Starmer’s Wrong: Transpeople Are Not Marginalised and Self-ID Is a Danger to Women

It hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for Stonewall. Having put their whole weight behind the campaign for trans rights, they now find themselves facing serious opposition and questioning at last. Various universities and organisations have found that the advice Stonewall has given them is misleading and may actually be illegal. The gay rights activist group was informing its clients that certain types of criticism, which are actually legal and protected, constituted hate speech and was illegal. An increasing number of gays and lesbians are also upset with the organisation’s almost exclusive focus on trans issues. Many lesbians resent the intrusion of biological men into their exclusive spaces – there have been complaints that the majority of lesbian pubs and clubs, at least in Canada, have closed down. There is pressure upon lesbians to have sexual relationships with trans identified men, and if the lesbians turn them down, then they are accused of being ‘transphobic’. There is also particular concern that butch lesbians, and feminine gay men, are being wrongly put under pressure to identify as trans and transition, while in reality they are simply butch lesbians and feminine gay men. As a result, a number of gays and lesbians have left Stonewall and similar organisations for organisations like the LGB Alliance, which concentrates solely on gay rights and excludes trans issues.

Earlier this week Benjamin Cohen, CEO of Pink News, was interviewed by Radio 4’s Simon Fanshawe about trans rights. He faced polite, but difficult questioning, something Cohen clearly wasn’t used to. All he could do in response was flail about flinging accusations that somehow Fanshawe was homophobic or transphobic or something, and point to his own minority position as a gay, disabled Jew. Which really isn’t relevant to the topic in hand.

The day after, Starmer came out to support trans rights and said he would support self-ID. Trans people were the most discriminated people in the UK, according to him. This is simply wrong. I doubt very much that trans people are any more discriminated against than the rest of the population. A year or so ago the trans lobby was agitating for a ‘trans day of remembrance’ in respect of all the trans people that have been killed. Except no trans people, or nearly no trans people, have been killed in Britain. They stats they use to support the claim of hundreds of trans people being massacred come from Latin America, where most of the victims are sex workers. Furthermore, transpeople, at least in America, aren’t poor and marginalised. Karen Davies, a Black anti-trans activist, posted a video citing a sociological study of the American trans community, which found them to be overwhelmingly White, extremely affluent, and very well educated. 13 per cent of them have Ph.Ds, as compared to one per cent of the general American population.

Where they are arguably discriminated against, there are very good reasons for doing so. Most transwomen – about 70% – 90% – retain their male genitalia, which is clearly an issue when it comes to transwomen being given access to women-only spaces, like toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres, women’s shelters and prisons. This issue is exacerbated further by research showing that sexual fetishes, like transvestism, tend to cluster. Transwomen don’t conform to female patterns of criminality, but male, and convicted transwomen may have a number of other paraphilias such as exhibitionism, sado-masochism and paedophilia. There are therefore extremely good scientific, criminological reasons why transwomen should not be housed in women’s prisons. They may constitute a danger to the female inmates. And indeed, despite the lies utter by Stonewall that nothing of the type has happened, women prisoners have been raped by biologically male sex offenders, who have been sent to women’s prisons because they have claimed to identify as women.

Here’s a couple of videos from Karen Davies again as she cites the sociological research into the transwomen and paraphilias/sexual fetishes.

More disturbing is the evidence from psychiatrists and law-enforcers that certain trans identified men have been getting sexual jollies from being in women’s spaces for a very long time. Be warned – this is sexually explicit.

I realise that this will upset some of the readers and commenters on this blog, who will feel that I am spreading hate and prejudice.

This is very definitely not my intention. I am certainly not trying to smear transwomen as a whole as dangerous sexual predators and I condemn utterly any attack or abuse of them simply for being trans. I believe totally that they should have the same respect, employment and educational rights and opportunities as everyone else.

What I don’t believe in is allowing trans ideology to prevail over fact when it comes to the safety of women and girls. And unfortunately this is the case, and will be the case, if self-ID is accepted and predatory and extremely dangerous trans-identified men are allowed into women’s spaces.

Starmer is here, quite simply, wrong. His promotion of self-ID has led many gender-critical women to leave the Labour party and tear up their membership cards. Yes, transpeople should have a place in the Labour party, and their rights should otherwise be guarded and promoted.

But they are not marginalised, they are not poor, and the promotion of the trans ideology is harming women, and vulnerable gays and lesbians.

