Good T**f, Bad T**f Julie Berchill article about Leftwing feminism

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Julie Burchill article about the fall out between some Left wing feminists and Kelly J Keen.
I think she is right in her view that Labour has not shifted and is not likely to, whether women want to leave the left for the other lot is another matter.

www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/29/why-terfs-need-to-leave-the-left/#.Yryqjdi6LWo.facebook

Ok, but that whole section about racism: in Burchill’s case that’s not just a spurious accusation, she was actually made to apologize for what she admits were racist comments. She didn’t “just” mention that men in grooming gangs are Muslim or object to young girls wearing hijab, she harassed a Muslim woman and libelled her. It’s fair for people to call her racist when there’s an actual finding against her.

amp.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/julie-burchill-agrees-to-pay-ash-sarkar-substantial-damages-in-libel-case

I’ve definitely shifted my perception of where I sit, and maybe moved to the right on some things. Not on the basic idea that we should share things in society more equally, but on the idea that all right wing people are wrong about everything, worse people or less intelligent than other people. But nothing about what I think has really changed. I always supported free speech and individual autonomy.

I am sick of the nonsense. The trans movement is deeply individualistic and right wing, however much morons on both sides claim it to be left wing.

The labour party has become a right wing party that gets called left wing... but the identity "left" is actually right.

The labour party needs to return to the actual left, the economic left.

‘It seems we are at a time where you can offend everyone except Muslims and transwomen – the rest of us are expected to take it on the chin’, she tweeted in 2018. This caused the left-wing gender-critical group A Woman’s Place to distance itself from her and disinvite her from a panel.

What I find really interesting about this, and not just in reference to anyone in this article, is that it's really a criticism of a particular kind of leftist, not of Muslims at all. For the most part it's not regular Muslim people going around calling people racists and trying to shut down discussions, though they may have opinions on things like anyone. It's this whole ideology that doesn't allow for any possibly critical comment about only specific groups of people. So you can't discuss whether hijabs on little girls are a good thing, even if you have no intention of banning them, but you can tar modern Christians with things that happened 500 years ago with impunity.

It's a perspective that treats any disagreements with its racial and ethnic and other hierarchies as attacks against the people which they have placed in those hierarchies.

generally speaking women are more left wing than men.

You wouldn't know it from visiting this website where the noxious fumes of the far right are becoming ever more visible,

Liberalism has infected both leftism and conservatism, neither of which it properly belongs to, but it's become a feature of both to a significant degree. I don't think the left can pass of the responsibility for what it's become by claiming that any kind of individualistic liberalism can only be of the right.

thank you for this. that incident had somehow escaped my notice

I have always classified Burchill as 'a bit dodgy', and generally read her pieces expecting to enjoy them but disagree with them.

she's a cracking writer and a disaster as a human being generally (in my opinion, obvs).

It's surprising to find myself agreeing with her on transgender issues and on purity spirals, but I know why I reached my conclusions and it wasn't because Julie told me to, so it's not a reason to change my mind.

good article

Oh, give over 🙄

I'm beginning to think that you are a parody account.

maybe the kind of poetry you get from righteous 13-14 year olds? The idea of fumes becoming 'more visible' might make at least weak sense in that context.

It's the left that's moving, most of us are standing still:
www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tweeted-my-cartoon-woke-progressive-left-wing-media-right-viral-twitter-politics-culture-liberal-center-11651504379

Yes fumes can indeed become visible.

As can the racism and extremism of many posters on here.

If there are any fumes on here, you seem to be sniffing them.

Yep, we have prolific posters on here with things like 'fascist' in their username making good use of this site.

I don't know how someone can 'leave' the Left, if it's largely everything you believe? Unless she just means by voting. I'm unlikely to ever vote Tory, never have, but all sides need to stop putting their fingers in their ears on this topic.

You sort of accept dishonesty from politicians, but on this topic your average 'left' person in the street seems to be completely unable to defend - or even explain - their views honestly and accurately. It's all question-dodging, for some reason.

