Emily Thornberry’s motivation

[achillestoes]

Emily Thornberry is tweeting in reply to Frances Barber, who said she would love Thornberry to look her in the eye and say a man can have a cervix.

Fair play to Thornberry, she does respond and says Barber can come to a constituency surgery any time. Thornberry says she has a cousin who is a transman (she uses ‘trans man’) and she presumes he has a cervix but she has never asked. She says her business is to love him and protect him from bullying.

So we can better understand her motivation, and I’m sure she would happily say that to Frances’s face.

But what would she say next? What, in Thornberry’s view, makes her cousin a man? What is a man anyway? How is that question ‘bullying’? What else will she leave to her cousin to decide?

This is on a day when a rational and compassionate letter is published in The Observer by a number of less captured Labour colleagues, who are not prepared to look the electorate in the eye and make things up because of the preferences of a family member.

Politicians shouldn’t be making policy based on relatives wants and desires though. It’s a clear conflict of interest. They should be looking at issues in the round from all angles.
I would argue that if politicians are particularly close to an issue (where there is debate/ conflict)they should excuse themselves from it or at least declare their interest ( similar to financial interests) so everyone is aware of the motivation.

Wanting to be kind and protect a trans cousin or spouse or child or friend is natural but is not a good enough reason to reorder society, change the literal meaning of words and remove sex segregation where that matters.
it makes me question Emily Thornberry’s position on all sorts of issues as she might be making policy decisions that affect millions of people motivated by family members or people she knows.

@sashagabadon - excellent post I agree with everything you say.

Posie, in one of her recent youtubes pointed out that a lot of Labour mps seem to have a 'single poor young trans person in their community' whom they are supporting!

She would vote for policy in line with gender ideology every time, so it’s probably a good thing that she is explicit about her opinions so we can continue to comment on and resist them.

I wonder what she really thinks makes her cousin a man. I’ve seen her get to this point in the discussion before and she starts that whole ‘This is very unedifying’ thing she does where she sighs and rolls her eyes.

Just tell us, Emily. What is a man?

It always boils down to personal relationships

whenever someone starts showing signs of gender lunacy I always assume they have a trans person in their lives

the idea that biological sex is less important than sexist stereotypes is not one you reach via logical reasoning

This^^

So many MPs with regards to this subject seem unable to separate their own experiences from what they are actually paid to be doing which is represent their constituents - I'd expect that separation to be understood as one of the basics of being an MP and it's concerning that it's not.

Agreed. Self interest that runs through all this. Emily would be perfectly positioned to model how to have challenging but open discussions about belief, competing rights, the need to safeguard children etc. Instead she just becomes another incoherent politician unable to address outrageous medical experimentation on children because she daren't step outside the permitted mantra.
It just shows a lack of moral courage and credibility

Yes, whatever Thornberry believes personally, the law is the law, and the law is that we are all perfectly within our rights to say her cousin is a man.

*to say that her cousin is not a man

Presumably 🙂

Yes, that!

People can think what they want to think. What frustrates me about Thornberry is that she is so contemptuous of the notion that a person might legitimately disagree with her that she won’t engage in the conversation properly. She prefers to pull faces and pretend we’re obsessed with other people’s bodies.

Like Lisa Nandy with her transgender child constituent.

I have no doubt that this Nandy's constituent was genuinely deeply distressed about their body, and I'm sure their parents were acting in good faith when they sought help from Nandy. However, Nandy's emotional response to the child led to her stating that male prisoners who had been convicted of child rape should be in women's prisons (which often have mother and baby units) if that person identified as female.

Making policy based on the emotional plight of an individual is not good policy.

Emily Thornberry can't possibly look at the issue dispassionately because to question her cousin would be to risk damaging her relationship with that side of the family. I know a very intelligent man who speaks absolute nonsense on this issue because his best friends have a trans child. He can't bring himself to acknowledge the damage that is being done to the child, so he has to convince himself that there is such a thing as a brain in the wrong body (we last spoke on the issue in 2020 when 'born in the wrong body' was still a literal concept not a figurative one. I don't know if he is aware that Mermaids et al have rowed back from the literal interpretation).

I’ve noticed this, too.

They must have relatives and friends who are GC, they must know, and possibly are, women who have been sexually assaulted. Why can't they see it's not anti-trans?

Politicians have a duty to all their constituents not just their family members. If a politician voted on e.g. tax rules to benefit a family member that discriminated against the majority that would be wrong, Why is it any different here?

Politicians tend to use personal anecdotes from their constituent or people they meet in the park to appear more in touch and approachable. But the idea that one or two convincing people, or their own relatives, should influence party politics so much isnt the makings of fair and democratic policies.

The fact that politicians don't see this is dreadful.

Using constituent anecdotes or even family members is generally ok where an area is undisputed like improving cancer surgery wait times or better midwifery services or other areas where everyone generally benefits from an improvement to a service ( that the anecdote highlights) but it is not ok in contested or controversial or debated topics that will have a negative impact on others.

My thought is that this has something to do with the way many Labour Party MPs, and also many members, seem to think about issues in general. Everything has to be wrapped up with a big yes or no. It's all about their ideological constructs, and those have to be unified with their feelings and emotions.

I suspect it's why people will go on about Tories "not really caring. To them, that's about the worst thing you could say, that you might analyze a situation pragmatically without having some emotional passion.

I've known a number of people like this in my personal life and you can see how it causes them problems. They can't imagine, for example, having a friend, or even a child who makes some kind of choice that they deeply disagree with, and still loving that person. They can't understand, for example, someone like Roger Scrunton could get on with Douglas Murray, since they didn't have the same views on homosexuality. They are weather-vanes because if people they care about do something they disapprove of, they need to either change their views or cut them off.

It's also the fact that activists and lobbyists have made certain that identifying as trans never be a nuanced exercise.

It has to be that they are definitely male, but with a different configuration of genitals and anyone who deviates from that line is bigoted and mean.

So people like Thornberry have to go to an extreme in order to defend their relative at all.

You can't defend them 'a bit'. If you do that, you're just as bad as a bigoted terf.

So no, politicians should not be basing policy purely on the individual circumstances of family members.

And certainly not where an ideology places you in a position where you have to look like a swivel eyed zealot just in order to have empathy for your cousin.

The sooner we can return the concept of transgenderism to one of a medical condition called gender dysphoria, the quicker we can have sympathy for people who have it, without having to buy into delusion that they are actually the opposite sex, fostered by lobbyists.

Rolling her eyes and speaking contemptuously seems to be Emily Thornberry’s stock in trade whenever she is challenged. So patronising, reminds me of my old headmistress.

@FigRollsAlly

She definitely comes across badly when she does that. I’m not sure she knows.

She can’t engage in this conversation logically because none of it stands up to logical discussion and she knows that

Shame they don’t represent the numerous women in their constituencies that are concerned about women’s rights

@MenopausalMe

Agree. What would she say if she honestly approached the question of what makes her think her cousin is a man?

If you're on Twitter, Frances could do with a bit of support. She's been outspoken about Genderism for a long long time.

‘She definitely comes across badly when she does that. I’m not sure she knows.’

Emily Thornberry knows this very well.

Her stance on women only spaces is loosing her friends in the constituency.
Her majority in 2017 was 30,000+ & this fell to 17,000+ in 2019.

Thornberry is Bandwagon Labour.