Month: September 2021

Categories
Labour Politics women

The Cervix Question – how difficult can it be?

Dinosaur carrying 'bagfuls' of women's rights

David Lammy has just demonstrated as clearly as anyone ever did why we say ‘men don’t listen to women’.

Are women ‘dinosaurs’ who are ‘hoarding their rights’? This notion of Lammy’s was beautifully illustrated by Alex Kenny on t’internet…

… but oh my goodness, Lammy really was the star of men making idiots of themselves over The Question.

Star drivel: “It’s probably the case that trans women don’t have ovaries but it’s probably the case that a cervix is something you can have following various procedures and you know treatment and all the rest of it.”

David, the vast majority of trans women do not have surgery at all, and most of those that do go for boob enhancement. There is not a doctor alive who can ‘make’ a cervix. If a certain person who appears on telly a lot really does have one, and carries out their threat to show it on the telly, it will be in a jar. We can only ask anxiously after the welfare of the woman they got it from.

“1 in 4 trans people commit suicide” David, no they don’t. These mythical suicide and murder stats get worse every time they’re gossiped onward. PLEASE read the Samaritans guidelines on chattering about suicide.

For those who have become confused

Thanks to Dr Emma Hilton for this really useful diagram…

The cervix is the portal of the womb. That incredibly tough organ that holds your baby in place for nine-and-a-half months and then manages to be supple enough to let the baby through into the world when it’s time. There is no ‘treatment’ – other than swiping some other woman’s innards and doing all that immune-suppressant stuff – that can make a cervix happen in a male. That is NOT the sort of thing the NHS gets up to. When people say they have ‘transitioned’, it *might* involve taking hormones or having surgery to make them look like the opposite sex. It is not magic. People are not clown fish. People do not change sex.

MPs don’t think about women

I did find a *few* people online who have offered sensible responses to The Question which, of course, is really about female people who don’t want to be called ‘women’ – trans men, non-binary people and possibly others – you see, the reason those MPs got in such a mess trying to answer The Question is because it didn’t occur to them that it might be about the OTHER HALF of the human race…

Good answers to The Question:

Dani Ahrens on Twitter

Lesbian Labour on Facebook

and Alex via a Google doc

Men don’t listen to women

Such a cliche, isn’t it. and to be fair, Lammy was far from being the only Labour MP talking twaddle about female body parts during conference. I suppose, if the subject had just hit him out of nowhere and he’d never thought about it, one could forgive him but I know that women from his constituency have been to talk to him about this, and got all the ‘tea-on-the-terrace’ treatment, so the only explanation for his nonsense is that he simply did not listen to a single word they said.

As MP after MP opened their mouths and proved they knew nothing on this topic that’s been worrying women for years, we can at least see why Keir Starmer’s comment of choice was ‘it should not be said’. Trouble is, this very, very worrying issue, that tens of thousands of women have been talking about, writing about, campaigning about and being told to shut up about is, according to Lammy, a marginal issue of interest to no-one (except women, of course).

That’ll be why they forgot to consider women as stakeholders when they first started considering changing the rules about single sex services and exceptions.

Thank you, @terfasaurus @Astrid_Arroway for the dinosaur

Thank you, Dr Emma Hilton for the useful diagram and the following advice. @FondOFBeetles

Categories
activism Corbyn Election Labour Politics

I have invented retrospective resignation

I believe people are allowed to join in politics. I joined the Green Party when the BBC said Nigel Farage could be all over the telly all the time because his then party had more members than the Greens. So did around 60 000 other people – people want to have an effect in politics.

I joined the Labour Party along with hundreds of thousands of others because Ed Miliband let people join in, and then Jeremy Corbyn gave them hope of honest, humane government. The establishment responded by pulling every trick in the book to make sure nothing like the Corbyn years ever happens again.

Dear Labour Party,

The Labour Party is the most toxic, abusive, dishonest and disabling organisation I have ever had the misfortune of being a part of. You – and when I say ‘you’, I mean your administration and most of your MPs have lied, cheated and bullied your way through every situation I have experienced as a member. You fluffed the EU referendum debate by failing to believe people were capable of being given information and making a decision for themselves. Jeremy Corbyn tried to give us a proper debate. You called that ‘indecisive’. You made the ‘left, right or broad church’ debate about the party itself impossible to resolve. You made it impossible for socialist Jews to do their politics at all, and you have bluffed and blustered on the undeniable conflict between women’s rights and Stonewall’s demands for trans people, gaslighting and frustrating members, whatever their views, so utterly and for so long that many can no longer get along with each other at all. You have done serious harm to a large swathe of the population – and that’s without even getting into government.

