Previous thread OP BloodyFreezing wrote Sat 24-Mar-18:
"The Deptford People Project and the impact of self-ID and transactivism on working class women
Interesting interview with Lucy McDonagh, co-founder of the Deptford People Project in this article:
www.feministcurrent.com/2018/03/23/leftist-women-uk-refuse-accept-labours-attempts-silence-critiques-gender-identity/ "
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3203804-The-Deptford-People-Project-and-the-impact-of-self-ID-and-transactivism-on-working-class-women
Feminist Current article by Meghan Murphy linked above:
(extract)
"Lucy Mcdonagh grew up working class, raised by a single mother. Her life as a young woman was marked by addiction, abuse, poverty, and mental health issues. She managed to escape a relationship with an extremely violent man at 32-years-old, after being partnered with him for 10 years. “My experience of being a working class woman and the level of trauma carried by many working class people has been my driving force since I was young,” Mcdonagh told me.
“All I have ever wanted to do is to try and empower working class people into supporting ourselves and, in doing so, empower our community. Being working class isn’t just about poverty. It’s about resilience and an unspoken understanding of violence. We don’t talk about our struggles because that places us at greater harm.” (continues)
"She tells me there is “a very real lack of understanding about female victims of abuse, their need for sex-segregated spaces, and their need to be protected from predatory men.” But it has become impossible to debate or even discuss these issues. “Suddenly (mainly) white middle class students were shouting down and abusing working class women for expressing concern,” she says. “These people were bullying real victims into [submitting to] their ideology — women who have spent their lives being forced to accept situations they don’t want.”
Mcdonagh says she doesn’t believe that “a rich white boy” can “understand the needs of a working class ex-care system woman, raped and abused for decades by many different men — a woman living in a world that won’t ever feel safe again and who is bringing up children in a community that is suffering [due to] poverty, abuse, and trauma.”
“I couldn’t sit back a watch this final episode of ‘Gentrification Deptford’ invade the only thing that working class women have left: their experience.”
Mcdonagh and her group were concerned about how the proposed changes might affect services for women like her and those she worked with. Yet the questions they have are not being answered. They worry about how they will be able protect the women they work with from males who need only self-identify as female in order to access women’s spaces and about whether or not a “small, unfunded, grassroots organization [will be able to] challenge the law for the greater good if needed.” They also want to know whether challenging such a law could jeopardize their access to funding in future.
“Working class women know the lengths that abusers will go to get access to their victims,” she said. “We know this because we have lived it.”
“I fear that just the possibility that a male-bodied person [whether a client or staff member] could access a women-only service would be enough for, for example, our Muslim women’s community to avoid those spaces,” Mcdonagh says. “We are still trying to access hard to reach women and this would definitely make it more difficult.” (continues)