This morning, I asked Shereen Benjamin if I could reproduce a post from her social media for a blog article. Here it is…

Edinburgh SUTR said this:

Yesterday’s demo would not have been possible, or half as much fun, without the amazing Tom and Nathan from @cabaretagainst 🎶 Constantly keeping the energy up and tearing the fascists down, we can’t thank them enough for their excellent job comparing and performing at the parliament.

They were talking about this demo (click here to watch vid)

On her FB page, Shereen said this:

This post & video are from yesterday’s demonstration against the far right groups who were rallying in Edinburgh yesterday. You might wonder why the man – Tom Harlow – is leading chants about trans rights at an anti-racist protest. Well, the clip was made not long after he’d spotted me at the rally. Never one to miss an opportunity to shout at gender critical women, he shouted that I shouldn’t be there, as it was a “trans-inclusive space”. Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been actively demonstrating against the far right for decades, probably since before Tom was born. Other speakers at the rally had (rightly in my view) called for a coalition to oppose the rise of the far right in Scotland. But for some activists, Tom among them, anyone who supports women having rights on the basis of sex, and/or lesbians and gay men having rights on the basis of same-sex attraction, is so far beyond the pale as to have no place in whatever struggle they think they’re fighting. It’s the kind of dogmatic authoritarianism that’s tearing the left apart, and it’s a gift to the actual far right.

Anyway, after I failed to leave as instructed by Tom, he of course had to lead some rousing choruses of “Trans rights are human rights, trans rights are women’s rights” and so on. That’s what’s happening in this video. The lovely rainbow-lanyarded woman I was chatting to while it unfolded was distinctly unimpressed with his behaviour and we ignored him as far as it’s possible to ignore a huge, loud and aggressive man shouting at you. I left when I was good and ready!

SUTR’s page isn’t open to replies so I can’t post this there. But if any of their leadership see this, I hope they’ll reflect on the unity for which so many of their speakers called, and on whether handing so much responsibility to a man who wants to hound out women he doesn’t agree with on sex and gender is the best way to build a strong anti-racist coalition.

… and I thought we should give the story a wider spin and remind the world, this is not a one-off. It’s still very difficult for some women — and increasingly men who are understanding this problem — to join in political events because of a noisy minority who still think defending women’s sex-based rights is ‘bigotry’, and that women who do so should be hounded out of ‘their’ groups and events.

Don’t join in with bullies

Let’s see an end to it now. It may sound ‘lovely’ and ‘inclusive’ when people start chanting about trans rights but when you hear them doing so, do please take a good look before you join in and make sure they’re not doing it just to see off what they consider to be ‘the wrong sort of women’. That is not how you build a movement. It is bullying. It is misogyny.

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