This week, you expelled one of my constituency’s delegates, a politically experienced, honest, honourable socialist Jewish woman, slap in the middle of conference. Here she is at the 2017 conference, reacting to the scheming and manipulation our CLP faced that year…

…and here she is at this year’s conference.

Leah’s expulsion is just one injustice. Pretty much every lefty CLP in the country can tell a similar story of their efforts being frustrated.

Retrospective resignation

Apparently, you have expelled Leah retrospectively, for having dealings in the past with an organisation you have just proscribed. Well, let’s see if *that* works both ways. I am resigning retrospectively. Please return all the subs I have paid since Kier Starmer and his team screwed the General Election with their Brexit means Remain manoeuvers, instead of allowing the people a clear choice.

Here is the General Secretary Starmer imposed on us, explaining why he abandoned the principles he claims he has to get rid of socialists, especially Jewish socialists ( Recording via Vox Political ).

And here is what he was pulling out all the stops to destroy ( Video via Jeremy Corbyn )

Now, I know you think it doesn’t matter, you think we’ll all have to campaign and vote for you because we want to get rid of this lousy government. Well, you are wrong. Many of us have noted that, in effect, you are a part of this lousy government. There are other ways a population can express itself and get its way, and we will find them. You can’t break the hearts of millions of people and expect to get away with it. For a start, if you continue to be anything but a force for good in this country, there will be hundreds of thousands of members, ex-members and ex-supporters seeking to provoke by-elections against you at every opportunity.

Please examine your conscience – yes, even if you’re only a casual worker disinterestedly doing a stint in the Labour Party office, skim-reading this letter. Examine your conscience, ask yourself if your kids have any hope of a future. You could give things a good hard shake and give the Labour Party the dose of honesty it needs, and we could be comrades once more.

I have cancelled my direct debit and await the return of the subs you took whilst pretending to be our Labour Party.

Yours Sincerely,

A Red Green Non-Party-Political Person

A reminder to my friends, comrades and sisters everywhere: keep doing politics, keep networking. We are many – they are few.

How to do politics…

Categories
activism economics Housing media Politics Privatisation women

CRISIS!

From “argh, toilet roll!” to “argh, petrol!”

A mild disturbance in the supply of absolutely anything we’re used to buying every day has more political impact than, say, people losing their homes, children going hungry, abused women being locked up with male sex-offenders, asylum seekers drowning in the channel, the govt selling our services and infrastructure to foreign businesses, climate change wrecking our world before our grandchildren can live out their lives – any of the things I’ve ever tried campaigning about, really.

Attention seeking

I don’t think answers like ‘people are stupid’ or ‘people are greedy’ help much. It’s about where most people’s attention is, most of the time. Most of us usually have our heads down, ploughing through ‘what needs doing’ in the face of a huge range of obstacles from lack of funds to people not answering phones to illness and disability. Everything that disrupts the battle is a ****ing nuisance to throw ourselves at in determined fury.

Do you remember all those extraordinary ideas, songs, lectures, meetings and above all community support projects people thought up in response to lockdown?

Time to think

The time people need in order to think reappears when everyday buzz, pressures and demands stop. Those people we briefly learned to call ‘essential workers’ just had to go on working ( some called lockdown ‘where the middle class stay home and the working classes bring them things’ ). Those whose lives were already in extreme difficulty – for example in insecure housing, in prisons and refugee hostels ( not the homeless though – the government briefly made the effort to ‘get people off the streets’ ) – all those people really had their noses rubbed in how bad things are…

… but the salaried classes, the service, financial and what have you workers – all got used to not being able to go where we want or buy anything we want at a moment’s notice, and started THINKING.

So I’ll be getting on with the community organising, the networking and the educating and the production of books, more aware than ever that these are the vital political acts. How about you? Have you thought of any other things we can do….? (comments section below)

Just keep thinking about how this government, the government that does not care one jot about destroying businesses and jobs, or creating poverty, or stranding the old and the sick, was so desperately, desperately keen to avoid another lockdown. What is it they’re scared of?

