Amnesty International Statement on FiLiA

@trancepants and @LobsterNapkin it’s really not love that is good for a child, it’s security, respect, trust, safety, guidance, boundaries, routine, skill, care, bonding and nurture. Love is dressed up as so much and a good proportion is not good, especially for children where much of their mental hang ups can come from the parent who abuses / neglects but says they love them. Love must mean respect. Which is why a banner with ‘love is a human right’ on could then be used alongside such sexually violent threats, because it doesn’t preclude violence and entitlement.

I am who I say I am* = And I demand my right to be treated as such even when it threatens and diminishes others and is at odds with basic reality.
Love is a human right = Everyone is owed sex**

*Unless I'm female in which case my opinions are systematically ignored or I'm accused of wrongthink

**From women

No thankyou

LobsterNapkin

I was replying / agreeing to your post but I think I summarised too much

"they clearly don't believe that citizens should be free to make all kinds of political arguments. So maybe it seems less relevant."

Amnesty, in Ireland, have done a complete Uturn on supporting the right to express all kinds of political belief

Amnesty signed a public letter from a Trans lobbying orgnisation which publicly demanding that making a political argument eg supporting single sex spaces should result in that individual being exclusion from any political representation

Its Executive Director then did same tapdance: did you read the letter, if you did read the letter it did not say that and even if it did you misread/misunderstood the collection of words in the letter we did sign

Sort of like their signs

@JojobaFromOctober absolutely. Anyone who knows anything about safeguarding and abuse of power, know that love is not a human right. It’s not Amnesty’s original premise either, so very very far from it, where just being able to exist is a human right. That is the Amnesty I respected.

I paid towards and campaigned for Amnesty for 20 years, helped run a local group for most of that, but now to give them a penny would be to fund a group that no longer cares one bit for women and girls. Same here. I have been very committed, part of a special writing group at one point pouring out letters.

Their email response to my cancellation was absolutely shocking. A conference about sexual violence, and all they wanted to do was ram down my throat trans ideologies about having the right to use single sex spaces. That they would choose this as a campaign priority rather than actual violence (against women in this case) is unforgivable. There wasn’t even a hint in their reply that they cared about those women inside the conference, let alone cared about being sexually threatened outside under their name. Shame on them.

Love is not a human right and not everyone is who they say they are.

This is obvious to anyone who cares to think critically about those statements for a few seconds.

Being loved and nurtured is really important for children.
But loving someone doesn't make it a safe relationship for you. It is important for Amnesty to recognize that 75% of serious child abuse comes from people a child knows and loves.

Most of the children I've worked with who have been sexually abused by parental figures at least at first don't want the abusive family member to leave the home they just want the abuse to stop.

The deep shame and confusion that kids are left with after disclosing abuse but still loving the abuser and parts of their relationship with them often forms part of therapy.

Love isn't simple and it isn't always safe either.

People often aren't who they say they are and love isn't a right, either as an action or a thought.
Care, protection and safety are less catchy but more meaningful.

The "Love is a human right" does, like a pp said, come out of the "love is love" catchphrase. Well, that's just as bad. We can make an argument that the love in homosexual romantic relationships is as good or harmless as in heterosexual relationships. Or you can make the argument that it's not socially harmful and therefor should fall under the umbrella of individual decision making. But neither of those things is the same as "love is love" where it is supposed to apply to romantic or sexual love.

A lot of these phrases are meant to be thought terminating I suspect. And then once people have just accepted them as true, they can be picked up and used in other ways and a lot of people will just accept it.

Go and ask those declaiming it if non compliant females who call themselves females have a human right to love, and how loving they are being towards them?

And then you'll start hearing the next bit of terrifying political Titanicking that human rights should be exclusively reserved only for people who think like them and are the Right Sort.

So when sorting the world into those entitled to service and those not: you've handily created your enforced service providers.

Plantations in the deep south would have agreed heartily with all this, just with a difference on the characteristic that created the right served sort and the wrong service enforced sort.

WW2 was supposed to have ended all this crap, how did we raise this generation to be this ridiculous?

That's an awful lot of waffle words, just to say 'It wisnae me! I didn't do nuffink!'.

@RepentMotherfucker Hmmmmm. See I think that's simplistic and a bit woolly tbh.

Lots of birth parents of children in the care system love their children very very much but are simply unable to look after them. What those children need is a whole raft of things we associate with love (attention, empathy, food, safety, shelter, boundaries, good socialisation etc etc etc) but not love per se. So no, I don't agree that this means that 'love is a human right' in this context.

'Appropriate nurture is a human right' isn't very catchy though...

