Statement on the gender critical movement and the far right

[hellotowel]

https://x.com/GCAntiFarRight/status/1823790909462602205

"We, the undersigned, are deeply disturbed that populist messages particularly targeting Muslims have gained traction among significant numbers of social media accounts associated with the gender critical movement."
Read and sign our statement below.
https://gcantifarright.wordpress.com/2024/08/13/statement-on-gc-movement-and-the-far-right/

do your research.

Absolutely those who wrote and signed this would have been more been more believable if they had evidenced there assertions.

Its not for those reading an article, whether on social media or in a newspaper, to then have to go and find the evidence that proves the article right!

What back to front nonsense is that.

I have no idea what Wakefield is or whatever.

As you are asserting it did happen, you need to back yourself up by providing the evidence.

So yes please do do your research before asserting something as a fact.

Does this mean they don’t hold the same gender critical views (that sex is binary, immutable & sometimes a very important grouping method) as people who are far right? Are their gender critical views different?

I doubt anyone seriously thinks any of these signatories hold racist or anti-Muslim views. The people that shout about all people with GC views being racist and far right aren’t going to change their opinion because of yet another mass letter. This letter has no value other than to make the signatories feel smug and to enable them to other anybody who doesn’t sign for whatever reason.

Sometimes by shouting about distancing yourself from one group, all you actually achieve is linking yourself to that group in people’s minds. The association is made, even if erroneous.

Just speak up and take action in ways that align with your own values, let others do the same. If you speak up against racism, as I know some of those signatories do, then you carry on doing so, condemn all racists, not just those who also happen to be GC. If you only speak up against GC people who are racist then I find that rather hypocritical and more point scoring than anything else.

The GC ‘community' isn’t actually a community at all. It’s just individuals with different views about almost everything and anything. Do your own bits as well as you can, spread your own message as clearly as you can. We aren’t a hive mind.

I don’t need to be told that x doesn’t like y, and a, b & c agree. I can work that out for myself. I might also dislike y but think that b is a total tosser. That doesn’t change my opinion on y but I might start to question the judgment of x if they are happy to be associated with b. All this does is stoke division among what sometimes seems a fairly shaky alliance.

Wakefield is a city in Yorkshire, the singer is from there.
The problem with the political split is that gender critical views have oftenbeen attributed to those who are very right leaning and often "Islamaphobic". This has been added to by quite prominent gender critical figures espousing right wing statements and aligning themselves with Tommy Robinson. I don't save tweets, you don't have to believe me, any more than I have to agree with racists because we all happen to believe that sex is binary and immutable.

This is how the GC community may see it, but has the Islamic community actually asked GC people for their help?

So your posts are about your beliefs, not facts.

They are about what I have seen with my own eyes. What people have written about their own view points. Some of it has actually been quite disturbing, with some people who certainly claim to be gc wanting to over turn the outcome of the general election, calling into question the validity of the government. People who this board has supported in the past and joined in crowd funding for legal cases.

TheHomeEdit yes, there is a difference between a materialist analysis of women as a sex class and social constructions of gender and saying that sex is binary.

Yes, the GC alliance is very shaky by its nature. The signatories to the letter aren't stoking division, they are articulating their own boundaries.

I think you'll find MN full of posts about people's beliefs *Iwanttoretire". It's a discussion forum. People sharing and engaging with others' beliefs It's pretty much how it works.

.

I think that the "protest" that Yaxley-Lennon whips up has very little to do wioth defending women's and girls' rights and a lot to do with - well, masculinist thuggery.

There are elements of fundamentalist Islam, and fundamentalist Christianity, and fundamentalist Judaism (to name the 3 Abrahamic religions) which are totally inimical to basic human rights for women. Feminists rightly want to distance themselves from these fundamentalists, but at the same time, we need to be very clear that this is not an anti-Islam/Christian/Jewish move.

It's nuanced, and nuance seems sadly lacking in most public discourse at the moment.

Yes but in this instance it is a thread about a statement that says certain things happen or rather alleged about other women.

So in this instance saying you beliefed it happened is just plain ridiculous.

And I am bothering to make this point because this is actually an important issue, and it makes women attempting to be political look ridiculous.

The only ones I know are The Famous Artist Birdy Rose who seemed to think the rioters were right to at least to be protesting.

And Glinner - who leapt on the picture of unionists marching with anti-immigration protesters and one of them waving an Irish flag. He assumed Republicans were marching too and thought the issue was great for finally bringing the two sides together.

You seemed to be labouring under the misaphrention that I was asking about Wakefield as though I didn't know it was a town, rather than an incident.

So luckily - which you could have done - there is a thread on FWR about it.

Which boils down to there was a right wing march.

Nearby in a shop some LWS leaflets were handed out / on display.

So your belief, based on gossip and rumour, that LWS attended / supported a right wing march is just incomprehensibly silly.

Its like saying because someone was handing out leaflets about BPAS in the vincinity of a right wing march BPAS is a right wing collaborator.

And even if women who were actively involved in the right wing march handed out BPAS leaflets it would still be ridiculous to then try and assert that BPAS was right wing, and ultimately all pro abortion rights groups are right wing.

One of the things that worries me, is that what used to be one of the strong point of FWR, sharing information, backing them with facts and so on, is now being lost to just endless assertions that have gleaned rumours and bonkers comments on twitter are substantive.

