In wrong place
Are they just impossibly stupid?
Starmer ‘in wrong place’ on trans rights, says Thornberry
Sir Keir Starmer has “ended up in the wrong place” on trans issues, Dame Emily Thornberry has said.
The senior Labour MP, who was Sir Keir’s shadow attorney general before the general election, claimed the party had not been “following our hearts” when it came to trans people.
So trans people=following hearts and women=not following hearts? Why would that be? Are women as a group strikingly unlovable? Or what? Please explain.
The Prime Minister’s public position on trans issues has significantly changed since he became leader of the Labour Party in 2020, backtracking last year on his previous stance that “trans women are women”.
Blah blah blah position blah blah backtracking blah blah stance – if you just think about it instead of racing around trying to find a stance, you will realize how fatuous it is. Whether or not men are women is not a stance, it’s a fact, and the answer is no.
[Dame Emily] told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: “I think we’ve ended up in the wrong place on trans and I think we’ve ended up treading very self-consciously and not ending up following our hearts.”
She added: “Trans people are on the margins, they are vulnerable. If the Labour Party doesn’t look after trans people, what are we about?”
I don’t know, what are you about? Are you not aware that women are vulnerable? Are you not aware that women are even on the margins, when it comes to power and being heard and not being shoved out the window the minute a man in drag shows up? Why are you sobbing and whining about trans people at the expense of women? As Basil Fawlty put it: Is this a piece of your brain?
Well that’s mostly true in the sense that trans has for decades been an extreme subculture. But then, you can say the same thing about Furries, Leather Pups, and BDSM practitioners. And of course, there’s more than a little overlap among and between those groups, very much including trans. They overlap majorly.
But these groups aren’t politically oppressed. Marginal isn’t automatically synonymous with politically oppressed. Who’d’a thunk it?!
Why do people constantly conflate these two things?
Of course, a major complicating factor is gay rights. You could argue that homosexuality is, like those other groups, similarly marginal or “extreme” — and, let’s face it, there’s a bit of overlap with those aforementioned groups, too. I can attest to that, as I’ve seen plenty of Pups, Furries, BDSM types, and other kinky subcultural groups in the gay male community. We always knew they were kind of tagging along for the ride. We gays didn’t quite grasp the risk of politically tying the TQ to the LGB: that it wouldn’t lift up the latter letters that tended to lurk around us so much as drag down the former letters by highlighting and overemphasizing their overlap with us.
But in political terms, the gay rights agenda is not the same as these other groups’ recent demands. The point of gay rights politically has always been to ultimately universalize the codes of public and private conduct across society. As Pierre Trudeau said, “There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” We didn’t want special exemptions as gay people; we wanted the same rights as straight people to express our sexuality in private and to live in public as full-fledged citizens.
Gay rights in a nutshell says, What I do in my private life — the sex of the person I mate and pair-bond with — should have no repercussions in my public life, so long as I’m not explicitly doing it in public. You could expand that to add, We shouldn’t have to keep our atypical sex lives completely secret; we need only to not force other people to actively participate in them. By that reasoning, gay people are not only allowed to have sex with each other without criminal repercussions, we’re allowed to be open about it without facing unreasonable discrimination. Squabbles about wording and definitional boundaries aside, that’s been the basic backbone of gay rights, and the logical principle behind adding it to the pantheon of Euroamerican culture’s idea of universal human rights.
Trudeau (père) gave his famous bedroom speech in 1967, and that was around the same time that crossdressing was uncoupled from criminality in nations across the West. The logic there was along the same lines: it shouldn’t be illegal for crossdressers to merely crossdress. They were universalizing laws by de-sexing clothing designations. What they decidedly weren’t doing was giving crossdressers special extra privileges simply for being atypical. The law simply said, anyone of either sex would not be criminalized for choosing to wear pants or a skirt in public. Universal rules, across the sexes. The fact that many males chose to wear skirts for sexual reasons remained outside the scope of the law, so long as those men weren’t explicitly engaging in sexually inappropriate behaviour in public. (On that front, you can see pretty clearly how more squabbles about definitional boundaries have inevitably cropped up. But the general gist has been that you can’t arrest a man for criminally lewd behaviour for simply wearing a skirt in public or at work.)
As to “following our hearts”,
Turn your fucking brain back on, Dame Thornberry. “Marginal” is not the same thing as “in need of more legal accommodation” forever and ever. Some subcultures are inherently marginal and they’re destined to stay that way forever. That’s not a violation of any progressive human rights ideals. It’s just a statistical fact.
Questions of gays’ and transvestites’ and transsexuals’ and fetishists’ legal rights and the limits thereof in broader society are far too serious to relegate to fluffy feelings. It’s such a goddamned insult to gays and lesbians when we’re infantilized like that. Gay people want proper boundaries like everyone else; gay people recognize sex dimorphism and (for the most part) we recognize sex-based boundaries like everyone else. (It’s fair to argue that gay people are typically more exposed to trans people then everyone else, and some among the gay cohort become confused about our divergent movements’ demands, but that shoudn’t be too hard to parse. Give me a break!)
(Mind you, the adoption of the rainbow as our symbol did not help on that front. Rainbows may have symbolic potency in terms of representing universality and total spectrums of acceptance or whatever, but they are aesthetically the stuff of kindergarten classrooms. It was a mistake of the gay rights movement to go all-in on such gaudy imagery.)
As a gay man, I fully concede that the application of gay rights across the West has turned out to be more complicated than I and many fellow gays would have wanted. I’m sorry about that! For what it’s worth, for me, the first step towards fixing it and getting back on track is taking on people like Dame Thornbery and pushing back hard on her brand of wafflepuffery.
Agreed! We desperately need to ditch the mindless slogans and have a serious conversation about the hard issues that arise when the legitimate interests of various groups groups intersect and how we can as a society adjudicate between competing claims. Slogans don’t work. “Following our hearts” doesn’t work. Even the trusty language of rights doesn’t work anymore. In a world where nobody believes anything genuinely new is possible we need new language and new ideas. It’s going to be a big job.