Dinosaurs
Shadow Justice Secretary David Lammy has told a Labour Party conference fringe event when discussing trans rights this morning that “there are some dinosaurs on the right” and also that “those dinosaurs exist in our own party” who want to “hoard rights”.
“Hoard rights”? Is that like hoarding sugar and butter during the war?
Asked at a fringe meeting today about the ongoing conflict in the party over the rights of transgender people, he said there is “always a debate when you’re extending rights to people who have been denied them for so long”.
What “rights” have trans people been denied for so long? The right to ignore gender conventions? Probably, somewhat, but then non-trans people have been denied those for so long too. What other rights? If he means the purported right to be validated on all sides as the sex you aren’t, that isn’t a genuine right. It can’t be, because it interferes with too many existing, and genuine, rights, like the right to see what you see, and the right not to have to spend any time and energy and attention on what pronouns other people want you to use to refer to them.
Lammy told the event that the “great story of the 20th century is “people who had no rights claiming those rights” – including the working class on the factory floor, and those fighting for LGBT rights and BME rights.
Yes but this is this problem again: you can’t talk about “LGBT” rights, because the T ones are sharply different, and in some ways in conflict with the LGB ones.
“I will always be on the side of minority communities kept out of the mix for having the freedoms everyone else has enjoyed,” the Labour frontbencher said. “I’m not in the business of inflaming a very small minority group.”
Meaning what? How about the community of child molesters? The community of rapists? The community of woman-stranglers? Not all communities are benign.
Maybe by ‘T rights’ (T as in trans in LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ) they mean transfer whereby rights are moved like pieces on a chessboard and the winner gets to do as he/she/it damn well pleases, and amid the verbiage and in particular, use womens’ rest rooms while sporting male genitalia.
Any local government agency supporting such ‘rights’ desperately needs to be voted out, and ASAP.
People in the 90s were not fighting for LGBT rights, they were fighting for LGB rights. The T was not there, not fighting with them, not being arrested, not being beat up, not being jailed and/or killed. They were in the Olympics, or the boardroom or the gym, or wherever they spent their time, living their existence, probably most of them with no thought to being a woman (and a lot of them weren’t even born yet). Once the lesbian and gay community did all the work and all the suffering, the T come along, tack their letter on the end and take over the clubhouse. It’s all about them now, no room for anyone else.
Women were also fighting for rights. Fighting for the right to vote got women arrested and jailed with harsh treatment. Fighting for the right to own property and take out loans without their husbands signature and get housing allowances like men did and have jobs open up to them that had been closed. They fought for equal rights in divorce, the right to have custody of their child, the right to have single sex spaces, the right to have rape in marriage recognized, the right to contraception and abortion. And every fight was hard, and a lot of them are not won yet. We have a long way to go, and we are still fighting.
So along comes T, thinking they can stick their dicks into our spaces, our movement, and be centered in it, just like they were in LGB. But women refused. We refused to move over, step down, and shut up. We refused to make them a sandwich or have sex with them if we didn’t want it. We refused to wheesht. And they are pissed as hell about that, because they don’t want to have to do the hard work of convincing anyone why they should have rights the rest of us don’t have, why they should be able to intrude on sex segregated spaces, and so forth. It’s a lot of work, isn’t it, TAs? And you thought the women would do all the work for you and then you get to take over, didn’t you? While you stand around trying to decide which flamboyant color of lipstick goes with your flamboyant dress and your outrageous wig. You have no idea how to be a woman. It isn’t about clothes or make up or shoes. It isn’t about caring and nurturing. It is about bearing the burden of carrying children in our bodies for nine months, risking serious changes to our health, enduring massive changes to our body, to our lives, to our sanity. And then it appears to be about being expected to take on the bulk of the burden in bringing that child to adulthood, even while making sure Daddy is well fed and sexually satisfied. Yeah, I’ve seen the messages. And if my husband goes out with a ring around his collar, that’s his damn fault. I don’t do his laundry for him. He’s a big boy.
Sorry for the rant. I am working through my safety training videos at work, and today was treated to a stupid lesson on how to make LGBTQ+ feel comfortable and safe on your campus. Statements made without evidence, things asked of me that I should not be required to do, and the total erasing of discrimination based on sex. They listed every other category – disability, race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation – but one of the oldest, longest lasting oppressions was missing from the list. I hope when I get to the obligatory Title IX training (nothing new from last year’s obligatory training, I imagine), they will at least manage to mention oppression based on sex. I doubt it.
TL;DR: I’m pissed.
I’ve just been listening to Fresh Air and there was a lot of blather about “queer people” and then trans people with all the usual
suspectsclichés deployed.I saw an article titled “Three Polish regions scrap anti-LGBT resolutions” and I had to read through the details to determine, I think, that these were all anti-gay measures. It’s infuriating.
@2 brilliant rant. All this needs to be said, and everyone needs to hear and understand it.
Wait… I thought rights are not like pie and giving people more doesn’t take them away from anyone else?
So how can rights be hoarded?
It’s almost as though this whole thing is absolute total, abject nonsense from beginning to end and everyone is just making it up as they go along.