My town has just experienced a stinking rotten council campaign in which the combined forces of the Labour and Green and Tory campaigns seemed to focus on a visceral desire to discredit a sitting candidate, a woman rejected by Labour, who went on to do a couple of useful years as a member of an independent group looking to become their own, locally focused party. I defended them a fair bit around social media, but found myself reflecting on how that can all get a bit one-way. Once people become councillors, they tend to defend others only when it is expedient to do so, and they gradually run out of people to defend them.
And then someone says to me, “when did [JK Rowling] become so bitchy?”
Gosh.
There’s a reason why so many women are currently twitting and blogging away about just how much they’ve been hurt, insulted, frightened, kicked back and pushed out during the years of the self-ID v women’s rights goings on. Firstly, they can finally do so with relatively little risk of losing their jobs and secondly, they need to. It does feel odd though, at a time when those who are politically engaged are taken up with trying to fight back an actual genocide with hundreds of horrible deaths occurring daily.
But it really does need to go on record, because these things are all linked. Here’s my ‘hurty feelz’ blog, and some thoughts about how it all stacks up…
In the last few years, I’ve been asked to shut up about an anti-austerity, pro-NHS movement in Labour, shut up about Labour HQ sabotaging our phonelines the night before the 2017 elections, shut up about the extreme danger of allowing male sex offenders into female prisons and the extreme danger to children of the breakdown in safeguarding rules in schools, to shut up about a local councillor, a woman who was living alone, being publicly trashed from the stage at Pride, about the perpetrator of that being sanctioned by the council standards committee, and most recently, to shut up about mass murder in Gaza, all for the sake of others’ tender feelings.
Being a Labour Party officer in a marginal, lefty CLP during the Corbyn years, I spent a lot of energy on putting my own feelings aside in order to deal with things. It’s a familiar experience to anyone who’s been a parent or a teacher but there are those in our society who truly believe they have the right to go through life screaming and breaking crockery on seeing or hearing anything that causes them hurty feelz. All the time I was a Labour Party officer, I knew terrible things would happen if I said “Blairite” or “Zionist” and later, “female”. When I recount that odd fact now, people look really surprised. I’m not sure if they believe me. That’s how easily the “cry bully” technique can bury a truth.
It works like this – someone who’s in a position that enables them to give you considerable trouble says “if you speak your truth I will be LOUDLY and DESTRUCTIVELY upset.” You are probably aware of the current one – it’s why many politicians and journalists have been instructed not to say “genocide”.
My life with hurty feelz
It may come as a surprise to many who know me that I get offended/upset/frightened/embarrassed ridiculously easily – well so it seems to me, but it’s phenomenally difficult to compare subjective experiences with others to get a genuine perspective. One of the extreme difficulties of doing feminism is that making a case for women’s rights and women’s needs necessitates both explaining female concerns to males and encouraging confrontation-averse humans (that’s most women and more than a few men) to state some ‘controversial’ truths but, I think it might be useful just now to be a bit indulgent, and write about my own experience of those things. I don’t know – up to you, poor, long-suffering reader…
Angry men
As a woman, I’ve always considered angry men to be creatures one should, without exception, get away from as quickly and quietly as possible but, at the first Labour Party meeting I ever attended, a local borough councillor, appalled by the huge influx of socialists wanting to support Corbyn’s bid for leadership, had a major rant about how we’d all mess up the party then leave. It didn’t seem sensible for us all to give up and go home at that point, so we had to stay put and listen until he ranted himself dry and walked out. That, for me, was the first example of how doing politics makes your heart race, messes up your digestion and makes you wake up in the night twitching with anxiety and doubt.
We soon discovered that long standing councillors and MPs across the country were a mass of anger and hurt feelings. Many were, they said, terrified. The only way to build and maintain the movement in the Party was to let them get on with it and carry on anyway.
A few examples:
Angela Eagle MP was terrified when a brick was flung through her office window – oh actually, it turned out, a window in the hallway of the large building in which she had an office had been cracked, possibly by the application of a brick-like object – but anyway, she was terrified and it was our fault.
Stella Creasy was terrified by a pro-Corbyn demo in her constituency that gathered outside her home – oh actually, it was her constituency office, and not while she was in it but anyway, she was terrified.
Jess Phillips, on hearing John McDonnell was in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, announced that she’d have a panic room installed in her office.
Well that councillor at my local CLP meeting was right – after putting up with a barrage of slanders, smears and sabotage attempts from ‘terrified’ MPs and their staffers, after having all meetings nationwide cancelled for months because some MP in Brighton claimed someone had spat at someone on the stairs and terrified everyone, after seeing our rule-change attempts composited at conference with motions that said the opposite (so the result came out as ‘do nothing’), after we’d all been called thugs, trots and antisemites on a weekly basis for several years, after all our best activists had been expelled for hurting the feelings of MPs and their paid staffers, whilst Corbyn and McDonnell continually apologized for the bad behaviour centrist MPs said we were guilty of, we gave up, and most of us left the party.
