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What other stuff would people like to see?
I'd like to see something about social justice in there. There's nothing about protecting the vulnerable or standing with the oppressed. I know that we've spent a bit too much time on this over the last six years but it is an important part of being a democratic socialist organisation and we can't hide our values when they're so much a part of why we exist.
This is specifically on the trans rights stuff that I'm thinking. Starmer has been weak on Duffield and imo anyone who argues that the equality act 2010 should reduce its scope of protection for trans people should not be in the party.
ReekBlefs-
This is specifically on the trans rights stuff that I'm thinking. Starmer has been weak on Duffield and imo anyone who argues that the equality act 2010 should reduce its scope of protection for trans people should not be in the party.
I don’t think you realise how fucking angry many female (afab) people are.
It’s less than 100 years since we got the vote. Within my adult lifetime it was still legal for a man to rape his wife. On average in the UK a female person is murdered every three days, almost always by a male and 50% of the time by a current or ex partner.
Yet we are being told that how society treats people with female bodies is irrelevant to feminism, and that our lived experience as female from birth has no more authority than a feeling in a male head.
And of course society can redefine womanhood as nothing to do with the female body if it wants to.
But our bodies still exist and the shit we deal with because of them still happens whatever we are (or are not) called, so IMO we have damn good reason to say we exist as a meaningful social and political group.
Yet we are being literally undefined, not for our own benefit but as the solution to a problem being experienced by males.
And this is progressive?
I think trans women and female people have a lot in common. We both suffer from gender stereotypes and toxic masculinity. We should be allies. We should join our voices. But we both also have challenges the other does not share. We are not interchangeable.
I want to talk about this. This is a massive thing that is being done to female people. Maybe it’s the right thing. I’d love to be persuaded that it is. I want the concerns I have to be dismissed not by just ignoring them or calling me a bigot but with convincing reasons why they are not the problem I think they are.
And I want there to be discussion about why, if sex and gender are different, we can’t support trans people by acknowledging both sex and gender instead of demanding the wholesale replacement of sex with gender.
But that’s not happening. The redefinition of women/undefinition of female is being imposed on us without any public debate because “it’s too toxic” to let the female people who have concerns, usually older women who’ve lived long enough to see that youthful ideals about equality don’t hold up against the established real world power structures, talk about it.
(In the interest of keeping the post succinct I’ll not touch on trans boys and men other than to say they also deal with the challenges of being female and the male/female power dynamic means they don’t impact male political power in the way trans women and girls impact female political power, so my concerns here are more about whether individuals are getting the right support than the overall social impact.)
brokenbetty
It all looks pretty reasonable. There's nothing revolutionary or particularly exciting in there but, to be honest, I'm not sure that's what's required at the moment.
What other stuff would people like to see?