The awesome Feminism In Schools (NI) are currently gearing up for their second to-be-annual conference at Queen’s Belfast next month.
Alliance For Choice (Derry) will not be attending, because it turns out the event is doing actual feminism. For female people. I’ve attached their statement from Twitter, which they of course posted without Alt-Text, because their energies for change are wholly performative & disabled people are not trendy. I can’t focus on it well enough to type it up, but their objections are basically:
• unsafe! unsafe!
• GC beliefs “harmful & dangerous”
• hate crimes! (Obviously no mention it was in fact surge in non-crime hate incidents people were begged to report: they are busy with their hyperbole & reality would just spoil it.)
• most marginalised!
• mafia-style reconsideration-urging
• “Alliance for Choice Derry stand firmly in solidarity with our transgender friends and regret that this is the case.”
That last one will amuse me for some time, yes. Is there a TERF trapped in their Offices somewhere?!
The distortion of the term “intersectional feminism” from “ensuring the inclusion of ALL women & acknowledgement that factors including class, disability, education, race & religion impact on our lives & will shape our approach to feminism” to “centre male people who say they’re female” is enraging & sickening. Marginalised women? Want a seat at that table, to be heard & considered. Males? They want all the seats. And the table. And the women to make them a sandwich. And somehow this is meant to be ok. And still, in some way “feminism”. Corralling women into fighting for “trans rights” (over & above their own interests) in addition to making the LGB all about the T is quite some trick; but it isn’t feminism.
Alliance For Change Derry’s current pinned tweet is advertising a march to stop VAWG, together with Stop Street Harrassment NI. How do you stop something happening to a group you can’t define? I mean, they don’t really need to try to do anything concrete if they do some shouting, right?
🚨✊ Our International Women’s Day theme this year is STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS.🚨✊
That includes trans women and girls, women locally and globally, whether they are facing sexism, misogyny, racism, poverty or state, sexual or domestic violence or street harassment.
Alliance for Choice was formed in 1996 to help women on both sides of the border safely access abortions. They still claim to be focused on reproductive justice - so the whole focus-on-trans-people makes even less sense. Before anyone comes screeching in about “trans men can need abortions”; the objection being made is that a feminist conference is doing feminism. This is not about trans men’s access to care - care that feminists are in fact anxious they not be able to receive if necessary but they all be very clearly informed they may need if they have unprotected PIV sex relying on testosterone [& a partner’s CSH] to prevent conception. This is, yet again, about women saying that males, however they identify, are not welcome in their space & an angry response to that.
Women & girls are oppressed on the basis of our sex. We require abortions because of our sex. We have the right to organise in our own interests, as a sex class, and just because a member of our oppressor class decides that how he feels is as a woman does, it doesn’t give him the right to invade our spaces nor to prevent us from organising in that way.
Alliance For Choice might identify as feminists, but feminism cannot centre males. Hopefully they’ll work that out before too long - though tbh it looks as if NI abortion services might actually be up & running before they cop on.