That Starmer fella...

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.

Personally I think it's too early in the election cycle to be launching fully formed plans. We're probably looking at two or three years until the next election, anything released now will have lost its impact by then (or possibly be unworkable in post covid/brexit times).

@ReekBlefs I guess in theory that's point 4. Maybe they didn't go for anything more explicit as they didn't want to be accused of being too "woke". Although I think they could have promoted something like that together with "British values" of tolerance, fighting for the underdog, etc

@ReekBlefs I guess in theory that's point 4. Maybe they didn't go for anything more explicit as they didn't want to be accused of being too "woke". Although I think they could have promoted something like that together with "British values" of tolerance, fighting for the underdog, etc

We're in total agreement on that. I think it's a deliberate decision to stay away from the culture wars - an approach which may be electorally sensible but it also throws our most vulnerable under the bus, and I don't like it. I think a good leader wins a culture war by convincing those on the wrong side of it that they have no reason to be scared. Starmer's triangulation on this issue reminds me of Corbyn's triangulation on Brexit. You cannot face both ways on an important, divisive topic without looking weak. Imo.

Personally I think it's too early in the election cycle to be launching fully formed plans.

This seems to be the go to response for any criticism of Starmer. "It's too soon." When it comes to politicking, sure - that may be a valid - even prudent - position. But this document isn't intended to represent "fully formed plans." He's not put out a party manifesto or electoral pledge. It's supposed to represent his political thought (hence it being published by the Fabians). I think it's intellectually problematic to claim it's "too soon" for him to express that.

(To be explicit, I'm not calling you intellectually dishonest!)

I’m not sure why the sensibles are looking to change the leadership election rules. Wes Streeting is being lined up as a replacement, they could swop Keith with Wes and no one would notice.

The terrible significance of the EHRC report has still yet to sink in for large chunks of the left, hasn't it?

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.)

Hear fucking hear.

I don’t think you realise how fucking angry many female (afab) people are.

Be as angry as you like, I'll even join you on some of it. But Duffield is a legal representative of Labour, and what she says and amplifies about trans and bisexual people is far far worse than what Ken Livingstone and Pam whatsherface said about Jewish people.

Labour is legally responsible for her words and I do not want another EHRC judgement against us. She is a liability.

The terrible significance of the EHRC report has still yet to sink in for large chunks of the left, hasn't it?

I'm not sure it ever will. As a nation, we've elected a government of islanpohobes, racists and classists. I hate to say it but I'm not sure many voters give much thought to discrimination and prejudice in politics.

government of antisemites too. plus let's not forget her majesty's opposition also riddled with horrific islamophobes.

I don’t “like” being angry. I AM fucking angry. Like the body I have and the sexism that comes with it, it’s not a choice.

What, in her own words, did Duffield say?

I hate to say it but I'm not sure many voters give much thought to discrimination and prejudice in politics.

Oh I don’t know... I think for some it’s a positive motivation - “they hate xxx like I do”. Helps explain some things in politics that have happened over my lifetime. But sure for others, probably the majority, it’s not the deal-breaker that it should be.

Don’t forget, Starter also buried a report into racism in the Labour Party, and referred to BLM as a Black Lives ‘Moment’

Edit- Starter wasn’t on purpose, but I do find it amusing now auto-correct mangles Keir Starmer’s name.

What, in her own words, did Duffield say?

Let's just stick to what she's done this month, shall we? The list is too long and depressing to go through entirely. Here's a single twitter thread where she:

• referred to trans women as 'male bodied biological men' - this is mis-gendering, and therefore harassment under the EHRC guidelines
  
• said she does not accept the protections conveyed to trans women under the equality act - undermining one of the last bits of Labour legislation we got through
  
• repeated her support for excluding trans women from lists of murdered women - not an illegal thing to do but I think you'll agree, pretty poor taste
  
  

Then a few days later she appeared on Radio Four Today programme in which she:

• defended the convicted criminal Kurtis Tripp, a man arrested by the FBI on terrorism charges after threatening to shoot up a school, who thinks trans suicide rates are 'funny' and thinks trans people are 'cosplaying' as the opposite sex (a tweet which Duffield 'liked')
  
• accepted that by 'liking' the 'deeply offensive' cosplay tweet, she was endorsing the viewpoint contained within it
  
• suggested that bisexual men in relationships with women aren't really queer and are in fact co-opting gay culture - on bi visibility day!
  
