I think one of the most disastrous things that’s happened as our lives moved online is that ‘block’ function on social media. I think we’ve brought up a generation of humans who can’t cope with the fact that they can’t block everyone they don’t like in real life. What’s even more destructive is that it’s made a lot of intelligent, well-meaning people completely unaware of when they’re offending others, making enemies of people who could and should be friends and comrades.

Oh, and Julie’s just fired off another scorcher aimed at women defending Palestine and Heather, who’s just been arrested for doing just that has fired both barrels right back — what am I going to do? I love both those women — I have signed copies of their books and I ain’t moving — on my feminism or on Palestine. I’ll just have to stand in between and invite everyone to fire at me again.

Please try to resist unsubscribing from the blog. I’ve only just built up a following again after the last time. Look…

People you disagree with are not dangerous, not even necessarily upsetting. I had coffee-meets with transactivists in the early days of the women’s rights campaign, before the TU zealots and TwitX babes insisted we should be deadly enemies. We didn’t agree, but we thought we should try to understand each other. Now, the Labour Party and the media are trying to persuade life-long radical feminists who are my very good friends that we should be deadly enemies because of the Palestine campaign.

I AM NOT WILLING TO ACCEPT ANOTHER BATCH OF ENEMIES.

Someone lent me a copy of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht. It got me thinking about the combined effect of social media blocking, social silencing and celeb-world ‘cancel culture’, about the world of ‘safe spaces’ and virtuous ostracism.

This is going to be a blog about silencing, selling an idea, and learning (and about how you can’t do all three) but also, a book review.

The book is the story of the women’s rights campaign in Scotland, so there’s not a lot about my personal, south coast journey in that campaign but my goodness, do I recognize the experience. It’s absolutely the best documentation I’ve seen of the thinking behind, and reasons for, the women’s rights campaign, and of those judicial reviews (only the finale really made the mainstream news) but also of what we’ve all been through, what we’ve achieved, what we faced, and what the consequences of all that are on our society and our future.

Although there’s not much about we southern women, if you’re like me, you’ll be intrigued, and will be seeing yourself between the lines. I was a speaker at that meeting Ann Henderson describes – the one where “Labour staff members and conference delegates [were] among the protesters outside.” I was a Labour Party officer. We were supposed to be rallying party and country for ‘a better, kinder politics’ and there they were, driving abuse survivors into the panic room, trying to kick windows in and terrorize their ‘comrades’ (us) into silence.

I was one of the organizers of the Hastings meeting Claire L Heuchan describes, which has gone down in women’s history as “the one that got the bomb threat” (personally, I thought a far more significant feature was that the Director of the local Pride organization wrote to every venue in town saying we were some kind of murky evil cult). In her chapter, Claire introduced me to the term CPTSD. It’s why proper feminist organizations move slowly and deal carefully with disagreements and debate – they have a lot of followers who are prone to trauma-crises, and it’s not because ‘women are like that’ – it’s because women are like that if you terrorize them over a long period of time (so are men, actually but they tend not to get the same kind of long-term abuse from ‘friends’ and family). Thank you Claire. Now I know why, however much I tell myself all that made me stronger, even though I tell myself I can now do politics in a calm, determined, intelligent way, I still fly off the handle from time to time and say/do/write things that I wish I hadn’t, sometimes because I’d said/done/written it wrong, but more often because it just plain scared me. It’s not my enemies who made me a bit crazy though — it’s my ‘friends’.

So, wherever you are in the country, even if the names on the cover of Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht include some who aren’t in the same place as you politically, if you really want to understand what our women have been, and still are, going through, and how high the stakes are, please read this book.

In Joan McAlpine’s chapter, she describes all the ways people have been silenced by proponents of gender ideology but perhaps most importantly, she writes “But women are silenced mostly by social control – the fear that expressing the wrong opinion will result in ostracism and ridicule.”

