Eleanor Scott article, 'Did Mumsnet Just Hand Penny Mordaunt Her Arse?'

[R0wantrees]

'Did Mumsnet Just Hand Penny Mordaunt Her Arse?'
(extract)

“Don’t you worry about getting back to us, Penny dearest. Mumsnet only has ‘14 million unique users’ a month ... Just you sit tight and eventually get one of your minions to post some anodyne rhetoric about valuing diversity and it’ll all be fine.”
— Mumsnet poster, webchat with Penny Mordaunt 14/3/19 13.55pm

It takes a certain set of tools to turn a golden opportunity to engage with hundreds of thousands of women on International Women’s Day into an unmitigated PR disaster, and Penny Mordaunt MP has somehow managed to pull it off. I’ve met Penny Mordaunt a few times in Portsmouth over the years while I was on Council-related business, and she has always seemed perfectly likeable and pleasant. But future Prime Minister material? Not unless courting disaster is now seen as prerequisite rather than unfortunate happenstance." (continues)

concludes:
"The Mumsnetters who had asked their questions in such detail, and with such courtesy - posters have to abide by Mumsnet’s fairly stringent ‘Talk Guidlines’ - were left disappointed and, frankly, pissed off, especially regarding the unanswered points about children’s safeguarding. But they weren’t leaving the webchat meekly. ‘Disappointed but not surprised’ wrote one poster. ‘Completely disingenuous’ wrote another. Of her apparent ignorance around the issues raised concerning children’s safeguarding, a poster wrote, more in sadness than anger, ‘This is unforgiveable. You were given all the information. All of it. Spoonfed it. You haven’t bloody well read it.’ And one of the most damning comments so far: ‘Either Penny, or Penny’s SPADs are not up to par on the reports coming out of the Tavistock’. (Click here if you want to read the Mail’s report about the potentially brewing scandal, or here for a BBC snippet. It’s worth digging deeper if you’re interested.)

And finally, can the Minister for Women even define what is a woman? On this showing, the answer would seem to be No. The actual Minister for Woman apparently doesn’t ‘get it’, doesn’t want to ‘get it’, and seemingly can’t be bothered to ‘get it’. That’s a lot of women’s votes that have just been lost, whichever way you look at it. Post-modern, philosophical ideologies of feelings, and misunderstandings of the difference between sex and gender, should never, ever compromise the safeguarding of children. People who raise red flags about safeguarding deserve to be taken seriously and to have their voices heard. If we’ve we’ve learned nothing else during the past decade, surely to God we’ve learned that."
eleanorscottarchaeology.com/els-blog/2019/3/14/the-day-that-mumsnet-took-down-penny-mordaunt-mp

thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/mumsnet_live_events/3523984-International-Women-s-Day-Q-A-with-Penny-Mordaunt-MP-Secretary-of-State-for-International-Development-NOW-CLOSED-TO-NEW-QUESTIONS

It is so short sighted of the Tory party. They started all this by half listening to the TRAs and deciding they wanted easy Woke points.

They could pivot now to become the defenders of lesbians, the resistance against children being medically and surgically altered.

The TRA idealogy is so batshit, and so beloved by Corbyn, they could easily make this a destroy the loony left issue. They could show up the misogyny in the Labour party. Tories had two female prime ministers, FFS. It's a goldmine they just won't mine.

I'm a floating voter myself who currently hates them all.

deciding they wanted easy Woke points.

I don't think it's anything so innocent.

TowelNumber42

I'm a paid up Conservative member and I've told my Tory MP exactly that. I suspect most are too tied up with Brexit so this is slipping under the radar. I simply don't 'get' Mordaunt's take on this.

The TRA idealogy is so batshit, and so beloved by Corbyn, they could easily make this a destroy the loony left issue. They could show up the misogyny in the Labour party. Tories had two female prime ministers, FFS. It's a goldmine they just won't mine.

All political parties have been lobbied and become complicit.
Conservative MPs and Ministers including Andre Lansley, Maria Miller have played active & significant roles in the prioritisation of supporting transactivists to the detriment of women's rights & safeguarding frameworks.

Anne Harper Wright's important article:

'Sex, Gender & the NHS'
October 2018
(extract)
"The [Gender Recognition Act 2004] in essence changed the definition of male and female from a biological definition to a psychological one.

This set in motion the re-categorisation of an entire society into two psychological gender groups instead of by the sexes.

Gender gradually REPLACED sex. For all of us. People started to be sorted by purported ‘psychology’, not biology.

