Film of protest outside the Lesbian Project meeting

[DameMaud]

This needs to be shared far and wide!
Made by a YouTube auditor who had no idea what the protest was about and was shocked by the protesters and police.
Think he has just peaked a few thousand more people ( read the comments!)

I've just finished watching this! These activists are unhinged.

Didn’t have time to watch this all the way through, but it is horrifying that a lone man filming on the street is mobbed by activists and the police seem to decide that HE’S the problem.

It's brilliant. Gonna peak thousands. Bet he'll be at Reformers Tree next month. The woman at the end with the dog .. it's long, but well worth watching. Absolutely mental and the police are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard, they're terrified of upsetting the protestors.

I'm still watching it but when people intimidating demonstrating in a public place get twitchy about being filmed, one has to wonder why they're so jumpy.

Interesting that these demonstrators (so many young women) were led at that protest by a man claiming to be a woman who served 30 years for kidnap & torture!
And at the end of this shameful display the women who'd been at the meeting emerged, smiling and thanking the police for their efforts. Such a contrast to the aggressive behaviour of the protesters

@CryptoFascistMadameCholet did a good summary of the footage - going to steal it just so it's up near the top of the thread.

Bloke who knows pretty much nothing about the Transgender encroachment on women’s sex based rights stumbles across the trans protest happening outside The Lesbian Project meeting.

Bloke has a small YouTube channel that focuses on documenting British Police at work and challenging their professional transgressions.

Bloke obviously takes an interest in the police who are there to supervise the protest and starts filming, the intended subjects of his footage are the police, but the TRAs don’t know this and decide Bloke must be some sort of enemy force to trans rights.

Chaos ensues. All on camera.

Trans activists do normal transactivist type things. Police do not behave well.

Bloke is surprised, but not in a good way.

Bloke challenged police using his specialist police-watching knowledge.

Bloke uploads footage to aforementioned small YouTube channel, where his dedicated police-watching audience are similarly surprised-in-not-good-way.

Video gets shared around a bit. New comments are made sharing the back story.

Bloke reaches the tipping top of trans mountain in a single day, perhaps the fastest ever ascent from neutral base camp to the absolute ‘these people are scary’ summit. Takes his entire YouTube audience up with him.

I hadn't meant to watch it all but started to get hooked, so did. It was interesting watching the man with the camera shifting from 'I have no problem with this, apart from a few bits' to 'WTF????'

The police clearly favour the protesters, even when they're breaking the law. And those protesters, a worrying number of whom were female, were beyond ridiculous. Chanting about no 'fash' on their streets (whose streets, exactly?). And who did we emerge from the building at the end? A bunch of (mostly) middle aged women and a dog.

Excellent summary from @CryptoFascistMadameCholet via @NecessaryScene. Thanks for that. I had no idea who Bloke was and what his angle on this was, other than it wasn't the same as mine. Mine was TRA watching, not cop-watching.

I was just wondering, we already know that the police don't bother to police transactivists but, now that barristers pledging not to prosecute those they politically support is a thing (thanks, Jolyon), in the unlikely event one does get arrested, will the prosecution be singled out for harassment for failing to recuse themselves?

I got to 28 minutes in, when the PC asks the man filming if he knows why the people holding up placards (deliberately to block the filmer’s view) are “chasing him” 😳 WTF?? Why doesn’t PC Plod ask the placard-holders themselves?

So these placard people are protesting outside a group of lesbians meeting?! What the hell has it got to do with the placard people?!

At last, someone with an easy to understand accent.

I think this is a great example of when people show the world who they are, believe them.

What I have noticed recently, is the usual voices who would come on FWR threads have gone quiet. At least some have.

Because they understand no one, absolutely no one, will believe that this group of people are the most tolerant or the most loving (I have been told that on some threads - a ‘wonderful loving group’. Yeah fuck that!).

Instead we now have posters trying to convince people that if only groups were asked to not come and particular words are used in the asking then groups would not come and protest.

Instead we have posters repeating the lie of a group of feminists that if only women spoke nicely and then used the magic combination of words they believe in that these extreme activists and the media would not be able to keep connecting certain political groups to the movement. Which seems just as morally bankrupt in many ways as the protestors who turn up to silence women and who do it under the guise that they are ‘peacefully’ protesting.

If a group of feminists had not made a page full of their bad faith misrepresentation of what Kellie Jay said in their own efforts to discredit her, then it could be said that the media would have only had Wikipedia with no other source. Yet that group will forever deny that they have hypocritically contributed to this current situation. But more women every day have realised what has happened.

That is why we have seen fewer extreme activist posters who realise their group cannot be vindicated and more supporters of the other group who are desperate to vindicate those feminists. By using the same lies and shame that the extreme trans rights activists use while again, showing their hypocrisy, accusing regular posters of behaving like ‘TRAs’.

