Has Jess Phillips finally found her spine?

[BlackForestCake]

I see Jess Phillips spoke on a Labour Women's Declaration platform tonight. Which means at least she's burnt her last remaining bridges to the wokies.

Well that's where you and I part company, RealityFan.

What have I said now?

I don't want to derail the thread, but fundamentally I don't believe anything about the TRA position is 'Left' in any sense, and it annoys me very much when TRA protestors are described as 'Leftists' (even if they so describe themselves).

tl;dr:

Not 'my' Left.

I agree, “Leftists” and “woke” are lazy tropes that instantly demean any argument, however sound the rest of it is. Spiked columnists ruin many of their excellent gender articles with liberal splashings of “woke”, and that fella filming the LWS/Labour conference on this or another thread diminished his point (for me) by taunting the trans protesters with “leftie” insults, it’s so… childish, so silly. Most GC people I know are left-wing, they/we don’t see it as a party political issue, like e.g. Billy Bragg and Owen Jones do.

This is the video I was referencing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=5Q5giAAn76BwM2nj&v=VGC6g7JHUi0&feature=youtu.be

Said as much on the thread. But it's a relatively minor quibble; I'm glad he was there and documented it.

I am seeing "left" in this context (RealityFan's comment) as the Labour progressive "no-one to my left" stance.
I do see Jess Phillips and Lisa Nandy being cut from this cloth.
It's the cloth I would have considered myself cut from too until I realised where it logically led to.

I hadn't really thought through what it meant before I started understanding the impact of gender identity belief. I just assumed the far left was simply communism, so I had discounted that from my "no-one" as a very niche type of politics that wasn't really related to the idea of progressive labour/liberal thinking.

Sorry, meant to attach this... Just tried on the edit button but couldn't work it out.

Partly agree and disagree. I believe gender ideology is agnostic, seeds in late 60s social justice activism, 80s Thatcher individualism culture, 90s 00s Blair legal codified human rights, all leading to less and less communitarian impulses, more and more Me Culture. Throw in the second wave of social justice activism after the 60s, the Stonewall drive to hyper individualism, even the tabloids have given up on Benefit Street and Fat Slag type headlines. And now the predominantly Right libertarian/neo liberal drive to transhumanism.
Imho, trans activism is the mutant offspring of Right economic individualism mixed with Left barrier breaking, fuelled by Authentic Self therapeutic approaches and Weaponised Kindness as all judging from society upon individuals actions to be shunned.
And the magic ingredient that has always been present in both Right and Left, men, and the male impulse to control women, if they're humiliated into the bargain, all well and good.

Well, I think “woke” is a useful term for precisely the reason that it draws a line between posturing, symbolic identity politics and the genuine class-struggle left.

Regarding Phillips's and Nandy's motives for their stance, I keep getting caught up thinking why? What attracts two sentient women to this GI dangerous-for-actual-women claptrap? The answer, I suppose, has to lie within misogyny itself.

I thought a lot about this thread as I watched the Jo Phoenix employment tribunal unfold via MN and TT. One of the things discussed on the Phoenix threads at length was the state of the witnesses. Many were female, came across as dissemblers, neither spectacularly intelligent nor successful outside of extreme gender theory circles, and lacking cogency when giving evidence.

I think Jess Phillips and Lisa Nandy are cut from the same cloth. This 'gender identity' ideology is a route to power that they probably feel keeps them looking fresh, young and relevant. Politics is obsessed with youth and 'in crowds'.

Phillips and Nandy are 42 and 44 years old respectively. In May 2010 when Labour lost power and became the Opposition, Phillips would have still been only 28 and Nandy 31. Since then, Opposition is all they've known. They have grown toward middle age in Opposition - and given the bloody awful sexism and misogyny in politics, especially around female ageing, it's possible that they are clinging on to their 'young firebrand' personas with an adherence to a very trendy post-2015 ideology. (Nandy entered parliament in 2010; Phillips in 2015.) Maybe that's what I'm seeing also in universities and other organisations: MRA-approved routes to some power and some safety for women.

What did Madonna say recently about aging?
“Once again I am caught in the glare of ageism and misogyny that permeates the world we live in. A world that refuses to celebrate women [past] the age of 45 And feels the need to punish her if she continues to be strong willed, hard-working and adventurous.”

That's interesting, politics must be the most artificial goldfish bowl environment, especially on the Left, where to feel like you must be relevant, you must adjust your appeal to be "in" with people with views so contrary to the man in the street.

It fits the theory that Labour is now not a working class party but the party of the professional managerial classes PMCs, those that represent the OU witnesses looking to trash Jo Phoenix.

If I'm right and Labour indeed is the political party wing of the PMCs, then yes, fealty to GI is both the norm and expected of you.

Of course, the PMCs are the big part of the workings of civic life eg the civil service, and a Labour govt will need the PMCs to enact their program when in power, so now there will be unanimity for the first time of intersectional class analysis in the government creating laws and policies and the institutions executing those laws and policies.

Phillips and Nandy don't really care what the woman in the street thinks about trans policy, it's the application of Left policies as a govt, and that requires working with the PMCs in the civil service and other institutions.

They are who Labour, and the female (and male) MPs in Labour, now think about first, not mainstream GC citizens (80-90% of the population).

Don't get me wrong, she was certainly on the other side but I recall an interview where she (very, very cautiously) clearly had problems with the Genderist viewpoint.

Don't get me wrong, she was certainly on the other side but I recall an interview where she (very, very cautiously) clearly had problems with the Genderist viewpoint.

I wonder if that's the Genderist threats to

• the mental, emotional and reproductive health of young people
• health and social care service provision
• the academy
• freedom of speech
• freedom of thought
• democracy
• the criminal justice system
• social justice…

She very clearly refers to women as a sex class here.

IIRC it was about the need for single sex spaces and the harassment of women by some Genderists but it was couched in very 'be kind' terms.

It stuck me as subtly at odds with the prevailing mantras that she definitely also parroted.

I think it all comes down to how one feels about mp's changing with the wind. Which is exactly what jp is doing.
Some might find it pragmatism. I think it makes her untrustworthy.

If you don’t allow politicians to change tack and acknowledge that women need single sex provisions and that self ID is dangerous to safeguarding. We will never get equality

It's not about 'not allowing them'. It's about distrusting their new position will stick and not feeling the need to celebrate their new-found common sense. We're not God, we don't have to celebrate prodigals returning to reality especially since even the prodigal in the Bible acknowledged where he had gone wrong.

I don’t think we should celebrate them, but pissing on them is not going to help