Did Keir Starmer just say

[Helpuschoose]

To Nick Ferrari on LBC that transwomen with a GRC will not be allowed in female single-sex spaces? It sounded like it. Is this a clear move or does it still leave wriggle-room? I’m not sure.

I would also say allocation due to safety. Side rooms don’t offer the visuals like a ward does. So it could be dangerous to put a patient in a side room. In my experience, staff are often rushed off their feet and are relying on other patients and visitors to flag up concerns. Last time I was in hospital I was filling up the water jugs of other patients because I was the one not bed-bound.

He's not just any lawyer.

He's a lawyer who specialised in Human Rights.

Can we keep our eyes on this please. This is supposedly his specialist area.

Single sex accomodation in hospitals was supposed to be introduced when exactly? Its not something thats wholly a 'Tory thing'. Many of our hospitals were built and planned using PFI prior to this government and were not designed in a way that was frankly fit for purpose even then.

Hospitals can't manage single sex accomodation as it is. They are allowed to 'make exceptions' all the time over it.

So the trans stuff, is often irrelevant because single sex provision is deemed such a low priority as an issue to begin with.

Its a put up or shut up mentality with that too.

Single-sex wards in the NHS 'now the norm' Published 18 August 2011

The definition is much looser than we'd like. It can be a single sex bay on a mixed sex ward, with the toilets allocated for either men or women.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-14573155

I was sure there were older articles than I found. Just found this but the site is not an official Labour Party site and it does state that:

"As part of our concern to ensure quality, we will work towards the elimination of mixed-sex wards"

www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml

I also found this, with extracts of the manifesto and it seems to match although no, I have not checked every single item.

publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199899/ldselect/ldprivi/106i/106i13.htm

Anyway the first link might provide more of the history.

He was talking about keeping a ward single sex by excluding men with a GRC. It's impossible to construe that as sex=legal sex.

And how is that possible in practice?

Doesn't matter what he says. I don't believe a word of it. He's a weasel.

What's most annoying is his petulant atte mpt to suggest his position had never changed.

I think Labour need to own how badly they've fucked up, from the dreadful slapdash EA, the frankly insane GRA, to expelling women who have tried to raise matters.

Never apologise, never explain is for jokes, not politics.

And it needs to be Starmer, not his kite flier Wes Streeting.

Apologies if this has already been raised, I haven't RTFT.

Labour's problem with women's rights issues is the same as Brexit - a choice they don't want to make:
Option A - follow the TRA lead, be seen by many younger voters as "progressive" and definitely not Tories and lose votes from women
Option B: protect women's rights and sound like the Tories and appear socially conservative to progressive and/or younger voters

It's a Lose-Lose for Labour which is of course why the Tories have discovered its importance during election season (and not during the last 14 years when they could have legislated about it.)

I personally think Labour will follow Option B if they gain power and they have my vote. Everyone will suffer from more Tory rule.

The problem with option B is you can only protect women's rights if you know what a woman is. Labour don't.

Fascinating discussion - highlighting what a mess it all is and what an impossible situation labour find themselves in by having signed up to transactivism in the first place.
It of course speaks to a lack of ethics, lack of critical thinking and embedded misogyny that they tossed away women's rights and the need for children to be safeguarded in favour of rainbow flags and drag queens.

NHS will have to change its process for recording gender reassignment to retain a birth sex marker. It was crazy not doing that from the medical POV alone.

It does. And I bet you anything you like, they wish they'd never started it.

He is bloody Captain Flip Flop.

And the result of that is now I wouldn't trust him as far as I can throw him.

Yes. Without this crucial step, Starmer's promise is meaningless. And we'd also need to ensure that a GRC didn't change that sex marker.

So a trans woman would be put in a side room of a men’s ward? Thus using the men’s bathroom and shower? Or the women’s ward?

Good question.

Starmer is very cleverly (he thinks) trying to fudge this. As usual.

Safe spaces is a meaningless phrase he’s deliberately adopted to seem reasonable. But single sex spaces is a clear and widely understood concept and should be unequivocal.

If my brother entered a women’s only space I can guarantee those women would be completely safe. Thats completely irrelevant to the women who don’t know him and require privacy, dignity and, in the case of sport, fairness.

A parallel conversation going on, on another thread is highlighting one of the problems here.

In an age of image and appearances, the most important thing on social media is virtue signalling your beliefs and this concept of showing how nice you are.

