Or: what happens when your playbook doesn’t work any more

This week, the big story amongst women’s and lesbian and gay campaign groups was that Amnesty report, that labelled some of our favourite organisations as ‘anti-rights’ groups. The report was very quickly withdrawn when the letters and emails from the slandered organisations started flying around – but how on earth did Amnesty, a supposedly experienced, professional organisation, come to do anything so daft?

And this is not all about JK Rowling – the media just like telling it that way, because she’s interestingly rich. Please consider this: you may or may not see it as part of the same thing but please bear with me for a paragraph or two…

Last week, whilst giving evidence at Westminster on the topic of child-transitioning, Dr Hilary Cass told a hair-raising tale of a child who ‘transitioned’ at two-and-a-half years old, and was now a weak-boned adolescent who rarely left their room, and feared attending school.

This is the point where a lot of people will screech to a halt and say ‘how could this have happened?’ Just a few years ago, we were all reading the story of Keira Bell, and asking ourselves (as the court was asked) whether a 14 or 15 or 16 year-old was really in a position to ‘choose’ the sex they would attempt to present as for life, and to accept the permanently life-altering medical interventions which are claimed to aid that process…

… but a child of TWO AND A HALF? Do you know any kids of 2 or 3 years old? I remember a child who put together some hand-me-downs and dressing up stuff to create for herself the outfit of a popular kids’ story character. She got quite attached to this ‘identity’ for a while. I’m sure if the idea was presented to her that she was a special kind of person who ‘identified as’ this creature, she’d have loved the idea. For a while. Then she’d have tired of it, begun to feel restricted by it, and, had anyone been daft enough to bend the world to fix that identity  permanently for her, I can imagine she might have become a fearful adolescent who never left her room.

…. and our government wants to try transitioning another thousand kids to see what happens???

So how did it come to this? And how is this incredibly risk-bound practice of ‘transitioning’ children bound up with adult trans wants such as self-ID, the ‘right’ to participate in women’s sports, and all the other stuff that comes under the heading of ‘trans rights’?

Well…

Where do you start? In a meeting I was at recently, someone started at the beginning, for the sake of those recently made aware of the problem and nearly caused a nervous breakdown in those of us who’ve been on this for a decade or more “it’s all been written already”, “let’s not re-invent the wheel…”

All valid points, but all the time, there are new people picking up on the problems of transactivism and gender ideology. “Where did it all come from,” they say.

I’ll just have to ask those who’ve been on the case for decades to please skim on down while I tell some history…

You can’t claim ‘’trans rights are human rights’ unless people who are trans – that is, who are ‘the other sex really’, are a natural phenomenon, and you can’t make that idea stick unless you a) place ‘gender identity’ in people’s minds as an objective reality, and b) produce some kids who were ‘born that way’. Those two things were achieved a) via the Yogyakarta Principles and b) via the Denton Report.

And then we start talking about corporate lobbyists, about the ‘trans humanist’ billionaires who nursed the Yogyakarta Principles into play in NGO world long before any of their goals were visible to the public at large; about how and why the GRA (Gender Recognition Act) was passed in the way it was, and pretty soon we are sounding like conspiracy theorists — except that the evidence is there, in the US corporations that set up the first ‘gender clinics’, even in the Epstein Files, where those who care to look will see Epstein himself responding to a request from a ‘gender doctor’ for funding, an exchange in which you can see the master-misogynist thinking ‘ooh, an interesting new way to make young humans into sex-toys…’

At this point, the newbie to this nightmare world is probably thinking it’s easy to imagine corporates doing something that evil but what caused all the hatred and violence in the general population? The smashing of venues, the slander-campaigns, the calls to ‘hang terfs’ or for opponents to ‘die in a grease fire’?

Well – misogyny is out there, the young kick-back against the older generation is there, adolescent alienation is there, all you need is a professional campaign to mobilise those feelings against your intended targets – and that’s where the Denton Report comes in…

In 2019, a report was published by Denton’s Law Firm, Thompson Reuters Foundation and The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth and Student Organisation.

