Trans Rights: The Conjuring Trick at the Toilet Door - AND left vs Liberalism ID

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

https://labourheartlands.com/trans-rights-the-conjuring-trick-at-the-toilet-door/

In general - this piece is just fantastic. It deserves to be shared very far and very wide.

Personally Ive been struggling to come to terms with feeling and being centre left but being passionately against trans ideology. This has given me a clear unambiguous explanation, and one that’s given me hope.

Such a good article. thank you.

One part that stood out for me was:

"....[Trans] people’s rights matter. Let that be stated plainly and without any qualification. The right not to be harassed, not to be discriminated against in employment, not to be subjected to violence or cruelty: these rights are absolute and non-negotiable. Protecting them costs women nothing, and any decent society provides them without hesitation.
But rights are not the same thing as demands. And the demand that half the population, fifty-one per cent of the people in this country, surrender sex-based protections won through generations of organised political struggle, is not a rights claim. It is a power claim. It is the assertion that the rights of one in two hundred must take legal and moral precedence over the rights of one in two, and that any woman who objects is not exercising her own right but committing a prejudice."

There was a piece in the Grauniad (where else 🙄 ) by a transwoman bemoaning the 'loss of rights' because of the Supreme Court ruling and the EHRC guidance, which just comes across as "s'not fair" whining.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/27/trans-people-segregation-parliament-supreme-court-ehrc

Thank you. What a clear, well-written piece.

Brilliant article.

The honest version of the argument would require its advocates to say plainly: we want the legal category “woman” to be defined by identity rather than sex, and we want that definition to take precedence over the sex-based protections women currently hold in law. Made plainly, that argument would lose. It would lose because most people, without requiring a Supreme Court judgment to guide them, understand that bodies are not merely opinions about bodies, that the reality of male violence against women is not dissolved by a change of identity, and that half the population did not spend a century fighting for legal protections only to be told those protections were a form of prejudice.

This is why the TRAs' response in the last year has been so incoherent, relying on vague legal challenges to FWS itself, political manoeuvres to stall its implementation, and naked appeals to institutions to break the law by ignoring it, when the logical response would be to lobby for an amendment to the law. They know that doing the latter would reveal what they're really about.

I don't agree that EA2010 was not intended to have the GRA applied to it. It was a mistake, for the reasons set out in FWS, but it was not accidental, as the explanatory note to Schedule 3 Paragraph 28 alone proves. Lord Tebbit pointed out all the potential problems when the GRA itself was debated years earlier - and EA2010 paid lip service to that, but its attempts to provide even a minimal bit of safeguarding were obliterated by TRAs. They overreached.

That's a great article. A pleasure to read and perhaps one that might be read (rather than dismissed) by some of our serially disappointing Labour MPs.

Yes, the Let’s Go Back to 2007” thread here is illuminating.

It feels like it is written in the language and arguments they understand. I hope it gets in front of as many of them as possible.

I have for quite a while been really concerned that I have been staring into the abyss for so long it really is staring back

Because, bizarrely, the old left / new authoritarians have taken a stand to dismantle women's rights and the old right / new pluralists are the only ones who talk about it in these terms and defend women's rights - I have been exposed to all the other things on that side of the political divide. I don't know how much I like it. Maybe my opinions are changing because I am being exposed to wider opinions and that's good, or maybe I am being persuaded to change other long standing political beliefs by insidious means...

Or maybe I am getting older and thats just how we roll as we age.

Either way. It was notably refreshing to hear a clearly very left wing voice speak so very directly and eloquently about this issue and put the situation in such clear terms.

We all know this is BS. Unless he wants everything to be Unisex he still wants segregation, but on his terms.

As a left wing GC person, the article is very affirming. I've said all along that the prioritisation of the demands of a minority of men to do as they please over the greater good of women (and indeed society as a whole when you think of the cost to the public purse its caused) is extreme Liberalism, rather than the 'far left' its branded as.
Its incredibly frustrating that people on the left have embraced TIM as an oppressed group and decided their 'struggle' deserved diverting resources away from the genuinely oppressed.

Thanks for that. It was heartening to be reminded that an authentically socialist, material analysis of this crap ideology would pierce straight through to the meretricious garbage at its core.

He uses the word 'liberal' to mean 'identifies as liberal but is really authoritarian', which is a USA framing.

A liberal state seeks to maximise individual freedom whilst protecting common goods and preventing predation of the strong on the weak.

Labour and Conservative are both liberal parties, who disagree on where to draw the lines.

For some reason, Labour voters have decided that transwomen are weak actors who require protection, but women are not (there's a similar distressing reversal in their attitude to the Jews).

Conservative voters are just as likely to be misogynistic (or antisemitic) as Labour voters, and to believe, or not, in magical things. But they really don't like the state interfering by giving a visible minority additional rights.

TLDR – Being GC doesn't mean you have to become a Nazi.

Great article thanks for the link, I agree they've tried to trivialise it by making it all about toilets, there's plenty of posts on many threads here trying just that. 😤

A very interesting piece, thanks for sharing.

