New to this - question about reconciling left leaning politics...

[scaredsadandstuck]

....when the mainstream support for GC thinking seems to mostly come from more right wing people and organisations?

Hi - I've been lurking for a little while but am still very new to this. I am pretty sure I agree that women are being erased in a way we've not seen before. But I also feel uncomfortable when it seems like it is those on the right that are the mainstream voice supporting that view. I feel like I don't trust my own position! Am I missing something?

How do you reconcile this if you are left leaning but don't buy in to TWAW and you don't think being a women is something you can choose, and you really believe that women need single sex spaces. Am I overthinking it?

Please do direct me to any existing threads if this has been done to death already!

A Welcome from me too OP.

The briefest way I can describe it is it's not me who has changed but the political sliding scale has shifted to extremes and I have stood steadfast in my values.

I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me. I would now be described as right of centre but that's only really because I know what a woman is.

I agree with much of what has already been shared, and it has been said better that I can say it today.

(I'm a rinse and repeat ex Green. I leave over the horrors of the party and return because of the horrors of the climate crisis. )

I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me.

Perfectly put.

@Highwind

Hi and welcome.

Once you get out of the mindset of automatically thinking that left=good and right=bad, it makes it a lot easier.

Even our current government, whilst Conservative is still fairly central. Certainly more centre-right than actually right-wing, whilst the main opposition has swung massively left.

Most peoples political beliefs are more central than they realise and they reject both far right and far left politics.

You are not aligning yourself with the right by holding GC views, you are aligning with the majority centrist position. :)

Absolutely this.

I align myself centre-right. I'm "small c" conservative and can't abide party politics.

Left is not good. Right is not bad. They lie at either end of a swinging pendulum and that pendulum can sometimes swing so far that it swoops round on itself. That is what I feel is currently happening with "The Left". The pendulum has swing so far it's shifted into Marxism, cancel culture, and a totalitarian urge to control what people get to think and say.

Gender ideology is as far from Marxism as you can get.

OP, it's because I'm left-wing that I'm GC.

Hi OP. This is a Marxist analysis posted previously. I'm not a Marxist myself but it's GC, if that helps reconcile your views!

Includes a useful comparison of trans rights / GC / right wing views.

@StillFemale

From a working class socialist standpoint the TWAW chants feel like middle class indulgence. As an example I’m concerned about dignity and safety of women in prison, and know women who have been in prison, this is not theoretical. I’ve never really felt UK Labour was interested in my views as a working class female so whilst I detest the current cabinet with pretty much every fibre of my being I acknowledge some conservatives are decent people and am grateful for their support for women and girls.

There’s no way the left of old would’ve stood by, grinning and clapping as middle class blue ticks on twitter spewed out their hatred for women, had social media existed back then. For all their faults. They would have seen through this.

The height of bourgeois bullying.

From a working class socialist standpoint the TWAW chants feel like middle class indulgence

This. I'm from a working class northern town classic red wall territory. Its absolutely middle class navel gazing, the people in my town worry about feeding the kids, paying rent, finding work. The stuff Labour used to focus on.

Yep, I grew up in a similar town (North West) and this is exactly why Labour have failed to get votes up there, and they still don’t seem to be listening!

The 'Right': Sex is real. Gender is real.

TRA: Sex isn't real. Gender is real.

Gender Critical: Sex is real. Gender isn't real.

GC and 'the Right' have some similar positions but approach it from completely different viewpoints with ultimately diverging desired outcomes.

Just a few years ago, if I'd posted on FB, "AIBU to think it's excluding Muslims from education if a college doesn't have a meditation room set aside for prayers?" people would have been falling over themselves to comment YANBU.

Now you put "AIBU to think it's excluding Muslim girls from education if a college doesn't have single-sex toilets so they can prepare themselves for prayer?" and some of the same people say YABU.

Just following the crowd, they are.

Well, I had a cut and paste fail, and then lost what I've just typed out, but basically what LadyFuHao said!

GC feminists agree with the right that biological sex is real, but trans activists agree with the right in that they accept gender roles. GC feminists disgree with both in that point.

Don't be put off by the lazy argument that GCs agree with the right, so we must all be right wing. That is very sloppy thinking, and a cheap argument.

I’m left in the old-school sense yet found myself in the odd position a few years back of calling the office of David T C Davies (Conservative MP for Monmouth) to thank him for standing up for women. It’s a funny old world

There are plenty of people on the left who feel that identity politics has gone bonkers, in different ways.

In the UK most of the GC voices are very left-wing.

When you see claims that GC feminist = 'right wing', look at what else that person is saying. It's a fairly good bet they'll claim that what GC feminists want is to 'eradicate all trans people' and to 'put everyone in restrictive gender roles like the 1950s'. These are in no way accurate or even sane summaries of a belief that... sex is real and matters.

