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!

I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me
This is how I feel. I've always been centre left but that's centre left in terms of economics, public services, concern about inequality.
At some point the left started caring more about what privileged 20 year olds on university campuses felt about identity politics than the reality of most working class to lower middle class people.

The left is losing people because there is a hard core of activists who are so convinced they have right think on a range of issues that they police wrong think by calling people bigots. This alienates the vast majority of people who are concerned about every day politics and not what someone said on Twitter.

@NecessaryScene1

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

I disagree on "people" but agree on "organisations". Here in the UK at least, it's predominantly left-wing grass-roots.

Look harder, and I think you'll see that.

The problem is that left-wing organisations have bought in too hard to an "individual rights" model, and are seeing this stuff as part of it, and thinking it's the next "thing like gay rights". The problem is that it isn't really analogous. Gay rights did not impact others in the same way. This stuff needs class analysis, but they're thinking like neoliberals.

Check out this piece by Jane Clare Jones - Gay Rights and Trans Rights - A Compare and Contrast

JCJ is brilliant and utterly on the left, and she attacks this neoliberal stuff with a venom. And coloured pens. Check out the other stuff on her site.

There are plenty of non-feminists on the right happy to just use it as a stick to beat the left with. There are also those who are more concerned with the free speech/anti-authoritarian issues. But since when were those "right-wing" things...?

Agreed.

The fact that you are a U.S poster is always very apparent. You make all sorts of false cultural and political assumptions based on very predictable tropes and cliches that dominate discourse in the U.S.

By the way Julie Bindel and Julie Burchill are two different people, with very different modes of operation. You ought to be aware of that before you start promulgating untruths and cliches about U.K gender critical thinking.

In Britain we have a tradition of political critique which is not so narrowly defined or identified, and the cultural imposition of U.S style identity politics is really not welcome or wanted.

This. Is "not having a clue" a defence to libel?

In Britain we have a tradition of political critique which is not so narrowly defined or identified, and the cultural imposition of U.S style identity politics is really not welcome or wanted.

Ooh, my opportunity to post this helpful diagram I saw on Twitter the other day. Courtesy of ExcelPope, via DocStockk, in response to yet another Yank announcing she wanted to research the U.S. funding of UK "T*RFs".

It's strange to me that there are people on the left who can't see this. If you find yourself aligned with these people on this single issue, but stand against them on all others, it's something to consider at least

It might seem "strange" to someone so tightly aligned with tribal identity politics, but there are many areas in which people can find common cause. What is most important is truth and personal integrity, and that is not exclusive to one political party or to another.

People of all persuasions can agree that sex is real, and that this reality has material, social and cultural impacts and consequences.

@PronounssheRa

It's absolutely no surprise to me, for example, that someone such as Julie Bindel has defamed a feminist trans ally with appalling racism, Islamaphobia and misogyny.

Libel is a thing, you might want to ask for your post to be deleted because you have this wrong Dadjoke

You are absolutely right - I have done this. The ironic thing is I had just read that tweet.

@NecessaryScene1

In Britain we have a tradition of political critique which is not so narrowly defined or identified, and the cultural imposition of U.S style identity politics is really not welcome or wanted.

Ooh, my opportunity to post this helpful diagram I saw on Twitter the other day. Courtesy of ExcelPope, via DocStockk, in response to yet another Yank announcing she wanted to research the U.S. funding of UK "T*RFs".

ExcelPope is brilliant

Interesting the point about class. I used to run women’s refuges. The women living there were mainly not middle class. Because middle class women often had more disposable income with which to escape. Or friends houses they could stay at or whatever. It’s my main overriding thought on the whole thing. That I could feel pressured to letting a trans woman into the refuge. The thought horrifies me. I absolutely believe that trans women should also have access to safe spaces if they are the victim of DV. Just not in a woman’s refuge.

A lot of left wing politics seems to have been stripped of any ideology beyond "help those less fortunate than yourself". Identity politics fills this vacuum because it provides a simple-minded method to determine who is less fortunate than you (and you are therefore obliged to help) and who is more fortunate than you (and is therefore obliged to help you). This in turn lets you decide who are the 'good people' and who are the 'bad people' based on who is 'doing their bit' for those below them in the heirarchy.

This whole system is liable to being gamed, because the lower down the heirarchy you are the more clout you gain. If you can convince others that your group is at the bottom of the pile then you can demand everything of them while they can demand nothing of you.

To me it’s also that the right wing are able to question things as they don’t believe in political correctness. The left are so scared of being thought of as bigoted that they just follow the ‘rules’ of what they perceive is the correct way of thinking. This is why so many left wing TWAW types are also antisemitic.

Yes you are missing something, Op.

You are missing the fact that, if Left leaning women from the Greens, LibDems and Labour hadn't stood up in the face of bullying and violent attacks while Theresa May's Government was pushing the GRA and TWAW for all it was worth, we probably wouldn't have known a thing about it until it was too late.

Those Left women are still standing firm. It angers me considerably to see the attempts to re-write history by conveniently forgetting what we owe them.

This is not Party political, and reaches right across the political spectrum.

Julie Bindel in Conversation with Cambridge Radical Feminist Network yesterday evening. Worth watching all the Q&A too. We ARE the left!

@MaudTheInvincible
Just been listening to the Bindel talk that you put up. "There is no place for feminism outside the left", going on to explain that its all about structural oppression. Women on the left should reclaim it, is the message.

Yes, she reiterates it again later on. I haven't watched her speak before, I certainly will again!

Thanks again for all the thoughts on my question. I'm really still getting my head around it all and there's loads here to help me.

It's worth remembering that the term Left Wing has its origins in the French Revolution, which went from an enlightened and progressive project to a bloodbath within 5 years. Some young activists come across as being more at the 1794 end of the scale.