A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK says Amnesty who claim over 50% are Gender Critical groups

[IwantToRetire]

Quote:

Anti-rights actors seek a society in which women and men have fixed and distinct roles, based on what they view as ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’. These actors perceive the idea that gender is socially constructed as a threat because it suggests that gender roles can, and do, change across societies and over time. In fact, progress in the rights of women and LGBT+ people has been underpinned by changing understandings of gender and social roles.

Anti-rights actors refer to this perceived threat as ‘gender ideology’, portraying it as an attack on national traditions, family structures, marriage and religious freedom. These narratives often seek to generate fear and uncertainty and rely on misinformation or exaggerated claims.

The term ‘gender ideology’ emerged in the context of debates within international institutions, particularly the United Nations, about gender equality and sexual and reproductive rights.

In 1964, the Holy See became a Permanent Observer at the UN General Assembly, the only religious body with this status. As a permanent observer the Holy See can participate in processes at the General Assembly as well as other UN bodies. It cannot vote but it has the possibility to co-sponsor resolutions if a member state requests a vote. Although it cannot vote, the Holy See can participate in UN discussions and processes and has played an influential role in debates on women's rights and LGBT+ rights.

The term ‘gender ideology’ gained prominence in response to progress on gender equality and Cairo in 1994. These conference were a landmark moment for the global women's rights movement. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action is widely regarded as a key international framework for advancing women's rights and gender equality, and states continue to report on its implementation through the Commission on the Status of Women.

While opposition to sexual and reproductive rights predates the Beijing conference, the term ‘gender ideology’ became a particularly important response to the advances achieved there. The phrase was coined to explain the growing influence of gender equality agendas and to mobilise opposition to them.

Although the term originated in debates at the international level, it has since become a broad political narrative used by a wide range of anti-rights actors. Today, it is often used to connect campaigns against gender equality, sexual and reproductive rights, and LGBT+ rights across different countries and contexts.

From intro to report at
https://media.amnesty.org.uk/documents/Report_-_A_growing_threat__the_anti-rights_movement_in_the_UK_July_2026.pdf

See images of the list of 51 groups Amnesty is claiming are right wing.

It was a joke - or maybe sarcasm.

ie prompt enough to follow the rules, so they know they have FU.

But not made any effort to publicly apologise.

Two face hypocrites.

(Isn't it nice that MNHQ have now got spell checker. Means I can almost appear literate!)

You say “If you say or act to imply that people who read it won't be influenced against you by doing so, then you don't have a claim.”

That isn’t what’s happening. What’s happening is they are saying people who read it and also read that AI is unable or unwilling to provide any factual basis for their claims will conclude that AI is willing to make false and damaging claims.

Nothing in that damages the libel claim, which is that if people read the claims without also knowing they were unsupported and false, they will be influenced against you.

JKR has no choice in this scenario.

If she does nothing she fails to protect the women she intends to care for.

She has stated that since the report was published the organisation has been subject to numerous threats etc and it's probably put women off using the service.

If she does not do anything, this will continue and other groups will also target it, potentially leading to it's closure.

The action is to protect it legally and ensure that anyone who attacked Beira's place has action taken against them and they don't have the defence that a charity with a reputation which is reputable said it and thus they were acting in good faith.

It's firmly damage limitation.

In this sense, ensuring that the report is kept as evidence so it can not be denied as never existing (by conspiracy type theorists) and ensuring Amnesty's reputation is damaged (look at the shit they've written) isn't something she has a choice in.

It's disinformation. It has to be dealt with and shown that such disinformation is not something you can just throw out. You are responsible for disinformation and it has legal liabilities. Otherwise it will continue.

It's a line in the sand moment.

Really good article in the Australian newspaper, The Age

https://x.com/i/status/2077878747102052486

Great post.

There's been a lot of years of 'rising above it' and 'being the bigger person' by women and women's charities and groups. Unfortunately for a particular kind of aggressor, this is perceived as weakness and encourages escalation.

As seen here, eventually the escalation gets egregious enough that there are consequences, the articles in the national press having forced a bit of back pedalling. Whether it goes further? How many times in the past decade have women here thought 'this is the one, this is what will have to cause action to be taken now', only to watch in bewilderment as it all just settles down again.

Rather like article 15 in the states - the checks and balances set in the system to avoid such things largely don't work when the point finally comes of them being needed, in the same way that basic safeguarding policy doesn't work to prevent many critical incidents. People don't want to take responsibility and accountability themselves and hope that someone else will do it, and they don't want to provoke the difficult and unhinged and then have to deal with their behaviours.

I believe they have a duty to report if they break the rules.