Maybe one day someone will manage to explain how we've ended up 72 genders and yet only 2 political positions: left and far right.

I am no more likely to stop thinking of myself as left wing as I am thinking of myself as a woman. - I am left wing because i believe in collective action to amerliorate structural inequalities and disparities. I am a woman because I am an adult human female. Just as i resent the redefinintion of womanhood to mean being feminine, i resent the idea of the left being recast as identity politics

Haha that's quite a funny and refreshing article.

At the end of the day JB1 and JB2 are both great feminists and neither deserve attacks from extreme political activists.

Left "matches" West, and Right "matches" East. Therefore if you live in the West and are right-wing, your politics don't align with your location, and you are transpolitical.

One is a physical compass location, the other is a nebulous group of ideas loosely forming under the headings Left and Right in our society.

Some of us might think that the idea that these two separate concepts can 'match' or 'mismatch' seems absurd.

I cannot for the life of me understand how so many of the so called Left have decided to support this ideology, when you actually have a recording the mother of one of the USA's most high profile transitioned children clearly state she wanted to avoid having a homosexual son.

The whole weird dynamic between the left and the women who cling on to it can be seen in a statement by A Woman’s Place made in response to Kellie-Jay’s tweet: ‘We know failure to recognise the concerns of women, as well as active mistreatment of women on and by the parts of the political left has led to many becoming estranged or ostracised from the socialist and labour movement. Our values remain of the left and progressive, and we still believe that equality, justice and solidarity are worth fighting for.’

I think this quote is interesting and gets to the heart of the disagreement in some ways.

It seems to very accurately describe how some feel. To put it on it's head, they can't leave the left because another political position would not be progressive, and would not be about justice, and would not believe in equality or solidarity.

So the underlying idea is that the left, and the left alone, believe in solidarity, justice, and progressivism, and leaving the left would mean abandoning those things.

I think that maybe what Berchill is getting at is, that assumption needs to be scrutinized. Maybe it's not only the left that believes in justice. Maybe we need to ask what is meant by solidarity and equality, and whether those ideas only exist on the left.

I think there are quite a lot of people who have asked that in relation to organizations like the Labour Party, and have come to the conclusions that the assumption that those values only exist on one side is wrong. And instead that there are people in both parties who value those things, and some who don't, and a greater difference is how they see those values functioning in society.

The idea of political progressivism is perhaps somewhat different, I think that a certain number of people have begun to think that as a concept or ideology it may be fatally flawed, and in fact part of what allowed gender ideology to take hold and flourish. Because in practice it amounts to a kind of utopianism, the idea of a "right side of history" and an assumption that we know what constitutes progress. And so it stymies looking at policy ideas from the perspective of pros and cons and thinking about unexpected effects over time.

I suspect a lot of the cultural elites on the Left would never watch that kind of tv show.

If gender ideology did a single thing to trouble our dominant structure on society (that of favouring white middle class males) does anybody seriously think corporations would have been so eager to lap it up and virtue signal their compliance?

It is the most individualist, capitalist wet dream. And so utterly regressive in its desire to fit humans into artificial pink or blue gender boxes.

This is true of quite a lot of id politics things though. Corporations are also happy to lap up things like anti-racism, BLM, sometimes women's issues, and all the rest. LGB causes were a favorite for a while because it meant people with no special issues which needed to be accommodated.

It's a great distraction technique for corporations and political parties but I don't think that is all that is going on.

I'm left wing and I just realised being disappointed in the labour party has become tiresomely familiar. Iraq war, tougher on benefits, antisemitism and, now, gender ideology. I think I'm not a supporter of labour, just usually they're the least worst option. This time though...

I always thought it was age - generally people get more right-wing as they age not everyone but it's a general trend.

But I went looking

www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/young-women-are-more-left-wing-than-men-study-reveals/

Young women are more left wing - older women more likely right wing.

Given 60s population bulge and that older voter turn out much more - there are likely more older women voters at moment.