Question Time right now!

[Seeingadistance]

Prof Robert Winston has just stated very clearly that it is not possible to change sex.

In relation to freedom of speech and Kathleen Stock.

Alison McGovern (and many other politicians) would do well to take lessons from Anne McElvoy in how to communicate.

@chasingmytail4

Alison McGovern (and many other politicians) would do well to take lessons from Anne McElvoy in how to communicate.

So true

He is utterly fantastic. Student - cringed a lot.

Poor students they’re only 12 and they think everyone else is a fucking moron because they’re so old

If a trans woman can't be a biological woman why are they given legal rights?

They don’t have legal rights as women.

They do have legal rights not to be discriminated against as transpeople.

Thanks for this.

I thought it was great that Prof Winston not only got to state 'I will say this categorically - that you cannot change your sex' but also that prior to that he said 'I'm about to say something that'll probably mean you'll want to edit the programme when I've finished' which I took to be a way of trying to raise the bias and silencing as a huge part of the issue.

However, I do just want to get my head straight on something that he said, which I have heard elsewhere regarding different aspects of sex.

Prof W said 'You have a chromosomal sex, you have genetic sex, you have hormonal sex and psychological - brain sex'

My understanding of the above is that these are all different aspects of the same thing in terms of biology. In other words, you could NOT have a human with XY chromosomes and therefore biologically male, having the hormonal profile (hormonal sex?) of a female? So yes, there is more to being male or female than chromosomes alone, but they are all linked - with the exception of 'psychological brain sex' which I assume is where the born on the wrong body narrative is from. But I have seen it being used as if you could have XY chromosomal sex but XX hormonal sex.

Robert Winston is one of the cleverest people in the country. His contribution to science is huge. How anybody has the nerve to talk nonsense in the same room as him I really don't know.
Absolutely!

Just watching it now.

McGovern looks supremely uncomfortable, imo, and I'm not sure she actually believes much of what she's saying. She looks as if she wants to cry half the time, as would I if I felt forced to toe the nonsense party line that the current Labour Party are intent on pursuing. But more fool her really.

Frustrating that Winston wasn't given more airtime. I can only imagine what was going on in his head, he must despair.

The drama student was just embarrassing. The look on her face when Anne McElvoy suggested that she should expect to be challenged at university!

I am so pleased that this is getting out in the open though. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and all that - the more mainstream this conversation becomes the more people will see it for the barking mad fantasy it is.

And as an aside, I've just signed my contract for a new university job, and I was delighted to see a specific clause about the importance of protecting academic freedoms in it. My current place definitely didn't have that...

Robert Winston is one of the cleverest people in the country. His contribution to science is huge. How anybody has the nerve to talk nonsense in the same room as him I really don't know.

They probably have no idea who he is, and think he's just an out of touch old man...

If a trans woman can't be a biological woman why are they given legal rights?

Originally as a sort of "witness protection scheme". The thought was that some people would be living "undercover" as the opposite sex, after some sort of surgery, as a form of treatment for "gender dysphoria", and that government bodies should let them change some of their paperwork to not "out" them.

It was all predicated on them being undercover, and the assumption that this was necessary for their privacy/safety/etc. None of this would be necessary for anyone obviously trans. Someone visibly male doesn't benefit from fake ID saying they're female.

And a lot of this was tied in with homophobia - in some way a "transwoman" attracted to men is "not really gay", so it's okay. People were prepared to tolerate it in a way that gay people were not tolerated, and the point of being undercover is to avoid homophobia. You still see this in places like Iran, where homosexuality is only tolerated via transition.

Then the GRA2004 came along, prompted by an European human rights case - someone saying the government is recognising me as "a woman", via certain records, but is not letting me marry a man.

The European court (I forget which) said, "no, if you're going to partially treat this man as a woman, you have to do it more fully". So the government introduced the GRA2004 to give more complete recognition, including the ability for a transwoman to marry a man, despite gay marriage still being illegal.

What we're seeing now is this ratcheting further, to say "well, if you're going to let people change sex, why should I have to have gender dysphoria or surgery to get this right?" and "why should there any exemptions - if I'm a woman I need to always be treated as a woman, even in sports, rape crisis centres, prisons"?

And then that's mixed in with the "if I can choose my sex, why can't I choose something other than the 2 sexes?" stuff, together with the use of the word "gender" which either does or doesn't mean sex depending on which argument is being used.

Problem is, there are rational arguments for basing some things on actual sex, and we can make those arguments based on its objective reality, with data and evidence. There's no reason to base anything on a self-declared "gender", because no-one knows what they even mean. Even all the proponents, as evidenced in that Nolan podcast.

You can make an argument that sex doesn't matter, and there shouldn't be any rules about sex. But you can't coherently argue that gender matters more than sex for any sort of public policy.

@HipTightOnions

If a trans woman can't be a biological woman why are they given legal rights?

They don’t have legal rights as women.

They do have legal rights not to be discriminated against as transpeople.

AND they have all the human rights that every other person has.

They are not denied any of the basic human rights.

@phishy

Fiona Bruce was not very confident on the subject, amd seemed to be afraid of saying the wrong thing. There’s impartiality and then there’s appeasement. Scary when even Fiona has to watch her words.