Its a real shame that effectively FWR is being twitterised.

So at this point, and realise it might change, no one has any evidence that the assertions in the OP statement can be evidenced by actual fact.

Casually slurring other women to attempt to pretend your position has more virtue, is stooping very low.

So to date 2 celebrities may have made dubious comments and based on this GC feminists are being accused of being Islamaphobic.

I don't go on twitter much - so just saying I popped in and immediately saw those examples at the top of my feed. Didn't look at their replies so don't know how much agreement versus disagreement they got.

Who is this letter actually for? Who is going to receive it, what impact do they think they'll have? It's all just self righteous, egotistical, performance.

They've made their grandiose proclamation and the world goes on regardless. It's pathetic.

I think the adorable James Dreyfus has nailed it.
https://x.com/DreyfusJames/status/1823824970088374337?t=02mUvMCuiHszMLvbPTHa0g&s=19

Going to clarify my remark on this post, as a few are missing my point.

Of COURSE, the thugs who went to burn down that hotel, full of asylum seekers, set fires, attacked the police, looted & acted like feral beasts should be locked up. That kind of should go without saying, doesn’t it? Aren’t we ALL agreed that this is reprehensible??

But having witnessed, for example, the fear of the Jewish community & seen them being terrorised, cased down streets, having death threats hurled at them, beaten up, rocks thrown, car rallies driving through their neighbourhoods screaming “F* the Jws. We’ll rpe your daughters!” by equally vile racists, I’m surprised we didn’t have equally strong social media messages & similar outrage.

Or the police failing to protect women when they speak out. Or protect their spaces. Often leaving them open to violence & abuse from Antifa/Far left TRA thugs. I don’t see many of them being condemned in a similar fashion.

My point is really quite simple.

Arrest & prosecute ALL those who use thuggery & violence against another group. Announce your cracking down on far right & far left. Condemn religious extremism of any kind.

But do it across the board.

Again this comes down to “equality”. True equality.

I see a DISTINCTLY different approach by those who give orders to the police, & THAT is the issue. Criticising this does NOT equate to “siding with the far right”. Quite the opposite.

I thought we’d all learnt this by now, having to defend ourselves so often against baseless accusations of “hate” simply for standing up for equality.

The British Union of Fascists was formed in 1932. That’s 4 years after the passage of the Equal Franchise Act (1928); & 15 years after the WSPU was disbanded; & 14 after the Representation of the People Act (1918) granted the vote to around 66% of British [& Irish] women (& bumped the male vote from 58% of the adult male population to almost 100%).

So no, this wasn’t some kind of noble statement about how democracy should function; this was [a small number of] women actively embracing [Oswald Mousley’s brand of] fascism. If you’re interested, here’s a Slate article from 2017 about why Suffragettes joined the BUF; or there’s a 1998 Women’s History Review article about Mary Richardson (“suffragette, socialist and fascist”).

This frankly execrable extract is a 2023 TRA attempt at smearing all GC women as fascists - featuring the fun claim that feminism is simply riddled with fascism from the point it emerged. What with it being made of purest white supremacy. (Yes, the authors are male 🙄). In August 2023 the Journal of Intercultural Studies published an interview with the authors about the whole book which - despite mostly being gushing praise in question form - dug up some more interesting stuff. The two pieces combined show that they’re well-briefed on all the TRA talking-points - including MumsNet being a radicalisation portal:
Many BUF women were Tories, some came from Labour. Most Women's Section meetings were held in Women's Institute buildings, a clear parallel to the "ordinary", inoffensive mainstream-ness of the website Mumsnet and the radio programme BBC Women's Hour - focal points for the growth of GC feminism today.
(I won’t blame anyone for not slogging through this absolute dross. If I’d handed in something that badly written as an Undergraduate I’d’ve got a ticking off; if I’d done it twice [with the same supervisor] they’d quite possibly have refused to mark it & viva-d me instead - with, if I was lucky, the opportunity to rewrite & resubmit alongside the essay set at the end of that supervision.)

"I do not screen shot x comments'
Why is that?

I know to whom Dumbo is referring and yes, I was very disappointed and quite shocked to see her performing at a TR rally and publicly supporting him.

I supported her and her new campaigning organisation for the arts. I support her right to free speech but I think she’s dead wrong on this.

When vocal GC campaigners are standing with Tommy Robinson and his ilk, I’m not surprised feminist activists want to publicly reject that.

One prominent GC account with 81,000 followers is retweeting Tommy Robinson and posting inflammatory videos about Muslims.

Don't know if that's the one referred to - there may be others.

You weren't the only one.

Just seen what insomnia o’clock me rechristened Mosley… 🤦‍♀️

I've completely lost track of almost everything but two things:

There IS no GC movement.
Even people who are critical of gender as a concept are free to be in whichever political camp they want to be in.

And people who haven't witnessed a two tier policing issue are also welcome to write whatever letters they want.

It would appear that at least one person has said their name is on there and they didn't sign it. However that again could be another red herring and be a complete lie. Nobody knows.

If you aren't far right then the letter isn't for you right? So ignore it.

Free speech in the UK is due to be cancelled soon enough anyway so enjoy it whilst it lasts.

Ambassador, with these passive aggressive digs you are really spoiling us!