The GC meeting from hell
However, the bit that still sings out like a banshee on acid in the corridors of my memory of those years wasn’t any of the (many) examples of being abused, slandered and vexatiously misunderstood by ‘centrists’. It’s actually not so terribly hurty feely (in my view) when the people being rude to you are those you don’t support or trust anyway.
Nor was it the bit at conference in Brighton where a super-wokey Corbyny lefty cried ‘shame on you’ from the platform, unchallenged by the Chair, because we’d had a WPUK meeting in the conference fringe. It wasn’t even the bit where some rabble rouser did a call out from the stage at World Transformed the night before, and mustered fifty or so young thugs to come and shout at women entering the meeting.
No, the most hurty feely memory was the General Committee meeting in my own town where I addressed my local branch’s umpteenth motion in support of ‘trans rights’ and ‘self-ID’ by saying that if they’re going to call for changes in the Equality Act (a Labour Party achievement from 2010), then could they please also underline their continued commitment to women’s sex-based rights.
I’ve said it before but, for the record — my intervention was called ‘provocative’ and ‘unnecessary’. One local member switched her camera off (this was the COVID year, the time of zoom meetings), and from the blank, black screen, she proceeded to shriek at me, unhindered by the Committee Chair. This is not a sexist comment. I do not mean she had a high voice – I mean she was literally screaming about how deeply hurt and upset she was at my wanting an affirmation of women’s current legal rights. She wasn’t used to it, you see. Our CLP was still stuffed with women who would rather let women’s legal rights fall by the wayside than risk hurting the feelings of trans-activists.
You know, it’s not the abuse that makes the heart race and the digestion go awry, it’s the sitting there being comradely and letting people slander, misunderstand and put you down. That’s what does the damage but hey, standing orders, eh? If it’s okay by the Chair, it’s okay.
This particular meeting was unusual in that several male members had joined the zoom with the intention of understanding – one even attempted to speak up about – what was happening to women’s rights campaigners in the backwash from the corporate-funded, ubiquitous ‘trans rights’ lobby so I had visible support. It wasn’t a bad experience as such, although it did induce the now familiar feeling of my heart-rate going up and my stomach setting me up for indigestion later – it was just that one of that night’s joiners was still sort of normal, and his shock at the way I was put down and shrieked at, and at the number of silent watchers, and at the Chair who, having not looked into the situation one iota, stated that he didn’t believe self-ID would have any impact on women’s legal rights, and duly went on to vote down my amendment on the group’s assumption that I was just being silly.
I did my best to be polite to the people who approached me privately afterwards saying they thought I was right. It didn’t help the heart-rate go back down.
The guy who joined to observe that night reminded me that those kinds of behaviours amongst people who actually know each other, and are broadly ‘on the same side’, was not normal. It reminded me of just how much abuse, rudeness and vexacious misunderstanding I’d been labouring under, first as a lefty in the Party, then as a feminist who dared to speak up for women’s rights. As a WPUK supporter who’s been to a lot of feminist meetings that were ‘protested’, I had kind of got used to it so that night was very much a wake-up call. It’s not good to get used to things that push your blood pressure up and mess with your digestion.
I didn’t have the screaming ab dabs, nor did I try to break the Labour Party. I had stood down from my former position as CLP Vice Chair a year or so before that because I didn’t want to bring the abuse the women’s movement was getting from Pride and Momentum down on the heads of our local party. Now, I decided it was time to stop my own CLP causing me stress. Like many, many women before me, I decided to stop going to Labour Party meetings.
I think I learned when I was about five that it’s not a good idea to break things you value just because you happen to be suffering from hurty feelz. During the process of learning about writing and publishing, I learned to value criticism and also to accept the fact that writers are usually living in a state of at least mild embarrassment. Neither are fatal. I am, however, a social worrier (possibly also a warrior, but mostly a worrier.)
My big feet
The other day, I was deep in a long conversation with local activists on my FB feed, about the complexities of the recent election and the extraordinary behaviour of certain borough councillors in our town, (who among other extraordinary things, closed down the last council meeting before the election on the grounds of ‘feeling unsafe’ and, when challenged to point out anything dangerous, claimed that councillors had been frightening each other behind the scenes). At one point, I said something exasperated about how anyone who’s been a councillor for more than a year seems to go deaf and blind. Then I saw in my notifications that a Councillor friend from another town was reading/liking bits of that conversation.
Oh dear, I didn’t want to upset her – should I dash in and point out that that was a comment about a specific council, in a specific context? No, that would look silly – I’d just settle for worrying.
Then I saw her put a cuddly emoticon on another post I’d make about something that had quite upset me and I felt all comforted and loved and grateful.
