Coming out as transgender

Clearly.

No trisher I'm not suggesting you made it up and I know all about the vile manipulation of working class women, arrested, imprisoned, force fed and abandoned by arrogant middle class suffragettes to further their own agenda.
What I object to is your using the evils of the Tory party per se to validate the view that, because these women have Tory connections and possible agendas, there can be no value in what they're saying regarding upholding womens' rights and sensibilities and that if we hold the same view i.e. no vote for a party/politician who doesn't respect my sex then we're supping with the Devil Tories and don't have minds of our own.
I direct the quote at ALL parties and I am not swayed by any agenda I've not fully explored and evaluated. I'm not daft.

The trouble is it doesnt matter how 'we' vote. The electorate tend not to vote in the way people on the internet want them to vote they are a bugger that way . And the labour party (there are other parties but its the one I vote for) need to look how can I put it, as if they are not absolutely bonkers. Because whether you like it or not for a large part of the electorate that was how they were seen for the last view years. They have allowed themselves to fall into this hole.

Few years even.

And since you are badgering me for what I think, I’ll tell you that I vote for parties that have the closest set of priorities to mine. I don’t ascribe nefarious agendas to parties that have some differences from me. I look at the entirely of their policies. I don’t make fantastical extrapolations about their policies that make me look like I’m paranoid.

That sounds sensible.

Nannee49

No trisher I'm not suggesting you made it up and I know all about the vile manipulation of working class women, arrested, imprisoned, force fed and abandoned by arrogant middle class suffragettes to further their own agenda.
What I object to is your using the evils of the Tory party per se to validate the view that, because these women have Tory connections and possible agendas, there can be no value in what they're saying regarding upholding womens' rights and sensibilities and that if we hold the same view i.e. no vote for a party/politician who doesn't respect my sex then we're supping with the Devil Tories and don't have minds of our own.
I direct the quote at ALL parties and I am not swayed by any agenda I've not fully explored and evaluated. I'm not daft.

No I'm saying look at the evidence.
Look at what the Tory party has done for women and ask yourself why on earth they are now suddenly concerned about their rights? It's absolutely nothing to do with women or their rights. It's to stop anyone focussing on what has actually happened and the dreadful economic mess we are in. IT's sleight hand. Of course once you've fallen for it women, transwomen and every minority group in existence will be worse off. Divide and conquer.
Incidently middle class suffragettes were imprisoned and force fed, it was by no means confined to the working class women.In fact there are very few working class women imprisoned. They couldn't afford the time away from work or the loss of reputation.

If you keep telling people they have 'fallen for it', I dont mean on here, I mean if thats the message you send to the electorate at large, we will have a tory government.

I don't think the Tories care about women's rights. I think that the electorate are utterly sick of hearing about trans issues (as can be seen by a lot of 'Groundhog Day' comments on here) and will see Johnson's comments as sensible. And the LP has handled the whole thing incredibly badly, as have the Lib Dems and the SNP.

In other words, I agree with what Galaxy says upthread .

Pops in, breathes deeply, waves to doodle, Galaxy, Rosie Nanny49 and others who continue to debate in the face of some unpleasant goading and provocation.

I’m a long term Labour voter. No secret that I saw Corbyn as a disaster. I voted for my good Labour mp who lost his seat. Voters were very clear, never vote Labour wi’yon mon in charge love, we were told. They didn’t either. Labour has to have a wide appeal to beat the tories. The country is suffering from years of Tory misrule.
We are beyond any point where politicians in the LP can refuse to answer. I sympathies with Yvette Cooper when she avoided going down the rabbit hole but it won’t do. The parry needs a coherent response.

And I have been thinking about the 'importance' of some issues over others. And sometimes seemingly smaller issues of right/wrong may trump for me the larger moral issues of the nhs, etc. If the labour candidate in my constitiency ran a sugar daddy website, I could not and would not vote for him. I wouldnt vote tory but my seat after the last election is a target seat to win back so its not as if every vote doesn't count here. Its interesting. Thankfully our tory mp has an interesting history shall we say so I can confidently not vote for them on all counts.