But good governance shouldn't be doing this. It should be looking at policy and problems not public performance. It should be indifferent to whether it makes you look good. It should be about what's right for society in a way that does the least harm and recognise issues even ones that happen to be inconvenient.

That means taking this whole emotional stuff out of the equation.

That means killing dead the idea that if you aren't virtue signalling your acceptance, you are somehow a bad person and a bigot. Cos it's just not true.

It's possible to see acceptance as a reasonable thing but also understand there are limitations because otherwise you create harms to other vulnerable groups in certain situations.

If you continue with the whole performance stuff you just perpetuate these myths and make it harder for those with completely legitimate issues to come forward. And you just end up with festering issues which have no place in our society in 2024.

We have got this strange mentality that the only people who can be racist are white or if you are trans you must be liberal and accepting of homosexuals and totally feminist. It puts tackling injustices in these areas into a box marked 'do not touch'. How is that ok?

Minorities are capable of behaviour and attitudes that aren't ok. We need to stop ignoring this and truly treat people equally in even these difficult areas.

We need to stop social media glossing over the cracks - it's similar to green washing.

Stop focusing on identities and look at the whole picture and acknowledge actual problems regardless of who is saying it and whether they are a 'worthy' person or not.

This whole Good V Evil thing that's engulfed politics is pathetic. We don't live in a world with Marvel Superheroes. It's unfortunately closer to Amazon's The Boys.

(Sidenote: The Boys is reflective the time and of this unspoken concern about Black and White ideas of the world which is why it's so offensive, grim and makes the supposed Goodie actually the Baddie. TV is always reflective of the political issues of the time - often including ones we don't speak about so openly. I am fascinated about the ITV drama next week about Cancel Culture and whether Steven Moffat 'gets it' in terms of it's problematic nature too. It's interesting to see a few programmes are appearing to reflect a problem of our age... They have an audience in mind)

I think there is no law to say single sex spaces must be single sex. An individual space could decide to allow other sexes. So Edinburgh RCC could just allow it. With all the transactivism and Equality and diversity around single sex spaces are fewer.

Even if KS says a GRC transwoman would not be allowed on a ward, would that stand up to law in practice?
What about Haldane’s decision that sex has been changed with the acquisition of a GRC?
What about not being allowed to ask if someone has one?
(I am not being rhetorical, but asking.)

I think an important point being missed is that his answer was 'what [he thinks] happens now' not 'what is proposed under a Laboiur government '.

He may have tried to imply they wouldn't change the (imagined) status quo, but he didn't actually say it.

The use of side rooms on female single-sex wards is very much contingent on trans-identified males staying in the side rooms and not wandering out to the main female wards or using the same showers/toilets/day room as the women on the main female wards.

Would it not make more sense to accommodate trans-identified males in side rooms on wards for males? Or is this the policy being suggested and I’ve got the wrong end of the stick?

For everything that Starmer says there is only one question:

'But how?'

This has been the unanswered question in politics since the invasion of Iraq.

What do we do then? How do we actually achieve what we say we want in practical terms?

It all very well saying 'oh we are going to Brexit' without defining what Brexit actually means and what is realistically achievable given other international concerns and geography.

It's all very well saying we are going to attack Iraq and end terrorism, without thinking about how you are going to fill the political vacuum that you create.

It's all very well saying we are going to make sure there's single sex provision everywhere without thought to available facilities and staffing levels. And without properly addressing the very definition of sex which has been made out as contentious.

The magical thinking that is never questioned has to start being pointed out.

We have questioned the magical thinking of Reform's manifesto financials (as should be the case), but we don't do it everywhere.

Why?

@ScrollingLeaves

Even if KS says a GRC transwoman would not be allowed on a ward, would that stand up to law in practice?

Yes. Excluding a GRC holder is already legal, but not mandatory. KS is saying they will make it NHS practice. Trans can sue, but respondent only needs to show they were treated well enough not that they were given everything they demanded

What about Haldane’s decision that sex has been changed with the acquisition of a GRC?

Only relevant for applying law that is affected by sex, like discrimination law. Doesn't actually change the person's sex for other purposes, such as whether their presence disadvantages a woman or member of a religious minority.

What about not being allowed to ask if someone has one?

You are allowed but they don't have to answer. I expect the NHS to be able to work out people's sex though (transsexuals have been using it for years).