Trans people must not be used as political punchbag, says Phillipson

[IwantToRetire]

Interesting to note that this article was called Labout Lost Focus on Why Single Sex Spaces Matter if you look at the web link:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/01/01/labour-lost-focus-on-why-single-sex-spaces-matter/

What does it say about the Telegraph that they changed it so that the emphasis wasn't on the loss of women's sex based rights, but on catering to trans needs.

Full article can also be read at https://archive.is/9ptZV

Which shows that Labour isn't budging

I think that was Ciaran Jenkins of Ch4. I thought it would mark a turnaround in how the media treated this issue, giving it the same scrutiny and calling out any irrationality as they would any other political issue. It didn't seem to. Has Ciaran continued to do his journalistic duty on this issue, or has he kept quiet like all the other poor dabs who get a backlash from activists?

I should have said that unless we have proper interrogation of mealy-mouthed messaging like Phillipson's we're not going to get anywhere. The media are generally reporting only on one side at a time, with a token balancing quote. It's absolute rubbish that trans identified people have been used as a political punchbag, but if it continues to be repeated as if it were fact the mud is going to stick. And even if it were true, that doesn't mean that the government gets to ignore the law.

I wouldn't be surprised if like all the best groupthink regimes (tell me the modern media is anything but), poor old Ciaran, who in times past would have got an award, hasn't been sent to the salt mines, reporting on local fêtes and parking misdemeanors.

I used to wonder, how did Germany, Ireland, etc sleep-walk into self-id laws, but it all makes more and more sense now, once you realise that most of the political parties support it (certainly in Ireland), and the media are complicit or worse. It's going to be very hard to put all that into reverse.

My analysis is that trans ideology is literally the intersection of capitalist neo-liberalism/trans-humanism/libertarian ultra choice, with the ultimate expression of liberal values and the jump into post-liberalism (ie the ultimate expression of our human rights/DEI based Western governance and also it's jump the shark moment).
And this unholy confluence of the inability to even start to criticise the concept of the trans child and an enforced increasing freeze on anything approaching criticism of people's personal choice including men choosing to culturally appropriate womanhood/femininity.
Anything also looking "backwards" is viewed as culturally repressive ("What next if trans are forced back into the shadows? You want to go back on gay marriage? Put Rosa Parks to the back of the bus? Put kids up chimneys? Re-introduce slavery?"), non progressive.
Yes, even back just 10-15 years when sanity last existed.
As to where this leaves us, I fluctuate between optimism and pessimism.
Right now, I don't have any confidence this administration will do the right thing, so in thrall to the trans child and a DEI first philosophy are they.
Starmer will also be calculating that this issue, as in 2024, is not an election clincher.
That the 51% of voters won't march towards a party offering a clear GC policy.
I fear he's right.
As a long term Tory voter, my anger for them only grows.
But not only did Teresa May, Penny Mordaunt, Maria Miller etc burn invaluable political energy, time and capital pushing down the Self ID route (even Tories are infected by suicidal empathy), but Johnson Truss and especially Sunak did nothing to put this problem to bed.
In fact, Sunak couldn't have done less.
Two years to lock down reality, and they failed abjectly.
Even Badenoch could have done more during this period, it's a myth she worked tirelessly as a GC campaigner in govt.
The rot is very deep indeed.

Happy for trans people not to be punching bags.

But it’d be nice if trans ideologues stopped using girls and women as their punching bags.

It’d be nice if transpeople stopped using vulnerable autistic boys and girls as their punching vags

It’d be nice if trans people would stop using effeminate gay pre-pubescent boys as their punching bags.

No human being should be a punching bag

yep: the interview is v different from the reports of it

Totally agree with this analysis. However...

Anything also looking "backwards" is viewed as culturally repressive ("What next if trans are forced back into the shadows? You want to go back on gay marriage? Put Rosa Parks to the back of the bus? Put kids up chimneys? Re-introduce slavery?"), non progressive.

You're right, but it begs the question why - in light of this - do they not baulk at the regressive reinforcement of gender stereotypes or the erosion of sex discrimination protection for women (it's not just 'single sex spaces' that are lost if the the word 'women' becomes a mixed-sex grouping, but all the anti-discrimination protections that we and our foremothers fought for)? [obviously the answer is because those harms predominantly affect the group of people formerly known as 'women', who are obviously non-player characters so it doesn't really matter.]

I sometimes wonder whether the focus on single sex spaces (important though those are) helps to obscure that wider damage.

