People are in the comments talking about allyship with the Right, the dangers of it and so on, but that's not the point I was making. what I'm saying is--don't let the right sit on the issue until they're ready to weaponise it. If they're in power, it doesn't matter if you're left or right-leaning yourself, we need to hold them to account.
My genuine fear is that the right have no intention to be anti woke and support the human rights of half the human race.
We can survive a few years of rampant capitalism, we've done it before. But women as a sex may take 100 years to come back from the brutality of trans misogyny if it is enshrined by law.
However, as I said in the original comment, my fear is that the right are not anti woke. They're just biding their time. If they were really anti woke they would have declared it loudly by now. I think they intend to keep quiet, win by default and then we will have government that is anti state health care, anti state education, anti state social welfare AND anti women's sex based rights. That's my genuine fear.
I grew up in a Glasgow slum, I've loathed Margaret Thatcher along with every other working class Scot, Tory was a swear word where I grew up. I'm not in the UK any more but have always voted left.
And of course I will vote right if the left throw the human rights of half the human race under the bus. Of course that matters more than anything. There is nothing more important than the sex based human rights of half the human race. It would be ridiculous to not support The Tories/Republicans/Liberals (in Aus the right wing call themselves the Liberal party, lol) whichever party supports the sex based rights and protections of half the human race.
But I don't want to vote against my conscience and give my allegiance to the right out of desperation, only to find the fuckers have conned us all.
I totally agree with you. I've loathed the Tories all my life, but I'll vote for them if they stick up for women's rights, because this is the most toxic misogynistic ideology I have ever seen.
I mean, seriously. It's half the human race we're talking about here. How anybody can think the protection, safety, dignity and literal human rights of half the human race doesn't surpass any other concerns they may have is beyond me.
My observation is that it seems like this effort in the UK was spearheaded by feminists on the left. In the USA, where I am, the environment seems different. It seems like our feminists on the left are siding with the trans lobby. The ones I see battling this are mostly women/men on the right. I understand that our motives will be questioned. In the USA in the 1960's civil rights were won because left and right united to demand them. It was Eisenhower who opened the door to comprehensive civil rights legislation in 1957. A greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats ended up voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is what can be accomplished if we agree to come together to fight for an issue.
pseudofeminists on the left who support sex work and defund the police are siding with the trans lobby. I've been following this for a long time and it seems to me 2nd wavers are alienated in the US just as in the UK, but the b.s. has just not hit here yet like it did in the UK, until Biden and his EQ. It was in the US that they killed the Michigan women's music festival and Dana Rivers murdered two lesbians associated with it, and their child. Give it time, US women will make their voices heard.
Yep, the pro prostitution libfems are not feminists. Quislings, the lot of them. We need another word for feminist, they've tainted and ruined the word with their internalised misogyny.
I've been testing the waters with "femalist" in casual discussions with American friends. Interesting responses so far to the nonpartisan nature of the term...
"but the b.s. has just not hit here yet like it did in the UK" - That's true. As I said in other comments, I feel like it has begun, but we are not giving information about some of the disasters happening and we are prevented, sometimes forcibly on social media, from talking about it.
Excellent--and it's also important to start applying the new "Maya ruling," as I'm calling it. For example, if there are companies that demand "gender training," insist they also include "gender critical training." Academics should be starting "Women's Studies" programs to counter all the "Gender Studies" programs. We need legal eagles to take on cases of harassment because of "lack of belief" in gender ideology. Etc. We have to take the Maya ruling and make the most of it!
It's all projection. The recent comment from Nancy Kelley, likening GC beliefs to anti-Semitism, is a good example. Tell us Lisa, who is it that wants to silence debate, cancel opponents, burn books, make death threats and coerce with violence? 👉 Your lot.
they certainly project well. The transvestite predators are the actual Nazis via genetic heritage though. Dig deep enough and you find most of them come from extreme (white protestant) privilege and have ruling class families. That's why they are using that trope, most of them and their supporters are so young and ignorant they don't even get that many if not most of the 2nd wave feminists that birthed the philosophy of gender critical ideology are/were Jewish and many of the most prominent voices in the later half of the 2nd wave were women of color. To label the 2nd wave as anything other than a movement of working class women, WOC and prominent Jewish writers and thinkers is just a big fat stinking lie. They have only been successful in that characterization with young historically ignorant idiots on social media, because the older, larger public understand and remember names like Steinem and Freidan, and Azbug and Dworkin and Shulamith Firestone (Feurestein) Writer Robin Morgan is also of Jewish ancestry (https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/morgan-robin) and Adrienne Rich's father was Jewish. I'm surprised that more folks don't speak up and remind these ignorant gen z foghorns that 2nd wave feminism was a movement lead and driven by the voices of Jewish women. GC is the 21st century heir of these amazing, creative, and driven leaders.
some amazing Jewish feminists on this list...Kathy Acker, Susan Brownmiller, the list just goes on and on...as I was raised a hardcore working class evangelical in the Southern US I was always fascinated at the sheer brazen conviction and confidence of the Jewish girls I knew. I always wondered where it comes from, what about their upbringing, though under similar religious doctrine, left them with such conviction where mine was beaten out of me to the point where I stuttered and shook when I tried to stand up for myself or my beliefs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_feminists
"Otherwise, why aren't they trumpeting the fact that men are already in women's prisons, political appointments, rape shelters, toilets, and so on and on and on?" I think it's because men tend to cover for other men when it comes to sexual gratification, regardless of their political philosophy. They just don't want to interfere with other men's pleasures, no matter what they are - witness the long-term existence of PornHub, and the many, many institutional sex-abuse scandals....I hope I'm wrong, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Right to do right.
We are lucky in the US that the demands of the TRA just happen to step on the toes of the RFRA and are threatening to cause religious institutions to have to comply with things like abortion and underwriting those who believe sex can be changed. As long as sex based protections fall in with that category we are covered...it's disturbing to me some GOP senators are trying to 'work out a compromise' which will axe sex based protections for women and endanger girls horribly, instead of just letting Joe Manchin vote down and ax the Equality Act as he is prepared to do, any compromise will be a disaster for women's sex based rights as only religious belief will be given an exemption. After Maya's victory yesterday I think belief in science should be labeled a belief system as well and be protected also. I think all girls should be pulled out of public school in the US until the federal gov't stops signing off on their sexual violation. What is going on now is hideous and the youngest and most marginalized are paying the highest price.
"it's disturbing to me some GOP senators are trying to 'work out a compromise' which will axe sex based protections for women and endanger girls horribly" Amen. And the RFRA, while good, doesn't protect everyone. It doesn't protect public school kids from this. I feel as though its inevitable that the RFRA will fall, too. The left seems determined to attack the idea of the Constitution itself. The answer is to have a groundswell of public awareness about what's really happening and what's at stake and to empower the public to address this, but the internet censorship and fear of being labeled "hateful" is so strong.
only on social media. that's not the real world. 70 percent of the public while not supporting discrimination against trans people, also doesn't support the vacating of women's sex based rights, cause they have common sense and don't want their children transed without their consent and their daughters violated. The left has a huge voice of pro-TRA on social media BECAUSE it's the pornsick psychopathic tech geeks that end up transing themselves in a desperate attempt to keep up their masturbation and sex addictions since they've been porn addicted since like 7 years old via porn exposure in gaming communities. They were groomed by predators whether corporate or individual and now they are predators themselves. They are PREDATORS that have taken over the LGBT moniker and are using it to get access to women and children in every conceivable way. Social media is not reality and doesn't represent the electorates views on these issues in any way, shape or form. And the left wing media outlets online like Vice/Raw Story/Daily Beast etc and worse are totally captured by this idiocy. But it's not real, the public is not in support of them. The public is anti-discrimination but also anti-predation.
