Or have Labour totally lost the plot wrt women’s rights?

[Lion400]

Does Starmer really underestimate women this much??

‘Would you vote for a party that promised to let men parade around bollock-naked in women’s changing rooms?

Or a party that was alarmingly blasé about gay kids being ‘corrected’ with drugs and surgery?

Or a party that threatened to clamp down on thoughtcriminals who refer to people with penises and testicles – you know, men – as men?

If not, then don’t vote Labour in the upcoming General Election. Because it’s possible it will pursue all of these petty tyrannical policies’

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/13/tyranny-in-drag/

People can start any thread they want

If posters don’t want to contribute, don’t or hide it even

Just realised this is in politics not AIBU. Probably why it’s quieter

Anyway no one has to click on it. quite a few voting yanbu though. Thankfully

The joke is that the ‘poor vulnerable women and girls’ that some of these posters are so concerned about rarely get chance to use leisure centre changing rooms because shock horror they can’t afford to use gyms due to the Tory’s abysmal economic governance. What a luxury.
These same women don’t have easy access to refuges because surprise local authority funding has been cut massively and many are living on borrowed time, again due to Tory austerity.
Most woman from low income backgrounds buy from supermarkets or internet or funnily enough charity shops. No changing rooms in bloody Toast or Seasalt to fret about seeing a trans woman in.
For most of the largely middle class women on here they’ve nowt else to worry about, certainly not the COL crisis or cuts to services or lack of decent housing.

Whatever other policies Labour has, its position on transgenderism is absolutely fundamental because of the way it interacts with the rights of women.

Transgender “women” have certain rights but they are men so they do not have the right to access women’s spaces.

This is the subject under discussion and it is legitimate and important to talk about. I too wish we would talk about other things - it still seems incredible to have to say that a person with a penis is not, was never and can never be, a woman. But there we are. I didn’t open up this battle front.

Labour have good policies on women's rights. Not that you'd know if if you spent your whole time focusing on trans.

Well if they think a man can be a woman then those policies are somewhat moot, aren’t they.

This from Judith Butler is interesting: Judith Butler: When I was burned in effigy in Brazil in 2017, I could see people screaming about gender, and they understood ‘gender’ to mean ‘paedophilia.’ And then I heard people in France describing gender as a Jewish intellectual movement imported from the US. This book started because I had to figure out what gender had become. I was naïve. I was stupid. I had no idea that it had become this flash point for right-wing movements throughout the world. So I started doing the work to reconstruct why I was being called a paedophile, and why that woman in the airport wanted to kill me with the trolley.
I’m not offering a new theory of gender here; I’m tracking this phantasm’s formation and circulation and how it’s linked to emerging authoritarianism, how it stokes fear to expand state powers. Luckily, I was able to contact a lot of people who translated Gender Trouble in different parts of the world, who were often gender activists and scholars in their own right. They told me about what’s happening in Serbia, what’s happening in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Russia. So I became a student of gender again. I’ve been out of the field for a while. I stay relatively literate, of course, but I’ve written on war, on ethics, on violence, on nonviolence, on the pandemic… I’m not in gender studies all the time. I had to do a lot of reading.
There’s a lot of focus in the book on how the anti-gender movement has moved across the world in the past few decades, and how it’s inextricable from Catholic doctrine. It was clarifying for me; domestic anti-trans movements in the UK mostly self-identify as secular.
Judith Butler: In the UK, and even in the US, people don’t realise that this anti-gender ideology movement has been going on for some time in the Americas, in central Europe, to a certain degree in Africa, and that it’s arrived in the US by different routes, but it’s arrived without announcing its history. It became clear to me that a lot of the trans-exclusionary feminists didn’t realise where their discourse was coming from. Some of them do; some people who call themselves feminists are aligned with right-wing positions, and it’s confusing, but there it is.

TL/DR

The anti-trans movement - globally - is driven by the religious right and deeply, viciously misogynistic.

Judith Butler’s academic theory underpins an ideology that has included puberty blockers for children and males in females sports and refuges.

Do you agree with those outcomes?

Agree. Miriam Cates that great advocate of women’s rights. Keep women in their place, tied to the kitchen sink with 5 kids, knows her place, goes to church, but hey also knows what a woman is, a drudge 😂

Yes. Was on AIBU now in Politics. Threads about women’s rights are almost always moved away from an area where more people will read them, and think about the issues within them.

There was some good news re puberty blockers yesterday which in part is due to women speaking up

It is sad that stopping women who do speak up is a priority. Really depressing

It's not (for want of a better word) a binary choice. There's nothing imposing puberty blockers on anyone. It's possible to say no to that and equally being open to the possibility of a trans child later on. A friend of mine had a child who came out as trans as a teen. They let their teen live as their chosen identity clothes and name wise, but no medical interventions until they were 21. The child went on to choose those interventions for themselves.

Luckily women will never stop speaking up.

This AIBU about Starmer was allowed to stay in AIBU.. Of Course it wasn’t about women and women’s rights. 😑

I agree that as an area of policy, it warrants robust discussion.

What irritates me is making it a party-political issue (i.e., usually Tories using it as a stick to beat Labour with) when the positions of the two parties are so similar.

Its all very well and good for Sunak to say that women don’t have penises but unless he repeals the Gender Recognition Act (which does not seem to be on his agenda, and likely isn’t realistic while the UK is still a EHCR member), then Starmer’s comments are probably more reflective of the current law in the UK.

The Tories are all posturing and no substance on this issue and it’s hard to see why anyone who wouldn’t vote for Labour, due to trans issues, would vote for the Conservatives - unless all they want is to hear agreeable, pandering words.

I think this is a good point and the noises made by Sunak about knowing what a woman is etc perhaps masks the Tories’ own inadequacies on this issue. I don’t think Sunak is particularly interested in this issue to be honest, although the likes of Kemi Badenoch have said some sensible things. It’s a pretty depressing state of affairs all round.

The lobbying power of males is part of it.

If a party cannot say no to them it’ll be tough.

I hope that won’t be the case as we’ve made some gains

And Kemi Badenoch isn’t without issues either…
What gets me is that it’s perfectly possible to disagree with certain aspects of gender ID, dislike the tories because of their actual record and support labour in general….Like how posters on here are trying to persuade us that the Tories are a decent bet after the events of this week., it’s ludicrous. See the wider picture.

If Labour continue to confirm that they do not understand biological sex, they cannot protect women’s sex-based rights.

Until they can protect women’s sex-based rights, they cannot protect women and girls.

It’s that simple.

@Lion400 no it’s not. It’s stupidly reductive and simplistic. However you play it morally the Tories are on the wrong side of history…

That's a strange thing to say. "Males" make up 50% of the population and aren't part of some lobbying group

Males do have a disproportionate amount of power compared to women which generally means they don't need to lobby for rights.

Saying one needs to understand biological sex in order to protect women’s sex-based rights isn’t ’stupidly reductive and simplistic’. It’s factual. You can argue against it all you like. 🤔 Sounds familiar somehow ..

Prosecuting rapists effectively would protect women and girls. That stands regardless of whether starmer says 99.9% of women don't have a penis. In response to a question, BTW, not apropos of nothing or as a statement of policy

Males who are lobbying

If they’re not, they’re not included

I just used the term instead of trans lobby, as it will primarily be about male access

Do you mean on gender?

Morally gender ideology is right is that what you meant?

To argue that a party that has done nothing for most women and girls for the last 14 years deserves to win the next GE is ludicrous. What have they done that is positive
apart from stirring up hatred ?