THINKING.

PS This blog started life as an FB status post, and got the following comment, which struck me as absolutely on the button…

Aaron McConnell wrote:

In an individualistic society, most of the time we’re encouraged to live in our own heads. And on those occasions where the problems of others manage to permeate our thoughts, we’re also encouraged to think “oh well, they must have done something wrong”, and at that point the concerns and suffering of others can be dismissed as fair because they’ve brought it upon themselves. Taken to an extreme, that logic starts to sound like: “everyone on benefits is an undeserving scrounger… except me, when I was made redundant through no fault of my own.” We’ve all heard that kind of thing.

The anger and panic you allude to in this article I think springs from that mindset. When people who think like that find themselves swept up into a crisis that wasn’t of their making – and they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong – the first explanation they reach for is that someone else must have messed up; and the consequences of that mistake are falling unjustly on the people who had no part in making it. That prompts anger, and creates a strong incentive to blame others.

It’s very easy to ignore something when it’s not affecting you directly.

Categories
activism Hastings Labour Politics Uncategorized women

Another community activist says farewell to Labour

Julia on St Leonard’s seafront on the local elections polling day, 3rd May 2018.
Polling day 2018

Guest blog: Julia Price

Julia Price joined the Labour Party in 2015, in south London. She canvassed for Labour in local elections and for the Mayor of London election in May 2016 when the Labour candidate, Tooting MP, Sadiq Khan won.            

After moving to St Leonards in 2016, she helped with canvassing in 2017. That same summer, she became closely involved in the local campaign to save St Leonards Crown Post Office. She canvassed and campaigned for Labour’s Parliamentary candidate, Peter Chowney in June 2017, when Peter came within 346 votes of Amber Rudd, the sitting Tory MP, massively reducing her majority. 

In early 2018 she was a council candidate for Labour in West St Leonards. She campaigned and canvassed in this ward and across the borough. She came within 56 votes of winning the West St Leonards ward for Labour.

She canvassed and campaigned almost daily in the December 2019 general election.

Julia delivers a LARGE letter at the demonstration after the public meeting to save the post office.
Public meeting at the Isabel Blackman Centre in St Leonards in October 2017, attended by Peter Chowney, then HBC Leader, also Laura Tarling, Post Office Ltd. spokesperson and Amber Rudd, then MP.
Julia addresses the public meeting at the Isabel Blackman Centre in St Leonards in October 2017, attended by Peter Chowney, then HBC Leader, also Laura Tarling, Post Office Ltd. spokesperson and Amber Rudd, then MP.
Julia wearing one of a set of crowns made by one of the campaigners - to emphasise the community’s campaign to save the integrity of St Leonards Crown Post Office. Her placard: This PO is the beating heart of our community

In March 2021, Julia sent Labour the following message:

Julia’s Farewell to the Labour Party

I have cancelled my monthly Direct Debit to the Labour Party. It is with sadness and regret that I would like to ask you to cancel my membership. There is no longer enough to keep my allegiance, my respect and my belief in the Labour Party. Too many betrayals of too many good, loyal, hard-working Party members, and especially of Jeremy Corbyn. Too many witch hunts. Too much betrayal of women. Of women MPs in the House and of women’s rights. The signing of the so-called Trans Pledge. The Party’s acceptance of the gender ideology mantra: trans women are women. They are not. They are trans women. Trans men are trans men. All respect to trans people and may they live their lives safely and well. But biology is real and women as a sex class have protection under the Equality Act 2010. The Labour Party offers no support or protection to women who are aggressively silenced and vilified by trans rights activists who operate throughout social media and on university campuses, in CLPs and in workplaces.

Silence on the risk to children

No attempt to protect children from the capture of trans ideology; it has taken this Tory government to do that: to ban puberty blockers to under 16s without a court order. It took a detransitioning young woman, Keira Bell, to take the Tavistock Clinic to court and win a High Court judgement against them in December 2020. Then there was the subsequent CQC-judgement of the Tavistock Clinic as Inadequate in January this year. A 4000% plus increase in the decade to 2018 of young teenage girls seeking to transition. Being referred to start medical pathways after only one or two gender identity clinic consultations. No time spent considering their sociological and / or psychological backgrounds. A concern expressed in a report by Dr David Bell, ex staff governor and psychologist at the Tavistock.

