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)?

Is it cos he wants to share changing rooms/bathrooms with little girls?
That's what i'd be asking. Any bloke that doesn't have any care about women and girls being forced to share facilities, needs to be having a very deep think about the roll on effects to everything else and if women and girls are too scared to fully participate in society, nothing else matters much.

Such a pity the Women's Equality Party think anyone can be a woman. Although , under the quaintly Medieval FPTP system , they'd never get an MP elected anyway.

A Women's Rights Party here in Ireland might fare better. They'd surely get lots of 2nd preferences from women across the political spectrum?

One woman just one being negatively affected by trans rights is one too many and it is already more than one.

Tell him to make sure transwomen are welcomed and supported in the male single sex spaces where they belong.

I wish the Labour party would really resolve this issue in a way that fully respects the rights of women. If they don't and people are going to vote Tory instead then we are going to be stuck with the outcome of Tory policies for another 4 years and the country will be on its knees.

Keir Starmer thinks 1 in 1000 women have a penis. For me this makes him as credible as the Monster Raving Loony party.

For me this is the biggie. It's not just the potential damage of this one policy (bad as it is) but the potential damage of people that stupid or dishonest running the country.

Your husband is entitled to vote for who he wants based on whatever issues he likes.

If you believe that "knowing what a woman is" is worth sending female asylum seekers to Rwanda for then crack on and vote Tory.

Personally I don't think any party is good for women's rights. I don't understand why people think that the Tories are given that they are currently in power while women's rights are being eroded.

I agree but don't you think the Tories have showed themselves to be equally stupid and dishonest?

I am considering spoiling my paper but then I feel bad about wasting my vote.
I don't know what to do.

It boggles my mind that there are people who will vote for the devious, self serving, dishonest and plain cruel Tories, on a single issue.

They've destroyed education, health, social care and absolutely everything that any woman should care about and which affects their lives and those of all those they love. And then there's climate change...

They're evil, and them claiming to know what a woman is, is I'm afraid, nowhere near enough for me to vote for them

I agree with your DH.

Your husband has not grasped that one male in a women's space makes it mixed sex, and so destroys it.

Or that, as a man, he has no conception of why that matters so much. If a decent man, he will accept that the decision on whether it does isn't his.

Over to him.

Still can’t vote for Keir, he just keeps digging that hole.

A lot of people think that way, as we see in discussions here all the time. And of course whenever you have a bunch of poor choices, it is very tricky to balance what is more important.

But to some extent I think it comes down to people who see these policies in terms of a bunch of discrete policies, and those who seem them more as a systematic whole.

For me there are a few systems implicated with these policies. One is that we know they are creating these complex legal fictions, that they are building upon more and more, and which will become the basis for more policies. I think the idea of basing these complex policy systems on things which we know are objectively untrue can only lead to disaster. There aren't many other policy areas that look quite so cracked in that way to me - in most cases I look at sets of policies about things like economics or the environment and think different groups have elements of the truth or arguable interpretations of reality.

There's the point that we can see in places that have made the legal changes Labour is talking about, it has become completely impossible to even discuss many of these problems.

A huge issue for me is that gender ideology is part of a larger anti-democratic way of thinking, and part of a type of identity politics that believes in hierarchical power games and that enforcing equality of outcome among groups (The right groups anyway) through the machinations of the state, is a good idea. In that I can't separate it from the authoritarianism we saw more and more openly during the pandemic, the interference in scientific inquiry on politically contentious topics, or larger problems in education, among other things.

I don't want women to be called "womb havers" or whatever but if you think that's an issue on a par with climate change or the collapse of health and social care in this country then frankly you've lost all perspective.

Please don’t vote Tory - they are simply the worst

I agree with him - I vote based on a whole bunch of issues with climate and economy and support for the disadvantaged near the top. and Labour are far better on all of those.

I also don't think the tories are doing anything about women's rights out of a solid principle that women's rights matter. they just think it is part of the culture wars and is a way to annoy Labour. Most of them would be happy to ignore women / put us back in the kitchen if they could. So I wouldn't trust them on this matter or anything else.

I don’t think you can change his point of view, which I suspect is what most people in this country think (Fundamentally I think your DH is correct)

For me its the pandering and inability to say the truth out loud. We know this sort of thinking leads to eg Rotherham etc because of being scared of racism accusations. And now tw in Prisons because of fear of transphobia. If they can say things like it's wrong to say only women have a cervix what else do they fundamentally misunderstand? How can they make law and uphold justice if they are deluded?

BTW the tories have been awful for this too but at least recognise yhat white working class girls can be victims of abuse and tw can be abusers.

This is a canary in the coal mine issue for me. If a leader is too stupid or too cowardly to state biological reality in public then I don't believe that person is competent to deal with any other issue. Someone who hasn't got the nerve to state TW are not W shouldn't be given the nuclear codes.

Yeah, I agree. I will probably have to vote labour because another 5 years of Tories is an unmitigated disaster.

I think Starmer has probably moved far enough from the Corbyn position of pure SelfID for me to hold my nose.

It's a depressing choice though.

I suppose it comes down to whether you trust your thoughts on the canary in the coal mine or the entire body of evidence of the Tory policies over the last 12 years and living within the outcome of that for you and your family. For me the problem with voting based on a single issue is that you don't give equal attention across a broad range of issues many of which are vital to the future of the country. The fact that so many Tory MPs voted to pollute our waterways with sewage, the care home/covid debacle/the fact that never has so little been invested in the NHS/the 21,000 less police brings into question their competence - are these not canaries in a coal mine?

Oh no they're not!

I might have got my threads crossed.

I didn't say that the Tories didn't have their canary in a coal mine moments but rather that this is an important issue. It's one which is testing the mettle of a lot of politicians and many are demonstrating that they are easily manipulated fools.

I can understand voting on a broadly defined single issue, but voting Tory on the basis of their purported support for women’s rights, give their record over the past 13 years seems crazy

Wildeheart, surely he can see how gobsmackingly illogical that point is! His answer would be funny if the issue wasn't so serious.

Just one man in a women's changing room, or rape crisis centre, or hospital ward stops them being single-sex spaces. In fact, if we know men are allowed into so-called women's spaces, it doesn't matter if no man actually enters them: we've lost the safety of knowing they are female-only.

Just one man competing against women can prevent all women from winning an Olympic gold medal in that sport. Three men competing, from around the entire world, could prevent any woman standing on the winners' podium in that sport.

And self-ID means that every man, whether or not he has the slightest trans tendency, will have the right to enter any women-only space, because no one will have the right to challenge him.