Oh, and one more thing, though not putting it in this thread because it's a somewhat different issue. But it honestly seems transphobia just doesn't really work as an electoral mobilising or demobilising "culture war" the way Brexit and immigration somewhat do. People just don't seem to care.
OK here goes.
Obviously, the big story is the Labour landslide, but a win of that size was only really possible due to the fragmentation of the right. At the same time, while on these results they're unlikely to care much, Labour underestimated the susceptibility of the left to fragment too. 1/
Now, indifference to trans people is of course not at all the same as support, and I suspect there's a decent chance media pressure will cause Labour and the Tories to continue to have a disproportionate obsession with it anyway. But there's little sign here that it's a vote-winner.
Some of this may well be due to the continued media/political pretence that the popular base of anti-trans attitudes are a niche of jilty lefty feminist women, rather than older mostly male social reactionaries, so the latter, not being directly spoken to when the issue was invoked, ignored it.
KJK stood in bristol and received 195 votes.
Count Binface received 308 votes.
Thats right - A man with a Bin on his head stood with his primary policy idea being demolishing Birmingham to build an intergalactic spaceport - polled over 50% more votes than KJK.
Transphobia is not a vote winner
KJK's party which stood on a platform of transphobia , stood in 16 constituencies.
Polled 5,077 votes in total, under 318 votes per seat,gained less than 0.015% of the total vote & lost their deposit in all 16 seats.
Their anti-trans views have been overwhelmingly rejected by the electorate.
The anti trans movement can do a lot with institutional capture. The Cass report has utterly normalised anti gender affirming care for youth talking points. Challenging that requires pushing back against some loud interests. Doubt there’s any appetite for that
No doubt, a lot of damage has already been done, and there's unlikely to be any Labour desire to reverse it on their own initiative any time soon. Improvement will unfortunately likely take years of lower level activism.
I'm not as ... optimistic seems the wrong word... as Mumsnet on Harman as Chair of the EHRC but if that is who it ends up being I think that would at least stop things continuing to get worse in the same way going forward and help /enable/ improvement
She's said some pro trans rights things, but AFAIK all of that was back when the factional lines were very different and I've been burned on people shifting since then before (see: R. Duffield).
But doesn't seem at all brainwormed on it and does seem focused on actual women's rights issues, so....
