Julie Bindel,
"Read this if you are interested in some of the history of the tranocity:"
twitter.com/bindelj/status/1046466048659271680
from 2008
glamourousrags.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/bindel/
by roz kaveney
(extract)
I am joking of course. I do not for a second think that Julie Bindel will ever do anything real to placate us, though I was mildly surprised when she agreed to talk to Christine Burns. That at least was a step, though I am sure that she thought she was playing Christine and I am not sure that she was not right.
Christine is a fine campaigner for trans rights whom I have known and respected for many years. If anyone was going to talk to Julie Bindel, it was probably most sensible that it was Christine.
However, I don;t think she got enough out of Bindel to justify the idea that we should now back off Stonewall. It is clear that Julie Bindel still assumes that she has an absolute right to demand of the trans community that we engage in a ‘robust debate’ about our right to exist, and whether we should pursue surgery as an option, and a number of similar questions.
As I said the other week, this is Julie Bindel demanding the uncompensated access to trans people’s time and concern that has been the bedevilling feature of relationships between her sort of feminist and the trans community ever since the beginning of the 1970s." (continues)
(concludes)
"What Julie Bindel is asking for is not a debate: it is a capitulation. She is not interested in being persuaded, only in our doing what she says. Linda Bellos is someone who is genuinely prepared to accept that she may not understand trans people – that what we say about our lives is contrary to some of her sense of how things are – but that, in the end, we are serious people in charge of our own destinies: that at least is the impression I got of her position last time we talked some years ago.
Linda Bellos, though, is an adult with a real political past and not an over-rated, jumped-up,
self-important journalist.
We are not accountable to Julie Bindel and she cannot make us be.
In the end, though, this is not about her; this is about Stonewall.
Stonewall have been monumentally clueless and have angered a whole generation of trans and other activists. They need to find a way forward, and cosy little chats are not that way, which is why I will only talk to Ben Summerskill if anyone suggests some demands I can usefully make.
In a sense, what is going to happen outside the V&A is theatre, but so much of the daily grind of politics is, which does not mean that it is not real.
I am as old an activist as it gets, and I sit on committees when it is time to sit on committees, and meet with the Great and Good when it is time to meet the Great and Good, and swallow my anger and nod and smile.
Sometimes though, the point is to change things and change the rules of engagement, and standing in a street with banners is one of the ways in which we do that.
Much as I like the tea and biscuits side of things, this is shout in the streets time."