Because the circular argument that says TWAW means that there is no regression for women. Women are women, and that other lot are women.
By the women that are women saying they don't want the others that are women, the criticism would come back, that in the past heterosexual women didn't want to share spaces with lesbians, white women wanted black and brown women excluded, able bodied women couldn't countenance disabled women, middle class/rich women didn't fancy much sharing with working class/poor women.
This is just the last taboo, cis women declaring transwomen as not even the same species.
We're not going back to cisheteronormative judgement calls, all women will share with all women.

You're good at this. How shit it all is.

Please don't think I believe any of this. But I believe I have worked out some of the thinking behind it.
A multi-headed hydra on so many levels.
It is interesting that trans has managed to establish itself as victimized minority number one.
So that any woman who speaks against it goes from a previously oppressed group (just a century into getting the vote, half a century since abortion and the Pill breakthrus), direct to oppressor.
Ditto any gay that says trans is homophobic, he or she is automatically transferred from a gilt edged minority just two decades ago (tail end of Thatcher's Section 28, no gay marriage on the horizon) to anti trans bigot.
As a bulletproof minority, impervious to questioning, fatally weakening any other carefully managed and boundary sensitive social group it crowbars it's way into, it's scary in its power.
Of course, like all great revolutionary movements, it had to control the language first.
The moment it had the language on its side, it had the advantage in always being the ones to frame the arguments in the ways most beneficial to it's side.
If you look at trans-racialism, the black and brown communities never for one moment allowed white people to create the argument. The momentum was never with whites in saying they were/could be black.
In America especially, no familial links to slavery, migration from Africa etc to the US, you were never gonna get away with calling yourself black.
In early 2010s when the trans messaging really stated taking off, sure, Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer etc might have said "hang on, Jack!", but a hundred other women said to them "where's your empathy?"
The men running the movement from groomers re the trans child to the acceptance of the AGP fetish absolutely weaponised this empathy amongst so many men and women who'd consider themselves good human beings.
15 years later, the empathy became suicidal, the language was lost to women, and the craziest behaviours and demands became commonplace and accepted (or certainly not resisted) by so many.

@1984Now Don't worry, I know you don't believe it. I'm just impressed with the depth of your analysis. And depressed by what it says.

I think because I've spent my whole adult life from late teens rebelling against organized religion (although I'm more spiritual as I've gotten older), I was always hyper confident I'd never have to contend with a new religion, certainly not a widespread religion, absolutely not one imposed on me (or anyone else).
And surely not fallen for, hook line and sinker, by apparently some of the deepest thinkers, those proud secularists and atheists that railed against the Catholic Church (strangely silent on Islam), and the useless proles with their strange ways.
The Ben Goldacres and Stephen Frys of this world.
So absolute has been my 180 against the group I used to seamlessly fit into as they capitulated en masse to trans (and every other shibboleth of the Omnicause), I've spent the last few years reverse engineering what a belief in liberal values actually means, and what the consequences for liberalism in general in the West might be.
I hate the conclusions I've arrived at.

The Ben Goldacres and Stephen Frys of this world.

Yeah, them. 😡Find myself nodding along to your posts, @1984Now , which crystallise what most of us think, I imagine. And the point about language is massive, how acute was Orwell on that?

Thanks for the kind words, one of the problems is that the common-senseicals (is that a word?) are in the majority, the vast majority. But it doesn't feel like it atm, if anything, despite Hannah Barnes Tavistock expose, the WPATH Files reveal, Cass, the SC ruling and associated ECHR conclusions, the end to all this should feel at hand, but in fact feels further away.
Like one of those nightmares you see in horror films where the harder you run towards the door, the more distant it becomes.
I recall listening to Helen Joyce a couple of years ago, and she said despite whatever wins that science and natural justice force on trans ideology, it's adherents will be bulletproof, and acolytes in the public sphere will reverse ferret to shed their skins.
Look at the debacle on Imane Khelif in the boxing at the Olympics last year.
The IOC who aggressively batted away all criticism, the Khelif band who just lied, the elite corps who decried JK Rowling and all other women saying no as transphobes, journalists and scientists and media who spun the lying narrative.
Today? Whatever you think of Trump, his taking on the rotten edifice especially with his promise to make the LA Olympics correctly sexed, brought irrevocable pressure to add to those brave enough to call Khelif out.
And all the ones holding Khelif's hand? Reverse ferreted as he withdraws
from boxing, never to take that simple cheek swab that would prove things once and for all.
Like that final line in The Usual Suspects re Keyse Soze "...and just like that, he was gone".
Khelif truth telling should feel like a victory, but there is no fallout, no calling to account, no natural justice.
Again, the co-opting of the language means that Khelif and the swathe of liberal opinion makers who control the discourse still make GC women out to be the devil.