This will be a continuing problem until trans allies admit the massive loophole self-id creates, and that a "rights" movement should exclude sexual predators OBVIOUSLY. They might give brief lip-service to this but we see time and time again that they don't differentiate between gender dysphoria and kink/AGP, and actually side with abusers. They're so afraid of not being woke, afraid to draw that line. It's like the Rotherham scandal all over again, it continued because people were afraid of drawing that line, and predators will continue to push the boundaries in a decent and tolerant society.
Working in domestic abuse services for over 20 years in Greater Manchester, I can safely say that Lisa Nandy has no idea about women in refuges and the fear they feel.
Why when Lisa Nandy was asked about safeguarding in single sex refuges and shelters and how self ID conflicts with that, did she shift focus onto refugees who were child soldiers? Nice way to dodge the issue. The clapping from a predominantly male audience at the TWAW and TMAM phrase felt rather sinister
It is heartbreaking for me. My family is steeped in Labour history. My great great grandfather worked in the Yorkshire mills and campaigned to stop child labour there. Yet I now feel unable to vote for Labour because they are betraying women in such a wholesale and callous way. There must be many left wing women who feel the same way. We also ran the offices, picked up the phones, put leaflets through doors but my letter to my CLP about women’s rights goes unanswered. The only conclusion I can draw is that they just don’t care.
I feel politically homeless in the United States as well. The working class has been abandoned along with women’s rights.
As states begin to pass legislation protecting girls/women’s sport or preventing the medicalization of children, it is always framed as hateful or anti trans. No discussion is allowed.
I've always known I was politically homeless. My father was a radical union organizer and we were freaks in our working-class suburb. I've been marginalized all my life and while I see the benefits of being an utter outsider, it would be nice to find commonality with other people (I'm also rural and isolated).
Glad to see this raised. As a socialist & a feminist I don’t trust the Telegraph further than I could kick it, but if it’s the only place I can read about this stuff, I will.
One of the reasons I love Glinner & you all is that the only agenda I can discern here is to establish what’s going on and tell us about it as clearly as possible.
It worries me very much how willing the right are to use it as a wedge issue - I’ve seen Eddie Izzard’s image used on social media before the last two elections as a “look at this ‘son of the working class’ who represents everything bad about Labour” take that.
It also worries me how willing some on the left are willing to say “if it’s in the Telegraph it can’t be true & you mustn’t even be looking at that right wing stuff”.
It’s a proper dropped pie.
Anyway, I’ve got to get back to being “schooled” on Facebook by a bunch of rugrats.
Yes that’s right women and children do not have equal rights or specific to their sex or age based needs under male domination and oppression anywhere. In NZ I note right wing politicians are siloing off women’s sports rather than the whole “shebang” of failures under successive Governments and utter failures of homoerotic machismo bs under Labour here to address women’s representation and legal and human rights with their tokenism and performative sops to women. Same old same old.
Thank you for this. I ditched the misogynistic Guardian years ago, and took a Telegraph subscription after Suzanne Moore started writing for them . They allow me to speak the reality that men aren't women, which is far more than any of the so called left wing media do. The left no longer exists as a party for the working class. It remains to be seen if they can cut out their own cancerous misogyny, or if they're dead and buried.
It's the political class in a nutshell : Cowardice. It's why Bozza the Bullshitter ™ gets away with so much, er, bullshit.
There are many blue-collar right-wingers ... but few blue-collar Tories. It's why the chattering classes were shocked by Brexit and Trump. Trump's a slightly different phenomenon so we'll park that one but Brexit is the *perfect* illustration of the void between politicians and the working-class public; and why it was only the Westminster bubble that was "shocked" by the result (and why the entitled shitheads thought they could thwart it in the courts)
Same for the gender bollocks. It's only the sneering, condescending metropolitans and MPs of all colours who are on-board with the shit show; the populace want no part of the car crash regardless of their political hue.
the general population in the US is opposed to discrimination vs. trans but equally opposed to imposing trans males on women and girls, both by about 70%. The left wing press in the US only harps on the first stat but never tells the truth that a great majority of the public knows this is a pervert/sex offender driven ideology and wants no part of it.
Where in hell do you find left-wing press in the U.S.? I know there are some over-privileged white boys running so-called left-wing websites who don't have the balls to allow gender criticism, but they are not generally referred to as the press.
I consider U.S. standards corrupt, bankrupt, and utterly despicable. The end of our empire is coming and it is not a pretty sight. How many people got caught up in a mass shooting today?
I wrote to local Tory MSP before the May elections. Got a couple of wishy washy replies from his admin and nothing since I asked what definition of woman he was using. I even pointed out the Conservatives in Scotland have never been able to get any traction now they're staring at an open goal. One did talk about men in women's prisons though on a radio discussion.
The problem for me is that this is a mistaken example of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". That formulation is always wrong - the best that can ever be said is that the enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. I have spent too many years on thus planet fighting the Right to embrace them just because they MAY align with me on this point, important as it is. I might stand alongside them with a peg on my nose whilst wearing an NBC suit, but I can never do anything to show approval of them because their very existence is anathema to me.
The left we knew is gone. That's the problem. In the US we have sex work is work, and defund the police as platforms of the left now. We have leftist males soaked in online porn and misogyny who deify sex workers and think that real feminism, 2nd wave feminism is nazism. The left is dead. 40 percent of the electorate in the US is now in the center, unaffiliated, up from being the minority 15 years ago to a solid majority with the dems lagging behind at 31% and the GOP at 25%, and exact reversal of the situation 15 yrs ago.. The left wing in the US IS NOW MY ENEMY. As a second wave feminist in my early 50's the misogyny on the left is now equivalent with the misogyny on the right. The only two voices in the US Senate obtusely standing up for GC feminist belief also belong to the two biggest loons otherwise, Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert, who have without nuance defended women's sex based rights. MTG is the mother of an elite athlete who went to college on a softball scholarship and is the stated OPENLY that males do not belong in the locker rooms/showers of female athletes; it's enraging to me that female politicians on the left in this country WOULDN'T DARE state something like this, when they of all people should be screaming it from the rooftops.
I look back on my days of 'belonging' to the democratic party as a lapse in judgement. No free human being should 'belong' to a party, political parties run on greed funded by corporate lobbies and should have to work very hard to get people's votes.There is no party of the people now, just a party of the corporate lobbies. Now that the left is the absolute enemy of women and girls and setting us in the path of sexual assault via transvestite predators (not to mention our children being maimed by medicalization) I don't know how any woman can consider herself to be at an advantage by belonging to either party. Leaving the parties is the only thing that will make them tone down their extremism. I wish we could get two centrist right and left parties in the US but we are not there. AS it stands right now I fully believe a sane, level-headed centrist could garner serious support running as an independent. The problem is without two such candidates that person would just split the vote and hand it probably right back to dems. I have never sat out a presidential election in my life but if the choice in 24 in the US is between Trump and Biden I'm abstaining.
We do not have a left-wing party in the U.S. Democrats are not left-wing. Progressives are not left-wing. Liberals are not left-wing. All these groups are center-right in their politics; they do not represent working people, they do not represent the poor, and they only pay lip service to racial justice or women's rights (both of which they will happily toss in the trash). Our media is soaked in propaganda; trans propaganda is only a small sample. And one of the biggest lies is that Democrats, progressives, and liberals are leftists. One test is that leftists do not subscribe to IMPERIALISM, which all of these groups do.
We don't have an openly communist party in the USA... but I'd argue that the Democrats are certainly moving further left. AOC, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders and others are certainly left-wing.
The Democratic Party is not moving left. AOC is a supreme self-promoter who will cave to any pressure. Bernie Sanders is a sheepdogger for the party, steering people to vote for Clinton or Biden, both war criminals, and plenty of Vermonters have lots to say about Sanders. And we do have some openly communist and socialist parties for your information. But not, as an economist pointed out, a strong CP and two strong SPs as we had in the 1930s to counter capitalist predation.
