Melissa Martin

I want you all to know this. There are 650 MPs in Parliament. Yet the one MP chosen by @UKLabour to Chair the Bill Committee for the controversial, dangerous and dismally bad draft legislation, the Conversion Practices Bill, is Alex Barros-Curtis. Until July 2024, when Alex was given a very safe Labour seat in Cardiff, he was the Head of the Labour Party's Governance and Legal Unit in London. This was a department set up to investigate complaints against members of the Labour Party. Complaints of antisemitism, Islamophobia, abuse, and of course latterly, mostly women holding legally-protected 'Gender Critical' (sex realist) beliefs. Alex oversaw the investigation of hundreds of members who liked or tweeted gender critical or feminist views. I was one of them. He investigated me, as a sitting Labour MP, for 13 months. 13 months to 'investigate' one like of one tweet. I had a great lawyer, one of the names we're all now familiar with, and I had to crowdfund to pay for his (excellent) work. They first tried in 2020. But the screenshots crudely attached to that passive aggressive, threatening-sounding email from LP admin staff were so risible that I replied that it was too ridiculous for me to waste my precious time on. They left it. Years of Starmer bumbling and stuttering through interviews about whether he had spoken to me, whether he supported me, etc followed. My feminist sins continued apace. And then I 'liked' a tweet by my GC comedian friend @Glinner. He had mocked Eddie'Suzy' for comparing his choice to wear traditional women's clothing, fake plastic breasts and nails, to those being persecuted by the Nazis during WWII. I found his sarcasm, as a award-winning comedy writer in the face of such offensive narcissism amusing and so 'liked' it. I found it absurd and obscene that Izzard, an extremely privileged and wealthy man, who openly changed his 'gender' at will, should write himself into history falseley as someone who would have been oppressed due to a circumstance beyond his control. We all know the groups who were tortured, starved and killed... There is obviously more to my story, I will tell it all, it's just one chapter of the years of spiteful abusive and bullying practices meted out to me by the Labour Party managers. Not those who'd achieved office on merit, or even unexpectedly, but those in the club, often having failed to be elected themselves. So Barros-Curtis who we were repeatedly told led 'the many *independent* inquiries into women members and MPs like me, now often stands as a trans-rights activist on the Labour backbenches. He has also been gifted the role of Chair of this Committee and is a huge supporter of this Bill. And I am not a part of the Bill Committee, although plenty of TRA MPs are. Does that sound like the democratic scrutiny of legislation to you?