Some questions for the socialist/left feminists here

[BlackWaveComing]

It's a free world, apparently, but this isn't a thread seeking input from conservative or right wing GC's. So

Otoh, if you are a feminist whose feminism encompasses but is not confined to GC in the context of transgender issues, and you have a socialist or left political alignment, I'd like your input. I suppose it's an AIBU for you. ( For context, I appreciate the role of social conservatism as a balancing force, and have defended FWR from accusations of transphobia on many occasions. Posting here for years, other names. You can PM me if you want my other names for veracity.)

I feel like FWR is losing a connection to feminism, and becoming a free speech board with an upsetting number of anti-feminist and anti- w/c tropes appearing here, largely unchallenged, daily.

Today I note the patriarchal notion that mothers are to blame for their children's mentally illness being trotted out. ROGD children, subject to an individualist corporation mediated social pressure being called attention seekers. This veers towards t-phobia, imo. And a complete lack of recognition that feminism is for poor women too, a cohort to whom the economic right is no friend.

Am I unreasonable in my assessment that yes, FWR is sliding into anti-genderism, anti-feminist conservatism?

And regardless of whether I'm wrong or right, is there a place for international w/c socialist feminists to discuss gender, among the many other issues facing women and children?

TIA.

Seriously? Have you not heard of the Domestic Abuse Act 2020?

Have come back online before bed as something occurred to me. I haven't always been on the left. For a time, I took refuge in the straitjacket embrace of extreme conservatism. When I extricated myself and began to reason and discern my own mind, I hoped that I would further my liberation by finding the people who had been presented as the compassionate arbiters of kinder views than the right wing I had been sucked into.

Instead I found that all those people had decamped from class analysis, jettisoned ending injustice and abandoned the liberal embrace of progressive freedom and set up a Disneyfied version of the left, which was thinly veiled bourgeois capitalist individualism, full of misogyny and animosity towards homosexuality.

So for me, it's not that the left wing left me. It's that when I finally moved left, the left wasn't there anymore, and had decided to take up the spaces I had left far behind.

And the Voyeurism (upskirting) Act. Also passed under the Tories.

In addition to the decampment of the Left, I'm darned if I know where the Centre has gone nowadays.

Best of luck over there with the right. I do wonder what use they'll find for feminism once our utility as a wedge for the left fades. Hopefully I'm wrong and women's rights for all women will blossom somehow under free market neoliberal social conservatism.

I find this kind of entrenched attitude so hard to understand. Do remind me how many female leaders of the Labour party there have been? And let's not even get on to how badly trades unions have traditionally treated women!

www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/03/gmb-union-institutionally-sexist-inquiry-finds

From this September, just for a start:

GMB union institutionally sexist, inquiry finds

While I would agree that generally speaking the Tories are no friends of women, nor are Labour. If anything Labour are currently worse for women as they seem intent on giving away womes rights wholesale! How will that help poorer women? Disabled women? Any women really? When not only do they have other problems to deal with, their sex is no longer recognised so stuff like maternity rights disappear up the chimney?!

Which is kind of the issue for me and why I am politically homeless.

And also the problem of how..TRA stuff is intertwined in so many aspects of feminism that I see now, so its kind of hard to discuss many things without bringing GRA stuff into it at times.

@Asterion

www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/03/gmb-union-institutionally-sexist-inquiry-finds

From this September, just for a start:

GMB union institutionally sexist, inquiry finds

This is not even slightly surprising, depressingly.

I really feel like everyone has just totally abandoned women tbh. Its not a good place to be in my head.

Oh goodness, how wonderful women out on the street will be free from the scourge of upskirting. Icing. Absolute tone deafness. Do you understand a nice shiny law doesn't matter when women are trapped by rw economic policy?

When you move right to save woman, you leave a lot of women behind. I don't think feminists are blind to this; a heck of a lot of Mumsnetters are.

