Brigitte Phillipson blocking EHRC guidance

[lcakethereforeIam]

I'm not sure if there's anything new here though

Phillipson blocks trans guidance after landmark Supreme Court ruling https://share.google/P91PBE5Cy4ROwsdA1

It's a very stark article in the Telegraph.

Her point was more that they cannot entertain any criticism of this belief because that would mean admitting they may have caused great harm to a child (often their own).

It would quite literally make them think the unthinkable and that’s a powerful driver for otherwise incomprehensible behaviour and decisions. Also explains the extreme level of anger aimed at anyone who even mildly questions GI beliefs.

An unwillingness to entertain criticism of the child (or ‘my lovely trans friend’ etc) definitely comes into it but Helen’s point was more about the self protection of people involved in the transIng of children and the need to keep critical voices at bay at all costs.

(Edited for clarity)

I’d be very interested to read the
(2) SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WORK AND PENSIONS’s submission.

GLP haven’t published that. Nor the other two

Yes - that would answer a lot of questions wouldn't it?

I honestly don’t think he’ll ever have a clear position on this because he is just as evasive on pretty much everything else. His lack of commitment to anything more detailed than ‘national renewal’ is striking. Some people might call this ‘pragmatism’ or even ‘party management’, but I think it’s more a reflection of his inability to lead his party or the country. He can’t take anyone with him because he doesn’t where he wants to end up.

i can see how the government has come to the idea that refuges should be single sex, but day to day places should be pretend single sex.

If that is what they truly believe they can change legislation to make all toilets mixed sex, or they could use the EHRC's logic on opposite sex children in changing rooms and say "It is unlikely that men pose a threat to women's safety"

But for some reason they don't seem able to do this.

This is pretty much the exact response I had from my backbench Labour MP. She talked about "sensitive safe spaces" (I.e. rape crisis centres) but everywhere else we need to focus on 'inclusivity".

When I responded that this is not what the law is, as per the SCJ, she didn't bother replying. She is one of the 2024 intake of MPs, in a seat that has been conservative for years. I very much doubt she will get re-elected, as she doesn't seem to be popular locally. She likes having her photo taken to promote new cafes opening etc, but the general consensus seems to be that she doesn't do anything effective.

when is the outcome of this due? They said before Xmas …..

but I think it’s more a reflection of his inability to lead his party or the country.

Perhaps because his party and the country don't really see eye to eye.

I mean his ability to manage the PLP which, like the rest of the country, is divided. Only someone very skilled could manage such divisions. He’s not good at this, and he doesn’t have a coherent vision or programme which can bring enough people together.

Have the GLP just published their submissions? I've been wondering why there has been a flurry of articles about this in the Telegraph, when there has been nothing in the articles that we didn't already know.

This is pretty much the exact response I had from my backbench Labour MP. She talked about "sensitive safe spaces" (I.e. rape crisis centres) but everywhere else we need to focus on 'inclusivity".

Got to get that daily validation somehow.

Absolute infuriating.

As if toilets aren't a sensitive place. Where women and girls are routinely undressed from the waist down, have leaking breasts, period floods, are throwing up because they're pregnant...or finding refuge from sex pests and predatory men.

I can understand men thinking it, they have no cause to consider women's biology, but other women??

As people say, this is such a fucking luxury belief.

but everywhere else we need to focus on 'inclusivity".

But if that is their agreed policy, they need to make the argument that a toilet is not a place where somebody could reasonably object to the presence of somebody of the opposite sex, so they should all be mixed sex.

What is stopping them?

Maybe because more people use toilets than prisons and would finally realise this isn't just a niche issue that only affects a tiny minority?
Maybe because many men aren't that liberal, and object to their women using mixed sex facilities?
Maybe because activists want them named as single sex spaces. Remember the inclusive Open mixed sex swimming competition that had no entries?

https://www.bbc.com/sport/swimming/66993112

The Labour should honestly let everyone in the country know that the Labour manifesto is that any man who says they are a woman can use women’s toilets; and let them know they have every intention of ignoring the Supreme Court.

