to let you know how men use the Equality Act to undermine women's spaces

[pisacake]

This is Liam. Liam was a 17-year-old Harry Potter fan (photo here from his Twitter).

twitter.com/iamLilyTM/status/639376063655739392

Liam doesn't appear to have too much interest in running, but nonetheless got very upset that there are women-only runs, in addition to the thousands that are open to men.

He thinks this is similar to apartheid, or Rosa Parks being told to go to the back of the bus. twitter.com/iamLilyTM/status/637324189733666816 (August 2015)

Being kept out annoys Liam. (And a lot of other MRAs alike who get REALLY angry at not being allowed to join, despite their being literally thousands of other places to run.)

But wait! An idea! If Liam says he is a girl, he will be able to go wherever he likes including all those women-only runs he was so cruelly rebuffed from.

After all, at one time the Race for Life was able to be kept relatively man-free, as Cancer Research said:

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120528181520/raceforlife.cancerresearchuk.org/utilities/faqs/who-can-enter/index.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20120528181520/raceforlife.cancerresearchuk.org/utilities/faqs/who-can-enter/index.html

"Under the Gender Recognition Act 2004 we are happy to accept entries from individuals who possess a female birth certificate or gender recognition certificate. However, as Race for Life is a female-only event we have a promise and responsibility to our female supporters to ensure our Race for Life events are represented by women only. Therefore, if you do not have either a gender recognition certificate or a female birth certificate, we are afraid you will not be able to participate in Race for Life. "

But this didn't last long! The Equality Act 2010 came along and it said

"A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process [of changing gender]". So anyone who is even THINKING about changing gender is protected, and you better be careful about crossing them.

So Raceforlife quickly deleted the requirement for a GRC, and just to confirm this.

twitter.com/CharlotteMedler/status/604486954785357824

"Hey @raceforlife what is your opinion on pre-op women running? Does having a wang mean I can't do it? Let me know, pls."

The reply:
"hello, transgender women are welcome to take part in our events, so we'd love to have you :)"

Message has got through loud and clear to Liam, a few months later Liam says he is a girl called Lily (this declaration isn't really accompanied by any action, though he has had one Gender clinic appointment, where he got some handouts about hormones).

He tells his school. Some people, including his younger sister, are unhappy about his behaviour.

But not to worry, he looks up 'solicitor' on Google, and finds a firm of solicitor who represent teenage Harry Potter fans wanting access to women & girls spaces, completely for free! www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/this-trans-teen-threatened-her-school-with-legal-action-to-w Awesome! Free lawyers!Totally no consequences!

Emboldened, he moves on, with his MRA activity, getting a woman kicked kicked out of a neighbouring constituency Labour party:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5087503/All-Labour-officials-local-committee-resign.html

Then he's elected women's officer in his own CLP.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-teenager-lily-madigan-voted-in-as-a-labour-women-s-officer-mwchkhzq8

Then people point out that he seems to own a Twitter account with blowjob, rape, Jimmy Savile & curry jokes. He says it's fake then it's pointed out it's dated 2013 so unlikely to be, and finally he blames his younger brother for the acocunt and says his family is racist, sexist and homophobic and that's why he has moved on from them.

www.kentlive.news/news/kent-news/transgender-labour-womens-officer-rochester-817234

Said brother is not impressed and calls him out publicly for throwing him under the bus

twitter.com/madigan_smurf/status/933760359810428928

Lily/Liam is a big fan of Jeremy Corbyn, who for his own part has said that, as a genuine 100% authentic transwoman, Lily/Liam can do whatever he wants. www.facebook.com/MedwayLabour/posts/1506650112756340

As if all these weren't enough, he's now being sponsored for a Women in Leadership programme in by Tris Osborne, a (male, natch) Labour candidate in Luton. twitter.com/cllrtrisosborne/status/934368405993508864

Rosa Parks eat your heart out eh? Look who's got the last laugh now! Silly women wanting a race without men in it!

Oh yeah, that RTN tweet is entirely intended to rile. Complaining about the RfL exposes him as a teenager who is very angry with women. And that feeling is being fuelled by the Labour Party

I'm ashamed that I typed I know see rather than I now see in my last post. It was a typo but I can only apologise

Part of the problem is is that this is being driven by momentum, who are positioning their members at local clp groups and voting their members in to replace the old labour (what they consider the blairites) unfotunately most clps are small as most people really arent that politically active at a grass roots level, so it doesnt take many votes to oust the current people (its happened at my local one. I know the person who is rallying the troops for each and every vote.
Lily is a useful pawn in all this as the young tend to be more fervent and ideologically driven.
Lily could have been a frog and they would have been voted in. This was not about promoting trans rights, but its useful virtue signalling along the way. This is about replacing grass roots teams with momentum members and driving Labour policy in that direction. Women arent and never have been a consideration. Were just collateral damage in all this
The only way to get round this is to become politically active and for women to start getting involved in politics, joining and attending their CLP meetings and starting to push the vote towards people they want to see in power.
It could probably be achieved with less thahn a hundred women per area and we could take over and drive CLPs in the dorection we want. But unfortunately most women are too caught up in family life, work and often just treading water to keep going in the current times and have little energy left over for this and the TRA's and momentum are swooping in and engineering a grass roots take over of the labour party.

