All this talk about the US trip reminds me of Natasha Chart's excellent speech outside the HRC.
Partial transcript from 4:38:
I keep hearing that in the course of doing this very necessary public work to protect women's rights, that we are not allowed to talk to a lot of people. That there are certain people that will give us cooties or something if we talk to them.
We are not supposed to talk to people who oppose abortion.
And they don't mean the Democrats who wrote the abortion exclusions into the Affordable Care Act. They don't mean the Obama Administration which declared the Hyde Amendment a matter of 'settled law', overturning 40 years of women's activism in the Democratic Party, to try to get our leadership to suppport abortion rights.
We're told we're not supposed to talk to people who push conversion therapy and they don't mean the people on the left who are sterilising children for playing with the wrong toys, or wearing the wrong clothes, or being on the autism spectrum, or seeming like they might grow up to be gay.
They don't mean that conversion therapy.
WEe're not supposed to talk to people who oppose women's bodily autonomy and they don't mean the non-profits who sold feminism to the pimp lobby and the johns for a song.
No-one else in politics is required to play by these rules.
Organisations like the Human Rights Campaign lobby everyone in DC to ask for what they want. They show up, you can guarantee they've sent lobbyists to the Trump administration, you can guarantee they've sent lobbyists and had constituent [fly-ins?] to have people talk to republicans in congress. I can promise you that they have done these things.
They're trusted to advocate wherever they go from a deep conviction in their founding principles and they advocate for the interests of their constituents, no matter who they're talking to.
And maybe it's because these organisations are run by men and for men that they trust each other to do the right thing, no matter where they are.
But they still think that we need guardians. We need chaperones, we need to be home by 8. We need political minders.
They still want to be able to say what rights we can ask for, even as they work to erase them. Better still if they can get women, in our advocacy, to ask for more rights for men. They seem to love that.
And when we won't agree, they threaten us, they blacklist us, they demonise us, they get us fired, they stand in front of doors that they've closed to us. And they shout that if they can't have us, no-one will.
And we've all heard this before I think, and I think we're all pretty sick of it, pretty tired of hearing that from men. And I think I, and many of you, are pretty sick of having the left treat feminist politics like it's their girlfriend and they're jealous. And we're making male friends they don't approve of and they're very upset. And they want to check our phones, and they want to read our social media, and they want to find out what we're doing. And they want to stalk us, and they want to threaten us.
And I think some of us have been there before and we don't want to be there again. And we're not going to put up with it.
And to our sisters on the left - we know that you're doing important work and putting up with a lot of shouty manbabies to do it. And thank god for you. But to you, and to women everywhere: get yourselves free. Get yourselves free.