Action Aid - no such thing as a biological female

[Apileofballyhoo]

Has this been posted already? It's from an email they sent. I saw it on Twitter so I'll be back with links.

This is what really does get to me. Not to trivialise the whole trans issue, but it's such first world nonsense

It absolutely is first world nonsense. Girls in these countries don't even have sanitary pads let alone a gold lame purse to purse to express their gender identity.

When you spend your days struggling to survive and wondering if you will eat then you don’t have time to wonder if you should change your name and grow your hair.

If you don't know something, go find out about it. If something doesn't add up, investigate it. We all have power if we think about this and simply learn to ask questions rather than accept what we are told.

Thanks Red. Also for cheering me up a little bit.

For anyone who has found Red's work here useful and doesn't read them already, you might find it very interesting to read Red's Westminster threads on UK politics on the Brexit board.

I was approached years ago as a local volunteer for Action Aid, they wanted people to leaflet locally, so asked donors from each area. I liked their grassroots approach and I did volunteer for a couple of years and have followed their work.

I am not supporting toilets to make girls and women's lives safer if those toilets are not safe spaces.

As they quote in the report into the need for women's safe spaces, sometimes men use crises to exploit and abuse women.

You might think that would have taught them something.

I have had it with this crap. Fuck Off Action Aid.

I am in touch with a project that gives women a particular skill to have goods to sell - which they then vote to spend their co-operative earnings on toilets. I will support them instead.

One should definitely read actual accounts of the big charities. Its eye opening stuff.
I worked in a charity shop as a volunteer for reference purposes. Quite a while ago now. But discovered how much the one shop manager was being paid by accident. So later I trawled through the accounts that are freely available online and discovered a huge amount of money raised was spent on swanky offices and wages, a bigger still amount was either reserved for future projects and/or invested to create a return (income from interest and the like) and some money went to the actual cause.
A lot of charity shops dont make enough to pay the one shop managers salary. So I came to the conclusion the shops are there to promote the charity and not much else. And the more I hear of the prices being similar to high street new, the more I believe it's just an exercise to keep the charity at the forefront of everyone's mind.
So in conclusion I give directly to the food bank and a tiny toy library locally. The big ones can shove off.

Have just caught up with this thread - massive appreciation of the hard work done by @RedToothBrush for their breakdown, and also for the info about Ethiopia etc.

Am also reassured by others confirming I'm not alone in my feelings which I posted last night.

I have been looking into so much stuff over the last few days that are essentially dismissed as conspiracy theory territory, even when supported by actual documented evidence, and a common thread of them all is that it is largely women and children of both sexes who are the victims / survivors.

It is interesting that even when clear patterns are identifiable, the overall message is that because we are evolutionarily wired to see patterns as part of instinctive risk assessment, it just indicates confirmation bias - it all gets bounced back as some kind pf psychological failing on the part of the observer aka you can't trust what your eyes, brain and ears are telling you even when it is blatantly true.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely believe that evidence is important, and that some wilder theories are more than likely not true - but they should be properly, transparently debunked, not just have the "you must be mentally ill if you think that" - which is what dictatorships and the Eastern Bloc did very successfully. That immediately shuts down these things through fear, and makes the initial suspicions loom larger IMHO.

I am wary of large charities myself because of much is what is written here, and from hearing the experiences of friends who have worked in charity shops etc.

There is a saying "just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you" - which again, sounds utterly tin foil hat. I do wonder though, I do wonder.......

I'm reading this open mouthed. Including the live aid stuff. I knew there were some problems, but I had absolutely no idea of the profound mismanagement of the entire thing.

Red you're absolutely brilliant at this. Your understanding of the wider issues is phenomenal.

I'm wondering, if stupidly denying that biological sex exists, by a charity who relies on it for donations, is what will precipitate some clearly overdue scrutiny into exactly where the money goes.

Many charities worry me. They feel impregnable and unaccountable and very, very powerful.

Jesus, I am so done.

RTB, thank you so much for that epic piece of work (I know what you mean about something being obvious in ten mins but taking hours to write up clearly).

Between you and Maya Forstatter, I'm cancelling a DD that has been in place for literally decades.

Nobody wants trans people to have terrible lives, not at all, but denying basic biology is insane. And it's your biology that lands you in the shit if you're born female in many, many countries.

The danger is that the Act could be used to stop criticism of the sitting government during an election campaign which limits its public accountability.

I personally think it might be better to have some obligation to have some sort of political declaration in the aims of a charity and how much is directly spent in this area with it being separated out from 'charitiable spending' in accounting.

This way its more transparent without it tipping the balance in favour of the state and big business.

This is a really good idea. Campaigning work is important and valuable, but we should know what is spent on this work, and what is spent on the ground, when a charity fundraise on the latter and are silent on the former. With Action Aid, who claim to work with the world's most marginalised, the reality in terms of lobbying spend in the UK is astonishing, and quite honestly feels pretty deceitful to me. It's hardly something they flag up, is it? I don't want to fund a protest against Trump - what's the point, we don't exactly have a vote! - if that's money that could be going on education for girls instead, or healthcare in the Global South. If people want to donate to that sort of stuff then there are orgs who are upfront on that being their aim.

There needs to be honesty and transparency, if appealing for funding.

RTB, thank you so much for that epic piece of work.

I second that. I hae become quite the cynic in the past decade, including the charity business. I thought nothing can surprise me. But that Live Aid basically bought Ethiopia's dictator an army to finish off his enemies - wow. That's a whole new level. I am floored.