If you don’t think what ‘the left’ puts women like me through is that traumatic, just stop and think about the fact that it was our ‘friends and comrades’ who were doing it, and those who we might have expected to defend us were unwilling to say anything because it would have caused a ruckus in the movement. It was and is traumatic in the same way that violence and abuse in the family are, when friends and neighbours try to paper over it, and victims are left thinking there’s no safe place, and no reliable friend, in the whole world.

(One of the points in that most excellent book The Ministry for the Future is quite easily missed, but gets a mention near the end — that proper regard for women’s experience, vulnerabilities and potential is just about the last thing a ‘progressive’ movement gets around to taking seriously. Even, perhaps especially, earnest, progressive women generally ignore women’s pain.)

Peakless

I can’t remember now, in which chapter someone gave a definition of ‘peaking’ – women ‘peak’ when they reach the point of losing patience with the demands of gender ideology. When they finally give up trying to ‘be nice’, and yell that this is absurd, it’s harming women and children, and why the hell does no-one care?

I suppose I’ve never tried to be ‘nice’. At least, I haven’t if being ‘nice’ means going along with other people’s nonsense in the belief that it’s a requirement of polite society. I never ‘peaked’ because there never was a time when I tried to believe people who told me some people ‘change sex’, are ‘the other sex really’, or need doctors to ‘change their sex’ so they can ‘be their authentic selves’. I never believed them, not least because they would try to say all those things at once, and they just aren’t the same thing; but mostly I never believed them because it was so obviously the next step towards madness on the crazy road of gender-powered sexism that I always thought was rank nonsense, even before feminism taught me the words to say it.

How dare they persuade our girls that they can ‘save themselves’ by altering their bodies and calling themselves ‘they’ or worse, ‘him’. You need to survive to at least the age of 25 to discover what a glorious piece of wonder it is to be born a girl, and have the opportunity to be a woman –there is, if you ignore genderists’ dictats, a limitless range of possibilities of how to be a woman. How dare they tell them lopping their breasts off and taking hormones is the cure for their woes. It’s the same rotten, capitalist answer as underwired bras and crippling shoes, but worse because they’ll probably never fully recover from the hormones-and-surgery route.

Everybody knows

Similarly, I’ve been troubled all my life by the very obvious fact, visible in front of me from childhood, that we humans are systematically wrecking our environment and for all my adult life I’ve known — as most people know — that we really are on the verge of making our planet uninhabitable — not for some far future generation, but for our own grandchildren — the very ones we’re currently distracting with hormones and pronouns, then alienating from  politics by creating hate-powered divides and demonizing anyone who doesn’t ‘get it’.

Most people seem to wake up and notice the environmental threat for a moment every now and then, and say “wow!” – like for example when we noticed you don’t get dead insects splattered all over car windscreens any more. Then they forget it again. It’s related to the ability to ‘be nice’ and not react to people talking nonsense. People do it to try and be ‘normal’. I can’t. Why would I? I want us to stop wrecking everything.

…and then this last two years, most of the western world has finally noticed what Western Asia, Ireland and socialists everywhere have known for decades — that Israel is trying to kill Palestine — to murder a whole country — and — it’s not just that our politicians don’t mind and didn’t tell us, but that our governments are helping them do it. The division is between former victims of colonisation and former empire-builders. Which side you are on, if you’re in the UK, depends on whether you’ve noticed what kind of government we have.

I’ve said a lot about what women have been faced with, and the ability of many ‘socialists’ to ignore it. The other side of the coin is trying to explain to some of the women’s groups what Palestine campaigners are going through, and why they deserve respect.

Me, I’ve been as horrified and miserable as anyone at what’s been going on in Gaza — but also a little bit hopeful. I’ve wondered if the #FreePalestine movement is people finally waking up to how fatally dreadful things are, and realizing we need to get together and do something. The government certainly think we’re waking up. That’s why they’re running scared, trying to demonize and destroy the #FreePalestine movement.

