Thread by @akuareindorf

Long 🧵
1 Reading Billy Bragg comparing the @EHRC Code with Thatcher & section 28 is baffling. In the 80s I was a left wing feminist teenager – demonstrating against s.28, implacably anti-Thatcher, visiting Greenham Common, the whole scene – & I came out as a lesbian in the 90s…

2 Section 28 wasn’t about the LGBTQ+ community. It was about same-sex attracted people. It was an attempt to prevent the normalisation of our private & family lives. At the time lesbians’ kids were being removed by the state & lesbians were routinely violently attacked by men...

3 The “joke” that lesbians hadn’t met the right dick yet was prevalent. Feminists were mocked as lentil-eating dungaree-wearing harpies. But then, in the new century, there was a seismic change in social & civic life for LGB people and the perception of feminism…

4 While Bragg was singing dreary songs, feminist lesbian heroes like @bindelj & many others had fought to make it possible for others like me to love women & raise children without fear of government, the law or straight men. Suddenly feminism was no longer a dirty word…

@bindelj 5 Then, bizarrely, in around 2015 our own organisations turned against us. They started to pretend that men could be women, and it broke everything. My own moment of revelation was being told that I was a bigot because I said I wouldn’t have sex with “a woman with a penis”…

@bindelj 6 Looking back to the 80s, it’s impossible to imagine I’d have been anything but proud if I’d known then that 40yrs on I’d work on guidance that articulates women’s rights to safety, dignity & privacy away from men & lesbians’ right to gather together without heterosexual males…

@bindelj 7 I’ll never not find it mystifying that people like Bragg attempt to recharacterise those rights as politically objectionable. Ultimately the only part of this screenshot I can recommend are the last two words.