MPs who believe ‘women have a penis’ will be named and shamed ahead of general election

[fromorbit]

Brilliant plan sure plenty of Mumsnetters will be up for being part of the volunteer army asking questions:

An “army” of volunteers in an apolitical new grassroots campaign is gearing up to meet all MPs and parliamentary candidates at hustings events and on their doorsteps to ask each one the question: “What is a woman?”

Their answers will be video recorded and uploaded individually to a website which is being launched in the coming months.

It will allow voters to find out instantly whether their next MP thinks women must be born female and that binary biological sex cannot be changed, or whether they believe that male-born transgender women are women too.

Sharron Davies MBE, the former Olympic swimmer and feminist campaigner who has been appointed as the campaign’s first ambassador, said it would let voters “know if their MP will stand up for women”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/23/mps-believe-women-penis-named-trans-election-sharron-davies/

We also need a women's issues hustings in every constituency in the election run by people who know what women are. Women Won't Wheesht (WWW) have already run the prototype in Rutherglen [the hustings was reinstated after an attempt to cancel it after they realised banning women's meetings is in fact illegal.]
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4899435-womens-group-hustings-for-rutherglen-hamilton-west-byelection-cancelled

Who benefits?

Interesting question as you say there is a right wing inclined free speech section who are very interested in culture wars.

Yet there is also a centerist liberal section focused on free speech and a section of old school leftists [people interested in material conditions over identity issues] who want free speech too. All of these people benefit.

Because what you are ignoring here is the internal war inside all the political parties. As you point out the new official Labour line is that women are adult females. In this they are aligning with the position of Labour Women's Declaration though not admitting that. The new position are also saying the TRA faction inside Labour ARE WRONG. So advantage LWD because in Starmer's Labour defying the party line is a risky prospect.

This is in fact a huge win for those fighting the internal war. Because once you admit women exist you are destroying Trans attempts to take Women's Officers positions in local CLPs a long term aim of theirs. Also crippling any attempt to get rid of the many gender crits in Labour. You also encourage gender fanatics to leave the party.

So getting every Labour candidate in the election to say women are women cripples TRA attempts to subverts Labour. In the inevitable parliamentary battles over women's rights to come it means that many Labour MPs will have been forced to say they think women exist. They can backtrack later, but it will on record. Because this is as much about the 2028/9 election as the one in 2024.

Likewise for those fighting in Liberals, Greens, SNP and the Tories. Because don't forget the TRA faction inside the Tories still exist and are sabotaging attempts to get biological sex recognised as much as possible.

It forces candidates to declare positions and this helps in the internal battles.

Obviously only a small number of people are going to change their vote over this so in that I agree it doesn't matter that much.

In the wider battle over gender though this is a massive thing though. Because it makes it clear there is a war between biological realists and gender idealists in Parliament, NHS, schools and everywhere else.

This isn't just daft women going wait a second people are saying I don't exist and that is important. Some of our MPs actually believe this. Some people think sex isn't real.

You can easily find out if individual MPs are institutional religious or not. This is just as important to know.

So most of your objections were based on things not happening anyway.

As for who benefits. I do. And others who are interested in hearing answers

Why now - because it’s better before a GE than after we’ve already voted

On how much impact it has well that’s where media headlines come in.

And classifying a trans-woman as female doesn't make any cis-women less women?

and with just this statement, you have made women "other" and "less"

We are not a sub class, we are just women.

I have an issue with a coordinated campaign to "name and shame" MPs with the "wrong" views. Because I think it opens them up to abuse. For many (especially in Scotland) they are just doing their job and following the party line.
Thats just not an excuse. I have no one left to vote for because of this - though how can I tell a secretly-pro-woman-but-feart-of-losing-seat politician from a full on believer? I can't, so I won't vote for them.

Classifying a male person (regardless of how they identify) as female means you no longer have a word that actually means female.

None of this makes women any less women, or indeed trans women any more women. The obvious differences between us, and the obvious common factors between trans women and men, will continue to exist even if all the vocabulary we used to have to describe these things has been redefined and repurposed. It will just be that much harder to communicate who and what we are talking about when we are trying to discuss our lives and our rights.

I have an issue with a coordinated campaign to "name and shame" MPs with the "wrong" views. Because I think it opens them up to abuse. For many (especially in Scotland) they are just doing their job and following the party line.

Are there other topics on which we can't ask MPs for their views, lest they provoke extremists?

I appreciate being an MP must be very hard and no doubt they get a lot of attacks. I understand this is worse for women, and I empathise.

The solution just cannot be that MPs avoid offering a position or can't be questioned. That's mad.

The job of MPs is not to follow the party line. The job of MPs is to represent their constituents. If an MP is willing to lie to their constituents about something as basic as whether men are women, he or she is not going to be a good MP.

I have to ask, do most people on this thread vote for the ‘leader’ or vote for the candidate who has the best local and national manifesto?

Maybe because I come from a country with compulsory voting, I have never yet voted for the potential ‘leader’ because that has in the past, in my experience, delivered the candidate who is the weakest for my electorate. I don’t have many friends who have voted just for the leader either.

So, who benefits? I agree with others, me! On important issues, a handy reckoner listing opinions in one place such as this is useful.

I have asked several times on the thread though about the question. I do think that merely asking ‘what is a woman?’ is going to deliver some ambiguous answers. But it is a start and it is something. It already has produced results where some candidates/MPs have virtue signaled to unconditional and unquestioning trans support.

However, I also don’t agree that MPs merely ‘toe the line’. Some don’t, some have been elected because they are independent thinkers (and that might be supportive or not) and they are the ones that are good to know about.

