Julie Bindel on twitter

[Anonymouswasawoman]

Did her account get deleted?
twitter.com/bindelj/
Twitter is telling me it doesn't exist

No it doesn't make you female/male/woman/man/neither. No, not everyone has one. But equally no, its not just "personality"; nor is it sign you're stuck in regressive tropes about womanhood or manhood (or no more than most of the planet).

It would be more helpful if she could explain what 'gender identity' is, rather than just what it is not.

As someone said about, bindel calls her mtf friends "she". Stock does the same. I've had, fortunately, very little interaction with jcj, and freedman just loves to push cursedE on us and call some men "she" that her colours shine bright.

Any woman who thinks "not my nigel" trans friend is a threat to women an s insists on mis-sexing them and insist they take their seat at the table of feminism , displacing women along the way, are not gender critical feminists. They are your common garden variety of international women .

To those who support JCJ you all do realise she outted a victim without having the decency to advise her, in her, now infamous, "May day weekend meltdown"? Not so long ago a respectable and well loved feminist was outted as a csa survivor and most people supported the faux feminist putting people in personal vendettas..........

Stop sitting on the fence ladies.

It's either black or white, shades of grey are not acceptable in the war on women (by women)

I suggest you stop telling us what to do, thank you, it is not helpful.
I can fully understand how friendships can complicate things.

I couldn't believe it when Freedman gave support to CursedE. Lost all respect for her that day.

Any woman who thinks "not my nigel" trans friend

I don't mind if some women think "not my Nigel" provided they are still fighting for woman to mean woman.

I think it's obvious from this thread that all women who speak up have flaws, just like every male politician.

I have seen fantastic speeches and read amazing articles from all the women who have been mentioned on this thread.

The important thing is that we all keep focused on arguing for our rights, not getting involved in minor spats.

I don't recognise the 'two tribes' - is that just a twitter thing?

Why are some people so keen to force people into being on someone's 'side'? Surely I can just not give a fuck at all and go 'meh' to the whole thing.

I don't recognise half of the stuff that people are talking about.

May Day weekend meltdowns, CursedE, not my Nigel....

But I would say that Julie Bindel and Julia Long were pushing back against gender ideology for YEARS before 'GC feminism' was even coined as a phrase and before it was discussed on MN.

I have tremendous admiration for them and feminists like Linda Bellos and Germaine Greer who were often lone voices out there in the wilderness before the proposed GRA reforms and before most of us (including me) had really engaged with these issues.

Thanks R0wantrees for all the links and memory (and have I mentioned how much I fucking love Mumsnet)

I think it is right that this is the fundamental tension:

*Some GCs want to be able to freely misgender TW in public.

Other GCs know they won’t get anywhere near the mainstream media or keep their jobs if they openly misgender people.*

(Or correctly sex....)

And the reason for it is not to be gratuitously mean but to be able to name men and spot male patterns.

I don't think it quite splits into two tribes, people work together and value each other. But I do think it is what underlies the outbursts of personal animosity between people who are all brilliant and brave and basically on the same side. (And we've all been under incredible pressure)

If you think about this carefully and honestly enough I think it's impossible to avoid landing up at TWAM. And you can either say it, and then decide how far your personal politeness and sense of self preservation will allow you to fudge it in personal or professional situations..... Or your cognitive dissonance kicks in "I'm not the kind of person who fudges the truth, so there must be a deaper and more nuanced truth,"

I don't think TWATW holds as a sustainable position. It's a social niceity. We've spent two years and more painfully learning how to spell out that there are two sexes and you can't change from one to the other.

Mechanisms for avoiding cognitive dissonance are how a meme (in the Dawkins sense) protects itself inside your head against your own intellectual probing. TWATW/it's more complex than W=AHF/Not my Nigel etc... are a different meme than TWAW but they still kick up the dust clouds of cognitive dissonance avoidance.

For me I think it is most helpful to come at this from the angle of consent: Is there anything a man can feel, say, wear, do to his body, do by legal or administrative process that should allow him access to womens bodies against their consent?

No... Good ok then we need words and laws and rules and expectations for that.

Once we've got that clear then we can talk about how to protect the rights of the broad umbrella of males who don't fit with male gender stereotypes or dont feel comfortable identifying as men (practically - offer privacy: unisex options wherever possible, "prefer not to say" on forms etc...)

