The US ultra-right should leave the UK alone!!!

[StandFirm]

I was going to use a rude expletive in the thread title to truly reflect my thoughts on this. I've known about this insidious creeping influence for a little while but reading the article in the link below has made me livid. We are not going to be censored by foreign actors who understand nothing about our culture. I have often observed a false sense of familiarity among Brits regarding American culture but it goes both ways, and this attempt at dragging us along into the dark pit of ignorance should stay the fuck away from here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/14/librarians-in-uk-increasingly-asked-to-remove-books-as-influence-of-us-pressure-groups-spreads

I don't understand what this sentence is supposed to say.

‘Anti trans frothier’?

The Supreme Court today is apparently ruling on the legal definition of a woman. An adult female human that is capable of growing a new human, and they are struggling to agree to define one. We are the future of the species.

Why is there no ruling on the legal definition of males? The answer is obvious. Because there is a huge difference biologically - but the major difference is one of status and women have lower status than men despite all our work and the fact that we are the future. Or because of it.

They all know what women are. The ones who can be pushed out of work and away from well paid work again and again. It’s happened again and again. And it’s happening again now.

No means no.

I never even remotely implied that it doesn't matter! I find it annoying when certain topics get co-opted by people who may not care all that much. There are certainly people who genuinely care about women's sports. There are also people who use the trans issue as an excuse to roll back the rights of all women - and that is a cynical manipulation. Just like some great 'champions' of free speech only care about free speech if it means agreeing with them.
Can you not see the rampant hypocrisy of those people? Not saying you are necessarily one of them, but you have to open your eyes and see how manipulative and gaslighting a segment of the US right has become and similar people are trying to manipulate UK voters too. It's a shared issue we have in both countries.

The far left are far too fecking stupid to listen. Far too stupid to ask for the list of all the books that have been banned, or maybe they don't want to ask for the titles because it does not suit their narrative? On this occasion they are happy to go with anecdata. I hope Trump goes all out suing companies/platforms that allows slander of individuals on its platforms I.e platforms that allows users to call people rapists etc when they have not been convicted by a court of law. Whether a person is a criminal or not is not decided by the opinion of a few idiots who have been brainwashed by msnbc.

If that’s your ‘hot take’ then I’m not sure this subject is for you.

Whether a person is a criminal or not is determined by proven facts which in turn determine the court rulings. Courts rulings have to be followed.
I want to live under rule of law, not arbitrary decisions made by individuals in power. That is the founding principle of a democracy.
Regarding the article I shared: it is something to keep an eye on. It raises the question of whether this could turn into a significant threat down the line AND that there is an INTENTION on the part of US pressure groups to wield significant influence on our country's culture. To which I say they should fuck the fuck off.

I think women are entitled to say that women's sports should be for female athletes only without having to demonstrate to you or anyone else that they have met a minimum threshold for caring about women's sports or any other feminist issue.

A group of women saying, "we don't want to include male athletes in women's sports" is a good enough reason on its own.

There is absolutely no argument for including male athletes in women's sports that does not ultimately boil down to "because it's what trans activists want".

Why should what trans activists want take priority over what female athletes and people who care about women's sports want?

You're right that there are certain people using the trans issue as an excuse to roll back women's rights in general. It should not be possible for them to do this. They would not be able to make political capital out of knowing what a woman is or saving women's sports if their political opponents hadn't made the CHOICE to throw women under a bus to please trans activists.

The blame for this lies solely with the Democrats and their equivalent in other countries.

Just like last year, when people were saying, "the Tories go on about knowing what a woman is but will they actually do anything for women?", they were failing to grasp the exact same point. It should not be possible to get one over on your political opponents by knowing what a woman is. Everyone knows what a woman is, and nobody should be pretending not to.

By the way, I think Trump has far more in common with the far left than with, say, Reagan. Unless you consider Reagan far left??

When rape convictions are at a reasonable level then you, @Idontsweat , will have the right to complain about women who are scared that men will hurt and kill them or ruin their entire lives. And will get away with it, essentially because they are male and more valued.

The arguments about men’s rights and trans rights are not, ultimately abput reason. We all know the difference between men and women. There is not a man alive who did not come out of a woman, one way or another.

It’s not about reason. It’s about power. The very fact that we have to argue about what women are shows the lack of regard men have for women. Men want to push us out of public life at every opportunity. They want the rights to take whatever they want. They can fottfsofawtgtfosm.

The blame for this lies solely with the Democrats and their equivalent in other countries.

Even if you were right on this (I personally disagree, but let's assume for the sake of argument) the Trump regime and its wannabe 'franchises' in other countries do not in any way present a viable alternative. We go with them and we end up losing everything you and I may care about.

It's up to Trump's political opponents to offer us a viable alternative.

I'm not voting for someone just because they're not Trump/the Tories/whoever.

They need to give me an actual positive reason to vote for them.

The Democrats failed to give people enough positive reasons to vote for them, which is why they lost.

It also didn't help that Trump had previously been president for 4 years and the sky did not actually fall in.

