Posie’s tactics are essential in all this because we need a mix of messages to reach different people, and the questions in this video are great. Many teachers will feel deeply uncomfortable with what they are being asked to do. Important questions to ask.
But there is more to say if Posie is looking to persuade teachers who are committed enough to be at a Stonewall event.
Posie is a brilliant, empathetic, witty, to-the-point video presenter, I think she could film something in her car in 5 minutes that could supplement this video and make the overall message better understood.
This video relates to issues to be protested at an event about LGBT teaching in schools from Stonewall. Many people still think Stonewall is the LGB-supporting charity that it used to be. Many of those people don’t understand the solidarity that gender critical women (regardless of their sexual orientation or gender conformity or not) have with lesbian women and transmen, who are being horrendously gaslit by this male sexual rights movement. Because this agenda is a common threat across all women.
A key problem with this video is that it doesn’t mention the concerns there are for lesbian and gay kids (and adults!) and what we know about the TRA agenda’s existential threat to the right to same-sex attraction. Transing away the gay.
The video doesn’t mention the disgusting pressure on lesbians around the ‘cotton ceiling’, being pressured to accept sex with men if those men identify as women, doesn’t mention the complete takeover of youth groups and LGB organisations by this dogma leaving lesbian, gay and bisexual kids very little space to find support.
Lesbians out on the scene are being made unwelcome in their own spaces and are becoming made synonymous with ‘TERF’ in an increasingly violent rhetoric against TERFs online and in real life. Also crucially for school teachers to understand- detransitioned young people are being marginalised and socially excluded because they have deviated from the narrative.
What support is Stonewall advocating for, for them in schools? Do teachers feel free to ask about that, if not why not?. I think this politics is extremism and don’t schools have statutory duties around that?
It would be good also to advocate for more NHS spending on mental health support for kids and teens being needed who are already experiencing distress around ‘gender’ whatever the complex roots of that are (internalised misogyny, homophobia, anxieties about growing up, rejection of being constantly sexually objectified as an adolescent, pressure around personal appearance from porn imagery and many many other issues.) not to mention for those who detransition.
Finally Posie has been accused of taking funding from American pro life groups, the far right and whoever else and this particular video doesn’t say where it’s funded from. For some people that will be reason to dismiss it. The creepy music, American-looking school bus and clock tower school imagery, and silly spidery writing don’t help.
I am with Posie’s aims 100%, I massively admire the time and energy she is giving to this and I think the protest will be great, I just hope she will follow up with further videos. I would particularly like to see her and Julia Long co-present a video about lesbians and this agenda in time for the protest.