Of course. It's why I stated that it's not something that's easy and is something that we as a society need to work towards. If it was just something simplistic and wooly, we'd never have to think about it because all children would just be safe and loved. But they aren't. So we do need to acknowledge how important it is for children to ensure as many children who aren't in safe loving homes, can be.

It's veering off topic anyway. But the reality is that we are prosocial mammals. Love isn't so much a human right but an essential part of our evolutionary development.

There is zero chance that the Amnesty members at Filia would have been unaware of the other messaging towards those attending. But even if the worst of those messages were somehow unknown, at what point did it become acceptable for the focus of protest - by a supposed human rights organisation - to be women at a feminist conference hearing about sexual abuses, children being pushed into prostitution, lesbians persecuted in their home countries etc

That is your focus now?

I paid towards and campaigned for Amnesty for 20 years, helped run a local group for most of that, but now to give them a penny would be to fund a group that no longer cares one bit for women and girls. Certainly not those up for 'thought crimes' in attending Filia. The joke is one of the first campaigns I was involved with was Stop Violence Against Women.

I am who I say I am

Some years ago after we moved to a modest house we started receiving post addressed to "Earl XX" "Lord YY" "The Earl of ZZ". Also phone calls. One day a plain clothes police woman came looking for the Earl. I explained about the post and she said it was one of the pseudonyms of the partner of the woman we had bought from. Turned out he wasn't who he said he was at all! Who'd have guessed it!

The slogan is basically a vote for Walter Mitty. It's nonsense.

Though I did sometimes wish I was capable of adopting a totally different persona and accepting the invitations to the launch of a new super yacht. But I'm not very good at not being myself.

There is absolutely no evidence that this would happen. In countries where self-identification is already the process (Argentina, Ireland) the policy has had absolutely no impact on anyone other than trans people, making their lives easier.

Well this isn't true for a start. Do Amnesty think that women don't have access to the internet?

Also, what the hell were they doing endorsing a protest against a women's conference?

The speakers and the topics being discussed at the FiLiA Conference were readily available and Amnesty still chose to support a protest against it, which says it all.

I've just emailed Amnesty about this,. How dare they call themselves a human rights group when they officially endorse protests against women meeting to discuss our own rights?

So the official position of Amnesty International is that they are happy to support protests against a women's rights conference.

Because that is what they are saying. Their only concern is how that protest against a women's rights conference is conducted.

I'm really pleased they so openly clarified this. Amnesty = actively opposes women meeting to discuss women's rights.

Amnesty need a different tag line, I'd be banned if I put down what I think it should be based on their current ethos.

I don’t want to get this deleted so won’t post the name, but the case in Ireland currently where the now 18 year old transgender (m to f) prisoner is a good example. While that child, like all children, deserved love and nurturing at birth from his (as he was a him at birth) then parents, at the point when he was ten and brutally attacked his mother and was taken into care for this and for continuing to threaten to rape and murder her I’m not sold it’s reasonable to say he has the right to be loved by his mother.

Lots of birth parents of children in the care system love their children very very much but are simply unable to look after them. What those children need is a whole raft of things we associate with love (attention, empathy, food, safety, shelter, boundaries, good socialisation etc etc etc) but not love per se. So no, I don't agree that this means that 'love is a human right' in this context.

'Appropriate nurture is a human right' isn't very catchy though...

Maybe so that when they say ‘we are the good guys’ we will alllll be conditioned to say ‘yessir’. Not.

What on Earth are Amnesty thinking?

I do understand the phrase 'love is a human right' in terms of babies and children. If you were organising a campaign against situations like Magdalen Laundries, Ceaușescu's Romanian orphanages, children being removed from political dissidents in fascist regimes. Even, maybe, the current situation in some countries where children are losing the right to be with their loving parents because their parents object to them being given puberty blockers.

All of those babies and children had a right to be loved. Children in the care system have a right to be loved. Children in neglectful homes have a right to be loved. Children who don't conform to gender stereotypes deserve to be loved, exactly as they are. There aren't always easy answers about how to make sure all children are loved. But as a society, we should always be aiming to be a society where children can be raised by people who love them.

So 'love is a human right' I believe to be true but only in specific contexts. Adults do also generally need and deserve to be loved. But we can't force others to love us. And tbh, I think in many ways the largest section of adults in our society who are not loved, are women in abusive marriages. So if we were going to aim 'love as a human right' at anyone, maybe it should be at women sacrificing themselves for men who are not actually capable of loving anyone. Women who need to start exercising their human right to love themselves more than the people who actively prevent them from being loved.