Promoting its event on Jun 19, the British Embassy in Helsinki said on Twitter that with “Pride month in full swing”, the ambassador Ms Bubbear “pointed out at our panel discussion on the anti-gender movement [that] Pride is for the whole of the year”.
Dr Honkasalo, from the University of Helsinki, also told embassy staff that the “anti-gender movement” – which he has previously dismissed as “anti-trans groups that claim to be feminist” in the UK – is “difficult to challenge”.
Embassy staff were told that “to oppose anti-gender actors, we need a wide grassroot level coalition of solidarity taking into account that the majority is #diverse”.
But in a research paper in April titled, “Transfeminine letter clubs, community care and the radical politics of the erotic”, Dr Honkasalo used the controversial term “Terfs”, which has been used by activists to describe figures such as the author JK Rowling who defend biological sex as binary and immutable against calls for limitless self-identified genders.
He wrote: “As has been shown by Pearce et al. (2020), in the UK context in particular, the Terf rhetoric vocally draws on a history of moral panics that insist trans women are sexually predatory (e.g. Raymond, 1979).
“This rhetoric constructs the White, feminine, heterosexual or lesbian ‘biological woman’ as a fragile and vulnerable subject in need of protection, whereas racialised and gender non-normative bodies appearing in public spaces are conceptualised as a sexual threat.
“As Ulrika Dahl (2017) and others have pointed out, a feminist discourse that centres on the fragility and vulnerability of White femininity is predominant also in much of White, liberal feminism (Dahl and Volcano, 2009; Pearce et al. 2020; Snorton, 2017).
“Hence, the Terf rhetoric draws on a long tradition of transmisogyny and racism inherent in feminist theory.”
(A) Tory MP said: “Referring to people who care about single sex spaces and women’s basic rights as ‘Terfs’ shows how out of touch these gender extremists are. We shouldn’t be entertaining them using taxpayer cash.”
This is from a Telegraph article reprinted by yahoo. Embassy visit by anti-Terf trans activist criticised by Kemi Badenoch (yahoo.com)
(Part of me doesn't want to use material from the Telegraph but if they are the only paper doing research - getting leaks - about this, then there isn't much choice. If other so called newspapers were doing their job - ie reporting - there would be multiple sources. We are sleepwalking into this. We are having what is actually happening being hidden from us - by "NEWS" papers.)