Gender Critical Disputes - Radical Notion special edition free to read online

[IwantToRetire]

Cant say I have heard of Radical Notion. They say:

THE RADICAL NOTION was founded in 2020 to create a space for the resurgent wave of feminist thinking and activism. This not-for-profit magazine is run by an all-women collective of radical and socialist feminists. We are committed to the materialist analysis of sex-based oppression, and to challenging the material and symbolic structures of male dominance. This moment is a historic opportunity to deepen and widen the analysis of all aspects of women’s political condition, and its foundational role in all systems of extraction and domination.

We welcome words and images from women of all nationalities, classes, ethnicities and backgrounds to illuminate the meaning of feminist politics in their lives, and to create a global picture of this political moment. Our current battle, and the social, political and environmental unravellings we see all around us are, at their root, crises of patriarchy. We want to seize this moment to speak that truth.

theradicalnotion.org/gender-critical-disputes/

It seems quite expensive to subscribe but they have made this issue free to read online. A lot of it seems to be the ongoing antagonism (meaning the issues are real but seem to be motivated as much by personal fallouts) between radical feminist and socialist feminist gender critical women.

Some may remember this thread www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4662757-womens-place-uk-filia-event-the-elephant-ignored-yet-again and the revelation that WPUK seems to now be linked to the group Actual Gender Critical Left, who endlessly snipe about Karin Dansky and KJK.

Anyhow posting in case anyone wants to have a read.

Still not sure why some women think in the day of virtual opportunites to talk directly to other women, they need to go down the routed of "publishing" as though their ideas are somehow special and shouldn't be submitted to the rough and tumble on online forums like this one!

heavens the real feminist police are tedious

all those words to say they're better than other women

Im not very impressed. It needs better editing for a start for correct word usage and clarity. I'm also deeply uncomfortable with any self-id feminist who would call for women with different political views to be cast out of feminism, Sophie Corcoran being another target here. Now I won't deny on a personal level I can't stand the woman but feminism is for her as much as it is for anyone else and the smug political gatekeeping is rather irritating, especially from those putting party before women. A little self-reflection is needed here.

Ugh. I don't know what happened to the rest of my post. I don't have the patience to rewrite it. Essentially, I agree with @ExiledElsie.

When was this released? Just wondering about the timing, that's all.

Also, web accessibility is not great.

Ah yes, that struck me too @Alltheprettyseahorses

We welcome words and images from women of all nationalities, classes, ethnicities and backgrounds to illuminate the meaning of feminist politics in their lives, and to create a global picture of this political moment.

Political background missing in that list. What, not even to have dialogue with? Debate with? And no religion either. So a woman of Pakistani origin would be welcome, as long as she was not a practising Muslim? Disability? (Identity?) Very narrow parameters.

I'm uncomfortable being led by feminists who think some trans identifying males are our "sisters". JCJ seems to think we have to pass an exam in feminist philosophy before we're allowed to act or speak on behalf of women's rights. I'd rather philosophically imperfect but effective action than the reverse.

I'm the woman who bumbled into the WPUK event at Filia and, sensing something wasn't right, started the thread linked to by the OP. I had no idea what I was venturing into. That thread made me think really critically about my allegiance to the left.

I was also, until last year, a subscriber to the Radical Notion. It looked interesting but I stopped subscribing because too many of the articles seemed like bloody hard work. Some of them were Butlerian in their opacity.

I just read Rose Pickford's opening essay. Talk about doubling down where 'my' thread left off. No, I won't be resubscribing.

I did exactly the same.
I refuse to take sides in this, but I noticed there was little interaction with JCJ on twitter when she wrote about the new edition. I suspect The Radical Notion has lost a lot of support. I don't think they quite understood that their readership was quite broad and a lot of the women who read it also admire what KJK is doing. It's interesting they released it this weekend when women really are putting themselves on the frontline physically in Glasgow. I don't think it's a good look for them, but each to their own I suppose. I think they've gone back to being niche.

I wonder why they chose to make this particular edition free to read online? It’s such a niche topic and hardly likely to draw in more readers to the magazine. I could speculate on the reasons but I don’t want to be unjust to JCJ.

I will say though that I think it’s a shame that it wasn’t some other edition with a more universal and important feminist theme that has been highlighted like this.

What gets me is how they think change happens, it happens when you're in the Daily Mail, the front page of all the Scottish tabloids, when it's discussed on This Morning, Question Time. I could go on. They should be celebrating this shift, that people divorced from academic feminism are seeing it. That there's a sea change in public discourse and awareness. Instead it feels like they're upset it's not their baby anymore now it's gone out into the world. They cant control it, well of course they cant, it's got too big!

Instead it feels like they're upset it's not their baby anymore now it's gone out into the world.

Its never been just their baby. It's more important than them.

I will say though that I think it’s a shame that it wasn’t some other edition with a more universal and important feminist theme that has been highlighted like this.

This.

Nope. Life is too short to wade through the turgid sludge of what passes for prose in that irrelevant publication. You hate KJK, we get it. Time to move on.

