The latest fallouts in GC world

[Pluvia]

My terfing energy has been focussed elsewhere in recent months and I haven't been here or on TwiX or social media much. Now I've taken responsibility for tweeting/ comms on behalf of a small but potentially significant LGB group and I discover that there seems to be something going on — another schism — in GC world. Jane Clare Jones's name seems to be coming up a lot. Something seems to have gone on but I can't work out what.

If it was my own account I'd just ignore, but the followers of this account are bringing it up and seem to expect an opinion to be expressed or a side to be taken. Also I'm seeing a lot about 'ultras' and 'lites', which is new to me. Can anyone enlighten me? I need to tread carefully.

I agree with this. Also worth noting that people are not alleging KJK invited the extreme right wing to her events. They were asking what made them feel welcome to attend in the first place, and why when they attended did KJK not say they should not come to future events? Instead she said they were welcome.

KJK attacks anyone who mildly disagrees with her using very personal insults.
I also agree the election party KJK set up was a total waste of all her supporters time. She over estimated her importance and looked foolish.

Have you listened to anything KJK said about the GE. She didn't expect anyone from POW to win, the point was publicity and the mailshot for each candidate. She has said many times it's local elections that are more important. She also encourages people to join committees, become school governors etc so they can effect change at a local level. Basically use the same routes as TRAs have used to gain power.

They are welcome because she can't police the open spaces and as citizens, anyone is welcome. Keep up.

Yes, I think this is really an interesting phenomena.

It's like, it doesn't actually matter what the policy question is, if it is "right wing" people on he left will be deeply embarrassed to even entertain it.

One of the things that has really interested me the last few years is the way traditionally left wing ideas have become associated with the right. Euro-skepticism is probably the one I noticed first.

I keep seeing more and more of these flips where things previously part of the old left are coded right. Tariffs and protection of industry, immigration. From the other direction the left now seems to embrace free trade deals that give corporate interests huge institutionalized political power, filling jobs with temporary foreign workers, big Pharma, and most recently I've seen dedicated AMerican Democrats treat anyone who doesn't want to send their kids to state education as dodgy.

I feel like every time there is a new one my eyebrows go further up. It's like there has been a total flip - and yet people who have been on the left for 40 years don't seem to be questioning it!

I read an article in Unherd yesterday about how Sanders has been approving of certain directions that Trump is going in. Well, yes, of course he bloody well is, because some of them are things that have been integral to left wing thought and action and the left today has totally abandoned them! There is a reason many Sanders voters switched to Trump, and I think he's being pretty pragmatic in agreeing with elements he sees as moving in the right direction. He cares about policy, not which side happens to lay claim to it.

I honestly think that if some authoritative (to left wingers) person now calls any policy left wing, there is a huge group of people who will support it because they are simply terrified of being called right wing. Globalism, forced vaccination, suppression of free speech, whatever.

Yes this is my impression.

I'm not on Twitter, so I do get secondhand, watered down versions of what's going on.

But it's certainly been my impression that there is an actual pushback against repeal of the GRA. And not just because it feels like an uphill struggle. But because there is still a belief in what we used to call true trans.

Whether you think that most transwomen are AGP, with a few who aren't, or they all are, or none, to me, it is a little irrelevant. Because even if they're not, the entire concept of the GRA is sexist.

Maybe other people see it more as a remedy for rare cases of authentic gender dysphoria, first and foremost.

Whereas I see it as underpinning women's disadvantage, first and foremost. We should not be providing remedy to anybody, male or female, which leverages women's oppression to be effective.

It might well be that this idea of true trans or not, is how the two factions get divided, and the GRA is just the tinder box.

It may explain how some men managed to infiltrate into the very groups which have been set up to address them.

edited to add the reason why I quoted Eresh - if you do believe in true trans, then there is going to be a safeguarding hole.

Do you agree with the let women speak events that KJK puts on? Where she gives a microphone to any woman who wishes to say something in public?

