Another long piece about Jess in which she plays up her feminist credentials and side-steps the central feminist issue of the age (paywall).
www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/04/09/jess-phillips-no-trans-person-met-has-said-cant-say-woman/
I’m very conflicted about Phillips. She does so much for women and I have to respect that, but on this issue she seems to hide in the tall grass and I don’t understand her reasons.
Big straw man in this article: “no trans person I’ve met has said we can’t say woman”.
Nobody is saying they have. We’re saying some trans activists and their sympathisers say we can’t associate the word woman with the class of (to quote Lavery - at least useful for something) organically occurring people we call “female”. The argument is we can say woman, but we can’t say “pregnant women” unless we also say “and birthing persons”, or we can say woman, but we might be referring to a woman with prostate cancer.
And if JP as a feminist has nothing to say about a) the strategic divorce of those two concepts and b) the policing of what we as a class of people are allowed to say, and when, then I lose a lot of my patience with her.