This situation is fucked up. And once you start unpicking the lies, where they are coming from and understand why some posters are spreading them, it is disturbing. Because there is a political alignment in common with ‘some’ of the people from these two groups. And that alignment is not centrist, right or even ‘far right’.

What's with the tactical chatters - the bloke and the woman who seem to just be there to talk to him politely (the woman) or in a really weird, non-committal, non-productive manner, asking him to define things (the bloke)?

Who's deploying these tactics? This wasn't spontaneous

They all knew that what they were doing both was, and looked, wrong.

(Love Cryptofascist's summary. Really shows the absurdity)

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole last night on the concept of ‘Auditors’

Overview of the term:
https://www.cyberdefinitions.com/definitions/AUDITORS.html

It started in the US, where it’s often referred to as ‘1st Amendment Auditing’
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_audits

It’s a sort of crossover between activism and citizen journalism - monitoring interactions between the police and public to see if the police are acting within the law and not infringing on the freedoms of law abiding citizens.
it’s fairly new to the UK (seems to have started at the very end of 2021 and slowly grown for just over a year?)

Auditing is somewhat controversial because some Auditors do seem to escalate and antagonise a situation for social media likes.
However it seems that the best/most respected Auditors are largely passive and polite observers who don’t do anything except film and (where necessary) verbally remind the police of their responsibilities and reiterate the rights of citizens, including their own rights to film in a public place. They hold their ground and refuse to back down (knowing the law, as written, is on their side, even if the police are not).

Fortunately, the YouTuber (‘The Laughing Auditor’) who stumbled across the The Lesbian Project meeting seems to be one of the well-behaved, not deliberately antagonistic Auditors.

Here are some more links (all UK relevant):

Police Scotland document on Auditors (looks like it’s designed to be internal comms?)

https://www.scotland.police.uk/spa-media/ngulpset/22-0731-data.pdf

FOI request to National Police Chiefs’ Council:

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/722938/response/1721570/attach/5/AuditorsSocial%20Media%20Bloggers%20Guidelines%20v3.pdf

Police Forum talking about Auditors

https://police.community/topic/359348-auditors/

Local news Substack piece about an incident in Sheffield (gives some background info on auditing in the U.K. including some of the negatives)

https://www.sheffieldtribune.co.uk/p/the-dark-knights-of-sheffield

Anyway, it seems to me that there is a rich seam of egregious police behaviour for Auditors to mine for social media footage that can be found whenever and wherever women get together and try to speak about their sex based rights, both in the U.K. and abroad.

Some responsible and well informed Police Auditing would likely be quite helpful to us in proving that the police treat transactivists as super special people with more rights than everyone else, and women as second class (or perhaps even third class) citizens.

They don’t even need to agree with us, they could solely concentrate on the inconsistency in policing behaviour.

Perhaps we’ll see more Auditing/Terf crossovers?

(If any Auditors stumble across this conversation, do feel free to correct any mistakes I made in my summary - I’ve just done a quick bit of information gathering online but am always aware that the internet is full of half truths and misrepresentations - I know this from interacting with TRAs online who the basic biology equivalent to flat earthers 😆)

There is an interesting take on that in the YouTube comments - I already copied it onto the thread about The Lesbian Project Meeting but will replicate it here too)

(Italic emphasis mine, copy and paste is the whole comment, not just a partial):

——————————

You can't avoid politics when you are auditing TLA. Auditing is a political act.

TERFS is a term of abuse or even hatred towards feminists that believe that trans women are not identical to biological (XX) women. That the two categories cannot be folded into one.

Oooh, that Public Order Offence. Funny how the police are very particular about enforcing the law when it suits them ain't it? There's only two potential reasons for that. Either some people are more equal than others under the law or the police are worried about the protesters escalating into violence and rioting if the police pull some of them out of the crowd to arrest them.

Edit: What set the trans lot off was the talk about free speech. They associate anyone talking about free speech with people on the political right. People like Toby Young. And of course they don't distinguish anything on the right from fascism and nazism.

People who have that kind of mindset also think that punching nazis is not only okay it is pretty much an obligation.

Yeah. It's not sophisticated politics.

What is fairly sophisticated is their organisation and information gathering. Those 'nice' people having a convo with TLA were the ones who picked up on the 'free speech' remark and fed that info back into the group. None of the conversations with any of the people involved in the protest were innocent or general polite conversation. They were all based on suspicion and disguised hostility.

You should bear in mind that the likes of Toby Young are more likely to be supportive of the rights of the people in the building to carry on their business than of the trans protesters who wish to erase all opposition from 'TERFS' by more or less any means. including violence. So the 'free speech' comment put TLA in the bracket of 'potential spy' or the like for the trans lot.

