Spectator article: Don't fall for it people

The tories' murderous and brutal attack on ordinary people has hit women particularly hard: disabled women, women carers and lone parents. Women are living with their kids in rancid B&Bs and turning to food banks while Sir Philip Green swans round on a floating hotel, thanks to tory tax breaks."

I will follow you Jennifer!!

You are warrior!!

I've just emailed my MP & linked him to this thread.
See if I get a response....

TBH now I'm a bit worried that her whole GoFundMe campaign has been a Corbyn backed operation the whole time, designed to demoralize those of us who are actually against self-ID. I can be paranoid though, but it is a worry with politics being the way it is these days

A bit too tinfoil hat for me, but even if that was the case I'd say it's backfired spectacularly. Rather than demoralising us it appears to have set a lot of things in motion, including a banding together of women from across all political parties and an increasing amount of spotlight shining on the issues that most of the public don't even know about yet.

As more and more women find out what it really means for them, and it isn't just 'being nice' we will see an even bigger backlash than we have going on right now.

I'll call it right now. The first party to give disenfranchised women a strong message that they oppose self-ID will win the next election.

Don't know if this got linked to but this
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-s-purge-of-the-trans-rights-heretics-p32khgn36

was a recent one from Janice Turner in The Times where she says Corbyn has got to sort the issue after the blacklist and suspensions.

Few speak out because they get even more abuse than feminist heretics. But this horrible, exhausting stand-off has to end. Otherwise, my Labour Party membership number is L1287560. I do not believe in transubstantiation: add me to the list

With a comment below from "jennifer james"

"Given that sex is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, it is quite bizarre that our attempts to ENFORCE the Equality Act have lead us here. We look forward to self-id being looked at by party lawyers.
The Labour party is not divided, however much The Times wishes it were. Self-id is just one issue and it will be soon resolved. The party is absolutely united behind Jeremy Corbyn and his magnificent socialist policies which will lift women out of poverty, allow them to return to education and build homes for them and their children.
The tories' murderous and brutal attack on ordinary people has hit women particularly hard: disabled women, women carers and lone parents. Women are living with their kids in rancid B&Bs and turning to food banks while Sir Philip Green swans round on a floating hotel, thanks to tory tax breaks."

look this silly student posturing that Times = Rupert Murdoch is just not helpfu

Nothing silly about it.

Murdoch is a potent evil. Foxx News is a horror show.

Thanks Terftastic, off to look at twitter:

twitter.com/socialistMike/status/963334153365262337

As far as the rest of the thread goes, tribalism is probably the biggest turn off in politics for me. Even before I'd become aware of the self-ID stuff, the tribalism on the left had driven me away.

I've just seen it this minute on Twitter.

"SocialistMike" tweeted "This is not an important issue. Let's get the Tories out"

One answer: "yeah, calm down ladies - we'll sort out women's rights after the glorious revolution.' Nah mate #labourlosingwomen

Not this time! We're not falling for that one again...

Welcome to the underground feminist resistance Marge, there's thousands of us, and we aren't going down without a fight.

I came across this discussion on Mumsnet via the Spectator article, and as a 60-something feminist who went to uni in the early seventies, I salute all TERFS out there who are putting up a fight.

I've been perplexed for some time as to whether my natural (adverse)reaction to all this gender identify stuff was an overreaction, and maybe it was an age thing and I was just morphing into Victoria Meldrew; but I'm horrified by what I'm reading on here and truly scared for what the future holds for my grandchildren if we don't all get a grip.

I have just given up a volunteer role with a national charity, where the sex/gender debate actually had no relevance to the topic . The admin side was run by a much younger team and I'm afraid the whole gender-neutral stance just made me want to rage. I found it patronising and rude, and when I had the term 'gender-fluid' as an excuse for perceived victim-hood thrown back at me, I decided I'd had enough of listening to this cr*p.

I have no problem with anyone wanting to dress or live any way they want, so no, I'm not a bigot, but being classified as a woman is a biological, not an ideological, fact.

I doubt the vast majority of the over-40s, male or female, take this seriously, so MNs...shout it from the rooftops until they do.

