Nigel Scott on the Liberal Democrats, queer theory and transsexual rights: "The Liberal Democrats’ have adopted a queer theory centred approach to trans rights. This means that the party implicitly opposes women’s sex-based rights, because women no longer exist as a fixed sex class. Accordingly, any man can adopt the status of a woman on demand and because 'transwomen are women' in the words of the party's mantra, there is no longer a rationale for single sex spaces."
"Having been for centuries essentially a comprehensive for the aristocracy, Eton changed into an oligarchical grammar school. With the incomes of the super-rich racing ahead, especially after Thatcher;s tax cuts for the wealthy and ;big bang; deregulation of the City, the sky was the limit for both fees and resources." To understand Boris Johnson you must understand Eton, arguesAndrew Adonis.
Heather Burns says the new Online Safety Bill gives government enormous to redefine, constrain and censor the boundaries of free and legal speech.
"Today there is no former rust-bucket city, no sometime edgeland, no crumbling dock, no monument to asbestos that has escaped rebranding as a 'creative quarter'." Jonathan Meades pours cold water on fantasies of regeneration.
Jane Nightshade celebrates Nicholas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now.
"In the collection’s final poem ‘Who’ Causley writes of seeing the ghostly figure of himself as a child haunting the places around Launceston he has known his whole life. He sees his younger self wandering beside the River Kensey in old fashioned clothes and has a vision of the fields where he once played, now covered by houses." The Cornish Bird surveys the life and work of the Cornish poet Charles Causley.
The idea of sex-based rights is a weird one, and it seems to have been created specifically to try and exclude and marginalize trans people. Historically it is absurd to say that women have been granted sex-based rights, what they have faced is perpetual sex-based discrimination and sex-based denial of rights. If the idea of sex-based rights is to mean anything then it must surely be about protecting people from these negative things and achieving sexual equality. However, there is absolutely nothing threatening to sexual equality about either a) allowing people to transition their sex or b) saying that it is up to individuals, and not psychologists, to say whether or not they have achieved such a transition. The way people like Nigel talk about this you get the sense that they imagine every woman has some birthright to special privileges and that great care must be taken to ensure that these do not pass on to men. That could not be further from the case and it ought not to be our aim to make it so!
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