The government are robbing us blind, and you know it. While every single one of us watches our climate slipping to the no-return stage of climate crisis, we are each of us spending a large proportion of our energy fighting against the slipping away of our personal income and opportunities as bills go up. the ways organisations have of giving us the tasks and someone else the money proliferate, and forever overtake our attempts to hang onto a livable income. We can’t win without drastic change, you know this – however near or far from the edge you personally are. You also know that many people fall over that edge into destitution every day.

Hundreds of thousands of us tried to fight back by joining the Labour Party a few years back. Before that, people joined the Green Party, or trade unions or whatever, looking for a way to solve these attacks on everyone and everything.

The Labour Party betrayed us – most people realise that now. Many joined other organisations, looking for an alternative solidarity group to fight back with. I was one of hundreds of thousands who saw the push-back from the my-money-my-power element in the Labour Party establishment, and understood the nature of the beast. I’ve personally seen dozens of my comrades who are socialist Jews and/or working-class black activists kicked out of the party, or leave in disgust over the treatment of their friends. I saw the party’s energy and resources draining as they left. At least most lefties understood that, and helped with the fightback, but their attack had another weapon that many didn’t understand, that many were complicit with.

I saw thousands – no, I’m not exaggerating, I’m a member of several numerous groups – I saw THOUSANDS of women bullied, frustrated and hounded out of the party, its energy and resources draining as they left, because women have an issue with the government over the way it is seeking to CHANGE THE LEGAL STATUS OF WOMEN by legalising ‘self-ID’ or ‘gender identity’ and prioritising those over laws about sex.

I have been doubly, triply frustrated by so many apparently intelligent people responding to the women’s campaign to protect our sex-based rights by saying ‘why are you obsessed with the trans issue’? For us, it is not a ‘trans issue’. It’s been a huge campaign to get the government to acknowledge that messing with the sex exemption in the Equalities Act, or making new laws that trump the sex exemption, matters to women.

Many politicians do see that now, but it’s taken vast amounts of energy by vast numbers of women to break through the smoke and mirrors of ‘stop going on about the trans issue’. That’s vast numbers of women slogging away on a campaign that makes them tired, anxious, and depletes their earning opportunities. In many sectors, it makes them ‘unemployable’, because they have been branded ‘transphobes’, and their organisations branded ‘anti-trans hate groups’ – but they did it, those brave, activist women, because you CANNOT run a political campaign in polite silence, and no politically literate women, once she’s seen the seriousness of the legal issue, is going to politely ignore it. It is, finally, in the news as a legal issue. Those women who spoke out have succeeded but in many cases at much cost to themselves (NOT just Kathleen Stock – that’s NOT a one-off story, it just happens to be the one that broke through).

All this while we watch our planet reel into irreversible change, and our incomes and our resources stolen away by bad government.

If you haven’t helped the women, if you haven’t stood up for them, take your share of the blame. If you are still asking women to please pipe down about ‘the trans issue’, take your share of the blame.

We need – all of us – the 99% – we need to be working together against the forces that are progressively impoverishing every single one of us. Think about this every day, as you watch YOUR income and opportunities go down, your bills go up, the climate clock ticking to zero, and the number of women who can no longer find the patience to work with you increasing.

Speak up for gender-critical women, as you should for all the groups bad government demonises, and then maybe you can start talking about ‘solidarity’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism’ and ‘community’, and all the rest of those things we are going to need, if we are to save a world worth living in for our grandchildren.