  

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zsdd - starts at 1:50:00

Do not get me wrong here. Cis women need specific protections too, and people like me - who only object to the mis-representation of the law, and the lies, and the framing of trans women as a threat - absolutely stand with you on those. Just off the top of my head, I also support laws for making misogyny a hate crime, and for making street harassment a specific criminal offence, one which imo should involve being put on the sex offenders register. I just don't think we need to get into bed with terrorists and criminals or bring the party into disrepute, or throw trans people under the bus, in order to stand up for women.

not much to disagree with in here though it is funny that it's taken until 2021 for this to be covered in the guardian, when 200-follower count twitter users with names like 'hang_marine_A' and 'greennewdealmetilIfart' have been saying most of these things since 2015. what this doesn't seem to mention is: 2017; and, also KS' election to the leadership on the back of the ideas developed in 2015-19 (many of which he has since appeared to repudiate)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/24/keir-starmer-centrists-leader-essay-party-modernise

I think I may have misunderstood what you wanted. I was more referring to specific plans (e.g. this is what we do, this is how we'll fund it, etc).

It does go into some detail, stuff like this for instance:

... a New Deal for Working People. It will provide security and opportunities for people across the country, with improved conditions, quality jobs, training and better pay. It will increase
the minimum wage, ensuring proper wages that people can raise a family on. It will ensure rights for all workers from day one, such as sick pay, parental leave, and the right to flexible working, reflecting the realities of the post-Covid world. It would ban dubious practices
such as fire and rehire and stop firms exploiting loopholes to get out of giving employment rights to their workers.
We would give people stronger rights to be represented at work by their trade unions to help raise standards and protect workers. And, crucially, it would guarantee work or training for young people.
We would replace universal credit and reimagine our social security system to ensure that work pays. We want low-paid people to keep more of the money they earn, so that having
enough money to raise a family isn’t the preserve of the better-off.
All this would make a difference to hard-working people. It would put far more emphasis on balancing work with family, rather than choosing between the two. It would create happier, more productive employees.

The thing i find ridiculous is that Labour / Starmer get this level of scrutiny - yes, but how will you do that, where do the funds come from, what does it mean - and yet Tories are literally just shouting slogans out and get elected on it.

Would Keir do better just writing ‘Levelling up’ on a big piece of paper? Dunno

Yeah, I still need to read it so it may all be there. I might have to go to Canterbury later today so will bring it along on the train with me if so.

It's pretty much 30 pages of aspirations and platitudes. I didn't find much to disagree with in it (though there are many parts where going further would have established clearer principles), but we can all agree that motherhood and apple pie are good things ...

It's shy of detailed policy (fair enough, it's not a manifesto), it's shy of anything that's actionable, and it's shy of anything that could even form a decent slogan.

referred to trans women as 'male bodied biological men' - this is
mis-gendering, and therefore harassment under the EHRC guidelines

Trans women are biologically male (amab). That's literally the definition of a trans woman. If she wasn't male, she would not be trans. "Man", like "Woman", has been redefined as a mixed-sex single gender group but not everyone accepts that. I personally would have not issue with the redefinition - in fact I'd see it as positive - IF it was done in parallel with preserving pre-existing single-sex provisions. But that's not what is happening. Female people are simply being unnamed and disempowered, because the impact on us is considered unimportant. This is seen as purely a trans rights question but it is not, it is also a female rights question. Yet female people (by which I mean groups who speak for females of any gender rather than women of both sexes) are not at the table.

said she does not accept the protections conveyed to trans women under
the equality act - undermining one of the last bits of Labour

She wants to preserve the rights of female peple to exclude male in certain circumstances. I agree with her. It is not a gender issue, it is a sex issue. One of the most important engines of feminism was when female people started talking and realised that the problems they faced were not just individual to them but a systemic and structural devaluing and underpowering of fenale people in favour of male. That has got better but it has not in any way stopped. As a female, I feel the weight of male voices and male presence all the time. Males dominate spaces (literal and metaphorical). They talk over us. They reframe what we say to fit their own expectations. Sometimes they physically abuse us. They insert their sexualisation of us into everything we do.

