Women Stand Up in Washington, D.C.

[GrinitchSpinach]

The board is, ahem, moving fast today, and some marvelous stuff is getting buried in the monster threads. I thought this might be a good place to collect reports from on the ground in D.C.

Thanks to SpartacusAutisticus for posting Natasha Chart's wonderful, raw speech outside Human Rights Campaign:
www.facebook.com/100003299679086/posts/2366913433428623/

Here is the protest outside Twitter:
m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2366769483443018&id=100003299679086&refsrc=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FD8guU5XQ0R&_rdr

The American Spectator, v sympathetic to Posie, Julia and the other activists:

Posie explained her thinking to Cockburn. ‘I thought: When am I going to get this opportunity again to talk someone so powerful in the business of lobbying?…In this culture of silence bringing this issue into the public consciousness can never be counterproductive…I will take my lead from the mothers who are facing the catastrophic mutilation and irreversible damage to their daughters’ bodies.’

The consequence, inevitably, was that this was then spun into a ‘transphobic ambush’ narrative. HuffPost ran a story with the headline, ‘2 Women Disrupt Meeting To Harass Transgender Activist In Appalling Video’. Gay Star News went with, ‘Shocking video shows women barging into meeting and harassing trans woman’.

‘I am bewildered by the characterization of us being in a position of power and influence so that our questions are being called harassment. We were in the corridors of the Senate building in the land of free speech. That doesn’t square! Questions cannot be harassment’, Posie said.

Posie, who is pro-choice, added: ‘Most of those critics would have no issue if I’d gone in a room with Mike Pence and asked him why he disagrees with abortion in aggressive terms. I could have verbally assaulted him with bad language, and everybody would think it was great. Yet women who purport to be in opposition to gender ideology tend to uphold it with their double standards, as if a powerful lobbyist is somehow vulnerable if they identify as a woman.’
spectator.us/terfs-take-america/

Posie, who is pro-choice, added: ‘Most of those critics would have no issue if I’d gone in a room with Mike Pence and asked him why he disagrees with abortion in aggressive terms. I could have verbally assaulted him with bad language, and everybody would think it was great. Yet women who purport to be in opposition to gender ideology tend to uphold it with their double standards, as if a powerful lobbyist is somehow vulnerable if they identify as a woman.’

This^ totally support her on this

Posie, who is pro-choice, added: ‘Most of those critics would have no issue if I’d gone in a room with Mike Pence and asked him why he disagrees with abortion in aggressive terms. I could have verbally assaulted him with bad language, and everybody would think it was great. Yet women who purport to be in opposition to gender ideology tend to uphold it with their double standards, as if a powerful lobbyist is somehow vulnerable if they identify as a woman.’

YES! Absolutely this. What about when documentary makers like Michael Moore or investigative journalists doorstep someone? Then it's applauded and seen as hard-hitting, brave, appropriate. But two women do it, and suddenly it's a huge outrage.

What about when documentary makers like Michael Moore or investigative journalists doorstep someone? Then it's applauded and seen as hard-hitting, brave, appropriate. But two women do it, and suddenly it's a huge outrage.

Yes! This!

This article by Natasha Chart at WoLF is must read (i know its been linked to already, but just giving it another boost)

womensliberationfront.org/posie-parker-in-the-house/

extract from the Natasha Chart at WoLF article:

I’m not sure I could have done what Julia and Posie did. But when they rushed over, I thought about the 19-year-old woman who stood behind me on Sunday at the library, where we’d earlier heard from Lierre Keith, Meghan Murphy, Kara Dansky, and Brie Jontry. This young woman came to tell a room full of strangers that she had started transition about five years ago, had been on testosterone and already had a double mastectomy, only to realize that she was a lesbian, and a woman, and to wish someone had told her when she was younger that that was okay.

Does anyone have a link to the video from 'We Need To Talk' meeting referred to.
The young woman who spoke so powerfully and bravely at the end cannot fail to have moved anyone who listened.

Her voice and experience is so important.

That article by Natasha is great. This is crazy:

The president of HRC makes close to half a million dollars a year in salary to ostensibly represent women like myself, and I can’t say I’m impressed

Wow, what a lot of money!

This is the video from the 'We Need To Talk' meeting in Washington

www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=_twaEEStWUw

Watch the last 25 minutes if short of time to listen to the damage that is being done to young women, especially young lesbians.

Anyone who thinks we handled this week wrong is more than welcome to go out and show us how to do it better. I’ll take notes, because I have room for improvement. I, and my colleagues, consider this situation an emergency for women’s rights, so constructive ideas from just about any quarter will be considered.

Ah but those attacking are too busy tweeting to do any actual work

Is this getting into all the mainstream news? Has Posy been interviewed on TV?

Is this getting into all the mainstream news? Has Posy been interviewed on TV?

No, the mainstream news here are very invested in the "stunning brave" narrative and steadfastly ignore almost all criticism of gender ideology.

However, Posie has gotten more coverage this week in the conservative press than WoLF or Hands Across the Aisle the past several years combined.

I conclude that whoever it was upthread, I think Bernard, who said that we need Man Friday is right. It will take splashy stunts to get women's voices on the TV. Heaven help me, though; I don't have the courage to don the mankini for the cameras...

