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????

Me. I have, in the past, been accused of being to the left of Marx.

I'm OK with that 😁

However I don’t thing being right of centre is something to demonise someone for.
I think there’s good points in each case, I think the centre is the sensible place.

I'm left wing. I don't agree with the conservatives or U.S. right on trans issues, because I think their views are not at all gender critical, but based in a deep-seated sexist belief in essentialist gender roles. In that respect they are far, far closer to many trans activists than they are to gender critical feminists who believe gender is a social construct. I think trans activists who believe in gender essentialism and Trump and UK conservatives are in agreement in regressive gender essentialist views at core, whereas gender critical feminists are radical and progressive.

Me - and almost all my friends. We feel politically homeless.

The Tories have had three female leaders and Labour had none. Margaret Becket would have been a great labour leader, but unfortunately for her she was a woman

That's not true of most conservatives I've met, who see less wealthy people as deserving of their lot, nor is it much comfort to the thousands of people killed by Conservative policies.
But yes in general I agree!

Me too. I really cannot understand why this is a party issue in the 1st place. Even less why all parties apart from the Converatives have taken the position they have. If it wasnt happening I would have expected the opposite.

No. But if you are - as many of us are - left-wing it is a massive insult to say we're right-wing nazis because we agree on one thing.

People who are supportive of women’s rights tend not to use the misogynistic term “hysterical” to try to shut women up.

Spot on. There is some disingenuous loonery that says this tory party is “far right”. It’s really not at all. Godwins law never helped anyone. There are plenty of women from both sides of the house here with a common cause: women’s rights.

That's true, but none if them showed any interest in women's needs or rights.

I wouldn't consider Labour left wing, by the way : that's stretching things somewhat!!

Trans activism is right wing politics. It advocates for:

• 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.

So being “left wing” or “right wing” is meaningless these days. It’s a topsy turvy world.

I am generally left wing, yes. But what this fight has highlighted to me is that (in the simplest terms) it’s possible to agree with people one on issue but not others. I think we have become too tribal and it’s almost as if we have to accept opinions as a package now.

anyway as a woman I’m a feminist first.

That doesn't make them feminist or even pro-women. It does highlight the utter misogyny of a lot of left-wing parties, though.

Yes, it's telling.

Just because someone describes themselves as on the left doesn’t automatically make them any less patronising or misogynistic than the average Sir Bufton Tufton.

Unionised men pushed back hard against women being paid the same as them and the Unions still have a big problem with promoting women to senior positions; not to mention the various payoffs / NDAs to keep their handsy bosses out of the tabloids.

There’s still not been a female Labour leader, and enough Labour MPs are wedded to the ‘sex workers are workers’ line (and seem happy to stand next to the “suck my girl dick” or “kill TERFs” type signs at TRA ‘protests’) to be concerning.

I’d like my daughters to have the rights to safe spaces that their mum once had, so I won’t be voting Labour, Green or LD next year and will have to hope that the SDP field a candidate, or that someone decent stands as an Indy.

It’s interesting though that the tories do well on both ethnic minority representation and women leaders despite being far less into “wokery”.

I've voted Lib Dem (national) and Green (local) all my life. I now find these parties unrecognisable. Or recognisable, but from a lost episode of Brass Eye.

I sometimes feel like I've turned up at a meeting of middle aged Geography teachers, and midway through a discussion on marking schemes, they all rip off their tweed jackets and start shouting about the forthcoming visit of the High Priest Umly-Rah from the Planet Zroog, and everyone nods along and agrees that Zroogism is right and progressive, and the anti-Zroogs need to be rounded up and bonfired on the village green. Like chanting TWAW is a new variation of St Vitus' Dance.

Lifelong left winger, though I'm now casting my eye backwards and wondering how much misogyny I was prepared to fail to see because it was coming from "my own side", going all the way back to 1970s CND rallies where it was just accepted that men made speeches and women made sandwiches.