Female-only spaces and conversations take that pressure off. The right to those spaces matters. to speak and have our voices heard as female is so important.

It simply comes down to, do you think female people should have the right to associate without males even when those males identify as women? Should we have the right to a female healthcare provider in intimate or triggering situations? When sleeping or undressing in accommodation or spaces that were not arranged by ourselves where we cannot personally chose who comes in, should we have the right to have a blanket exclusion of males? That doesn't in any way mean everything must always exclude tran women, just that it should be possible for female people to say "in this case, it's female-only" and for that to be seen as a reasonable and valid thing not a de facto act of hate.

To be very clear, if there were evidence that trans women in these scenarios behave like female people rather than male, none of this would matter but as far as I know there is not. The removal of the concept of female people as a meaningful group is being done not because of evidence it's unnecessary but because of an ideology that says this is how things should be.

So if you have any evidence to the contrary please please share it, because I would love to be wrong about all this! As someone who would naturally align with the standard progressive views it is very alien to me to be standing against on this specific topic. But it's not because I am suddenly no longer progressive, but because I believe what it does to female people is not progressive.

repeated her support for excluding trans women from lists of murdered
women - not an illegal thing to do but I think you'll agree, pretty
poor taste

As I understand it, there were no trans women murdered in the UK in the period which the most recent list reading covered. Meanwhile female people are being murdered at about three a week. That might just be a factor of there being much fewer trans women than female but in absolute terms the number of murdered females is undeniably much higher than the number of murdered trans women. I think given that context, trying to make it an issue about trans women is in pretty poor taste. I hope you agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zsd­d - starts at 1:50:00

I haven't had time to listen to the interview but will try and do so over the weekend. Given the context I do have:

defended the convicted criminal Kurtis Tripp, a man arrested by the
FBI on terrorism charges after threatening to shoot up a school, who
thinks trans suicide rates are 'funny' and thinks trans people are
'cosplaying' as the opposite sex (a tweet which Duffield 'liked')

I will do more reading about Kurtis Tripp. I found this from him. Clearly it's biased, being his actual own words, but it certainly puts a different light on both the school "threat" and "stalking". https://kurtistrippmusic.medium.com/ribbons-72d563814132 . The only copies of the "suicide" tweet I can find are a cropped part of the conversation. It's not quite saying trans suicide stats themselves are funny but it may equally well be offensive for other reasons so I don't want to go too far on that based on what I saw. If you have more context I'd like to see it (not necessarily to defend him).

accepted that by 'liking' the 'deeply offensive' cosplay tweet, she
was endorsing the viewpoint contained within it

The "cosplay" comment is certainly offensive. What you may not realise that many female people find the hyper-feminised / sexualised presentation of some prominent trans women also offensive. That's where the "cosplay" reaction comes from. I have no doubt that the trans women in question have genuine reasons and needs to present they way they do, but for female people it's the same old story of female people being being told to STFU about our own offense to accommodate male emotional needs.

bisexual men in relationships with women aren't really queer and are
in fact co-opting gay culture - on bi visibility day!

Yes, on the face of it that sounds pretty nasty.

Do not get me wrong here. Cis women need specific protections too

I'm not just talking about cis women though. I'm talking about female people. Not all female people are women. I don't identify as cis - I don't meet the criteria. In fact I only identify as a woman because that's where the rights and protections that I as a female person need currently sit - I don't actually meet the gender-based definition of "woman" at all.

