Livestream of Venice talking to protestors in Haringey

[CandidPeel]

m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2392035440916422&id=100003299679086

I can't help finding this kinda sweet and and funny

On a more positive note I am glad to see that the meeting went ahead, was not prevented from happening by authoritarians, and that everyone inside the church got to talk in peace.

I do like Venice Allen and what she says and how she says it. I find her entirely credible and it's shocking the way the 'Voices from the Left' event has been twisted and used against her and others.

The spin and misrepresentation of information/events in this whole debate troubles me greatly.

Thanks for posting this on here and for all your comments

They were actually the nicest group of TAs that I've come across so far. Some of them genuinely wanted dialogue.

It was a shame the livestream cut out then because there was another great 10 mins of it and it got quite interesting.

One TA said he'd made a gabba remix of one of my Christmas songs hahahaha but now I can't remember his name or soundcloud

Venice, you handled it really well - your good humour and calm is I'm sure what kept the "tone" of the protest (at that stage anyway) basically good humoured and calm on their part too. And I agree that there have been much nastier protests at other meetings. The ones we had at the Brighton Womans' Place meeting last July was about the same size, and while it wasn't anything like as intimidating as what went on at the Jamjar in Bristol they were much more sort of sullen and hostile.

I am not so sure about "generational divide". It seems to me (and it's very frustrating) that the actual students are 99% "there" - that you could have the conversations, agree vehemently all the way through the parts about nonconformity being brilliant (one protester at the Brighton meeting had a T shirt with "fuck gender norms" on it and of course everyone AT the meeting wanted one!) - there's just some "block" right at the end that leads feminists, sorry women's rights activists (!) to say ultimately "and that's OK" but which leads them to say "and therefore s/he's a wo/man" GAHHHHH. I'm hopeful that it's bridgeabe though - well, it has to be or this crap will never end.

The thing is though, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist I promise, that there are active lies woven into what is going on for the "studetnts". As I've said I was at the Brighton WPUK meeting and a month or so later I got talking to a group of Icelandic women all about 50 (it was their joint birthday outing) at the next table in a local restaurant. For their previous visit to the city they'd been staying at the hotel where the meeting was held and at the same time, and they had spoken to some of the protestors. They were told by them that WPUK were a Christian Fundamentalist group who wanted "being trans" to be made illegal, and a bunch of other stuff.

Now I don't suppose the protestors there (mainly perfectly ordinary looking students, if slightly at the blue haired end of things) had made up those lies either, but some people somewhere are (and other lies) and they are making sure that they are getting out there. (This is one reason why the Heritage Foundation thing has been such difficult optics - it has fed into lies that have already had such traction).

Oh, and you'll be glad to hear that my new Icelandic friends had worked out within 20 minutes of a bit of chat and googling on our phones that actually they belonged inside the meeting.

Students do love their little protests don't they? T'was ever thus.
The subject of the protests is not actually important - they just like to protest. Must say they don't do it half as effectively though as 1960s students.

Replay it to them when they've grown up and watch them cringe.

That’s what I mean about these young people being so naïve and not seeming to the possess critical thinking skills needed to question bizarre claims such as women, often lesbians, with long histories of fighting for gay rights, women’s rights, in the trade union movement & Labour Party, have now become far-right Christian bigots with a particular hatred of transgender people. Although that doesn’t seem restricted to the students tbf, people who are older and should be wiser come out with equally bonkers beliefs repeated without question or critical thought.

YY Cwen.

there are active lies woven

There certainly are!

The whole Aimee Challenor thing made me look a lot more closely at what was happening from the TRA side than before. Lots of IT savvy, gamers, multiple fetishists sharing files on the dark web, creating bots, socks, secret groups.

Weaving lies has been at the heart of transactivism for yonks. Think about WPATH and lies about made up research being 'peer reviewed'- professionals were so sure no one would ever lie about that, they never checked, so they got away with it- even Mark Helen/Natacha Kennedy of Goldsmiths University writing 'reasearch' papers on 'trans' kids, self 'co-authored'.

Lying is what they do and it is so easy to spread them, particularly with blocking software - they spread like wildfire, unchallenged by anyone outside the consciously constructed echo chamber.

The dangerous thing is that the majority of people simply can't be arsed with politics. Most people just want to get on with work, rest and play with a bit of superficial gossip at dinner parties, down the pub or on social media. Smear someone a 'phobe' and most people won't give them the benefit of the doubt. Got to appear right on. Those thinking and questioning and doubting, who have the guts to go against the grain are in the minority.

I remember how a few right on dudes (mates, i might add) crawled out of the woodwork to challenge me about supporting the Get the L out protest and the Adult Human Female billboards. I was astonished that they felt so certain of their right to admonish me and of course their arguments were piss-weak along the lines of 'you sound like a Daily Mail reader having those views'.

So anyway, lies are easy to spread if you are a lying, controlling arsehole with no conscience or moral compass because most people are more likely to believe any lies you tell them (especially if they make women look bad) than in the existence of lying, controlling arseholes without consciences or moral compasses who would spread that kind of shit.