Janice Turner interviews Jess Philips in the Times

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

Interesting read:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d8851824-e3c1-11eb-afdb-c7b01afbcfc5?shareToken=aab7b7c1ae6d3cef2a3097ebc6dfec5b

Excerpts:

She says her greatest achievement is “making women as important as bins”. Councils only had only two statutory duties: adult and children’s social services, and refuse collection. The Domestic Abuse Act adds a third: providing women’s refuges.

What surprised her when sitting on the women and equalities committee, which discussed Gender Recognition Act reforms, was the requirement of two years living “in role” as the opposite sex before changing a birth certificate. “How do you live in role as a man? Have I got to use a spanner? No one could answer that. I’ve got short hair. I’m wearing trousers. Like, it’s not an act, is it? You can’t act like a woman, because we’re all different.”

She is aghast that the modern left seeks to legitimise, even idealise, prostitution, which through her long experience in the refuge movement she sees as sexual abuse. She uses the term “prostituted women” rather than the woke euphemism “sex workers”. Moreover, she’s long been concerned about long-standing women’s refuges losing funds in favour of generic services that purport to include everyone. “If you had £1 million for domestic violence services, you’d give £800,000 to a women’s refuge based on need and numbers. Having specialist services for LGBT or male victims of domestic abuse is totally brilliant and legitimate. They’re not the same. They need different services.”

Shonagh Dillon's PhD is interesting about the disconnect between some people's evidence as reported and what they recollect that they had reported as part of the Stonewall research:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4287881-Congratulations-Shonagh-Dillon-for-Defending-Your-PhD-TERF-Bigot-Transphobe-We-found-the-witch-burn-her?msgid=108769551

Dillon has made her PhD available for download.

I think it was the Transgender Equality report that did it for me - the standard of it, and researching who had actually contributed. It is hard to believe this was supposed to be the basis for legislation, and the lack of curiosity as to who might be affected by it.

In July 2017 Janice Turner interviewed Maria Miller MP, who was the chair of the committee, about the implications particuarly for girls and women,

(extract)
"The heart of the controversy is the view, espoused by Ms Miller’s report, that switching gender should instead merely be a matter of “self-definition”. A man need only “declare” that he is a woman. Your gender is what you feel it to be: there would be no requirement even to take female hormones or have surgery — about 70 per cent of trans women still have intact male genitals — or even “present” as a woman to be legally female. (Some older trans people are troubled by this, believing that it trivialises and delegitimises their struggles to live in their non-birth gender.)

Furthermore, if the law changes, “gender identity” is likely to become a protected characteristic under equalities legislation: ie if you deny a person is a woman or a man when they claim to be, you are guilty of discrimination or hate crime.

When Ms Miller, 53, released her report in January last year she was surprised that criticism came not from conservatives but, as she put it, “women who purport to be feminists”. This may be because feminists, well versed in sexual politics and long-time supporters of gay rights, are among the few people who can penetrate the arcane, confusing terminology.

Many see potential loopholes and conflicts of rights that put women at risk, giving men access to rare female-only spaces such as single-sex wards, changing rooms and domestic violence refuges, designed to keep them safe and private. It is these concerns I put to Ms Miller in her Basingstoke constituency. (continues)

Yet this very idea of “non-binary” or “gender fluidity” is challenged by feminists. Because it assumes that being female is a narrow category: involving pink, make-up, girlie pursuits as opposed to the male world of noise, fun and muddy sports. Isn’t the epidemic of girls wanting to transition — they make up 1,000 out of the Tavistock clinic’s 1,400 referrals — a rebellion against society’s rigid gender strictures rather than a sign that they were “born in the wrong body” and require hormones? This is around the point at which Ms Miller threatens to leave. She relents and we talk a little longer. Although Ms Miller as equalities minister guided gay marriage through parliament, she is at heart a home counties conservative who in 2007 voted against regulations to stop discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. She voted to lower the abortion limit to 20 weeks and for a Nadine Dorries amendment to stop abortion providers such as Marie Stopes giving counselling. (continues)

thread with full article:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2993425-Maria-Miller-interviewed-by-Janice-Turner-full-text

Rowan. As ever awesome 😎

The full list of members of that select committee is:

Current membership
Mrs Maria Miller (Conservative, Basingstoke) (Chair)
Ruth Cadbury (Labour, Brentford and Isleworth)
Maria Caulfield (Conservative, Lewes)
Jo Churchill (Conservative, Bury St Edmunds)
Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party, Lanark and Hamilton East)
Mims Davies (Conservative, Eastleigh)
Mrs Flick Drummond (Conservative, Portsmouth South)
Ben Howlett (Conservative, Bath)
Siobhain McDonagh (Labour, Mitcham and Morden)
Jess Phillips (Labour, Birmingham, Yardley)
Mr Gavin Shuker (Labour (Co-op), Luton South)

As Kathleen Stock's speech demonstrates it was deeply flawed with very serious consequences particularly for women and children. I would strongly encourage anyone concerned to read both the report and Stock's analysis and to ask questions of those responsible.

