Helen Joyce & Julie Bindel: Should TERFs unite with the Right?

[ILikeDungs]

By Unherd, a debate-style response to the purity spiral after Brighton. I do admire Helen Joyce and her ability to calmly and logically discuss the issues. Unherd have made it age restricted (because of all the fucks, I suppose!):

WPUKs assumption that everyone must be on the left or ignorant racist scum is literally the problem.

That's horrible, and not true.

Of course WPUK are happy to work with people on the right. They're very comfortable talking to Tory politicians like Miriam Cates or Emma Nicholson, for example. They don't vet speakers for their political affiliation - I'm fairly sure that Sharron Davies, for example, who spoke at one event, is on the right, and no doubt many others have been too.

But there's a difference between right and far right. I think that some women in the UK don't really appreciate how far to the right people like Tucker Carlson, or the US evangelical movement, are. These people are very much not friends to women - not just that, they are positively harmful. They will use the gender issue as a way of pushing a regressive anti-women, anti-gay agenda.

You're not looking hard enough I'm afraid

Okay, I've watched the whole thing now. I think JB is very passionate in arguing that the fight against ideology can only come from feminism and any other way means we won't win.

I think she doesn't really understand, as HJ points out, the reality-denying aspects of this. That it's not the same thing as every other misogynistic practice, but "an attack on the whole of civilisation". So it's a fight for everyone.

Yeah, I kind of think this idea that gender ideology is a feature of "patriarchy," that word which can mean any shadowy force somehow creating something you don't like, prevents any honest need for the left to come to terms with why it is, now, a feature of so much left wing thinking. And not just GI, but id pol more generally, have to a significant degree become what the left is.

And feminism is part of the patrimony (matrimony?) of id pol. This is something women should want to dig down into, an important part of any successful social movement is looking at the results of your ideas over time and seeing what has stood up and what hasn't.

As an explanation it's just inadequate.

I agree RoyalCorgi.

WPUK work with a broad church. Their statement clarifying their position earlier this year says explicitly that they stand by the political boundaries they work within, don't impose this stance on others, that people should be free to work with who they want, that they support the right of women to peacefully assemble and protest and condemn those harassing and intimidating these women.

Both JB and HJ have spoken at WPUK events. WPUK have promoted and held launch events for their books.

They've generally done a lot to amplify the voices of many different women.

Seriously, if DH wanted to see, say, the rules tightened up for social transition of kids, I would be happy to accept Hayton's vote, speak at the same event, work on a committee to draft legislation, accept funds raised, whatever. I wouldn't even care if DH filmed me making a speech and then distributed it saying it was a good thing to listen to.

Like - how do people think anything gets done without working with others?

Setting your boundaries in these discussions basically seems to mean being unable to actually reach any level of social consensus on laws or really anything.

Another thing that I got from the debate is that JB is prepared to work with people on the broad right and similaly HJ has people she won't work with. The difference is that because they are fighting different ways their boundaries are in different places

I had the same take away Beastly.
I agree with this point too.
I think that's maybe why it's brought the interest of such a broad demographic. I think it's thanks to the feminists (like JB) for raising, analysing and explaining the issue, but it's as if this is bigger than any single movement. A different split. I don't know- identity vs reality? Not sure how to formulate it.
As an analogy , something like Lord of the Rings come to mind. The nerd in me, sees the Shire under threat, so the elves, and the humans, and the hobbits all have to work together.
I'm ill and have had some wine though so might be getting a bit grandiose/fantastical with this...

Yes, but it doesn't make any sense to me. JB will work with people on the right. HJ says there are people on the left she won't work with. Both are happy to accept the other's boundaries.

So where is all the hate and anger for women working with the right coming from?

I fear I do know the answer, sadly.

I'm also thinking it can be a bit like the blind men and the elephant story:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant#:~:text=The%20parable%20of%20the%20blind,the%20side%20or%20the%20tusk.

From what I saw, it never occurred to WPUK and associated 'actual GC left' women that HJ or MF might not be left wing. They just assumed that they were until they were informed otherwise.

Has 'gender' and all the associated shenanigans brought new women to feminism? Women who weren't previously involved? Maybe, say, women with different political inclinations than most feminists are maybe used to?

Of course WPUK knew that HJ and MF weren't left- wing.

HJ used to wrote for The Economist for goodness sake

They work with a broad church and draw their lines where they see fit.

Just as they support other women to do.

Indeed it did not.

