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'm not sure "white men" are a social group at all.

Power is difficult to quantify. Would it be terribly tactless of me to observe that Ruth Serwotka, co-founder of WPUK, is married to Mark Serwotka, General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union? Mark was apparently once named one of Britain's 100 most influential Catholics. (I'm not sure how serious the list was though. It may have been entirely tongue in cheek.)

There are certainly more people in the PCS than in HoO, and in the BNP put together. In another thread, I ended up looking at the BNP's typical vote share in their heyday of winning council elections, and I think the PC contains more people than have ever voted BNP at one time!

Does this mean Ruth, and thus WPUK, has power because of her husband's position? Well, I don't think so. But then, I don't think HoO gained power from standing in a park near SFW attendees. If I did, I suppose I'd think WPUK benefited from Ruth's connections, wouldn't I? It seems internally consistent.

They're a demographic. I don't think they're an identity group (although I wouldn't be surprised to see that change in the coming years.)

Half the global population is made up of women - approximately 4 billion people, all with different opinions. And yet the universal oppression of women continues, because it is sex based oppression. Unless women put aside their differences and unite against their oppressors, nothing will change.

This is from the Independent, about strike action.

Job-seekers, people collecting benefits and those applying for passports could all face problems after tens of thousands of civil servants voted to strike in a row over pay and pensions.

Some 100,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union overwhelmingly backed taking industrial action.

Bold mine.

I think the last two posters are both on the wrong thread?

Nah, right thread. I just wanted to drum home the relative size of the union that Mark Serwotka heads up. If power by social association truly worked, the socialist feminists' goals would be be sorted, given the proximity of WPUK to senior union leaders.

As power through social association clearly doesn't work, I won't be worrying about HoO etc gaining something from breathing the same air as SFW attendees.

Disagree - KJK and Kara Dansky got to share their message with an audience that already agrees with them. So they gained nothing.

Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, gained far more, by being able to draw on their presence to present himself as a good guy, caring about women. Which is, let's face it, the opposite of the truth.

The people who lost out in this were women. Because alienating potential supporters on the left - which is where the gap is, and the US govt, and likely the future UK govt - is not going to help any of us.

That would be really stupid and short-sighted, given current polls.

You might not like it, but the reality is that it's more urgent than ever to win Labour over.

And the very last thing that 'terfs uniting with the right' will achieve is winning over Labour, I think it's fair to say. On the contrary, it would make it even easier for every misogynist out there to point the finger and label anything pro-women or pro-reality as 'far right'.

Not a very useful one though, there is just so much variation within a group like that.

TC has a huge number of viewers, many on the left, surprising as it may seem. And why would you assume that all his viewers know all about this controversy?

You also seem to have bought into this idea that people like TC are motivated by some kind of outright evil intent towards women. Which is a pretty far-out claim. It's interesting, I saw the same thing when Glen Laoury was interviewed by him - people told him that TC was totally disingenuous, just a racist who was using GL. GL found his interview highlighted some things he thought were really important, but what does he know, after all?

BNP run by white men, the most powerful social group

I was putting together a post yesterday, explaining how Shinyredbicycle was doing identity politics, but it's now totally explicit.

The identity politics game is that you don't look at individuals as individuals, you treat them as avatars of some larger group.

And this is the approach I utterly abhor for the same reasons as I do when anyone else does it.

And indeed, it's the main reason I abhorred feminism for a long time. It's totally toxic, and feminism seemed to be relying on it far too much. The reason I've been able to be on board with this fight is due to the relative lack of identity politics in the feminism - it's been just material reality-based.

Another key part of the game is that the powerful people get to make up the groups to ensure they win on the bizarrely one-dimensional oppression stack. And this is why women lose when they start playing it - "cis" was invented to trump them.

The main hypocrisy in this particular case is attaching people you don't like to wider "powerful" groups, while denying that the people you do like are parts of wider "powerful" groups, and then asserting that your opponents are more "powerful", due to those group views.

Disagree - KJK and Kara Dansky got to share their message with an audience that already agrees with them. So they gained nothing.