Dear god, constituency that should say.

Iam64

Pops in, breathes deeply, waves to doodle, Galaxy, Rosie Nanny49 and others who continue to debate in the face of some unpleasant goading and provocation.

I’m a long term Labour voter. No secret that I saw Corbyn as a disaster. I voted for my good Labour mp who lost his seat. Voters were very clear, never vote Labour wi’yon mon in charge love, we were told. They didn’t either. Labour has to have a wide appeal to beat the tories. The country is suffering from years of Tory misrule.
We are beyond any point where politicians in the LP can refuse to answer. I sympathies with Yvette Cooper when she avoided going down the rabbit hole but it won’t do. The parry needs a coherent response.

Yes, it does. People vote for many issues, primarily their own living standards I would guess, but other things as well, and trans issues will obviously, at the next election, be one of them, for some people.

Others don't care either way.

I wouldn't vote Tory, regardless of whatever, despite our local Tory MP being pretty ok. The cabinet etc are hopeless and self serving.

I wonder, though, hypothetically, whether those on here saying Labour alone should be voted for to save the NHS etc, would still vote for them, if Labour came out and said that, as a party, they didn't recognise TW as women, and in future people would only have the rights and facilities their "sex at birth" entitled them to?

I have never voted Tory and I am not going to start now, but I do want Labour politicians and Keir Starmer in particular to give a very clear answer when journalists ask him what a woman is or whether a woman can have a penis because up to now his non answers have made him look weak.
There is a thread on Mumsnet calling him spineless and wondering how he could possibly take his place with other countries leaders as an equal.
I don't believe for a second that the Tories care more about women but they know a vote winning answer when they see one.
I don't know why so many women vote Tory but they do and Labour have to see that and try and think of ways to encourage them to vote Labour. Calling them dinosaurs like David Lammy did is not going to change anyone's mind.

On a personal level, we occasionally have a real Socialist candidate in my area and if we have one at the next general election I will vote for them. In May I will vote Labour because of Andy Burnham.

The Tory Trans MP has some ineresting business connections,
Sugar Daddy wasn't just for women, it catered for all.
www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/jamie-wallis-sugar-daddies

Yes I know. He was obviously a strong believer in equal opportunities in his exploitation of others.

Either way, he wasn't suitable, in my view, to be an MP. He also shouldn't be driving if his PTSD makes him run away from a car accident, before he can be breathalysed.

Jamie Wallis’s business history should raise red flags. He’s flakey, unethical, an equal opportunity exploiter. I haven’t seen the fliers he used to suppprt hus election campaign. Bet they didn’t mention Sugar Daddy or multiple complaints to trading standards.

Trisher, do not tell me I've fallen for anything...I've had to stop myself short of adding you cheeky cow. Though it might suit your POV to cast me as an idiot supporter of the utter sh*tshower that is the Tory party, past and present, I most certainly am not.

And do not tell me to look at their appalling track record when I've lived through their heinous policies from the vomitous Thatcher through to the equally despicable current incumbent of no.10. "Respect my sex if you want my X" isn't Tory policy or part of it's manifesto even if the originators of this movement are dyed in the wool, blue rinsers.

If the slogan chimes with my view on this really important topic then it's a disservice to dismiss it as Tory propaganda.

I'll reiterate for possibly the last time as my head is too valuable to me to keep banging it on a hard surface, this is a cross party issue that all should be aware of.

Not the only issue, not more important than the NHS or any other vital moral issues but nevertheless an important issue to many and not to be dismissed as if it's all Tory handmaidenly and a bit rubbish to support it.

And while I'm here, I know middle-class women were subject to the horrors of force feeding but if we're doing top trumps on the consequences of suffering, it's my view that the sacrifice of working class women with the threat of utter penury and starvation was greater.
Those noble women had no comfortable cushion of mummy and daddy and a possibly a private income and a willing little (working class) skivvy to make their food, bed, fire.
I think Selina Cooper, Helen Silcock, Ada Neild Chew and Sarah Reddish mobilising brave women at the factory gates, to name just a handful of the hundreds of thousands of working class women prepared to stand defiant come what may, would take strong offence with your dismissive "it was only a few".

