Category: activism
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I’m on strike – Cormoran Strike

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith If anyone asks, I don’t like detective novels – same way I don’t like spy novels. For one thing they’re menz stories set in a menz world, however many dynamic women you put in them (yes, yes, I saw all the innovative series about females acting like the eternal private…
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Early morning picket line

Having a busy day on, I decided to visit today’s RMT picket in Hastings before I got started — of course, 7.30 in the morning isn’t particularly early to most of our key workers. On the way to the station, I noticed some newly decorated lamp posts… … don’t forget, the strikes and demos you…
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The Goldilocks Zone

This is a road-map of the “sex-based rights v gender-identity” conversation that’s raging out there… What? Oh – apparently, a lot of people haven’t really had that conversation yet, beyond a few comments on stories in the press. Okay sisters, we have a job to do… Otherwise known as the “Circumstellar Habitable Zone”, there is…
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To a good man

You know that cry, “It’s not all men”? Actually, it is all men. I know it, and I know you can’t entirely solve it – not alone, anyway, and men aren’t brought up to be good at thinking together. It would help if more men could get their heads round exactly what it is they…
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I’ve been and gone and done it now

Five years of frustration, trying to get “the left” to sort out the appalling ignorance of lefty MPs, activists and groups on the women’s rights issue, on what’s happening to vulnerable women and girls, and to our kids – now, finally, the problems we’ve been trying to amplify have “gone mainstream”. Most people at least…
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Faux democracy

Jeremy Corbyn lost a fair bit of his loyal following immediately after the Brexit vote because he stood there and told reporters we should now action Article 50 (I think it was called) and start the Brexit process. He lost quite a bit more in the following weeks, when he was asked questions about the…
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Left, right and left behind

This article is, ultimately, about the row about ‘drag’ (!) which I think offers a good opportunity to think about the left/right confusion in the women’s campaign… Is ‘queer theory’ left wing? Is ‘gender critical’ theory right wing? How many people are sufficiently academic, sufficiently fond of critical reading and sufficiently practiced in critical thinking…
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How the Gender Identity Industry Broke Politics

Before the world went mad, when I was still Vice-Chair of a Labour CLP, and active with my union, and had a seat on the committee of my favourite lefty group, I started hearing really weird things about sex and gender, including being told by a couple of therapist friends I knew that they were…
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Not the Forde Report

When I was out and about in Wales, one of the things I enjoyed was taking photos of any Welsh language signs and posters, so I could check out the meaning later, and learn some new words. I took this one by accident because I didn’t know Splott was a name, so wondered what a…
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Please don’t waste your valuable time and skills on party politics

I left the Labour Party last year. They had the audacity to suspend our elected delegate mid-conference. It was one of those ‘retrospective suspensions’, where they’d suddenly make a rule against something, then suspend someone for having done that thing before they made the rule. For that reason, I resigned retrospectively. It wasn’t just because…