@Asterion

Best of luck over there with the right. I do wonder what use they'll find for feminism once our utility as a wedge for the left fades. Hopefully I'm wrong and women's rights for all women will blossom somehow under free market neoliberal social conservatism.

I find this kind of entrenched attitude so hard to understand. Do remind me how many female leaders of the Labour party there have been? And let's not even get on to how badly trades unions have traditionally treated women!

You are talking about icing.

The cake is policy.

The Domestic Violence Act was also passed by the Tories. This year.

And I am telling you, the Act is meaningless without being married to an ability to secure economic safety for
all women and children.

So far your answer to that is Thatcher! May! Be an entrepreneur!

@BlackWaveComing

And I am telling you, the Act is meaningless without being married to an ability to secure economic safety for all women and children.

So far your answer to that is Thatcher! May! Be an entrepreneur!

I was responding to this quote:

Best of luck over there with the right. I do wonder what use they'll find for feminism once our utility as a wedge for the left fades. Hopefully I'm wrong and women's rights for all women will blossom somehow under free market neoliberal social conservatism.

• And I am telling you, the Act is meaningless without being married to an ability to secure economic safety for all women and children. *

You're not wrong. Unfortunately, the Left have never convinced the electorate on their ability to secure economic safety for anyone.(not since the 70s, within my memory, and assessing New Labour as more centrist than Left).

@ErrolTheDragon

* And I am telling you, the Act is meaningless without being married to an ability to secure economic safety for all women and children. *

You're not wrong. Unfortunately, the Left have never convinced the electorate on their ability to secure economic safety for anyone.(not since the 70s, within my memory, and assessing New Labour as more centrist than Left).

I don't know what is meant to happen for women who don't have means/have disability etc.

How do we not leave them behind in the shift rightwards? Will the economic right ever make important moves towards ending homelessness, for example, let alone in the unfashionable demographic if older women?

I just despair.

We’ve been under austerity for over a decade, so the women getting left behind issue has happened.

I don’t consider things like upskirting and domestic abuse to be separate to issues of economic hardship. Poorer women and girls need those laws more because they are more vulnerable.

Right wing feminists are not going to change their minds on core economic policies. It doesn’t actually distract left wing feminists from working on left economic policy just because they are also co-operating with right wing feminists on other issues.

There are misogynists on the left and misogynists on the right. The ones on the left have been very busy disguising it better by supporting supposedly virtuous ideas that screw women over such as trans rights and cultural relativity.

I think women's rights and freedoms need an entirely new axis to be represented properly, one that isn't based on any political tribalism that emerged from male interests and conflicts.

I don't know enough about socialism to answer the OP's specific question. I'm for high tax and high spend, nationalisation, a cap on the difference between the lowest paid and the highest paid in organisations, and a safety net for those in society who cannot fend for themselves. I would have thought that makes me left wing. Yet I sense I am branded right wing simply for saying you need strict limits on low-skill immigration into such a system because you don't want to overburden finite support resources that I feel a government is morally obliged to provide for its existing citizens in need first. We will never have enough housing if net immigration is quarter of a million people a year - ever! Both left and right have ignored this, the left want the votes, the right want the cheap labour. Even if we did attempt to match housing supply to ever increasing demand, it's always a negative for the natural environment to add more humans. Why is this continually ignored? This is not right wing! It's classic green (or 'conservation' as we called it then) from 30 years ago until discussions about population control and not paving over paradise were shut down.

I'm not as clever or as politically educated as others here, but it has become obvious to me that my radical feminist leanings are not compatible with capitalism, and I find myself having to make what I consider to be profoundly un-feminist choices by virtue of being an a) straight b) mother in a capitalist society.

So, in the same way that you find policy to be the cake and individual pieces of legislation to be the icing, I find capitalism to be the (fucking bollocks, special edition Halloween themed, fake Mr Kipling) cake and so-called left or right wing-ness - in the UK, within the political party choices we have - to be the icing.