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!):

I feel that HJ’s style is always ameliorative and she supports her opponents in quite a generous way, looking for common ground and avoiding being confrontational or making them look daft. It means her point can play second-fiddle to her social grace, but I think her argument in this debate is this:

There are decent people and arseholes in this world, regardless of their politics. If you hold to your personal understanding of the truth, you will piss people off, whether or not you agree with their politics overall.

Work with people who are decent whatever their politics.

Even work with someone whose views are completely opposed to yours, if you keep that overlapping interest within strict boundaries.

What does ‘working with’ mean anyway? It’s important to clarify that in order to answer the question.

I’ve never seen her explain clearly the subject of the debate, you are making assumptions about my level of familiarity.

One thing for certain, and you definitely see it in that debate, is that JB has her die hard fans, who are very ostentatiously laughing along in support every time she quips. I don’t think any of those could see any fault in her.

Oh another key point of HJs was that people on the left tend to have a dualistic idea of good and evil, goodies and baddies and tend to believe that people on the right are the baddies and that every thing they do is driven by their evil intent.

Don't know how I've lost you. I clearly answered your question.

But I think you've changed the terms a bit. It wasn't a matter of saying feminist groups have power OVER other groups, but that they are relatively more powerful than the groups discussed in the debate.

Sorry @Shinyredbicycle maybe your "you've lost me" comment wasn't directed at me? But in case it was, this is the comment I made. You asked which groups, and I repeated, the groups HJ and JB talked about in the discussion.

NecessaryScene - "This particular society-wide Woke mess is a new acute problem hitting everyone - particularly women due to their chronic problem."

JB is so behind the curve on this that she is a liability with her "Calm down, dear, left wing feminists can sort this out!" attitude.

Going with JB's references to FGM, prostitution, etc. the equivalent situation would be:
. . . . schools across the country would be promoting FGM, prostitution, etc.

. . . . the NHS would be planning to increase funding for FGM surgery (well, they are but they don't call it FGM)

. . . . Girl Guiding would have a Lolita Badge for Brownies

. . . . every schoolgirl in the country would either have a pimp or know at least a couple of friends who had volunteered to be regularly gang-raped

. . . . almost every family would have a daughter, grand daughter, niece, cousin or a friend with a child who is convinced that she needs "life-saving FGM surgery" or that if she doesn't have a man selling her to be raped that she will kill herself.

Meanwhile, girls are STILL being trafficked for sex as they have been for the last 40 years and STILL nobody knows how many children are affected and how many perpetrators are involved.
www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/investigation

Parents have been organising to protect their children but they do not need to fear that they will be reported to the police for being "untoward about paedophiles".
paceuk.info/

FGM and the rape of children are not being promoted as good and natural things by everyone from the BBC to the CofE and parents are not being taught that a toddler pulling open the poppers on their onesie is signalling that they either want to be raped or be subjected to FGM.

Note:
"FGM" in the previous paragraph is not a synonym for "gender affirming care".

JB really does not seem to appreciate the scale and urgency and, despite her references to the BNP and Tommy Robinson muscling in on the "grooming gang" fiasco, gives pats on the back to her Soc Fem pals who prioritise polishing their left-wing credentials over protecting children.

In the screenshot from the Facebook "Actual Gender Critical Left" note the first comment:
"The replies are all trite cliches. Sometimes I think if I hear (read) "safeguarding" one more time I will vomit".

Note the "reactions": they are all "Likes" or "Laughs".

This is in response to comments on a WPUK Facebook post about Jayne Egerton's article ""Women and the Religious Right in the USA" (lauded by JB).

Note the comments that follow.

What is vastly more important to these women than "safeguarding", which either makes them want to vomit or is a joke, is approbation by other members of their in-crowd and fellow journalists and academics.

The Soc Fems in that screenshot are also mainly in the USA, where the situation is even more dire than here in the UK.

These women, in both the UK and the USA, spend their time researching and posting about Hearts of Oak, Tommy Robinson, the Proud Boys, etc. as well as the increasingly ugly and dangerous backlash by the USA religious right against anything and everything under the LGBT+ umbrella.

There is also post after damning post about women in the UK and USA who are taking court cases, organising public meetings and street protests, who are doing their utmost to engage with policy-makers and the public and raise awareness. Utterly evil - some of them have even appeared on the Tucker Carlson Show 😱

JB seems to have in her mind's eye a fantasy army of Left Wing Feminists bravely doing battle to save women and children from male violence, of which transgender ideology is just the latest pocket of horrors. She praises their armchair activism, which consists predominantly of slagging-off actual activists in blog posts and on social media.

