“Sorry you feel unsafe”
The resignation of [former shadow women and equalities secretary] Marsha De Cordova leaves a vacancy for a job one MP calls “the most poisoned chalice in politics”. Labour, like all progressive parties, is being torn apart by the quasi-religious schism of gender. Two warring tribes have emerged: “gender critical” feminists who believe single-sex spaces, in prisons or refuges, are needed to protect women; and LGBT Labour which argues if a biological male identifies as a woman they must, immediately and in every circumstance, be treated as female.
… De Cordova was vilified for meeting feminists who’ve formed the Labour Women’s Declaration on sex-based rights, and for declining to address Stonewall’s conference fringe meeting. Her reasons for resigning are complex, but she reportedly felt cut adrift by Starmer.
As does Rosie Duffield MP, who has endured such extreme physical threats for the crime of tweeting that only women have cervixes, she won’t attend next week’s Labour conference. Starmer has texted Duffield, a victim of domestic abuse, to say he’s sorry she felt unsafe, but offered no help with security. Nor has he publicly defended her after a year of angry demands she lose the whip. “Keir is terrified of conflict,” says one MP. “He just hopes it will all go away.”
Yeah that’s great. The man in charge is “terrified of conflict,” i.e. disagreement, so he abandons the woman to her fate, which includes threats of actual literal violence, not mere “conflict.”
In all left-of- centre political parties the gender wars are escalating. Asked on Radio 4’s Today if he believed “there should be spaces where biological males can’t go”, the LibDem leader Sir Ed Davey replied: “No.” The very morning a government report revealed an epidemic of violence against women and girls, Davey promised to scrap all existing female safeguards.
So women and girls are going to start to be afraid to leave the house. Taliban by other means.
In the SNP, civil war has broken out over its pledge, in alliance with the Greens, to push through self-ID for over-16s. A movement, Women Won’t Wheesht (shut up), was formed to oppose SNP proposals such as erasing data about biological sex from the Scottish census and denying raped women the right to choose a female medical examiner. When the Tory MSP Murdo Fraser referenced a large WWW protest outside the Scottish parliament, Nicola Sturgeon heckled: “Shame on you!” Women’s concerns, she said, are “not valid”.
The concerns of men who say they are women are not just valid but positively sacred, while the concerns of women are so much fluff.
Starmer too needs to grasp the gender nettle. These extreme LGBT activists are a small, unrepresentative hard-left group who hate him anyway: women are half the electorate. Starmer must choose a shadow equalities minister ready to defend women. Then he must defend her. Because there’s a new political slogan in town: “If you don’t respect my sex, you can’t expect to get my X.”
Oh but conflict.
The attacks on Rosie Duffield are utterly disgraceful.
And the current LGBT Labour hysteria about “Gender Critical fascists” hiding everywhere, reminds me of the 1930s Daily Worker’s rants about “Trotskyist-fascists”
Keith Starmer isn’t afraid of “conflict.” Regardless of one’s feelings about Corbyn supporters, the fact that Starmer has basically declared war on them shows that he’s not afraid of conflict. Nor is he afraid of losing Labour Party members.
So there must be another reason he’s decided to throw gender critical feminists under the bus in favour of TRA’s.
I find it astonishing that women saying that male-bodied people are potentially violent and definitely upsetting presences for female victims of male violence are being presented as fascists while the incoherent, contradictory mishmash of drivel presented by TRA’s who literally threaten and commit violence are treated with respect.
“LGB”T Labour. I resent—in fact, I passionately loathe—this forced teaming. Gender critical feminists disproportionately hail from the L and the B, and gay men are increasingly awakening to the fact that they are not well served by a movement that, while nominally pro-gay, renders same-sex attraction unspeakable. The T needs to stand or fall on its own merits and stop hiding behind the LGB.
On a more frivolous note, the slogan “If you don’t respect my sex, you can’t expect to get my X” has potential but is a wee bit cumbersome. I humbly suggest the following rephrase: “Don’t respect my sex? Don’t expect my X.”
As…smoke… How about–
Expect my X? Respect my sex!
You’d think that fear of being on the “wrong side of history” would pale in comparison to being on the wrong side of reality.
I dunno, seems consistent: “wrong side of history” and “gender identity” are both things that there are words for but do not really exist…
I don’t think it fair to say that Starmer is “terrified of conflict”. IMO it would be more accurate to say that he is terrified of conflict in which he cannot be certain that he is morally in the right.
As he is a man, not a woman, that certainty is denied him and there are two possible logical conclusion for him to draw from that. Either he should step down because the party needs to be led by a woman, or alternatively that he should step down because he is not equal to challenge of engaging in that sort of conflict without such certainty, suggesting that he should be in some kind of liberal party adhering to the tragic vision rather than a socialist/social democratic party adhering to the utopian vision.