The single-sex-based exemptions
There is much confusion right now about Labour and its position on women and what exactly it is trying to say.
Yesterday @Womans_Place_UK tweeted:
WPUK is pleased to see that @UKLabour recognises the importance of the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act is committing to upholding them. https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Real-Change-Labour-Manifesto-2019.pdf 1/2
But now there is waffling, or there isn’t but there is the appearance that there is.
Dawn Butler, Labour Women & Equalities Secretary, says nothing has changed.
.@UKLabour will reform the GRA to introduce self-declaration for trans people.
We will remove outdated language from the Equalities Act.
And there is no way spaces will be permitted to discriminate against trans people. That is illegal and it will stay illegal.
So when they say single-sex based exemptions (such as changing rooms and toilets) will be enforced they don’t mean it? Or they do, and Dawn Butler is resisting? The situation is unclear.
Labour putting a sensible-sounding position on gender identity and women’s rights in the manifesto, then giving an outrider the contradictory version the faithful want to hear, is such a dishonest idiot’s version of politics
I mean, it’s smart in that it puts the sane version where the sane people will see it, and the one for the Twitter nutters where the Twitter nutters can see it, and both groups get tell themselves they’re the wife and the other one’s the mistress
But if Labour is ever in power, there is no way here to write a functional policy. Then again who gives a fuck about policy when it only affects that capricious group of semi-humans called women
Like @helenlewis I’m deleting earlier tweets suggesting @UKLabour finally recognise that women are distinct group who need legal protection. I continue to hear from well-placed people this doesn’t reflect intention of manifesto but position’s destructively ambiguous to say least.
Do they? Don’t they? It’s up in the air.
If they’re saying they prioritize “ensur(ing) that the single-sex-based exemptions… are understood (my emphasis,)” then I’d say it’s dollars to donuts that they’re planning on using that opportunity as a teaching moment for the social good.
It’s all going to hinge on how they define “single-sex.” Our understanding is that it’s different than “gender.” We might learn otherwise.
Well, that may mean that they expect the only men who will use the women’s bathrooms are the ones that are really, honestly, sincerely women, and that because these men who say they are women are really women, they are going to say they belong in the single-sex bathrooms and women who don’t like that can just go home and stay home. And bake cookies, of course (sorry, that’s biscuits in the UK, right? And loos?)
Yes, that would definitely be the ploy. The single-sex-based exemptions of course apply to trans women because THEY ARE WOMEN.
But there have been conversations, and Labour people saying no that’s not what it means and Butler is just blowing smoke.
I think cookies are distinctly different from biscuits (and a lot of things Americans call cookies/sandwich cookies are in truth biscuits).
Yes we have both cookies and biscuits. Yes they are completely different things. No there is no reliable way to tell which is which.
I hope that clears things up.
Okay, because my roommate in college, who was from London, was always offering me cookies, and she always called them biscuits. But she also used “milkweed” for a plant that was quite plainly a “spurge”, and couldn’t recognize a milkweed at all…so there’s that, too.
Divided by a common language.
A lot of British people dismiss certain terms as ‘Americanisms’, which is very definitely meant as an insult. In fact, a lot of common terms have changed quite recently, apparently as a direct result of US TV shows. It can be a littlle grating.
However, it’s surprising how many so-called Americanisms originate in Britain, made it over to the states and then died out here. It amuses me when people roll their eyes at ‘Americanisms’ that Shakespeare used.
A rule of thumb: the larger it is, the softer it is, and the more ‘home cooked’ it looks (e.g. irregular, broken surface), the more likely it becomes that this is a cookie. The ones from a packet are pretty much always biscuits.
And the Kingston is the best of them all.
Well you say that, but then how do you account for this, eh?
https://img.tesco.com/Groceries/pi/160/0072417136160/IDShot_540x540.jpg
Besides, this path will inevitably lead us to the Jaffa Cake controversy and nobody wants to go there.
That is a biscuit trying to pass itself off as home cooked, per my extremely reliable guide posted above. It identifies as a cookie, but we all know it really is a biscuit.
Wait, these biscuits identify as cookies but demand inclusion in biscuit spaces (i.e. packets)?
I think they’re doing this wrong.
Shoudln’t custard creams be demanding to be used as cheap and contemptuous retirement cakes? Shouldn’t Jammie Dodgers be demanding access to hithertoo gingerbread only spaces?
I was curious about the biscuit in the American sense, and I came across this article that might be of interest or entertaining.
https://www.vox.com/2015/11/29/9806038/great-british-baking-show-pudding-biscuit
Sakbut, that’s a little relevant to my point about ‘Americanisms’.
In Britain, that show is called “Bake-off”, which is definitely inspired by US terminology. And in the US it’s called “Baking Show”, which (presumably deliberately) sounds more British. Who on Earth are the people who decide these things?
As for the difference between the US and Brit understandings of “pudding”, I will say only this. It was a big joke in my family for someone to ask, after a main course, whether you wanted pudding. If you said yes, they’d punch you as hard as they could and say “pud”. You had been….pudded. It was…pudding. Every mealtime. For fourteen years. There were other reasons I left home at 14 but I can’t pretend this wasn’t one of them.
Heh, to add to the Great British Bakewhatever, here it’s introduced with an exaggeratedly crisp posh accent, which I assume is especially for the credulous Yanks. (The original, that is. I won’t go near the new one.)
(A local public station is recycling the old ones. I find them addictive.)