Hey Oxy I saw your post on the other thread and don't want to wade in there, so here are some for you. I am so sorry you went through what must have been a terrifying ordeal; hope you've found some peace now.

Thank you so much. I only had small flashbacks, so the ordeal itself I can’t recall as I hit my head on the road and passed out. It was the reactions and treatment afterwards that was really horrible ( and findin injuries ). I have found peace as some years after I found a new set of friends that made sure I understood I was a rape victim, not a slut. Thank you so much for your kindness. I really ought not to get involved in that thread! It’s not very nice and I think the wrong place to focus.

Thank you for all this, this thread is marvellous!

Is this getting into all the mainstream news? Has Posy been interviewed on TV?

Spectator US article:

Have you heard of Posie Parker? She’s a 5 ft 1 mum of four from Wiltshire, England who looks an awful lot like Marilyn Monroe and has a truly radical belief – that the definition of ‘woman’ is the one that which appears in the Google dictionary: adult human female. But what about men who identify as women? Cockburn asked her. ‘They’re not women’, Posie replied bluntly.

Golly!

Cockburn met Posie and her female friends – Venice Allan, kicked out of the British Labour Party for saying that only females can be women, and Dr Julia Long, researcher and activist for the first time in Washington D.C., last weekend. Cockburn was blown away by their good company and by their fearless commitment to stating the obvious.

From fighting the notorious clinical activist – Mr Harrop – on Sky News to providing women across the UK with ‘adult human female’ T-shirts, Posie has been a leader in the resistance to the proposed changes to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act.

If reformed as trans activists would like, the GRA would enable a person to change his legal gender simply by filling out a form. The implications of this have disturbed many adult human females. Especially after the case of Karen White – a rapist born a man, but who identifies as a woman – who was put in a women’s prison, where White was able to abuse females.

Likewise, human females in America face an uphill struggle in the form of the Equality Act. The Equality Act, which is on the House’s agenda and is likely to pass, would continue the legacy of Obama in interpreting sex to mean ‘gender identity’ – both for civil rights protection and for federally funded entities."

Posie and her galpals flew to America last week to raise awareness and hold those responsible to account.

‘This ideology has been imported into the UK by America. So to stem the flow of female erasure we have to come to its source’, Posie told Cockburn.

‘What the Equality Act will do is it will replace women’s sex-based rights and protections with gender identity. So, in one swift move, women will no longer have sex-based rights in the USA. Which will be an unprecedented roll back of women’s rights in America.’

‘We’re over here to lend our support to our sisters in America who no one else is listening to,’ Julia added.(continues)

It is also worth being aware how the article (as many others will do) also chooses to focus on specific points of criticism.
In this case quoting Katheen Stock:
(extract)
"Yet, in Britain, various gender critical feminists have tweeted to say that they are disapproving of Posie and Julia’s actions. Some claimed that they had ‘ambushed’ the powerful lobbyist.

Kathleen Stock
@ Docstockk
Posie Parker & Julia Long are a liability. I’d be mortified to be ambushed like that. Their jaunt to Washington is setting back a productive conversation, in US context, about female rights by decades. I’ve nothing to do with them anyway, but no-one should think they act for me.

Cockburn asked Posie and Julia what they would say to such critics. Their answer?

‘I would rather you just said thank you.’

[[https://spectator.us/terfs-take-america/

There is a bigger picture which is always important to be aware of.
Just as it will be Chelsea Clinton's response that receives more criticism and then focus.
Sexism and political gain will always be powerful forces.

I am disappointed in Kathleen Stock. Setting us back by decades, what an over-reaction.

Does nobody remember what the Suffragettes got up to?!?!?!

I think the danger is in allowing focus to be turned on individual women.

Women come from different viewpoints and this will inform their reactions.

There's a bigger picture.

There's a bigger picture.

Yes there is.

I wouldn’t do what Posie did, because I just don’t have that kind of courage. I’m grateful for all contributions to this struggle

I am disappointed in Kathleen Stock.
I am too. And in Jane Clare Jones. And Rosa Freedman. I'll still follow them but I have to say, I'm beginning to wonder whether the sound I'm hearing is that of noses being put of joint.

I think its always better to consider the broader contributions and actions of women who have all contributed rather than particular reactions.

The point was made on a current thread, that women are often held to much higher account.
We can be both flawed and do brilliant things!

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

Yeah it is but we can mention we are disappointed in the response you’ve shared here, and still appreciate other things they’ve contributed.

Of course.
Its also worth being aware how some will want to amplify and cause such a focus, what the motivations and/or consequences would be.

this seems particularly apposite today

and yeah, i think it's ok to express disappointment, and to have your own views, but we need to be aware that there are people who want to divide us, and encourage us to ostracise others.

it's what i'm trying to bear in mind today anyway

I think what might be a positive outcome over this whole thing, is that rather than distance ourselves from one another, that we show we can disagree, even angrily, and still come together when it matters. I guess that’s why I’m disappointed at the condemnation of the individuals, rather than a simple ‘ I don’t like that particular event/action, but I still stand with them’

Personally, I appreciate all of them and I’m glad for them.

Brie Jontry's speech at the DC public library now uploaded: