Women's Place UK: Filia event: the elephant ignored yet again

[pattihews]

I attended the WPUK event at Filia yesterday and came out feeling disturbed by what struck me as a very heavy-handed event designed to avoid talking about the elephant in the room. For what it's worth, I've voted Labour at every election since 1979. I imagine 90% of the audience had a similar track record.

Put briefly, we had 90 minutes of:
Feminism=socialism and if you're not a socialist you can't be a feminist and if you're not a feminist-socialist you're the enemy.
The right is sly and will lie and try to draw you in (illustrated with a video from the US about the right-wing origins of many apparently liberal groups, including the Heritage Foundation) and you must resist any temptation to get involved with them.
The way to do it is to join unions and change them from within, hold socialist women's salons to recruit and inform and get involved at grass roots level.

There were also regular warnings about racism, which seemed odd and extraneous because WPUK is all about gender ideology.

And then the penny dropped. Though her name was never mentioned, I suddenly realised that the whole tightly-managed event (no talking unless you're holding the microphone) was a warning not to fraternise with Posie Parker.

At lunchtime I encountered several other women, all of them furious about what they'd sat through. Furious in particular because of course the elephant in the room was the fact that the Labour Party, to which WPUK is loyal to death, is the biggest threat to women's rights in this country. And they'd used PP to deflect from that.

I'm not a Posie fan. Posie's clear she's not a feminist. She says things that make me cringe. I have doubts about her motivation and we wouldn't be friends in RL. But I went to one of her events when she came to my area and she can mobilise women the left will never reach and for that she's important and valuable. When I go canvassing for Labour I meet working-class as well as middle-class women who vote or have voted Conservative. They include aspirational minority ethnic women. They have their reasons, and some of them I can understand.

A woman I've never seen before and may not see again joined my table for lunch and explained why so many women were feeling really disturbed. These are TRA tactics.
The huge issue that concerns so many of us (should we vote Labour?) was avoided and we were instead lectured on how to be good socialists and feminists.

Was anyone else there? What did you make of it?

Populist rhetoric causes divisions between a perceived intellectual elite and 'ordinary women'. Which is pretty patronising but hugely effective (judging by this thread).

No, ‘populist rhetoric’ exploits the divisions that already exist between a left-behind industrial working class and the London/Brighton elites who identify as our political representation whilst not actually giving a shiny shit about us (and even worse, calling us ‘Domesticated Zombies’ because we what, want to raise our own kids and clean our own houses rather than be paid minimum wage for childminding and cleaning for the media classes?ODFOD).

TheClogLady and what of those of us who neither work as cleaners nor employ a cleaner?

Those of us whose children went to the local children's centre nursery because I had to work?

And who really dislike the name calling and judging of other women?

Do we have a place in this worldview?

Yeah. Working class origins and with a PhD. Only one in family to finish school. Older relatives suffered under Thatcher and I know what poverty is as much as I know what a woman is.

Helpful to developing a feminist movement Tinselangel. I dunno, I sort of think that this is what WPUK are trying to contribute to.

How exactly does that happen while supporting a self admitted AGP male into a position of influence within a union? Not 4 years ago either. How 'feminist' is it to support a man like this for political expediency while effectively sticking two fingers up to the women who face the blunt end of abusive misogynistic larping men like that & suffer hugely as a result?

Let's not kid ourselves that 'feminist solidarity' extends to women like those tinsel supports who need it, especially if it's politically undesirable to shine a light on the abusive element of what 'transition' actually entails for women & children expected to be endlessly selfless & supportive of these men.

Instructions to cease name calling should be directed equally to those who identify as our leaders, as to those they see as the rank and file, if such instructions are going to appear as anything other than an attempt to control women's speech for political purposes.

Should I know where you fit?

Do you know where you fit?

If I don’t know where you fit is that because I’m too poor or too intellectually challenged to understand?*

Do you actually care about why so many women have commented to say why they feel left out/ignored/belittled/bullied/patronised? Why we’d be upset that our financial contributions are erased and instead credited to shadowy right wing boogeymen?