It opens with a disclaimer: “IGLYO, Dentons and Thomson Reuters Foundation neither verify the accuracy of, nor assume liability for, the information within the report,” it goes on to say that it doesn’t constitute legal advice, and does not represent the views of individuals involved – which is typical of how paid legal experts usually present, and that’s probably just as well for them, now it’s all falling apart.

Probably, among the things none of the producers would wish to stand by in court would be all the bald statements trans activists make about suicide ideation and other terrible things that apparently happen to children if parents drag their feet over agreeing to medicalise an attempted sex-change (or ‘social transition’, as they call it these days).

In short, this was a ‘playbook’ for campaigners who were having trouble persuading the world that child-transition was a good idea. Once feminists and other campaigners for women and girls found and read this report, they began to understand where the strategies and beliefs of ‘trans activists’ had come from.

Forced teaming: “no LGB without the T”

In particular, they identified the source of the ‘forced teaming’ they had experienced – for example, the bile poured on any organisation that attempted to work for gay and/or lesbian people, but not for the more recently added letters of the Stonewall alphabet (none of which are sexual orientations); note how the Yogyakarta Principles address not the usual alphabetti, but ‘SOGI’ issues, tying the long-accepted concepts of gay and lesbian same-sex orientation to the new and entirely unevidenced idea of ‘gender identity’.

Virtue-signalling resolutions

Equally notorious amongst women’s rights campaigners are the ‘shit sandwich’ motions, where support for self-ID, or child transitioning, would appear as a line in motions brought to trade unions and political parties which treated largely and loudly of issues most virtue-signalling organisations would rush to endorse, such as gay rights, or abortion access.

(This is much the same as the process by which Yvette Cooper won a vote in Parliament to proscribe Palestine Action — it came along with the Maniacs Murder Cult and Russian Imperial Movement. No MP wanted to be on record as refusing to proscribe all three).

Smooth talking

But perhaps the most important factor here is the use of language and structuring of texts that builds on the Yogyakarta Principles, and appears to make trans wants ‘human rights’ issues. This strategy by implication, places any dissenters as ‘anti-rights’.

Put all those into play alongside the misogynist’s glee at being given permission to shout at older women and the eagerness of many adolescents to find their parents’ generation stupid and wrong, and you get yourself a fire-brand campaign that will seek (we can but hope metaphorically) to burn down all the opposition it encounters.

All of those forces are in play in the Amnesty ‘anti-rights’ lists, and the accompanying report so really, the question to ask isn’t so much ‘how did this happen’ as why is it that this time, after years of successfully quashing women’s and children’s rights groups anywhere they conflict with the trans bandwagon, why did Amnesty immediately get it in the neck when they published this latest mass of slanders?

A gallery of letters and posts….

The answer to that is in another of the Denton Report’s recommendations: at all costs, avoid publicity and public debate…

This gradually morphed from ‘don’t court publicity’ to ‘don’t let anyone talk about it.’ Up until around 2020, most trans rights literature was presented on social media with the hashtag #NoDebate. So, it would seem the authors of that Amnesty report thought the #NoDebate command still worked — but…

Probably, the organisation we should thank above all others for the failure of the #NoDebate plan is Woman’s Place UK which was formed specifically to facilitate the debate many women clearly wanted to have, but were largely prevented from furthering by the fury of the #NoDebate campaign.

#NoDebate framed any discussion of the clash between trans demands and women’s rights as ‘debating our existence’ or ‘denying trans human rights’, so that for example, when the extremely popular lefty MP Laura Pidcock published a fairly run-of-the-mill article on socialist feminism in The Tribune, calling for a discussion about areas of contention between trans and women’s rights, even the Tribune’s own social media team tweeted that she was committing the terrible sin of trying to debate the existence of trans people.

But the ‘snowball’ was already rolling, thanks to the sturdy efforts of WPUK and other women’s rights groups that seemed to be springing up daily. Over the course of a few years ‘on the road’, WPUK ran dozens of events across the country which offered women space to ask the questions they wanted to ask, and get that debate going. It took a while to work – I remember WPUK activist Kiri Tunks saying ‘it’s the Olympics that’ll win it for us in the end’ and she was right. By the time the public found themselves watching men getting prizes for bashing women in Olympic sports, including the boxing ring, the discussions WPUK and others had precipitated were out there, and the majority of the people hearing them got a very, very large eyeful of naked emperor: transwomen are men, ‘intersex’ people are not something in between, they know what sex they are — and you just can’t choose your sex.

