Julie Bindel & Sharron Davies can't believe women centre their politics around the trans issue

[ImpossibleDrum]

Julie Bindel

You may hate me for this (well, some of you at least, but I cannot BELIEVE that many of you on here are deciding who is good or bad for PM because of the trans issue ALONE. I mean, I KNOW it is an urgent issue, but so are a million other things right now!!

Sharron Davies

I agree with your too Julie. There’s a bigger picture right now with people potentially unable to feed or keep their kids warm this winter. We can keep bringing the sunlight to other issues.

That was when she was Paymaster General, wasn't it? Before she got demoted again?

I don't think anyone actually does that. It's always a balance, it's more that some people decide that is a particularly urgent one.

But JB, at least, tends somewhat to be a believer that the political left is represents the good people and the right the bad, selfish people.

‘You'll have to excuse this attitude in here I'm afraid, FWR is riddled with Daily Mail reading, tory voting people LARPing as feminists.’

Just like Twitter is full of Guardian reading, brie-eating, AGA-salivating misogynists LARPing as the working class.

Unless you live in a seat with a smallish majority, who you vote for is largely irrelevant. My constituency will never change hands

I do wonder about mine as it's always been Labour but last time the majority was only around 900 votes and looking at results it's been on a downside spiral for last 5 elections.

But I see so many people on here saying they can't possibly vote Labour because of TWAW but Boris knows what a woman is. He has literally just been sacked for lying,

So the Tories have sacked their leader for lying but Labour not only allow theirs to lie with impunity (TWAW) but join in. And that is meant to show the Tories are worse?

TWAW is a lie, a harmful obsence lie that destroys women's rights, destroys our ability to point out harms to women, that put women at risk, make us second class citizens, activily causes us harm by ignoring differences in medicine and risks due to product design. It also shows politicians who are prepared to ignore evidence or think critically and refuse to stand up to a baying mob.

Mercurial yes in your case you would really need to think carefully about how you use or don't use your vote. Not all votes are equal.

Where are all these trans people, I work in the NHS and in the past three years I've met three.

Not three years, that should read 10 years.

@Shehasadiamondinthesky

I have seen two trans people, none in the town I live in at all. From that, I could conclude one of two things: either, trans people are a minuscule minority and therefore so vulnerable that they should have all the laws and norms of society reworked around them, OR the group is so tiny that it is ludicrous for all the laws and norms of society to be reworked around them.

Guess which.

Yesterday I was hunting for food and fuel support for a single woman and her kid due to DWP fucking up her payment yes she was hungry mainly because she was making sure her kid wasn't I guess to you her hunger doesn't matter?

Why did you mention she was a woman? Not just say a person? Do you think being female makes her more vulnerable? Do you think more women are single parents than men so more likely to need this support? Do you consider women's reproductive role places them at more risk? That pregnancy could make a women in her situation more precarious? Or that an employer may not want to employ someone at risk of pregnancy? How can you talk about, let alone frame policies to address this when you can't even define women?

And I don't hate JB and SD - and I disagree with them on this point (and probably other points too).

I hate the fact that this has gradually turned me into a single issue voter. To me it is foundational. The material reality of women as a sex class is the fundamental underpinning of how we treat women and how we address the societal and economic issues they face. It impinges on justice (how women are treated as witnesses/victims, how women are punished), preventing VAWG (SSS, shelters, counselling etc), women’s access to politics (all women shortlists), equal pay (how you assess equal pay when males who identify as women can’t be excluded), statistical analysis of how women are affected by all sorts of societal and economic factors (census and more broadly inability or unwillingness of many organisations to collect or disaggregate data on sex), health (accurate and comprehensible healthcare information).

If a political party says it will make policy on all those issues on the basis that sex does not exist, or is not material, or should not be a protected characteristic, or should be replaced by or conflated with gender, policy decisions on all those issues go off kilter and adversely affect women.

We know that because we have already seen it to some degree (and yes I know much of this was under a Conservative government). But the further it goes the harder it will be to get back, and we have yet to see how far it will go with active support from a leader who says he wants this to be a priority for his first 100 days.