I see lots of marxist youth on tiktock threatening to beat women to the ground, and worse, for being nazis. I disagree 100% with your analysis and I think communism/marxism of leftist youth is a marker for enabling the TRA. I have never seen such rabid, drooling for violence, wannabe jackbooted thugs as those marxists defending the TRA movement online and endorsing horrible violence against any women that speak out against the gender scam. Communism and Marxism and some aspects of socialism are nothing but uber-confiscatory imperialism and capitalism in their real world applications, the gov't of countries run on these pseudo-philosophies dreamt up by privileged white males with no real world experience are always little more than mafias.
"And we do have some openly communist and socialist parties for your information." I know... I was referring to viable parties. "The Democratic Party is not moving left."
On the other hand the only real people that appear to be willing to stand up to the trans lobby in the USA are the people on the right. Personally, I am a conservative. I'm more socially liberal, but I'm a capitalist and despite its faults, I think the USA is a great country.
What is so odd is that women, in general, who used to be considered a political force, seem to be utterly ignored now as the intersectional folks try to chase after the votes of people that they can exploit as "more marginalized" than women. We often hear, "Trans rights is the new civil rights battle". The problem, of course, is that the trans lobby demands that it be able to oppress others in order to achieve their goals.
Some of us have watched the train approaching, but really America has never had a political debate/discussion around "trans rights". Title IX simply happened via the hand of Obama without the nation discussing what it really meant. Caitlyn Jenner came out and everyone celebrated "this is the new reality" and it's really interesting to see how that is going. Caitlyn is now demonized for being a Republican who likes America. Although some politicians have spoken about it and there are pundits (mainly on the right) who speak out, the national conversation has not really happened because it gets censored online as "hate" or shouted down as bigotry.
At around the time that Caitlyn announced herself we had a national "scandal" because North Carolina passed its "bathroom bill". No one discussed what led to the bill. There was simply great national uproar because NC wasn't going to allow trans folks to pee. It was difficult to find information about the "why" of that bathroom bill. Big name bands canceled shows in NC and there was loud outrage and major media gave biased coverage. The real story is that the bill came about because the city of Charlotte, NC passed an ordinance. The ordinance applied to every business in the city and said that anyone based on their "gender expression" should be allowed to use the facilities that they wanted to. In the original ordinance there was language that said something like, "except in obviously private sex segregated spaces where privacy is required like the locker room at the Y". This language was struck from the ordinance. So passage of that ordinance made it so that "Sally's Luxury Spa" which had locker rooms with hot tubs, saunas...where women undress... would have to admit a 6'3" lumberjack-looking person if they expressed that they were a woman.
That was what NC was responding to, but that tale was never told. Charlotte did what it did with no intention on compromising on the parameters of the ordinance, so the state stepped in to protect women's privacy. National media only told a biased and weighted version of the story. I cannot recall a single national media outlet that is considered "mainstream" covering the story of the Illinois women's prison inmate who claims that she was raped by a penisperson inmate and charges that the prison pressured her to recant her accusations and alleges that they are based in "transphobia". But any sane human being has to think that putting penispeople charged with violent crimes into women's prisons is a terrible idea. But absent major media coverage, it's simply happening and we have never had a national discussion about how to keep all inmates safe.
There's a situation now where this group's rights are sacrosanct and everyone else's rights are secondary. Objecting, as a woman, to something that you see as unreasonable gets you labeled a "TERF" even if you aren't a giant F, let alone a radical one. TERFS are called Nazis even though they are mostly on the left, politically. Violence is encouraged against them. If you are encouraging the idea that some women deserve violence, why should we not consider you to simply be abusive men looking to abuse women? Generally, women don't go around punching other women for disagreeing with them.
Sometimes when you make reasonable objections to things these people will simply accuse you of killing trans people because the suicide rates are high. I'm sorry about that mental fragility, but this is emotional blackmail. I'm not a murderer because I believe that penispeople convicted of violent crime do not belong in prison with vagina-havers. It has to be noted that "I'll kill myself" is something that male spouse abusers say to women who threaten to leave them.
But all of this has simply "happened" in the USA without us being even allowed to have a national conversation about it because if you say the wrong thing or say something the wrong way even while trying to be respectful, people fly into a rage and accuse you of transphobia. Saying "I'm not okay with forcing spas to accept all clients based on their gender expression in areas where people disrobe" is not saying that you think that trans folks or gender-fluid entities are predators, it's saying that bad actors will take advantage of that and it will put women and girls at risk. And there's an internet full of creeper porn that makes the case that it will happen.
Saying, "Get your children off the internet or highly supervise them while they are on it because there are communities dedicated to grooming them" is a simple fact and not a statement of hate. If gendered toy aisles in a toy store are "dangerously brainwashing" kids into being one gender or another then these communities where young kids are welcomed, celebrated, cyber-loved and exposed to sexuality and complex issues before they are ready to deal with them and are told that their normal awkwardness might be because they are in the wrong body and maybe they can self-soothe by pretending to be a puppy and sucking on a pacifier are doing what?
Right now the concern is lesbian women and kids, but this will come for everyone. Gay men are being told that vaginapeople who identify as men are valid men and refusing sex with them is transphobia. Straight men are being told that penispeople who identify as women are real women and how dare you say you aren't into that? It seems like it will get to the point that if someone at work asks you out on a date and you decline, you may be targeted for revenge if they are trans.
So conservative or liberal, male or female, religious or atheist... everyone needs to get under the umbrella because the rain of insanity is starting to fall. We don't have to agree on everything, but we should be able to agree that no one deserves to step on the rights of others to demand a special validation for themselves. Because that is hate, not love. That is injustice, not equality. It's a path to disaster.
I was webcam spied a year ago and got active in the anti-porn tube movement and I agree this is 100% about the internet. I recently took a pc back from my nephew, that I had let him use the two days he is here, who at 13 had about ten social media accounts and was posting sexual content (memes) and anti-semitic tropes like pepe the frog, etc. The internet is NOT a place for children. Title IX was passed in the seventies and greatly benefitted girls and women in athletics in schools and colleges, my generation was the benefactor of that. It also established guidelines for how sexual assaults are reported and addressed in schools and colleges. It is the best thing that ever happened to female athletes in public schools. Obama had nothing to do with it.
I've researched every statistic the trans movement has put out. The suicides are NOT high. The suicide statistics ARE NOT KEPT because sex at birth is used. I have never found any, it is the one area of their stat flinging I can find zero corroboration for. The suicide ATTEMPT rate is being driven by young girls...girls transitiong to male have an attempt rate double that of mtf adolescents. Suicide among girls ten to fourteen has tripled in the last 15 years (guess how old social media is?) It is a girl genocide, not a trans one.
And there is NO trans murder epidemic. It is not only one of the safer demographics, unless you are a sex worker. The murder of sex workers is high across the board, it is an occupational hazard that has zero to do with their trans status but rather their choice of occupation (which for them mainly is used to pay for trans surgeries). Wilfred Reilly painstakingly does the math here: https://quillette.com/2019/12/07/are-we-in-the-midst-of-a-transgender-murder-epidemic/
That's exactly what it is. It's horrible to see how better parties such as the Greens and Labour are forcing women to choose between identity politics and decent policies. The Tories have been more supportive of GC women but they're crap on the environment and social policies (which tend to affect women more than men). I'm angry at the Guardian but still could not subscribe to the Telegraph or Times because I hate everything else they stand for.
I'm the same. I want to read GC articles, but I'm against the Tories, Brexit and all their other principles really. Telegraph and Times have done nasty articles on people I admire and I cannot support them! So sick of the cowardice in the left media.
