www.socialistparty.org.uk/campaign/Women/27550
Hi Mumsnet,
I'm a young woman about to start a degree this year who's been lurking for the past week or two after hearing about how you are all horrible gender critical old nags, much to my interest. From what I've seen and heard I'm concerned that the world of academia is going to be a little less welcoming to a working class woman such as myself who has a 50p charity shop Female Eunuch to thank for her introduction to feminism nearly ten years ago, than when I first studied on the south coast for a year in 2013.
This was when pronouns and gender politics were really coming up. It was the first time, as someone who's political background involved groups based in the north, that I'd been sat down in a circle and had to wait for everybody to tell everybody their preferred pronoun before we could get on to the meeting. There was all sorts of funny hand signals resembling jazz hands and suchlike that people adopted as signifier s of agreement/disagreement. I encountered polyamoury, asexuals, LGBT clubbing, non-binary people, safe spaces, no-platforming and radical reading groups for the first time. It was all really cool except it was the posher Uni for more smart kids that had plenty of Occupy action unlike my ex-poly that couldn't get more than five students to a lecturers picket line to my embarassment. I had a lecturer that was a member of the Socialist Workers Party that I'd joined when I was 17 for a year and a half before I realised I'd accidentally joined a cult that preferred paper sales, copious amounts of alcohol, young women and rape apology to actually teaching people about marxism. they called myself and others 'creeping feminists' when we left.
So...
I know how easy it is to get hooked into what's now called 'liberation politics' by the National Union of Students when you're a youngster. I know how easily young people can be manipulated by older people into doing things they wouldn't normally have done for the sake of all manner of causes. I pissed years away with faux-marxists, faux-anarchists with trust funds when I should have been studying. Eventually I found myself up the duff, moved back north and signed on the dole. Found everything was as dull as it always had been here and cemented my autonomy with Marie Stopes. Wasted another year victimising myself fighting with the DWP before the universal credit rollout. It's crazy to me that its literally years ago that in small northern shithole towns we were warning of the implications of UC for women in abusive relationships on bedroom tax demos and now this is reality. I tried to engage with a lot of unemployed people and I've seen the fantastic work that DPAC did but UKIP and Brexit came along and pretended Johnny Foreigner's like my boyfriend were more dangerous than the Tory party. I got bored of having the same conversations. Now, I see that perhaps because of these experiences I can add something to others conversations.
I haven't been 'active' in a long time. I've had my own personal struggles against the shitstem - slum landlords, evictions, endless sanctions, agencies, black/casual labour, problematic relationships - but for the most part I became and still am very disillusioned and cynical about the future. What I've linked to is a good example of how it's not just tory councils that are the enemy of working class women. This particular Womens Aid was saved by a very courageous longstanding activist and proud feminist that ended up being sacked by the trustees of the charity that she herself had appointed, for sticking her head above the parapet. Their campaign will be of interest to many of you as it was run on a basis of keeping the space women-only (this does not means trans exclusionary - I'm not aware of the campaigners ever making a public statement about trans women).
I've read a lot about research being blocked, women being no-platformed and the replacement of sex with gender. I'm worried about what it's going to mean for me in my next decade of studies and work experience in an environment in which much can be taught and much can be silenced that I might not agree with but will be afraid to say that I do. Climate, water, agricultural, resource based disasters are literally just around the corner making the whole gender/sex disagreement seem pretty meaningless a lot of the time too to tell the truth but nevertheless I do believe this exercise in doublethink and a growing deep need in the 'west' to follow and worship ideology is symptomatic of an economic system about to crash. I feel escapism, narcissism, isolation, dissociation and self-doubt are rife in this country. We have more refugees worldwide than have ever existed before. I believe the situation we are in is directly related to the historical silencing of women's -particular mothers- voices but I think I'd need a lot more characters to prove that.
I don't see this as being a world in which a child would benefit from being born into. I worry the experience of childbirth has been taken away from me by the 88% male parliamentarians and their global capitalist Ilk that will have made much of this world uninhabitable for future generations and I am angry and sad for my loss. I am angry not about British toilets but angry when I see men fighting for the right to have a womb transplanted into their bodies who apparently cannot see what I see, although they claim to have been feeling like myself for a very long time.