How did we get here? yes, corruption, yes, attacks on Corbyn, yes, failures by Corbyn — and the theft of the Labour Party but most of those tragic conversations on the left are leaving something out. Something huge.

Here’s a flashback…

Standing in the foyer at the 2019 Labour Party Women’s Conference in Telford, talking to a couple of other women who’d just arrived. In front of us, hordes of legs in jeans and trainers going up and down the stairs to the main conference floor. Occasionally, legs in nylons and court shoes went by. As a pair of legs in a particularly tight mini skirt caught our eye, one of the women said to me, “it’s easy to spot the men here, isn’t it.”

When we went up to the exhibition room, we noted a bunch of those nylons and court shoes around the LGBTQ Labour stall.

Women

It had taken years to persuade the Party to give women a proper, free-standing conference and now here it was, and Diane Abbott was brilliant. She was everywhere, urging women to avoid getting tied up in Party bureaucracy, to get stuck in and take advantage of the opportunity. Someone certainly did. The Party had stipulated that CLPs could send two delegates, and one must be Black, disabled or LGBTQ. That worked to an extent. We did hear from a lot of those women but it’s astonishing how many CLPs decided to kick their Black, disabled and lesbian women aside, and send along a man in nylons and court shoes.

Black people

I was still learning about racism and sexism. I’d learned enough about racism by then to be very, very concerned when Dawn Butler took to the stage gushing about how wonderfully free of systemic racism the Labour Party was, how stunningly good it was for Black women. It put my stress-levels through the roof, and prompted me to go along to a side-meeting later on about the experiences of Black women in local councils, where I found a roomful of Black women full of pent up distress about problems they’d been facing, and how the Party lovelies around them just couldn’t seem to see the problem.

Jewish socialists

The parallels were startling. I saw the same again when I spoke to a friend who’d been working on the Jewish socialists’ issues with things like not being allowed to say ‘Zionist’ in the Party. It came back to me when I left the Labour Party a couple of years later, and found myself flooded with relief. I heard another woman say “it feels like finally leaving an abusive relationship.”

The poor, the sick, the homeless, the refugees…

… all the people we were trying to hold it together for.

Initially, I said very little to my CLP about what was wrong with Telford conference, for the sake of ‘solidarity’. I came home and wrote enthusiastic blogs about it, but even I was aware they had a hysterical edge to them. When my CLP asked me for feedback on the conference, I had a rant about how crap Telford was for pedestrians if they strayed beyond the official walkways corporate designers had condescended to provide for them. I would have exploded if I’d tried to pretend I was a hundred percent happy and optimistic, and going on about that was the only outlet I could think of.

I lost count of the number of men who took to the stage at that conference, but only one of them spoke about women’s rights and women’s needs. That was Jeremy Corbyn. He came as a guest – as a man. He was (and still is, I think) a true-believer in gender identity but his priority was, as with Brexit, trying to stop the Party eating itself with divisions. That conference was so divided it was painful and, I’d say it was about 50/50 – the trouble is, as a deeply oppressed group, women are not good at shouting when they’re kicked. They’re far better at cheering others on.

That’ll be why the true-believers were squealing and cheering whenever one of the men in nylons said anything at all, and the other half were fretting in corners. The toilets were all mixed sex, so women couldn’t have those stress-release conversations in the loos that used to be such a feature of big gatherings, but we found each other in corridors and cafes, and I spoke to dozens of conference-goers, including MPs and Women’s Committee members, who were desperately worried.

One of my last acts in the Labour Party was to suggest to my CLP that they ought to put an amendment to a ‘trans rights’ motion, re-affirming parallel support for women’s rights. That got hit by several of those female trans rights devotees. Now, several years hard work later, we have an affirmation from the Supreme Court that our Equality Act has a protective exemption called ‘gender reassignment’, that is for trans people and one called ‘sex’, that is for male and female people respectively. The aggregate stress level across the nation briefly dropped, as millions of women went ‘phew!’.

Which brings us back to now.

I attended a women’s group last week, just to be in company with people who knew what that Supreme Court ruling meant for everyone. One woman commented on the astonishing way all discussions, not just on the trans thing, but on anything that affects women, simply disregard women’s pain. It is very sobering, but understanding that fact has brought many more women to awareness of how much work there is still to do in the battle against sexism. Now, at last, we said, we can get on with all that. We can have women’s meetings to talk about women’s needs. We’ll be able to release details of the venue without fear, and have more than 25 attendees without bracing for a fight if we need to use the sex exception.

