The photo on the left is real. The one on the right is a photo-shop fantasy - but you already knew that, didn't you. How did you know that?
Things that can't be said:
Not so long ago, Starmer was asked if it's true that only women have a cervix. His answer was that he thought that was 'a thing that should not be said'. Similarly, when Angela Rayner was asked about the weaponisation of anti-Semitism in Labour, she explained to her interviewer that some things, even if true, were not acceptable.
We know there are certain things, at any one time, that MPs won't talk honestly about. How do we know it so well, so deeply instinctively? Chomsky explains it, here…
… so it's absolutely unquestionably true that your MP might be seen on a Pride march but (unless you live in Canterbury) you know you wouldn't have seen your MP anywhere near a demo for women's sex-based rights (and until recently, all the other MPs were busy distancing themselves from Rosie Duffield, the problematic MP who would keep talking about sex-based rights.)
Similarly, Andrew Marr and his colleagues do not consciously have a list of things they won't say but we all know what they are when they come up. We know that newsrooms would fall silent and all those 'brave, stroppy' reporters would carefully move away from any mad person who said, for example, "but Assange hasn't done anything wrong" or "why do we say 'the occupied territories' why don't we make it clear, by saying 'lands where Israel insurgents are making war on civilians'?"
It's just that people who would say things like that would never have got into the newsroom as professionals – because of their 'behaviour problems'.
Stroppy women
So we know that only women with 'behaviour problems' would have been audacious enough to be out defending their legal, sex-based rights, and that no properly trained MP would have publicly endorsed that battle until the establishment had moved the frame of what's acceptable to allow it.
This week, as Starmer and Streeting come forward to move Labour into what is now the new acceptable opinion, social media is once again full of women having rows about the subject. Why is that? I think it's because the 'proper' women, who don't have 'behaviour problems' are happy that the task is done because Starmer has officially said 'adult human female' (which, formerly, only stroppy people said) and Wes Streeting has officially noticed that 'even the strongest women he knows' have been unfairly silenced.
This infuriates the stroppy women because he continues to be dishonest. He is now pretending he's only just discovered that women have been hounded and bullied, when we stroppy women know (because we were on their list) that Streeting was a member of that notorious bully-gang, 'Labour Against Transphobia' who built a list of women they intended to hound out of the party, and spent their time raining misogynistic abuse on those women.
Spousal veto
Annalese Dodds infuriates stroppy women because she's followed the moving frame on what's acceptable so completely that no matter how many times women spoke to her, she failed to understand each individual point in sex-based law until the moment she was sure understanding it had become acceptable. That's why she's still clinging onto the fiction that the 'spousal veto' is a nasty, mean, old fashioned rule that allows wives to stop their husbands transitioning. She does so because for as long as most people think that's true, she still has a point where Labour can say 'this is old fashioned, we will modernise it'. It's Labour's one remaining sop for the transactivists, and they're hanging onto it just in case.
It won't work of course, because as they'll soon discover, that element of the alleged trans community who've been fighting the 'self-ID' side of the battle aren't keen on compromise...
But that's not a problem for Starmer and Streeting because, now the frame has moved so far, they can acknowledge that people like that just have behaviour problems.
WPUK statement about incitment to violence at London Trans Pride
(Never forget, for the last five years it's been WPUK who have been accused of having behaviour problems).
"Corbyn fans"
It's not yet acceptable to know that many women in the Corbyn movement were and are gender-critical. It wasn't a thing you could say within the movement during the Corbyn leadership, and those women have emerged from the battle of the last few years feeling bruised and traumatised, because they weren't 'Corbyn fans', most of them. They were just people who were campaigning for a more honest form of politics – that's what people supported Corbyn for, and so when the 'proper' women say why don't they approve of Starmer and Streeting now we've got what we want, the answer is no, we haven't got what we wanted because they are still very obviously not being honest. They're just 'moving with the times'. Yes, we won but it doesn't make us any less critical of dishonest MPs.
Who has behaviour problems? Anti-austerity activists? Anti-war activists? How about Sinaed O'Connor?
A win for women's legal rights
It's a win. It's a brilliant win. Labour have endorsed women's legal rights. I'm sure the vast majority of the angry, bruised women out there are as proud of Women's Place, the Labour Women's Declaration team and all the other groups as I am…
WPUK congratulates LWD and other women activists for achieving this policy change
…. But those of us who are after a better, more honest form of politics – a form of politics that can save our NHS and steer us away from poverty, exploitation and planet-scale destruction – are still far from happy, and the damage that's been done to our girls, and to women's services, while the likes of Starmer and Streeting were refusing to know what a women is will take decades to heal.
In this twitter thread, you can see LWD soldiering on, patiently sorting out the policy details…
Be pleased with this win for women, be grateful to those who carry on calmly, but allow the women to be angry. They have a right and a need, because up and down the country there are universities, councils, TUs and political branches who should come clean and publicly endorse the women they allowed to be hounded out of politics for believing in women's rights - but they won't, so they must endure women's anger.
There's much still to do battle for. Thank you, LWD and all the women's campaign groups, for your exceptional patience and endless diligence or, as the likes of Andrew Marr probably see it, your 'behaviour problems'.
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