Thread by @SexMattersOrg

Update from Maya!

On Sunday I was in Manchester with Helen Joyce and Sex Matters board members Emma Hilton and Rebecca Bull for a teach-in on the Equality Act and human rights at the People’s History Museum…

You may have seen the videos on social media, and Helen has written about what happened in her newsletter.

This was a return trip for Sex Matters to the People’s History Museum – the national museum of democracy…

thehelenjoyce.com/joyce-activate…

Last time we were there, in June, for a board meeting, the museum publicly apologised for allowing us to hire a room and promised to build trust with the community that wanted to see us cancelled…

sex-matters.org/posts/updates/…

It later withdrew that statement “pending legal advice” and accepted our booking for a return visit (thank you to the Equality Act!)…

This time, we were met by protesters at the entrance to the museum, shouting slogans like “TERF scum off our streets” and “We hate cops and TERFS too”. But the meeting went ahead and went well…

https://twitter.com/sexmattersorg/status/1700905638627299580

What we didn’t know was that the museum had taken the decision during our meeting to close to the public for the whole day. It has not explained why…

I can only think that the museum did not want to open to the public because the protestors, to whom it had already pledged allegiance, would not obey rules. It would have to ask them to behave or leave, and if they refused to do either, it would have had to call the police…

The museum has a publicly stated policy that it does not permit the sharing of any external materials, including leaflets, stickers and display banners, or the obstruction of public areas within the museum with protests and rallies…

phm.org.uk/about/?mc_cid=…

It says that it does not tolerate inappropriate behaviour or language, “aggression, hostility and discrimination towards others or exhibition content”.

We complied with all of this, including by taking down a banner which we had put up facing the room we had hired…

We later saw that a Progress Pride flag had been placed near the entrance to the museum by a staff member. This banner was left undisturbed, despite being far more widely visible than ours would have been…

My guess is that the museum knew that the transactivists would not accept that the same rules apply to everyone, and could not face the optics of dealing with their inappropriate behaviour…

At the end of our meeting, rather than letting us walk around the exhibits as we had planned, the museum staff told us to leaving straight away through a side entrance. They told us that this would be safe and out of sight of the protestors, and hustled us out of the door in a group…

But when we walked out onto the side street, the protestors were there already, waiting for us just a few metres away…

https://twitter.com/sexmattersorg/status/1700905645032006026

As we walked away they followed us, chanting, waving flags in our faces and shouting abusive slogans directed personally at me (“Maya is a liar and an enemy to feminism” and Helen (“My body, my choice, f**k Helen Joyce”)…

We later found out they had covered the pavement in front of the museum with similar chalked messages about “TERFs” and about us personally.

It was intimidating and upsetting…

https://twitter.com/mforstater/status/1701142044138168491

But we put on defiant faces and filmed as we walked in front of them.
At the end of the road we stopped and worked out with the police that if the two of us stayed there on the corner, everyone else in the group, including all the ticket-holders, would be able to disperse…

https://twitter.com/mforstater/status/1701136464614920409

We waited while the protestors shouted “You are not welcome here!” until a police car picked us up. The protesters then surrounded the car and blocked it from going forward, forcing the police officer to reverse down the street. By the time they dropped us off we were shaking…

https://twitter.com/mforstater/status/1701136876348842006

We have put in crime reports for the public-order offence of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, with intent to cause that person to believe that violence will be used against them and causing intentional harassment, alarm or distress…

We have asked the museum for a security debriefing to discuss how the decision was made to close the museum and to send us out through the side door.

Its response, after we sent three emails and the crime reports, was…

“We would not ordinarily have a security debrief with a client following a Venue Hire booking but we will be carefully considering all the issues and will write to you again to let you know if we think a further discussion would be helpful.”…

Meanwhile, Billy Bragg told me that it can’t have been harassment because we kept smiling…

x.com/billybragg/sta…

And so we keep on going. I went home and got on with sorting out the food for a good-luck party to send @JoPhoenix1 on her way to her employment tribunal against the Open University…

crowdjustice.com/case/harassed-…

Helen went to Ireland to see her family and to speak at a free-speech event…

freespeechireland.ie/ireland-uncens…

We have written to the trustees of the Museum, and the mayor of Manchester, and we will plan another event there…

https://twitter.com/mforstater/status/1701136232456073700

It is good to see Róisín Murphy’s album…

telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/1…

…and Graham Linehan’s book rising to the top of the sales charts…
eye-books.com/books/tough-cr…

…as JK Rowling’s books did…

independent.co.uk/arts-entertain…

…as well as the Hogwarts legacy video games…

gamesindustry.biz/hogwarts-legac…

The bullies are few, but they have disproportionate impact on cowardly institutions.

They cannot cancel us all.