Recently we have seen signs that Sir Keir Starmer the Labour Party leader is walking back, or at least giving the appearance of walking back from his previous position that ‘trans women are women’. He and his advisors have realised that more and more people are not buying what the activists from the cult of trans are selling and which the Labour Party has been slavishly supporting. The upper reaches of the Labour Party, in which I include Sir Keir and his advisors have noticed that supporting things like gender self ID, gender mutilation for children and men in women’s sports, changing rooms and toilets, is not a vote winner.
However his backtrack, despite being welcome, is really not good enough. He’s recently said that ‘99.9% of women don’t have a penis’. The problem for Starmer is that the reality is that 100% of women don’t have penises. The ‘99.9%’ response to questions about ‘what is a woman’ doesn’t reassure me that if elected a Labour Government would respect women’s rights, what it tells me is that here we have Starmer trying to convince the electorate that he’s seen the light (I don’t think he has in reality) whilst still trying to keep on board the ‘troon loons’ trans rights activists and their allies in his party.
If he can’t tell the truth, which is that 100% of women don’t have penises and can only come out with this equivocating answer, then many of us are going to suspect that this answer to the ‘what is a woman’ question tells us that Starmer is engaging in cynical electioneering in order to get the votes of both men and women who are pissed off with the extremes of the cult of Trans. Starmer’s answer gives me the distinct impression that if elected, the votaries of the cult of Trans in the Labour Party would cease being silent and would come out of the woodwork and wreak havoc on women’s and children’s rights and women’s rightfully sex segregated places.
Some may choose to believe that Sir Keir Starmer has seen the light about the awful and destructive gender ideology and that’s fine by me if you choose to believe Starmer on this. But for me, I’ve seen enough of the current Labour Party leader over the years to believe that Starmer is not a person who has been newly converted to the ideas of common sense and human biological reality and that Starmer is merely involved in a cynical and probably dishonest vote grab.
Perhaps this isn’t so surprising.
Patrick O’Flynn in the Spectator has an article on Starmer as well which I think neatly explains Starmer’s attitude. O’Flynn writes … “Does he [Starmer] really believe in protecting the traditional sex categories or has he just sensed the way the wind is blowing? Helpfully, he has answered this question frankly himself by coming up with a new formula on social reform that runs as follows: ‘If you can’t take the public with you on a journey of reform, then you’re probably not on the right journey.’ This sounds reasonable enough on first hearing but think about it: what he is really saying is that he will give his support to ideas on the basis of whether they are popular, not whether he considers them to be right. Opportunism actually is his principle.”
Thus Starmer is trying have his cake and eat it – he wants to persuade the “99.9%” of people who think that trans is tosh that he agrees with them, whilst simultaneously keeping the trans-ideologies on side as well.
This could well turn from being a hopeful win-win into a lose-lose if everybody realised just how much of a weather-vane (or is that whether-vain?) he really is.
O’Flynn makes another good point about this as well … “How would this approach fare in power? Surely it would merely encourage lobbyists of all kinds in the belief that PM Starmer could be browbeaten into any U-turn so long as sufficient pressure was applied. Currently it is … the forces of [social] conservatism which hold most sway over Starmer because he so desperately needs to bag the votes of social conservatives. But in power it could equally be the forces of the identitarian Left, which is so well dug-in across public bodies, that he needs to keep sweet.”
While l lean towards the wysiwyg view of this issue l have learnt something recently which has given me pause for thought (and some sympathy for politicians).
Seems my belief in x and y chromosomes as the sole determinant of biological sex is wrong, it’s the sry gene that determines “maleness” (Google it) and someone with a faulty sry gene will develop as a female even if they have xy chromosomes (seems that it’s also possible for someone to develop as a male despite having xx chromosomes). In addition it seems there is about 30 genes (3 on the x, 1 on the y and balance spread across the remaining chromosomes) which all interact when determining sex. In other words, at a biological level, sex is not as clear cut as we have believed.
My guess is that this relatively new research has found it’s way out of biology into the humanities and has not been thoroughly thought through leading to so much b#ll#x coming out of acedemia and other vested interests.
Seems to me there does need to be a grown up debate on this issue but my gut feeling is that we should continue to challenge gender stereotypes rather than create all these ‘new’ gender etc. After all, is there really a right way to be male/female.
Finally, stop asking “what’s a woman ‘, if you have a penis then you have a functioning sry gene and you are a male, everything else is female. Which brings us back to wysiwyg.
Whilst there may well be biochemical variations that make some men more feminine looking and with feminine musculature and vice versa for some women being more butch looking than others, this is unlikely to be a massive issue. You have male reproductive organs and produce small gametes then you are man, female repro organs and large gametes then you are female. Variations in physical appearance in things like musculature face shape etc do not alter the body sexual dimorphism of humans.
I can see where you are coming from with regards gender stereotypes and the challenge thereof but we’ve been doing this for the last fifty or sixty years or so and although the academics might not like it there is no escape from our biology. We are what we are.
You make a good point about how biochemical discoveries have been taken up and ran with (in wrong directions I believe) by academia. Reminds me of the quote, I think it was from Orwell which reads ‘there are some ideas so stupid that only an academic can believe them’.