General Politics Thread

[kuuderes_shadow]

I think Labour needs to go more liberal and try and destroy the lib Dems and greens

If you think destroying the Lib Dems would hand Labour ANY of the Lib Dems current seats in parliament then you're living in cloud cuckooland.

If the Lib Dems were destroyed then every single one of those seats would go to the Conservatives, and not by a small margin (except Caithness etc. which would go SNP with the Tories in second and Orkney & Shetland which would probably still go liberal just because).

And I can't think of a single marginal with the Lib Dems in second that would turn into anything other than a stonking majority for the current top placed party either. Which is generally not Labour. Or the Greens.

Just like the vast majority of the seats the Lib Dems lost in 2015 went to the Conservatives, after 5 years of Labour doing everything they could to attack the Lib Dems in those seats.

And on a local level you'd probably see most go the Tories and most of the rest go to Independents as well.

---

Not that I'd personally be opposed to a more liberal Labour party. The problem is that it wouldn't get results. It would just drive away the left-conservative voter block (which are the ones Labour have been shedding to the Tories these past few elections) even further, whilst not actually gaining them anything of note in exchange. Right-leaning liberals wouldn't switch to Labour en masse without a wholesale redefining of the party, while left-leaning liberals are already voting overwhelmingly Labour in much of the country, and the places where they aren't are because other parties stand a good chance of defeating the Tories while Labour never could.

 

[thedoctor2016]

I think how the SNP Destroyed labour and the red wall shows the map can and is being rewritten we keep winning Sheffield Hallam now. And labour will have to pick because the greens made gains in the council and i bet it was because of the deal and the fake right baiting Starmer has been doing. Its not going to win an election any time soon but I would know what a liberal labour party stood for.

 

[ayase]

A long standing and highly effective strategy of the Conservative Party at all levels has been to allocate money to those that they want to vote Conservative and cuts to those who they either think will not or think will do so regardless.

In the past, the North (being in the "not" category) suffered. Now the Tories want the North more than anything so flood it with money. And the voters there respond accordingly.

Like I said, it’s still more than New Labour ever did for anyone around here. Thatcher ignored us because she knew she would never get our votes, Blair ignored us because he knew he always would.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to buy my vote they absolutely can, it would just be a matter of negotiating a price. A bidding war would probably be the best way, just get the Labour and Tory candidates to outbid each other for how much better off they’ll make me and I’ll pick whoever goes highest. I voted for Corbyn because I thought he’d be the most likely to do a bit of fair wealth redistribution, but if Boris does more or less the same thing and cuts funding to safe Tory seats and gives it to Teesside for cynical reasons, the end result is still the same. Perhaps I should be happy that my area finally matters.

 

[kuuderes_shadow]

I think how the SNP Destroyed labour and the red wall shows the map can and is being rewritten we keep winning Sheffield Hallam now. And labour will have to pick because the greens made gains in the council and i bet it was because of the deal and the fake right baiting Starmer has been doing. Its not going to win an election any time soon but I would know what a liberal labour party stood for.

You're in Sheffield? That makes things make much more sense. But all the Labour gains realistically possible on parliamentary level from the map being redrawn away from the Lib Dems have already happened. Everywhere left the Conservatives are the only possible winners. Twickenham, Richmond, Kingston, Bath, Guildford, Winchester, Cheltenham, heck even Westmorland and Lonsdale... these places aren't going to switch to Labour unless the Labour party rewrites itself to the point where it is effectively them that has been killed off, and not the Lib Dems/Greens.

Adopting a policy of "nudge in the liberal direction and focus our efforts on killing off the Lib Dems and Greens" for Labour would result in easily 50+ seats going Conservative over the 2019 result (mostly from Labour). In exchange for what for Labour? Brighton Pavilion and Watford, and that's about it I'd reckon (although whether Brighton Pavilion would actually be anything other than a Green hold at this point even if Labour focused everything on destroying them is doubtful tbh). Just about everywhere else that policy shift would appeal to enough to win the seat voted Labour last time. Maybe also getting respectable but fairly distant second in St Albans and St Ives.