The irony is that KJK obviously admires JB and has repeatedly invited her on to her YouTube Channel and to attend #LetWomenSpeak events.

JB seems to think that to do so would damn her as a "right wing bigot" - apparently not realising that she already has that reputation with some on "the Left", being seen as a sell-out patsy writing click-bait for the Daily Mail. However, on the Right she is seen as a raging Left-wing feminist, so her involvement might well serve to scare off - or educate - the right wing men apparently lurking in the shadows ready to appropriate Gender Critical activism.

By contrast, HJ seems well aware that this is much more than a feminist issue and that we should not hang around while it gets rapidly worse, leaving the field wide open for violent far-right opportunists to step in, ie. without any help or encouragement from the diverse ranks of dissenters who are Gender Critical women and Feminists.

The far right, mainly men, are already doing just that in the USA and, wouldn't you know it, the Soc Fems who sit on their arses penning hit-pieces are blaming other women.

Pull your finger out, Julie, stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

I can’t believe my comment where I refuted the accusation that I’d contradicted myself got deleted. Nuts.

I sometimes suspect the mods randomly delete comments just to remind us all to stay in line.

Seems about right BeastlySlumber

(Meanwhile on another thread, a poster who tells a woman whose husband just tried to kill her that it could be a one off and all these comments telling you to leave are manhaters trying to break up your marriage, has all her comments still standing. Makes you wonder.)

I wonder whether the many ‘site down’ situations are when hackers are getting mod login details and they do weird shit, but not too much, so they don’t raise suspicion.

Is Julie Bindel part of that Actual Gender Critical Left Facebook group? I think someone's already asked this but I can't see any answer.

Bosky it is undeniable when you lay it all out like that.

Yeah, who knows? I'm pretty sure there's at least one TRA mod.

Surely not? I know JB can be petty and mean but surely she wouldn't waste her time like that?

It's petrifying, isn't it?

The sheer scale of the problem is horrifying.

In Norway, a woman was threatened with jail for three years for identifying a man as a man.

Talking normally, about reality, is risking incarceration for women.

I don't find the explanations in JBs articles any more clear-sighted than her explanations here, I don't think that's the issue.

The "other group" I would say is the "far right". Feminism clearly has more credibility than whatever it is we are meant to think of when people use that phrase, that's the whole point of using it. To contrast the goodies with the obvious baddies.

The fact that usually it isn't any kind of far right that is being discussed notwithstanding.

My impression is that JB is only interested in feminism which is specifically about rescuing women from violent male perpetrators.

Any feminism that doesn’t have that potential is a bit “meh” for her.

I remember when Invisible Women came out, she said it was a tour de force, or some such thing. Then recently, when she was on triggernometry, she said that she wasn’t interested in feminism about whether women have safety gear that fits them - she even said - I think - “it’s not a matter of life and death” - when it literally is a matter of life and death if a female police officer gets stabbed under her stab-proof vest, because it doesn’t fit.

I also think she is pretty territorial and petty, which is really confusing when she seems to have such noble aspirations.That’s why the explanations don’t hold up. It’s because they aren’t really her actual motivations.

Yes - excellent post.

I can't remember if she says it in this debate but I have heard her say she's not interested in the pay gap for rich women as they have comfy lives anyway.

I can appreciate that it's not her focus, and it is obviously less urgent that women suffering violence.

However, the fact that women are consistently underpaid is because women are just not seen as valuable as men are. So it's really the same problem.

I think that was also from the Triggernomatry interview.

Personally I am not that concerned about the pay gap because I think it is largely down to childbearing, and I don't think the answer to women's issues is to make them give up having and caring for children.

What struck me most in that particular interview was almost the first thing she said - she got into feminism because she went looking for lesbians.

I don't think she has a very serious interest in building a society, as such. So the political process isn't actually that important.

The pay gap is driven by child rearing only if you take it as given that jobs should be packaged in that way. Why for example do law firms compete on availability rather than other dimensions of quality. Its the invisible women mechanism again

I can't see that feminists have power over any of those groups tbh.

Gender ideology is an acute problem because of the chronic problem of male violence not rather than.

It would never have taken hold if there wasn't already entrenched oppression of women and violence towards women and girls.

If women/feminists have even equal power, one 'no' would have been enough.