Starmer and his 99.9%

[bellinisurge]

The Labour leader is desperately trying to stay on the fence with his 99.9% of women are biological women schtick.

He repeated it in the recent MN interview.

Let me be clear, as he is so fond of saying, 100% of women are biological women. And as long as you keep pandering to this alleged "0.1%", we will lose the language we need to describe us, and we will lose the right to single sex spaces. Women are a sex class. And any attempt to pretend otherwise will fall over at the first scrutiny. And you will lose the election because you have manufactured an existential crisis for women. Try harder.

And I don't think the Tories are friends to women. That's why I won't vote for them.

@BitOutOfPractice you may well be right, and all the more reason why the LP should be reading them and answering our very reasonable concerns

They should learn from the Brexit disaster that dismissing people's genuine concerns and assuming they are all trolls and bigots doesn't end well.
I voted Remain btw.

Yep.
Me too.

Wow!

I 100% agree with your views as it happens. And I'm not saying we shouldn't be listened to and campaign for change. But I think publicly slating the LP over and over again on one issue is counter-productive and is handing the Tories a victory they most certainly do NOT deserve based on their record on women's rights and issues that are important to women. That does NOT mean I am telling you to shut up before you decide that! But I am very very bored of the "at least the Tories know what a woman is" line being trotted out as nauseum though!

I'm doing my campaigning within the LP which I have been a member of since the 1980s. Hope that clears up my credentials for you!

Has anybody on this thread said the Conservative Party is a friend to women?

Trust me, there is nothing I want more than for Keir Starmer to be a leader I can vote for. I dislike the current Tory administration intensely and under normal circumstances I'd be desperate for Labour to get in. But how can I vote for someone who lies so blatantly? Who has failed to stand up for an MP in his own party, Rosie Duffield, who has been relentlessly bullied by party members? Who is pretending that an obvious male, Eddie Izzard, is a woman?

The arrogance of those currently running the left parties is a feature not a bug.

There's a huge amount of head patting superiority and a lot of belief in having minority special pets such as acting all passionate about the current causes of the hour, all the right noises made - ethnic women, working class, LGBT+, the homeless, yada yada, but if one of those special pets gets out of their box by trying to speak for themselves, or mentioning an opinion on themselves and their minority that goes off message, they get extremely pissed off extremely fast.

Special pets should be grateful and quiet and submissive, and they will get what they're given and like it.

Hence why Starmer is so very pissed off with MN. We're supposed to be naice and just ask about biscuits so he can talk about how wonderfully supportive he is of mothers of young children.

I will not keep quiet about this @BitOutOfPractice . It is up to the Labour Party to sort itself out on this. It is not my job to keep quiet.
To win the next election with our current voting system, Labour needs to win comprehensively in places it has lost. At the moment, it has a big lead in the polls.
But once it becomes clear that its Self ID policy means your granny won't be guaranteed intimate care from a biological woman when she's in hospital, that is going to turn people off.
Nothing in what Starmer has said reassures me.

I recognise both your use names as having been on Mumsnet for a long time, on many threads on many boards. Is that right?

I will not vote Labour and hope for the best. This is the only thing stopping me and many others from supporting Labour. And it is an existential matter to paraphrase Glinner.

All of this ^

And I was once an elected officer for Momentum in the NW 🙈

@AutumnsCrow , I've been in a bit.
Usually on here, the prepper boards (I'm a prepper) , Brexit boards because I'm still fucking pissed off about Brexit and occasionally Craicnet and Litter Tray.

I did say that I don't think you should shut up! But I don't think laying all of this sorry mess at Kier Starmer's door is fair either. It's a massive problem across the whole of the centre left of politics.

I also think that the truth is that, for most voters of any stripe, the issue of gender ID will be a long long way down their list of priorities, especially in view of the incoming recession.

I am not saying whether that is right of wrong. But I think people will have what they consider to be more pressing issues to vote on.

He is the leader of the party. He wants to be political leader of the country. Who else should I blame.
Leaders before him have battled Clause 4. It's not impossible to rid the party of an inappropriate influence.

If you are the age you say you are you will remember Jennifer's Ear. A seemingly tiny issue can dominate an election campaign. And this is just such an issue. And it's not tiny.

I think you are both right.

it is a massive problem across political parties (especially those on the centre left/left)

But also the buck stops with the party leader.

As far as I am concerned Starmer can take his 0.01% and shove it up his [redacted].

We are 51% of the population and we matter.

This is the worry. The issues have been debated in the press and on Mumsnet. He has plenty if staffers and researchers to help him. If he really doesn’t grasp the issues by now, then he isn’t bright enough to run the country. 😔 The fact that the Tories are utterly shit doesn’t mean Starmer is competent, sadly. The sex vs gender devate has shon a spotlight on the fact that Stermer might be a bit thick.

I'm trusting that he is a clever man on the nuance of the law - former DPP etc - and he has been advised that this 99.9% nonsense works as a strategy to diffuse any attempt to challenge him properly. And he's counting on people thinking this is a trans issue, therefore a tiny minority issue, and not a women's issue which is a majority issue. He's taking a gamble. And he will fail.

Yes. Forgetting conveniently that someone like, say, Katie Dolezal, has already affected the lives of several girls and women.

Katie Dolatowski!

metro.co.uk/2019/03/16/transgender-woman-18-sexually-assaulted-girl-10-morrisons-toilet-8914577/

Rachel Dolezal is the American woman who identified as black.

I live in Scotland.
I'm 100% politically homeless.

Freudian slip on dear Rachel. Identifying as something you can never be or ever understand.

@JohnsShirt , aren't Alba making gender critical noises. Although that assumes you are in favour of independence. If you aren't, there's only the Tories.

Yes, easy mistake to make!