Category: women
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The Mermaid of Black Conch

Life, eh! When you’re tired – years and years tired – of the struggle, of the battering of socialism, of feminism, of the average person’s chance to even earn a crust; when you know you’ve got too bitter and stroppy to do any good, and all but withdrawn from the fight, and a friend passes…
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Sorry, we broke the revolution?

I have a great view of the pincers of sexism from here just now. When we talk about gender being oppression, we’re not just talking about different dress codes. There have been ructions recently within feminism over women working with right wing organisations – particularly when trans-Atlantic link-ups have blurred people’s view, and led to…
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2022: Sisters, the campaign starts here

“This is the year our collective righteous bloody-minded refusal to shut the fuck up finally broke the impenetrable wall of ‘no debate’” – Jane Clare Jones on Twitter, 31st Dec 2021 Click here to read the whole message. So we have won the right to have the debate. Now, we need to win the debate.…
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A note on pronouns that contradicts a previous post I did on pronouns

Like the vast majority of people, I used to politely use whatever pronouns people wanted me to use. That goes right back to my teens in the 1970s, when I knew gay people, and camp entertainers, who were male, but liked to be called ‘she’. Why would one not go along with it? As to…
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If you were honest, what would you say?

Or Janice’s Goats ***Long Read *** I used to think I lived in a free country – born in the UK in the 1960s, it was a long time before I questioned the idea. Even when I discovered it wasn’t entirely true, I was still aware that as countries went, our country in the 20th…
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The gender-critical stance: a review of the basics

***Long read*** originally written for those thinking about Coming Out on the 19th The core principle: sex and gender There is ‘sex‘ – our species is naturally divided into male and female: not just us though. We are one type of the huge biological group called ‘mammals’. There has never been any doubt. Women and…
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What are prisons for?

When I was younger, most people who weren’t on the fairly far right politically thought prisons were a safe place to put people who were a danger to others. Knowing that there are very few women who are seriously a danger to others, I went along to a meeting about prisons recently and discovered that…
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Crosscut your community

In November 2021, the news hit Hastings that a group of refugees had drowned trying to cross the channel. It hit us hard, because being a southern coastal town, the victims of failed attempts tend to wash up on our shore. This has never been a problem we are able to ignore. Local reactions are…
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Luxury beliefs versus vulnerable women

This week on the BBC, we saw a stand off by the two sides of the deepest and most harmful split I have ever seen in left politics, one that I am still waiting for many on the left to even acknowledge. I believe that the resurgence of the establishment wing of the Labour Party…
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Forced teaming has dreadful consequences

Imagine Neptunian people are your thing (I know, I know but just imagine… ). Imagine the Neptunian Support Group has been the centre of your life and activity for decades. Then one day, the Neptunian Support Group is offered a load of funding for promoting Plutonian welfare. I mean, Plutonians are nice and all that,…