Heads men win, tails women lose
Please go soak your head.
What are we to conclude? That it’s a mistake to “cause offence” to a few hundred men who claim to be women but not a mistake to insult millions of women by knuckling under to petulant men who claim to be women.
Why are a few men more important than millions of women?
No one has explained that yet.
Laura Pascal was announced to be running for the position by Hackney Labour back in December. In recent weeks, tweets have been found from the potential councillor where she states that trans women are not women.
They’re not.
So she was suspended for not repeating a lie, and now she’s unsuspended because she knuckled under and repeated the lie, or at least apologized for not repeating it.
In the Labour rules it states: “We should not give voice to those who persistently engage in abuse and should avoid sharing their content, even when the item in question is unproblematic. For the avoidance of doubt, this includes where members either share or like (or otherwise favourite) any social media content that is racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, ableist, or uses otherwise racist and/or discriminatory language.”
Notice that “sexist” is almost the last item on the list, and appears after “transphobic.”
Damn.
So she loves Big Brother now.
It seems to me that she has apologised for ‘liking the wrong tweets’ and only that. She hasn’t apologised for anything she has said herself.
I see she has protected her twitter account, but a report in the Standard earlier this week quotes a couple of posts believed to be the subject of complaints:
Laura Pascal unblocked her account just a few hours after I posted the above. She drew attention to her Twitter profile, tweeting ‘Pleased to he (sic) able to update my Twitter profile this evening’.
I don’t know exactly what changes she has made to her profile; I can’t find an archived copy of the previous version. It currently says ‘Labour Candidate for Cazenove’; I suspect she may have had to remove the word ‘Labour’ while she was suspended from the party and before she took the account offline. Her profile also says, as it certainly did before – I recall it clearly – ‘Feminist and unapologetic for my gender critical views’.
She has evidently unpinned a post quoted in the Standard: ‘My embodied reality as a member of the oppressed sex class is experienced in a world where biology has a significant impact’, etc: see above. She has not, however, removed it from her timeline.
The other post quoted in the Standard also remains in her timeline: ‘trans women are not female. By definition they are male’ (29 July, 2023).
I hope this is a sign that the Labour Party leadership has finally begun to grasp that putting transgender activists in charge of who is and isn’t allowed to represent the party is going to lose them vital votes, especially from women.
They could have furthered this by not suspending her in the first place. It looks like Labour is trying to simultaneously hold two irreconcilable positions. They can either support women, or they can continue to kowtow to trans ideology. Labour leadership should have told the original, vexatious complainant that Pascal had done nothing wrong, and that no investigation or suspension was going to happen.