No. Sex based human rights for half the human race are the most important policy on the table. There is nothing more important. I will not give away my sex based rights and the sex based rights and protections of my daughter and stepdaughters. I will NOT concede to men in women's rape shelters re-traumatising victims, men in prisons raping vulnerable women, men stealing women's trophies and sporting accomplishments, men in their changing rooms and toilets. I will NOT hand those over out of a misguided loyalty to the left which has utterly deserted womankind.
I grew up in poverty in a Glasgow slum. I loathed Margaret Thatcher along with every other working class Scot. I have never voted right in my life. But of course I will do so if the left continue their rampage against half the human race.
However, my hope is that if we can force the right to declare their full intention to support women's sex based rights, if we can force them to openly state what has been going on and say they are against it, the left will then become so terrified of losing they will back down on their misogyny. Of course I'd rather not hand any country over to rampant capitalists who think dog eat dog is a social policy. But I will NOT hand over women's sex based rights and protections to the left. It's not even a choice.
We can survive a few years of rampant capitalism, we've done it before. But women as a sex may take 100 years to come back from the brutality of trans misogyny if it is enshrined by law.
However, as I said in the original comment, my fear is that the right are not anti woke. They're just biding their time. If they were really anti woke they would have declared it loudly by now. I think they intend to keep quiet, win by default and then we will have government that is anti state health care, anti state education, anti state social welfare AND anti women's sex based rights. That's my genuine fear.
I will vote right if the left throw the human rights of half the human race under the bus. Of course that matters more than anything. It would be ridiculous to do otherwise. But I don't want to vote against my conscience and give my allegiance to the right out of desperation, only to find the fuckers have conned us all.
In practice, there are far more centrists in the population than Left or Right (I'm using Left and Right here because it is the language of the original post - the issue is more about Authoritarianism v Freedom (or liberalism)). The USA and the UK political systems have developed a false binary which forces us into choices we shouldn't have to make.
If we, the people who vote for the government, make it clear that we won't stand for more social-engineering that removes sex-based rights, then it won't happen - political expediency will win out. Legal actions like those by Maya Forstater and Kiera Bell are making a difference (at least in the UK). Soon we'll be able to protest on public again. The "Women Won't Wheesht" campaign is subtle but effective. Spoiled ballot papers are more influential than people think.
Let's think smart. Let's not think in terms of numbers - it is too easy for people to say (just as an example), "If the NHS is dismantled, more than half the population will lose out". Let's face it, many men will think "If the NHS is dismantled, *I* will lose out", and not give women's rights a second thought. Trying to avoid these choices by showing that this is not a party-political issue is the way to go.
every politician alive needs to read what you just wrote, particularly "I have never voted in my life...but". God bless. My conviction is there are a whole lot of people out there who are livid about what is going on and will vote with their feet. I fully expect to see dems lose Congress next year. Then Biden's agenda will grind to a complete halt until the election in 2024. It may be the first presidential election I don't vote in at all... if Trump v. Biden is the ticket I'm abstaining.
I don't hate the right, I just have a clear-eyed view of them and what they stand for (speaking from the U.S.). I think standing alongside them is fine as long as one makes clear one's position. Some of this has been done in this country with women standing together against such crap as self-ID. My aunt is a Republican and it has benefited her enormously financially. We had an agreement not to discuss politics and then she began screaming at me "I believe Kavanaugh! I believe Kavanaugh!" a drunken predator if ever there was one who now sits for the rest of his life on the U.S. Supreme Court. She is a traumatized woman who chose to identify with her traumatizers; she was speaking to me from her amygdala, and there is no coherent, rational discussion with such a person. And that's been my experience with the right wing: there is no rational discussion. Sometimes there can be agreement on an issue, but that's it.
This is not my amygdala talking and I'm not a traumatized woman, but the allegations against Kavanaugh came from one woman and her own friend testified that what she claims happened, did not happen. You can believe her... but there are 65 women who knew him from high school on who signed a letter saying that he is not, in fact, a drunken predator.
This is what makes things difficult for me. Sex-based rights and rationality are incredibly important, but so are many other things, such as the NHS, social security, communitarianism, and controls on capitalism. Certainly, once the NHS and the social safety-net are gone (which could be within five years under the current Tory government), we'll never get them back.
Also, as Graham points out, politicians on the right are not our allies in the fight for sex-based rights. If they were, we'd be hearing about it all over the place. I cannot lend credibility to a political philosophy that acts against the good of the majority in the hope that, just because they aren't as far down the rabbit hole as the Left, they are going to support us.
Yes, I've been thinking for a while how much the Right is involved in this. One might sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I read someone's post showing some evidence that republican billionaires in the USA are bankrolling the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture puberty blockers. The left embrace something funded by the right and are falling foul of the "it's the left and their identity politics that are driving this".
It's a trap that they walk into.
Over in the UK the Tory party has its own trans activist MPs. Penny Mordaunt, Alicia Kearns and Caroline Noakes to name a few. Not forgetting Crispin Blunt who...thanks to my Hansard research for another project, used to argue against gay rights in the 90s, on the grounds it was legitimising predators(!)
People are saying they will vote Tory over this issue...but the cancer is there, too.
Speaking of the right wing, The Federalist Papers ran an excellent article by a feminist pinpointing various contributors to the trans agenda. Pritzker is one of the Republican billionaires financing this junk, and he thinks he's a woman. Yep, lots of women have hands like baseball mitts and wear shoes the size of canoes.
The same here, like when Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson was dropped some trans coins and came out as "transwomen are women" right before the election. Hardly any LD MPs left now...really huge mistake.
The Right, whatever they might have been once, are utterly amoral now. The only principle they have is to acquire more wealth and power by any means available. If you want to understand the moral philosophy of the Right today, look at the Mafia.
I've always been on the Left-ish, but there are some ideas that used to be associated with the (Liberal) Right I admired: personal freedom, personal responsibility, strong defence, an appreciation of the benefits of institutions (as well as their faults), evolution over revolution, an awareness of the dangers of an over-mighty state. The times when the Right paid anything more than lip-service to most of those ideas seems long gone, certainly here and the US.
So what the Right won't see is a terrible wrong being done that must be corrected. What they will see is an opportunity to further their own interests. They've been quiet about Gender lunacy because they feel no need to be noisy about it. Brexit hasn't bitten yet, Johnson is being given credit for the great work of the NHS and awareness of his failures is being carefully managed by the Tory press and the nobbled BBC. They're banking receipts ready for when the polls turn and elections approach.
The Prog/Lib/Left have obligingly provided so much ammunition that the Tories can, for once, win an election by telling the truth. I don't know where the parties are getting their advice from. Obviously they don't actually believe the woo - no one does - so they must think there are votes in it. But why? Whenever regular people learn the true horror of Gender Ideology - not the stunning, brave bullshit in the media - they are utterly repelled by it. Who told them that voters would approve? Why did they believe them?
But cynical vote-chasing aside, everyone here knows how regressive Gender Ideology is. It's not compatible with progressive, liberal values. Its victims are the vulnerable: drugged, carved up, exploited for profit, its activists and advocates as brutal, authoritarian and impermeable to reason as any fascist. So they haven't bothered to check, or the buzz of belonging and the lure of increased status are stronger than the principles they claim to hold. Whichever, it's a terrible indictment of people and organisations who take it for granted that they're a compassionate force for good, and expect others to take it for granted too.
People are in the comments talking about allyship with the Right, the dangers of it and so on, but that's not the point I was making. what I'm saying is--don't let the right sit on the issue until they're ready to weaponise it. If they're in power, it doesn't matter if you're left or right-leaning yourself, we need to hold them to account.
My genuine fear is that the right have no intention to be anti woke and support the human rights of half the human race.
We can survive a few years of rampant capitalism, we've done it before. But women as a sex may take 100 years to come back from the brutality of trans misogyny if it is enshrined by law.