" I know see that Lily's big advocate who is supporting Lily in his application to the Jo Cox Leadership thing (if Lily is actually applying) lost the VP election by 15 votes."

Not VP, but vice members officer. Vice chairman is Teresa Murray, the previous women's officer.

Thanks for the correction @pisacake. I’m not involved in LP politics at a local level but this is beginning to seem more and more like a Robert Galbraith novel

@MillicentFawcett, that's interesting about the votes. On that Twitter thread, Jason Patrick, who is also from Momentum, says that there were about 20 spoiled papers and abstentions on the Women's Officer vote.

Thanks for the analysis, pisa.

Lily is lying like a cheap rug about the application to the Jo Cox programme.

How depressing to hear about the goings on in the Labour movement. And annoying to as the Tories are so weak it would not take a lot to topple them. But instead of Labour being ready and able to capitalise on that, it is being (further) destroyed from within.

And then with the revelation on sexual assualt suddeninly being taken seriously, we also have this upsurge it the trans aganda.

Its like there are these invisible forces that keep the right wing and/or patriarchy (depending on your view) in power even at its most (outwardly) hapless.

pfff :(

Yes, thank you to Pisacake for bringing this together so clearly

Fwiw in response to the guardian article about the momentum ethics code we have a few tweets:

Wes Streeting MP @ wesstreeting
#QTWTAIN - No way I'm signing up to outsource my thinking to a third party organisation.

And

Mike Gapes @ mikegapes
I joined the Labour Party. I did not sign up to a Trotskyist party or a Stalinist cult.

There are MPs who see this for exactly what it is.

That's great Red.

I just put this on the other thread, but for some reason the BBC put this short film about Lily "starting treatment" (actually going to a gender workshop) on Nov 6

Ignore my last post - it was Nov 6 2016 that the Beeb posted it

Red - you might find this interesting reading on Momentum and how it describes itself and this on the code of ethics (which seems to have been a "thing" since early Sept)

In case anyone's still following Lily's shenanigans he spent yesterday claiming not to have applied for Jo Cox award (which does seem to be an automatic pathway into becoming a PPC ) and accusing Lucy Bannerman of being a liar.

Before then, around midnight saying 'I've just submitted my app for Jo Cox award' (bear in mind that the deadline was the end of yesterday), and getting lots of simpering support from handmaidens. He also said that 'integrity is important', as in Lucy Bannerman has none, he has lots.

I think, if you check their profiles, pisacake, they are definitely not 'maidens', except in their little dysfunctional world. 😉

Hmm, you're right a very substantial proportion are a massed trans lobby coming to cheer on their own.

But there are definitely a good few handmaidens as well

Just when we think women’s rights are progressing, a bunch of humans with male chromosomes and genitalia are attempting to take it from under us. TRA’s seem to have very similar views to MRA’s interestingly. It feels like infiltration. If you can’t beat them, join them. Interestingly even my iPad autocorrects Male with a capital M. But not female to a capital F.

If George Orwell had put this into a novel 60 odd years people would have laughed.

Thanks for setting the chronology down though - it's interesting, if shocking, reading.

How, just how have we ended up in this scenario? It defies all sense.

It defies sense because it's not about logic, and if you look at it in terms of logic you'll never get it.

It's all about identity and emotion. Note the use of emotional blackmail and this idea of hope through out.

Want an example of how powerful it is?

<a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DxOqS5hbafw8&ved=0ahUKEwjv1Ymxlt_XAhVIPRoKHVajAo4QwqsBCCkwAA&usg=AOvVaw28wJ8rgIvytQS1pgH9sTY4" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DxOqS5hbafw8&ved=0ahUKEwjv1Ymxlt_XAhVIPRoKHVajAo4QwqsBCCkwAA&usg=AOvVaw28wJ8rgIvytQS1pgH9sTY4

This party political broadcast from the election earlier this year.

There is no substance to it at all. No policy. Just a vague slogan and an emotional tune set to some pictures.

But boy is it good. It's the single best party political broadcast I've ever seen. (And I have had an interest having studied it). It brought a lump to my throat, and had a big impact on me despite knowing exactly what it was about and what it's aim was as a piece of propaganda.

Positive propaganda is using far more effective than negative too. So attacks on trans politics are at a disadvantage compared to a vision of utopia of 'rights for all' which the trans community are pushing. It's why the Remain campaign failed and why Trump won and why May didn't get her landslide.

To win this war, feminists much come up with a vision for the future that is positive - the problem being that they are competing for an unachievable utopia and there isn't a way to compete with that realistically. When you lie you can promise the earth. If you keep it deliberately vague then others with place their own understanding of what utopia is, to this grand vision. This ultimately leaves it open to abuse and hijacking by powerful groups who impose their agenda on the vague notion, with those who believe in the notion totally unaware of this.

