Dismissed by supposed ally husband

[BewilderedPiskie]

I thought my husband was truly listening and understanding my concerns about TRA rhetoric and it's political and social impact but now with an election looming he has told me repeatedly that I NEED to vote Labour as "the trans thing" is a non-issue and women are not under threat. Essentially he has now made it clear that he does not believe there is a problem and I am just being swayed by 'online' noise. I find this utterly repellent. I have spent 4 years listening to and reading both online and imprint. His out of hand dismissal of everything I have looked at, read and researched makes me realise how absolutely misogynistic ordinary and supposedly supportive men can be. I'm menopausal and my memory is terrible. I know that I have been made increasingly worried by a huge number of well researched and documented articles, online pieces, books and podcasts; please could you send me links that have the key GC arguments and that demonstrate why Labour is particularly problematic for women's concerns. I feel utterly betrayed.

I will expect to be lobbying whatever government that gets in, on GC issues. Reality is NONE of the major UK parties are GC.

There’s this fallacy that the Tories are going to reverse 13 years of policy and save us from TRAs. That is such utter bollocks. Vote Tory if you like the Tories- but remember this complete shitshow has happened entirely on the Tories’ watch.

The last 13 Tory years have sold women’s rights completely down the river and the only government action on GC issues is to very narrowly avoid bringing in self ID as proposed for the whole UK (until they saw it was electoral catsick) and the only concrete legal action taken has been to bring in the £5 GRC. They’ve not even produced proper guidance for schools, they haven’t listened to women at all.

Those things are what we have to thank the Tories for.

Your DH can fuck off- your vote is your own. And once you have voted for whoever you want we will all still be here together slogging it out with whatever new government it is because they are ALL such a long way from being GC.

I’m voting Labour because I cannot bear what the Tories have done to this country, on child poverty, unsafe school and hospital buildings, rampant political corruption, the Climate crisis, the housing crisis, the cost of living crisis, the social and economic disaster of Brexit, and financially starving the NHS. We had loads of excess deaths from Covid, PPE mis selling and backhanders from Tory contracts. And just the normalising of grotesque inequality - the fact that food banks are a daily necessity for thousands of people now. State schools are desperately struggling to provide just the bare minimum for kids, and you can basically forget it if your kids have additional needs. Sunak is ditching green energy targets and has no climate or economic vision for the future.

It’s a disgrace and I can’t reward this shitshow with my vote.

I think I might write, "Why is there no party which respects women's rights?" on my ballot paper.

And in 2026, when everything looks the same but you also have a political party operating with evangelical zeal, closing down language and building legal precedents to dissolve a sex for decades to come, what kind of lobbying holds that back?

The polling booth is private. You are under no obligation to justify who you vote for to anyone other than yourself.

There are two problems here.

Firstly, your political voting does not need to be shared with anyone. Discuss the different parties but your vote is between you and the ballot box.

I think your main problem is realising your husband is not who you thought he was. I had the same problem. I thought my husband knew women were equal and had rights. Then he told me that the little girl in the WII spa incident caused the trouble. She should have looked away apparently. It's not that he thinks TWAW but that women in general are wrong.

I am now in the process of divorce. I cannot live with a man who thinks me and half the population are worthless. If you want to delve into this side a bit more then start a thread in Relationships.

I’m voting Labour because I cannot bear what the Tories have done to this country, on child poverty, unsafe school and hospital buildings, rampant political corruption, the Climate crisis, the housing crisis, the cost of living crisis, the social and economic disaster of Brexit, and financially starving the NHS. We had loads of excess deaths from Covid, PPE mis selling and backhanders from Tory contracts. And just the normalising of grotesque inequality - the fact that food banks are a daily necessity for thousands of people now. State schools are desperately struggling to provide just the bare minimum for kids, and you can basically forget it if your kids have additional needs. Sunak is ditching green energy targets and has no climate or economic vision for the future.
It’s a disgrace and I can’t reward this shitshow with my vote.

Thank you @Slothtoes , for your eloquence and basically saying exactly how I feel.
Single issue voting on trans undermines all these issues that affect everyone in the country. I could weep for all the health, education, childcare and social care problems that my family members are dealing with, that simply wouldn't have been a problem a couple of decades ago. No party will be able to work miracles on the shit tip that the Tories are leaving behind, but there's no way in hell that I could ever vote Tory, whatever they come out with on the trans issue.

I begrudge my concerns being framed as a single issue. I'm concerned about women's single sex spaces, I'm concerned about freedom of speech, I'm concerned about safeguarding, I'm concerned about democracy, I'm concerned about the language games that disguise good data and bamboozle sensible discussion, I'm concerned about the appetite for moralizing dissent.

