Helen Joyce asks very pertinent questions about SEEN.

All sounds great. And I agree with most of what you say.

The problem for me was coming on with a new username and hectoring women on here.

I suppose it's key to work out the difference between constructive and useful criticism and what is what you call 'sniping' and 'sly jabs'. Which is what I meant by the need for clarity and directness.

I've been involved with various lesbians groups, disrupted Pride and my MP's face falls when I come through the door because I just won't let up. He's gone from 'You're paranoid, woman' to being GC. Quietly so, but it's traction.

Well done! 👏

Thank you, this is the kind of detailed response I appreciate: reasons why and so on instead of the kind of sly jabs that WPUK take.

Have you contacted SM about this? I've had contact with Helen and Maya, though they're very busy and they can take their time responding. Tell them what you say here.

I'm an ordinary person and all I can say is that they both listened to what I had to say. I also put some very ordinary, working class women in touch with them and those women felt heard and seen by HJ and MF and have gone on to further involvement with SM. I'm not lobbying for SM, I'm just talking from personal experience.

Who the fuck am I?, you ask. A lesbian who since 2008, when a man walked into my local Women's Centre and announced that he was exercising his right as a woman to attend lesbian events there, has been trying to stop the juggernaut. I've been posting on here since around 2015/16. I was one of those purged with LangCleg, then allowed back without explanation later, only to be locked out again for writing about AGP. On here I've posted at different times as Shedbuilder and Patti Hews and other names I don't remember.

Back in 2008 and in the few years that followed I lost at least half my friends and parts of my family because I'd taken the hateful bigot path. I started a couple of social groups for GC people, one women-only and one mixed. From those groups we've created a support group for people whose children have identified as trans and some of the parents in the original groups have formed a school-watch group and started tackling some of the issues going on in local schools. We encourage everyone in those groups to DO stuff, not to just come along each fortnight for a grumble. As a result, the LA and the Health Board have been getting feedback and questions they'd rather not face and we've seem some rewriting of action plans and material on their websites. A drop in the bucket, but drip by drip...

A couple of the people who are part of those groups went on to be involved in starting SEEN networks in their sectors — which is why I'm bloody annoyed with what HJ has said because I know what they had to go through to do it.

I've been involved with various lesbians groups, disrupted Pride and my MP's face falls when I come through the door because I just won't let up. He's gone from 'You're paranoid, woman' to being GC. Quietly so, but it's traction.

I'm one of the early members of LGBA and I run an LGBA Friends group. I go out every few weeks with WRNers and LWSers and others of all persuasions, leafletting and talking to people on High Streets about women's and children and LGB rights. I've been involved in setting up rallies, organising protests outside events, making banners and parading them when necessary. In the last few weeks I've worked with a couple of local gay men to block a proposed LGBTQ+ children and young peoples' group orchestrated by a man with a very dodgy past. That's just the half of it that I can say here without identifying myself too clearly.

Because I understand how hard it is to stand up and be counted, and how difficult it is to get anything approaching a movement going, I try not to knock other women who are doing something, even if they're not women I agree with on much. There are too many people in this fight who don't do much that's constructive or helpful but criticise and snigger about those who do. I was there at the event at Filia in Cardiff that sparked the Elephant in the Room debate, in which I participated. It's those sly attempts to smear other women that I hate most. I'm not going to play these purity games. I come onto FWR sometimes and open threads like this and half the contributors can be read as being transallies, posting sly jabs at women doing something in order to demoralise and deter. Magdalen Burns wouldn't be having it and neither am I. 'What would Magdalen Burns do' is my mantra.

Yeah, I'd say that some of us have a problem with WPUK precisely because WPUK don't just do their thing and let other people do other things, they seem much more focused on having a go at anyone who's not doing activism in precisely the way approved by WPUK.

I don't think Helen is like that. I'm sure I disagree with her on lots of things, but she's not someone who digs her heels in and won't listen to a critical point of view.

All fair comments @GustyFinknottle

For criticism to be helpful it needs to be clear, specific and open.

I'm with you. I support SM, I'll forever be grateful to HJ for ripping through the veil with her clarity of thought and expression and advancing the cause with Trans. I don't want SM to be in charge either and don't regard them in that light, perhaps because I'm a lesbian and so coming at things from a Sexuality Matters angle, as well as a Sex Matters one. I too have said in this thread that I'm annoyed with HJ for what she's said on this subject.

Email or tweet Helen and tell her what you think. I will. I've met her on several occasions. She listens.

What I can't bear, from the women posting here, from certain members of the Brighton mean girls, from the purity police, is the snide sniping at women who've put their reputations and possibly even their lives on the line to actually do something to get us out of this mess.

Not wishing to derail, and I expect there is a thread or two about this that MN's infamous search function will fail to find for me, but would you mind giving me a précis of what happened with KPSS and Sex Matters?

Criticizing someone's rubbish behaviour isn't being 'against' them. I do it to my children and there's no one I'm more in support of (nor who I love more) than them. And I note the hypocritical double standards applied by some posters in that HJs article is fine, but if we say what we don't like or are concerned might happen in the future with SM we're 'against' them. Why does HJ get to say what she thinks and we don't?

I donated money I really needed to spend elsewhere to Maya's case. She did an enormous amount of good with that case but I'm afraid I really don't like the way SM have behaved recently on several issues. They have huge blindspots IMO, particularly around class and safeguarding and the reality of life for those less well off than them.

SM increasingly seem to want to control the GC voice and be the sole representative to the government, but, as demonstrated here, they don't represent all sex realist women and arguably particularly not those most vulnerable to the harms of genderism.

I think losing KPSS is a huge loss - they achieved more practically to protect the most vulnerable women than any other group so far and it didn't take them 30 years. SM did not behave well to KPSS in my opinion.