Not a real woman is about a woman displaying what is considered male behaviour, isn't it?

A woman can't possibly be saying something strong and dominant. Women don't do that. So if a woman is doing that it's because she's a man. Gender boxes alive and kicking.

I really don't think that Corbyn/labour need any help undermining themselves.

Still some try to gaslight us and tell us what to do. It's almost funny.

“Not real women” gets used so much that the “no true Scotsman” logical fallacy needs renaming.

Few days ago on Twitter someone was using “no proper Feminist”...as in “no PROPER feminist is against self ID. Those that say they’re against it aren’t proper feminists”

Another non-Labour person here supporting the crowd funder because it's a women's rights issue.

The whole Corbyn thing is so Stalinist - apparently people in the camps used to say 'if Stalin knew what was really going on, he'd be appalled!'.

Now we have Jeremy doesn't mean it; he just doesn't understand it;he's biding his time; he's different when we're on our pen; his last girlfriend cheated on him and he finds it difficult to trust....

I remember it in a slightly different way. Thatcher was seen as a woman acting like a man in a man's world.

@LangCleg
Jen - this isn't a party political issue. Many women from outside Labour contributed to your crowdfunder for that very reason. At last, someone had finally done something constructive to which they could contribute. For them, this has nothing to do with internal Labour factioneering or which sections of the press support Labour and which don't. It's about women and women's rights. Only about women and women's rights.

This

look this silly student posturing that Times = Rupert Murdoch is just not helpful. We are not a student demo. There's some great work going on on the Times. Janice Turner has taken tonnes of shit speaking up for us, as has Andrew Gilligan on trans prisoners and sex offenders.

Great stuff going on in the MoS as well which is an entirely different paper to the Fail, a lot of it by Julie Bindel and co.

Even the Mail do some good campaigns.

We have to be pragmatic. Rupert Murdoch is absolutely essential the Tories getting re elected, if he doesn't like Self ID, what do you think the Tories will do?

If the Left Wing press don't like it, I suggest they actually do some journalism.

Kazzer, Mirialis, Dodo I too used to remember the "she's only in the job because she's really a bloke" comments and they used to annoy me back at the time. I hated Thatcher - but she was a woman, very successfully doing those things that I hated.

Another non Labour person here who donated to Jennifer James, because I was horrified to see a once great political movement acting in such an asinine way. Self ID was a Tory idea (Maria Miller) and the opposition's job is to oppose, not to clear a bloody path for the Government.

As far as Corbyn is concerned though I think he is acting true to form. It is informative to look at his performance as a Haringey councillor in the 1970s. A chancer.

The man in drag one about Margaret Thatcher is one I remember well. I heard similar about Edwina Currie, Teresa Gorman, Anne Widdicombe and others.

In short, the argument used to go something like:

"women don't think xyz"

"But Teresa Gorman just said on telly that she does"

"Yeah, but she's not really a woman"

Stereotyping women and using misogynistic crap in other words, rather than any attempt at engaging with the actual substance of the argument. All a bit #nodebate in fact. Placards carrying sexist insults were pretty common back then on left wing demonstrations - I went on a lot of those.

I remember that this used to drive my Tory voting mother right up the wall and she used to challenge me with "how can you associate with these sort of people when they clearly have so little regard for women?"

Mirialis - it goes further back than the 80s; Indira Gandhi in the 60s was referred to as 'the only real man in a cabinet of old women' and I think the same might have been said of Thatcher.

I hope the politicians of all hues read this at the weekend. Women's votes should count !
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/8137fcd6-0e71-11e8-b553-b6f31437c43b (Don't think anyone has linked to it on here.)

Ashamed to admit it but I was a big Corbyn fan before reaching peak trans, the lily madigan fiasco and his appearance on Andrew Marr. Now i just feel let down, he was the first politician in a long time that I felt was a decent person with morals, who would genuinely make society fairer. I now see what a mug I was. I paid to vote for him, my disabled benefit dependant mother paid to vote for him, and he would rather cosy up to LM than have the balls to say " women are women, transwomen are transwomen ". I will not and cannot vote Labour while this madness continues.

Ah x post olenna