New to this - question about reconciling left leaning politics...

Once you get out of the mindset of automatically thinking that left=good and right=bad, it makes it a lot easier

Completely this.

Critically analyse and separate points.

Read a range of papers; the DM is a pile of shit often but also regularly is the only paper to print stories that are about the abuse of women, that places such as the guardian won't print. Journalists pitch stories and editors decide.

It's hard but it makes you a better thinker and better able to stand up for your beliefs.

Don't forget that the extreme left has in the past at times been as disastrous for humans in history as the extreme right.

Science, facts and safeguarding trumps ideology and #bekind.

What Duck said.
You have to see the bigger picture here. Since the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the entire political spectrum has been transformed. There no longer is a real existing alternative to liberal capitalism, even China has an authoritarian version of it. I don’t know how old you are but changes in the political imaginary happen slowly. Identity politics is a bourgeois indulgence but we no longer have the words to say this clearly.

A lot of people who think they are socialists these days, or even leftists, are liberal individualists who like a little wealth redistribution.

One thing I have got from this.

I used to stick to my sources of truth- media I agreed with.

Now I read a wide range and I think that's more healthy. Hear other perspectives. Maybe understand a bit about why they feel that way. Discard them. Etc etc.

That's been a good result, I'm more open minded, less this is good that is bad the end.

When all this really kicked off it was so weird.

Lifelong lefty nicely feminist. Suddenly on the 'wrong' side. Very uncomfortable feeling.

Left the labour party over this. Politically homeless. Would never vote Tory.

The thing to ask yourself- and look at some of the women who labour have kicked out- why life long lefties, many of them activists. Have suddenly apparently become crazed right wing bigots.

I mean it's not very bloody likely is it. Do something else is going on.

There are plenty of people on the left who feel that identity politics has gone bonkers, in different ways.

In the UK most of the GC voices are very left-wing.

When you see claims that GC feminist = 'right wing', look at what else that person is saying. It's a fairly good bet they'll claim that what GC feminists want is to 'eradicate all trans people' and to 'put everyone in restrictive gender roles like the 1950s'. These are in no way accurate or even sane summaries of a belief that... sex is real and matters.

I’m left in the old-school sense yet found myself in the odd position a few years back of calling the office of David T C Davies (Conservative MP for Monmouth) to thank him for standing up for women. It’s a funny old world

Well, I had a cut and paste fail, and then lost what I've just typed out, but basically what LadyFuHao said!

GC feminists agree with the right that biological sex is real, but trans activists agree with the right in that they accept gender roles. GC feminists disgree with both in that point.

Don't be put off by the lazy argument that GCs agree with the right, so we must all be right wing. That is very sloppy thinking, and a cheap argument.

Just a few years ago, if I'd posted on FB, "AIBU to think it's excluding Muslims from education if a college doesn't have a meditation room set aside for prayers?" people would have been falling over themselves to comment YANBU.

Now you put "AIBU to think it's excluding Muslim girls from education if a college doesn't have single-sex toilets so they can prepare themselves for prayer?" and some of the same people say YABU.

Just following the crowd, they are.

The 'Right': Sex is real. Gender is real.

TRA: Sex isn't real. Gender is real.

Gender Critical: Sex is real. Gender isn't real.

GC and 'the Right' have some similar positions but approach it from completely different viewpoints with ultimately diverging desired outcomes.

From a working class socialist standpoint the TWAW chants feel like middle class indulgence

This. I'm from a working class northern town classic red wall territory. Its absolutely middle class navel gazing, the people in my town worry about feeding the kids, paying rent, finding work. The stuff Labour used to focus on.

Yep, I grew up in a similar town (North West) and this is exactly why Labour have failed to get votes up there, and they still don’t seem to be listening!

The height of bourgeois bullying.

Hi OP. This is a Marxist analysis posted previously. I'm not a Marxist myself but it's GC, if that helps reconcile your views!

Includes a useful comparison of trans rights / GC / right wing views.

Gender ideology is as far from Marxism as you can get.

OP, it's because I'm left-wing that I'm GC.

Absolutely this.

I align myself centre-right. I'm "small c" conservative and can't abide party politics.

Left is not good. Right is not bad. They lie at either end of a swinging pendulum and that pendulum can sometimes swing so far that it swoops round on itself. That is what I feel is currently happening with "The Left". The pendulum has swing so far it's shifted into Marxism, cancel culture, and a totalitarian urge to control what people get to think and say.

I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me.

Perfectly put.

A Welcome from me too OP.

The briefest way I can describe it is it's not me who has changed but the political sliding scale has shifted to extremes and I have stood steadfast in my values.

I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me. I would now be described as right of centre but that's only really because I know what a woman is.

I agree with much of what has already been shared, and it has been said better that I can say it today.

(I'm a rinse and repeat ex Green. I leave over the horrors of the party and return because of the horrors of the climate crisis. )

Welcome OP. I tend to think less in terms of left and right nowadays than how best to stay true to my own principles. I question myself all the time. I don't believe that male rapists should be incarcerated in the female estate with vulnerable women. I don't believe that adolescents should be encouraged to consider disfiguring surgery and put on a pathway to lifelong medicalisation, with a likelihood of sterility. I don't believe the safety of women and girls should be compromised and the language they use to describe themselves changed to protect the feelings of a tiny minority. I don't believe that men can be lesbians. I don't believe the motivation for these things - that human beings can change sex - is based on robust science. I try to read the views of people on both sides of the argument, I have done for a long time, I just don't believe the other side.

Andy Do you recall the last time there was a scandal about the food parcels for children to replace free school meals over lockdown, that were supposed to provide £30 of food (and looked like a fiver's worth)?

It really struck me that GC/radfem twitter was up in arms about working class children going hungry, and sharing stories of how they'd been on FSM as children themselves, and meanwhile the focus of North West Labour Party twitter was... how much they hated Rosie Duffield.

Not a bloody word about children being given two spoonfuls of tuna in a filthy bank coin bag, to last them the week. Not. A. Bloody. Word.

"This. I'm from a working class northern town classic red wall territory. Its absolutely middle class navel gazing, the people in my town worry about feeding the kids, paying rent, finding work. The stuff Labour used to focus on."

100% this. This is why the Labour heartlands didn't vote Labour in the last election, sadly the Labour party are lacking self reflection, and are full steam ahead on the "identity politics" train.

Socialism uses class analysis; identity politics does not. It isnt left wing or socialist, its neoliberal. Its also being pushed by the current Govt which is decidedly not left wing.

There are some great articles about how gender ideology is not left wing at all as it doesn't focus on structural oppression or class but I have no idea where I saw them and I am not that brainy so perhaps not summarising well. Perhaps Jo Bartosh? I think the Morning Star had some good articles too. Hopefully someone else will know. The Labour Party is a disgrace for making people feel like they are not left wing if they are concerned about this.
Oh and Woman's Place is mainly made up of LP members and trade unionists.

From a working class socialist standpoint the TWAW chants feel like middle class indulgence

This. I'm from a working class northern town classic red wall territory. Its absolutely middle class navel gazing, the people in my town worry about feeding the kids, paying rent, finding work. The stuff Labour used to focus on.