Swivel eyed transphobes

[TonTonMacoute]

Apparently it's people who don't believe you can magically change sex who are the loonies! Who knew?

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/19/transphobes-swivel-eyed-says-labour-mp-leaked-audio/

https://x.com/JamesEsses/status/1946613898414637397

Actual link rather than to the comment.

As did I! 😂

'Rationalism and compassion' really aren't the purview of the 'no debate' side.

I can only imagine he hates being an MP and is doing his damnedest to make sure he loses his previously safe Tory seat. Comments all against him that I could see.

He’s my MP unfortunately. I will be sending him an email tomorrow. I don’t actually want to see him even if that were possible.

Lots of comments calling him Marxist , Communist etc. I'd be very surprised if he wasnt a milk and water liberal type to be honest.
No real socialist could elevate these delusions above the class struggle . It's a bourgeois deviation maaan.

He’s followed the party line so far. He voted for removing the winter fuel allowance and the Welfare Bill. I hear from other people that he doesn’t respond to emails. I did email him on one issue and received a reply months later. I can’t imagine Keir Starmer is very happy with him at the moment. He’s not from the town although was brought up nearby. He’s lived in London for since university I believe and was on Westminster council. I’m sure he’d prefer a London seat!

Of all the LARPing that GII enables, individualistic (usually middle class) capitalists pretending to be heroes of the disenfranchised common man LARP the most.

He's not the full shilling

🤷‍♀️

Oh he knows exactly what you're saying.

He simply doesn't want women to have any choice but to undress in front of men.

Also enjoying the use of testerical.

As a gay man, it's possible the concerns of women and children hold zero interest for him, as his life is probably very male centric. I can understand that, as a straight women, the concerns of gay men are rarely a blip on my radar, but I'm not a MP, so my lack of concern is of no consequence.

This is what happens when activists get voted into office, they use the position to further their own agenda, as an MP he shouldn't be talking about his 'community', he's supposed to be representing the whole of his constituency.

He should be trying to bring the needs and concerns of his area to the attention of the government so he can secure the national resources it needs to improve the lot of as many of the people who live in his area as he can. Doing nothing but pursuing his own personal agenda just makes him another useless MP.

The Labour party selecting DEI candidates to field in an election is the 21st century version of the rotten boroughs.

I’d like someone to ask him in parliament (so he can’t tell porkies) how many GC women he’s actually discussed this subject with. I expect it’s about zero.

I do agree with this. There’s no mention or focus on women from him.

The issue I emailed him about was the winter fuel allowance when he voted to support its removal. One of my points was that there was sexism built into the policy. I won’t say how but I see many women over 70 who have the state pension and perhaps a very small private pension. They worked in low paid jobs, factories, shops etc and had time off having children. Many of the men in a similar age group have much better pensions. They worked in power, the railways, BT etc etc where good pensions were part of the package and of course had no time off for looking after children. And as we know the unions are very good at supporting men generally. I think single elderly women were going to be the most impacted group.

This is one of the points I will be making in my email - that I never hear him speak on women’s concerns. It’s just not an area of interest for him.

Back in the late 70s and the 80s, the term 'swivel-eyed' was the go-to term in the right-wing press to describe Tony Benn, so it is him that I think of when I hear it now.

Basically the term was used as a form of shutdown, an instruction to newspaper readers to regard his commitment and forcefulness as some kind of personality defect. It was a strategy for othering him and framing his left-wing politics as outside of the range of beliefs that we have a duty to understand and respond to with actual reason and evidence.

Regardless of what stance you might have in relation to his left-wing views, he was a man of such determined integrity that GC women should wear with some pride the fact that they have been subjected to the same term of abuse.

(Having said this, though, I have no idea how Benn would have reacted to transactivist pressures. Sadly it wouldn't surprise me if he had gone the same way as so many others, mouthing support as a way to appease members of his leftist tribe, as so many other apparently respectable politicians have done.)

Hopefully their plan to install an idealogue like themselves as EHRC chair won't work now that this has been leaked. If Bridget Phillipson capitulates, then it will be apparent these are the type of people she is trying to appease, people who have total disdain for the law and for a sizeable portion of the British population.