I also support laws for making misogyny a hate crime, and for making street
harassment a specific criminal offence, one which imo should involve
being put on the sex offenders register.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I understand that you are coming from a good place.

I just don't think we need to throw trans people under the bus, in order to stand up for women.

I agree we do not need to throw trans people under the bus in order to stand up for female people. But we also do not need to throw female people under the bus in order to stand up for trans people. After all, plenty of female people ARE trans! I do think we need to be able to talk honestly about the differences between female people and trans women to find a way that works for us all. Share the bus!

Honestly I'm not saying Duffield is a saint. But she is at least trying to get this conversation on the table. Starmer, and other like him, KNOW this is wrong. They KNOW it's not fair to female people. But they are too scared to talk about it, to have that "toxic" debate, so they want female people to SFTU and put male needs first. That is a tale as old as time.

Edited to add: And I'm going to leave it here. This is a public forum but it's also one where people know me IRL and female people have been threatened and worse for saying less than I have here so I have taken a pretty big step today. Anything further would be better as a face to face conversation over beer or cake.

Long time lurker and occasional poster, not sure if this is the right place for this and absolutely don't want to derail the current debate, but I got a strong reminder this morning that behind all the passionate views on the future of the party there are real people trying to do their best for the future of the country, and sadly sometimes life happens to those real people...

https://labourlist.org/2021/09/tom-warnett-replaced-by-gavin-sibthorpe-as-gmb-rep-on-labours-nec/

Tom was a good friend growing up, I was best friends with his younger brother. I have many happy memories of cramming into the back of his Citroen Saxo to go to our first festivals, firing potatoes from his home-made spud cannon over the river Severn and general teenage tomfoolery.

I hadn't realised quite how senior he'd got within Labour and I probably last saw him at his brother's wedding six years ago but seeing this news today has really hit me for six. I hope they have caught it early enough and he pulls through!

I'm not going to insult both of us by multi quoting and going line by line, but a few points:

• by advocating that single sex spaces exclude trans women by default, you are arguing for discrimination as defined by the equality act - which you are welcome to do, we're all free to campaign for changes to the law. but by pretending that the EA already allows this and misgendering, Rosie Duffield crosses that line into misinformation and harassment
  
• the equality act already allows trans women to be excluded in SOME situations (because of course I realise in the case of Karen White et al, you do not want that person in a woman's prison - for the safety of cis AND trans women) - just not by default
  
• the concept of female as a biological term is NOT being erased - the equality act defines sex based protections and gender based protections separately, and it even defines what happens where those rights clash, quite reasonably imo
  
• the equality act was proposed in 2007 and the debate at the time was public and widely consulted - this isn't happening against the will of the public, it was enacted by the public and their representatives in parliament
  
• the evidence that trans women behave like cis women in women's spaces is in the fact that these inclusionary rules have been in place for over a decade in the UK, and trans women have been using these spaces for far longer, and no-one has really noticed. Look at Ireland!
  
• I'd love to believe trans women hadn't been murdered during the time period in question but I'm afraid they were deliberately excluded - here is the person who collates it explaining why she does so. Pointing this out is not 'trying to make it about trans women'
  
• here is Kurtis Tripp saying he thinks trans suicide is funny:
  
  
• and here he is accusing trans people of 'cosplaying as the opposite sex':
  
• Just to remind you, Rosie Duffield said of Kurtis Tripp: 'I am in touch with (him)...he finds this particular issue incredibly difficult...he has a valid right to talk about it without being cancelled'. This is unjustifiable. No matter where you stand.
  
  

This reminds me a lot of the antisemitism problem in Labour. Corbyn's commitment to the Palestinian people is not up for debate, but in arguing for them, he stood with open antisemites and racists, and damaged his whole platform in doing so. Those who defend Rosie Duffield run the same very real risk.

.

BREAKING @uklabour NEC won't now discuss @Keir_Starmer's rule changes https://mobile.twitter.com/iainjwatson/status/1441457797187604485