My husband

[Wildeheart]

DH thinks that a political party’s approach to trans rights is a small aspect of their manifesto and, while important, we should give more weight to their other policies on, for example, climate change when deciding who to vote for. This is in context of me saying that I would consider voting for the Tories for the first time ever instead of Labour if the Lib Dems were not the popular party in my area. How can I explain to him that trans rights potentially have a huge impact on women’s rights even though trans people make up a small percentage of the population (which is his argument)?

If a party will lie to your face about something as simple as whether women have penises, how can you trust them about anything else?

Changing laws, services and building based around the preferences of a small group will affect everyone who doesn’t share those preferences, not just the small group.

Men tend to like privacy and dignity too - they don’t want gender neutral everything (although they have less to fear from the safety aspect).

Look at how unrestrained liberalism ended up in a witch hunt in NZ. What the left increasingly represents is a brutal intolerance of dissenting views and cries of fascism. This can more widely be attributed to any other dissenting view that isn't on the progressive left.

I think women's safety and freedom of speech are pretty essential to a healthy democracy rather than mob rule.

Just say this is your Brexit.

Women’s basic human rights are not something which can be bargained away for ‘the greater good’. To think they can is just an admission that one thinks women are second class humans.

I would not more vote for a pro-gender ideology party that was good on other stuff, than I would vote for a pro-slavery party that was good on their stuff. Fundamental human rights are, well, fundamental, not ‘nice to haves’.

I would vote for a pro-slavery party that was good on their stuff. Should have said ‘ good on other stuff’

Ask him what could possibly be more important than human rights.

But I think if he doesn’t get it, he’s probably not going to until he processes it in a personal way. ie; how it impacts you, his mother, daughter or sister.

Some men simply decide that they don’t want men in the bathroom with their women. Terribly paternalistic but I think better than not caring at all.

My husband understands it in the way @BlackForestCake explained. It’s just an obvious lie, and anyone willing to go along with it is nuts. But we are in the US and have a great deal of obvious “emperor’s new clothes” things happening constantly, which helps.

Your dh can vote for whatever reason and whatever party he wants to and so can you. Lots of people vote on single issues. I do, I voted for the best party on childcare for at least two elections for example. Now this is not as important to me so I vote on women’s rights now. In the future I might vote on something else entirely.

DH thinks that a political party’s approach to trans rights is a small aspect of their manifesto

Because he is male, so is less affected by this. So he is selfish. Does he have daughters?

51% of the population are female so it actually affects 33 million people not a tiny percentage at all.

If a party will lie to your face about something as simple as whether women have penises, how can you trust them about anything else?.

This.

First of all, no-one here is against trans rights nor would we want ot vote for a party that is.

But the loss of women's rights, the lack of safeguarding for women and children and the teaching of queer theory in schools are issues that seriously affect some 60% or 70% of the population.

I do think considering the position on trans issues is important as it impacts greatly on women’s rights.

However, in a way your husband has a point - if we don’t get climate change, amongst other bigger issues, right, then we are utterly stuffed. All of us.

Need to have a viable planet and healthy human population in order to have rights.

Admittedly, I will not be voting for a party whose position is that a women can have a penis - but I don’t think they will get other issues right either so I wouldn’t have voted for them anyway.

I agree with everyone. He is arguing that only a small percentage of people are trans, so we are worrying about how less than 1% of people can affect women’s right to, for example, single sex spaces. As a result, the vast majority of women will not be affected by trans rights.

Changing laws, services and building based around the preferences of a small group will affect everyone who doesn’t share those preferences, not just the small group.

This. "Trans" people don't need to exist at all for the policy of "let men into women's spaces on demand, and persecute women who object" to be a bad one...

I don't care what the justification for that policy is who it's supposed to be helping - it's just bad policy.

(I struggled with what adjective to put there, and settled for "bad". You can substitute other as you wish.)

Or, looking at it the other way, you could say it's based around prioritising 50% of the population over the other 50%. Doesn't matter. Whether you believe it's for no-one, a tiny minority, or 50%, it's still doing the same harm to women.

(The only way the policy would not be bad for women would be if men didn't exist.)

your husband is n+1 man ie it’s never enough women that will be affected for him to think it matters

Basically he thinks womens right are not human rights and so don’t matter

When the laws are fully implemented (self-id etc) so that we cannot identify women as a sex class, the men will all rise to the top. In everything. And there will be no way of calling this out, because the laws will say that they are now women.
And our government, even if they bring in laws for 50:50 representation in government, will be half men in trousers and half TW. No women at all.
And we will NEVER be able to get our rights back, because the 'women' in parliament will vote against it.