The reality is that political parties need to support their candidates. If a group is going to abuse the candidate for holding a legal and reasonable and evidenced opinion, the party needs to address that.

And needs to pull their heads out and stop with the fucked up ‘it is both sides’ and ‘take the heat out’ type narrative they have allocated to the issues. They have done effectively used those platitudes to ignore those issues and been able to do so because they have not been in the position of power.

A mixture, Helle, for me personally. Individual MPs do matter, a lot. So does party policy.

Yes. I agree.

It is about both local and national aims for that candidate. I don’t believe a local candidate would have a local manifesto that didn’t fit with the national one, would they?

But I would never vote for a candidate just to get a particular person into the PM role under any government run using the Westminster model. Because leaders change and often that means a faction change.

"It wasn't my fault, I was just following the party line".

How many genocides has this excuse been trotted out after?

All of them.

No.

Their job is NOT to follow the party line. Their job is to represent their constituents.

All of them, not just the 4% of screamers with interesting hair.

Yes. If a candidate is paying lipservice, just following the tribal line/activist groupthink, it suggests that their other "principles" may also not be genuine.

I think it's remarkable how the idea of asking a question of people aspiring to be our elected representatives can on the one hand be so futile and on the other hand cause such discomfort.

In terms of elected representatives having to follow the party line, despite whips being issued regarding the GRR bill, 9 SNP and 2 Labour MSP's ignored their party's whip and voted with their own principles.

They've taken a lot of shit for it - Ash Regan in particular. But I'll tell you what- I'm a lot more likely to vote for them, knowing that they won't blindly follow the party line, if they disagree with it.

I have a question about why one poster thinks so.

Are they perhaps one of those who will be required to answer?

Yes, it's really quite amazing 🧐

Possibly just someone who thinks nothing is more important than getting the Tories out.

Meh.

The Tories have been in power for 13 years and yes, a lot of things have turned to absolute shit in that time, but society hasn't completely broken down and is still a long way off that point.

I'd rather have them in power for another five years if that's what it will take to make Labour see sense on women's rights.

I think blindly hating tories is as ridiculous as blindly loving Labour.

Both get it terribly, terribly wrong sometimes.

Both get it right sometimes.

As for the SNP.....it'll be a cold day in hell before I ever vote for them, irrespective of how truly lovely and optimistic my local MSP is. I'm sad that I can't vote for them, but I'd be shooting myself in the eye if I did that.

Yes baldie. I consider each party deserves a great deal of suspicion. I actually don’t quite understand blind adherence to a political party as a voter. But then, political party alignment has never been something I have made integral to my identity.

@AdamRyan I think we’ll all benefit from asking a clear simple question, you seem to be making something simple into the usual “it’s complex”. We don’t want to muddy the waters.
what is a woman ? Should be easy enough to answer. Then follow up with can someone born male ever be a woman.
I look forward to the answers, if they are any longer than two sentences, we can assume they’ve swallowed the genderborg

More broadly and to my original point there are so many other things I'd rather talk to my MP about which would impact women

Like what?
Tell us what you think is more pressing right now and we'll say why that wont work if you include men of any gender.

@AdamRyan is another , shut up silly women, your rights don’t matter, stop upsetting the grown ups

I also think there's a very high likelihood of politicians of all stripes saying "woman = adult human female" (as per Starmer recently) and no-one feeling reassured because maybe female includes people with a GRC, or maybe TRAs are going to colonise womanhood.

starmer said adult female, he never specified which species.

Given how recently the phrase 'adult human female' was regarded by some as a dog whistle if not out and out hate speech, then I will take its adoption by any mainstream party as a small win, although of course it won't end the war.

I'm less bothered about the fact that he didn't specify which species and more bothered about the fact that we now need to ask people to clarify what they mean when they use the word "female".

This is why I've actually rowed back from my previous position that trans women should be considered women in some circumstances, i.e. that "woman" could refer to "gender" whereas "female" clearly refers to sex.

As soon as I started to see people referring to trans women as female, I realised there was nowhere further to go except right back to the start.

Because as soon as you start describing male people as female, you no longer have a word in your language that actually means female, i.e. the childbearing sex.

If I now want to refer to all members of the childbearing sex in language that proponents of gender identity theory will currently accept and not pretend to misunderstand, I have to say "people who were assigned female at birth". I don't want to do this for three reasons. Firstly, it refers to a completely fictional concept, i.e. the idea that babies are assigned something at birth. This is antiscientific nonsense and I know that sane people will think less of me if I use terminology like this. And secondly, this term isn't particularly useful for communicating with anyone other than trans activists because it isn't widely used outside their particular echo chamber and so if I were to use it in a normal conversation with normal people, most of them wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about, especially if I used the acronym "AFAB". And that leads to my third reason. In the unlikely event that the term "assigned female at birth" or "AFAB" ever actually became widely used by the general population, some male people would start identifying as "AFAB", presumably on the basis that they were assigned a female gender identity by the gender fairy at birth.

When you actually analyse this never-ending moving of the goalposts, and the constant appropriation of every single word that means biologically female people to include biologically male people, the true intent becomes obvious.

It isn't about the words themselves, it's the idea. They do not want us to be able to express the idea that male people with gender identities are not the same as female people.

We are not the same, of course.

Male and female people will continue to exist separately from each other for as long as humans continue to exist, and this will continue to be completely obvious to anyone with eyes and ears.

They just want to stop us from talking about it by taking away all the vocabulary that allows us to do so.

This is the inevitable conclusion that I have come to and it is why I will not tolerate it anymore. It's why I am no longer afraid to say that a trans shovel is actually a spade, because trying to adapt our language to be sensitive to this particular group of people's feelings whilst simultaneously trying to maintain some sort of grip on reality is utterly futile.