'Labour are abandoning women'

[Destinysdaughter]

Wanted to share this excellent article ( written by a man ) I just saw on Twitter. It's pretty long and for many of us isn't saying anything new, but it's worth a read as it makes some good points.

medium.com/@tom_farr/the-left-are-abandoning-women-and-in-doing-so-abandoning-everything-they-stand-for-51fd63457d8c

Agree, an excellent article.

@TomFarr your article truly is wonderful. Clear, explanatory without preaching undertones or condescension, and manages to hit the nail on the head time and time again. Thank you for taking the time to write it.

Favourite quote

"To expand the scope of what it is to be a “woman” (i.e. a biologically adult female) to mean that but also literally anybody else is to deny those same women the ability and fundamental language to describe their oppression and organise to dismantle it accordingly."

Yes, well done Tom!

Excellent article Tom, thank you.

Excellent article!

@TomFarr

It's a sad fact that people listen to men more than they listen to women. And I doubt you will get the abuse that women come in for.

Nonetheless, it's good when men speak out.

I have to admit, I thought Tom Farr was a pseudonym. I was absolutely certain you were female.

And that's a compliment!

Irishfeminist
I get where you’re coming from but to me it’s just heartening to have someone outside of the usual gender critical/rad fem tribe who shows good critical thinking skills.

Excellent. Should we make him an honorary TERF?

Prepare yourself for a tsunami of TRA shit being rained upon you on twitter, Tom. They are vicious and unrelenting.

@tomfarr - thank you. Really well written and well argued article.

As others say, don your hard hat and flameproof cardie - you’re about to get a sense of just what kind of hatred is directed at women for expressing these views.

Hold fast sir, and screw your courage to the sticking point.

Welcome to mumsnet. Stick around :)

Great article Tom. I really enjoyed it and thought it was well written.

I just have a small suggestion - I found the use of italicising words for emphasis a little too heavy in places. For me, it was too much and kept drawing my attention away from the piece rather than helping it to flow.

Most of the sentences you used this in I felt the reader could be trusted to understand the gravity of the word italicised by themselves.

I only mention it because it did affect my engagement with the piece.

I bet the tra's don't come in quite so hot and heavy as tom is, I assume, a chap. It's not chaps that they want to 'suck their ladydicks'. That would surely be boring old mainstream gayish, not speshul.

Great article, Tom, and welcome to Mumsnet.

I hope you’ll stick around on this board.

That's a fantastic article - well-informed & very well written. Kudos to Tom Farr!

Excellent article.

Be aware. There is a massive & well organised campaign going on at present on Twitter, to get gender critical people blocked & banned.

Superb.

I am seriously wearied by the number of people on the left, especially men, who seem to think being a socialist or a liberal is an internal virtue and not a political position. Once you decide you have that virtue then the correct views on everything will automatically flow from it, and you will be in the right, and whatever you do/say/believe/ignore will be the right thing to do/say/believe/ignore. Like the antisemitism rows recently - "but nobody here can be anti-Semitic, we're the good guys!" No, that is not how it works.

Lefty blokes especially seem to fall foul of this very much when it comes down to things that don't break neatly along political lines. Both anti-Semitism and misogyny have a really rich history on the left, and there's such resistance to confronting them because no no no, that's not us, that's the other lot. No, it's you, too. Shut up lecturing Jews about anti-Semitism and women about feminism, and LISTEN for a minute.

(I am a socialist, although I've given up entirely on discussing it with men because so many of them were so terrible at any kind of self-reflection. I have seriously had a self-proclaimed socialist feminist man say I'm wrong to criticise exploitative surrogacy in developing countries, because the women are getting paid. WHAT.)

Nice one, Tom. Hits the nail on the head.

And this woman is abandoning the LibDems, as of today.

Excellent post 53

Over the past few days 53rdWay I've been reading a fair amount of argument from lefty blokes denying that Labour has a problem with anti-semitism. "Are you saying Jeremy is anti-semitic? Well? Are you, eh, eh?"

In just about every sentence I've read I heard echoes of "there's only one valid position and that's that transwomen are women".

It's like seeing completely different arguments having been formed on the same template.

Excellent article. I spoke to 2 women at my work yesterday and pointed them in the direction of the petition. They couldn’t believe it and said ‘but that’s ridiculous ‘ in an Emperors new clothes type of way. They could not believe this was actually real and happening. I think many women know nothing about this. I only did through mumsnet. I don’t do twitter etc.
I’m not sure who to vote for now at the next election. Seems like nobody.

Shulamith Firestone, in a letter to the Guardian in the 1960s:

"We say to the left: in this past decade you have failed to live up to your rhetoric of revolution. You have not reached the people. And we won’t hitch ourselves to your poor donkey. There are millions of women out there desperate enough to rise. Women’s liberation is dynamite. And we have more important things to do than to try to get you to come around. You will come around when you have to, because you need us more than we need you… Fuck off, left. You can examine your navel by yourself from now on. We’re starting our own movement."

Spot on 53rdway

Tories/the right are the bad guys so we must automatically be opposed to them on everything, because they are wrong and bad and we are right and good. Except life doesn't work that way.