Or do you just want us to shut up and be nicer to the people who patronise us? Those who’d rather pretend we don’t exist than deal with the inconvenient truth that the Left has failed women, and that Labour has failed the Northern working class it was founded to represent?

Are you going to tell off the women who called us ‘Domesticated Zombies’ and who called Posie ‘Poundshop LePen’?

Or is your tone policing reserved for those of us who recognise a Head Girl when we come across one and won’t shut up and acquiesce on demand?

Maybe those of us who don’t fit WPUKs ideal should just sack off the Feminist label once and for all, eh?

I’m sure the Head Girls will enjoy their lacrosse match so much more if you chase all the council estate girls off the playing field for them.

Wouldn’t want to get in the way of their socialist utopia purity spiral 🙄

*In terms of social dynamics, based purely on our interaction on this thread, you seem like a ‘side kick’.
Not part of the Head Girl’s inner circle but a second tier friend - the one who desperately wants to be BFFs with the Head Girls but never has the right branded wellies and doesnt own her own show jumping pony.
You join in with the belittling of the out-group girls but your heart isn’t really in it, you just know you can’ never beat ‘em so you’ve tried joining ‘em, it’s a survival strategy.
You’ll probably go on to get a better grade at University than the HGs do but it will never translate into higher earnings because they’ve got the social contacts (and the right wellies) and you haven’t.

We haven’t got the right wellies either, can’t afford ‘em, and the Lidl ones have a more interesting pattern anyway…

100% to everything cloglady said.

I know no one who even votes in my friendship circle on my council estate, never mind political (or union) membership. They don't have the mental space to think about it, they are too busy just surviving.

It’s a fascinating phenomenon, innit?

Would be nice to witness it in action a little less often but the more you see it, the quicker it is to spot, so I guess that’s something!

That should be 'some of us there'. Because I picked up that the heavy-handed video was an allusion to KJK and I can perfectly understand why others might have done the same. Can we please stop pretending that a video that lectured against fraternisation with the right and mentioned the Heritage Foundation wouldn't have set many women thinking 'Is this about KJK?'

I've only just realised that KJK was supposed to be in Portland, possibly fraternising with the right, that weekend. I didn't know because I don't follow SFW. But there will have been women at the event who did. So let's drop this insinuation that anyone who mentioned KJK was some kind of plant put there by enemies/ rivals of WPUK to sidetrack proceedings.

Interesting article from Louise Perry www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-the-next-wave-of-feminism-is-conservative

Feminism in the second half of the 20th century was strongly associated with the left, since it grew out of the American civil rights movements of the 1960s. But it has not always been so. There have been plenty of periods during which feminism of a much more conservative flavour has dominated. I believe we are entering another one of those periods now.

This rightward shift is a result of two phenomena, both connected to the advent of the internet. First, there has been the politicisation of otherwise non-political women during the Great British Terf War that began in the early 2010s – a war that is now over, by the way, with the ‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists’ (who mostly prefer to describe themselves as ‘gender critical’) very clearly victorious.

Again, I never said anything about 'plants' in the meeting. Why do you continue to put words in my mouth?

KJK never crossed my mind in that meeting until someone in the audience mentioned her.

Was that directed at me TheClogLady?

I'm not putting words into your mouth. I used the phrase 'some kind of plant' to indicate that I'm not entirely sure what it is you're alleging. What word would you prefer? You clearly seem to think there was some kind of what — interaction? plan? intention? — afoot that involved two women getting up and mentioning KJK. What motive do you ascribe to them?

I don't doubt that thoughts of KJK never crossed your mind. But why so anxious to deny that they could have crossed others'?

Interesting article. I agree that KJK reaches women the left can't. Whether once gender ideology has been routed and the status quo restored they will just go back to their old lives and attitudes I don't know. KJK isn't a feminist so I don't suppose we can expect her to turn her attention to other feminist issues. But it would be great if she has inadvertently raised the consciousness — political and feminist — of the women she's brought out.