I doubt there are any rules about libel & it won't be regarding libel that they are referring themselves to the Charity Commission. The rules that are likely to have been broken will be regarding political campaigning.

This isn't Amnesty's first rodeo.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/28/amnesty-international-leaked-review-ukraine-report-legally-questionable

“This is part of an ongoing internal learning process, and we welcome the full findings which will inform and improve our future work.”

Can they keep saying 'lessons have been learned' while clearly learning no lessons?

I'm not in any way criticising JKR, far from it.

I'm just lamenting the fact that AI smeared a whole range of groups, from small grassroots ones to parliamentarians, but the focus is going to be on Beira's Place and JKR, and we all know what irrational hatred the letters J-K-R inspire in many people, who will probably only hear about the JKR connection, and unthinkingly assume that if she is involved, AI must be the heroes in all this.

That's all I was saying, nothing negative about JKR's involvement as such, just the way the media will frame it - e.g. the Guardian headline quoted above which refers to AI 'calling JK Rowling's women's centre 'anti rights'.

These charities get a lot of money to employ people to indulge themselves, don’t they?

Agree.

The only thing these people respect is power. If you let them they will walk all over you. It took years to get to this point. The fight is not over, but things are changing because a whole bunch of people fought back. They only care about money and power. We can use that against them.

One source of the success of our fight back is we have so many groups willing to step up. They are all doing their bit, but in different ways. The TAs are starting to understand they are in trouble.

The SNP found this out. Amnesty is finding this out. Bristol County Council is going to. So are others.

Another point of success is that a bunch of men in dresses are so awful they actively help our side. See Herbert for a perfect example. You need a huge system to cover up their behaviour. When it starts coming down they will actively help.

Exactly how I feel. There need to be some consequences. Amnesty has a responsibility not to produce harmful disinformation to suit its political agenda. They’re a charity, whose main remit used to be prisoners of conscience. Truly desperate people with no voice. And that’s what most of their legacy supporters fund them for.

That’s bizarre, and doesn’t jive with their other omnicause positions. Is there a suggestion that the bias towards Russia was deliberate?

There's been a lot of years of 'rising above it' and 'being the bigger person' by women and women's charities and groups. Unfortunately for a particular kind of aggressor, this is perceived as weakness and encourages escalation.

Sorry for the tagging @Wishesandhorses I'm trying to avoid the dreaded "show more" by not quoting your entire post <sigh>

I am reminded of the push and pull on FWR about should we/shouldn't we respond to an obvious derailer who posts a lot of BS as actual fact. They do it to bully us. Do we act as the "better people" and not respond, thereby leaving the fallacious information there for all to see (with no amendment)? Or do we respond with correct information, thereby risking an escalation of the derailment? In a very small way, this will be what JKR and her team are weighing up, I suppose.

I think including Beira's Place in the report will be the undoing of Amnesty UK. I remember there was criticism when the Like a Snowball report came out, but smearing Sex Matters and FWS is par for the course. The outrage doesn't usually extend beyond GC circles.

Since the FWS judgement, TRAs (along with the media) have managed to keep the focus on toilets. They have elicited people's sympathies with stories of poor, vulnerable transwomen being afraid to leave the house because they can't go to the toilet and warning people that big, hairy trans men in the ladies loos will be sending "cis" women running in terror.

They have deliberately kept discussion away from rape crisis centres, shelters etc because they know this will be a much harder argument to win. The Amnesty report has torpedoed this and exposed the unreasonableness and selfishness of TRA demands. Of course TRAs will paint this as JKR using her wealth to silence them. But calling a service that provides specialist support to traumatised victims of sexual violence "anti-rights" is really beyond the pale, and I think it will get a lot of people off the fence. Amnesty have really fucked up.

I think it's in line wth Zack Polanski saying he would 'build a relationship' with Putin instead of fighting and Corbyn's questioning whether Moscow was behind the Salisbury poisonings.

I think it's not so much that Omnicause supporters are pro-Russia as that they shrink away from any position that could in any way be seen as supporting 'Western Capitalism/Imperialism' . This leaves them open to exploitation. Putin is obviously also vocal about his hate for western imperialism...

They also dropped Navalny's designation as a prisoner of conscience in 2021 before apologising and reversing their decision.

Re: Amnesty and Ukraine, the Times said:

Members of the public who generously donate money and time to it in the belief that they are aiding victims of persecution should stop. A once-respected humanitarian campaign, Amnesty now evinces a deplorable indifference to oppression. Having shown itself soft on crime and soft on fascism, it should have the decency to depart the stage.

But that obviously didn't happen.

https://archive.ph/Io9tg#selection-2187.128-2187.467

Yes, even on heavily moderated pro TRA subs r/Scotland and r/unitedkingdom there are plenty of normie types saying “why can’t women have a rape crisis centre that’s women only”.