But it's true that a big part of Labour's issue is that it's not really clear what they stand for right now. And that they have to do something about this if they want to stop the decline they've seen over the last few years. Boris has taken a bunch of Miliband's policies and made them into his own, which has kind of left Labour at a bit of a loss - it's hard to criticise policies or come up with an alternative vision when they're policies you were putting forwards yourself just a few years ago, after all.

 

[ayase]

To be honest, seeing that Labour's pitiful and hilarious (though predictable) response to doing so woefully is "we'll take this on the chin, no excuses whatsoever from us this time. But it's all Jeremy Corbyn's fault even though he hasn't been leader for over a year and we've done nothing at all in that time except tell you we are nothing like him. We promise to become more right wing." has made me wish I actually did vote for Shaun Bailey the conservative candidate for mayor, just because I think nothing short of defeat in London will actually cause these fools in Labour to do any self reflection.

I do think there’s some merit in the idea of causing some upset by just voting out the incumbent every time regardless. Safe seats are one of the worst things about our system, and why I think proportional representation would be better, but even then you’d probably find the parties would just put all their most entrenched names at the top of the list so they still always get elected.

 

[kuuderes_shadow]

I do think there’s some merit in the idea of causing some upset by just voting out the incumbent every time regardless. Safe seats are one of the worst things about our system, and why I think proportional representation would be better, but even then you’d probably find the parties would just put all their most entrenched names at the top of the list so they still always get elected.

The easiest way around that is to have what's called an open list, which is where you make it so that rather than just voting for a party list, you vote for a specific candidate within the list. There are lots of countries around the world (Open list - Wikipedia) that use open list PR rather than closed list which is where the party chooses the candidate ordering.

You allocate seats between parties based on the total share of the vote between the parties, but allocate seats within the parties based on which candidates got the most people voting for them.

So for example:

Party A gets 22, 8, 7 and 3 votes for its 4 candidates (40 total)
Party B gets 10, 9, 5 and 2 votes for its 4 candidates (26 total)

Party A gets allocated 3 seats, while party B gets allocated 1 seat. So the people from Party A who got 22, 8 and 7 votes get elected, as does the person from Party B who gets 10 votes - even if the person from B who got 9 votes was the party's preferred candidate.

 

[ayase]

The easiest way around that is to have what's called an open list, which is where you make it so that rather than just voting for a party list, you vote for a specific candidate within the list.

Ah yes, that’s the ones with all the different ballot papers, isn’t it (presumably so each ballot paper doesn’t look like a toilet roll)?

I have to admit I’ve never fully understood those. I feel like if UK voters had the choice between every single candidate standing in an election, the HoC would end up with maybe a dozen people in it, with Boris, Keir, Nigel, Nicola and Jeremy taking about five million votes a piece. Perhaps it works better for smaller parliaments.

 

[kuuderes_shadow]

Ah yes, that’s the ones with all the different ballot papers, isn’t it (presumably so each ballot paper doesn’t look like a toilet roll)?

I have to admit I’ve never fully understood those. I feel like if UK voters had the choice between every single candidate standing in an election, the HoC would end up with maybe a dozen people in it, with Boris, Keir, Nigel, Nicola and Jeremy taking about five million votes a piece. Perhaps it works better for smaller parliaments.

Well maybe, if it was a nationwide list. But the only country I know of that has a nationwide list with open PR is the Netherlands (they have no threshold either which makes it even more extreme).

More likely I'd expect most constituencies would have 6-10 members each, which would keep the number of contesting parties (and candidates within each party in a constituency) to a reasonably sane limit. Estonia would be a good example.

Also remember that each vote is a vote for the party first and a vote for the person within the party second. So everyone who votes for Jeremy Corbyn or the Corbynista party in a hypothetical North London constituency is first and foremost voting for the Corbynista party to get seats, and then voting for Jeremy Corbyn to get the first of the seats the Corbynista party picks up.

 

[GayAndProudJotaro]

My favourite politician is Michael gove dad says he makes us more money

 

[jake scully]

When the zinc alloy lady, Theresa "Hostile Environment" May, Theresa "Snooper's Charter" May, tells you that you might be going a bit too far with restricting people's freedom, you might just possibly be going a little bit too far with restricting people's freedom. Thanks for helping prepare the ground for this though, Theresa.

