Thread by @WomensLibFront

Let’s talk about civility in the movement. For years now, many radical and lesbian feminists have been told by leading names in UK gender critical feminism to shut up about men presenting as women getting elevated as leading spokespeople for women’s rights.

UK women, who’ve had more opportunities to network and more media presence, have dominated this conversation globally. This is surely because of structural factors operating in their favor, rather than intent. They were only going about their own business, and mainly still are.

We discussed the structural factors in a previous thread, but in sum, US feminists were largely silenced & shut out of the media before the full force of the gender identity policies rolled into place, in the UK, gender activists couldn’t get it done in time to quash complaints.

https://twitter.com/womenslibfront/status/1309155358796058627

This matters because the largest concentration of any Anglophone commentary about this issue, and certainly the largest source of ongoing edited and published commentary, has been & still is the UK. And thank goodness that women there have refused to be silenced.

The largest concentration of activism, however, has been centered around a group dominated by extreme Labour Party loyalists, who’ve set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of acceptability, even to the point of acting as though they have the right to control US activism.

In the course of their dogged fight to try & remain acceptable to Labour men who still only seem to hate and trash them, who attack their meetings, and regularly call them bigots, they’ve heavy-handedly gone around to encourage shunning of women they find embarrassing or uncivil.

Here’s an incomplete list of things that the founders and key allies of this group have done, in the name of having a more civil movement to fight the harms of gender identity to women’s rights...

Their website still has up a denunciation of another woman as ‘racist’ for talking plainly about the harms of forced veiling and the very serious situation of grooming gangs in the UK, which happened to have been mainly led by Asian men. They have never stopped badmouthing her.

This badmouthing has included calling her a “white supremacist,” because someone she didn’t know came up to her at a conference, and because she has talked to a variety of obscure YouTubers with questionable politics in order to get the message out about the harms of gender.

It’s included accusing her of a crime for asking questions of the communications director of a large US LGBT org, while in a US congressional office building, feeding lies about her trip to the US to gender activists, and breathlessly repeating further lies without fact checking.

It’s included calling this woman “dog sh*t,” a comment that led merely to fawning adoration piled on the speaker by members of this group, rather than a movement-wide war of ideas about the borders of civility. Mainly because other women are afraid of the pile-one.

The woman who made the “dog sh*t” remark was able, without a trace of self-reflection or irony, go on to lecture yet another woman about how calling a gender activists’ ideas “silly” was too awful a put down to use, rather than an invitation to reconsidering a perspective.

Further, in insisting on catering to the sensibilities of men presenting as women, this group has alienated and monstered a number of lesbian activists who wouldn’t go along with it. They’ve had the nerve to characterize resistance to all of this as homophobic, or “anti-trans.”

Because WoLF wouldn’t go along with the shunning of these women, and because we’ve worked with US conservatives, this rancid grudge crossed the Atlantic.

One of the group’s founders wrote an essay for their site that opened by talking about WWII-era British fascists, ignorantly mischaracterized the recent Harris/Bostock case, and said of our work with conservatives, “A more perverse or problematic alliance could not be imagined.”

That essay went up and immediately quashed sharing of articles about the case that mentioned us, our rally, and our legal arguments. It’s still, nearly a year later, the author’s pinned tweet. But ‘civility.’

In the essay, a vague reference was made to a ‘trenchant critic’ who protested us. This refers to a woman who, because of an unrelated grudge, showed up to our rally last October to shout at us through a bullhorn in very close proximity, for about an hour.

The bullhorn shouter has maintained a Facebook feed where she’s posted film of herself shouting at a WoLF member on TV, burning a paper with our logo on it in a fireplace, posted financial information discovered about a former volunteer through legal channels, ...

... has compared WoLF members to the hypnotized victims of Pennywise the Clown from It, has demanded public postings of a board member’s tax returns, posted the resume of a young feminist to ridicule it, and that’s not all! But you get the point.

“Trenchant criticism.”

In response to that essay comparing us to fascists, a journalist friend of the group’s founder said, over Twitter, “I love you ...,” a sentiment that was evidently reciprocated. This journalist has said she’s writing an article about how feminists must never work with the right.

This essay about how feminists must never work with the right, for which we’ve been asked for comment, is apparently being offered to Unherd.

Unherd. Bastion of hard left loyalism?

The same journalist has written in Quillette, the Daily Mail, the Spectator, and the now-defunct US publication founded by Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard. She’s appeared on panels with a Breitbart employee, male pornographers, and a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

The same journalist works with US organizations on trafficking and surrogacy who are, themselves, almost exclusively platformed here by conservative groups like The Heritage Foundation, because US liberals increasingly favor trafficking in women. We’re a problem though. Reasons.

Another journalist friend of the group works at the BBC, one of the foremost purveyors of child transition propaganda in Britain. She likes to spread conspiracy theories about us, mostly relating to American political groups she’s Googled.

The group’s members also came down hard on the Morning Star, for publishing a feminist cartoon critical of men using gender identity to break into women’s spaces. They joined the caterwauling from male Labour activists, helping force a retraction and apology.

In yesterday’s big brouhaha, where a lesbian criticized the way trans-identified men and women are used as token shields from criticism by some gender critical women, and listened to and praised more than lesbian women who’ve been in the fight a long time, ...

... in spite of the fact that they promote beliefs and practices—including the idea that there are ‘true transsexuals,’ or endorse pornography and cosmetic surgery—that are incompatible with radical feminist values, these ‘civility’ champions were on the case!

It’s okay to them to call a women’s rights campaigner “dog sh*t,” but not to make a tongue-in-cheek reference to Revelations. It’s okay to them to compare feminists to fascists, and push that line for nearly a year, but not to criticize a pornographer who trashed a rape victim.

It’s okay to them to refuse to address any of the substantive points raised, while a likely friend of theirs uses a sock puppet account to accuse the lesbian author of being shady, as she’d platformed some of the only doctors in the US who speak against child transition.

They continually refuse to address the issue of child transition in the US in a way that would have implications for who they compare to fascists here, who they spread lies & conspiracy theories about, and when it’s okay to platform articles written for conservative publications.

If their friend, who shares their grudges, writes in a conservative publication, it’s approved. You can share it. Phew!

If a woman they’ve marked as damned writes in a conservative publication, or writes something critical of them, well, best pretend you didn’t see it.

We’re told that this is ‘having principles.’

Never mind that they work with conservatives in their own country. It’s totally different! They said so, after all. And you better listen, or you might be next on their “dog sh*t” list.

It’d be a real boon for civility if this foul, hypocritical behavior stopped. If maybe some apologies or retractions were issued.

It’d be good if they cared more about the opinions of other feminists who put women first, rather than the opinions of Labour men, who hate them.

Was it the ‘radical socialist feminism’ we criticized, or was it trying to hound women out of public life, lying about them, calling them nasty, dehumanizing names, or trashing women you don’t even know in another country to keep the heat off yourselves?