Anyone else GC and left wing in their politics?

[mids2019]

I am finding the conservative party conference difficult in some sense as I agree with some of their GC policies and attitudes yet would describe my self as a working class died in the will leftie. I really don't like this assumption that being for women's rights automatically means people associate you with right wing politics in general. For me it's simply not the case.

Why is it that poor now associate left with trans rights????

I don't understand what you mean.

Given what the Tories have done to women's rights over the past 13 years, I am astonished that any feminist could vote for them.

I don't know what core left-wing views would logically require someone to support TWAW and all of the trans-rights claims?

Unless you want to provide an argument here, it can just be that many left-wing parties have adopted the idea, but it's not required by their other beliefs at all.

Also, if left-wing politics logically leads to "TWAW", then something has gone wrong with the whole system, because it's leading to an absurdity.

The exceptions to this such as the communist party are so fringe they are like the exceptions that prove the rule.

What are you actually talking about? How does something not adhering to a rule prove that there is a consistent rule?!

Do you even understand what you're saying? Explain it in other words.

Left wing GC feminist here in Australia. Have only voted Labour or Greens. Voted yes for marriage equality in 2017 and wondered at the time why the Federal Government needed a plebiscite to change the Marriage Act. Why didn’t they just change the Act because the outcome wouldn’t adversely affect anyone else’s rights. And since I recently peaked I’ve found out that my state Labour government had quietly amended the law to enable “trans and gender diverse people to use the toilets, change rooms and facilities appropriate to their identified gender”. I feel so betrayed. Like so many others on this thread I now feel politically homeless.

It's so depressing to read through this thread. I've just deleted a lengthy post with a lefty c.v. going back over fifty years. Anti Apartheid, Grunwick, Race, Lesbian and Gay Rights, Equal Pay, Disability, Maternity, and then through most of the struggles pp have already listed. No privilege nor money in my background.

I don't regret any of it, but I'm no longer a Labour Party member and I'm no longer a union member. (UCU was my last trades union.)

It might be that I end up spoiling my ballot paper in the next G. E. If there is an independent local candidate who sounds ok then I will give them my X.

I'll continue to speak up and fight for the rights of women and girls.

Also politically homeless. I left the Labour Party in the Corbyn wilderness years, and nothing I've seen since is tempting me back. I think the Lammy 'rights hoarding dinosaurs' moment was the nail in the coffin. In my constituency it's Tory or LD. I couldn't vote Tory, and I'm still furious with the Lib Dems for enabling them in 2010. There's zero chance for Labour here, so whoever they field will be an unknown, probably of the posturing TWAW variety. But as a pp said, women suffered and died for my right to vote, so I'm going to have to make a choice when the time comes.

None of us should have to consider spoiling our ballots.

I know, but I can't vote for the sitting Labour woman MP who tells me TWAW.
Neither would I not vote.
So I hope there is someone else I can support, otherwise I'll have to write what I think on the paper.
That's what it has come to for me, sad to say.

Yeah, I'm dreading the Labour candidate - who seems good in other ways - knocking on my door, because I'm going to have to ask him the question and I suspect I'm going to be very disappointed.

What I object to here is that Sunak has put out his binary men can't be women sound bite, not because he plans genuine policy change (ie following advice to ensure schools do not keep gender issues secret from parents etc), but purely as a stick to beat Starmer and Labour, and force a schism simply to get votes.

I really doubt this. If he could manage to get this kind of thing done, it would only be advantageous to him. And I think like most reasonably intelligent politically engaged people who aren't in thrall to id politics, he understands the nature of the problem. As do others in the party.

The problem is with actually getting something done, in the face of already existing legislation, regulations, and so on, when it's going to potentially- almost certainly - be robustly legally challenged, and then dealing with arms length organizations without being guilty of inappropriate interference, and dealing with well entrenched ideology in the civil service which makes it very difficult to do anything effectively.

The way that activists tried to get this entrenched before people realized the implications was very clever and will likely take as many years of concerted effort to remedy.