When all this really kicked off it was so weird.

Lifelong lefty nicely feminist. Suddenly on the 'wrong' side. Very uncomfortable feeling.

Left the labour party over this. Politically homeless. Would never vote Tory.

The thing to ask yourself- and look at some of the women who labour have kicked out- why life long lefties, many of them activists. Have suddenly apparently become crazed right wing bigots.

I mean it's not very bloody likely is it. Do something else is going on.

One thing I have got from this.

I used to stick to my sources of truth- media I agreed with.

Now I read a wide range and I think that's more healthy. Hear other perspectives. Maybe understand a bit about why they feel that way. Discard them. Etc etc.

That's been a good result, I'm more open minded, less this is good that is bad the end.

A lot of people who think they are socialists these days, or even leftists, are liberal individualists who like a little wealth redistribution.

What Duck said.
You have to see the bigger picture here. Since the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the entire political spectrum has been transformed. There no longer is a real existing alternative to liberal capitalism, even China has an authoritarian version of it. I don’t know how old you are but changes in the political imaginary happen slowly. Identity politics is a bourgeois indulgence but we no longer have the words to say this clearly.

Once you get out of the mindset of automatically thinking that left=good and right=bad, it makes it a lot easier

Completely this.

Critically analyse and separate points.

Read a range of papers; the DM is a pile of shit often but also regularly is the only paper to print stories that are about the abuse of women, that places such as the guardian won't print. Journalists pitch stories and editors decide.

It's hard but it makes you a better thinker and better able to stand up for your beliefs.

Don't forget that the extreme left has in the past at times been as disastrous for humans in history as the extreme right.

Science, facts and safeguarding trumps ideology and #bekind.

Re Marxism, this is a great site by some current young left leaning woman centring feminists:

onthewomanquestion.com/

I'm left wing and GC :)
Placemarking.

Thank you all very much for your perspectives. The idea of a Venn diagram of GC feminist thinking is a very helpful concept (I know that's not exactly what was said but it's how I visualised it).

I will look into all the sources you've pointed me to.

I'm left wing and GC too, I won't be voting Labour because of the way they view GC women (would never vote Tory). It bothers me that I no longer have a party to vote for but I will stay true to myself and my beliefs.

@NiceGerbil

One thing I have got from this.

I used to stick to my sources of truth- media I agreed with.

Now I read a wide range and I think that's more healthy. Hear other perspectives. Maybe understand a bit about why they feel that way. Discard them. Etc etc.

That's been a good result, I'm more open minded, less this is good that is bad the end.

Very much this! And think about how massively male-dominated the media, especially tech, is. Whose voices get amplified, and whose silenced, and in whose favour is this all working? When JKR made her tweet, Twitter limited the number of 'likes' and made 'likes' disappear. Feminist accounts mysteriously lost followers (my account has been made to unfollow some - nothing to do with me!). Feminist accounts are shut down on the main social media platforms, while MRAs and TRAs merrily post death threats but mostly their accounts are still there. And when you look up someone like JKR or a feminist subject you find really negative tweets about them bumped up the timeline, not because they're the most liked, but because they're the ones someone running the site thinks you ought to see.

More generally, I've seen many Left-leaning people, especially in the Arts, bullied off Twitter or cowed into silence by pile-ons. The Arts are very vulnerable to pile-ons because of the way activists can bombard sites like Amazon or IMDB with negative reviews. We've seen similar things happen with bullying to control content at The Guardian, The Stage and even Boyz. There's a great Radio 4 programme, the Purity Spiral, that particularly focuses on this in the arts and with creatives, and is on BBC Sounds.

I won't be voting Labour because of the way they view GC women

Same here. It was labour's treatment of Anne Ruzylo that opened my eyes to what was going on in the Labour Party.

PotholeHellhole

"It really struck me that GC/radfem twitter was up in arms about working class children going hungry, and sharing stories of how they'd been on FSM as children themselves, and meanwhile the focus of North West Labour Party twitter was... how much they hated Rosie Duffield."

Exactly, talk about taking their eyes off the ball, that was an open goal, but they didn't even take a shot at it.
Somebody will have to remind me, when was the last time the Labour party ever got involved with social issues, you know, the nitty, gritty things which affect the poorest in society, because the last year has negatively impacted the poor like no other time.
It took a young footballer, Marcus Rashford to question and pressurise the government over the way they mishandled their response to meals for children.

"Same here. It was labour's treatment of Anne Ruzylo that opened my eyes to what was going on in the Labour Party."

That was a disgusting episode. I wonder where the person responsible for that has gone.