Don’t forget Theresa ‘I can’t dance to Dancing Queen’ May
She made a fool of herself again with that
Think it was at Tory party conference aka the ‘we are all super rich and you’re not’ party

hello? based department?

Based department ? What do you mean?

 

[ayase]

Benjamin Netanyahu: How many international laws are you breaking right now?

Alexander Lukashenko: Like, maybe 2 or 3 my dude

Benjamin Netanyahu: You are like a little baby. Watch THIS

 

[ayase]

So I’ve been a bit confused recently why the Democrats in the US even need to negotiate with the Republicans, given that they hold the Presidency and majorities in both houses, so I went down the rabbit hole of American political procedure.

What I found leaves me staggered that America has ever had a functioning federal government. So the filibuster, something which wasn’t even in the Constitution and used to require senators to constantly debate in order to block legislation (we have something similar, and similarly stupid called “talking out”) now doesn’t even require senators to do anything at all in order to block a vote, so while you can pass law with a majority, you need a majority of at least 10 to even HAVE the vote in the first place. So a majority of any less than 10 means nothing.

But THEN, executive orders exist, which basically allow Presidents to pass whatever crazy laws they like without even having a vote, and regardless of who has a majority in congress or the senate, completely eliminating the need for even the slightest compromise. Why on Earth do Presidents not just use these ALL THE TIME?

Well apparently, executive orders can be overturned in court, but since a President has the power to appoint judges via a simple majority of 51 after the filibuster requirement for this was REMOVED, they could just have the senate pack the courts with judges who would rule in their favour (which is what they already do with the supreme court) at which point there would no longer even be any need for congress or the senate, and a President could just rule as a dictator via executive orders upheld by his lackeys in the judiciary. In fact, if a President just declares a “national emergency”, something for which there are NO preconditions, they can pretty much do whatever they like. Given the array of options available to him that could have been used to seize absolute power, I’d say in hindsight Donald Trump was very restrained.

Well, there’s a couple of compelling paths to power for any Americans reading.

 

[ayase]

It speaks volumes, I think, about control and manipulation of media that the Covid “lab leak” theory was regarded as crazy, unfounded, borderline racist conspiracy theory which got people banned from social media for propagating it... right up until the point the UK and US political and intelligence establishments started to publicise the fact they were entertaining it as a possibility (the publicising in particular being something I wouldn’t have thought would have been necessary unless they had the specific intention of manipulating public perception).

Not that I’m suggesting people should in any way, shape or form trust either conspiracy theorists, the political establishment or the intelligence services (ymmv on which of those sources you believe to be more likely to lie to the public to further their own agenda than another, I’d have a hard time making that call myself) but it is interesting how the narrative can be flipped completely on its head when the exact same opinions are expressed by different sources and reported differently, isn’t it?

 

[jake scully]

So I’ve been a bit confused recently why the Democrats in the US even need to negotiate with the Republicans, given that they hold the Presidency and majorities in both houses, so I went down the rabbit hole of American political procedure.

What I found leaves me staggered that America has ever had a functioning federal government. So the filibuster, something which wasn’t even in the Constitution and used to require senators to constantly debate in order to block legislation (we have something similar, and similarly stupid called “talking out”) now doesn’t even require senators to do anything at all in order to block a vote, so while you can pass law with a majority, you need a majority of at least 10 to even HAVE the vote in the first place. So a majority of any less than 10 means nothing.

But THEN, executive orders exist, which basically allow Presidents to pass whatever crazy laws they like without even having a vote, and regardless of who has a majority in congress or the senate, completely eliminating the need for even the slightest compromise. Why on Earth do Presidents not just use these ALL THE TIME?

Well apparently, executive orders can be overturned in court, but since a President has the power to appoint judges via a simple majority of 51 after the filibuster requirement for this was REMOVED, they could just have the senate pack the courts with judges who would rule in their favour (which is what they already do with the supreme court) at which point there would no longer even be any need for congress or the senate, and a President could just rule as a dictator via executive orders upheld by his lackeys in the judiciary. In fact, if a President just declares a “national emergency”, something for which there are NO preconditions, they can pretty much do whatever they like. Given the array of options available to him that could have been used to seize absolute power, I’d say in hindsight Donald Trump was very restrained.