WTAF? So Carlson's audience is full of left-wing feminists? The normal claim was that they were a bunch of right-wing bigots. (The truth is actually that the audience is huge, and politically diverse - some stats showing it as the most watched show of its type among Democrat voters.)

And Tucker Carlson's audience were somehow fully informed on men's incursion into women's rights without Keen and Dansky? How did this happen? You're reckoning they've got some right-wing women rights coverage? And you don't want them to hear any left-wing voices? To hence be convinced that the left-wing are totally lost to this?

Playing the "this is a right-wing issue" cover-up game might work on a Guardian reader, but it's not going to work on someone prepared to watch Carlson, who's going to cover it regardless. At that point it would look like "the left doesn't care about the problem" rather than "the problem doesn't exist or they'd be covering it".

You don't just have to win the left-wing parties over, you have to stop the massive pull of normal people away from the left-wing parties because of this stuff. If normal people (ie Carlson viewers) do not see left-wing opposition, they won't be paying attention any more if/when the "left-wing" parties ever sort themselves out.

That is a lot of mothers. And an untapped resource as far as JB is concerned.

KJK understands that mothers will go to the ends of the earth to protect their children. Look at mumsnet. All these women, mostly. mothers and FWR is one of the most popular boards.

JB could be capitalising on the collective power of all these women.

Yes, I don't think she is. I asked because someone mentioned that group in a discussion about her.

WPUK aren't a member group, so none.

About a dozen women volunteers running it.

I don't think JB is interested in 'capitalising' on anyone.

She did mention the work that she'd done with mothers of some of the girls exploited by grooming gangs in the interview.

That's nice of you to think about me, but understanding that some social groups have more power than others is the opposite of identity politics.

Male violence towards women and girls, lack of access to abortion care, poverty, unpaid caring work are the material realities which feminism organises against.

Identity politics is pretending that you can identity in or out of a social group that you are not. In this world, men can become women, structural power and oppression are irrelevant.

Not sure where being an avatar fits in, but your word not mine.

Ruth isn't involved with WPUK now and hasn't been for a while.

Most of the women running WPUK come from TU backgrounds. They built the organisation from grass roots, as has every other women-centred or feminist organisation that's developed over the last few years.

WPUK are like some sort of bogeyperson on MN. Portrayed as either completely ineffective and having achieved nothing or more powerful than the leading Christian rights organisation in the world (still stunned at that one, tbh).

I thought twice about using that word 🙄. But if women's oppression isn't improving and is getting worse in terms of gender ideology, then you need all the support you can get.

KJK is going directly to the women affected. Mothers. All fourteen million of them. Many of whom make up the twelve million unique users of mumsnet.

But JB seems to dismiss them. And has nothing but contempt for KJK.

As a strategy to increase support, it doesn't work.

At the Nottingham library meeting held in the car park she did speak about how she had been doing this work for ages and would still be doing it when all these Johnny-come-latelys had moved on. (Paraphrasing)

I know it's annoying when the thing you do goes in and out of fashion but surely any campaigner should always welcome new faces and give them tasks to do to get more involved.

I don't think JB is interested in popular support tbh, nor delegating other women tasks!

She was extremely unpopular, dismissed as a bigot, non platformed, slurred for years by the left, right and most feminists for years.

It's organising and working against male violence towards women and girls, especially those 'at the bottom' as she puts it that motivate her.

The prostituted, the groomed, the sexually assaulted and raped, the survivors of domestic violence and abuse, the poor and the disenfranchised.

She does a lot of work with other women around these issues - see this week's fab news about JKR's women-only service in Edinburgh.

Indeed. And I think most women here have nothing but admiration and gratitude for the work she does.

And of course, if she doesn't view popular support or the delegation of campaigning tasks as of any interest, then it's understandable why those things are unlikely to happen.

Well, except those things are happening as they're a focus for other women and other groups.

@Shinyredbicycle could you quote or make it clear which posts you are replying to? There's a few in a row upthread and I'm not sure which posts they relate to. Thanks 😊

ADF likewise, no one hear ever heard of them until feminists started speaking about them.

Wow, it's pretty embarrassing as a campaigning feminist to admit that, have you not been following what's been going on in Northern Ireland?