However, as I said in the original comment, my fear is that the right are not anti woke. They're just biding their time. If they were really anti woke they would have declared it loudly by now. I think they intend to keep quiet, win by default and then we will have government that is anti state health care, anti state education, anti state social welfare AND anti women's sex based rights. That's my genuine fear.
I grew up in a Glasgow slum, I've loathed Margaret Thatcher along with every other working class Scot, Tory was a swear word where I grew up. I'm not in the UK any more but have always voted left.
And of course I will vote right if the left throw the human rights of half the human race under the bus. Of course that matters more than anything. There is nothing more important than the sex based human rights of half the human race. It would be ridiculous to not support The Tories/Republicans/Liberals (in Aus the right wing call themselves the Liberal party, lol) whichever party supports the sex based rights and protections of half the human race.
But I don't want to vote against my conscience and give my allegiance to the right out of desperation, only to find the fuckers have conned us all.
I totally agree with you. I've loathed the Tories all my life, but I'll vote for them if they stick up for women's rights, because this is the most toxic misogynistic ideology I have ever seen.
I mean, seriously. It's half the human race we're talking about here. How anybody can think the protection, safety, dignity and literal human rights of half the human race doesn't surpass any other concerns they may have is beyond me.
My observation is that it seems like this effort in the UK was spearheaded by feminists on the left. In the USA, where I am, the environment seems different. It seems like our feminists on the left are siding with the trans lobby. The ones I see battling this are mostly women/men on the right. I understand that our motives will be questioned. In the USA in the 1960's civil rights were won because left and right united to demand them. It was Eisenhower who opened the door to comprehensive civil rights legislation in 1957. A greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats ended up voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is what can be accomplished if we agree to come together to fight for an issue.
pseudofeminists on the left who support sex work and defund the police are siding with the trans lobby. I've been following this for a long time and it seems to me 2nd wavers are alienated in the US just as in the UK, but the b.s. has just not hit here yet like it did in the UK, until Biden and his EQ. It was in the US that they killed the Michigan women's music festival and Dana Rivers murdered two lesbians associated with it, and their child. Give it time, US women will make their voices heard.
Yep, the pro prostitution libfems are not feminists. Quislings, the lot of them. We need another word for feminist, they've tainted and ruined the word with their internalised misogyny.
I've been testing the waters with "femalist" in casual discussions with American friends. Interesting responses so far to the nonpartisan nature of the term...
"but the b.s. has just not hit here yet like it did in the UK" - That's true. As I said in other comments, I feel like it has begun, but we are not giving information about some of the disasters happening and we are prevented, sometimes forcibly on social media, from talking about it.
Excellent--and it's also important to start applying the new "Maya ruling," as I'm calling it. For example, if there are companies that demand "gender training," insist they also include "gender critical training." Academics should be starting "Women's Studies" programs to counter all the "Gender Studies" programs. We need legal eagles to take on cases of harassment because of "lack of belief" in gender ideology. Etc. We have to take the Maya ruling and make the most of it!
It's all projection. The recent comment from Nancy Kelley, likening GC beliefs to anti-Semitism, is a good example. Tell us Lisa, who is it that wants to silence debate, cancel opponents, burn books, make death threats and coerce with violence? 👉 Your lot.
they certainly project well. The transvestite predators are the actual Nazis via genetic heritage though. Dig deep enough and you find most of them come from extreme (white protestant) privilege and have ruling class families. That's why they are using that trope, most of them and their supporters are so young and ignorant they don't even get that many if not most of the 2nd wave feminists that birthed the philosophy of gender critical ideology are/were Jewish and many of the most prominent voices in the later half of the 2nd wave were women of color. To label the 2nd wave as anything other than a movement of working class women, WOC and prominent Jewish writers and thinkers is just a big fat stinking lie. They have only been successful in that characterization with young historically ignorant idiots on social media, because the older, larger public understand and remember names like Steinem and Freidan, and Azbug and Dworkin and Shulamith Firestone (Feurestein) Writer Robin Morgan is also of Jewish ancestry (https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/morgan-robin) and Adrienne Rich's father was Jewish. I'm surprised that more folks don't speak up and remind these ignorant gen z foghorns that 2nd wave feminism was a movement lead and driven by the voices of Jewish women. GC is the 21st century heir of these amazing, creative, and driven leaders.
some amazing Jewish feminists on this list...Kathy Acker, Susan Brownmiller, the list just goes on and on...as I was raised a hardcore working class evangelical in the Southern US I was always fascinated at the sheer brazen conviction and confidence of the Jewish girls I knew. I always wondered where it comes from, what about their upbringing, though under similar religious doctrine, left them with such conviction where mine was beaten out of me to the point where I stuttered and shook when I tried to stand up for myself or my beliefs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_feminists
Not sure who Lisa is. 👀 😆
I meant Nancy of course. 😁
"Otherwise, why aren't they trumpeting the fact that men are already in women's prisons, political appointments, rape shelters, toilets, and so on and on and on?" I think it's because men tend to cover for other men when it comes to sexual gratification, regardless of their political philosophy. They just don't want to interfere with other men's pleasures, no matter what they are - witness the long-term existence of PornHub, and the many, many institutional sex-abuse scandals....I hope I'm wrong, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Right to do right.
We are lucky in the US that the demands of the TRA just happen to step on the toes of the RFRA and are threatening to cause religious institutions to have to comply with things like abortion and underwriting those who believe sex can be changed. As long as sex based protections fall in with that category we are covered...it's disturbing to me some GOP senators are trying to 'work out a compromise' which will axe sex based protections for women and endanger girls horribly, instead of just letting Joe Manchin vote down and ax the Equality Act as he is prepared to do, any compromise will be a disaster for women's sex based rights as only religious belief will be given an exemption. After Maya's victory yesterday I think belief in science should be labeled a belief system as well and be protected also. I think all girls should be pulled out of public school in the US until the federal gov't stops signing off on their sexual violation. What is going on now is hideous and the youngest and most marginalized are paying the highest price.
"it's disturbing to me some GOP senators are trying to 'work out a compromise' which will axe sex based protections for women and endanger girls horribly" Amen. And the RFRA, while good, doesn't protect everyone. It doesn't protect public school kids from this. I feel as though its inevitable that the RFRA will fall, too. The left seems determined to attack the idea of the Constitution itself. The answer is to have a groundswell of public awareness about what's really happening and what's at stake and to empower the public to address this, but the internet censorship and fear of being labeled "hateful" is so strong.
only on social media. that's not the real world. 70 percent of the public while not supporting discrimination against trans people, also doesn't support the vacating of women's sex based rights, cause they have common sense and don't want their children transed without their consent and their daughters violated. The left has a huge voice of pro-TRA on social media BECAUSE it's the pornsick psychopathic tech geeks that end up transing themselves in a desperate attempt to keep up their masturbation and sex addictions since they've been porn addicted since like 7 years old via porn exposure in gaming communities. They were groomed by predators whether corporate or individual and now they are predators themselves. They are PREDATORS that have taken over the LGBT moniker and are using it to get access to women and children in every conceivable way. Social media is not reality and doesn't represent the electorates views on these issues in any way, shape or form. And the left wing media outlets online like Vice/Raw Story/Daily Beast etc and worse are totally captured by this idiocy. But it's not real, the public is not in support of them. The public is anti-discrimination but also anti-predation.
This will be a continuing problem until trans allies admit the massive loophole self-id creates, and that a "rights" movement should exclude sexual predators OBVIOUSLY. They might give brief lip-service to this but we see time and time again that they don't differentiate between gender dysphoria and kink/AGP, and actually side with abusers. They're so afraid of not being woke, afraid to draw that line. It's like the Rotherham scandal all over again, it continued because people were afraid of drawing that line, and predators will continue to push the boundaries in a decent and tolerant society.