Well, there’s a couple of compelling paths to power for any Americans reading.

Compared to the UK system it’s very complicated and at times I give up reading stuff on internet- but Trump was always trying to undermine the US constitution and make new rules for himself as many journalists and politicians have said

 

[ayase]

Gosh, there are a few topics I feel like discussing today (well, writing about at least given this thread’s recent lack of discussion, what happened to all of AUKN’s politicos?) but the foremost burning question I have today is: When is discrimination acceptable? I wonder because of this furore around Maya Forstater and this court ruling on her comments on biological sex and gender, which, although I don’t agree with some of the things she has said (though I do agree with others) I still find rather disturbing that it was ever in question whether or not she should be allowed to express an opinion. So with that in mind, when is it okay to discriminate against anyone?

Bathrooms? The reason there is obviously modesty, and while I couldn’t care less about that, I can perhaps understand some people wouldn’t be comfortable taking their pants off and relieving themselves in the presence of people of different genders or biological sexes. Not everybody is ready for that yet, just as I imagine not everybody would be ready for them to remove the cubicles. Safe spaces? Not something I particularly care for, as I can see little difference between a group of black people or a group of women not letting white people or men in and a group of white people or a group of men not letting black people or women in, all of which feel racist and sexist to me. But then I also believe people should be allowed freedom of association and that nobody should be forced to tolerate the presence of people they don’t want to; if the price of that is allowing racists and sexists to have their own closed groups, so be it. These are things which are open to debate and while I have my own views, I can understand the opposing arguments even if I don’t agree with them.

But when it comes to transgender people and sports, this is clearly an emotive issue but I feel like it should not be a political one. It’s an issue of simple biology. Though there are exceptions, people who are biologically male are, in general, able to physically outperform people who are biologically female (the women who are able to compete with the men are awesome, but also very few). That’s the reason sport is segregated into men’s and women’s events. I don’t see anybody arguing for the complete elimination of any segregation in sport and making women compete against men, and the reason for that is obviously because most female athletes would be demolished by male athletes. That’s why this is an issue for women’s sport, it has nothing to do with cisgender women being “transphobic” and everything to do with the fact that an MtF transgender woman still has a biological advantage over a cis woman due to being born male. It baffles me that this is even up for debate.

If this is a barrier to transgender people competing in sporting events (which it is) why is no-one proposing the very sensible indeed option of having transgender men and transgender women compete in their own sporting events? That would surely be fair and allow transgender people to realise their athletic talents without ignoring the role biology plays in people’s physical abilities and unfairly disadvantaging cis women athletes in the name of political correctness.

But most of all, why can nobody seem to discuss any of these things rationally and work it out so that everybody can have what they want instead of one group of people having to “lose” and another group “win”? If there was a bathroom for men, a bathroom for women and a bathroom for anybody who doesn’t give a toss what sex or gender anyone using it is, wouldn’t everybody be happy? If there was a club for black people, a club for white people and a club for anyone who doesn’t give a toss what race you are, wouldn’t everyone be happy? I’ve tolerated and tried to understand, then tried to ignore identity politics, but I think it is genuinely destroying dialogue and pitting people against each other to the point its ONLY use is now as a tool of division by the elite. Who is it actually helping at this point?

 

[Vashdaman]

I haven't much knowledge on the subject, but my ignorant initial guess is that you could well be right about transgender female athletes having an unfair edge in sport against biologically female ones (I know some argue we're all born with different biology and hormonal levels anyway though even in our own sexes, which is true, but I feel it could still be unfair, I don't really know though), However, I sometimes feel the ones who often make this issue actually political and blow it up are the ones who feign genuine concern over sporting fairness and rather use this (legitimate but, in my opinion, pretty small) issue to delegitimate transgender rights and people in general. I find the tone of some of these pieces give away the intentions of the author pretty easily.