Yes I have considered it. But I think it’s right wing because of the reasons I posted much earlier in the thread:

• the prioritisation of the individual (one male) over the many (females)

• that personal choice and freedom should be prioritised over ethics and government oversight “we should be able to adulterate our bodies however we want and no one should be able to stop us”

• homophobia

• suppression of free speech that challenges the ideology.

Who should feminists vote for then?

The Tories?

Or the people who don't think we should be allowed to exist?

that personal choice and freedom should be prioritised over ethics and government oversight “we should be able to adulterate our bodies however we want and no one should be able to stop us”

It's kind of interesting that you are trying to say that both, if they are medical libertarian then that's right-wing, but also, if they are authoritarian suppressing speech they don't like, then that's right-wing.

Anyway, I haven't noticed trans-activists appealing to a libertarian persepctive.

I think it's more that they appeal to the results of medical studies, that all these medical organisations support them, and that it's "life saving treatment".

The medical evidence may not be anything like as good as they claim, but that's a different issue.

I guess they could need to be libertarian here, if they are saying something like that a "non binary" female should just be able to get testosterone for their gender expression, unconnected to mental health.

But then I'm not sure that being a medical libertarian, is something that we would strongly associate with the right-wing.

When it comes to recreational drugs say, it's the left-wing that has traditionally being a bit more on the side of personal freedom, and the right-wing on the side of criminalising them for the public good.

suppression of free speech that challenges the ideology.

Both the left-wing and the right-wing have authoritarianism in their past.

As I said, the "no platform" and "punch a TERF" style tactics seem to have been borrowed from the left-wing antifascist movement. Not sure you can blame the right wing for left-wing extremism.

Me. GC and member of Labour Party and left wing. We are there.

Trans people are not a marginalised group in the UK.

They have created this group and self-identified into it, and identify as oppressed and marginalised despite having the same rights as anyone else, plus extra privileges which no one else has.

They obtained the right to marry someone of the same sex over a decade before gay people did.

They are the only people in the whole of society who are allowed to use single sex spaces for members of the opposite sex.

They have the more or less unquestioning support of Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and some of the Conservative Party, plus the Civil Service, the Police, the NHS, the BBC and the vast majority of celebrities.

They have powerful lobby groups such as Stonewall, as well as over 300 other LGBT+ charities fighting for their interests.

They can get people fired for tweeting that sex is immutable or that the "cotton ceiling" is homophobic.

They have created a culture of fear in many workplaces where other members of staff do not feel safe objecting to mixed sex toilets or being required to state their pronouns.

They managed to convince the NHS to remove sex based language from information about women's health, thus disadvantaging various other groups who need clear and unambiguous language.

They can show up to peaceful women's rights demonstrations with the sole aim of stopping women from being allowed to speak, behave violently, assault women, and the media will describe them as brave people fighting for their own rights in the face of mindless bigotry.

They can be convicted of rape and still be allowed to serve their prison sentences in women's prisons.

They have succeeded in getting their personal belief system taught to young and impressionable children in school and in educational literature as though it is fact.

They are allowed to dictate how we refer to them and also how we are supposed to refer to ourselves.

They have an entire month of the year plus numerous other random months and days dedicated to celebrating them.

How many other groups have this kind of political representation?

If most of the corporate world turns its logos rainbow coloured for the whole month of July, if Twitter and Facebook and Instagram are prompting everyone to declare their pronouns, if the governments of modern western democracies are passing legislation making it illegal for people to refer to your biological sex or to treat you the same as other members of your biological sex because this offends you, YOU ARE NOT A MARGINALISED GROUP.

MargotBamborough 🔥 👏

Amazing post MargotBamborough!

Exactly. There's no genuine civil rights movement in history that had this kind of advantage. Oh, and let's not forget: it's nearly always about TW, not TM. In other words, the actual males.

What a STUNNING COINCIDENCE that their number one enemy appears to be feminist women of the exact generation where women's rights and sniffing out male patriarchal bullshit was at its peak. Not to mention women who are probably the best in society at picking up both coercive control tactics and enforcing safeguarding.

