Do you know about the bomb threat made to GC feminists by transactivists, HDDD?
It happened in Hastings, to one of the first meetings women were organising to discuss the proposed changes to the GRA and their ramifications for women.
What women wanted, the entire purpose of the meeting, was that the government agree to consult women regarding the way changes to the GRA could impact women and girls. But the only response women got, from MPs, Stonewall, academics, and activists was: Transwomen are Women: No Debate.
It was around that time, or perhaps a bit earlier, that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said that she supported trans rights but that transwomen were not the same as natal women, and that difference had to be taken into account — and she was slammed hard all over social media and in print journalism.
Similarly, Rose Magowan, at a reading for her memoir in which she detailed the rape and abuse Harvey Weinstein had doled out to her, including sending former Mossad agents to threaten her, was harangued by a transactivist later identified as a paedophile for her “c*s privilege” for not doing enough to stop a claimed genocide of transwomen and then, after being deluged with hate messages, Magowan was made to apologise for her sins and promise to centre transwomen in her activism. (She has been notably silent ever since.)
The extreme amount of vitriol Adichie and Magowan received served to silence many women.
I believe it was last year that transactivists gathered outside the offices of the Metro UK and set off smoke bombs after the paper published a story they didn’t like.
I’m sure you’ve read about the dead rat recently nailed to the door of Vancouver Rape Relief along with spray-painted graffiti reading “Kill T*rfs” and “Trans Power” and of the near bankruptcy faced by VRR — a rape refuge built and paid for by women — throughout a twelve-year long legal battle VRR fought to maintain a policy of hiring only women to be rape counselors to their female clientele. Ultimately VRR won in the Supreme Court and was awarded court costs the plaintiff has never paid, and that plaintiff has not stopped efforts to force VRR’s closure.
I’m sure you’ve read about the transactivists harassing human rights attorney Rosa Freedman — who’d been giving talks about the way human rights law works when there is a clash of rights between groups, about ways to balance rights. She was threatened and chased on her campus to the point she had to hide in the bushes, received the late night phoned death threats, and then discovered that a man had urinated all over her office door.
And I’m sure you read about Maria MacLachlan knocked to the ground, kicked, beaten, and throttled by three male transactivists, though the police were only able to identify and arrest one. I’m sure you read about the assault on Julie Bindel, and while the male fist didn’t connect with her face, thanks to security personnel, the action is nonetheless an assault under the law.
Let’s see: there was also a meeting in Bristol, where transactivists with masked faces stormed the stairwells and entrances to prevent women meeting, threatening violence.
And an attempted meeting at the Millwall Football Club, where transactivists so threatened the venue that even the redoubtable Millwall bent beneath the threats and canceled the meeting.
There was the police summoned to eject Julia Long and three other women at an open-to-the-public meeting at Accenture’s office regarding trans rights — merely because a panelists felt unsafe that Julia was there, because Julia might ask a question. Heaven forfend that a question inspire nuanced debate.
In Canada, Meghan Murphy, scheduled to give a talk in the Vancouver Public Library about women’s issues regarding self i.d. received so many threats, as did the library itself, that the library charged her several thousand dollars in security costs just to avail herself of public space all citizens are entitled to.
Also in Vancouver, at the Dyke March, transactivists surrounded lesbians wearing interlocking female symbols, depictions of a uterus, or the labrys symbol, and physically prevented them marching in the parade.
In San Francisco, long the centre of the gay and lesbian rights movement in the US, the public library hosted an exhibit of pink-and-blue baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, axes, and t-shirts painted red to simulate blood along with slogans about punching T*erfs, and when women protested, the library claimed it was an art exhibit. But at the SF Dyke March, transactivists wore those t-shirts, carried those axes (until the police stopped them) and roughed up several lesbians, knocking one to the ground.
In Baltimore, the local LGBT organisation fired the only lesbian (and only female) on the governing board when she could not agree that males could be lesbians, and the Baltimore Pride celebration included a party announcement depicting a woman hanged by her neck.
I’m trying to remember the names of all the women who lost jobs and/or contracts for expressing gender critical opinions, but I’ve forgotten names, and many of the incidents. The arts instructor, the tax specialist, the filmmaker, the graduate teaching assistant. Then the names and professions of those who are certain that if they spoke up, they’d lose their jobs. The teacher, the headmaster, the sport coach, the therapist, the social worker, the civil service employee, the writer, the journalist, the tech worker.
Denunciation, firings, harangue, threat, and violence are the responses women have gotten when attempting to have nuanced debate about the fact that girls and women are stakeholders in the proposed legal changes.
The fact that some, and by no means all, transactivists have moved off the No Debate stance is a credit not to them but to the courage, resolve, and persistently rational points women have made while standing in the face of actual, physical threat.
In Hastings, after the bomb threat was made, as women weren’t sure whether they would again be stymied in merely holding a meeting to find ways to make sure women were consulted regarding legal changes that affected them, police investigated, identified the man who’d made the threat, searched his home, and found explosives.
I have long been worried that as women make their voices more and more heard in this debate, someone — a woman — is going to get killed.
Three men upon a 60-year old woman, knocking her to the ground — had she landed differently, Maria MacLachlan could have been killed. We all know that a male fist, with sufficient momentum, can bring enough force to a woman’s skull to fracture it — Julie Bindel could have been severely injured or killed. At the Metro UK, anyone with COPD could have ended up in respiratory distress or failure. The man in Hastings could have taken his explosives to the women’s meeting.
Every day I read death threat to feminists. I read of us described as pestilence, vermin, and Nazis. I read that the proper response to our advocacy on our own behalf is our extermination. These are not always from fringe crazies, either — these are from academics, journalists, celebrities, local politicians, college students. Whether they realise it or not, are providing cover for and legitimating violence against women as a response to political disagreement.
Nothing women have said or done justifies the response we have gotten, and nothing women have said is in any way equivalent in threat.
Transactivists expected to have won self I.d. already, and they have not. The possibility now exists that they might not win it in the foreseeable future.
Anyone who understands patterns of male abuse of women knows that fact puts us, right now, in a very dangerous time.
I expect escalation of hyperbole and threat from transactivists. And I expect that women, esp. in the UK, having shown so much resolve already, will not now yield. I expect that in some places, women and girls are going to move into civil disobedience, as organisations bow to regulatory capture and strip away rights and protections regardless of the stall in legal change.
Anyone seeking nuanced rationale debate about balancing rights has simply arrived on scene too late.