Sorry that's a wall of text but I hope it helps make sense of what the people involved were thinking since they didn't spell any of it out for you.

—————

That was interesting and enlightening to watch but I also strongly agree with the women who posted this:

"I liked the bit then you asked the masked man to define fascist. Shame we cannot hear his reply but it sounded like he was unable to give a clear definition. You should have done more of that, get them to explain themselves.

Why didnt you ask the "reasonable" ones who engaged with you, why the protest was taking place in that particular street at that particular time? Get THEM to do the talking. You did far too much talking and you made the documenrary all about YOU and this is wrong and a huge waste because you had the opportunity to force them to say "We are here to scare a tiny bunch of middle aged lesbians, because we do not bellieve lesbians have a right to meet without men being present." This is what they were doing, and why, and yet you were so focussed ony ourself that you never even bothered to ask them! Huge wasted opportunity.

I am frustrated that you made this more and more about yourself and your grievances against the police. You never ever covered the lesbian meeting angle, which is what the bloody protest was all about, so, very poor effort, I'd say."

"In the last ten minutes you were 100% wrong. You were focussed ONLY on having a go at the police. Why weren't you focused on the actual matter in hand - the tiny group of quiet women emerging from the meeting, that the trans fascists were protesting? What a shame that you made this all about YOU in the end. You complerely ignored that small group leaving the meeting. You could have asked the police what the protest was about instead of deliberately annoying them just for your own personal vendetta against all police. What a shame."

It's definitely worth reading the YouTube comments - totally different crowd there to what you normally see - a lot of newbies to this issue.

You were focussed ONLY on having a go at the police. Why weren't you focused on the actual matter in hand - the tiny group of quiet women emerging from the meeting, that the trans fascists were protesting?

To be fair, he's coming in on this almost 100% blind, and this is very much not his area of interest/activism. (Or at least it wasn't up until now). It's only at the very end that he's shocked to see these women coming out and comes to the realisation that this is what the protest was about. I think he still didn't quite really grasp it until getting into conversation with people in the comments.

I'm hoping he'll leap at the opportunity to monitor the policing at women's events in future - this is obviously a rich seam of material he was hitherto unaware of.

@Tabitha1960 - I don’t disagree with the points made by Lesbian commentator (because we share the same interest angle) but the film makers special interest/hobby IS the police, not TRAs or Women’s Rights Campaigners, so obvs he’s going to be focussed on the police (and the interaction between him and the cops is apparently what the ‘Auditing’ youtube genre is all about).

If he were there specifically to make footage of TRAs intimidating women then great criticisms, but he wasn’t, he was there to cop watch and challenge cops on film for his cop watching audience.

It’s a fascinating example of two separate worlds colliding and the cross over on the Venn diagram between terves and auditors is the bit where the police aren’t doing their jobs properly.

'You were focussed ONLY on having a go at the police. Why weren't you focused on the actual matter in hand - the tiny group of quiet women emerging from the meeting, that the trans fascists were protesting?'

I don't agree with this - because he was there to observe the police, his slow realisation of what the situation really was was all the more powerful.

The video footage is fascinating in a horrible sort of way. You feel a bit soiled after watching it. The ' nice ' couple who tried butter him up were on a fishing expedition I think. Very creepy...especially honey trap girl.

The guy in the red beret is that Sarah Jane Baker , who did time for kidnap , torture and attempted murder I think. Using his 📣 to call the film maker a fascist. Friend of the great and good . Seems to enjoy police protection. What does he know I wonder - and about whom?

A depressing contrast between the age profile of the lovely peaceful lesbians and the deranged fanatics besetting their private meeting. There must be a lot of peer pressure on younger lesbians to believe this nonsense. Or at least pretend to.

That would have been a very different video though. I think this benefits from his neutrality towards the protesters. Its not like making them look nuts was part of his agenda, they just do.

It's interesting to see how deliberately badly some forces are policing women's events compared to how the Glasgow Posie event was policed. Maybe the sectarianism in Glasgow means the police are much better at keeping different groups apart. Maybe it's because the police realised the men supporting Posie's events wouldn't stand idly by if the MRAs* started their crap.
The Glasgow policing showed just how complicit the other forces are in allowing men to intimidate women.

*I'm not calling them TRAs any more. This is all about Men's Rights.

From the comments under the video on Youtube:

The police appear to be acting as the military arm of Stonewall now

They reminded me of Scientologists. If you've ever watched interactions they have with people they're suspicious of you'll recognise it. Fake nicety and reasonableness with a threatening undertone. Made my skin crawl TBH.