The constant "most vulnerable" rhetoric is utter bullshit.

Yes, isn't it funny that this new marginalised group mostly shares some very key characteristics with the most privileged group in history, i.e. wealthy, white and male?

Yes, I know that lots of looked after children in Blackpool identify as trans but let's get real, none of this is being done for their benefit, is it?

Well, I’ll try and explain it best I can but I thought it was pretty obvious… Philosophically speaking, the Western centre left/liberal parties are like the devil in the book paradise lost that many people on this forum probably had to read at university. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven… The modern left see biology like they see the rest of nature, something to be overcome and transcended by the individuals will, not something to be understood and conformed too. They don’t believe people should be constrained by biology or by anything else really. They think everyone should get to be whoever and whatever they want.

That’s why now that old the traditional restraints on liberalism have largely gone (stuff like tradition, duty, religion etc) liberalism is desolving society and replacing it with rampant individualism. This was always going to happen, it doesn’t just stop because one group have their rights, in their ideology the individual will must be absolutely free of every constraint other than perhaps their interpretation of the harm principle. Of course the same parties that fought for women’s liberation are going to fight for trans rights. They won’t just stop fighting for rights now because women have theirs.

If this doesn’t make sense I don’t know how else I could explain it, but I suspect a lot of people won’t want to see it that way and therefore won’t. Your reason and logic will lead you to wherever your heart wants to go. So if people don’t want to see something they simply won’t.

The problem that I have is that I want to vote for a party that prioritises climate, with social justice as a close second.
With the Green Party having drunk the Kool Aid I am now homeless and face just not voting next time, or voting Green and hoping that the tide turns.

I like your Paradise Lost explanation. Not all or even most of us on the left are postmodernist individualists, though, so I think there's still hope! :)

Why is it that people now associate left with trans rights????

Cos they read too much (American) shite on social media and don't bother to either listen or check what's actually been said and by whom.

This is best demonstrated by JKR.

Instead they've been sucked into the propaganda of either being with us or against us. And since they are left wing and all left wingers are against discrimination and for equality with the one dimensional narrative they have been fed, it stands to reason that everyone else is right wing. Left wingers can't possibly be sexist or homophobic or racist cos they are above that.

Except that's not true.

Their poor little brains might explode at the notion that it's a bit more complicated than that and there's lots of left wingers who are concerned about this subject precisely because it discriminates and produces inequality for certain groups.

It's depressing.

@Duffdee’Of course the same parties that fought for women’s liberation are going to fight for trans rights.’

There is no ‘of course’ about it. It is obvious that Trans rights tramples all over women’s rights. Anyone with an ounce of understanding can see that.

The issue is also that the characteristic of being a woman is not a protected characteristic, so women are not regarded as ‘vulnerable’ and our rights do not need protection. No one thought through self identification and the effect on women only spaces.

Neither homophobia nor suppression of free speech belong inherently to the right wing, and they certainly aren't alien to the left. Otherwise we are going to have to call Maoist China a right wing project! That's the point, it does not belong on a list that tells us something must be right wing.

Any ideology that creates a social hierarchy can be broken down to the individual. Even in a classic leftist class analysis you still ultimately have some individuals against some other individuals. It's on the basis, according to the theory, of class membership, but they are still real people with individual wills and circumstances.

This ideology is not basing its hierarchy on the primacy of the individual, it's based upon membership in an identity grouping. In this case "gender" but it could be any other identity group, and they are organized into a hierarchy that is based on who is supposedly socially oppressed.

You can argue this is illegitimate, not based in material reality, whatever, but it's a leftist construction, neither individualistic nor conservative.

The question around who controls the body I don't think manages to be inherently of the right either. You could say it has a libertarian flavour, but while you find economic libertarians on the right, mainly, social libertarians seem to associate more with the left. The argument that people should be able to do what they want with their own bodies is hardly alien to left wing feminism, for example - though there have also been far left groups that were quite happy to control people's body for the good of the cause. I'd suggest that kind of elevation of freedom as the highest good isn't really left or right wing, it's liberal.