Mark Drakeford, First Minister Wales: women's concerns a 'shrill dogwhistle'

[Pluvia]

This is the man who went to Swansea Pride the other week and talked solely about trans, ignoring the LGB completely.

Today he accused a member of the Senedd voicing concerns brought to him by her constituents of being shrill and using a dogwhistle.

https://twitter.com/LauraJ4SWEast/status/1655954016151695360

How can it be democratic if your responses are muted?

Mark Drakeford in January:
Wales should have a gender self-identification system similar to the one approved in Scotland, Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford has said.

Mark Drakeford yesterday:
I'm simply not going to get drawn into the shrill and deliberately divisive debate that the Member continuously attempts to raise on the floor of this Senedd ... The Member and people like her spent the whole of April trying to raise these dog-whistle concerns ... Don't come here and tell me that I don't understand people's priorities when you pursue an agenda that is designed exclusively to divide people, when our job should be to try and unite people in pursuit of basic decencies.

So in January bringing in gender self-ID for Wales was something that Drakeford thought was really important. Now debating this is a 'dogwhistle concern' that the Tories are trying to draw him into.

If he doesn't want to discuss his position on this issue, perhaps he should withdraw his support for a change to the GRA which would remove women's rights.

He wants to bring in a deeply divisive law without any debate, while claiming to try to "unite people in pursuit of basic decencies" but accuses his political opponents of pursuing "an agenda that is designed exclusively to divide people".

To all you said here -
what an accurate analysis, thank you for laying that out so clearly, OldCrone · Today 13:30

IME men call women 'shrill' when they want them to be silent.

Nothing to do with the tone of their voice; it's a not-very-subtle reminder that they are female, and should know their place, and be silent.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/27/eight-words-sexism-heart-english-language

https://phys.org/news/2021-05-shrill-bossy-emotional-language-gender.html

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-century-of-shrill-how-bias-in-technology-has-hurt-womens-voices

https://www.bustle.com/articles/140093-5-ways-to-stop-describing-womens-speaking-habits-because-shrill-is-a-gendered-term

https://debuk.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/the-taming-of-the-shrill/

'Low voice pitch, a highly salient marker of maleness, is also strongly associated with authority. In 2012 an experimental study using digitally manipulated recordings of men and women saying ‘I urge you to vote for me this November’ found that judges of both sexes preferred the lower pitched version of each recording. Both men and women were advantaged by having a lower voice than their same-sex ‘rival’.
This association is what makes the word ‘shrill’, which combines the concept of high pitch with the idea of an unpleasantly piercing sound, such a common criticism of female public speakers. The linguist Nic Subtirelu has investigated the use of ‘shrill’, along with two other terms that do a similar job, ‘shriek’ and ‘screech’, in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. He calculates that the media are
2.17 times more likely to describe a woman or a girl as “screeching” (or a related form of the word) than a man. A woman or girl is also 3.14 times more likely to be described as “shrieking” (or a related form of the word), and she’s 2.3 times more likely to be described as “shrill”.'

https://time.com/4268325/history-calling-women-shrill/

Very interesting post, @ArabeIIaScott Thank you.

It's a pity a man in the senedd doesn't stand up and support her. Drakeford would have to whistle up another demeaning adjective.

Merched Cymru have made a formal complaint to the Senedd Commissioner for Standards about what has happened: twitter.com/MerchedCymru/status/1656370180472074245

Laura herself made a formal complaint to the Senedd’s Presiding Officer, Elin Jones regarding the use language which she says was “discriminatory, sexist and offensive”.

Nation Cymru has covered it too.
https://nation.cymru/news/first-minister-accused-of-sexist-jibe-in-senedd/

Just been following the FB comments on the nation cymru page the misogynists have crawled out in force

https://www.facebook.com/979485022187968/posts/pfbid02UffQEVW6iH5mUMy8Y3gu34p7x7WEpdaQFNKM5u3vYZwNe1zCEwGgCYrA7URMxvMAl/?sfnsn=scwspmo

Link if you have FB apparently only Tories would think that Drakeford was out of order.

Good. Well done, all of them.

Excellent tweets from Merched Cymru! Archived now, too: https://archive.ph/LDLTx

I love that Enfield/Whitehouse sketch.