Jean Hatchet, new blog post

[SugarPlumFairy99]

jeanhatchet.blogspot.com/2019/01/why-i-wont-be-standing-up-for-women.html

This blog post from Jean is eye-opening. Working alongside anti-abortion, hard right groups undermines decades of feminism.

Shame on Posie. I agree with Jean, I will also be sitting down for women.

If you haven't seen it yet, here is the video from today's meeting in Washington, in the room in the building occupied by The Heritage Foundation [hint: this meeting was nothing to do with anyone British, let alone any British feminist!]

That video made me well up. The despair, the fear.

As did Natasha's, with the absolute rage.

I completely agree that the politics is totally different, and you need to understand it.

But that feeling, from those women, is universal.

this meeting was nothing to do with anyone British, let alone any British feminist

Just think that should be emphasised in case anyone making accusations out there feels like apologising

But that feeling, from those women, is universal.

This ^^

current thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a3492318-A-reminder-What-we-did-was-brilliant-Is-brilliant

FWIW, I think the free speech angle will wake up most people, and the really big peak-trans moment will come at the next Olympics.

Relevant to this, apparently the Japanese Diet has recently addressed suggestions that the requirement for "sterilization" (by which the people using that word mean that the removal of male genitalia is required for full legal transition) be dropped in terms of how their system handles transitioners (was DH who saw the news report so don't quote me on exact details). No change happening, and the last I heard the Olympic committee was putting in specific gender neutral toilets on the assumption that those were what trans people would use at the Olympic venues, so I anticipate some major confrontations at the Tokyo Olympics.

Posie's video hit me like a punch in the stomach too. I think a lot of TRAs don't understand the drive to protect children that mothers, and indeed many women who aren't mothers, have.

I think a lot of TRAs don't understand the drive to protect children that mothers, and indeed many women who aren't mothers, have.

Julia Long's speech includes a focus on the damage to young females bodies.
'Transgenderism & Lesbian Erasure'

When women were trying to win their fundamental right to vote in the U.S. women of ALL backgrounds joined forces in the fight, such as religious Quakers and lesbians and right-wing women and feminists and so on.

The left has effectively cut gender-identity-critical women off from all liberal or left-wing resources and media venues, and instead advocates, in one glowing radio or TV program or news article after another, the transing of even CHILDREN, with growth-stunting and permanently-sterilizing hormones, and surgical mutilations such as cutting off healthy breasts in girls as young as 13 and genital mutilation of girls and boys, women and men.

Quibbling at this point over which mainstream venues we should or shouldn't go to in order to be seen and heard around this extremely important issue, as every day more children and adults are sterilized and mutilated, and the legal protections of women and girls are destroyed, is a waste of precious time and energy best served FIGHTING BACK and DISSEMINATING INFORMATION.

@Jeanhatchet - only just catching up with this. You are an amazing person. Hope you feel you can return to twitter soon, I (along with many others) will miss you.

Somewhere in this thread I posted a comment of what I felt at the time had happened. That I supported Jean's right to not be involved in any way with right wing groups, but that it was conincidence that 2 meetings were happening in Washington one involving UK feminists and one with a platform with the Heritage Foundation.

Unfortunately over the last couple of days I now realise I was foolish to accept statements that promoted this view of the meetings being happistance.

It was not only Jean who felt misled. Some of the Resisters groups withdrew from the planned day of action because through ommission rather than direct lies they were not told of connections to the HF.

Worse still that attempts by some women to sort out the politics of this, ie if no one else with give women a voice is it okay to work / be funded by the right / christian fundamentalists, have descended into name calling and personal insults.

I accept that women whether as groups or individual entrepreneurs have every right to organise and make public statements based on their view points. What they dont have the right to do is decide that either other women are too dim to be part of the planning /politics and they should just meekly tag along or that knowing that what they are doing in their partnering would be challenged just remain silent or actively lie.

I hope in the long run that more comes out of this that a publicity stunt to promote t shirts but at this stage the blow back looks like trust is going to be hard to rebuild.

Or to trust the motives of others.