I carefully listened to Phillipson on the podcast. She was very controlled in her use of language. But only alluded to refuges, a little to prisons and sport.
Maybe it was a simple omission that she didn't mention toilets, changing rooms, showers, women's dedicated social spaces (WI, book clubs, lesbian speed dating etc). Or maybe it was deliberate.
At this stage, with Labour's weak tea approach to all things gender, I'm minded to think it's deliberate.
Hive off the most contentious aspects of absolute need to seperate men and women...rape/DV crisis, sports, prisons.
What you might call the sharp end of the need to seperate men and women.
Leaving a whole tranche of less contentious (as she would see it) social spaces that could remain effectively mixed.
Toilets, showers, social spaces.
Good luck when the first court cases come in on girls forced to use effectively mixed toilets and showers in schools, older women at risk on mixed wards, teen girls using the changing rooms at Primark.

Always the compulsory performative gronda to the aspidistra.

At this point if Labour manage to come out with anything at all, they'll float four different versions to see what happens, then witter and run around for a while, and then possibly release something that they will then U turn on. She might mean it. She might not. Who knows? What's the point? Screw Labour, roll on the next government because it won't be Labour.

I think it's Kemi Badenoch's article today where she mentions that Labour MPs are now wary of suggesting anything because of the endless in out in out hokey cokey of it all. The law is the law, and anything this current disaster might finally get around to doing - and sticking with without u turning - can be undone.

My problem with Badenoch is that even on her specialist subject of GC TERFery in govt, she overall flattered to deceive.
Sure, she may have been instrumental in spiking Theresa May, Penny Mordaunt and Maria Millar push to Self ID, but once she had real influence as a serious cabinet minister under Sunak, she was happy to push all kinds of DEI workery, critically boosting ID politics in the NHS.
Labour are doing exactly as I'd expect them to do, but the Tories especially under Sunak did nothing to make things clearer, even worse, they made this Labour govts mission to not prioritise women so much easier.

But but but, they're only women and children, so not as important as men. And the Lib Dems and Greens agree with us, so there!

But women have votes, and women need to use them in local and national elections and start writing to councillors and MP's and making it clear that they will NOT vote for people who think they should lose their rights to pander to a tiny minority.

Where is the Badenoch article?

Why do men breaking our boundaries deserve dignity and respect anyway? Why are they to be protected and in fact encouraged rather than told a firm "no"?

Many of the men she is talking about are dressing in bizarre, porno type clothing. See the guy in the baby doll dress at the London march ladt year. See the guy who served me in Brighton recently wearing a skimpy black sun dress, complete with boobs falling out.

Why do their wishes count and mine don't?

Because the trans they're meeting are the young Gen Z autistic/ADHD/socially challenged types, or the barrier-breaking Non Binaries.
Remember, at least half the Labour Party MPs (plus LDs, Greens, SNP) have a trans child, or in extended family, friends and colleagues with one or more.
If they know older men who've transed, they'll be the ones who've been bullied, kept it secret, been so brave in emerging from their chrysalis.
They'll be thinking back to the days of homosexuals in the shadows, gay kids too scared to come out, Thatcher Section 28, and declaring that trans will never go thru the pain that same-sex attracted did.
Mangled teens, misdiagnosed autists, AGP gleefully crashing women's barriers, none of these factor in the Just Be Kind MPs.

That correlation between poorly handled neurodiversity and politicians is fascinating. Do you have any more information?

By poorly handled, I suppose I mean they reach the point where they don't want to BE that person any more because they don't fit. The successful neurodiverse I know via my children have always had someone to fight their corner, encourage them, shove them where necessary and always, always say 'you know what? I love you just how you are and a label is just a label.' Is there something about politicians that means they're less capable of doing that? And is it the same something that means there's so many actors and actressses with trans children? They do say that politics is show business for ugly people...

I think it's more that the trans child is the new gay label to be championed. After millennia of homosexuality being absolutely prohibited and shunned, their civil rights only being sorted in the last few decades, gay marriage just one decade ago, trans was always going to be the minority that never suffered.
And so when the explosion via ROGD took off after 2012, this was only going one way. Which then meant that older men IDing as women would also get a total bye.
Once Stonewall got gay marriage sorted and needed to carry on a grift to survive and thrive, well, what a gilt edged opportunity was trans.
Politicians with trans IDing children, virtue turned up to eleven.