I understand that you look at the same landscape and come to another conclusion but it's not reasonable to suggest that I'm myopic rather than just different.

But we cannot solve that problem while everything else burns.

Absolutely this

Well said @Desecratedcoconut. It’s very reductive and patronising to suggest that the erosion of our rights is a single issue. As you rightly point out this issue impacts multiple policy areas and disadvantages women in each of them.

0.5% of the population identifies as a gender not in line with their sex.

22% of the population is in poverty.

That's just one 'bigger' problem.

51% of the population is female.

Why should the demands of the 0.5% who believe that there should be some correlation between their personality and their genitalia trump the needs of the 51%?

Is that 0.5% statistic based on the flawed consensus data, where yet more language mangling, saw a huge uptick in transgenderism in areas where English was more likely to be a second language?

I really understand this and I have huge sympathy, the NHS is completely broken and failing people (despite the best efforts of the medical staff), but I don't understand why anyone thinks it will be better under Labour? If anything I think there will be more rainbow flags and even fewer front line staff. They'll just handwave any complaints away and deny facts, just as they do on biological reality.

There is the National Health Action party which I'd vote for if I could but other than them, I don't actually see any party with workable plans to save the NHS. I'm not really sure what's happened to them actually. I hope they still exist.

Labour gave us the disastrous PFI. I just don't see Labour as being any better for the NHS than the Tories.

I can’t reply to this because your statistics have nothing to do with mine and the post I replied to.

a PP said that a whole generation of gay kids will be ‘transed’ and lose their fertility, and asked what bigger problem than that there was.

apart from the fact that I don’t know where they got their info from (is it ALL gay kids? Just a fraction?), I pointed out one problem that is bigger than ‘transing’, that affects more of the population.

DH has said that Mumsnet should form a political party, the collective of Mumsnet could rule the world according to him.

Even if it is, I doubt the adjustment would quite equal to 22%.

after all, the ‘tiny’ percentage of people who identify as trans is always brought up in FWR arguments as to why they shouldn’t be pandered to. It’s even been mentioned here.

funny how it’s always a small statistic when arguing for that, but it’s ‘flawed data’ when in an argument about something else being more prevalent.

and FWIW, I am GC. But there are issues that are more important to me, which will be affecting who I vote for.

I mean, it's been widely reported that the staff at the Tavistock clinic joked about the fact that there would be no more gay kids left because they would all have transitioned.

I find that pretty alarming.

Single issue voting on trans undermines all these issues that affect everyone in the country.

Can I just point out that it's a womens rights issue here, and not a singular problem. Many political issues can disproportionatly affect women (eg Benefits, as so many women are carers, Health eg endless maternity unit scandals and Public Transport, as so many women do shift work). But we can't measure the impact of policy decisions unless we know what a woman is (and isn't) and are collecting clear data. We can't monitor pay gaps between men and women if senior males can put "she/her" pronouns in their emails and then fudge the figures. We can't look at crime stats and offender rehabilitation if we're forced to pretend that women can be rapists. How can we trust politicians who want to run a country based on pretence and feelings rather than facts and reality?

Wtf are you on about? My question asked where you got that data from and if it was another example of language mangling? I made no other comment about that.

Apparently the answer is, 'Even if' - as though it's entirely irrelevant and academic that this aptly demonstrates that there is a gulf between the comprehension skills of much of the general public, so much so that they could incorrectly and accidentally declare themselves to be transgender, and the way that that this new language is being deployed to change important policy.

I am amazed why people still want to vote Labour when thy don't know even what a woman is !!

That is a horrible thing for staff to have said. But the for purposes of voting, there are things I find much more alarming.

If replacing women's rights and political voice with some hazy idea based on gender is so much less important than all the other issues why are Labour not just defusing that bomb now by saying they will make no further moves towards self id in law or in practice, and reassert that the existing rights to offer single sex services and support are valid, reasonable and should be respected and protected? Why is it women that need to swallow shit for the good of all rather than those who want to reduce and marginalise us?

Basically, if it's such a minor thing why isn't anyone telling the TRAs to back down and focus on the real important stuff?

Basically, if it's such a minor thing why isn't anyone telling the TRAs to back down and focus on the real important stuff?

This!

I think it is terribly sweet that so many people think labour is the answer.

They have literally zero policies. You have no idea what they will do, because they don't either.

What a shit show

I completely agree. The faux progressive misogyny of their extremists also frightens me.

Your husband can't force you to vote a certain way just like you can't force him to.