Shocking dishonesty

The shocking news in the leaked report last year that the executive and others in the Labour Party were so anti Corbyn that they actively worked to snag and disrupt the GE campaigns of 2017 & 2019. Working against hundreds and thousands of Party members like me who were out practically every day, knocking on doors, canvassing and campaigning hard for a Labour victory.


This is dishonourable, uncomradely conduct. It is not what I thought the Labour Party was about. I no longer wish to be a member.


I have met many wonderful people during my five and a half years of membership. I am grateful for their comradeship and friendship. I wish them well.

Polling Day in West St Leonards: the results: Julia comes 56 votes short of winning a council seat for Labour, May 2018
Campaign leaflets: Julia Price, Anne Rouse, Your Labour Candidates for West St Lenoards, Hastings Borough Council Elections Thursday 3rd May

Editor’s note: Julia is one of the many Labour Party women who worked so enthusiastically for socialism in that hope-filled time between 2016 and 2019, but are now leaving the party. She received no reply to her farewell statement.

Categories
activism Book reviews book shops Politics Uncategorized women

Really useful feminism

Feminism for Women - book cover

Why we should all read Julie Bindel’s new book

I’ve been wondering why feminism grabbed me so much the second time I looked, but not the first.

I remember feminism going on around me when I was a teenager. I had a vague idea it involved a lot of arguments about whether you should shave your legs or not. A couple of decades later, my daughter told me she’d had the impression for years that she couldn’t be a feminist because she likes dressing up, cooking and being a mum.

In the 70s, I couldn’t do feminism because I didn’t like dungarees. In the 80s, I couldn’t afford the ‘power dressing’ and then in latter years, I thought I couldn’t be a feminist because my partner was a bloke, and because the ‘feminists’ I saw on telly all seemed to spend their time making pointlessly rude and embarrassingly flirtatious swipes at men. And anyway, those somewhat boring organisations like the Fawcett Society and Labour Women’s Network were constantly bashing on about whether female execs in London were earning enough tens of thousands more than me, yet.

And then Stonewall tried to get women’s legal rights repealed. A new kind of women’s campaign (new to me) came along. I was so angry, so involved, and so excited, talking to so many great women, helping to put together ideas for the Women’s Place UK manifesto, getting involved with the Women’s Liberation Conference, and to top it all, I’d discovered FiLiA, with its glorious weekend every year of women singing, women cooking, women dancing, running businesses, making friends, building communities and doing politics, women escaping and traveling the world as fugitives, then coming together at last, singing, cooking, dancing, making friends, running businesses, building communities and doing politics.

People ask why women get so ‘obsessed’ with the sex based rights campaign, why we never ‘come down off it’. Well you know, there’s more to it than that. For those of us who were relatively new to feminism, the women we met on the way told us about real feminism, and Woman’s Place, and all the other organisations the benighted like to call ‘anti-trans hate groups’ set women’s worlds on fire. It’s VERY exciting. (Apparently, last time around they called the women’s groups ‘anti-men hate groups’.)

Read Julie Bindel’s REALLY exciting new book, and discover proper feminism. As she explains, the stuff that went mainstream – liberal feminism, they call it, IS boring. Radical feminism isn’t feminism only more so, it’s the growing, sustaining root of feminism. In manifestation, it’s any aspect of feminism that’s not acceptable to the establishment.

‘We don’t want half the seats at the table,’ says Bindel, ‘we want to break the table.’

Feminism is about rescuing and standing with fugitives, it’s about learning and teaching, about fighting back, about community politics and addressing the problems that are so big mainstream politicians barely dare touch them.

Buy the book, go to FiLiA. Get angry, get serious, get excited. You can sing, dance, make friends, dress up and cook as you go if you want to. You can also make up your own mind as to whether you shave your legs or not. You decide, it doesn’t matter – but you might have some interesting conversations over coffee about why mainstream society thinks such things matter so much.

Just read the book, in fact read all her books, and her journalism. I am!

What happened in Cyprus
The Forgotten Victims
Straight Expectations book cover
The Pimping of Prostitution

Video: Julie Bindel in conversation with Claire Horchan

The book…