Working in domestic abuse services for over 20 years in Greater Manchester, I can safely say that Lisa Nandy has no idea about women in refuges and the fear they feel.
Why when Lisa Nandy was asked about safeguarding in single sex refuges and shelters and how self ID conflicts with that, did she shift focus onto refugees who were child soldiers? Nice way to dodge the issue. The clapping from a predominantly male audience at the TWAW and TMAM phrase felt rather sinister
Thats exactly what I felt too.
It is heartbreaking for me. My family is steeped in Labour history. My great great grandfather worked in the Yorkshire mills and campaigned to stop child labour there. Yet I now feel unable to vote for Labour because they are betraying women in such a wholesale and callous way. There must be many left wing women who feel the same way. We also ran the offices, picked up the phones, put leaflets through doors but my letter to my CLP about women’s rights goes unanswered. The only conclusion I can draw is that they just don’t care.
I feel politically homeless in the United States as well. The working class has been abandoned along with women’s rights.
As states begin to pass legislation protecting girls/women’s sport or preventing the medicalization of children, it is always framed as hateful or anti trans. No discussion is allowed.
I've always known I was politically homeless. My father was a radical union organizer and we were freaks in our working-class suburb. I've been marginalized all my life and while I see the benefits of being an utter outsider, it would be nice to find commonality with other people (I'm also rural and isolated).
Glad to see this raised. As a socialist & a feminist I don’t trust the Telegraph further than I could kick it, but if it’s the only place I can read about this stuff, I will.
One of the reasons I love Glinner & you all is that the only agenda I can discern here is to establish what’s going on and tell us about it as clearly as possible.
It worries me very much how willing the right are to use it as a wedge issue - I’ve seen Eddie Izzard’s image used on social media before the last two elections as a “look at this ‘son of the working class’ who represents everything bad about Labour” take that.
It also worries me how willing some on the left are willing to say “if it’s in the Telegraph it can’t be true & you mustn’t even be looking at that right wing stuff”.
It’s a proper dropped pie.
Anyway, I’ve got to get back to being “schooled” on Facebook by a bunch of rugrats.
Yes that’s right women and children do not have equal rights or specific to their sex or age based needs under male domination and oppression anywhere. In NZ I note right wing politicians are siloing off women’s sports rather than the whole “shebang” of failures under successive Governments and utter failures of homoerotic machismo bs under Labour here to address women’s representation and legal and human rights with their tokenism and performative sops to women. Same old same old.
Thank you for this. I ditched the misogynistic Guardian years ago, and took a Telegraph subscription after Suzanne Moore started writing for them . They allow me to speak the reality that men aren't women, which is far more than any of the so called left wing media do. The left no longer exists as a party for the working class. It remains to be seen if they can cut out their own cancerous misogyny, or if they're dead and buried.
It's the political class in a nutshell : Cowardice. It's why Bozza the Bullshitter ™ gets away with so much, er, bullshit.
There are many blue-collar right-wingers ... but few blue-collar Tories. It's why the chattering classes were shocked by Brexit and Trump. Trump's a slightly different phenomenon so we'll park that one but Brexit is the *perfect* illustration of the void between politicians and the working-class public; and why it was only the Westminster bubble that was "shocked" by the result (and why the entitled shitheads thought they could thwart it in the courts)
Same for the gender bollocks. It's only the sneering, condescending metropolitans and MPs of all colours who are on-board with the shit show; the populace want no part of the car crash regardless of their political hue.
the general population in the US is opposed to discrimination vs. trans but equally opposed to imposing trans males on women and girls, both by about 70%. The left wing press in the US only harps on the first stat but never tells the truth that a great majority of the public knows this is a pervert/sex offender driven ideology and wants no part of it.
Where in hell do you find left-wing press in the U.S.? I know there are some over-privileged white boys running so-called left-wing websites who don't have the balls to allow gender criticism, but they are not generally referred to as the press.
please don't talk to me anymore on here, thanks. you are a waste of time.
Most of US media skews left by US standards.
I consider U.S. standards corrupt, bankrupt, and utterly despicable. The end of our empire is coming and it is not a pretty sight. How many people got caught up in a mass shooting today?
It really is a delight to talk to you.
I wrote to local Tory MSP before the May elections. Got a couple of wishy washy replies from his admin and nothing since I asked what definition of woman he was using. I even pointed out the Conservatives in Scotland have never been able to get any traction now they're staring at an open goal. One did talk about men in women's prisons though on a radio discussion.
The problem for me is that this is a mistaken example of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". That formulation is always wrong - the best that can ever be said is that the enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. I have spent too many years on thus planet fighting the Right to embrace them just because they MAY align with me on this point, important as it is. I might stand alongside them with a peg on my nose whilst wearing an NBC suit, but I can never do anything to show approval of them because their very existence is anathema to me.
The left we knew is gone. That's the problem. In the US we have sex work is work, and defund the police as platforms of the left now. We have leftist males soaked in online porn and misogyny who deify sex workers and think that real feminism, 2nd wave feminism is nazism. The left is dead. 40 percent of the electorate in the US is now in the center, unaffiliated, up from being the minority 15 years ago to a solid majority with the dems lagging behind at 31% and the GOP at 25%, and exact reversal of the situation 15 yrs ago.. The left wing in the US IS NOW MY ENEMY. As a second wave feminist in my early 50's the misogyny on the left is now equivalent with the misogyny on the right. The only two voices in the US Senate obtusely standing up for GC feminist belief also belong to the two biggest loons otherwise, Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert, who have without nuance defended women's sex based rights. MTG is the mother of an elite athlete who went to college on a softball scholarship and is the stated OPENLY that males do not belong in the locker rooms/showers of female athletes; it's enraging to me that female politicians on the left in this country WOULDN'T DARE state something like this, when they of all people should be screaming it from the rooftops.
I look back on my days of 'belonging' to the democratic party as a lapse in judgement. No free human being should 'belong' to a party, political parties run on greed funded by corporate lobbies and should have to work very hard to get people's votes.There is no party of the people now, just a party of the corporate lobbies. Now that the left is the absolute enemy of women and girls and setting us in the path of sexual assault via transvestite predators (not to mention our children being maimed by medicalization) I don't know how any woman can consider herself to be at an advantage by belonging to either party. Leaving the parties is the only thing that will make them tone down their extremism. I wish we could get two centrist right and left parties in the US but we are not there. AS it stands right now I fully believe a sane, level-headed centrist could garner serious support running as an independent. The problem is without two such candidates that person would just split the vote and hand it probably right back to dems. I have never sat out a presidential election in my life but if the choice in 24 in the US is between Trump and Biden I'm abstaining.
We do not have a left-wing party in the U.S. Democrats are not left-wing. Progressives are not left-wing. Liberals are not left-wing. All these groups are center-right in their politics; they do not represent working people, they do not represent the poor, and they only pay lip service to racial justice or women's rights (both of which they will happily toss in the trash). Our media is soaked in propaganda; trans propaganda is only a small sample. And one of the biggest lies is that Democrats, progressives, and liberals are leftists. One test is that leftists do not subscribe to IMPERIALISM, which all of these groups do.
Whatever. Not bothering with marxist bullshit. The marxists are the worst defenders of the TRA. Best of luck.
We don't have an openly communist party in the USA... but I'd argue that the Democrats are certainly moving further left. AOC, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders and others are certainly left-wing.
The Democratic Party is not moving left. AOC is a supreme self-promoter who will cave to any pressure. Bernie Sanders is a sheepdogger for the party, steering people to vote for Clinton or Biden, both war criminals, and plenty of Vermonters have lots to say about Sanders. And we do have some openly communist and socialist parties for your information. But not, as an economist pointed out, a strong CP and two strong SPs as we had in the 1930s to counter capitalist predation.