Sargon on the Gay Rights Civil War between Lesbians and Trans Activists

Sargon of Akkad, real name Carl Benjamin, is a shabby individual. I’ve blogged about him several times before, not least because his recruitment to UKIP along with Mark ‘Nazi Pug’ Meecham and Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars infamy, effectively destroyed whatever electoral credibility that borderline Fascist party had. Sargon is very definitely a member of the extreme right. He’s islamophobic, anti-feminist and has been credibly accused of racism. He claims to represent the moderate left, but also defines himself as a ‘classical liberal’. Which means that he favours the complete privatisation of the economy, and the destruction of the welfare state. He’s notorious for sending a particularly noxious text to the Labour MP Jess Philips telling her ‘I wouldn’t even rape you’ when she was describing the threats of sexual assault and worse she receives.

But this time, surprisingly, he sounds like a reasonable human being.

In this video he comments on a letter sent last month to the Sunday Times, signed by 22 leading gay rights activists, including Simon Fanshawe, the co-founder of the gay rights organisation Stonewall. The letter condemns that that organisation for its support of trans activists and their denial of the biological basis of gender identity, which they feel is a dangerous threat to women’s rights. They are particularly concerned about the way their ideology – that gender identity is a mental construct – threatens to undermine women’s rights and voices in issues like FGM, pregnancy and abortion. Sargon agrees with them, noting that concepts like lesbianism and bisexuality are based on there being only two genders, which the trans activists deny. Sargon and the gays here object to people, who have been born men, claiming to have a right to speak for women on these issues. They also state that it is dangerous for trans activists to go into schools to encourage children to review their gender identity. Sargon also agrees with this, stating that half the time if ask children about what gender they identify with, they’ll answer with fire-engines and dinosaurs.

The lesbian activist Julie Bindel is also concerned about the violence and threats coming from trans activists. She states that there are no threats of violence coming from the terfs – an acronym standing for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. But there certainly are threats made by the trans activists. Such as slogans like ‘Punch a Terf’. Sargon also shows a video on the Mail Online page, in which Bindel walks down a road in which trans activists are holding a counter demonstration against a meeting by an anti-trans feminist group. The trans people are chanting ‘Trans rights are human rights’ and kicking at the windows of the building in which the meeting is being held. Bindel states that this being done to intimidate the women inside. She states that women are being threatened, and criticises the police around the building for not doing anything to protect the women inside.

So great is the conflict between gays, bisexuals and lesbians, particularly the latter, with the trans rights activists, that the letter to the Times talks of a split occurring in the LGBTQ group, with the formation of a splinter organisation, LGBQ.

Naturally the video also contains Sargon’s sneers about feminists and gay rights activists. He states that he finds their views ridiculous and laughs at them. In a dig at progressivism in general he replies to Bindels comment about women being intimidated that the police will do nothing against the trans activists, as trans people trump women as being a more oppressed group. Well, there’s that. But the way the cops moved Bindel on when she tried to stop and talk to some of the counterdemonstrators suggested that they were more worried that any action by them would turn it into a violent riot. Sargon does say, however, that although he laughs at the Terfs, they have a right to their views and to express them. And so he opposes their deplatforming and the way some organisations, like the Cooperative Bank, have refused to deal with Terf groups.

It’s a crazy situation when a near Fascist like Sargon actually starts to make sense and defends free speech and democracy. I think he’s right in that most people would see gender identity as based in biology, and it is dangerous for trans activists to try to encourage children to question their gender identity. And he’s right when he says that women faced with issues like FGM cannot escape them by claiming to be a different gender mentally.

There are caveats to his views, however. Some transpeople, like the trans vlogger Rose of Dawn, draws a distinction between the genuine transgendered and the gender radicals. Rose of Dawn is a transwoman herself, and has stated that trans people like her have invested a great deal financially and psychologically in their transition to the opposite gender. The gender radicals, however, consider gender to be simply a mental construct. They make little or no effort to change the physical markers of gender identity or their biological gender itself. They have created any number of different genders, some of which come close to, or are indistinguishable from parody. One of them is a ‘gender that identifies with space, stars and nebulae’. Most dangerously, these people consider that as gender is a mental construct, they wish to overturn the 2004 act that stipulates that diagnoses of gender dysphoria – the medical condition in which one’s mental gender does not match one’s biology – should only be made by medical professionals. Rose of Dawn is, unfortunately, like Sargon in that she is a person of the right. Nevertheless, she makes some excellent and interesting points.

The radical trans activists do seem to be a threat to women’s rights, although I would argue that some, hopefully the majority of transpeople identify so strongly with the gender to which they have transitioned, that they should be treated equally to born members of those genders. I also have a read accounts by trans activists, who have been physically assaulted by radical feminists, so I don’t believe that the violence and threats are all on one side. But there is a genuine issue here, and it’s a sad state when only the right is discussing it.