All I'm hearing from much younger people than me is they are sick of the fucking u turns and willingness to throw trans people under a bus
Starmers made it very clear he doesn't actually like Labour members and activists
Conversely, all I'm hearing from long-term lefty women of a similar-ish age to me, 40-50s, is they are sick of women being thrown under a bus.
Notwithstanding Starmer's recent comment that a woman is an adult female and his apparent backtracking/U-turn on gender self-ID...
"The Labour leader said he did not believe the policy of self-identification was “the right way forward”, and that he believed that “the principle of safe spaces is very important for women”."
Labour says that it has hardened its stance on self-identification after having a ‘chance to reflect’
www.telegraph.co.uk
(Is there any Labour Party policy that Starmer actually genuinely believes in and supports wholeheartedly? Is he possibly the most inconsistent and flip-floppy leader of any major political party? I can't recall any other party political leader with a track record like his.)
Anyway, back to women of a certain age and an observation I've made with the usual cautions about anecdata.
I'd say my Facebook friends list includes several different cohorts, I'm guessing it's the same for many others, ie longstanding friends of many years, some more recent friends, former colleagues/friends from several jobs over the years, friends from living in different places current or former neighbours and housemates and squatmates etc, people from shared interest groups like sewing and gardening, people from professional or personal interest workshops/courses I've done over the years, people of a similar political persuasion eg from housing campaign groups and disability rights activists and anti-war and environmental rights activists etc, friends-of-friends who I might've met irl or friends-of-friends who've become online acquaintances, all of whom might or might not be part of overlapping groups in a sort of complicated Venn diagram.
I'd say that out of all of those there are three unlinked groups of gender critical feminists.
Of the local longstanding lefty women I know, some are vocal GC feminists. Including a former neighbour of mine has been reported in the media as losing her job due to being a gender critical feminist.
(Conversely, other women I know are vocal trans rights activists and speak up for trans rights and share articles and information about protests and so on.)
Another cohort is women who work in the media. Some of whom write about their own gender critical views or write about other GC women, amongst other things. Some of whom have GC views in a personal capacity but don't write about them publicly in the media, but do occasionally post and comment about the subject on Facebook.
And there's an outlier of someone else I know in a different part of the country, who started out as an online friend but who I've since met irl at a festival.
I'm mentioning this to illustrate that they are disparate groups, otherwise unconnected.
Some of those from the first group and also the outlier became actively involved in Labour Party politics during the Corbyn era, some just joining the party as members, some becoming active members in terms of canvassing and campaigning and holding office in their local CLPs.
Since then, the very vast majority of them have left the party. Some having expressed disillusionment more generally at an anti-war and/or anti-poverty/anti-austerity leader like Corbyn being ousted.
Some, however, have specifically commented about feeling politically homeless due to Labour's stance on gender self-ID and how they felt that Labour was throwing women under the bus and how they didn't feel represented by any political party. Some commented along the lines that not even the Women's Equality Party was a safe place for women.
So I've been thinking for a while now about how the Labour Party seemed unaware and/or didn't care about how it was alienating so many women on and of the left.
And I'm aware that some are trying to associate/write-off gender critical feminists with being right-wing, but those in those three groups I mentioned are nothing of the sort, although many hadn't previously been involved in left-wing party politics before Corbyn (and some didn't get involved in party politics at all), many were involved in left-wing politics in terms of single-issues, through campaigning and activism and even direct action.
And I don't just mean armchair activists, I mean lefty women with principles and strong convictions who've been arrestables/arrested for anti-war/anti-nuclear weapons protests, environmental/climate change protests, animal rights protests, like proper hardcore lefties. Not Starmer-style flip-flopping opinions according to focus groups lefty.
These women were saying that they were not going to be voting Labour. (Many saying they wouldn't be voting at all as they felt politically homeless.)
So these aren't women who've suddenly become right-wingers. If anything, they remained staunchly to the left of the Labour Party that had moved leftwards towards them during Corbyn's leadership campaign and during his tenure, only to become more centrist and even 'Tory lite' under austerity and two child cap supporting Starmer.
Bearing in mind that women make up half the population and the Labour Party under Starmer has been alienating so many of them, I figured a while ago that Labour's in real trouble in the next election, not from the risk of lefty women switching their vote to another political party, but the risk of them not voting.
I figured that if what I was observing in three disparate unconnected loose groups of women (ie not formal groups, just groups in the sense of being randomly either women I knew locally or who worked in the media like I used to) was being replicated around the country, then Starmer had no idea as to how many votes he/the Labour Party stood to lose.
Although his recent comment suggests the Labour Party or their consultants/strategists might've run some focus groups and belatedly realised how they've been sailing like the Titanic towards an iceberg where the visible part has been the trans rights activists and they've not been paying heed to the many women concerned about women's rights and women's safety who've become increasingly alienated and vocal about planning to not vote for Labour after decades of doing so, like the 9/10ths of an iceberg below the surface.
It remains to be seen whether those women will trust Starmer who increasingly has a reputation for just saying whatever's politically expedient at any given moment in time and being totally untrustworthy.
