Jam tomorrow
Jill Foster at the Telegraph on Labour v women:
Last month, when the Supreme Court ruling clarified that sex in law meant “biological sex”, some naively assumed that it might finally put to rest this thorniest of issues in Labour’s side. But it seems that if anything, tensions have been ramped up rather than tempered.
This week, the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) voted that women officer roles and all-women shortlists would be limited to biological women. It was a remarkable volte face from its 2018 decision that “self-identifying” trans women (biological men who could simply declare themselves women without any surgery or medical treatment) were eligible for Labour’s all-women shortlists and other roles.
In a further twist, the NEC also decided to postpone the women’s conference planned for September – leading to criticism from both trans activists (who had been planning to protest at the event) and women’s groups alike.
Wellll look at it from their point of view – you can’t just let women have a conference whenever they feel like it. They’re underlings, and they’ll have a conference when we say they can.
Labour Women’s Declaration, which campaigns for women’s rights, said that while it was pleased that the party “had at long last decided to follow the advice we had been giving them since 2019 and comply with the Equality Act 2010”, it added that the cancellation of the conference was “ridiculous and unnecessary”.
“The absence of the democratic process for women this year, as a result of this postponement, is appalling and fails to recognise the importance of women’s voices within the Labour Party,” they said in a statement. “The party must now address this as a matter of urgency.”
Nah. Women are just an annoying little faction, and can safely be ignored.
Mandy Clare, a former Labour councillor from Cheshire, was elected onto Labour’s National Women’s Committee in 2020 but left the party after being deselected and taken through a disciplinary for alleged transphobia.
“I highly suspect the cancellation of the women’s conference this year is yet another cynical, controlling and possibly vindictive move by the party, at the behest of activists, to again remind women of their place,” she says. “Women within the Labour Party have to dance to the men’s rights tune or expect to be abused and discarded.”
Well of course they do. Men are the real people, and women are a bizarre afterthought who don’t really count.
Strange how Labour (or much too large a chunk of it) is deathly afraid of that 0.1% of “women with penises” and their friends, as opposed to brushing off half the population. This minority has that power over them because Labour gave it to them. Labour might feel it’s gone too far to step away from this parasitical “alliance”, but doing so would probably win them more support than it would cost. It’s too bad they can’t see this. If they don’t, their statements in support of genderism over the last few years are going to be held up as examples of lunacy and extremism for decades to come. Forget the “wrong side of history”; how about the wrong side of reality. Ironic that this stance completely guts any pretense that Labour really supports women’s rights, handing this issue to Tories on a silver platter, like Democrats and Republicans in the US.
Trans activism has been much more successful at selling itself as a “progressive” movement, than it has at convincing people that men can be women, as many seem to go along with the former in order to “be kind” (or to avoid the attentions of gender goblins), who nevertheless reject the latter. Its “progressive” status is taken as a given, despite the evidence of its inherent misogyny, homophobia, and its reliance on lies, bullying, and intimidation.
However it managed to work its way into the progressive platform, the real question is how do we get it out? It is a blight and cancer that needs to be excised. Genderism as it is exemplified in its current form, is a drain of resources, and a distraction from more important matters. It forces women to needlessly re-fight battles that had just barely been won, while adding this additional burden of invasive, predatory, trans activism to their already ongoing struggles. How do we shut down this shit show?
Progressives have long figured they could push women’s issues aside in favor of ‘more important’ things, because the assumption was that women have no where else to go. Going to the conservative side is a no-win situation for women. Staying with the progressives has seemed prudent. It looks like a lot of women are starting to get sick of being the ones doing a lot of the work while getting no consideration. Now they are not only not getting consideration, they are being shunted aside in favor of men in dresses. A lot of us have had too much. We may or may not find somewhere else to go, but we are saying ‘a pox on both your houses’.
How that can translate into effective political action, I have no clue.
It’s like both “sides” (all sides?) start out from a foundational principle that women’s needs don’t matter, and are luxury indulgences when given any attention at all. You’d think, in any human politics that made sense, the needs of women and children would be of paramount importance. Women are the humans capable of making new human beings; children are those new human beings. Not centralized in a stifling, paternalistic “Keep them sheltered, protected, hidden, and separate from everything else (including power)” way, but in a “This is the basis of how we do nearly everything. This is the starting point upon which we base our way of deciding what to do” way. That centralization of mothers and children, along with the biogeophysical limits and constraints of the locality, region, planet, would be our guide to policy and action. “How do we live and perpetuate ourselves in a good and balanced way that can work over many generations?”
Of course we’re much messier than that, and much of our history has been shaped and directed by concerns of power, control, and acquisition, to the extent that this drive has come to threaten our very existence. The exponential ballooning of our technological capabilities has allowed our unguided, experimental modifications of the landscape to attain the status of terraforminghave, and have blown up tribal aggressions to a planetary scale.
Smaller groups of less technologically advanced humans were much better at living in some sort of balance over many generations as a matter of course, as their limited numbers and power had a smaller impact on the local environment, and on each other. (Not that there was no environmental destruction, or violent clashes with neighbours, but the scope of either was limited, and not as likely to be lethaly terminal.) We have to be able to get to that position from our position as industrialized nation states in global society. Can we get there from here? At this point, we have no choice; we must succeed or die. Business as usual is suicide. But much of today’s politics seems bent on self destruction.
Why do I get the nagging feeling that we might have avoided this had women had more power sooner? Am I being sexist in this assumption? Am I falling back on stereotypes of female nurturance and sacrifice? Maybe, but I don’t think we’d be in such a mess if women, rather than men, had been in charge, or even if they had just been more influential, equal partners. Isn’t it time we gave that a try?
So, their argument is women must have conferences or we’ll have nowhere to
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