But I won’t be too confident about the glimmer of hope until enough people understand that we all have to stand together now, and say ‘stop’. Stop selling bombs, stop wrecking the planet, and stop bloody telling lonely kids they can solve their problems by bloody changing sex.

We need a generation to grow up confident that they’re okay as they are, but that they need to come together, even with uncool people, so we can change the world so everyone can live peacefully in it.

There’s a persistent strain of autism in my family. My daughter and I were both still being ID’d when we were in our mid-twenties — it goes with the territory. And it’s probably why I get particularly angry when women who’ve stood with me in defense of lesbian and autistic kids turn round and tell me Greta Thunberg’s a silly little girl. (That’s probably an example of what I said up at the top there — they probably have no idea how offensive they’re being.)

Oh yes, the book review…

It’s a good book: an important piece of history. Please take the time to read it, out of respect for all the women who have given so much to this campaign. Please recommend it to your lefty friends, so that they can see why so many women are bitterly against ‘the left’. I need my radical feminist friends and my radical socialist friends to talk to each other, so that we can build a truly broad-based movement to stop politicians wrecking the planet, killing Palestine and dividing us with their dishonest representations of race, sex and class.

We need the women’s movement to understand that Zara Sultana is a valuable politician with great courage and integrity, who just got one thing wrong (she either thinks kids can change sex or that it’s good for them if we pretend they can) and we need socialists to understand that J K Rowling is an intelligent and generous advocate for women, who just got one thing wrong (she fell for the Zionists’ antisemitism trick).

Okay, so they both chose a pretty dire thing to get wrong but it’s still only one mistake, and you can’t do solidarity if you revile other people’s heroes. Are we going to drop anyone who ever makes one mistake? Sure, point out the mistake — please, please help us rediscover the art of comradely debate let’s not revile people who are merely in error. Let’s not drive people to mud-slinging fury, then wonder why they’re being so rude.

Sure, we have some real enemies, some bad-faith players, but that’s different. We’re too used to confronting each other with swords drawn on TwitX and sure, when people have received shedloads of abuse and insults, they need to lash out, to reclaim their space and self-regard — but we need to talk properly in real life. Out there, where the movement that might save us all is growing, we need to find the patience and respect to understand each other, because those two fiendish con-tricks (gender-ideology and Zionism) are not going to disperse in a moment. We will continue to hear people from ‘the other side’ (on gender, or on Palestine) say things we know are nonsense, but they won’t learn different if we just hurl insults at them, they will (quite naturally) hurl insults right back.

Here are a couple of great TwitX duellers (JCJ is a Marxist feminist, by the way). Social media wars can be the only way to spread an idea if you’re being ‘cancelled’ in real life — it feels like therapy, and it emboldens your comrades — but the downside is that people fear you’ll talk to them like that in real life, and start avoiding the subjects we need to discuss.

I don’t care what anyone thinks about a certain other woman who’s made herself famous. She’s just a clever grifter. Whichever ‘side’ you’re on, don’t write off an entire movement because one person is trouble. And for the other side of the coin, I don’t care what anyone thinks of a certain tiny socialist ‘party’ that’s mainly famous for a rape scandal. Most of the left is not like them.

To get past all that, we need feminists to teach the current generation of the left about the dangers of gender, and the socialists to teach the current generation of feminists that no, we never were ‘obsessed with Israel’, it’s just that we knew Israel was fed by the global military-industrial powers, and that if they got away with killing a whole country to create a rich-people playground, there’d be no stopping them after that … and that on the other hand, if we could only come together and call ‘game’s up’ on that one, we’d then be able to push back on what they’re doing to Sudan, to Congo, to Afghanistan and all the other places Zionists name in their ‘whataboutery’ excuses for Israel’s behaviour.

So please read Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, and please tell your friends ‘on the other side’ why they should read it. If they don’t believe you, buy them a copy.

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