So well done, WPUK – among the many slow-cooking consequences of that nationwide debate was the controversy over child-transitioning that led to Dr Cass telling that terrible, terrible story in Westminster and – here’s my favourite bit of FiLiA’s letter to Amnesty…

And here’s hoping that now, after all that’s gone on, we might have reached a stage where we can talk properly.  This is the debate: do we base our laws and practices in relation to women and girls on the reality of biological sex and its consequences, or on the newly invented notion of ‘gender identity’, which appears to be about how ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ a person happens to feel, because if it’s the former, we can push back against imposed ideas of ‘gender’ that make kids like Keira Bell feel that they’re doing ‘being a girl’ wrong, or they don’t like ‘being a girl’ whereas if it’s the latter, we’ll have to drag those kids through the long, painful and not-necessarily-successful process of turning them into simulacra of the opposite sex.

Just five minutes of that debate makes it very easy to see why Dentons advised the trans lobby to pull out all the stops to try to prevent that debate if, for example, you wanted to keep the money rolling in to ‘gender clinics’.

Me, I thank our lucky stars that the Amnesty watershed has happened. We are no longer in thrall to the ‘Dentons Playbook’. Now, let’s have that debate properly, shall we?

A rogue organisation, or a symptom of a sexist, corrupt society?

And finally, about Amnesty, consider the following statements:

They are a rogue organisation because they have a bad attitude to women employees.

They are a rogue organisation because they’re doing anti-racism wrong.

They are a rogue organisation because they chickened out of fully backing Julian Assange.

They are a rogue organisation because they shame-listed some of our most dynamic women’s and gay organisations.

They are a rogue organisation because only people blinded by sexism could believe transwomen are women.

They are a rogue organisation because they interviewed Moazzam Begg, to find out what was going on at Guantanamo.

They are a rogue organisation because they point out Israeli war crimes, and defend desperate Palestinians.

They are a rogue organisation because they stand for the decriminalisation of sex work, despite increasing numbers of women’s organisations demonstrating that decrim is harmful to women.

I’ve seen all these and more posted on social media in recent days, as proof that Amnesty are crap. I’m willing to bet that very few people agree with all of them, so let’s try this for size:

Amnesty International is a typically misogynist, sexist, ageist organisation, that’s typically bad at working out complicated ideas such as ‘not all gays and lesbians agree on everything’, and they are not always strong enough to stave off corporate or government pressures. What you think about the various controversies depends on where you stand politically. You probably shouldn’t feel the need to utterly destroy any organisation that doesn’t see eye-to-eye with you on all political issues, because that would logically lead to destroying most NGOs.

So maybe we should stop cheering on the fall of Amnesty, and start trying to fix the misogyny, sexism, ageism, racism etc of the entire NGO world. A good place to start would be to make sure EVERYONE knows about the Yogyakarta Principles and the Denton Report, so that we all understand the results of a professional, PR-driven campaign run by people with the time and resources to place words, phrases and ideas where they want them and build a campaign from within corporate and NGO world, instead of winning popular support with evidence and reasoned arguments.

So much of our politics is done that way these days — all signed and sealed in backroom deals between politicians and CEOs, and sold to the public as emotive, do-or-die ideas that create hatred and division. Understand that, and we’ll begin to understand where the almost uniquely destructive force of gender ideology comes from.

I said almost uniquely destructive. Imagine how delighted establishment forces must be to have TWO big, well-funded, PR driven splitters, often cross-cut against each other, destabilising popular solidarity…

Now, which side are you on with Zionism?

 ********************

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.

You can make one-off or monthly payments by BACS to Mrs K Green, Sort: 07 01 16, Acct No: 43287058, Reference: blog

Or via Paypal…

Click here to donate via Paypal

Another great way to support this, and other independent blogs you read, is liking and sharing on social media, signing up for email updates, or by emailing a link to friends.

Cheers,

Kay

********************