Banging on the window while the police did absolutely nothing
Julie Bindel on the WPUK meeting:
State of this outside the venue where #WPUKLab19 were meeting to talk about women’s sex-based rights, a load of trans-activist misogynists screaming, shouting and banging on the window while the police did absolutely nothing:
The protesters seem to be chanting “What do we do? FIGHT BACK!”
To remind themselves that they’re the victims.
From what I can tell, the police did do one thing — they hustled Julie Bindel away when someone (presumably a protester) said something to her and she started to ask what it was. Without the police there, she might have been torn to bits by all those victims fighting back.
I think I also heard a lot of “Trans rights are human rights!” Because when a group of women gets together to talk about what affects them, they MUST be plotting to rob somebody male of some human rights.
Many if not most of the chanting voices sound female to me. It’s enough to make a woman weep.
@Laurel;
Trans Rights has been successfully framed as a feminist issue, on par with feminists recognizing and welcoming lesbians and women of color into their goal of promoting the ideal that “women are people.” I think the best way to understand the level of anger being displayed by the protesters here is to imagine that the Women’s Place UK was holding a meeting which both excluded lesbians and women of color and was being held for the specific purpose of justifying that. Add in a premise that lesbians and WOC are, right now, living in an apartheid political and social climate and you’ve got the whole “we’re fighting back” mentality.
That’s why I’m leery of saying that all the women who are part of the Trans Rights movement are motivated by self-hatred, or accepting the patriarchy, or the like. That’s not the right focus and I don’t think it gives credit to the women. As I see it, the fundamental problem doesn’t reside in the people themselves, but in what I consider a flawed line of reasoning.
It’s really no different than understanding the religious, or pseudoscience supporters, or any sort of fanaticism or extremism. I try to put myself in their place: if I accepted all the facts which they accept, would I be kicking the windows, too? Or, at least, condemning it while explaining that it’s perfectly understandable because the targets do after all deserve it?
Quite probably.
I think it’s not Julie in the video – it doesn’t sound like her. I think she just shared it.
About kicking the windows if we accepted the same premises…I’m not convinced. Previous rights movements after all didn’t kick the windows. Previous rights movements didn’t march with posters of knives dripping blood or “KILL ____s” or the like.
The movement for trans “validation” (which is the real demand, as opposed to rights) seems to attract people with a taste for threats and intimidation. I think the unreasonableness of the claims is related to the taste for intimidation.
@Ophelia;
Ah, okay. Not her, but someone else the policeman was removing from the possibility (probability) of a confrontation. I can’t make out what he’s saying, but the person filming (or being filmed) does seem to agree with it.
It’s not much of a response of course — preventing a gender critical feminist from being physically attacked by an unruly mob by getting her out of there — but I say it’s arguably better than if the cops had just decided to stand by and hey, what happens, happens. Small mercies.
@Ophelia #5:
You could be right. Perhaps we’d also have to accept the premise that this is what we should have done back then — shown more outrage, more defiance, more willingness to shout and shove and kick when black people were refused service at lunch counters or lesbians were fired from their jobs. We let the Nazis go too far, and then it became too late. (This) is like (that.) And, as you say, if your justification is built on a house of cards, you’re going to be quicker to default to emotional bluster.
One of the claims which the advocates think reasonable is that trans people kill themselves if they’re not validated. This now entails that everything has escalated into a life and death situation. In light of this, the shakiness of the claim may be superseded by a sense of urgency and heightened sense of pity. They’re vulnerable and in immediate danger: will you just stand by?
When I look at the self-proclaimed feminists on both sides in this controversy, it seems to me that I’m looking at very similar sorts of people. I really can’t say that there are violent-types who jumped to a particular side. It looks to me more like the difference in tempered discourse has to do with the ideology and the way it reframes an entire situation. Perhaps the feminist TRAs want to “kill the T*s” because something in the line of reasoning appeals to people with a particularly strong instinct to discover victims in mortal peril and rescue them from monsters. I don’t know.
But yes, it is suspicious that the TRAs seem to be focusing their monster-detectors more on the group with the arguments than on the groups with the disgust reactions. You’d think the suicidal would be more driven to suicide by “you’re an abomination of nature and an offense to God!” than “being a woman is not a way of thinking.”
There are a great many claims that the two groups, the “disgust” group and the “arguments” group, are the same. The situation is perhaps made more complicated by organizations like the Catholic Church including valid and humane arguments (no such thing as a wrong body, there are only two sexes, biological fact) in with their God talk.
The “arguments” group is easier to fight than the “disgust” group. Religion has heavy support from strong institutions and the bulk of the people (even though many people don’t support the extremist claims of religion, it is still considered unacceptable to attack religious ideas in many parts of the world). Feminism has never had anything more than lukewarm support from the most powerful institutions, and it has required a huge amount of work to maintain even that. Negative female stereotypes still prevail in entertainment and education both. Plus, many young women are on the “trans women are women, period” side, which weakens us further.
Many of these individuals have shown they are much more interested in fighting or competing against women, perceived as weaker, then against the stronger males. Why should it be any different in the actual “rights” (or “validation”) campaign?
If this is true, then IMO these people qualify for interment. People who kill themselves if not validated are so fragile that they are a danger to themselves and others.
It also is emotional blackmail on par with desperate man that threatens to kill himself if his partner of the moment dares to leave.
That’s what they did with me when I was suicidal. It’s the usual response, but they scream TERF at anyone who suggests any form of mental illness and for some reason screaming TERF is a powerful weapon these days.
Thank you for making the point about emotional blackmail. It needs to be said.