Recognize

Lisa Nandy did an interview with the Guardian the other day. She sounds quite good in many ways. But…

We are meeting a couple of days after Harvey Weinstein received his guilty verdict in a New York courtroom. Nandy says she is appalled that there are women in the Labour party whose sexual harassment cases have still not been resolved years after they made complaints. “We’ve failed a lot of women over recent years,” she says. “It’s very reminiscent of what happened with antisemitism where there are a number of cases which quite simply haven’t been dealt with. It gives the green light to people who harass women to believe they can find a home in the Labour party.” She says she would allow a committee of women to determine what harassment is, introduce an independent complaints process, and robust protections for whistleblowers. Aiming fire at Jeremy Corbyn she says: “There cannot be one rule for friends of the leader and another rule for others.”

Recently Nandy has landed herself in hot water with some feminists over her decision to sign, along with Long-Bailey, a pledge from the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights that calls for the expulsion of members who hold “bigoted, transphobic views”. It describes Women’s Place UK – which wants to protect single-sex spaces – as a “hate group”. Does she regret it? “No, I don’t. I care deeply about safe spaces for women. I know from personal experience there is a generation of women who fought very hard to create and protect safe spaces, that it matters. Where you have women who want to have a genuine debate about how better to protect them, it’s a very welcome debate. But that has to start with the recognition that trans men are men, trans women are women and that they exist.”

And if it doesn’t then that’s a “hate group.”

We have to start with “the recognition” of a lie, that men who think of themselves as women literally are women. We have to, and if we don’t, Lisa Nandy will call us a hate group.

Progressive movements of the past haven’t ordered people to “recognize” lies. They didn’t say workers were plutocrats, much less that plutocrats were workers. They didn’t order us to “recognize” that white people who want to be black actually are black. This is a new thing on earth, and it speaks of a truly deep contempt for women, so deep that women share it too.

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