In like the way I saw a recent tweet that Dawkins (this brings back memories!) wrote recently mentioned somewhere, his tweet was something to the effect of "a few years ago a white man tried to self identify as black and was publicly lambasted for it, while anyone who now claims transgender women aren't women are publicly lambasted". Now I'm actually all for racial fluidity being seen as a legitimate thing and for race being opened up to personal questioning and self reidentification much in the way sex and gender is (an opinion I'm not sure the world is ready or willing to hear yet, I'll admit) but to me it seems likely Dawkins cares little about that and rather just wants to use it as a snidey sneaky way to have a pop at trans people.

Which leads me to agree with you that gender politics does get used as a tool of division by the elite, but I definitely disagree that that's all it does. I think things like fourth wave feminism and BLM and Trans rights movements ect have had tangible positive effects and these kinds of "identity politics" if that's what they are, are actually crucial in my opinion. What is also crucial, that is perhaps sometimes lacking, is the will and energy to find ways of bringing about unity and solidarity.

 

[RadFemHedonist]

Sorry @ayase I'm actually really interested in politics and passionate about it but also a rather sensitive soul so I dip in and out as my mental health requires.

 

[ayase]

I sometimes feel the ones who often make this issue actually political and blow it up are the ones who feign genuine concern over sporting fairness and rather use this (legitimate but, in my opinion, pretty small) issue to delegitimate transgender rights and people in general. I find the tone of some of these pieces give away the intentions of the author pretty easily.

I definitely agree with that, but at the same time I also think it’s possible to identify when people are NOT having a go at any particular group and are actually attempting to raise reasonable points and questions, only for their arguments to be shut down by people wrongly claiming that they are just being whatever-ist or whoever-phobic. This doesn’t foster any kind of solidarity or create any dialogue, at best it just makes people stay silent for fear of being labelled bigots (sometimes for fear of losing their jobs, or their friends) and at worst it actually pushes them further towards those kinds of extreme views by making them feel their valid opinions are being misinterpreted and ignored.

As for Dawkins, I’m not sure quite what he’s thinking there (and to be honest he has lost me more in recent years as he’s moved further away from the message of “people can be good without religion” towards “religion is always bad for people” even towards religious people who keep it to themselves and aren’t doing anyone any harm) and he could definitely have phrased that better, but I do think it’s really important that mental health and exploring WHY people feel the way they do are the first points of call for anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable in their own skin, for whatever reason. Is there, perhaps (I say, knowing full well this could be construed as a transphobic argument, but it absolutely is not intended as such) an argument for saying that it’s better to help people feel like they are okay being who they are, that it’s fine for someone to live their life as whatever gender they like, wear whatever they like, use whatever pronouns they like but at the same time accept that they can never biologically become the opposite sex, and that no amount of drugs or surgery will ever change that? I don’t intend that as a hateful or hurtful thing to say, I just look at it from my own point of view and think: I’m short and I’m losing my hair. Those things make me a bit insecure but I think the healthiest thing for me to do about that is accept those facts about myself and become comfortable with the reality of my biology rather than take drugs or get a hair transplant (I couldn’t afford one anyway) and wear platform shoes. Perhaps a lot of people would disagree and say I should do whatever I like to make myself more comfortable about my appearance, and if the NHS was to start offering free hair transplants who knows, perhaps I would. The influence of big pharma on how people are encouraged to believe drugs are the answer to all their problems should perhaps wait for another time, but I do think it has a massive impact on how people, including but not limited to transgender people, are treated, and therefore societal attitudes as well. People trust doctors and medical science. Perhaps they shouldn’t, necessarily.

I think things like fourth wave feminism and BLM and Trans rights movements ect have had tangible positive effects and these kinds of "identity politics" if that's what they are, are actually crucial in my opinion. What is also crucial, that is perhaps sometimes lacking, is the will and energy to find ways of bringing about unity and solidarity.

Once again Vash, I don’t really disagree. I think any movement to lift disadvantaged people UP is generally a positive thing, it’s the putting DOWN and silencing of other disadvantaged people and the splintering of those groups into ever smaller, pettier and more ineffectual ones that irks me so much. White people living in poverty or men who feel marginalised and ignored don’t like being told they have it good by non-white people or women, this creates division not solidarity and, as I mentioned above, I think works to drive a lot of those white people and men who SHOULD be the natural ally of the downtrodden into the arms of actual racists and misogynists. And that’s just horribly sad and negative for everyone. As is the destruction by the genuinely privileged (those with wealth and power) of the sort of people who DO try and bring people together in solidarity, like Jeremy Corbyn. That, I’m sure we can agree on.