@Datun open mic events have their place and happen elsewhere. But there are ways to run so you do not have the issues KJK has had.

This simply is not true.
Euroscepticism has always been a cross party issue with both people in the left and right wing supporting EU or being sceptical, although often for very different reasons. It nearly tore the Conservative party apart.

Tariffs and protection of industry has also always been a cross party issue. Usually the left wing calling for tariffs and protection of industry to support jobs, and the right wing calling for them to support business owners. Both left and right have had those against tariffs as well.

Immigration has always been a cross party issue as well. The extreme right wing tend to lie about immigration and make up narratives that simply are not true. But the mainstream right and left wing both support some immigration, but both want limits. They disagree on the details.

So you think she shouldn't run them, because you don't agree with her and her issues?

If you’ve not been shouted down in person, lucky you. Some of us have been trying to say “can we please discuss Repeal?” and been immediately dismissed. And when you find others who’ve had the same experience, it turns out it’s very similar indeed. Spookily so. We aren’t even being given the opportunity of discussing it - it’s all rather #nodebate.

And safeguarding of children and vulnerable adults is not “high school clique bs”.

Crikey, I hadn't grasped that that wasn't TRAs talking.

If they genuinely think that people talking about safeguarding are trying to shut down discussion, why don't they ask to have a discussion?

I can't imagine women like Lang or safe schools alliance baulking at explaining how safeguarding can be compromised.

I would've thought that women concerned with safeguarding want the opposite of shutting down a discussion

I dont think we should ignore the impact of the growing number of GC males.

In a way, the right wing ones are more straight forward - nobody can change sex. End of discussion.

The left and libertarian ones are more complex. They agree that people cant change sex, but understand that gender plays a big part in a gay culture, and have seen the treatment of gender non conforming children and lgb people. They sympathise with their transsexuals friends and see the right as wanting gender conformity.

But what benefits adult male transitioners, damages women, children and girls and women caught up in gender ideology. How can it possibly benefit girls to be given the same diagnosis and treatment outcomes as AGP men?

So the left/libertarian feminist is pulled in lots of different directions.

She can do what she wants. But the way she runs them gives a platform and helps to legitimise the far right. I do not think that is a an accident though.
But in many ways it does not matter. Since the election debacle, KJK has pretty much faded from view. I never see her opinions now unless I seek them out. Before the election there was a point where she was beginning to get wider traction, she has now sunk back into obscurity. So what it does not really matter what she does.
I see the extreme right wing seeking out another alternative to promote their views.

The way she runs them...is to set up a mike and speakers and let anyone talk.

What a fucking bitch.

She’s the worst

She runs them like religious testimonial tents. Which makes sense as she has a theology degree so will be familiar with this method. She does not run them like second wave feminist open mic events.
There are ways to stop the extreme right wing speaking at open mic events. But she is not interested in doing this.

But the way she runs them gives a platform and helps to legitimise the far right

The point is free speech.

Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. The opposite is authoritarianism. Which can be both Left and right leaning and never ends well. History also teaches us that left leaning authoritarianism can stoke the fires of real far right ideologies, extremism and violence. It's how

Anti free speech strategies (#nodebate) are how TRAs managed silence anyone critical of GRA and twaw etc, and manipulate safeguarding laws.

But why on earth would you exclude right wing women from speaking if your focus is women's rights and child safeguarding?

Don't they deserve a voice too? Feminism isn't a preserve of the left (though getting the strong impression some would like it to be,). In fact, you could argue feminism has been more successful from the right. We've had three women prime ministers from the right (ok, the third was very, very short lived), none from the left, and the current leader of the opposition is a black woman who - unlike many of the current political cohort - actually bothers to find out the facts on any given issue and is competent and intelligent.

The right commissioned the Cass review and have been far better in halting safeguarding failures in school than the left though honorable mention to Wes Streeting who does appear to have at least read Cass.