Then I thought but that doesn’t mean I didn’t offend her – it might mean she’s just a really big hearted person, so I got on with the major essay I was writing on another thread where a friend appeared to have misunderstood another friend and I thought a clear statement of the issue under discussion might help prevent a falling-out.
Worry worry.
That’s how I am.
Janice Turner
That post I made about something that upset me…
… It’s complicated, because my lefty friends would think oh yeah, bastard centrist journo is nasty. Meanwhile, my feminist friends would be thinking but she’s our friend – we were working together on the women’s rights campaign. We know she’s not a lefty but – is she calling us parasitic worms? Let’s face it, we’ve had so much of this. A lot of the women we revere from the women’s rights campaign habitually tell the world what’s wrong with ‘the left’, and leave me thinking, ‘I suppose you don’t mean me.’ And then people we revere from ‘the left’ tell Turner they love it that she hates us, and there’s me, grieving over divisions, and feeling out on my own again.
“I’m sorry kids I can’t do it”
Janice Turner has become very important to all of us on the women’s rights campaign, particularly on the aspect of what’s been happening to vulnerable girls. She has, again and again, produced cool, clear, well-sourced articles explaining our arguments, taking them to the mainstream world. She seemed to have our backs in a way that the left never did, through the Corbyn years. We loved her. And then, from her high-profile, highly-respected platform in The Times, she published an article right before the tricky 2019 election, all about how she feels bad that she can’t indulge the youngsters by voting for Jeremy Corbyn. Oh, those hurty feelz!
I put a comment in a Facebook group we’re both in. I messaged a friend who was in her CLP. Could she please get in touch – could I please discuss something with her. That friend came back and said ‘you know, if her kids can’t change her mind, I’m sure you can’t.’
I wasn’t looking to change her mind. I know she’s not some wavering, easily influenced floozy. I wanted to ask her a favour. Given the high profile of her article, given the imminence of the election, and the influence she has with so many women, I wanted to remind her about women like me – we weren’t ‘kids’, we didn’t see Corbyn the bearded hero as everyone’s favourite uncle, we were women who had opted for the Corbyn movement as our best bet to save the NHS, to address the housing crisis that is causing so much pain to so many, to get a national education service up and running so we could get some control over the dodgy lobby groups getting into schools and teaching our kids dangerous nonsense… I wanted to ask her if she could please use her other incredibly high-profile platform – her twitter feed – just to acknowledge our existence, to set the record straight by saying that she knows the Corbyn movement isn’t just a chapter of teen fandom, but a serious, life-saving, women-and-girls-saving action. You don’t have to agree with it, I thought, but surely you know us well enough to acknowledge it? Surely sisterhood can reach that far across political fences?
But no, she must be protected from me – I’d probably cause her hurty feelz.
The women’s movement
The solidarity in the women’s rights movement could ride things like that for quite a while. We knew we were all very different sorts of people and we had a common enemy – mostly made up of extremely abusive men, men from the SWP, from Momentum, and other groups who never admitted to anything that wasn’t wokely correct, but managed to get a lot of misogyny into the mix via the ‘trans rights’ movement.
We developed heroes and role models of our own – Maya Forstater, Julie Bindel, J K Rowling, Rosie Duffield but, once those of us holding our peace for the sake of the Corbyn movement had nothing to lose any more, it got harder.
Maya wrote a blog article in which she declared that there’s no such thing as patriarchy, Helen Joyce dubbed our Woman’s Place UK manifesto a ‘Marxist utopia’ (I do have some friends who definitely count as ‘hard left’ — they were in some doubt as to whether WPUK’s largely Corbyn flavoured manifesto counted as socialist at all). Rosie Duffield was interviewed outside the House of Commons, being very sober about ‘anti-semitism in the Labour Party’ And JKR put a ‘lefty’ character in one of her detective novels who was a member of the Labour Party and spent his time writing complicated articles about Jewish conspiracies. Totally unrealistic in my experience. I was an officer in a most definitely lefty CLP, and we wouldn’t have tolerated that bloke for a moment, even if HQ did.
In fact, I found the left in the Labour Party painfully meticulous about not offending minorities …. oh, except for feminists … so er, oh, I can get over the hurty feelz and understand how JKR wouldn’t see that. But we women kept going, largely united, until the whole Kellie-Jay-Keen thing happened and suddenly there were women having the screaming ab dabs all over the place. I thought about what I learned when I was five about not breaking important things just cos you’re offended, so I tried to keep it calm.
Now, the women’s rights angle has gone mainstream (unfortunately, minus the full-blooded critique of gender that the left should have given it) so a meme like this on my feed can get a whole bunch of fearless likes and shares…
We disagree on just about everything…
In this superb interview, Debbie Hayton and Helen Joyce, two people who quite profoundly disagree with each other on most issues, present civilized debate. Watching it, I applauded Helen Joyce, whose politics I profoundly disagree with on just about everything except women’s rights, when she explained how disagreements in the women’s movement do not amount to ‘splitting the movement’, and why.