The votes for the Gender Recognition bill were split down party lines. A Labour Government whip resulted in 289 labour votes for the bill. Most conservative MPs however, voted against the passing of this bill that enabled the concept of ‘gender’ to supersede sex. A conservative MP, Andrew Lansley, however, rebelled and voted aye.

Andrew Lansley was in no doubt of the distinction between sex and gender. He voted for gender to legally outrank and overwrite sex.

Six years later in 2010 Andrew Lansley rose to the role of Health Secretary within the coalition government. (continues)

Elimination of Mixed Sex wards.
In 2010, to great fanfare, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley of the Conservative party announced the Coalition Government’s laudable commitment to place all NHS hospital patients in single-sex wards — with any mixed sex breaches made public and financial penalties imposed.

“It should be more than an expectation, it should be a requirement that patients who are admitted should be admitted to single-sex accommodation,” the Health Secretary told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme.

“Patients should be in single-sex accommodation, meaning that all of their period that they are admitted they should be in a bed or a bay which only consists of people of the same sex.

“And they should be able to come and go, for example to all their washing and toilet facilities, without having to pass through a part of the ward or another ward where there might be people of a different sex… so to that extent they would have the kind of privacy and dignity people have a right to expect.”

And he added:

“Patients should not suffer the indignity of being cared for in mixed-sex accommodation. I am determined to put an end to this practice, where it is not clinically justified.”

Categorical statements such as these from Lansley were uttered in the same year that a new Act; the Equality Act 2010, committed to continuing to protect biological SEX based rights, with sex being one of 9 protected characteristics that would be monitored to stop discrimination. ‘Gender reassignment’ was one of the nine protected characteristics, and biological sex was another, protected in its own right. The two characteristics are differentiated and distinct in law.

So when the Government announced the characteristic for NHS ward segregation would be ‘sex’ that was an unambiguous statement relating to a specific protected characteristic. Biological sex is a tangible, physical reality. NHS Wards were promised to be explicitly single sex, not single gender. Bodily dignity and privacy for the biological sexes, not segregation by invisible personality type. The government’s commitment to respecting the privacy and dignity of the sexes, they reassured us, still remained unassailable.

Mr Lansley’s choice of the word SEX rather than gender was very deliberate.

Sex and gender are not the same thing, after all.

The truth: “The policy commitment relates to gender, not sex”.
Despite what the public were told, the policy was always explicitly based upon segregating by ‘gender’ and not sex, right from its inception.

NHS documents and records dated from 2010 show that before the policy was implemented, whilst still in its design stages, the specifications always related to gender, not sex. And yet the name of the policy, and all references to it to the general public were explicitly instructed to be sex, not gender. The opposite of the truth."(continues)
medium.com/@anneharperwright/sex-gender-the-nhs-1e8f4e6363a6
discussed:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3396859-Weve-been-lied-to-about-Single-SEX-wards-since-2010

see also threads re recent media coverage of the NHS sex/gender issues:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3475792-Telegraph-article-NHS-trans-row-as-men-get-access-to-womens-wards-if-they-identify-as-female

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3525497-Health-secretary-looking-at-excluding-some-trans-women-from-female-NHS-wards

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3524088-NHS-to-review-its-transgender-policies

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3477104-NHS-say-ignore-parents-even-if-child-is-not-Gillick-competent

I did give politics a go once, but ended up resigning in disgust. I hope this link works (which starts the story which started my politics blog):

eleanorscottarchaeology.com/els-blog/2016/11/21/els-political-blog

But it did give me a grounding in the crucial importance of safeguarding children, and in recognising bullshit and bullshitters.

And inside politics, even local city council politics, you see the degree to which MPs are compromised by national party, local party, Westminster and local allegiances, and their own personal foibles and failings.

Here are all the Qs and As on the gender identity side ..... medium.com/@MForstater/85-questions-outside-the-minister-for-womens-office-32cf4c084b05

So many questions, so few answers.

@MForstater, I've just clicked on your link to the analysis you've done and it looks bloody tremendous. Excuse me while I go and read it properly.

Thoroughly recommended to all on here, posting and lurking.

That's an important piece, @MForstster, may I wrote a link to it on my website, please?

And thank you for doing it.

write not wrote! That damn timey-wimey tense auto-incorrect thing got me again.

Of course - backatcha eleanorscott

MForstater Such a good resource.

This may be naive but looking back at the abusers in the public eye - Savile, Rolf Harris, Cyril Smith etc, historically many of those in power claimed not to know what was happening. Yet now we have a senior politician openly dismantling sex based protections. Damian Hinds (Education) and David Gauk (Justice) have openly written celebrating removing sex segregated changing rooms, showers and toilets from children in school, placing male born paedophiles and sex offenders in women's prisons as well as enabling extreme porn advocates, flashers and paedophile apologists to access schools and other child / young people's organisations. Their signed letters and press interviews are all over the place. They will never be able to deny responsibility.
Does this not make it much easier to place the blame where it lies when the lawsuits start rolling in from the detransitioners and the abused? ?

