Helen Joyce & Julie Bindel: Should TERFs unite with the Right?

WPUK aren't a member group, so none.

About a dozen women volunteers running it.

Yes, I don't think she is. I asked because someone mentioned that group in a discussion about her.

That is a lot of mothers. And an untapped resource as far as JB is concerned.

KJK understands that mothers will go to the ends of the earth to protect their children. Look at mumsnet. All these women, mostly. mothers and FWR is one of the most popular boards.

JB could be capitalising on the collective power of all these women.

BNP run by white men, the most powerful social group

I was putting together a post yesterday, explaining how Shinyredbicycle was doing identity politics, but it's now totally explicit.

The identity politics game is that you don't look at individuals as individuals, you treat them as avatars of some larger group.

And this is the approach I utterly abhor for the same reasons as I do when anyone else does it.

And indeed, it's the main reason I abhorred feminism for a long time. It's totally toxic, and feminism seemed to be relying on it far too much. The reason I've been able to be on board with this fight is due to the relative lack of identity politics in the feminism - it's been just material reality-based.

Another key part of the game is that the powerful people get to make up the groups to ensure they win on the bizarrely one-dimensional oppression stack. And this is why women lose when they start playing it - "cis" was invented to trump them.

The main hypocrisy in this particular case is attaching people you don't like to wider "powerful" groups, while denying that the people you do like are parts of wider "powerful" groups, and then asserting that your opponents are more "powerful", due to those group views.

Disagree - KJK and Kara Dansky got to share their message with an audience that already agrees with them. So they gained nothing.

WTAF? So Carlson's audience is full of left-wing feminists? The normal claim was that they were a bunch of right-wing bigots. (The truth is actually that the audience is huge, and politically diverse - some stats showing it as the most watched show of its type among Democrat voters.)

And Tucker Carlson's audience were somehow fully informed on men's incursion into women's rights without Keen and Dansky? How did this happen? You're reckoning they've got some right-wing women rights coverage? And you don't want them to hear any left-wing voices? To hence be convinced that the left-wing are totally lost to this?

Playing the "this is a right-wing issue" cover-up game might work on a Guardian reader, but it's not going to work on someone prepared to watch Carlson, who's going to cover it regardless. At that point it would look like "the left doesn't care about the problem" rather than "the problem doesn't exist or they'd be covering it".

You don't just have to win the left-wing parties over, you have to stop the massive pull of normal people away from the left-wing parties because of this stuff. If normal people (ie Carlson viewers) do not see left-wing opposition, they won't be paying attention any more if/when the "left-wing" parties ever sort themselves out.

TC has a huge number of viewers, many on the left, surprising as it may seem. And why would you assume that all his viewers know all about this controversy?

You also seem to have bought into this idea that people like TC are motivated by some kind of outright evil intent towards women. Which is a pretty far-out claim. It's interesting, I saw the same thing when Glen Laoury was interviewed by him - people told him that TC was totally disingenuous, just a racist who was using GL. GL found his interview highlighted some things he thought were really important, but what does he know, after all?

Not a very useful one though, there is just so much variation within a group like that.

That would be really stupid and short-sighted, given current polls.

You might not like it, but the reality is that it's more urgent than ever to win Labour over.

And the very last thing that 'terfs uniting with the right' will achieve is winning over Labour, I think it's fair to say. On the contrary, it would make it even easier for every misogynist out there to point the finger and label anything pro-women or pro-reality as 'far right'.

Disagree - KJK and Kara Dansky got to share their message with an audience that already agrees with them. So they gained nothing.

Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, gained far more, by being able to draw on their presence to present himself as a good guy, caring about women. Which is, let's face it, the opposite of the truth.

The people who lost out in this were women. Because alienating potential supporters on the left - which is where the gap is, and the US govt, and likely the future UK govt - is not going to help any of us.

Nah, right thread. I just wanted to drum home the relative size of the union that Mark Serwotka heads up. If power by social association truly worked, the socialist feminists' goals would be be sorted, given the proximity of WPUK to senior union leaders.

As power through social association clearly doesn't work, I won't be worrying about HoO etc gaining something from breathing the same air as SFW attendees.

I think the last two posters are both on the wrong thread?

This is from the Independent, about strike action.

Job-seekers, people collecting benefits and those applying for passports could all face problems after tens of thousands of civil servants voted to strike in a row over pay and pensions.

Some 100,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union overwhelmingly backed taking industrial action.

Bold mine.

Half the global population is made up of women - approximately 4 billion people, all with different opinions. And yet the universal oppression of women continues, because it is sex based oppression. Unless women put aside their differences and unite against their oppressors, nothing will change.

They're a demographic. I don't think they're an identity group (although I wouldn't be surprised to see that change in the coming years.)