I think we can have some compassion for those who've built their life based on a promise that should never have been made (do "X" and you can have the right to access womens bodies without their consent). Just as it's worth understanding and having compassion for overly strict fathers trying to protect their daughters from harm in a patriarchal society by constraining their freedoms etc...(or if you watched Unorthodox have compassion and empathy for Yanky....)

But the promise should never have been made, by doctors and then fudged and overlooked by officials and lawmakers.

It's not a question of being more nuanced or strict about what "X" is.

I will read the philosophers books & artcles. I think it's really important what they've done to get us this far, in creating intellectual space. But ultimately this stuff has to be able to be understood and used by people without reading any books (and whether they are left, right, feminists or not ...). It needs to be simple and unambiguous.

For me I think it is most helpful to come at this from the angle of consent: Is there anything a man can feel, say, wear, do to his body, do by legal or administrative process that should allow him access to womens bodies against their consent?

Nail, meet hammer.
The answer is so obviously no that one wonders how anyone could argue against this.

I don't mind if some women think "not my Nigel" provided they are still fighting for woman to mean woman.

You may not but any GC feminist will disagree with you. Men cannot be women and if you think some men can be women then you go against the whole ethos of gc.

For me I think it is most helpful to come at this from the angle of consent: Is there anything a man can feel, say, wear, do to his body, do by legal or administrative process that should allow him access to womens bodies against their consent?

No, not one single thing.

We've now got someone on the thread dictating the "GC ethos"!!

You might love mumsnet MForstater but I bloody love you!

I ricochet between horror & incredulity with a fistful of frustration. I do ‘do’ things but anonymously and those who know me know why,so I am beyond grateful for those who can & will speak out in their own names but also know that people like you and many others (including Dr JL who hugged me and reassured me in a mini moment of panic-a complete stranger to her but her kindness to me still soothes me) know we are an army who will not let this go.

Cuntysnark

I'm not dictating anything. I am merely pointing out that if you are GC you can't say "well my forend Nigel is a woman cos she says so and she's nice" it's an oxymoron and I am incredulous it has to be pointed out numerous times by numerous people on the feminist forum at MN.

What has happened to this place? Had Spartacus been long forgotten? I do despair.

Amalfimamma Sorry if that came across as an answer to you. It was just me dumping my thoughts.

Cuntysnark

Sorry if I was irritable but my comment stands in general.

I am talking to a dear academic friend of mine who is much loved in gc circles. She's said this

It's like black lives matter having a white cop at the meetings, directing the argument.... because this one says what I want to hear.
Would they invite domestic abusers to come educate women on domestic abuse?
Pimps to teach us about the pimp perspective of the sex trade?

But I would say that Julie Bindel and Julia Long were pushing back against gender ideology for YEARS before 'GC feminism' was even coined as a phrase and before it was discussed on MN

And don't forget:

Germaine Greer (she made her position clear re the admittance of a relatively late-transitioning MtF TW to an all-female college over a decade ago)
Sheila Jeffreys - has written & spoken about this matter again for over a decade.

I am not wanting to set up a hierarchy of who's most valued to speak etc etc - but I think part of the problem is that many younger women have little idea of feminisms' histories & heritages.

As a feminist academic, (but not a famous one, just doxxed & disciplined re this debate almost 3 years ago) I wanted aso to say something about what academics do, and the way we think, which might be different from others - anonymous women on MN doing grass roots activism, visible activists IRL and on Twitter & other SM -

our jobs are centred around careful and nuanced research and discussion and debate of the evidence. So yes, this may seem arcane or exclusionary, but I think it's important as a space for thinking things through with more time and evidence than is possible in a 240 character Tweet. Indeed, I wrote a whole book over a decade ago about how so-called "invisible" women did their feminism (or not-feminism) in the 19th century in the particular tiny field I research, and how 21st C feminists might understand their work in this field.

I can speak about this research in simple headlines, and enjoy doing so, with my students & anyone else who's interested. But my real joy is doing the careful nuanced research & writing.

But all the time I work in my bit of the field of women's history, I am aware of the way that feminism - unlike ANY other political/ideological revolutionary movement - is grounded in everyday life, our bodies, and our everyday real-world activism. That feminisms (of all ideological persuasions) are lived politics.

So I think that's what for me takes feminism away from being just an ideological battle led by the Left.

That's what I really enjoy about doing women's history, actually - it means something now as well as giving us a revolutionary understanding of the past.