Me. A proper bleeding heart liberal who believes in the welfare state and everyone getting what they need.

we’re the generation that grew up with the internet - we’ve seen a lot. We voted in gay marriage. Science is mandatory in schools. We’re decreasingly religious. We’ve grown up with androgynous pop stars in dresses and makeup. We’ve grown up with different family types. We’ve got the most workers rights ever. We’re well traveled. We’re the best connected most informed generation - We’re not right wing religious bigots ffs.

Yes, I’m centre left and never voted Tory in my life. But my generation went through getting equal pay, pensions, maternity rights, etc etc and I can’t believe that we now need to fight again for women’s rights. I’m a scientist and therefore desperately disappointed that people like Alice Roberts can believe in all this gender guff. I feel politically homeless.

All my friends are left leaning and support womens rights without getting hysterical about a tiny percentage of the population who are trans.

@emmylousings This is what is so fascinating about the Trans movement, as you say trans people make up such a tiny percentage of the population as a whole and yet there is an expectation that 50% of the population must accomodate their wishes/beliefs without complaint or are automatically seen as bigots !

I can't think of any other comparable situation that requires this ?

Yes, absolutely.

Well, I am solidly left wing. I am a little on the fence on trans rights because some GC are too extreme for me. I reckon I'm part of the JK Rowling Tendency. But nothing could make me vote Tory, and I think getting them out is the single most important thing at the moment. I hope the TRAs are losing momentum and in a few years time sanity will prevail about the most egregious idiocies. The same canMt be said about Tory policies.

Me. I think being gender critical is a totally different axis to left/right. The political spectrum is already more complicated than left-right because the authoritarian-libertarian axis is independent of it, so there are liberal left-wingers who are happy with people having the personal freedom to get wealthy and eg use private scgools and authoritarian left wingers who want a more proscritive socialist state with more state control preventing too much divergence from an acceptable basic lifestyle that is in line with the state's ethical principles. You get liberal conservatives who hasically want the state to do not much more than maintain an army and provide oversight to ensure that the (privately owned and operated) infrastructure of civilization functions (power, phone & Internet connectivity, water, sewage and roads) and to enforce justice, but doesn't want any state control of people's life choices so want as few things as possible to be "illegal", and authoritarian conservatives who want to uphold specific (often religion-based) values and a traditional lifestyle and want to use authoritarian state power to define contravening those values as "illegal".

We all know that being Gender Critical isn't the same as being Anti Trans. There is a lot of Anti Trans rhetoric and policy from the people in the 4th category but its not always Gender Critical, it may be Gender Enforcing. There will be gender critical conservatives in the 3rd category (ie wear what you want, do what you want, call yourself what you want but I get to believe that science is science and no one gets to tell me what to believe)

Unfortunately a lot of the "progress" made recently has been more from people in the 4th category, who parcel it up with homophobia and want to enforce compliance with a heterosexual and gender-confirming "norm" and that is rather repellent. There's bad laws in some states which will need to be reformed by a later more liberal administration before there's any fairness.

I don't understand the left-wing's capture by the trans movement. The communist party are certainly properly GC and recognise that being female is a sex class that has been oppressed and has the right and the need to unite in class struggle to achieve equality and no male can "identify in" to that class but that's usually the more authoritarian end of the left-wing range, whereas the more liberal end, which I would expect to therefore share the view of "wear what you want, do what you want, call yourself what you want but I get to believe that science is science and no one gets to tell me what to believe" is instead weirdly authoritarian on this one issue, wanting to enforce compulsory belief in a counterfactual unreality.

To be honest I think most left-wingers who aren't GC (or at least if they do believe in counterfactual unreality thenselves, recognise other people's right not to do so) are probably just not that bright and haven't thought about it too deeply, or are plenty bright enough and do "get it", and are probably closet-GC actually, but are too cowardly to stand up to the powerful trans movement.