I think this is what angers me the most. Labour seem to think it's enough to arrive at the eleventh hour with some vague platitudes about women's safe spaces.
It's not enough. It's not even a teeny fraction of a percentage of enough.
Like a lot of women here and women no longer on MN but still involved in activism I've been pushing back on this for almost a decade now.
In this decade women have been subjected to so much abuse, violence, violent rhetoric and threats.
We've lost women's spaces and the right to say no to that. Women have lost to cheating men in sports over and over again.
Women have been raped in female prisons because this ideology put dangerous men in there.
Women have lost their jobs, been hounded by police for the faux crime of not believing men are women.
A man who holds terrible views about rape victims is still the head of ERCC.
We've had to crowdfund over and over to try and get justice for women and to protect children from an appalling medical scandal (winning the vast majority of cases I should add).
To do this many women have scrimped and donated their last spare fiver because it matters that much to us.
All of the above (and much more besides) that has taken place over the last 10 years is still not being acknowledged by Keir Starmer and Labour. I doubt he even knows about a fraction of it because he's never bothered to listen or find out.
I'm sure he's probably frustrated and perplexed as to why his pathetic bothsidesism, allusions to toxic debate and culture wars is not being accepted by women. Why won't they just accept these crumbs I'm throwing them a week before the election?
This is why Sir Keir. Too much has happened to women and girls in the name of this ideology for crumbs to be sufficient.
Labour are not wholly to blame for all these things that have happened to women but they do need to acknowledge it has happened which at the moment they are not doing and nor are they owning up to the parts they have played.
I often see it commented that most of this has happened under a Conservative government which is true, it has. The main difference is though the majority of Conservatives will now admit what has happened.
Labour are still stuck pretending most of it hasn't or they're genuinely ignorant about it because they never started listening which at least the Conservatives did eventually.
It took a while to get the Conservatives to start listening but bit by bit they did starting many years ago now with David TC Davies, the Welsh Minister who let the WNTT women meet in a HoC room after Millwall FC allowed themselves to be intimidated by threatening TRAs.
Labour today, numerous years on from that WNTT meeting, are still not yet at the point where they would allow women to meet to discuss our concerns. How many more years will women have to wait for them to acknowledge any of the above has even occurred?