You've just reminded me of somethingever I had to do in toilets that no man ever does - express breast milk. When I was travelling away from my daughter I had to express milk with a pump. I was a bit weird doing that with random women in the vicinity, but I would NOT have wanted to do that with a man potentially able to hear me in the next cubicle.

It's so bloody underhand, isn't it.

No one wants mixed sex toilets. Including trans identified men.

Have to keep it ladies only, because it's the ladies who provided the validation.

They want mixed sex toilets, but to keep up the pretence that they're single sex. Which is understandable if you're a fetishist, but if you're a fucking politician?

It's clearly unjustifiable.

And it's really tedious that we're now seeing all the endless, ridiculous TRA arguments being played out across the media, and by the government.

We've fucking been there and we've fucking done that.

And I have absolutely no doubt that we will still end up with these men being sorely disappointed.

But boy, is it bloody boring watching these fools playing catch up and trying to pretend that, no, it isn't pie.

I remember vividly the 'webchat' (curated selected pasting of pre written answers to preferred questions) with him during the Labour leadership campaign. The women candidates were openly and honestly batshit, but could communicate their vision, however loopy it was. He said.... nothing. There was... nothing. Everyone generously thought it meant he was a clever man keeping his powder dry etc etc because the general public are generally well intentioned and kind, but nope. There actually WAS nothing there. Empty vessel.

I've just seen a post from a barrister specialising in SEND who attended a county meeting with parents and LA officials on their bloody awful SEND practice. The LAs said 'they were there to listen' and then never shut up with lecturing the parents, and the barrister was stunned that they just repeated mantras. Untrue mantras, he had the evidence and so did the parents that what was being said was bollocks, it was lies. But the LA just repeated it. As the barrister said - and he knows nothing of this side of it I'd think - we're in a political era where the battle is no longer over the facts or evidence, it's over reality.

Politicians now just repeat the bollocks, endlessly, with the plan of brainwashing and exhausting everyone into believing/going along with the bollocks. Even in bloody courts of law they are staring you in the eye and lying.

Men are women.
Women have penises.
Men in women's spaces aren't a danger.
Women's rights are fine.
ADHD and ASD aren't real and are overdiagnosed
SEND needs are just fussy parents, those kids are fine
No one's disabled enough to not be able to work
Elderly people aren't cold and dying because of heating tax cuts
Destroying farms won't have any long term major implications on feeding this island, especially with war in Europe a real possibility

It's going to have to be a case of talk to the hand now with these people. You couldn't ask them the right time.

A journalist mentioned it in one of the articles in the past few days about Philipson: 'the permanently unhappy activists' .

Most of us who have had to do with people with problems are aware that the solution they currently and desperately want is a symptom, not the end point of the interaction. And those of us who escaped relationships with the really dysfunctional know that there will never be enough in the universe to fill the hole of 'want', because the need isn't being met by the thing being sought, but by the process of demands and the feeling of lack and the protesting and fighting, and the attention it brings, and the people running around apologising and trying to fix whatever the immediate biggest complaint is.

There won't be any end to this, there will never be a point of happy now and stability, and like with being supportively kind with pronouns, there will eventually be a point where you are pushed to having to say 'no, that's too far now'. The further you let yourself be pushed, the bigger the meltdown will be when you finally reach your boundary.

And those of us who escaped relationships with the really dysfunctional know that there will never be enough in the universe to fill the hole of 'want', because the need isn't being met by the thing being sought, but by the process of demands and the feeling of lack and the protesting and fighting, and the attention it brings, and the people running around apologising and trying to fix whatever the immediate biggest complaint is.

This is so true. It may be called Covert Narcissism.