The choice people make to use she pronouns in certain friendship and or professional settings is simply that, a choice. It absolutely is not a determination that the friend or colleague is a woman.

And you absolutely have no need whatsoever to keep misrepresenting this here. No despair necessary, you are free to leave people alone at anytime.

Amalfimamma I agree wholeheartedly

*YogaFaker8 thanks, I did mention Germaine Greer but Sheila Jeffreys had slipped my mind.

We owe her a lot.

And I do agree with you about the importance of academic feminism for the reasons that you give. I was at university when po-mo came into the scene and I have been very grateful numerous times over the past few years that even as an undergraduate I had all that time to read, look around me and at the women in my family history, and really think about my criticisms of it.

I'm not an academic, but I have some contact with HE via my work and have watched in quiet despair as Women's Studies morphed into Gender and Sexuality Studies and the like.

I also internally cry/laugh when i remember in the '90s at my leftist university that it felt that it had more or less been decided that po-mo could be no meaningful basis for political action and thought that argument was all sewn up!

Oh, the naivety of youth.

Why are some people so keen to force people into being on someone's 'side'? Surely I can just not give a fuck at all and go 'meh' to the whole thing.

Of course. No one here is telling you you have to pick a side.

I was making an observation that it is possible to class the key figures as having two very distinct modes of action and approach.

Julie Bindel and Julia Long were pushing back against gender ideology for YEARS before 'GC feminism' was even coined as a phrase

Yes but now they have different approaches to this; what may seem only very small differences, but they provoke very different responses from the public, the media and the law.

have watched in quiet despair as Women's Studies morphed into Gender and Sexuality Studies and the like

Indeed. I set up & taught in a Women's Studies postgrad degree in the 1990s. At the time, we actually wanted to call it Gender Studies - not for po-mo reasons, but because actually, we believed/argued that women aren't the problem.

The problem is maleness, masculinity, and patriarchy.

But that's a very different interpretation of "Gender Studies" the current one ...

And apols for missing your reference to Prof. Greer. She is both magnificent & sometimes infuriating. But every time I hear her, I"m aware of how much she's thought and deeply - about the issues she comments on. Her views on rape, for example, are far more complex and sound than the bite-size possibilities of headlines & short TV interviews can reveal.

And therein lies part of the problem - the difficulty of expressing complex & multi-layered ideas in simple headlines. And it's a pit, because I think that many women do like to think deeply about our condition.

pity not pit (darn iPad autocorrect)

This is perfect For me I think it is most helpful to come at this from the angle of consent: Is there anything a man can feel, say, wear, do to his body, do by legal or administrative process that should allow him access to womens bodies against their consent?

And also why I simply can not understand why anyone who values women could ever think/say TWAW

There is no grey.

I don't think TWATW holds as a sustainable position. It's a social niceity. We've spent two years and more painfully learning how to spell out that there are two sexes and you can't change from one to the other.

Mechanisms for avoiding cognitive dissonance are how a meme (in the Dawkins sense) protects itself inside your head against your own intellectual probing. TWATW/it's more complex than W=AHF/Not my Nigel etc... are a different meme than TWAW but they still kick up the dust clouds of cognitive dissonance avoidance.

For me I think it is most helpful to come at this from the angle of consent: Is there anything a man can feel, say, wear, do to his body, do by legal or administrative process that should allow him access to womens bodies against their consent?

No... Good ok then we need words and laws and rules and expectations for that.

This ^^
Consent, which is at the basis of all Safeguarding frameworks, is key.

Consent also has to be able to be given by the individual, be informed & given free from coersion or obligation.

Maya Forstater:
'Single sex spaces are a question of consent'
(extract)
"It’s a question of consent
In the UK the Equality Act 2010 sets out many everyday situations where it is lawful to provide single sex services. This includes:

Circumstances where a person of one sex might reasonably object to the presence of a person of the opposite sex
Equality Act 2010 – Schedule 3, Paragraph 27 (6)

People using a single sex service have not consented to sharing with members of the opposite sex.

Single sex spaces should be simple
The law does not require that any particular type of service is always provided on a single sex basis.
Mixed sex facilities can be fine too.

You shouldn’t need a law degree, or a PhD in gender studies to work out who can use which facilities. Nor should you have to guess.

To protect everybody’s privacy and dignity there needs to be clarity." (continues)

a-question-of-consent.net/