@whuttheactualeff

But... there's a literal genetic difference.

Women have XX chromosomes, men have XY chromosomes. How do they define that then?

Just this.

I think it's worth pointing out how many charities don't employ anyone at all and how many don't employ anyone who earns above £60,000 (I believe the figure is less than 1% for this latter point).

Apparently trust in charities is at an all time low and its not hard to work out why.

I think the problem ultimately lies in the fact the mega charities are less charities and more corporate entities and pr machines now. And if we think about it in these terms, it makes a lot more sense.

Corporate entities are focused on figures and targets rather than perhaps social aims.

My son has Asperger's and he's very naive. A few years ago, he kept getting stopped in town and was signing up to all these charities. I had to keep calling them and cancelling. I got so fed up that in the end I wrote to the charities commission. They all got a bit freaked when I told the what I was doing. The bastards new he was vulnerable. He has had it drummed into him now and wont sign up to anything but I still have to keep an eye out, but it shows how far removed they are now from the 'doing good' that used to be the case

So I gather Action Aid still peddling nonsense? arragh! most of my donation money is going to GC causes. I had to rewrite my will recently as I had left a substantial amount of my estate to Engender an organisation I volunteered for many years which is now totally enthralled to trans and done nothing to protect womens rights in Scotland. I eventually settled on leaving money to Rape Crisis in Cape Town in the hope my money might go further there.

Here's a cracking example of how the charity commissions front page for each charity and their spending doesn't work.

This is Save the Children.
apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfCharities/CharityWithPartB.aspx?RegisteredCharityNumber=1076822&SubsidiaryNumber=0

They have over 17,000 employs and yet the charities commission website says they spend 100% of the expenditure on charitable causes.

This is pretty baffling especially when you consider that it's accounts state the wage bill was over $360,000,000. (Yes I have the currency correct. That's how it appears on their accounts submitted to the charity commission).

Meanwhile Oxfams annual report talks about "Gender Justice and Women's Rights". Now I'm not quite sure why gender is being conflated with sex when that seems to be what they are talking about or whether gender justice is something entirely different to simple old fashioned women's rights.

This appears to be Oxfam (GB) and from the annual report I can't tell how this relates to Oxfam International (separate organisation from what I can tell). Or if whether the sections for humanitarian spending and development spending are set up in the same way as Actionaid to filter up to the parent organisation. It just isn't clear to me.

I'd really like this to be a hell of a lot easier to understand and for there to be standardised account reporting to the charity commission to be a legal requirement, which has much better and more defined terms of types of spending rather than accountants just being able to make this shit up and seemingly trying to hide stuff from potential donors.

Quite why the charities commission just are letting this shit pass is quite beyond me.

@highame

My son has Asperger's and he's very naive. A few years ago, he kept getting stopped in town and was signing up to all these charities. I had to keep calling them and cancelling. I got so fed up that in the end I wrote to the charities commission. They all got a bit freaked when I told the what I was doing. The bastards new he was vulnerable. He has had it drummed into him now and wont sign up to anything but I still have to keep an eye out, but it shows how far removed they are now from the 'doing good' that used to be the case

Quite a few years ago I worked for a company who did fundraising for various charities.

Largely ordinary people, often women, and usually elderly.

The arm twisting and emotional blackmail was pervasive.

In fact, didn't a woman kill herself a few years ago because so many charities ramped up the pressure for her to increase her direct debit?

The Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Act 2016 was brought in to require charities to stop targeting vulnerable people or placing anyone under undue pressure to donate.

I think this was a result of some pretty awful examples in the past.

@RedToothBrush thank you for a phenomenal bit of research, and a very clear breakdown. Even I can understand. I'll stay with my local donations from now on.

Follow the money, indeed. Blimey.

I used to work at Christian Aid and they'll never see a penny from me.

@wrongsideofhistorymyarse

I used to work at Christian Aid and they'll never see a penny from me.

Would you mind saying why? I'm already shifting the Action Aid DD to Ethiopaid on the basis of the recommendation on another thread - if CA are another wrong'un then I'd genuinely like to know.

Happy to have a PM instead if that is easier for you. I appreciate these things can be sensitive.

We used to have a very low income a few years ago and it's only relatively recently that we're better off, and able to donate to the causes we believe in each month. I'm not keen on any of those donations, however modest, to be wasted.

So based on one member of the public complaining, they have decided that biological sex doesn't exist and is therefore irrelevant when thinking about issues that affect women and girls, one of their major charitable focuses.

FFS

Bloody hell.
I thought their initial statement was bad enough, but RTB investigation actually makes it so much worse. They have an advert on Facebook at the moment with James Purefoy making a heartfelt appeal with accompanying photos of 'disadvantaged children' - such a cynical ploy as it seems a hefty wedge of their money is going on political lobbying in the UK! Talk about disingenuous.

Re Christian Aid in a nutshell:

• poor decision making processes and measurements of results
• all white senior management despite diverse workforce
• almost exclusively male senior management
• intolerance and outright bullying to my entire team

It's the only place I've ever not worked my notice. My team were great (we won awards FFS) but bullied my senior management. A senior manager called me a liar.

This was nearly a decade ago and I hope the culture has changed. But it was vile.

Was it Christian aid that made up all those boxes for kids then stuck all the religious leaflet in or was that another charity?

So what do they call the type of human who has the body parts previously associated with being female? There has to be a word for that. Or are we just going to pretend that we don’t need one?