I'm going to keep going with it but I can't help thinking that, in the time it's going to take to wade through and make sense of it, I could have travelled to Glasgow, gone to the Standing For Women event and come home again. Also can anyone tell me if there's a single article where the subtext isn't KJK?

I think it's sad. A depressing amount of energy misspent on criticising other women using endless turgid prose.

I started to try to read because I thought “come, come, EndlessTea, don’t be prejudiced”, so I had a little skim and my eye settled on the Femalist/Feminist one - because I know KJK started to use the former label to put some clear blue water between her and her bullies.

Anyway, I immediately felt lectured at, so I didn’t bother to continue. It reminds me of the tone of the articles when all the feminist blogs got taken over. I don’t feel like I’m being drawn in and participating by reading, I feel I am being instructed. Like reading a workplace policy. Doesn’t seem like a very relaxing magazine to read to me.

Also can anyone tell me if there's a single article where the subtext isn't KJK?

Well, there's the casual monstering of Trump (that also goes on here). Made me think of poor Gillian Duffy. You know, "the slaves are revolting because the slaves are revolting" stuff the working classes are used to getting from the left.

a single article where the subtext isn't KJK?

To be fair they loathe Kara Dansky and WDI USA, too, and seem to have gone very sour on Helen Joyce...

I knew they had it in for KJK but hadn't realised they hated those too.

How ridiculous! After all those women have done to wake everyone up to what's going on.

Who on earth does meet with their approval?

Oh yes, Helen Joyce seems to have also fallen out of favour, for disagreeing with Julie Bindel at the Unheard (?) debate a few months back.

When you see the photos from Glasgow today it just seems so daft. It's so inspiring seeing so many people stand up, they should be celebrating. A proper grass roots women's movement, I thought that was the aim. Oh well, you do you.

Julie Bindel has tweeted support for the demo in Glasgow (but only the feminists there) this afternoon. Is she changing her tune now that KJK is mobilising hundreds rather than dozens?

They made that plain at Filia last year. I was too uninformed to understand the background to what was going on, but something certainly was. I didn't understand why Kara and Jo Brew got up to defend themselves but now I do.

Inspired by you, I gave that piece a go. Lasted four pages, until the claim that 'femalists' (KJK thinly veiled) believe 'woman' is an identity that only female people can have, whereas proper feminists say male people shouldn't be in women's spaces because they're male.

Pretty sure this is bullshit, so stopped. Flicking ahead revealed sub headings about white nationalism, among other things. #NoThankYou

Blimey. I'm astounded at how right wing this place has become. I think that might turn out to be one of the saddest unintended outcomes of the schism - that it's actually allowed the right to take over this place, which has been so important to so many women of all political positions over the years. I'm not talking about a 'broadening of the church' but what seems to be a new dominant narrative within MN feminism.

I'm on what would previously have been called the liberal left. 20 years ago when I first started using MN, most users were. That's shifted over the years as MN has grown - there was a definite surge during Brexit - but that's life. It reflects a revival in conservative thinking which is the intended consequence of the dismantling of the structural underpinnings of this country. But this, on this board, is really sad.

I admire JCJ's intellect but I'm not a socialist feminist (if anything, I'm further to the left politically - but equally very wary of any politics which considers misogyny to be a subset of class oppression). I'm not a participant in the schism - I admire KJK for all the things that women admire her for.

But I'm sure I'm not the only person that finds it depressing to hear 'purity spiral' used, much as the TRAs use TWAW, as a debate-ender to shut down any suggestion that misogyny operates in, or even at the top of, a broader system of inequality and oppression. Purity spiral has a meaning - a competitive, no-one-wins escalation of what is required to be thought of as 'good'. It doesn't mean 'left wing' or 'liberal'.

I also can't be alone in cringing when I hear posters using 'woke'. You must have considered whether that word doesn't only weep aside 'progressive' postmodernism and the attempted destruction of material reality as a basis for, well, everything - but also he fact that certain groups, including women, are still at a shameful disadvantage in our society. You do sound like bigots when you use it. Like racist bigots, to be specific. There are other ways to express what you mean if you don't want to be thought of as that.

'Purity spiral', 'woke' - these are the la-la-la-can'thearyou throwdowns for a particular kind of populist conservativism. On another thread, I was accused of elitism and head girl feminism for - I think, I still can't really work it out - using sentences which sounded vaguely like they could be used in an essay? I am not an academic or an intellectual - but I'm really disturbed* by the fact that these words are used as slurs here now. This is Farage feminism.

(*Not quite as disturbed as I am to hear one poster bemoan the 'casual monstering' of Trump, but that's for another day.)

Someone on the other thread suggested that this all might be an unintended consequence of MN's coralling of all gender critical discussion into this topic and I can see her point. It is good that gender criticism is spreading beyond feminism - of course it is. Still, fucking depressing when a feminist board on a forum whose usp has always been that women's voices can actually be heard, seems to be increasingly dominated by women who are uncertain, at best, whether they are feminists.

Anyway, shout out to the MN wims from back in the day from onebatmother/OBM, if anyone is still here. If you've been a bit crushed by all this too, the only solution is to start speaking up. They can't shame us all

sweep aside, not weep aside.