Do you still think they’re a hate group?
Does Angela Rayner answer the question?
She does not.
She says many words but she does not answer the question.
Tip Jar
Does Angela Rayner answer the question?
She does not.
She says many words but she does not answer the question.
Hm. I don’t know what the party choices are in the UK, but if I translate that into Australia, the choices are either Labour (basically the same as in UK) or Liberal (Australia’s major conservatives). I can’t help but think that no matter how bad Labour are for women with this magical belief bullshit, Liberals are still worse for women. Yes, they know that men are not women and will probably prevent male women i.e. men from entering women’s spaces, but they will also do what they can to worsen women’s health care and give privileges to both religious groups and men in general.
Thank fuck we both have instant runoff preferential voting though, the choice is infinitely worse in USA where there are literally only two groups that a responsible person could possibly vote for (barring protest votes in states where your vote doesn’t count for shit).
Australia is one, but who is the other? The US and the UK are both FPPs, as is NZ where I think you live.
Australian House of Representatives’ main choices are Labor*, Liberal, or National, however, at the last federal election seventeen well backed highly motivated women stood for election and seven made it into the House of Representatives at the expense of sitting Liberals. They are now known as “The Teals” due to the primary colour of their election advertising.
In The Senate, things get more complicated due to the use of both proportional voting and each state and territory being a single electorate. This allows billionaires like Clive Palmer to spend $300 million to get a single Senator elected in Victoria, a man who spends his entire time preaching a return to “Biblical standards” and fellating (metaphorically) Donald Trump.
The next Australian federal election won’t be fought on women’s rights or the relative doddery of the party leaders, but whether or not we want to continue to embrace a future of wind/solar/battery electricity, or if we wish to regress and piss away over a trillion dollars to produce 2% of our electricity needs using nuclear generation.
We, too, are doomed.
*The Australian Labor Party is officially spelled without the “u”. Many apocryphal stories abound, one being the influence of US-born King O’Malley, another that it was a printer’s preferred spelling.
Rayner is playing “Follow her Leader,” using Starmer’s own weaselly wordplay in order to try, like Starmer, to have it both ways. She can’t back down from her original pronouncement without pissing off trans activists. She dare not say that it is not hateful to say that LGB people are entitled to their own organizations and spaces, that it is not hateful to say that men are not, and cannot become, women. She wants to see a “hate group?” Watch what trans activists have to say about her, and do to her if she ever scrapes together the courage to say that LGB Alliance and Women’s Place UK are not hate groups. She would be advised to avoid public appearances, and to hire security guards, and she knows this. In fact, their likely reaction is exactly what she is afraid of, and why she can’t answer the question. It’s the trans version of the whole “cartoons of Muhammad” affair. Fear of the violent response of a “marginalized” group gives that very group power and leverage to enforce their illiberal, anti-democratic demands. These people are not her friends, or allies; they are her captors.
At the same time, she feels she must mouth some vague, non-committal platitudes about “single-sex spaces” in order to placate women. But this is a meaningless sop. She would have to drop her party’s commitments in order to meet women’s needs. If you “simplify” the process of changing “gender identity,” and believe there is some process by which men can become women, then you kiss women’s single-sex spaces goodbye. Labour is still clearly quite prepared to sacrifice women’s dignity, health, and safety to appease men pretending to be women. So long as they struggle under the mistaken belief that trans activism is a “progressive” cause, Labour will be a threat to women’s rights. The Labour Party thinks it can do this to women with impunity, that it can have things both ways. After all, what are women going to do, vote Tory?
If they win the election, they’ve promised to solve this issue on their first day. But not all promises are worthy of keeping; some promises should not be made in the first. This is one of them. Any “debate”, “compromise” or “settlement” of the “trans rights” under the auspices of the current incarnation of the Labour Party will be imposed on women, not formulated with them. That Labour is talking about trans “rights” at all is a dead giveaway of what is going to happen.
Any “debate” will be token and perfunctory, with input allowed only from pre-approved, pro-trans voices, and captured “feminists.” One of trans activism’s core stances has been “NO DEBATE!” Any questioning of trans doctrine or demands has been branded as genocidal, bigoted, transphobic, denial of their “existence.” This has, up to now, successfully shielded their program of demands from scrutiny and evaluation. It is naive to think that trans activists will suddenly be willing to come to any discussion, bargaining, or negotiation, because their demands would not survive any such examination or discussion just because Labour asks them too. Their demands are both total and unreasonable. They are based on contradictory and irrational beliefs. Tugging on any of them unravels the lot. Even if they did show up at the table, a Labour Party that was unwilling to admit that only women have cervixes, because saying so would hurt men’s feelings, is unlikely to be an honest broker in any process it initiated. Women will be told to “Be kind” and surrender their rights.
Any “compromise” worked out will favour trans activists’ demands at the expense of women’s rights, since anything given to the former must perforce be taken from the later. It’s a zero sum game. All trans demands violate women’s rights and boundaries. All of them. Labour must know this because women have told them. David Lammy’s comment from a few years ago, wherein he likened some women to “dinosaurs” who were “hoarding rights,” was an unintended acknowledgement that trans “rights” come at the expense of women’s rights. That Starmer is nonetheless insisting on this chimerical, “unifying,” enforced group hug process is a threat to women.
What are “trans rights?” Is Labour going to clarify this before launching a process that will cement them into the UK’s legal framework? Having any definition at all would be a welcome change from the past, but I’m not holding my breath. What rights shared by the rest of society are trans people missing? None. They’re not being denied anything. Contrary to the mantra that “trans rights are human rights”, trans demands are for things that are not rights at all. They are demanding things that are dishonest, impossible, and dangerous to women. They want the promulgation and enforcement of the lie that men can become women. They want “gender identity” to trump sex in all legal and civil matters. They want recognition as the sex they are not, along with the access to single sex spaces to which they believe such recognition entitles them. These are not rights. They are intrusive, delusional fantasies that victimize women. They have no place in the formulation and regulation of any kind of policy or law whatsoever. That they are talked about as “rights” at all shows how far the table has been tilted away from both reasonable debate and women’s safety.
Any “settlement” will be deemed permanent and irrevocable because Starmer wants to put this no-win issue behind him, and get women to shut the fuck up about it. That they won’t is beside the point: he’ll point to his “openness” and “reasonableness” and brand any dissent as a hateful minority which is best ignored.