True - Democrats, Labour etc need to present a clear, constructive project for their countries, like any party that wants to be in charge of governing.
That is not something that the other side is really doing either.
With the polarisation of society though, i doubt whether voters have retained the ability to even acknowledge a constructive manifesto as such. The culture wars seem to have destroyed our ability to compromise. Consensus is dead and that's the real issue.
Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 have next to nothing in common. He has purged all competent adults and gone full on autocrat. His ideas (tariffs and so on) were kept in check last time. However, his actual belief that the 2020 election was rigged and that the insurrection attempt was a righteous move turned him and his supporters into a hazard. He privileges loyalty over competence again and again. Huge difference between the two terms and their respective agenda.

Absolutely, but it's too late now, he is president.

The point I was making is that the US continued to function more or less normally last time Trump was in power, so the Democrats should have known they couldn't rely on "but Trump!" as their only or main selling point. It didn't work in 2016, why would it work in 2024?

I think they did actually - but the perception and widely heard message was that it was only 'But Trump' as you say.

I'm afraid you have Mr Trump all wrong. He isn't a bit interested in protecting anyone from libel. Quite the reverse. Vance is ranting away about free speech and complaining about European attempts to rein in hate speech and eg images of child sexual abuse. Free speech is whatever suits the US and its big tech oligarchs.

No, because there is no organised left.

What matters is the message that is received, not the message you think you have sent.

So they need to rethink their comms strategy as well.

Really? It was Reagan that ripped up the welfare model and went neo-liberal, rejected the idea that tax-funded government programs are the best way to improve lives and put his faith in the market as the means of improvement. It was Reagan who cut taxes for the rich leading to a speedy rise on inequality.

Then we have the political polarisation of Trump, a tactic of Reagan whether it's the war on terror, immigration or critical race theory and gender. It's always framed as threat from outside.

Who is there on the far left (or even amongst democratic socialists) that ideologically aligns with that?

The "trans issue" itself was a rollback of the rights of women. It stripped women of pretty much every right and protection we had fought to win. And it did so by pretending there was any 'type of woman' other than an adult human female. We went from being protected on the basis of sex, to becoming a category of people with no clear definition under the law. Women were left stumbling around in the fog, trying to explain why it was offensive to redefine us as a gendered stereotype, while the whole world played dumb and called us Nazis over it.

When you talk about "all women" instead of just "women", you mean "women and men with magical lady feels". (Thank you Mr Menno for this wonderful phrase.) And then you sit there and talk about "gaslighting", "cynical manipulations", and "rampant hypocrisies". And wonder why it isn't going down so well.

With respect, If you don't know who Marjorie Taylor Greene is then maybe you're not really ready for a conversation about the US far right.

No political parties?
No Unions?
No Charities?
No organisations?

I think that you are mistaken

I think you underestimate the levels of funding, organisation & cooperation on the far right and overestimate the degree to which any parties or organisations could be considered any kind of coordinated "left".

Honestly, it's a ludicrous comparison.

My point is that despite some elements of his policies that look Reaganite, I suspect Trump is looking to implement a model that reinforces state control across various areas. There are seemingly loads of contradictions and inconsistencies (like Doge slashing federal departments, which looks neo-liberal on the surface) but it looks more and more like a project designed to concentrate power into the hands of one individual. Reagan whilst supporting some limited tariffs in certain areas was clearly in favour of free trade- like his pal Thatcher who gave us the EU single market. Trump is seeking to end globalisation wholesale.
So when I say 'far left' I really don't mean social democrat (which gets called 'far left' by the ultra right), I mean properly authoritarian regimes. In some respects (not all and I don't want to open up a debate about the differentiation between the two), far right and far left end up overlapping. The defining feature is how extreme the ideology is and how the state apparatus ends up controlling all aspects of society.

Well done to the Supreme Court and congratulations to the women that have fought to keep our female only spaces biologically female.

In response to your original OP. There is no need for children to be reading books about transgender people. It is mental illness and needs to be treated as such.

So you are calling me a hypocrite for saying 'all women'? For even mentioning the trans issue? No one on this thread has called anyone a Nazi.
There are biological women. There are biological men. And there are people who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria. Where do they belong in society? I don't think that acknowledging the existence of trans people should be contentious in itself. Re sports specifically, whilst I personally believe that male chromosomes give a transgender athlete (male to female) a physiological advantage in women sports, it should be acknowledged that the issue is complex. In an ideal world, there should be a separate category for those athletes but statistically the numbers are so low it's not commercially viable. That is also revealing, isn't it? Number are actually tiny but it's a flashpoint for the culture wars.

Personally, I would love to see a world in which our future is not determined or restricted by our biology in any way shape or form. I am a woman, so fucking what? I want true gender equality and will keep advocating for it because I don't want to have to keep thinking of all the ways my daughters and I are getting screwed over by virtue of us being women. Now, there are women who feel male and males who feel female - I can't pretend to understand what that means other than I can see there is great pain usually underpinning this condition. If we all lived in a world that was less obsessed with defining what the role of men and women should be, perhaps it would be easier all around for everyone, including trans people.