Keir Starmer - Trans Rights Can't Override Women's Rights

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In The Times

Seems like he's done a strategic U turn. I bet at least he's glad he can stop dodging the "what is a woman?" question.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/6841074a-d0a9-11ed-85a8-caaa67d15364?shareToken=2360ce9b239c4fae805bc8364adaea73

I’m still not clear. Is he saying that for 0.1% of women it is not biological?
and if not biological then what makes this 0.1% women? I think he needs to make that clear

Well, there's something very nasty oozing out of the dead corpse that is the Labour Party on this matter.

It's Starmer's fake sincerity that rankles, his "both sides...", his "the toxic conversation".

No, there is only one side.

No, the "other" side is the one that is toxic.

Just ask Posie, Billboard Chris, Lesbian Project, Alison Bailey etc.

Because they are desperately hoping the TRAs - both the violently hostile Twitter mob and the faction within the party - won’t notice and Starmer can get away with being all things to all people.

The TRAs already have noticed. They hate him more than we do. Anything he tweets is immediately followed by a hundred angry furries demanding he withdraws the Labour whip from Rosie Duffield. He is going to end up reviled from both sides.

Yeah you’re probably right - the more I find out the more I realise there is virtually no common ground between women and trans women and very few areas where compromise can appease both sides.

difficult to predict how it’s all going to pan out in the long run. My most optimistic hope is that gender ideology simply goes out of fashion and fizzles out and the angst ridden teens can go back to being goths and mid life crisis blokes start buying motorbikes again

Which doesn’t bode well for his future as party leader. It’s a shame, as a human rights lawyer I thought he’d make an excellent leader. But he’s turned out to be like all bloody lawyers I’ve worked with: won’t make a decision and instead just want to give a woolly opinion in the hope that a) you’ll make the decision yourself and b) you won’t blame them for it.

the more I find out the more I realise there is virtually no common ground between women and trans women and very few areas where compromise can appease both sides.

That. Sadly. Men cannot become and live as women without any boundaries on this without fundamentally destroying the very thing they're trying to capture.

So he doesn’t think being women is biological, just so happens most are?

Completely don't trust Liebour to get into power and then allow these men in dresses and hot pink to do whatever they want.

difficult to predict how it’s all going to pan out in the long run

I’ve always said that I have hopes that it will die down as this current generation grows older and another one comes through. Nothing makes something unfashionable faster than it being seen as something an “out of date” generation does and there was a thread recently about younger teenagers looking most disparagingly on what seems to becoming called “the they/thems”.

Couple that with the political sands shifting, greater public awareness that “trans rights” (i.e. additional rights for trans people as I’ve yet to see any evidence of a right which trans people don’t have but everyone else does) are not without cost to women, and scandals like the Tavistock, Isla Bryson, men in women’s sports etc, and I think it will dwindle down. There’ll still be TRAs for sure, but they’ll just be another angry little corner of the internet.

I think what Kier really means is" trans rights don't over-ride women's rights, so don't worry about it, ladies; but we do need to be kind to those struggling with their gender identity" - meanwhile still pressing for Self ID and ko-towing to the mantra TWAW.

Kow-Towing

Kier is a gutless coward, he cannot and will not stand up for one of his own MP's, Rosie Duffield, who has suffered abuse and bullying from members of the Labour Party and some Labour MP's - why the hell would anyone trust him to stand up for women or the Country? He folds at the first sign of it being a 'bit uncomfortable'.

As for the 'both sides' shit - what else will Kier 'both sides'? VAWG? Grooming gangs? The war in Ukraine? Democracy protests in Hong Kong? China vs Taiwan?

Pathetic.

I think journalists should start asking him if Stevenage Woman has a penis

They're very different in Hertfordshire!

the more I find out the more I realise there is virtually no common ground between women and trans women and very few areas where compromise can appease both sides.

The issue from my perspective is that what is in place is already a compromise for women.

The GRA already supports the premise that you can legally change sex, thus conflating sex and gender.

In addition you cannot ask if someone has a GRC thus forcing a presumption that people have one and are this the sex they claim to be.

Whilst the EA does make a distinction between sex and gender-reassignment, the onus is on service providers demonstrating a need for single sex spaces rather than this being the norm and many choose not to do so (some because they are captured and other because they can't be arsed).

Throw in stonewall lobbying gender identity rather than reassignment as a protected characteristic and what we have is an unholy mess where the current legislation gives more weight to the rights of trans women than women (even if that wasn't the intention).

Therefore the idea that women should be expected to compromise further is not something tenable to most GC supporters. Rather the whole shebang needs a revision that clarifies sex and gender as distinct, with sex being immutable.

I am pleased to see Labour slowly changing on this issue. After watching this whole situation develop during a decade of Conservative government (even as it's been pulled more rightwards by Brexit), I have zero belief that the right is any more trustworthy than Corbyn's version of Labour when it comes to protecting women's rights.

Starmer taking a sensible position on this is as credible as any other politician. That will upset anyone hoping to make hay on the trans issue for the right, I suspect.

I agree. The GRA was already a compromise agreed to on the grounds that the numbers affected would be very small. And so they were until recently. What I did want to add to was your point about service providers evoking the single sex exemptions. While many are captured or forced into compliance by funding conditions, I wouldn’t be surprised if some were just worried about being sued and the costs of defending their position.

Wholly agree ^^

Add in too that agencies and services run scared of the activists who openly use tactics such as:

• Ringing a refuge or women's service as a team, over and over and over for hours, with the aim of bombarding the service and blocking their service users. No fucks given for the impact on vulnerable females, only on smashing resistance. Any right thinking service only cares about males anyway in this viewpoint.

• Slamming them on social media, denouncing them as transphobic and dragging their rep through the mud as hard as possible to add pressure: often involving actual threats of violence from unstable and nameless individuals, which the police are never interested in despite often breaking the law. Those running the orgs have families and children, the threats often reference the children when the tweeter is angry with someone and their name is in the public domain.

• Contacting everyone possible to complain and to pressure for loss of funding, closure, police involvement and any other means of causing distress and increasing time wasting/inability to provide service on the grounds of transphobia.

Terrorism is really where we got to a long time ago. Under such bullying, concerted tactics many organisations learned a long time back to never risk saying no to this lobby. The behaviour has been permitted to be very, very successful. And so it has continued and escalated. Women played fair. It was their biggest mistake.

Just to mention in addition to the above:

all know the phrase 'more balls than Millwall'? 'Nobody likes us, we don't care' Millwall?

The activists buckled them in a few days and they cancelled the women's event that had booked with them.

"Here's a box of candy I got at the grocery store. Now will you please shut up about my affair with my secretary?"

women either do have a penis or they don’t.

99.9 % means nothing. It’s either all or none.

Of course. What’s laughable is that Starmer thinks anyone will read his comment and feel reassured by it.

“For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological . . . and of course they haven’t got a penis.”

this is going to get him no where as an answer to 'what is a woman?'

counter questions off the top of my head

who are these 0.1% of women with penises? what do I have in common with them that makes us both women? How do I recognise that these penis people are women when I come across them in single sex spaces? I mean, I'm entitled to challenge men invading the women's loos right? How do I know that these people with penises are actually laydees?

he's still going to look like a twat. he's adopted a logically unsound position and he's going to suffer (good)

and even if he said anything that made any fucking sense, I'd STILL need to see him treating Rosie Duffield with decency before Labour got even a sniff of my vote

Of course he is and it’s extremely annoying . What a boring , politician he is . Anything for votes . I just want someone to keep playing his previous quotes to him .

By my calculations is saying there are about 35000 women with penises in the uk . Who would have thought it ?