I see lots of marxist youth on tiktock threatening to beat women to the ground, and worse, for being nazis. I disagree 100% with your analysis and I think communism/marxism of leftist youth is a marker for enabling the TRA. I have never seen such rabid, drooling for violence, wannabe jackbooted thugs as those marxists defending the TRA movement online and endorsing horrible violence against any women that speak out against the gender scam. Communism and Marxism and some aspects of socialism are nothing but uber-confiscatory imperialism and capitalism in their real world applications, the gov't of countries run on these pseudo-philosophies dreamt up by privileged white males with no real world experience are always little more than mafias.
"And we do have some openly communist and socialist parties for your information." I know... I was referring to viable parties. "The Democratic Party is not moving left."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/democratic-voters-move-leftward-range-issues/574834/
On the other hand the only real people that appear to be willing to stand up to the trans lobby in the USA are the people on the right. Personally, I am a conservative. I'm more socially liberal, but I'm a capitalist and despite its faults, I think the USA is a great country.
What is so odd is that women, in general, who used to be considered a political force, seem to be utterly ignored now as the intersectional folks try to chase after the votes of people that they can exploit as "more marginalized" than women. We often hear, "Trans rights is the new civil rights battle". The problem, of course, is that the trans lobby demands that it be able to oppress others in order to achieve their goals.
Some of us have watched the train approaching, but really America has never had a political debate/discussion around "trans rights". Title IX simply happened via the hand of Obama without the nation discussing what it really meant. Caitlyn Jenner came out and everyone celebrated "this is the new reality" and it's really interesting to see how that is going. Caitlyn is now demonized for being a Republican who likes America. Although some politicians have spoken about it and there are pundits (mainly on the right) who speak out, the national conversation has not really happened because it gets censored online as "hate" or shouted down as bigotry.
At around the time that Caitlyn announced herself we had a national "scandal" because North Carolina passed its "bathroom bill". No one discussed what led to the bill. There was simply great national uproar because NC wasn't going to allow trans folks to pee. It was difficult to find information about the "why" of that bathroom bill. Big name bands canceled shows in NC and there was loud outrage and major media gave biased coverage. The real story is that the bill came about because the city of Charlotte, NC passed an ordinance. The ordinance applied to every business in the city and said that anyone based on their "gender expression" should be allowed to use the facilities that they wanted to. In the original ordinance there was language that said something like, "except in obviously private sex segregated spaces where privacy is required like the locker room at the Y". This language was struck from the ordinance. So passage of that ordinance made it so that "Sally's Luxury Spa" which had locker rooms with hot tubs, saunas...where women undress... would have to admit a 6'3" lumberjack-looking person if they expressed that they were a woman.
That was what NC was responding to, but that tale was never told. Charlotte did what it did with no intention on compromising on the parameters of the ordinance, so the state stepped in to protect women's privacy. National media only told a biased and weighted version of the story. I cannot recall a single national media outlet that is considered "mainstream" covering the story of the Illinois women's prison inmate who claims that she was raped by a penisperson inmate and charges that the prison pressured her to recant her accusations and alleges that they are based in "transphobia". But any sane human being has to think that putting penispeople charged with violent crimes into women's prisons is a terrible idea. But absent major media coverage, it's simply happening and we have never had a national discussion about how to keep all inmates safe.
There's a situation now where this group's rights are sacrosanct and everyone else's rights are secondary. Objecting, as a woman, to something that you see as unreasonable gets you labeled a "TERF" even if you aren't a giant F, let alone a radical one. TERFS are called Nazis even though they are mostly on the left, politically. Violence is encouraged against them. If you are encouraging the idea that some women deserve violence, why should we not consider you to simply be abusive men looking to abuse women? Generally, women don't go around punching other women for disagreeing with them.
Sometimes when you make reasonable objections to things these people will simply accuse you of killing trans people because the suicide rates are high. I'm sorry about that mental fragility, but this is emotional blackmail. I'm not a murderer because I believe that penispeople convicted of violent crime do not belong in prison with vagina-havers. It has to be noted that "I'll kill myself" is something that male spouse abusers say to women who threaten to leave them.
But all of this has simply "happened" in the USA without us being even allowed to have a national conversation about it because if you say the wrong thing or say something the wrong way even while trying to be respectful, people fly into a rage and accuse you of transphobia. Saying "I'm not okay with forcing spas to accept all clients based on their gender expression in areas where people disrobe" is not saying that you think that trans folks or gender-fluid entities are predators, it's saying that bad actors will take advantage of that and it will put women and girls at risk. And there's an internet full of creeper porn that makes the case that it will happen.
Saying, "Get your children off the internet or highly supervise them while they are on it because there are communities dedicated to grooming them" is a simple fact and not a statement of hate. If gendered toy aisles in a toy store are "dangerously brainwashing" kids into being one gender or another then these communities where young kids are welcomed, celebrated, cyber-loved and exposed to sexuality and complex issues before they are ready to deal with them and are told that their normal awkwardness might be because they are in the wrong body and maybe they can self-soothe by pretending to be a puppy and sucking on a pacifier are doing what?
Right now the concern is lesbian women and kids, but this will come for everyone. Gay men are being told that vaginapeople who identify as men are valid men and refusing sex with them is transphobia. Straight men are being told that penispeople who identify as women are real women and how dare you say you aren't into that? It seems like it will get to the point that if someone at work asks you out on a date and you decline, you may be targeted for revenge if they are trans.
So conservative or liberal, male or female, religious or atheist... everyone needs to get under the umbrella because the rain of insanity is starting to fall. We don't have to agree on everything, but we should be able to agree that no one deserves to step on the rights of others to demand a special validation for themselves. Because that is hate, not love. That is injustice, not equality. It's a path to disaster.
I was webcam spied a year ago and got active in the anti-porn tube movement and I agree this is 100% about the internet. I recently took a pc back from my nephew, that I had let him use the two days he is here, who at 13 had about ten social media accounts and was posting sexual content (memes) and anti-semitic tropes like pepe the frog, etc. The internet is NOT a place for children. Title IX was passed in the seventies and greatly benefitted girls and women in athletics in schools and colleges, my generation was the benefactor of that. It also established guidelines for how sexual assaults are reported and addressed in schools and colleges. It is the best thing that ever happened to female athletes in public schools. Obama had nothing to do with it.
I've researched every statistic the trans movement has put out. The suicides are NOT high. The suicide statistics ARE NOT KEPT because sex at birth is used. I have never found any, it is the one area of their stat flinging I can find zero corroboration for. The suicide ATTEMPT rate is being driven by young girls...girls transitiong to male have an attempt rate double that of mtf adolescents. Suicide among girls ten to fourteen has tripled in the last 15 years (guess how old social media is?) It is a girl genocide, not a trans one.
And there is NO trans murder epidemic. It is not only one of the safer demographics, unless you are a sex worker. The murder of sex workers is high across the board, it is an occupational hazard that has zero to do with their trans status but rather their choice of occupation (which for them mainly is used to pay for trans surgeries). Wilfred Reilly painstakingly does the math here: https://quillette.com/2019/12/07/are-we-in-the-midst-of-a-transgender-murder-epidemic/
"Obama had nothing to do with it." The road to hell is paved with good intentions. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/obama-administration-title-ix-transgender-student-rights-223149
That's exactly what it is. It's horrible to see how better parties such as the Greens and Labour are forcing women to choose between identity politics and decent policies. The Tories have been more supportive of GC women but they're crap on the environment and social policies (which tend to affect women more than men). I'm angry at the Guardian but still could not subscribe to the Telegraph or Times because I hate everything else they stand for.
I'm the same. I want to read GC articles, but I'm against the Tories, Brexit and all their other principles really. Telegraph and Times have done nasty articles on people I admire and I cannot support them! So sick of the cowardice in the left media.
You face a decision. Is your hatred of the right stronger than your desire to fight for sex based rights?