 

[Rui]

My views.

Bathrooms? The policing of this is ridiculous. I have used unisex bathrooms and survived the experience. I can understand that some people might have very specific needs requiring absolute privacy (e.g. abuse victims) but making victims out of other people is not the solution; they should be allowed to access the private, lockable disabled toilets (which should be far more abundant). The complaints conflate sex, gender, orientation and danger in a very unpleasant way and hurt cis women who don't look classically feminine enough as much as they hurt trans women. I don't like the idea of people judging 'how female' or 'how male' a person has to be to gatekeep toilets from their less feminine/masculine friends, which ridiculously actually happens in the real world now, just because people are more scared of trans women with no interest in other women than they are of actual molesters who happen to share their gender. Why don't we have criminal record checks before we're allowed to use public toilets if it's purely a safety issue? It ticks me off.

(On a similar subject, passports? All of this debate over whether to allow exceptions to the male/female designation yet people don't just remove the sex field entirely? It seems utterly superfluous. They have access to my birth details, picture, name, retina data and fingerprints; what exactly does my physical sex add to anything? I can see an argument for it being unnecessary personal data which has to be expunged under GDPR...)

Safe spaces for groups who face discrimination only seem to be a problem now that minorities are seeking them, while male-only social/entertainment spaces have been championed for generations with very little time for people who point out how awful they are. I don't care for them personally but if someone wants to have a productive debate about a sensitive topic without the #NotAllMen or #AllLivesMatter brigades charging in on purpose to derail it, which seems to be how 99% of these conversations end up online, I can see why people would want some space to breathe. I also don't really see the value in allowing physically female people to attend a meeting about checking for a male-only health issue (for example) though if someone really wants to go it seems polite to discuss it in a civilised way with the organisers (civil discourse seems to be a dying tactic). At which point it really becomes about the right for individuals to decide who can or cannot attend their private functions, which seems reasonable since I don't really want random strangers dropping in to (say) my D&D sessions either even if I do post about them online. Maybe more people will be fine with opening up once we stop drawing divisive lines between the sexes for no reason in other respects, and the need for safe spaces will vanish.

Sports: I cannot fathom why sports are divided by sex and not by measurable physical characteristics (i.e. testosterone levels/muscle mass/whatever is relevant in any given sport). Again, this is a situation where I feel that sticking to a traditional model for separating the two sides by sex alone makes no sense to me. There will always be women who have 'unfair' natural talents and men who have a similar natural advantage, so let the big folks (of any gender) compete together and the slower/weaker/smaller ones compete in a separate league. I'm sure that fair boundaries must be possible to figure out. Even setting trans people aside, we have the problem of intersex people and those who are cis women gifted with unusually high levels of performance-enhancing biology. Caster Semenya had her integrity and achievements called into question through no fault of her own simply because she was naturally blessed with 'unfeminine' levels of testosterone, forcing her to come close to losing her career and having tens of thousands of strangers questioning her credentials as a cis woman. If the rules mean that cis women are persecuted for being women too under rules specifically designed to protect women then they clearly make no sense, and dropping the sex requirement allows trans men/women to compete at the level that matches their actual physical limitations rather than humiliating them with constant questions about their transition status. They already have something similar with the paralympics, I believe, and it seems sensible to grade people based on their prowess rather than what they've got in their pants?

Ultimately, I agree that in an ideal world, trans folks wouldn't feel dysphoria in the first place because they could self-identify without question and present whichever characteristics they want. Like how coming out shouldn't matter in a world where everyone sensibly respects people's sexual preferences, except it does because so many people still don't. A person's birth sex really shouldn't matter to anyone but the person themselves unless they have a sex-specific medical problem and choose to seek help, but it does and our society (even down to our language) loves to divide people into little pigeon holes and force people to share these personal things. Until society changes in a major way, I don't think gender politics can go away. I've experienced so much gender-related ridiculousness in my life that I think the status quo is irredeemably broken in every way, and the ones who can fix it aren't the people who are directly suffering from its flaws.