Nanee49 well call it what you want, if you believe that two upperclass women one of whom is obviously Tory and one who has tried very hard to conceal her actual background by abandoning her company director roles before she entered into this venture are really non-political that's up to you.I can't help feeling it is manipulation especially when it's launch makes Daily mail headlines.
As for the suffragettes I wouldn't condemn any woman whatever her background who chose to go through the pain and suffering of forced feeding particularly when for some of them like the very posh Lady Constance Lytton it led to an early death.
None the less it was a middle class movement and the organisations which focussed on universal suffrage and were mainly working class like the Women's Labour League are largely forgotten.
But these women have alligned them selves to the middle class movement funny isn't it?

This must be a difficult post for some contributors.
This Conservative MP has ‘come out’ as transgender. I have no problem with not voting for him as Tory and neither do I have any support for him deciding to be a transwoman.
Originally, I thought ‘it takes a bit of nerve to come out when you’re a public person’ when you could face a lot of backlash.’
After all the feedback I’ve been reading on here about his lifestyle and businesses, it’s beginning to sound more like a convenient evasive tactic.
If he contributes to the loss of Tory voters, because of all that information, he’ll have done a good job. The risk is that all the TRA voters will support him just because he has been brave enough to come out.

Shall we hope he loses his seat? Will all the TRA claim discrimination or transphobia even if it makes them look like Tory supporters?

What the devil has the social class of the women got to do with it? That really is clutching at straws.

Who cares if the people doing the articulating and the debating, and leading the discussion are middle class? It's often the case that the people in those roles are middle class, if only because they are more likely to have the confidence to make their case, and may, as Nannee points out, have less to lose than others.

Should middle class women be silenced, not just for being women, not just for having the wrong sort of views, but because of having the wrong sort of family background, now?

As for the argument that if someone cares about trans issues it means that they don't care about other issues, frankly that is bollocks. If I said that I wouldn't vote for a party that doesn't condemn slavery (as an example of something that nobody could seriously want to see legalised), would that mean that I didn't care about the good things that it did support? Of course I would, but it could just be that I felt strongly enough about slavery to prioritise that over the rest and withdraw my vote. assume that most others would do the same?

We are in a mess, politically, just now. None of the parties is covering itself in glory, as far as I can see. None of them appears to have policies that are what I would hope for, but we'll find out more nearer the election. The bottom line, though, is that voters will have to sort out their own priorities, and if women's rights is at the top they might have to sacrifice other things in order to protect them. Equally, depending on what else the parties come up with, it may be that they have to put them further back on the priority list to fight off even more pernicious evils.

I don't think it's the same as 'only caring about one issue', but if a lot of people (on either 'side' of the debate - this doesn't just apply to the so-called 'gender critical') see it as an important issue it could sway the result. This is exactly why Johnson is playing it for all he's worth, and why Keir and the shadow cabinet are tripping over themselves not to say anything that might come back to bite them. The fact that what they are saying makes them sound ridiculous is because what they feel they have to say is ridiculous.

It is indeed irritating that the Tories seem to have positioned themselves as the party that supports women's rights, but they are clever at that sort of thing.
Labour need to up their game here, Starmer has set his stall out to attract Conservative voters, so he needs to look as if he too cares about women.

Oh I will call it exactly as I want trisher. Have a good weekend, I'm off for Pimm's. Cheerybye.

Yes, that sums it up nicely Ilovecheese.

Whatever class any woman is does not diminish a message that they choose to give! Either one agrees with the message or one doesn't! But choosing to agree or not agree based on the class of the proponent (or even considering their class as a criteria for possible agreement/disagreement) would be a dangerous road to go down!!

I am not suggesting anyone here is or is not doing that, the conversation just got me thinking!