So apologies to Jean. I did support you, but thought it a bit personal.

But if someone had done that to me I would have been effing angry and upset.

The right are funding nothing. They gave a meeting space stumbledin. Apr user name in these circumstances

apt

I wonder about the need to try to reignite things here.
Jean Hatchet, The ReSisters, Posie Parker, Venice Allen, Julia Long, Meghan Murphy, the American women who made up the panel in Washington and many women without public platforms are standing up or sitting down (riding a bicycle) for women and children in different ways.

Jeanhatchet Tue 29-Jan-19
"Can we stop all this now please? Let's focus on the brilliant feminist work that lots and lots of different women do all the time in various refuges and rape crisis centres and other women's services up and down the nation. Day in - day out. No one looks. No one rewards them. No one shouts about them on Twitter or Facebook. They just bloody get on with helping women.

And some of them have been doing it for decades.

Cheers to those women 🥂"

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3492108-Jean-Hatchet-deletes-Twitter-account?pg=8

SandyDrawsBadly wrote
www.facebook.com/theposieparker/videos/2369584096494890/?notif_id=1548694852085872¬if_t=live_video

"This certainly puts things in context.

I’m really sad that all of the events and work and organisation have been overshadowed by pretty much endless personal attacks.

I’m genuinely sad."

This is link to the event that Posie Parker attended:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Zh-j243Mg

these were very powerful & important speeches by the people on panel concerned for children and women.
Hopefully people will watch and react to the content.

Julia Beck
Writer, Producer at Women's Liberation Radio News, and Former Member of the Law and Policy Committee of Baltimore City's LGBTQ Commission

Jennifer Chavez
Lawyer and Board Member of the Women's Liberation Front

Kara Dansky
Board Member of the Women's Liberation Front

Hacsi Horvath
Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco and Formerly Identified as Transgender

Hosted by
Ryan T. Anderson Ph.D.
Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3492602-Posie-s-video-response-to-criticism-about-HF

current relevent threads:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3492065-ReSisters-standing-up-for-adult-human-females-Thread-title-edited-by-MNHQ

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3492318-A-reminder-What-we-did-was-brilliant-Is-brilliant

Like it or not, the US does not have a parliamentary government. That means just about all legislation passed had to appeal to some in both parties. Like it or not, it has a two-party system — if Democrats won’t offer support, the only alternative is Republicans.

Like it or not, the left and the Democrats have taken women voters for granted for decades, have presided over continued erosion of women’s rights and done nothing to stop that, and have told women repeatedly that women have nowhere else to go, using the lesser of two evils argument.

Leftists are extremely poor tacticians. Read Sun Tzu. Right now, approaching the right gives women LEVERAGE over the left.

Change happens at the point of pain. Unless what passes for left in the US and the Democrats themselves feel threatened by women, unless and until they must come ASKING for female support, instead of presuming it, women will get nothing from them. Much as we wish it would, electoral politics in he US doesn’t operate on principle.

It is not unusual for parties in the US to suddenly switch positions, for Republicans to outflank Democrats on the left, and vice versa. It wasn’t that long ago that the left was calling for removing US troops from Europe. Now the right is doing that, and the left is insisting on maintaining US military bases in Europe. It wasn’t that long ago that the left was advocating protectionist trade policies, and the right was all-in on free trade. Now those positions have flipped. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that as the left disavows women’s rights, the right will support women. Right wing women do use birth control and even obtain abortions, are raped, are sexually harrassed on the job, and right wing g parents of both sexes have daughters who, among other things, need college athletic scholarships. Some of them, like Dick Cheney, even have lesbian daughters and support gay rights — and I say that thinking, myself, that Dick Cheney is evil incarnate.

Change happens at the point of pain.

This is so true. Women are never heard until men have something to lose.

R0wantrees

I am not sure why you think your role is to be some sort of moderator.

I was owning up to having made an unintetional wrong statement earlier on.

And quite honestly who is going to go through endless mumsnet threads.

Most feminist activism is going on elsewhere and whether you like it or not there are huge repercussion from this.

Women who have been working together, or thought they were, have been misled (that's putting it politely).

