Dear Jean
I call you Jean now, even though I know that’s not your real name. Although you told me your name, I don’t believe you ever showed your true self to me in the thousands of messages we exchanged on WhatsApp, or the time we met IRL, so I will stick with your fake name.
Ever since you dropped that blog, I have been thinking about writing to you but I couldn’t see what it could achieve because I had no intention of reconciliation. I can never forgive you for deliberately publishing that while we were taking off on a flight that you were supposed to be on, even tweeting it out, ‘Why I’m not on a plane with Posie Parker.’
Yet the effects of your public outpouring of half truths and betrayal are still being felt online and in real life groups of women. Did you realise that it would make such a big impact? Did you consider the Resisters action, that you knew was being planned across the UK and Ireland, would be thrown into chaos? That your false accusations about Posie would convince many women to pull out, meaning that the media impact would be reduced and the fundraising efforts of Standing For Women would be wasted? Did you intend to completely overshadow the protest and events we had organised in DC?
I like to think that you foolishly didn’t consider how trans activists would seize upon it to falsely ‘prove’ how feminists are being funded by right wing organisations and how other feminists who already dislike and disapprove of Posie, Julia and I would delight in its confirmation of their low opinion of us and our work. Other women have told me that they believe that was your malicious intention from the beginning. I honestly don’t know.
You told me how you were a bit of a Lone Ranger in feminism and how you had been trashed by other women in the past. I believed you without question because the same has happened to me. You said you had my back, and Posie’s back, against the women that did that to us. I see they are the very same women that you are now retweeting and have become so chummy with on twitter.
In the blog itself, you actually say that you like and admire me. If that were true, why on earth would you have said all that about Posie and Kara and our trip that we had all collectively worked so hard on? Nobody even knew that you were planning to come or expected any kind of statement from you. I had also not not said publicly that I was going but I never got the chance to announce it myself because by the time we landed everyone was already criticising us all for being there.
You know full well that the event at the Heritage Foundation was not organised by us in any way. We were just invited to attend and you were the first of us to sign up! You also knew that event was the only right wing element of the entire week, yet you still allude to meetings, plural, in your blog: ‘I was in a difficult position and my partner suggested I could go on the trip and just stay out of the right wing meetings and plans I didn't agree with.’
All the way through it, you deliberately mislead readers into making untrue assumptions about us. The part about Posie’s attitude to Tommy Robinson is especially shameless, since anyone can listen to the Feminist Current podcast and hear what she actually said but the rest is much more duplicitous because only we know the truth. You know it and yet chose to twist it.
Why did you do it? That’s what everyone wants to know. The idea of you making such a fuss about right wing links doesn’t sit right with anyone who knows you. You stood on an austerity ticket to be a Conservative councillor yourself (although you never actually admitted that to us until you were doxxed by a trans activist). The only explanation that I have is that Posie never gave you enough love. The more you told her that you stood up for her, supported her and sent her adoring messages, the more she recoiled from you and you felt that. You messaged her, asking why she was cold-shouldering you, and she didn’t know what to say because you were right.
You were also correct in saying that you invited yourself on the trip, so I don’t know why you thought you would be able to control what we would do, who we would work with and where we would stay once we were there. Kara and the others at WoLF are amazing and inspiring feminist women and I’m angry about how you have smeared them.
You wrote that you were ‘left out of all the decision making’ yet it was your choice not to join in any of the conference calls or come up with ideas of actions and events. You hardly ever commented in our group and when you did they were mainly negative comments, so I’m not surprised that nobody responded as you wished. Despite that, the generous American women still offered to help you find a bike so you could do one of your rides for murdered women over there.
Honestly, I never wanted you to come with us, not because I didn’t like you but because of the issue of your health insurance. After publicly announcing your diagnosis in August, I was extremely worried that you could not be covered for this trip and would put yourself at huge financial risk.
As you well know, doing public actions against trans activists puts women in line for huge amounts of criticism and even physical danger. For all your talk of centring and supporting women, you put three women who were supposed to be your friends right in the middle of a dangerous, malicious controversy. Your talk of being silenced is laughable. If you had any decent intentions of writing about your objections, you would have at least waited for us to do the things in Washington that weekend, the protests outside the social media companies and our panel talk at the library, that you professed to support.
Now I am hearing about how you have a long history of this behaviour. So I am writing this publicly so other women can understand how personally betrayed I am and to protect themselves from you.
Sincerely
Venice