With all due respect, who the fuck are you?

As for SM - many of us here are long time supporters of them. FWIW I agree with HJ that organisations need to be reflexive and open to criticism. That also needs to be applied to SM, and I would actually expect her to welcome that approach.

Worth considering that HJ has said it will 'take thirty years' to fix genderism.

Is that an accurate assessment of the situation? Is it realistic, or is it fatalism?

If genderism could be resolved quite swiftly by reversing capture and fixing legal/law points, then why would it take so long, and would it be necessary to continue to campaign against it should we win the really fairly small changes to law that we need to protect women and children's rights?

I agree with this. I don't want to see SM go but I was mightily unimpressed with the KPSS and pronouns for favoured AGP messes. I also thought that SM and other groups failing to support a public inquiry after the Cass Review, stank.

I wish them luck with their lobby day but I'm struggling to see the point of it. Or why we should make childcare arrangements and take annual leave for that, when they didn't support SSA and James Esses.

There was also a petition to hold an inquiry that all those groups did not support. Why? It's illogical. What do they have to lose, exactly? What would have been wrong with an inquiry?

And then they've the brass neck to hold an event for SEENs, then two days later HJ writes what does rather look like a snidey blog post about about SEENs. And says she can't remember it. Come on. We aren't stupid.

What is it, exactly, that you have against SM? The fact that they've managed to get some traction?

I have nothing against Sex Matters, unless they try to undermine other womens rights groups by dishonest argument and prevent anyone else also getting traction.

And that article was a dishonest argument (altough honest enough to set out the sleight of hand up front).

There are cats and there are dogs - I will refer to both as 'mammals'.

Mammals are a problem because they bark a lot, and some people buy mammals to look threatening. This mammal is part of an organised gang that steals picnic baskets in Yosemite.

Therefore we need to be wary of Tiddles because she's a mammal and might maul people.

I want there to be a plurality of groups so all women are represented. I don't want to diminish Sex Matters per se, I just don't want them to be "in charge" of everything GC and I think Helen's comments here are a bit rich, really.

I also think that there needs to be a look at whether having a group for people with certain characteristics (or opinions, in the case of SEEN) means others get left unrepresented. Is it fair to have employees who don't have access to representation because they don't tick a box someone thought was relevant.

Those people who don't feel their views are being represented would then either form their own affinity group, as others before them had done, or not. Reaction, counter-reaction. The way the world works.

Stop being so passive. Be like generations of black people, women, disabled, LGB people have had to be — stand up and do something to ensure that your voice is heard. No one ever got things changed by waiting for someone else to come along and do the heavy lifting.

What happened here on FWR? When did so many of you turn into people who do nothing but stand and point at other women? Have you all been sent from TRA HQ to spread disillusion and demoralisation?

What is it, exactly, that you have against SM? The fact that they've managed to get some traction?

What a disingenuous reply, and disrespectful too to these volunteers who are not only doing this for free and fitting it in between other responsibilities, but who are also risking their livelihoods by doing so. Unlike SM for whom this now IS their livelihood.

I agree. I've not been impressed by some of their sharp elbow tactics recently. I've funded them monthly since they've started but I'm reconsidering that.

Several people have said that a lot of trouble started with what had been LGB networks and women's networks. That suggests an issue with the way groups like this can and do behave in the workplace.

Would you go into more detail about this 'trouble' that started with the creation of women's and LGB networks? There were women's networks and LGB networks when I started working in the 80s. How do you think that these networks affected the way women and LGB people behave in the workplace? Who was impacted by any change in the behaviour of women and LGB people?

She’s right, transparency matters. Which raises a question - who funds Sex Matters?

It's set up opaquely so we'll never know who the major benfactors are, there's several staff making a comfortable living out of it now - it would be shame for everything to end before they reach retirement, right?

Absolutely, SM should also be encouraged to be reflexive and open and accountable.

If one is trying to address a cultural and structural issue then it needs thought about how reactive responses risk mirroring the problem and how to avoid that.

And any group set up to deal with an issue risks perpetuating the issue in order to extend its own existence.

Isn’t Helen just describing politics?

I understand that it’s a risk that SEENs, whatever good they do right now, if they are successful might morph into organizations that those that currently support them might be horrified by. But that’s the nature of power. And if you aren’t prepared to develop your power to engage in the fight, you’ve already lost.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Maybe the end game is to change the form of workplaces affinity groups all together?

Several people have said that a lot of trouble started with what had been LGB networks and women's networks. That suggests an issue with the way groups like this can and do behave in the workplace.

I think a principle with a group like this has to be that they actually represent the real views of all people with the "affinity". Which means, all of those people are going to have, in some sense, to be invested - they have to be involved in selecting leadership and contributing to policy. That creates some real sticky issues though with regard to forcing participation.

I also think that there needs to be a look at whether having a group for people with certain characteristics (or opinions, in the case of SEEN) means others get left unrepresented. Is it fair to have employees who don't have access to representation because they don't tick a box someone thought was relevant.

I would say that if SEEN is really serious about the problem of gender woo in the workplace they should be looking very carefully at how these groups became captured and why the employer accepted the recommendations they gave. That's the real weakness that needs to be dealt with.

So start a thread about it. No one is stopping you I imagine people would be interested.

Sex Matters is a lobby groups, so it's mandate, trajectory, and structure is differernt than workplace affinity groups like SEEN, the answers to the same questions aren't likely to be the same for both groups.

My opinion of HJ has just sunk like a stone.

What a disingenuous reply, and disrespectful too to these volunteers who are not only doing this for free and fitting it in between other responsibilities, but who are also risking their livelihoods by doing so. Unlike SM for whom this now IS their livelihood.

100% agree with this.