This deadly combination almost makes it an unstoppable jugganaut. I only spotted the Brexit one two weeks before the referendum. The thing is identifying what's going on, and showing how it works to people can break the spell with some. Shatter the illusion. Describe how propaganda works, and how it works on EVERYONE. No one is immune to it, but if you know how to spot it, you can think a little more and ask more questions about what you are being told to believe.

There is an irony here: many Remainers laughed at Leavers for being stupid and falling for it. Yet you'll find many of these people totally oblivious to this, or if they see it, make excuses for it, in the same way as leavers did, because ultimately it achieves their goal and in their eyes that's all that matters. Not realising the real consequences of it.

I find it frustrating as I see legitimate arguments from political movements in this country totally obliterated in what in essence is a grab for power by authoritarians who have a lot less interest in the people than they profess to have.

Populism is a crock of shit.

So what can you do in the face of such hopelessness?

Well for starters, don't give up and don't play their game.

The problem is that so many people see the alternative as worse and aren't digging their heels and criticising their own side enough because 'ugh fascism' or 'ugh stalinism' and 'ugh look where were ended up with the neo-liberals got us'.

The only way you are going to get a future which isn't utter bullshit is by digging in heels and saying all these visions are a pile of pants and rejecting it all and not being afraid to criticise your 'own side's and applaud 'the enemy' for the quality of the argument at hand rather than resorting to this tribalism.

Look into yourself honestly and ask just how much you are buying into this tribalism. Are you being fair here when you criticise? You might not agree with X policy, but does it has a good idea at the heart of it, that maybe could be worked on to make it better? Find those grains of grit that produce pearls. Dont just be a critic all the time, come up with constructive criticism which has value instead. Resist becoming part of the jugganaut. Prove that making this country better is more important and that you really do sign up to and believe in the principle Jo Cox championed.

Prove you know what it means more than Lily. It's about democracy and liberty. Believe in democracy. Understand you do have a role in that. No matter who small, and it's not (just) about standing as an MP or being on a picket line every week.

Jo's way wins if enough people buy into it. Corbyn, has ironically proved this. But Jo's way wins only if people truly understand what she said and meant rather than allowing it to be hijacked. It's something that is about democracy and liberty. Revive it. Fight for it.

Be more political yourself in whatever small way you can, even if you can't join a party or don't want to. It's not just about the bit battles it's also about little localised ones.

The only thing that will save us is by all becoming 'extremist democrats', in the mould of the likes of Gina Miller. (She is a Lily). Ask questions. Resist. Try and get people thinking and fire them up to be passionate that democracy means them, and that saying 'they are all as bad as each other' or 'theres nothing I can do' is bullshit and exactly what groups like trans activists want you to do.

Can't make meetings because of child care issues? Demand a way you can be included despite this. Why not demand political meetings you can bring the kids?! Or that there are online meetings. Or some other sort of solution to the problem. Being told you just have to get a babysitter is not acceptable. It's prejudice against people who are unable to do this because of their sex and are disproportionately unable to attend meetings as a result. Swamp local parties with complaints about poor attitudes. Ask why aren't you entitled to this type of thing?

Reframe things.

Afterall that broadens the participation of women who otherwise would not be involved in politics, doesn't it?. If people like momentum say something, then play them at their own fucking game with this one. If they don't do it demand why not. This is what Lily did isn't it? As say, the little local battles are as big and as important as the huge ones.

Everyone has power. They just don't know how to access and harness it effectively. Be angry and turn that anger into passion. Go forth and be 'bloody difficult women'.

red your post has made me feel 🏋️‍♀️🏋️‍♀️🏋️‍♀️

And just to reiterate: please join a political party everyone. Doesn't matter which one, choose the one you like the most. And even if you can't do that, write to your MP, and go and see your MP in their surgery meetings. And join a feminist group, online only if needs be. Red's so right to say there is an authoritarian power grab in this country right now and we must resist (and resisting can be writing politely worded letters which state your views).

I don't understand. Isn't Trump against normalization of transvestite/transgender men's demands?

And I'd still like to know what Brendan Cox thinks about this appointment of "Lily" ....

The situation in the US is slightly different.

The left in the us forced through the bathroom act. This was too much for a lot of women (typically white working class) and tipped them from Hillary to Trump.

So trump has capitalised on the backlash.

He more generally a is against trans rights as trans rights are the politics of the democrats and perceived to be liberal. (even though they are in reality authoritarian) because of the way the culture war is different. Trump does not have to put up the pretence of being liberal in anyway. In fact it acts to his advantage not to.

In the UK, it's the Conservatives who are putting forward the authoritarian GRA proposals which are being backed by Labour. This is because both sides wish to appear liberal as the votes to tip the balance are liberals. Neither party wishes to appear too authoritarian for that reason.

Yes it is confusing, but the basic thing is who wants and needs liberal votes and how politics differ in both countries.

OK, got it. Thanks, Red. That sounds like a reasonable interpretation.

• I'm happy to take whatever good points come from whichever source.