Jesus, PandorasMailbox. Are you ok now?

And having an actual feminist with a background in DV work as an MP, is worth the sacrifice of her having to pay lip service to TWAW. In my opinion.

That sacrifice is not worth it in my view, and I'll tell you why DecayedStrumpet

Jess has an interest in DV and does genuinely want to help the women who suffer DV. She is thought of as someone who knows what she's talking about, because of her background in the VAWG sector. So when she stated in the Mumsnet webchat during the leadership campaign in 2020:

I ran a women's domestic and sexual violence service and am confident in specialist services being able to risk assess for safety. In that service, we had a small number of transwomen in my time there and they did not pose a risk. Everyone in service was risk assessed on their relative risk.

You can see she claims with great confidence that she worked for a refuge and they never had any issues with accepting adult transgender males into women's refuges. But there's three problems with that.

1. Now Jess didn't actually run a domestic violence refuge providing frontline services, she was the business development manager for a number of refuges for Women's Aid in Sandwell from 2010 to 2015. Here is her role described in 2015, just before she stopped:

Jess Phillips leads the organisation’s growth, development and partnerships. She leads on all aspects of service development, funding and contracts. Jess works closely with the Executive Director to drive forward the strategic aims of the organisation and to develop new and meaningful partnerships and projects in order to ensure services are available for a growing range of victims of interpersonal violence.

Business manager. Not running a specific refuge, not involved in delivering frontline services. Undoubtedly, even as a business manager for the regional organisation she would have learned a lot about the service and a lot about the women it was supporting.

Nonetheless, her positioning is misleading because it will be easily assumed by her audience that she had direct involvement and witnessed first hand that the inclusion of adult transgender males in the women's refuge was fine, because they were properly risk assessed. (I do not believe this is intentional and I do believe she genuinely thinks that what she states is the truth.)

1. But here lies the other problem - Karen Ingala Smith elaborated on the impossibility of such a risk assessment and the burden it places on refuge staff in a speech to the Scottish Parliament just a few days before Jess gave that answer here on Mumsnet.

kareningalasmith.com/2020/01/20/the-importance-of-women-only-spaces-and-services-for-women-and-girls-whove-been-subjected-to-mens-violence/

And as Karen and a number of other frontline workers also explained at that meeting (as did many others before and after), the problem isn't just about assessing risk in terms of whether this adult male might commit violence against the women already in the refuge.

These are traumatised women who cannot heal in the presence of adult males. If you include an adult male amongst women traumatised by male violence, you harm them. But that's not the risk Jess is considering.

Experience - my own and that of others - has shown that where VAWG sector organisations and staff claim that the inclusion of adult males in what should be a female-only therapeutic environment has never caused any problems, they do so without ever having asked the women in their care.

One DV victim, who tweets as Leonora Christina under the handle jammersminde demonstrates this problem in a thread about a talk with one frontline worker who thought male staff in a refuge was fine here:

mobile.twitter.com/JammersMinde/status/1050124033558233095

So to recap Jess assures us that there are no problems without 1) having been in a position to know and 2) without understanding the real issue which is that including adult males (and sometimes older male children) in the female-only therapeutic environment is always an issue, regardless of whether such a male is actually violent.

Which brings me to problem 3 and why I don't believe this is worth the sacrifice:

Jess is someone who will be believed when she says including male transgender people in women's refuges is no problem.

But she is wrong about that.

So when she then also says TWAW it's even more damaging for female survivors of male violence who depend on a female-only therapeutic environment being available to them for their recovery.

Because her statements and TWAW-ing bolster the arguments of those who campaign against single-sex provisions, who have been able to point to her and say Jess knows, she worked in a refuge, and it was fine. And so she's cheerleading the loss of female-only provisions that the women she truly, deeply cares about desperately depend on to function.

I won't speculate why she is doing it. But I wish she would stop before it's too late.

I welcome this interview and I hope she is waking up to what trans-inclusive policies actually mean in current practice for female survivors. But she will need to publicly reverse her previous position to undo the damage she has already done and I don't know that she will be able or willing to do so.

Dawn Butler has called JP out for slagging off OJ and Novara

@NotTheFunKindOfFeminist

Dawn Butler has called JP out for slagging off OJ and Novara

Maybe Dawn should do another poll.