Woman 1, speaking to Helen Joyce: Katie Hopkins? There are many beyond the pale. We do need a megaphone on the Left and I am sorry that you are describing yourself as “not left wing” HJ

Helen Joyce: JFC I’m a former finance editor of The Economist - OF COURSE I’m not left wing! I’m astounded anyone could possibly ever have thought I was!!

From the WPUK website, promoting the publication of 'Trans'

I'm afraid I'm going to have to both sides this. Jcj got hounded off twitter. There is a lot of hate directed at "soc fems"

crybully

Nounedit]
crybully (plural crybulliess*)
1 (derogatoryy^) A person who engages in intimidation, harassment, or other abusive behaviour while claiming to be a victim.

Yes @NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision . Had Helen remained in Ireland she could easily be a cabinet minister or Taoiseach even.

She'd be in one of the conservative parties here of course. Being ferociously articulate and an economist she could explain why nobody can afford a house and emigration is a really good idea.

She'd make it sound perfectly natural too. But ....this gives her a certain advantage wrt the gender issue : she can't be excluded from the 'left'.

As for the wider Idpol issue , I find myself agreeing more with an Irish socialist called Frankie Gaffney. It's a bit of a millstone. A shiny bauble to compensate for our failure to to defend the working class. After his article What Good is Identity Politics ( iirc) he was denounced from the pulpit by over 200 feminists in a sort of Papal letter of Excommunication entitled Cop on Comrades.

Most of the signatories are academics, writers , broadcasters , politicians etc. All rather depressing. So in short I'm glad HJ is out there but we sure as hell need a JB on what's left of the left.

I think so. JB is right that there are many issues that are very serious that she and others have been campaigning on for years. I respect that and I appreciate it must feel difficult to do all that thankless work and then have shiny new people riding in on a wave of Terven glory. But I think gender ideology is so huge and affects so many people directly, that it's meant more and more people getting involved in the fight who have no campaigning history. Some from a feminist angle, yes, but many from a personal one, a career one, in defence of free speech etc.

I think it would be good for the Real, Actual Feminists to accept that they are just one strand of this particular fight. Their critique is important, but it is not everything. And rather than spending all their time fighting to be leaders, accept that they will have a bigger voice if they fight alongside others.

I have noticed that both 'Real' and 'Actual' feminists seem to be a bit hazy on violence towards women when it is women that they don't like. Didn't the fb group victim blame the women being attacked at the Let Women Speak rallies?

And we have certainly seen more than one poster who uses the words 'I am a real/actual feminist' (two or three come to mind immediately) and then effectively dismiss the violence in some way.

I find this very disconcerting. There seems to be such hatred towards other women there.

I think where the Real and Actual Feminists get it wrong is that they are fully woke on everything except gender ideology. So they are constantly tying themselves in knots and trying to find reasons why it's bad to be for free speech except for when you're talking about this one issue, and why it's fine for JB to go on a speaking tour with a far right loon but not okay for KJK to have a couple of dodgy blokes stand near to her in a park. They're in a muddle because their critique is entirely based around the idea of patriarchy and misogyny, and the fact is that gender ideology isn't just about that at all. Fundamentally it's as Helen described, an attack on reality itself. But Actual Real Feminists are also engaged in attacks on reality when it comes to, say, the idea that some special males can be accepted as women, or that extremist-Muslim hatred of women has nothing to do with the rape gangs in Rochdale etc.

What FB group? Is JB a member?

I think where the Real and Actual Feminists get it wrong is that they are fully woke on everything except gender ideology

From the LotR analogy above, it does feel like the hobbitists have a very firm grasp of the way the Shire have been oppressed over the years, and are able to well explain why Sauron has been able to take over the Shire so easily compared to other parts of Middle Earth. Sauron is far from the first bad person coming through the shire.

But yet they are determined to hold on to their own ring of power, as it has proven useful against other opponents.

But how useful, really? JB described turning down offers of help in her fight against pornography as she didn't feel the organisations offering help had the right motivations. Fair enough, but maybe she would have made more headway had she been able to put those qualms aside. Would it have raised the profile of those organisations? Probably. But maybe it would also have made a difference to that campaign.

I think you have to be pragmatic in politics. You can't lead a political movement based on ideological purity unless you want to become some kind of a cult.

On the issue of knowing whether people are left-wing or right-wing, there are plenty of left-wing journalists writing for papers like the Mail and the Telegraph, so the fact that HJ was finance editor for the Economist wouldn't necessarily make her right-wing. As for Maya, she worked for a think tank tackling global poverty, which would certainly suggest she was of the left.