Jess Philips on VAWG and single sex spaces.

[ArabellaScott]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/02/24/jess-phillips-lindsay-hoyle-jo-cox-murder-gaza-vote/

Interviewed in the Telegraph, including on VAWG, and trans issues. Archived in the usual places.

'Would she still like to be prime minister? “I’d still give it a crack, sure!” she says, firmly. “I used to want to be the home secretary. But I’ve learnt I don’t have that special skill of plotting, organising for your own progression that you need to get on. Women are less interested in that than men. My only ambition in politics is to halve the levels of violence experienced by women and girls in a decade. Despite two women dying every week there is still <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/X8IhI/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/09/jess-philips-womens-lives-risk-failure-reform-child-payouts/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">no strategy or target around femicide. We live in a patriarchy still. It is 2024 but all our institutions are based on a 1950s, or 1850s or even 1750s ideal that doesn’t work for women.”

Prior to becoming an MP she worked for Women’s Aid and ran rape crisis refuges. I believe her when she says it is her life’s purpose. Phillips is a rare bird in today’s politics – a confident, clever working-class woman.

So where is she on trans issues, how has her work on protecting women been affected by this debate? “The actual work hasn’t been affected at all. The political space has undoubtedly been affected, not all negatively.” Can she still speak about women? “Of course! I feel totally comfortable speaking out about women – sometimes when I talk about women that means different things. I am capable of holding two ideas in my head at once… I believe in single sex spaces for biological women, prisons, refuges etc. – 100 per cent. I’ve got the T-shirt on that. But also, if someone asks me to refer to them as a woman, I personally will do that. I’ll call you whatever you ask me to. <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/X8IhI/www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/04/09/jess-phillips-no-trans-person-met-has-said-cant-say-woman/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">I am happy to refer to transwomen as women. But also the idea that I am meant to parrot ‘transwomen are women’ as a slogan is f-g meaningless.” Classic Phillips. Having her cake and eating it.

“When I worked in women’s refuges, we always asked questions on the referral forms about people’s sex at birth, whether people had transitioned, basically. The language we used would probably get you sent to the gallows now.” She smiles and goes into a long explanation about how “there are all sorts of reasons why women who are referred might not be allowed in a refuge, not just trans. For instance, if a woman had a 14-year-old son with her, she wouldn’t be allowed in the main women’s refuge centre, she would be cared for in dispersed houses within the community with supervision so she could stay with her son. Or women with child protection issues or those with substance abuse issues.

This is Parliament’s responsibility, it’s up to the legislature to make it clear. She stresses that it is disabled women, older women and those with complex needs who have “the hardest time accessing the right kind of safe spaces… We need to have women’s biological spaces, but also when I was on Birmingham City Council, I commissioned domestic refuges for LGBTQ+ folk, particularly men beaten up by their partners. It should not be beyond the wit of man to protect women’s biological sex spaces and provide different spaces for trans people.”'

Some posters are so behind the curve on the complexities of the topic under discussion that they may as well be posting from a Roman Road.

This might be helpful for posters looking to catch-up: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3145470-Break-it-down-for-me

Nope. Just not buying into your slurs and bigotry.

If she is getting there, it's only because it's politically expedient for her to do so. Don't forget she was on WESC when they carried out a consultation into reform of the GRA without consulting a single women's group.

As well as when she added a male to the list of murdered women. For which she's never apologised.

These sudden changes of heart don't appear to have much of a root in anything firm, sadly.

Well I'll start by saying that, if Jess Philips has decided it's politically expedient to speak up for
women’s biological sex spaces then I'm pleased to see it regardless of what the motive might be.

I also think that what she calls people in her private conversations is none of my business. I'm not interested.

However I do think it's my business when she's speaking on the record and in her capacity as an elected politician, paid from the public purse. This, I think, is when clarity of language is absolutely vital, and lack of clarity is the reason why I'm still not sure what the Labour Party mean when they talk about single sex spaces and services.

I think Jess gives a perfect demonstration of this when says that 'sometimes when I talk about women that means different things'
The thing is, it's not whether Jess knows what she means that matters here - the issue is whether her voters know, and whether they're clear about what they're voting for.

I'm not usually a black and white thinker, but on the trans issue I am. I believe women have to hold the line. It is not trivial to use 'polite' pronouns. Taken to its logical and extreme conclusion we get the nonsense such as the recent case of Scarlet Blake, just convicted of a strangling a man.

Some reports only mentioning low down the articles that Blake was actually a man, some not even mentioning it at all at the outset of the trial. Even here on Mumsnet posters were unsure. Instinct correctly told us this was not a female but it was a while before it became clear.

That's where this pronoun guff logically ends - in uncertainty, messed up crime statistics, men in women's prisons, refuges, hospital wards and sports.

Distort the language and you distort reality. I refuse to be a reluctant participant in TRA games.

Just so we're clear on your good faith, you don't believe this news item about the action of an NHS Trust?