Can anyone provide the date and place of any LWS event where an extreme right wing person has taken the mic? (A link to the video and approx time would be helpful)

👏

Even if an extreme right wing person had taken the mike, they are still citizens of the UK and as such, are allowed a voice.

And allowed to walk the streets. Where the mike and speakers are at.

From the other direction the left now seems to embrace free trade deals that give corporate interests huge institutionalized political power, filling jobs with temporary foreign workers, big Pharma, and most recently I've seen dedicated AMerican Democrats treat anyone who doesn't want to send their kids to state education as dodgy.

Under capitalism, neoliberalism has consumed much of the political discourse among left-leaning policymakers.

Additionally, the right (as in holding economically conservative views) is largely seen as more pro-business than the left (which is commonly known as being pro-union) and some have apparently felt the left needs to represent more corporate interests to counter that.

I'm not entirely sure about the point about state (public in the US) education, but one thing to note is that in the US right-wing libertarians and Republicans have kept advocating for charter schools and more private schools and decreasing government spending on education instead of attempting to address the severe disparity between well-funded state and private schools and underfunded and understaffed state schools by allocating more funds to the latter; this has not been well-received by centrists and Democrats.

I read an article in Unherd yesterday about how Sanders has been approving of certain directions that Trump is going in. Well, yes, of course he bloody well is, because some of them are things that have been integral to left wing thought and action and the left today has totally abandoned them! There is a reason many Sanders voters switched to Trump, and I think he's being pretty pragmatic in agreeing with elements he sees as moving in the right direction.

I would not say Sander has been "approving" of some of the policy directions Trump has indicated he might take, though his comments about the messaging to working-class voters could be noteworthy, and as of now we don't know whether many Sanders voters turned to Trump instead -- unless you're referring to a particular group of disaffected left-wing/self-described socialist/accelerationist voters who thought Americans needed another dose of Trump to wake up and dismantle capitalism and the two-party system.

Globalism, forced vaccination, suppression of free speech, whatever.

Both the left and the right can benefit from increased globalism and suppression of free speech, but in different ways.

If by "forced vaccinations" you're referring to mandates during the pandemic and not polio vaccinations for children, the issue was made out to be unnecessarily political (i.e. right-wing (individual rights above all) vs left-wing (the greater good of society is more important) people, excluding conspiracy theorists who believed Bill Gates was trying to insert a chip in their brains).

I think discussing these topics further would need a separate thread, though.

When it is your event, you do not need to give everyone a voice and in fact KJK does not. She would not hand the mic to a TRA.

In fact, you could argue feminism has been more successful from the right. We've had three women prime ministers from the right

The political affiliation itself doesn't paint the full picture on whether feminism can be considered to be more successful from the right because there are female politicians from conservative parties (not just in the UK, but in other countries as well, as I've noticed ); the questions we would be better off asking are, what kind of pro-women policies conservative female politicians have proposed and/or enacted? Have their conservative stances on other issues had a positive or negative impact on women?

Sometimes even in politically conservative countries conservative female politicians are elected to be heads of state/government, but that does raise a few questions: would they have been elected if they were not conservative? If not, why are some people less accepting of the notion of liberal female Prime Ministers/Presidents? Is it because that might be a little "extreme", being both female and liberal, in their eyes?

In fact, you could argue feminism has been more successful from the right. We've had three women prime ministers from the right

The political affiliation itself doesn't paint the full picture on whether feminism can be considered to be more successful from the right because there are female politicians from conservative parties (not just in the UK, but in other countries as well, as I've noticed ); the questions we would be better off asking are, what kind of pro-women policies conservative female politicians have proposed and/or enacted? Have their conservative stances on other issues had a positive or negative impact on women?

Sometimes even in politically conservative countries conservative female politicians are elected to be heads of state/government, but that does raise a few questions: would they have been elected if they were not conservative? If not, why are some people less accepting of the notion of liberal female Prime Ministers/Presidents? Is it because that might be a little "extreme", being both female and liberal, in their eyes?