Power is difficult to quantify. Would it be terribly tactless of me to observe that Ruth Serwotka, co-founder of WPUK, is married to Mark Serwotka, General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union? Mark was apparently once named one of Britain's 100 most influential Catholics. (I'm not sure how serious the list was though. It may have been entirely tongue in cheek.)

There are certainly more people in the PCS than in HoO, and in the BNP put together. In another thread, I ended up looking at the BNP's typical vote share in their heyday of winning council elections, and I think the PC contains more people than have ever voted BNP at one time!

Does this mean Ruth, and thus WPUK, has power because of her husband's position? Well, I don't think so. But then, I don't think HoO gained power from standing in a park near SFW attendees. If I did, I suppose I'd think WPUK benefited from Ruth's connections, wouldn't I? It seems internally consistent.

I'm not sure "white men" are a social group at all.

white men, the most powerful social group.

Bit off topic, but I'm not sure that white men are the most powerful social group in the UK these days. Status is conferred through victimhood nowadays. The most powerful group is surely the one whose members can avoid going to prison, or go to a prison of their choice, who are not subject to safeguarding or other rules, who are given preferential treatment and opportunities to be funded and supported, who cannot be mocked or insulted, who can get you out of a job simply by pointing a finger and calling you a name, who get favourable press coverage and can suppress media coverage they don't like, who can change the definitions of words, who have captured every institution to propagate their ideology...

Some of that group are white males, for sure. But white males who don't have a special identity are no longer high status and they can be easily silenced simply by pointing out that they're white men.

I'd never heard of HoO until the real feminists started banging on about them, and hadn't heard of ADF until the other day, when some purported feminist started banging on about them on a thread.

Definitely heard of WPUK, though. And been to some meetings.

I mean, it's also issues like media reach. Supporters of WPUK can get onto mainstream media. They lobby the labour party. They just have more mainstream reach.

I'm certainly not suggesting that WPUK work with any of these groups, but if they did, I think it's clear which group would have the resources and reach and which group would be needing the resources and reach. One of the reasons why WPUK wouldn't work with such groups is because they don't have anything to offer in that respect. You say the ADF has funding - well, I guess that makes them more useful.

This idea that man = powerful and woman = weak, the idea that this is some kind of static and eternal relationship, is one that I think does not stand up to any scrutiny. Just because a group is made up of men, doesn't mean it's automatically more powerful than a group of women. I just don't get that way of thinking. It's not like they're going into unarmed combat, or a game of rugby. When it comes to political strategising, women can certainly hold their own.

Look at KJK. She's a genius tactician. That's why groups like HoO want to cover what she's doing.

Why do the actual proper actual left wing proper feminists keep giving free publicity to small, irrelevant far right groups?

The BNP have 26 members.

How many members does WPUK have? I've no idea, but I've been to meetings put on by them where there's been more than 100 people there, maybe closer to 200.

So let's say WPUK have 200 supporters minimum (I'm sure it's way, way more than that).

That already makes them nearly 10 times as influential as the BNP, just on numbers alone.

Unless you think that a white man is worth 10 of a woman? But surely you don't think that?

Just because some white men run the BNP, it doesn’t follow that all white men run the BNP.

Just because all white men as a class together hold disproportionate social power, it doesn’t follow that every individual white man holds disproportionate social power, or that the small number of white men running the BNP are able to access and wield the power of the entire white male class.

And actual lol that no-one had ever heard of ADF until recently.

They're hugely powerful in the States and, I believe, over 100 countries in the world if you keep an eye on such things.

HoO more niche agreed (although I'd come across them in articles about the grooming gangs), but by the same token how many people outside of women's rights and/or feminism have heard of WPUK?

BNP run by white men, the most powerful social group. Have won seats in elections before.

Hearts of Oak also run by men, see above.

ADF international UK. Funded and supported by ADF, a powerful lobby group with global links.

MN's usual line on WPUK is that they're ineffective and haven't achieved anything. Surprising to see them positioned as more powerful than one of the leading Christian rights organisations in the world tbh.

I think JB is very smart and she has done some exceptional research especially on the sex industry. But goodness me she has some blind spots.

Does she know she's middle class, by the way? This whole column was written around people she has pissed off at North London dinner parties

LangClegsInSpace I find that article on motherhood odd. A glaring blind spot about what it actually entails - it comes across as immature and a bit embarrassing. Stick to talking about what you know and understand JB.

Yeah, I think you might have hit the nail on the head there.

I think it's clear that leftist feminists regard all relations as power relations and have no concept of equal exchange. It's all about who has power in the situation, who's oppressing who. The idea that a situation could arise where no one is being oppressed just does not compute.

Plus, I've said this before, but I don't think Julie Bindel is all that smart. She's like a dog with a bone when it comes to VAWG - and I say that with admiration - but she's not much of a thinker.