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5010993-trans-women-feeding-chemical-ridden-milk-to-babies-approved-by-nhs?reply=133277408

I haven’t noticed her supporting Rosie Duffield though.

The facts around this seem to be muddy. I've no idea about the science. I don't see why it's wrong in principle, or what it's got to do with sexual fetishes.

Personally, I don’t believe you have to go to church or be married to be Christian, but that aside, that person is not demanding that I state over and over that they are Christian, even if I don’t think they are.

Your insistence that I call a man “she” and pretend that I believe he’s a woman when I know perfectly well he isn’t is the obvious difference.

It’s one thing to quietly ignore someone lying about their own life, it’s quite another to be forced into saying you believe the lie.

And yes, being forced to lie is coercive control and the reason it would be difficult for me to lie is because I have experienced coercive control and would resist being pushed into it again.

I wonder if you read that post on that link because it's very clear.

It may be helpful to consider the following and see if you perhaps recognise some elements of evidential pre-emption in your engagement on this thread..

Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some have started to worry. Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Maybe we’ve all become trapped in echo chambers of our own making – wrapping ourselves in an intellectually impenetrable layer of likeminded friends and web pages and social media feeds.

But there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.

Current usage has blurred this crucial distinction, so let me introduce a somewhat artificial taxonomy. An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission. That omission might be purposeful: we might be selectively avoiding contact with contrary views because, say, they make us uncomfortable…

An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders.

[People in an echo chamber are alienated from outside sources. Outside is labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. So, for people like Limbaugh follower under discussion] exposure to contrary views could actually reinforce their views. Limbaugh might offer his followers a conspiracy theory: anybody who criticises him is doing it at the behest of a secret cabal of evil elites, which has already seized control of the mainstream media. His followers are now protected against simple exposure to contrary evidence. In fact, the more they find that the mainstream media calls out Limbaugh for inaccuracy, the more Limbaugh’s predictions will be confirmed. Perversely, exposure to outsiders with contrary views can thus increase echo-chamber members’ confidence in their insider sources, and hence their attachment to their worldview. The philosopher Endre Begby calls this effect ‘evidential pre-emption’. What’s happening is a kind of intellectual judo, in which the power and enthusiasm of contrary voices are turned against those contrary voices through a carefully rigged internal structure of belief.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult

Begby, Endre, 'Evidential Preemption', Prejudice: A Study in Non-Ideal Epistemology (Oxford, 2021; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Mar. 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198852834.003.0007

Do you think men's sexual fetishes exist at all. You get very defensive across all threads whenever it's mentioned.

This person is very well known. Are you calling them a liar?

(c/p from another poster) Quote from the article where Debbie himself admits to autogynephilia in case any moderators think I'm being mean:

"I have also discovered something deep-seated about myself — that what prompted me to transition was not, in fact, the desire to be a woman but that I was sexually aroused by the thought of myself as a woman.
This is an unusual and little understood sexual condition known as autogynephilia.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13011839/I-went-agonising-operation-thought-woman-finally-make-happy-devastating-revelation.html

I totally agree with this. The most important thing to me is single sex spaces and single sex sports. I don’t mind calling a person a they or it or cat if they prefer.

Does Peter Sutcliffe mean all Yorkshiremen are serial killers and rapists?

Of course they exist. No idea why you are all so obsessed by them.

Did you miss the example last year of Mika Minio-Paluello pretending to be a 'mum' on the itv news last year, who posted a photo of himself on a bus 'breastfeeding' a baby, and also posted photos of him engaging in his nipple clamp fetish?

You'll call people they/it/cat, but do you mind calling men "she"?

It's recognition not obsession. It's important that women can point them out when we are forced to play along with one that we don't consent to.

My previous post -
It is for some @PP82 . They freely admit it themselves.

Since when does "some" become "all"?

Now I know you aren't posting in good faith. Cheers for slipping up so early.

The trouble is that public discourse has become so muddled I'm no longer even confident I know what JP means when she talks about biological women. If you'd told me a couple of years ago I'd be saying that, I'd have laughed but here we are.

JP and her party could clarify things enormously for me by explaining whether or not they believe a GRC should enable the holder to access a single sex space or service intended for the opposite sex. (Yes I know, you may have had to read that a couple of times to unravel the meaning - this is where unclear language has got us.)

Or / and they could state their unambiguous support for clarifying the meaning of 'sex' in the Equality Act.

Two simple steps, Labour. There's still time.

X exists
No it doesn't
Here's proof
So are you saying all Y are Z

Make it make sense 😫

No idea about this person but if a cis woman has a nipple clamp fetish, should she be forbidden from breastfeeding? Not sure the two things are remotely connected.

Perhaps youd like to listen not to me, but what the most prominent transwomen out there say.

The use of language and comments they use, not me, are very interesting.

Wakey wakey. Start paying attention rather than throwing cheap comments about bigotry about. They are so 2018. This is 2024. We've moved on a bit.