No. Sex based human rights for half the human race are the most important policy on the table. There is nothing more important. I will not give away my sex based rights and the sex based rights and protections of my daughter and stepdaughters. I will NOT concede to men in women's rape shelters re-traumatising victims, men in prisons raping vulnerable women, men stealing women's trophies and sporting accomplishments, men in their changing rooms and toilets. I will NOT hand those over out of a misguided loyalty to the left which has utterly deserted womankind.
I grew up in poverty in a Glasgow slum. I loathed Margaret Thatcher along with every other working class Scot. I have never voted right in my life. But of course I will do so if the left continue their rampage against half the human race.
However, my hope is that if we can force the right to declare their full intention to support women's sex based rights, if we can force them to openly state what has been going on and say they are against it, the left will then become so terrified of losing they will back down on their misogyny. Of course I'd rather not hand any country over to rampant capitalists who think dog eat dog is a social policy. But I will NOT hand over women's sex based rights and protections to the left. It's not even a choice.
We can survive a few years of rampant capitalism, we've done it before. But women as a sex may take 100 years to come back from the brutality of trans misogyny if it is enshrined by law.
However, as I said in the original comment, my fear is that the right are not anti woke. They're just biding their time. If they were really anti woke they would have declared it loudly by now. I think they intend to keep quiet, win by default and then we will have government that is anti state health care, anti state education, anti state social welfare AND anti women's sex based rights. That's my genuine fear.
I will vote right if the left throw the human rights of half the human race under the bus. Of course that matters more than anything. It would be ridiculous to do otherwise. But I don't want to vote against my conscience and give my allegiance to the right out of desperation, only to find the fuckers have conned us all.
In practice, there are far more centrists in the population than Left or Right (I'm using Left and Right here because it is the language of the original post - the issue is more about Authoritarianism v Freedom (or liberalism)). The USA and the UK political systems have developed a false binary which forces us into choices we shouldn't have to make.
If we, the people who vote for the government, make it clear that we won't stand for more social-engineering that removes sex-based rights, then it won't happen - political expediency will win out. Legal actions like those by Maya Forstater and Kiera Bell are making a difference (at least in the UK). Soon we'll be able to protest on public again. The "Women Won't Wheesht" campaign is subtle but effective. Spoiled ballot papers are more influential than people think.
Let's think smart. Let's not think in terms of numbers - it is too easy for people to say (just as an example), "If the NHS is dismantled, more than half the population will lose out". Let's face it, many men will think "If the NHS is dismantled, *I* will lose out", and not give women's rights a second thought. Trying to avoid these choices by showing that this is not a party-political issue is the way to go.
every politician alive needs to read what you just wrote, particularly "I have never voted in my life...but". God bless. My conviction is there are a whole lot of people out there who are livid about what is going on and will vote with their feet. I fully expect to see dems lose Congress next year. Then Biden's agenda will grind to a complete halt until the election in 2024. It may be the first presidential election I don't vote in at all... if Trump v. Biden is the ticket I'm abstaining.
I don't hate the right, I just have a clear-eyed view of them and what they stand for (speaking from the U.S.). I think standing alongside them is fine as long as one makes clear one's position. Some of this has been done in this country with women standing together against such crap as self-ID. My aunt is a Republican and it has benefited her enormously financially. We had an agreement not to discuss politics and then she began screaming at me "I believe Kavanaugh! I believe Kavanaugh!" a drunken predator if ever there was one who now sits for the rest of his life on the U.S. Supreme Court. She is a traumatized woman who chose to identify with her traumatizers; she was speaking to me from her amygdala, and there is no coherent, rational discussion with such a person. And that's been my experience with the right wing: there is no rational discussion. Sometimes there can be agreement on an issue, but that's it.
This is not my amygdala talking and I'm not a traumatized woman, but the allegations against Kavanaugh came from one woman and her own friend testified that what she claims happened, did not happen. You can believe her... but there are 65 women who knew him from high school on who signed a letter saying that he is not, in fact, a drunken predator.
yes, no one in my family believe my father raped me, either. I'm scarred internally, I have medical proof.
I'm very sorry about your father. There's no doubt that many men are predators.
I'm so sorry he did that to you.
This is what makes things difficult for me. Sex-based rights and rationality are incredibly important, but so are many other things, such as the NHS, social security, communitarianism, and controls on capitalism. Certainly, once the NHS and the social safety-net are gone (which could be within five years under the current Tory government), we'll never get them back.
Also, as Graham points out, politicians on the right are not our allies in the fight for sex-based rights. If they were, we'd be hearing about it all over the place. I cannot lend credibility to a political philosophy that acts against the good of the majority in the hope that, just because they aren't as far down the rabbit hole as the Left, they are going to support us.
Yes, I've been thinking for a while how much the Right is involved in this. One might sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I read someone's post showing some evidence that republican billionaires in the USA are bankrolling the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture puberty blockers. The left embrace something funded by the right and are falling foul of the "it's the left and their identity politics that are driving this".
It's a trap that they walk into.
Over in the UK the Tory party has its own trans activist MPs. Penny Mordaunt, Alicia Kearns and Caroline Noakes to name a few. Not forgetting Crispin Blunt who...thanks to my Hansard research for another project, used to argue against gay rights in the 90s, on the grounds it was legitimising predators(!)
People are saying they will vote Tory over this issue...but the cancer is there, too.
Speaking of the right wing, The Federalist Papers ran an excellent article by a feminist pinpointing various contributors to the trans agenda. Pritzker is one of the Republican billionaires financing this junk, and he thinks he's a woman. Yep, lots of women have hands like baseball mitts and wear shoes the size of canoes.
Biden got 8 million from big pharma. They bankroll every politician, including Bernie Sanders who I think got a million. They bankroll everyone.
The same here, like when Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson was dropped some trans coins and came out as "transwomen are women" right before the election. Hardly any LD MPs left now...really huge mistake.
The Right, whatever they might have been once, are utterly amoral now. The only principle they have is to acquire more wealth and power by any means available. If you want to understand the moral philosophy of the Right today, look at the Mafia.
I've always been on the Left-ish, but there are some ideas that used to be associated with the (Liberal) Right I admired: personal freedom, personal responsibility, strong defence, an appreciation of the benefits of institutions (as well as their faults), evolution over revolution, an awareness of the dangers of an over-mighty state. The times when the Right paid anything more than lip-service to most of those ideas seems long gone, certainly here and the US.
So what the Right won't see is a terrible wrong being done that must be corrected. What they will see is an opportunity to further their own interests. They've been quiet about Gender lunacy because they feel no need to be noisy about it. Brexit hasn't bitten yet, Johnson is being given credit for the great work of the NHS and awareness of his failures is being carefully managed by the Tory press and the nobbled BBC. They're banking receipts ready for when the polls turn and elections approach.
The Prog/Lib/Left have obligingly provided so much ammunition that the Tories can, for once, win an election by telling the truth. I don't know where the parties are getting their advice from. Obviously they don't actually believe the woo - no one does - so they must think there are votes in it. But why? Whenever regular people learn the true horror of Gender Ideology - not the stunning, brave bullshit in the media - they are utterly repelled by it. Who told them that voters would approve? Why did they believe them?
But cynical vote-chasing aside, everyone here knows how regressive Gender Ideology is. It's not compatible with progressive, liberal values. Its victims are the vulnerable: drugged, carved up, exploited for profit, its activists and advocates as brutal, authoritarian and impermeable to reason as any fascist. So they haven't bothered to check, or the buzz of belonging and the lure of increased status are stronger than the principles they claim to hold. Whichever, it's a terrible indictment of people and organisations who take it for granted that they're a compassionate force for good, and expect others to take it for granted too.
I heard on the news today in the land of the septics, bills being debated in their parliament where the incumbents reference 'birthing person'...
So the focus is on the language used rather than what the legislative change is about.