I know this is the "chat" forum, but that doesn't mean it has to be dumbed down to lets all be nice to each other. I'm a bigger fan than you.

There are often message on the chat forum about having twitter users read what is going on.

What is also happening is that a number of women, having been told by the mainstream media are also reading these threads, and are concerned feminism is just a parlour game for women who have time on their hands and want a bit of a chat.

Oh, but please dont be so down beat as to suggest there might be serious issues like working with right wing fundamentlists who are anti abortion and anti lesbian.

Just like some feminists think women stripping off to make a protest undermines the actual message some women think groups that are fundamentally anti woman undermine any attempt to get women's issues taken seriously.

WoLF is well known for having worked with HF for some time. It isn't just about a room booking FFS

It is not unusual for parties in the US to suddenly switch positions, for Republicans to outflank Democrats on the left, and vice versa. It wasn’t that long ago that the left was calling for removing US troops from Europe. Now the right is doing that, and the left is insisting on maintaining US military bases in Europe. It wasn’t that long ago that the left was advocating protectionist trade policies, and the right was all-in on free trade. Now those positions have flipped. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that as the left disavows women’s rights, the right will support women. Right wing women do use birth control and even obtain abortions, are raped, are sexually harrassed on the job, and right wing g parents of both sexes have daughters who, among other things, need college athletic scholarships. Some of them, like Dick Cheney, even have lesbian daughters and support gay rights — and I say that thinking, myself, that Dick Cheney is evil incarnate.
That's an important point. US politics isn't stacked like ours. The amount of lobbying is immense in comparison. The amount of money spent on campaigning, the existence of super PACs, it's totally different to here. And if one party isn't listening, there is only the other one to go to.
I can see both sides of this argument and I can see why it's a bitter argument. The pragmatists on one side frustrated, impatient and wanting to strike while the iron is hot; on the other the idealists who want to know what this is doing to their hard-won political reputation.
I lean more towards the former, but this thread and similar are going to keep getting posters coming back to "aaand another thing" until they reach 1000 posts I think. It's just the nature of the argument.

I've been away dealing a personal hell, so missed a lot of this. I've tried to catch up and find myself agreeing with a lot of what stumbledin has said. The religious or conservative right are no friends of feminism. The left are fair-weather friends and have lately been blowing icy cold.

I remember when Atwood's Handmaid's Tale was published and realising that the choice was Gilead (and Atwood has created a dystopia that follows from radical feminists' choices to ally themselves with the religious right over porn - something that seems to be a bit air-brushed these days) and the liberal/libertarian left - which saw 'freedom' as inclusive of the patriarchal right to masturbate over pornified images of women and feeling very, very depressed. The lesson for those who choose to ally themselves with the right is that the right are richer and more powerful and have entrenched systems of governance that put men at the top and women at the bottom. They don't give a fuck about women's rights and they mostly actively campaign against them.

I totally get where Jean was coming from in that post. I'd have preferred it wasn't about Posie - who I think is amazing in her audacity - but I do think it is a warning to really carefully consider our allegiances and to reflect on our personal motives. I also remember in the second wave that many women sold out when given the sniff of a promise of personal gain (jobs, status, fame...).

stumbled can you evidence the connections to the HF or are you just here to pour fuel on something that is calming down?

Jean misrepresented a lot of stuff on her blog and whipped up a lot of anti-Posie, we-must-be-politically-pure righteousness. And it was timed deliberately to damage the work in the US.

stumbled can you evidence the connections to the HF or are you just here to pour fuel on something that is calming down?

I'm interested in this too.

I am not sure why you think your role is to be some sort of moderator.

Stumbledin
I don't.
I expressed my thoughts that I wonder about the need and motivations of reigniting things on this thread. (I still do)

I then linked to some relevent information which has been spread over various threads including Jean Hatchet's comment, the actual event so people might hear for themselves and Posie Parker's explanation as to why she was attending.

R0wantrees
Appreciated (by me anyway) thank you.

Seconded. Ro provides links that are helpful to people that are time poor. A quick guide summary to the issues at hand.