On what grounds did they say they were removing Navalny’s prisoner of conscience status?

Apologies if this has already been posted: JKR on X today. (my bold)

@jk_rowling

Amnesty UK was already smearing feminists as 'anti-rights' back in May, according to
@thetimes. It appears that, far from being an accidental slip up or an editorial error, the latest defamatory report accurately represents Amnesty UK's deep-seated hostility to all organisations that believe sex is real and important in contexts such as same sex attraction and healing after sexual violence and trauma. Those who've been defamed are owed an explanation of why Amnesty claimed to have withdrawn the report because of its 'language' when, per @thetimes article, it had already expressed exactly the same beliefs, in the same language, months previously. Many of the organisations Amnesty has attacked are grassroots campaigners with a tiny fraction of a gigantic, well-funded international NGO's resources. The defamatory report has already had serious consequences for a service supporting women at the most vulnerable time of their lives, as detailed by Beira's Place lawyers in the legal letter sent two days ago. The withdrawing of the report cannot undo the harm it has already done and is continuing to do. If Amnesty is under the illusion that the women's, children's and gay rights organisations it has attacked will be unwilling to go to court, they have made yet another massive error of judgement. They underestimate both the solidarity that exists between the targeted organisations and my willingness to support legal action, not just on behalf of Beira's Place, but for all women's and LGB organisations falsely branded 'anti-rights.'

It's over privileged people who have no idea of hardship and think everyone in the world is ultimately reasonable. It smacks of a massive lack of life experience and cosseted lives. It's a middle class bubble with no idea.

It's so depressing. In theory I fit this description myself but I look around beyond the bubble and have a very wide range of friends not just 'people like me'.

It's been a drive to conformity and this idea that if you don't do things in a particular way you are a failure. One of my son's mates said to me yesterday that he has to do x, y or z or he "won't get a good job" so he's already been set up for these ideas of conformity at age 11. This kid is working below the expected level and is very quirky. The thing is I've seen his work ethic out of school when he finds something he loves and he will shine if this is encouraged. But he's ostracised and shunned because he doesn't confirm. And I have this feeling that everything within our society has almost gone down this route.

The whole thing with Trans Rights is a grown up form of bullying and forcing conformity to gender stereotypes. It's depressing on a level that's shocking.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57029346

Navalny was previously associated with Russian nationalism and had made derogatory comments about migrant workers 13 years previously.

Does this mean he's not entitled to human rights?

That sounds a lot like the far right who say that criminals should be stripped of rights and immigrants who enter the country illegally shouldn't have rights because they are the wrong type of person.

The point is that human rights apply to everyone. Even the most reprehensible in our society. Even if they have views you fundamentally not only disagree with but think are appalling. Because 'freedom of speech'.

This is fundamental to Amnesty's remit. A failure to recognise this shows just how little they understand, and more importantly, value human rights.

If you're an omnicause believer, you don't like the West and capitalism - as @nicepotoftea pointed out.

The most significant anti-Western countries are Russia, Iran and China. It's no surprise if the omnicausers start shilling for them.

How anyone can cast Ukraine as the bad guy in the current situation is completely beyond me.

Yes, I have seen those comments too. And the point is also made in the article in The Age linked above - that having such an uncompromising position will backfire on TRAs.

Rather than JKR's intervention being used as fuel to vilify her, I think it might actually win her some supporters, particularly from people who didn't realise what her position is, but who had just accepted the narrative that she is evil and hates trans people.

This exactly.

The whole point and history of the concept of human rights was to try and prevent anything like the holocaust being able to happen again, because one political group decided another was beneath them and shouldn't be entitled to equality or humanity. Slave owners: they're not real humans, they don't have feelings, it's ok to treat them like this. Colonialists: we're a superior race we must force these ignorant fools to be like us. Human rights were supposed to stop that pattern being able to happen. The war trials at Nuremberg went to immense care to ensure the very worst of criminals were treated exactly as well as the most favourable person have been, it was the principle. Equality of standards for all, regardless.

As soon as a political group is stupid enough, arrogant enough, to throw that away, they can temporarily enjoy being the powerful bullies, but they have nothing left themselves but hope that they remain the powerful and popular force, and never end up the victims of other groups. And no group stays popular or safe forever. When bloody AI starts doing it with all their history.... something's gone very wrong indeed. Largely with having let themselves be captured.

I imagine they’d apply the same logic to any women (or men) held in prison anywhere in the world for being gender critical. At one point a Brazilian woman was facing up to 25 years under some draconian hate crime law for calling a TIM politician a man.