I do, however, take issue with taking axiomatically that this group deserve particular rights

These people’s rights matter. Let that be stated plainly and without any qualification. The right not to be harassed, not to be discriminated against in employment, not to be subjected to violence or cruelty: these rights are absolute and non-negotiable. Protecting them costs women nothing, and any decent society provides them without hesitation.

Their particular set of mistaken beliefs should be subject to no extra consideration in law, and it does a disservice to reality for the author to do this kind of dance.

Fantastic clear article, thank you. Exactly the point I'm coming from and why I got into this in the first place. Not because of toilets but because as a Feminist who cares about the unfair social disadvantages faced by female people because we are female, the idea that the simple phrase "this happens to me because of my sex" could become unsayable is horrifying.

I disagree. I think they deserve the protection of spiritual/religious belief. I put believing you are "really" the opposite sex inside in the same category as believing you are "really" the consciousness of an ancient race of aliens who gave spark to humanity as vessels for their further evolution. Harmless as long as you don't go past wearing the outfit into demanding others act on your beliefs as well.

You are misreading it.

He is simply saying that trans people have the same rights as everyone else.
Everyone has the right not to be harassed, discriminated against, subject to violence or cruelty, etc.

This is not giving these mistaken trans beliefs any extra consideration in law.

From the article:
A conjuring trick requires misdirection. The audience must watch one hand while the other does the work. Keep that principle in mind as you scroll through the endless, repetitive, deliberately narrowed argument about public lavatories, and the entire campaign snaps suddenly into focus.
The toilet is not the argument. The toilet is the frame.
It has been chosen with great care, because it achieves three things at once. It makes women’s objections appear mean, petty, almost obsessive. It reduces a broad legal settlement about women’s fundamental rights to a single, intimate, emotionally charged doorway. And it places women permanently on the defensive, forever justifying the existence of the boundary rather than those demanding its removal. The question is always “why are you so obsessed with where people go to the toilet?”, never “why is your campaign not about building new facilities for transgender use, but specifically about access to women’s existing ones?”
That last question answers itself.
Purpose-built, universally accessible facilities would solve the practical problem of provision. But the practical problem has never, in truth, been the point. The point is recognition.

Brilliant.
And just what we have been saying for years.

From the article:
The left is supposed to begin with material reality. Bodies. Labour. Class. Wages. Violence. The analysis of women’s oppression that produced the Equality Act, that built the refuges, that fought for the single-sex provisions now being contested, was a materialist analysis. Women are oppressed because they are female. Not because of how they feel about being female. Because of reproduction, sexual vulnerability, male violence, unpaid domestic care, wage inequality and systematic exclusion from public life. The material conditions of being a woman in this world are not a cultural mood. They are a structural fact.
Liberalism, in its contemporary iteration, has made a different set of commitments. It has committed to the proposition that identity is self-determined, that the sincere assertion of an identity creates an obligation on others to affirm it, and that any structure which resists this obligation is oppressive by definition. That is not materialism. It is idealism.

As has also been discussed, but probably not enough: the 'Left' is no-longer about socialism and class analysis. It is about identity politics. Because tackling the former is very hard, and the latter is easy, or was easy until women fought back.

I was just logging in to recommend this essay. And it's from the Left!!

That's important to me, as I'm at least left of centre, and much more radical than the left on women's rights, so it's good to see resistance to the bro lefties and misogynists like Little Owen Jones.

My more forgiving take on that is that the left is no longer about class because class is blurry and is no longer the clear and primary predictor of disadvantage it once was.
There is little point in the left fighting for a group many of whom don't want the battle won.
So the focus moves to those oppressed in other ways, due to their sex, race, disability, sexuality.
Its still on message, because its still about levelling the playing field and fighting the oppression by the powerful of those with less power.
Then comes the misstep. The huge error in thinking that there is a group of people who can move from being privileged to the most oppressed, merely on the basis of wishing they were the opposite sex. And not only oppressed, but the MOST oppressed.
This is the mind set that must change, because until it does, left wing support for TI will be just the left doing what the left does.

class is blurry and is no longer the clear and primary predictor of disadvantage it once was

I would dispute that, depending on how 'class' is defined and categorised.
However, class is still a clear and primary predictor of advantage.

There is little point in the left fighting for a group many of whom don't want the battle won.
There is a great deal of point in fighting against a group who don't want to lose, i.e. the disproportionally wealthy.

This .

Ideologies do develop and change over time. One change that has occured on the left is to reject a lot of materialist class analysis and embrace identity analysis. Not everyone agrees with this, but it is a kind of left analysis.

And it's wider than just gender ideology. It changes a lot of elements of left thinking.

It's a shame Paul Knaggs discovered generative AI.

If you're defining class as wealth, I'd agree with you. Wealth is the primary predictor of advantage as its can act as a counter point and shield against oppression based on other characteristics, and therefore in all but exceptional circumstances, trumps them all.

Why?

He's clearly capable of writing clearly by himself (I went back and read an old article) so it's a shame he's decided to hand his writing over to a machine.