We really do seem to be surviving the storm.
It’s a joy to see — but even as the whole gender-ideology tower began to crack and fall, the Hamas resistance brigades, along with Palestinian Jihad and some other groups, managed to break out of Gaza, where 2m Palestinians have been imprisoned by the Israeli blockade for years, and – well, everyone knows what happened on October 7th. The fact that the October 7th everyone knows about varies so dramatically according to which media you listen to is beside the point – everyone is sure they know what happened on October 7th, and is deeply hurt by other people’s differing views on what happened, and quite a few feminists are terrified that the gap in perception is going to break feminism.
Well I worry that their diffidence about calling out settler-colonialism and genocide might break the movement.
Hurty feelz were flung at those of us who had been campaigning against Israeli settler colonialism for years. Many simply could not understand why we didn’t drop our support for a free Palestine, and minister to Zionist hurty feelz. It could only be antisemitism, they wailed. I was left wondering why it is that I’m always on the side that’s supposed to shut up, to muffle a campaign I believe in to spare some other group of people from hurty feelz.
And that’s when Turner’s parasitic worm tweet turned up and hit me in the eye.
Click here to see the article it was promoting.
I am left wondering how someone can be so clear and so full of carefully built understanding on one issue and so superficial and daft on another – I know a load of lefties left the Greens to join Labour to support Corbyn but heck – a load of people left absolutely everything to join Labour when Corbyn came along with his dreadful, revolutionary idea, “let’s give honesty and kindness a try, shall we?” — or words to that effect — but is there actually any sign that hoards are leaving Labour and joining the Greens now? I know Jo Bird did – is she a part of the ‘intolerant, ideological hard left’? Or is Turner’s tribe assuming that the army of JKR’s mooted antisemitic lefties have joined the Greens because the Greens are supporting calls for a ceasefire in Palestine?
Caroline Lucas was never ‘nice’, Janice. She knew Corbyn, personally, from the Stop-the-War days and yet she joined in the ludicrous antisemitism claims against him when she thought it would benefit her. And oh no, oh my gods – Janice, are you seriously calling a Muslim an extremist and an antisemite for shouting, “Allahu Akbar!” Would you even think to comment in that tone if a white Christian activist shouted “praise the lord!”?
After that, the article reverts to the helpful Janice Turner analysis I’m used to – it is important people stop thinking of the Green Party as ‘nice’, and ‘safe’. There is no evidence whatsoever that they’re particularly socialist but there is abundant evidence that they are not democratic or reasonable, and that they are hopelessly lacking in political analysis. They are not a safe alternative to the very obviously toxic Labour and Tory parties but really Janice, who’s going to believe you if you use the appalling Peter Mandelson as your authority?
Me over here on the edge
I know my criticisms won’t make sense to her. I know that those we think of as ‘centrists’ are stuck on the notion that the left and the right are ‘intolerant’ and ‘ideological’, whereas their own take on the world is just common sense.
Oh well. Here I am, feeling like the only feminist environmentalist socialist in the world – strange how I still have a lot of friends and that they’re all feeling similarly isolated. I guess that’s what it’s like when the all-powerful mainstream media is determined that you don’t exist. Am I going to have a major rant and try to break the entire system? Well yes, actually – and I’m thinking, just now, about friends who are Jews but not Zionists. I don’t think anyone anywhere can be feeling quite so ignored and discounted as they do, while the BBC and all the rest of them go on about how campaigning against mass murder upsets Jews – but right now, just like me, Jewish peaceniks are not on the list of those who are supposed to have hurty feelz.
Race, sex and class
It all gets rather tiring, and if you don’t follow all the pieces of string back to the hands that spool them, you may even think it’s boring — but here’s why it matters. So many of the angry winds that blow through our society – the endless bad press against brown-skinned people, especially Muslims, men’s rights movements like the gender ideology cult, the whole EU-Leavers-as-gammons thing, if you look carefully at them, are sections of the massive army of forces that keep the white, wealthy male on top by dividing and offending everyone else, on the bases of race, sex and/or class.
Resist, sisters and brothers. We really are the 99%. I try to notice and message women when they get piled on by the cry-bully mob, and so far, I’ve always been contacted by women I revere when it happens to me. We continue to support and publicize each other’s work, and we keep going. I am very, very proud of that. Let’s keep it up. Now – when the hurty feelz get to you, remember Ursula Le Guin’s lovely idea – when you don’t know what to do, do the next thing. Sometimes, it’s the washing up. Right now, for me, it’s a kid who’s worrying about an exam, then more to do on Gaza. The Zionist tower is falling, let’s everybody give it another push.
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Dear Reader,
Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.
Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 