The women candidates were openly and honestly batshit, but could communicate their vision, however loopy it was. He said.... nothing. There was... nothing. Everyone generously thought it meant he was a clever man keeping his powder dry etc etc because the general public are generally well intentioned and kind, but nope. There actually WAS nothing there. Empty vessel.

I read the book Get In by Maguire and Pogrund, about Starmer's leadership, and although I like them as journalists, it's a very weird and frustrating book. There's an awful lot about Morgan McSweeney, which I suspect comes from "sources close to" McSweeney puffing up his genius, and you learn something from the portraits of people like Rayner and Mahmood and Sue Gray, but you're none the wiser at the end as to what Starmer believes, or what makes him tick.

The nearest I got to an insight into his character was the sacking of Long Bailey, for what was quite a trivial offence, but the account of Starmer's rage says to me that, if there's one thing he really hates, it's an uppity woman failing to do what she's told. And Becky isn't even that uppity.

But otherwise... I didn't get a sense of there being anything there. I remembered the old Robert Redford movie The Candidate, where Redford's character, who doesn't have any thoughts of his own, is packaged by consultants and launched into a Senate race on the basis that he looks good and can deliver platitudes to camera and seems senatorial... and I have a sneaking feeling that McSweeney took that as a how-to guide.

It can work for a while, because if there's nothing there, you can project what you like onto the candidate. He's a barrister, so people assumed he had a brilliant mind (barristers like to encourage this perception). His greyness and lack of charisma, in contrast to the clownishness of Boris Johnson, encouraged people to believe he was serious and therefore competent. And if he said little about what he wanted to do in government - the manifesto was light on policy and heavy on pictures of Starmer and Reeves striking poses - voters were encouraged to fill in the blanks with their own vision of what Labour would do.

It worked as a marketing strategy, but then they got into government and it all went a bit Pete Tong.

But I think the lesson of that is, we're all prone to confirmation bias and magical thinking, and the only (partial) defence against that is recognising that we do it.

I think there was a lot of wishful thinking about how Bridget Phillipson must be secretly GC, because she's worked in the women's sector. But so has Leanne Wood, and we know how batshit she is on genderwoo. It's not impossible for an intelligent woman in politics to know what a woman is, and why single sex spaces are necessary, and still to convince herself that single sex spaces are not compromised by allowed special men to self-ID into them. Especially when her political career creates incentives for her not to understand what she should understand.

So the question is, how do we change the incentives?

She is definitely a weathervane politician. I was listening to Simon Fanshawe, who is now rector at Uni of Edinburgh, talking about her on the Fearless Diversity podcast. When she started as Education Secretary, she was ready to shelve or massively water down the free speech university legislation because she thought she would get cheered for getting rid of this nasty piece of right-wing legislation.

However, she changed tack after getting pushback from across the political divide. She supported the Supreme Court judgement in April because she thought it was in her and the PLP's best interests to do so, but she has obviously changed her mind about this, so is stalling it. I wonder if all the howls of transphobia during the deputy leadership contest have had an impact?

It is so disappointing to see politicians behave with so little integrity. I guess we should be used to it by now.

I may be repeating myself here so sorry if I am, it's a long thread, but I could swear I read, on this board, probably a couple of years ago at least, that Bridget Phillipson had signed the Labour Women's Declaration. Does anyone else remember that? If she did, it would explain some of the hopes we had for her.

And in terms of incentives to get her to change course, I think this will depend on where the strongest criticism is coming from. Suella Braverman has written an article in the Telegraph about the guidance being stalled. BP will discount Suella Braverman's opinion and probably anyone else that writes opinion pieces in the Telegraph. She needs to feel she is under pressure from the left, but what influential people on the left are going to speak about this?

i don’t think so as I found the same links on the tribunal tweets substack; linking to exactly the same GLP links and only these documents.
https://tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/good-law-project-and-others-vs-the

i don’t know how to tell when either page was last updated

Abso bloody lutely.

I was thinking that as I read it, it's exactly that. It's the supply that's important, not the solution