Have not watched it or read all the thread but wanted to reply to this. This is what the Nolan Report needs to look at net after its excellent beginning. The BBC is claiming that their involvement with Stonewall was internal only, a matter of internal HR/employee relations. We need to know whether that training either leeched or was deliberately foisted onto their external function - reporting the news - such that their neutrality has been severely compromised.

There's a hint that this was happening with OfCom - that OfCom were going after broadcasters for so-called "transphobia", and then using these real life examples as proof that OfCom were ticking the Stonewall boxes in the Stonewall Equality Index. This is arguably severe compromise of the function of OfCom. So, what about the BBC and BBC News. Were they doing the same - putting out trans friendly items and quashing the right of women/scientists to reply on their current affairs programmes in order to gain Stonewall brownie points?

@Gumbomambo

Absolutely fantastic to see Robert saying this on the BBC, he knows he will get threats about it, he knows it would be easier to keep his mouth shut but he hasn’t.

He said very clearly that he will get hate mail for saying what he said. Surely that’s enough to make people stop and think?

@HipTightOnions

If a trans woman can't be a biological woman why are they given legal rights?

They don’t have legal rights as women.

They do have legal rights not to be discriminated against as transpeople.

Thank you.

@justbackfrombangkok

I do worry that the clever, sensible people are getting on in years. Whatever will we do without them?

That was exactly what was going through my mind.

So the two Labour panellists (Lord Winston is a Labour peer) had quite different views (I imagine the TRAs have already begun a campaign to withdraw the whip from Lord Winston!).
It doesn't surprise me that the centrist McGovern wing of the Labour Party is just as bad as the left of the party on this - I think that was always obvious (just look at the fact that the Lib Dems are, if anything, slightly worse than Labour on this). Despite some attempts to blame the left for TRA ideology, TRA ideology pervades the entire political space from the centre leftwards and has considerable influence on the centre-right as well (under T May the Tories were absolutely committed to GRA "reform" and even now there are people like Carrie advocating TRA ideology, plus despite the statements of people like Truss, the government has not yet put a stop to the way the public sector is being taken over the ideology).

I think this is the problem.
I was talking about Greenham Common recently, in the context of current demonstrations etc. Neither of my dc had a clue what I was talking about. I would have said they are pretty intelligent, had a reasonable education. However, the only history they ever did at school was the victorians and WW1 and 2.

The problem is that some men and handmaidens think that women saying 'no' is equivalent to discrimination.

But it's not.

TRAs (and Labour) want to take women's hard fought rights to single sex spaces away. It's not about giving rights to transpeople - they have the same rights as anyone else, it's about taking away women's rights.

And literally every argument the TRAs have could be answered with 3rd spaces which most feminists would happily campaign for. The reason they don't want to talk about 3rd spaces because the real agenda isn't 'safety' or 'inclusion' for transpeople it's about taking away the rights of women and girls.

This thread is amazing.

I think 24-hour media has a lot to answer for. Opposing, minority and -out-there opinion is often given far too much of a platform in the name of 'balance' as against something that is patently right and obvious.

I mean, how much airtime has Nigel Farage had over the years?

And then vulnerable people, or people who don't have critical thinking skills get taken in by it. And before you do it, the completely illogical 'other side' becomes some sort of mainstream opposition. Which is further exploited by the media, because they love nothing more than polarised views.

FFS Prof Lord Winston is an eminent scientist. Let's listen to him.

I was talking about Greenham Common recently, in the context of current demonstrations etc. Neither of my dc had a clue what I was talking about. I would have said they are pretty intelligent, had a reasonable education.

I think there is a problem in that new technology means young people genuinely have less knowledge of recent history. They're living in a "now" bubble with infinite content.

When I was young, there were 4 TV channels, which often had content repeated from previous decades, and other curated content, which meant that you soaked up culture with historical context.

I was born in the 70s, and WWII seemed like a long way away, but I still had a general picture of what the last 50 years were like from TV (and books). I'm not sure current generations get that so much.

@Viviennemary

Thats good. I agree. But I still think trans men and trans women should have rights.

I think you would struggle to find anyone on here who doesn’t think that

Just checked, and Robert Winston is still a Labour peer.

Lord Winston has also confirmed that the RC position on fertility is illiterate since there is no such thing as a "moment of conception," and that the vast majority of fertilised eggs, and therefore human souls, are flushed down the toilet.

if a trans woman can't be a biological woman why are they given legal rights?

Human rights do not extend to forcing others to believe we are something that we are not. I could believe (genuinely if I was in a delusional state) that I was the Queen. But that does not mean I have the right to access the royal palaces, stay in her private appartments, meet the prime minister and get paid from the civil list. But I do have the same rights as I had before I became delusional.

The fact people cannot change sex is so important. Until people understand it, including politician, the mantra TWAW will not stop being thrown about.

Look at American politics. What got Trump into the whitehouse? Loads of money and slick PR/social media campaign, appealing to the lowest common denominator and whipping up ‘outrage’. Playbook tactics.

Same it being done here (Dentons and stonewall wrote the playbook didn’t they?). There is backing - money plus a willing army of useful idiots. To what end - I’m still not certain but future generations will look back in the same was we look back at the witch trials and think ‘god they were so dumb back then’.