Thing is they will use every incident to discredit the GC movement. This is what we are up against.

PP isn't far right, and I can't see Harry being far right either, but TRAs will use anything to slur the women's and gay rights movement on this.

hopenothate.org.uk/2022/03/16/transphobia-and-the-far-right/

I haven't said that.

I agreed with you about the disingenuous tone of the event which, for me, was because most of the audience contributions didn't seem to be a response to what the panel had spoken about, but a rehash of various Twitter arguments which, I wondered, may have been been because some of the audience had attended a separate event the day before, so sort of continued conversations from there.

I’m fairly sure I’m not the only woman who’s spoken up for the first time at one of KJK’s meetings (Brighton, in my case), & felt pretty proud of herself for doing it. And then seen the condemnation from WPUK members & the likes of Ruth Serwotka & felt as if I’ve been slapped in the face.

I’ve been involved in all this long enough that I understand the politics & I have a lot of support. Other women in the same situation wouldn’t be that lucky.

I didn't make Filia this year but I did look through the agenda to see what was happening.

When I read the description of this event it sounded to me like just more of the same tedious fingerwagging we have been subjected to since Brighton Let Women Speak. Especially as it was run by WPUK and especially as I recognised a couple of panelists' names as being some of the most relentless fingerwaggers on twitter.

It sounded like a rehash of that Egerton article we're all supposed to be impressed with, but which offers no useful advice for women organising in the US at all, and which WDI have claimed is defamatory.

It would have been good if the session had allowed for open debate, however uncomfortable that would have been, but OP says that did not happen and instead, audience involvement was carefully contained in a 'rock and hard place' exercise.

It is disingenuous in the extreme to expect an audience of women to pretend the last month plus of fingerwagging and PP trashing has not happened and has not been instigated by some of the women on this panel, as well as WPUK as an org.

It's especially disingenuous for someone who was fingerwagging all over the Sarah Ditum thread to claim to have no idea why the audience was bringing up KJK.

I am bored shitless and sick to the back teeth of this now. I'm left wing but the actions of certain women over the past 6 weeks or so have put me off 'socialist feminism' for life.

Yes, these events are helping so many women find their voices and it's such a slap in the face to be told we are in bed with the far right, cosying up to the far right, forming alliances with the far right bla bla bla.

It's not true but it probably has made some women retreat back into silence. If I was new to this, that is the effect it would have on me.

Yes, I don't think women endlessly criticising KJK, nor KJK repeatedly criticising other feminists on her channel are good.

It women to 'take sides'. I'm utterly bored shitless of KJK being being brought into discussions about feminism. She's an irrelevance.

Sarah D's comments about KJK were unnecessary and unhelpful and have contributed to the intensifying of these divisions.

An irrelevance?

Yes. KJK explicitly says that she is not a feminist. She has no intention of working with other groups - SFW is it's own thing that she does that is important for lots of women.

Organising and campaigning for broader women's issues eg sexual health and reproductive rights, affordable childcare, a benefit system that supports not punishes women, equal pay, maternity rights etc etc isn't what she's interested in.

I'm loving the new 'KJK is an irrelevance' line

So the past 6 weeks of baseless accusations and smears, nasty name calling, denouncements and mean spirited blog posts were all for nothing?

Why have some socialist feminists wasted so much energy on someone who is irrelevant?

Why, having trashed another woman so very badly, do these women think they can just wave their hands and say she's an irrelevance anyway? Why do they expect other women to just forget what they did?

I don't consider their behaviour 'an irrelevance'.

No idea.

You're best off asking them.

I haven't written any blogs or any of those other things.

I don't like the divisions she contributes to by criticising other women on her channel, nor do I like the name calling and nastiness towards her.

Organising and campaigning for broader women's issues eg sexual health and reproductive rights, affordable childcare, a benefit system that supports not punishes women, equal pay, maternity rights etc etc isn't what she's interested in.

There's nothing wrong with single issue campaigning and organising. Do you have the same criticism of Transgender Trend, KPSS or Transwidows' Voices? They have even narrower focus than SFW.