I did agree with him when he said there are some things that can't be compromised on - yes, single sex spaces.

It’s another tricky area, because if you mention being gay might give a man a blind spot to the needs of women and children, you’ll be accused of being homophobic.

Sexual orientation alone shouldn’t disqualify someone from public office, but male dominated systems are already causing problems, and if a gay man has a deeply male centric mindset, his identity could end up reinforcing the very dominance we're trying to dismantle.

I just think it might be time to stop fielding candidates just because they ‘identify’ as one of the marginalised, in fact, perhaps self-identification should no longer be treated as a golden ticket, but as a moment to scrutinise a candidate’s perspective.

However, we are at the mercy of the parties, we can only vote for whoever they put up, and if they keep offering nothing but people who my not have any interest in the wider issues, we end up with numpties like this one.

@PlasticAcrobat I remember Tony Benn well. No article about him in the Sun or Daily Mail was complete without a reference to his allegedly ' mad staring eyes'. He was focused mainly on improving the lot of poorer people. So it is possible he may not have spotted the dangers of eg Self ID.

Look at those twits in the Irish government and Civil service. ' This was not foreseen in the legislation...blah blah'

Yes I do agree on this as well. It would never occur to me to reference his sexuality. But I am interested in understanding who exactly he is referring to by the “swivel-eyed transphobes” remark. Does he mean women? A specific group of women? A few individuals he’s met, all women and men who agree with the Supreme Court decision? Who exactly because it is a very insulting remark.

That full 7m clip is astounding. He really is living in another reality. All the talk of 'organising' and getting someone else in to lead the EHRC while also allegedly wanting reasonable discussion.

I'm sure Helen Joyce, any of the LGBA and others will gladly join him on a panel to discuss the issues reasonably.

It's a revealing reflection on how poor candidate selection is. These people live in a hermetically sealed echo chamber - they are all completely out of touch with the vast majority of the population.

As a lesbian let me explain;
gay men are not your friends. Most of them despise women.
We lesbians have known this for years but our straight sisters don't.

I think we can treat this in a matter of fact way. If there is no stigma attached to being gay (as there isn't in my eyes, and the eyes of most of the UK population I would hope) then it's just another thing a candidate might be. Say you have a parliamentary candidate who is male, 40 years old, white, comes from an affluent family, lived in a solidly middle class area and went to the very good local state schools, proceeded to a top university, got a job in a think tank, etc etc, what many of their poorer constituents would want to know is how well equipped is the aspiring MP to understand their constituents' lives and advocate for their interests, given that he seems to have no similar experiences in his background to draw on. In a case like that being gay would be the least relevant thing about the candidate. If constituents were also to say 'You don't have any children so you don't know how tough life is for families' that could apply to any childless candidate, not just one who is childless because he is a gay man.

It really is Emperor's New Clothes territory.

I'll give him the benefit and assume that he genuinely believes that a human being can change sex, someone at sometime has convinced him that this really can happen.

So he really thinks that all he has to do is apply that same compelling reasoning on 'transphobes', and to make them listen to it (without asking any difficult questions, obviously) et voilà! It never crosses his mind that other people are not as stupid and gullible as he is.

I wonder how many other impossible facts we could make him believe? That dogs are really fish? That all cows have five legs?

But actually the last paragraph, with the quote from James Esses is the most scary, our whole establishment is stuffed with people like this and they clearly feel that their delusions are more important than the highest laws of the land, and they intend to keep on fighting by fair means or foul.

Not a huge fan of Tony Benn, but leaving that aside... during his decades in parliament he voted consistently for every LGB rights issue. I have reason to believe that privately he wasn't quite so gay-friendly. (A few anecdotal accounts that have come my way, but they're consistent with each other and convincing to me)

If a 100-year-old Benn were alive today and politically active, I am absolutely certain he'd be full on TRA in everything he said publicly, and if he privately thought it was nonsense that wouldn't come out until years later.

I distrust politicians who do a lot of performative virtue, and the ones I warm to are the ones I've seen quietly showing kindness to people who aren't in a position to do anything for them. This does not map neatly onto party or ideology.