R

 

[Vashdaman]

As for Dawkins, I’m not sure quite what he’s thinking there (and to be honest he has lost me more in recent years as he’s moved further away from the message of “people can be good without religion” towards “religion is always bad for people” even towards religious people who keep it to themselves and aren’t doing anyone any harm) and he could definitely have phrased that better, but I do think it’s really important that mental health and exploring WHY people feel the way they do are the first points of call for anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable in their own skin, for whatever reason. Is there, perhaps (I say, knowing full well this could be construed as a transphobic argument, but it absolutely is not intended as such) an argument for saying that it’s better to help people feel like they are okay being who they are, that it’s fine for someone to live their life as whatever gender they like, wear whatever they like, use whatever pronouns they like but at the same time accept that they can never biologically become the opposite sex, and that no amount of drugs or surgery will ever change that? I don’t intend that as a hateful or hurtful thing to say, I just look at it from my own point of view and think: I’m short and I’m losing my hair. Those things make me a bit insecure but I think the healthiest thing for me to do about that is accept those facts about myself and become comfortable with the reality of my biology rather than take drugs or get a hair transplant (I couldn’t afford one anyway) and wear platform shoes. Perhaps a lot of people would disagree and say I should do whatever I like to make myself more comfortable about my appearance, and if the NHS was to start offering free hair transplants who knows, perhaps I would. The influence of big pharma on how people are encouraged to believe drugs are the answer to all their problems should perhaps wait for another time, but I do think it has a massive impact on how people, including but not limited to transgender people, are treated, and therefore societal attitudes as well. People trust doctors and medical science. Perhaps they shouldn’t, necessarily.

I find this a hard thing to answer really, especially as I'm not really knowledgeable about the science/psychology and trans issues beyond the relatively light reading here and there I've done and people I've spoken to. The other day this actually somehow came up in conversation with my close friend and he basically argued something similar to what you wrote, only he was more completely convinced of it perhaps, that any kind of surgery related to sex change is mistaken and acceptance of our natural bodies is what we should be encouraging. I mean I think all I can say to that is if possible being able to reconcile ones inner landscape with ones outer is good, and I would say people placing less value on the outer form in general is good (basically the argument my friend was making, and I understand where he's coming from. I've experienced body dysmorphia in my past and learned to deal with it by believing in the comparative unimportance of the outer versus the inner). But for many people with gender dysphoria that doesn't seem to always be possible, it's such a deep feeling, and of course even if I believe our bodies and sex shouldn't matter, as Rui said, we live in societies where sex and the appearance of it is such a major part of life. So I think the problem is less people needing to accept their bodies, and rather society needing to change majorly first so that it's more possible. Until then I would support anything that helps people find some peace and happiness in life.

Once again Vash, I don’t really disagree. I think any movement to lift disadvantaged people UP is generally a positive thing, it’s the putting DOWN and silencing of other disadvantaged people and the splintering of those groups into ever smaller, pettier and more ineffectual ones that irks me so much. White people living in poverty or men who feel marginalised and ignored don’t like being told they have it good by non-white people or women, this creates division not solidarity and, as I mentioned above, I think works to drive a lot of those white people and men who SHOULD be the natural ally of the downtrodden into the arms of actual racists and misogynists. And that’s just horribly sad and negative for everyone. As is the destruction by the genuinely privileged (those with wealth and power) of the sort of people who DO try and bring people together in solidarity, like Jeremy Corbyn. That, I’m sure we can agree on.

I agree that more work does need to be done to unite all the currently divided groups of downtrodden people, but the problem in my opinion isn't movements of people who do want to have specific issues of gender and race or whatever addressed and fixed. I imagine I would agree with you in that I think wealth is often the biggest factor when it comes to discrimination and quality of life, but those other issues of race and gender are very real and they all intersect. It all needs to be discussed and dealt with, and absolutely it should be done with the aim to unite people and bring working class white men onboard rather than push them away, but identity politics can not be ignored or side lined and people should not fear discussing these things and fighting for them. That's exactly what Corbyn tried to do. And even though he failed, I think there has to be a way for solidarity to be found. But we can't give up speaking up on these issues, surely.