issue at all. I hope that people like her continue to hold them to account, and I think her voice is very powerful in that.

And of course you can tell TW without 'looking in their pants'. They aren't women. Let them wear what they like, call themselves what they like, present how they like, do whatever hobbies and activities they like, but it doesn't make them women, and they don't have the same biological experiences or suffer from the prejudices or discrimination based on those biological experiences as women do. Other discimination, sure ,they are vulnerable in lots of ways. But that's not women's problem to solve. There are enough vulnerable women who need the supports that have been set up, and who would lose that support if men were given access to single-sex spaces. We don't need to solve the problem of a much much smaller problem of vulnerable men by destroying those women's supports. They can be given support in other ways, by changing the expectations and behaviours of men, or having third spaces that they can fight for.

Men aren't a minority

Jesus, thinking that a woman should pipe down.
What an awful thing to say

I must admit that it strikes me as odd that this issue is considered simultaneously so unimportant that nobody should reasonably let it influence their voting choice, and so important that high-profile women shouldn't talk about it, because knowing the truth about it will mean that some women decide that they won't vote Labour as a result.

Shut up and vote for us, you don't want to let the Tories in? Without even the promise of 'there are more important issues right now but we'll consider women's rights after the revolution election' because we all know which direction Labour is pushing in.

Of course transwomen who are abused can always do what women who were abused did in the seventies, set up refuges, fund them through donations, jumble sales and scrabbling down the back of the sofa for loose change , publicise the need for them by writing articles, lobbying, writing letters, dragging what had been a hidden secret for hundreds of years into the light of day and making men face up to their violence. They will need to find someone like Erin Pizzey to motivate and galvanise support, will need to overcome local councils reluctant to get involved to offer safe accommodation, persuade police forces that it is a real issue, then get parliamentary legislation drafted and passed to recognise how issues of domestic abuse, marital rape, date rape, rough sex, coercion and consent affect relationships.

Very interesting observation

It's so boring how deliberately misinterpreted their policy is.

It is only "easier" from the point of view they plan to make it quicker and involve fewer people on the decision making panel. That's good, it only costs £5 to apply for a GRC but it must cost more than that for the public purse to administer. Anything that makes it more cost effective for tax payers is helpful.

They are not making it "easier" to make a successful application. That is scaremongering.

It is not "self ID by the back door" as the process still involves gatekeeping and a diagnosis of dysphoria. That is also scaremongering.

It's very hard to take GC campaigners seriously when they wilfully distort the facts. Actually what's been happening during the increasing politicisation of this debate over the last couple of years has made me more sympathetic to trans people, not less. The same posters, repeatedly popping up to quote the same misrepresentations as "fact".

Yes what a thing to say

Luckily JKR can impact not just with her voice but success. Labour loses out on her hefty £1m donation.