But parts of ‘the left’, the ‘progressive’ people, have gone completely nuts. The Green Party, the SWP, the TUC, UNISON, do not seem to have a single member who understands what a Judicial Review is, or what has been decided. Sure, life’s not easy for trans people. Yes, they are going to be in doubt anywhere there are no mixed sex facilities but there are two things that remarkably few people have noticed.

The first is that the world has shifted itself at lightning speed to accommodate trans people. Far, far more mixed sex facilities have been installed on their behalf than were accessible toilets, in the first few years after the world realised disabled people might want to go out.

The second is that there is not a horde of ‘bigots and transphobes’ out there waiting to jump on trans people. Oh, they exist. There is no idiot idea some angry people won’t latch onto but the average ‘terf’ merely wants to protect confused kids, prevent vulnerable women in prisons being locked up with rapists, give girls a chance to excel in women’s sport, and make sure women’s politics is about women — and to do any of those things effectively, we need to know that the national stats about women are actually about women. None of that is a threat to trans people. Just a boundary – and men have never much liked women managing their own boundaries. That’s all it is.

I started a row in the local remnant of Red Labour. I said the TUC should not allow itself to operate as a branch of the SWP, that there is a whole swathe of people (mostly women) who won’t join in actions if all the placards have SWP on the top. (I am one of the very few women who actually say ‘no thank you’ to their SWP placards, and say why. Women are not good at saying things like that – they just walk away from the movement.)

And they’re out there now, Hastings SWP-TUC, saying things like this…

…scare-mongering, twisting the truth, driving deep divisions into attempts at a left fight-back. The best-known women’s group in town said this…

That’s a group that was founded ‘for all women’, with a particular eye on immigrant women, and women living on estates far from the town centre, struggling with deprivation and unemployment. I know some of the first members and founders of that group. They are furious. They see scare-mongering and division-digging.

To say that women who draw boundaries for the benefit of women – female people – are against abortion and body-autonomy well, you might as well say you know fruit is yellow because you’ve seen a banana. Women have a huge range of opinions on abortion but most women know women need boundaries. That’s why most women are not in your group, and why most women are not joining all the ‘progressive’, ‘lefty’ attempts at a political fightback across the nation.

Try to get your heads round this: the reason your groups are so solidly focused on the trans issue is that everybody else has left in exasperation.

If you want your group to specialize in trans rights and trans inclusion, that’s fine. Nobody’s stopping you – the judicial review — that hasn’t changed the law at all — certainly isn’t stopping you. It’s simply underlined that you need to be honest about who you are for. Name your groups accordingly, stop claiming that you’re ‘for all women’, or ‘for socialism’, and stop making local gatherings we should all be going to so damned toxic by calling everyone who doesn’t agree with you ‘bigots bullies and thugs’ who’ve got it in for trans people. It’s terrifying for trans people and alienating for just about everyone else.

Friday night

I’m writing this because something in me snapped when I got an invite to join a new left fightback group in Hastings last night, in the aftermath of those disastrous elections. Am I going to join, or am I going to stick to feminism, where women’s meetings are by, for and about women? I’m tired. I’ll sleep on it.

Let’s assume I dreamed a gallery of pick-your-own-realities. It looked like this…

Saturday morning

So, comrades, let this week’s election results be a warning to you. If you don’t do what most people want — if you don’t keep the Equality Act, with its protective exceptions for sex as well as for race, disability, trans and the rest, what you get is the far right, and that means no rights at all….

Well, here goes. I know a lot of women jump happily onto women’s rights flavoured blog posts when they come out, and there have been plenty in the last few weeks — if only some of those articles got shared around everyone’s groups and whatsapps, as well as women’s enclaves. What do you think, are you going to share this one? Are you going to talk about the pain women have suffered in all this?

Obviously, many personal and family stories are private and should stay that way but what women have been through out there, in their political groups and unions — Are you going to tell the world what you’ve told me, and others like me? I hope so, because the politicians and the media don’t speak for us very well, in fact the women’s rights/trans rights disaster is something they’re particularly prone to talking nonsense about — so it’s going to need a LOT of honest voices — female and male — to set this all right again.

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