Jess vs OJ

I'm not the biggest fan of Jess for reasons already outlined eloquently by others but I have a sneaking suspicion she'd win.

I used to really admire Jess, supported her for the leadership, but she lacks critical thinking and courage. I know the abuse female MPs get and I can understand what a dilemma it must be, but when there are women like Maya, Allison Bailey and Helen Joyce (to name just a few) around I cant help feeling some contempt for her now.
I don't believe for a minute she believes in gender ideology but she goes along with it .. so lost my respect. And I know she's done some good stuff but I cant accept the silence. Never one tweet to support Rosie Duffield.

Fantastic post charleyparlie

Very well explained, Charleyparlie

It's not (only) about the proportion of the risk that the natal male person will actively injure a natal female person when they are accepted into what is a female single sex space. This is an issue, but it's not the only issue.

The issue is that you cannot accept a natal male person into a natal female single sex space without harming the female only provision that was created in the first place to meet female only needs, and without excluding some females from that provision and therefore from any provision.

The needs of male people cannot trump the needs of female people.

It’s so much more than what we usually get from prominent Labour politicians so I’m inclined to take it as a big win even with all the associated caveats 🤷‍♀️

Even with the more fence sitting bits I’m sure the other side would still consider this literal violence.

In any case, the idea that you can risk assess members of a high risk groups is a red herring.
You can't accurately risk assess if there hasn't been a conviction; and a politician that claims a special interest in women's issues should know how low the conviction rate is.

www.spectator.co.uk/article/jess-phillips-and-the-assault-on-biology Article by Debbie Hayton in the Spectator. I haven't read it but she usually puts out a good GC argument

she usually puts out a good GC argument

How is it possible for a self confessed AGP male to truly support women or be in any way gender critical, for goodness sake?
What has happened to the usual high standard of FWR critical thinking on this thread?

@Thelnebriati

In any case, the idea that you can risk assess members of a high risk groups is a red herring. You can't accurately risk assess if there hasn't been a conviction; and a politician that claims a special interest in women's issues should know how low the conviction rate is.

And it misses the chilling effect of a male in a space for abused women even if that particular male is not an abuser.

Imagine being a trans widow, fleeing to a refuge and finding a male very like your ex, in residence. It defeats the whole object of refuges.

@highame

www.spectator.co.uk/article/jess-phillips-and-the-assault-on-biology Article by Debbie Hayton in the Spectator. I haven't read it but she usually puts out a good GC argument

archive version for anyone who doesn't have enough article allowance: archive.is/UiCbb

Why not Tinsel. Don't we argue against the kind of bigotry that excludes? Or is that just me

@highame

Why not Tinsel. Don't we argue against the kind of bigotry that excludes? Or is that just me

Dr Hayton has yet to renounce or undo their own policy they co wrote that encourages male teaching staff who cross dress part time to use the facilities of women and girls if they feel like it.

I'm with Tinsel on this one.

suedonym.substack.com/p/the-elephant-in-the-room

@highame

Why not Tinsel. Don't we argue against the kind of bigotry that excludes? Or is that just me

I don't know what you mean. Exclude who from where?

Accepteed Ova but this....
What has happened to the usual high standard of FWR critical thinking on this thread?......... I emphatically do not

I do not want to get into any sort of spat but I meant exclude a written piece. That's me finished on this one

(extract from article linked above)
"Jess Phillips thinks that transwomen — like me — are not female, but we should be treated as women. She has probably succeeded in upsetting both sides of what has become a toxic debate. (continues)

She called it the ‘de-womanising’ of language. Phillips drew attention to that as well, pointing out that the Domestic Abuse Bill avoided mention of women.

But from there Phillips tried to shuffle back to fence-sitting, claiming that trans people don’t eliminate the word ‘women’ and that the term could live happily alongside ‘people with cervixes’.

I would beg to differ. Some of us are quite happy to define the word woman as a human being whose reproductive development took the path that led to a cervix and not a prostate. Because what other definition has any real meaning at all?" (continues)

Have other women noticed how Dr Hayton determindly avoids the word 'man' and its definition in his articles? There are not 'two sides' and the implication that Hayton represents some mediating mid-ground is illusionary.

I am often minded these days of the rule, "Men are whatever men say they are and women are whatever men say they are."
(H/t thebewilderness who used to dwell here)

Some of us are are quite happy to define the word man as a human being whose reproductive development took the path that led to a prostate and not a cervix, though whether we (as women) are permitted to voice such a statement, let alone be paid to do so, is something all together different.