We must stand up NOW, or go down into the dark.
Tell your husband to join our side now.
The house IS on fire.

I think the major issue here is that the rights of biological males who believe that they are women, are being put above the rights of people who are biological females.

This may make life easier for the 2.7% of people it impacts. While compromising the safety, dignity and rights of women 51% (adult and children) and male children.

Ultimately trans women don’t bother me. People with penises who may take advantage of new legislation to attack, wound, perv upon, dupe, etc women and children are what bothers me. Alongside disproportionate advantage and priority of rights for trans women, over women.

They already have mixed changing rooms at leisure centres which disincentivises women and children from using them, just the beginning.

Well in some ways I think he is right.

If you vote Tories, you also vote to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. You vote fir brexit (if that’s till a thing). You vote to reduce welfare and destroy the NHS. You vote to reduce the right to protest. You tell them that all the money sent to their pals with PPE is ok etc etc…

So Imo whatever way you vote, you need to take ALL these things into account because with your vote, you are telling them that you are ok with it all. You can’t pick and chose iyswim.

Same with labour btw.

So you might put women rights at the top of your list but well above let’s say the NHS or the right to protest. Or climate change. And feel it’s worth accepting all that.
Your DH might feel other things - like climate change - are on the whole much more serious and is happy to accept all the trans stuff

Imo all the trans stuff is much more likely to change and evolve. It already is (see rules trans who can’t compete anymore in some sports). . It will need much more pressure I agree.
Climate change, the right to protests, human rights, the economy?
Now that scares the hell of me re women. Because we will be the first to suffer from it. We already are.

It's 1% - 2.7% that are trans (plus the percent of chancing men who are "at it") but the impact is on 51% of the population. Also a small percentage of men who won't like unisex everything.
1 TW in each sport ruins that sport for women. 1 in the news every so often in a changing room affects how women and girls feel accessing those changing rooms.
1 in a female prison has all the female prisoners on edge and a few abused.
1 boy in the girls changing area at school impacts all the girls there - whether they say it or not.
The impact of this couple of percent of men is huge in terms of the damage they can do and the number of women then altering their own behaviour in prefer to try stay safe.

The environment is far and away the most important issue. It’s existential.

For once women put yourself first!

When women's terminology and words are taken away so that there is no longer any simple way to describe the group which consists of adult female human beings almost all feminist work becomes incredibly difficult and some impossible.

When we become uterus-havers, vulva people, wombcarriers, menstruators etc., the word 'woman' has been appropriated and colonised and given some new meaning we are not even allowed to inquire about. We have been stripped of our embodied identities, the ones we need to fight for our shared political issues, to organise under.

So no, this does not affect only a tiny percentage of people, but a whole sex class, the one which is currently bearing all the negative consequences of trans demands .

@MyriadOfTravels

Climate change, the right to protests, human rights, the economy?
Now that scares the hell of me re women. Because we will be the first to suffer from it. We already are.

This 100%

I care about changing room issues and all that related to trans stuff.

However, none of it will matter a tinkers when we end up with another pandemic as we didn’t do anything about climate change. Which next time could be 10% fatality, then there will be economic collapse at risk on an already shaky economy and nobody will be accessing changing rooms as we’ll all be either stuck at home or dead. Well done humans 👏

Well, he is entitled to vote however he wants. What he should not be doing is trying to minimise your concerns and your views, and therefore, discouraging you to vote for who you want.

If you have discussed women's rights regarding this issue, and he is not seeing it then there's very little chance that you will persuade him to come round to your views. Not yet, not ever maybe.

I'm with your husband on this one. I don't think it's a tiny part, but it is only a part of their overall policies.

Personally, I think that another 5 years of the tories will utterly destroy our future prospects, and so I will vote for whoever (within reason) will get them out.

Aside from their positions on gender / sex, I mostly align with labour, so I will happily vote for them, while continually working to get them to change their position on this issue, whether that be by protesting, writing to my MP, supporting Gender Critical groups financially etc.

I'm male, so while this is an important issue for me, it's not the only important issue for me. I wouldn't suppose to change my DP's mind on who to votefor , that's up to her, and I wouldn't expect her to tell me who to vote for (although she's less gender critical than me)

I also think in a way he is right. Women's rights and a party that can actually define what a women is and that doesn't want to erase our rights is hugely important to me, but not at the expense of everything else. There is nothing that could make me vote for the conservatives. I couldn't live with myself if I voted for a party who care so little for everyone but themselves, who will treat people so cruelty and with such disdain. As a pp has said, if they win again I think they could actually destroy our country.