Having loved the feminist event I went to in Cheltenham, I decided to go to one in London on Sunday: Dissecting Gender, run by consented.co.uk.
It was a large event, 100+ people, and I'd estimate about one in eight were men. A previous event had been about masculinity so I could see why men who had attended that one might be interested in this one. However we were put into groups during the course of the event and, at the close of each session, in nearly every case it was the men in any group who gave their group's feedback and I appeared to be one of the only people who even noticed this, let alone were uncomfortable about this. I don't think the rest of them had any feminist understanding of group dynamics. At all.
It was very weird, and badly organized. From the outset it was clear that none of the people organizing it understood gender. They used sex and gender interchangeably. Imagine a feminist or even gender critical meeting without an understanding of gender. I kept coming back to the old saying "you can't make bricks without straw". You can't dissect gender unless you define it. Not only was gender not defined, no one seemed to think a definition mattered.
There were four groups, and you chose two. The first choice was between "Exploring white feminism and intersectionality" and "Decolonising Gender and patriarchy." The second was between performance art from a 21 year old transman and "Purple Drum: Misrepresentations: Linking media representation and violence against women of colour."
I thought it would be interesting to hear from the transman, but found it unbearable. To wild applause from the trendy audience, she described how much she loathed her body, that she had been forced to transition so as "not to die as a woman" and I was reminded of the lesbians I spoke to last summer who talked about the damage being done by the absence of role models and lesbian spaces in which butch lesbians find their peers and their culture. Transition was not making her happy, and I have a DC her age. All I could think about was the tragedy of her never coming to terms with her authentic self, and the physical harm done to her body. I found it so distressing that I snuck out and joined the other group. They were discussing women being catcalled by men in the street but using gender to mean sex at every turn. I wanted to ask whether men ask your gender identity before they catcall , but I genuinely thought by this time that such a comment would go clear over their heads. There was a half an hour Q and A at the end, and there was a lot I wanted to say, but I was so pissed off and discouraged that I just walked out at the end of the second session.
I met a couple of feminists during a break who, like me, thought it was a waste of money: a superficial event with sod all content, and a younger woman who wanted to explore feminism and who was not satisfied with what this event was offering. I recommended she join the Feminist board on Mumsnet, somewhat to her surprise, and can only hope she turns up.
I came home well cheesed off. My DC were very entertained. Apparently I have now met a mob of SJWs. The boys tell me these guys don't care if a cause makes no sense at all, so long as it's trendy. They were pretty trendy, it's true. Visually speaking, there was a wide range of ethnicity, but nearly everyone spoke perfect RP and it was clear that many were privately educated. I did feel quite angry at all these safe affluent young people cheering on a woman's self-destructive course. It's not their bodies that'll be damaged.
TLDR: Check out an event carefully before you spend your money. A surprising amount of people don't know that gender and sex are not the same. And there are a lot of very trendy people in Islington.