@thatwouldbeanecumenicalmatter

@MNHQ , is Penny taking follow up questions as per MN guidelines? (Though I suspect I know the answer given that the initial response is nearly a week late...)

@MNHQ ?

Hi @thatwouldbeanecumenicalmatter. We haven't discussed follow-up with Penny Mordaunt's office: it's not something we usually do with a Q&A. We will let her office know that there's been discussion of her answers and invite them to take a look and respond, but (just to be clear - because we don't want to create unrealistic expectations) this wasn't part of our plan with them and they may choose not to follow up.

I'm a floating voter too. Have voted Lib Dem (no way now after what Lynne Featherstone said & horror stories) and Labour (no way because of Corbyn, antisemitism and self ID). Totally up for grabs.

As Lundy Bancroft often says about abusive misogynists and people with personality disorders: it isn't that you haven't explained well enough, you need to stop assuming that if they just understood they'd realise the problem.

This!

you need to stop assuming that if they just understood they'd realise the problem.

^ This.

They all understand, they just don't care.

I couldn't agree more.

Nobody really believes that humans can change sex. They know. They have a different agenda though and it's working pretty well for them.

We will let her office know that there's been discussion of her answers and invite them to take a look and respond, but (just to be clear - because we don't want to create unrealistic expectations) this wasn't part of our plan with them and they may choose not to follow up.

links to further excellent analysis of Penny Mordant MP's answers and response/lack of response:

article, '85 Questions outside the Minister for Women’s Office'
by Maya Forstater
(extract)
"The questions were polite, serious, informed, worried and backed up with evidence. The answers were few, came late, lacked substance and were dismissive and contradictory. As Dr Eleanor Scott noted they fell into four categories: (1) Deliberately misunderstood the question; (2) Didn’t understand the question or the issue, and contradicted herself; (3) Resented being asked the question; and (4) Couldn’t be bothered to answer the question properly. The largest category of all were the questions that were ignored altogether.

70% of question posts were focused on how policies on ‘gender identity’ affect women and children. Other posts covered other issues relating to women and to international development, with a few on Brexit. Posts on other topics were four times more likely to get an answer than those on gender identity (and their answers lead with active verbs “we are committed…”, “I can reassure you …”, “I am keen…., ”I will”, whereas the questions on how women’s rights may be affected by policies on gender identity got vague assurances ‘we are considering whether we need to take any further action’ ).

(see screenshot for graphical representation)

A question on the choice of colourway used in a campaign to encourage girls to go into STEM subjects got the answer “Let me know where you found the pink font and I will go and have a word” whereas questions about what has happened to a promised investigation into the reasons for the 4000% increase in the number of young women being referred to gender identity clinics got no acknowledgement.

Here I have pulled out just the questions about sex and gender. Perhaps in the current Brexit madness, this particular car crash of a conversation will go unnoticed. But I don’t think the dismissive answers and non-answers will age well, particularly when the questions are about safeguarding children. These are serious issues that deserve attention from the Minister for Women.

So here, in the style of Mildred Hayes are the 85 questions still unanswered. “How Come, Minister for Women and Equalities?” (continues)

medium.com/@MForstater/85-questions-outside-the-minister-for-womens-office-32cf4c084b05

thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3535914-The-questions-and-answers-from-Penny-Mordaunt-on-sex-gender-identity

Excellent and powerful analysis MForstater. It’s so clear when it’s laid out like that. Penny should hang her head in shame.

Good to see Maya Forstater's piece in The Independent today. I appreciate that she took the time to write and submit this - and get it published.

www.independent.co.uk/voices/penny-mourdant-mumsnet-gender-recognition-act-a8835621.html

and/or and for both Eleanor and Maya for their articles. And Maya for her persistence in challenging the changing of words in her article by The Independent. In Maya's words the moral of the story: don't take no for an answer!

Thanks, @pombear.

It's interesting I think that Maya and I didn't know of each other before the Penny Mordaunt webchat, separately came to similar conclusions, and found common cause.

I wonder who the next Minister for Women will be.

As Penny Mordant has now left Women & Equalities for Defence ( hmm )

Maybe the next incumbant might be given another go at the serious issues that PM struggled with?

No she's left International Development for Defence but continuing as Women and Equalities minister.

Really?
Gosh!

Yes apparently so, I was surprised too.