It's not really a 'single issue' though, is it? First there are the practical implications of adopting a TWAW stance. That would be the stuff about sports, safe spaces for women, puberty blockers etc. When balanced against the Conservative response to COVID or the cost of living crisis etc, some people will conclude that the latter affects more people in worse ways and vote for Labour.

But intrinsically tied to a TWAW stance is the denial of biological reality. A blindness to science. And this puts the Labour party on a level with anti-vaxxers or flat-earthers or denying that human activity has had any impact on the climate. Voting Labour would be voting in an anti-science government.

Then you look at the authoritarian stance of those in charge: "it should not be said" that only women have a cervix (Starmer). "TWAW" (Sadiq Khan). The bullying of Rosie Duffield. The belief that some women's groups are hate groups. The refusal to engage with those of an opposing view. You're in a position of voting in a party that doesn't believe in free speech or freedom of expression. (Actually, I think the Tories have been fairly weak on this too, but Labour seem to value free speech even less than the Conservatives.)

So for me it's not just about the immediate consequences of bringing in Self-ID or allowing male-bodied people into female sports. It is to do with everything else that goes along with subscribing to this ideology.

Are there far too many people reliant on food banks? Yes. Are there too many rapists walking free? Yes. But I consider the cost of solving those problems by voting in Labour or the Liberal (hah!) Democrats to be too high.

Exactly this.

This is a tory leadership election, voted on by tory MPs and in the final round, by tory party members.

And it is 100% guaranteed that the winner will be a tory

I thought it was a strangely antagonistic post from Julie Bindel. Why start with 'some of you are going to hate me'? thereby conflating disagreement with hate when it's something women are accused of so often on social media?

I agree with EdgeOfACoin. There is so much more to all of this than "trans issues".

I imagine that Bindel is worried that this is becoming a right wing issue.

And the TrAs are being relatively successful implying that it's an extremist position.

It's not a right wing issue / US Republican issue.

The moderate GCs are maybe trying to take back a little control which seems a sensible thing to do.

TWAW is a lie, a harmful obsence lie that destroys women's rights, destroys our ability to point out harms to women, that put women at risk, make us second class citizens, activily causes us harm by ignoring differences in medicine and risks due to product design. It also shows politicians who are prepared to ignore evidence or think critically and refuse to stand up to a baying mob.

Well said.

@Live4weekend

The time to worry about getting carried away with our own radical success isn’t yet upon us.

Nor can I
Trans issue affect a very small number of people
When people vote they consider economy taxation employment etc
Trans issues do not affect the overwhelming majority of the electorate
Most of whom are simply notinterested

I think reframing it as 'single issue' voting is a deliberate misrepresentation tbh. Women are still most likely to be murdered, sexually assaulted, paid less, have the bulk of caring duties; live in substandard, overcrowded housing; be threatened online, be misdiagnosed for healthcare, head single parent households; be under-represented on boards, committees and in promoted posts; live in poverty, etc, etc. Almost every aspect of every day is impacted by our sex and how that sex is perceived in a patriarchy. Of course, that will impact voting intentions.

I said earlier I couldn't understand the timing of JB's comment. Now, I'm wondering if it wasn't so much about Boris as about the findings of the investigation into Starmer and Rayner and the lockdown rules. If KS and AR hadn't been cleared, they were going to resign. On past evidence, there are female Labour MPs that certain GC voices would want to become Labour leader. But those female Labour MPs have thrown women under the bus time and again. It would definitely suit some people if we all decided to conveniently forget that. Interesting that it's viewed as easier to ask women to forget than to ask those politicians to be honest about sex.

She's entitled to her opinion. I wasn't sure what she was getting at really as I've no control over who the Tories vote for as leader. Doesn't stop me having an opinion, ie not Penny Mordaunt.
I do respect Julie for all her work, but it did seem a bit ironic she was ticking me off for being unhappy with Labour in the week I bunged her a tenner to take a Labour council to task for discriminating against her?!
We all have our red lines, mine is self ID, so if Labour support it, I cant vote for them.

I think what she’s saying is, “GC women who are Tory members, don’t vote for Suella Braverman.”

"My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position [imposing “the good”] would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under of robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies."

"The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some points be satiated; but those who torment us for their own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to heaven yet at the same time likely to make a Hell of earth."

— C.S. Lewis