Sara Morrison v BFF - thread 5

[SexRealistic]

https://genderblog.net/sara-morrison-v-belfast-film-festival/

Just reposting Nick Wallis’s original blog here, he’s done great work on this case, and it has a link to give donations and sign up to his newsletter https://genderblog.net/morrison-written-closings/

Thank you for posting this. It hadn't occurred to me to check ♥️

You're welcome! I thought Nick deserved support for his work with a donation, which got me onto his useful email notifications.

I didn't know that

Is this the vulnerable mental health services user whose identity had to be protected? Wtf such barefaced lies and hypocrisy

I wonder about the timeline of deletions and scrubbing of profiles seeing that SM's team got their hands on the deleted stuff

Thanks. This seems much better -- posting the link rather than cut-and-pasting large amounts of NW's content, which might unintentionally deprive him of clicks..

Wow. What a read! When set out like this it's just so sinister!

Well done @plasticpotato. Standing up to this guff is so hard and you have my upmost admiration. xxx

Thanks for the written submissions. I can’t see anything at all wrong with Sara’s speech at LWS, or with her chat with Mark C. ( or indeed anything else!) . But his outrage at her approach seems egregious. They had a good relationship. I think any reasonable person might have done the same. And it clearly is about being a sex realist. LWS is continually denounced as anti- trans, because it is pro women, it was sharing a platform they hated, and referring to her child by the correct pronouns. No one knows better than the parent of a trans- identified person that they are human. I don’t believe for a second that she could behave transphobically, as MD and Caleb alleged. I hope her child knows that too.
In my opinion, her beautiful words; what begins as a cause, becomes a business and ends as a racket, are as pertinent to BFF, Outrage, and all the other publicly funded bodies in this sorry tale. I’m not going to criticise Naomi , I love her, but I think if Jane Russell had represented Sara( in an alternate universe, obvs), that phrase and the stinkpit of groupthink, nepotism and backroom deals it implies, would have been hammered home, and conspicuously applied to BFF.
I hope, win or lose, that Sara will feel buoyed by the support she has received. What
happened was shit. She’ll be right now. I’ve had some dealings with Genspec and an ethos of care permeated.

Yes - one and the same. I think that’s why anonymity was asked for - when they thought again about what a piece of cooked up nonsense it was

@plasticpotato well done, and thank you for taking this all on.

I'd be be getting that photo printed out bigly style and framed.

Your name is life goals 🤣

Merci Beaucoup!

Thanks to everyone for posting links to submissions.

These various film festivals seem to be very murky organizations when you dig into them. I've even started to feel (a tiny bit) sorry for Caleb and other minor characters because the core few established employees do seem to make their careers off the back of the more casual staff they pick up and discard along the way.

While looking up Michelle Devlin, I came across press articles that she seems to have offered to the press around her own relationships, and the term 'partner stealing' that didn't seem very nice earlier on during the tribunal seems more fitting when you consider that the partner who was 'stolen' by one or other of the then 40+yo festival directors in c2011 had only left school in 2008.

But details like that would be hard to tell from the 'artsy' festival programmes that obscure everyone's ages and paid/unpaid status by using cutesy eg 'teenage' or otherwise themed photos of everyone involved each year.

I wont post more details of that particular relationship because it doesn't seem fair or relevant to dwell on it but, my god, I bet there has been all sorts of rotten dealings over the years, and it's just jolly bad luck for them all that NC and Dr CE were put on the case for SM's tribunal.

Massive well done to prof @plasticpotato for finding the strength to take the rotten lot on. 💜💜💜

Also not going to dwell on the personal relationships but I think it is relevant that lesbian MD and her much younger partner decided to have a child by donor insemination.

Biology, eh? MD had all the thinky thoughts and feelz but when push came to shove, they needed a man, the old-fashioned biological kind, to make them a baby.

Tom Daley in reverse!

The (poor) alternatives leave extract of man as the viable choice for many lesbian couples.

“Extract of man” 😆

Ahem…we cut and pasted all of his tweets without compunction but I take your point.

@NebulousProfessorSupportPostcard

Power dynamic, age gap and the role of these two lesbian women in entrenched roles in influential arts organisations in Belfast have raised lots of eyebrows.

The partner was in the room when Naomi raised the point about the connection between Ruth & Michele. Michele made a big show of saying they weren’t married - only lived together. It was unpleasant for her to hear the distancing in person on the day.

On a completely unrelated subject - coercive relationships in one area of our lives are often mirrored in other areas.

Yes 'power imbalance' is the term that I was grasping for when reading. People may be vulnerable and ripe for exploitation in all sorts of ways but it's masked by a superficial display of solidarity and unity.

I think we are his audience and so much financial support comes from Mumsnet.

For anyone who wants to hear Michele -

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=182461270548796&surface_type=vod&referral_source=vod_deeplink_unit

It was reading his tweets on here (I'm not on Twitter) that sent me over to his sub stack and inspired a small donation - there will almost certainly be more to follow.

Quite a few of dont use X but copying tweets seems more like retweeting, coping substacks or blogs feels different. I suspect Nick is quite pleased with the amount of funding he gets from here.

Now I have time to read them at leisure, I'm going through Nick's round ups.

In his week one summary he says 'Devlin alleges that Morrison saw a trans person and said “Ergh!… I can’t look at it”.'

If that was the wording from the actual evidence, not the later abridged mentions of 'calling a transperson "it"', it makes absolute sense as a response to the picture. Whereas later mentions of it referring to the manicuriist never quite hung together grammatically. And it is totally reasonable - graphic fetish porn would elicit the same response from many people, regardless of the specific nature of the fetish.

(I also note he has the same its/it's battle with his autocorrect as I have with mine. I wonder whether his also insists on changing every 'on' to 'in' and 'if' to 'of'.)