Submit or get out
Pandemic or no pandemic, Labour is still busy getting rid of all these pesky women who don’t agree that men become women by saying some words.
Earlier this week, the Labour party – you remember, the party of fairness and kindness and compassion and equality – decided that it has no place for a woman who has worked tirelessly to protect women from abuse and to remind the world about murdered women who are so often ignored.
Let’s start with murdered women. There are quite a lot of them: 241 women were killed in England and Wales last year. Most of them are killed by men – men they know. Often this is taken as mundane, just one of those unremarkable facts of life (and death) that doesn’t make much news. Man kills woman is dog bites man, if you will.
Some people do think this is worth making noise about. You might know that every year, the Labour MP Jess Phillips reads out a roll-call of the dead, naming the women killed by men in the past year. Whether or not you share Phillips’ politics or think this issue is deserving of parliamentary time, you must concede that this simple act has both emotional power and political impact. It has helped push the often-neglected issue of domestic violence a little further up the agenda.
Which means it damn well is deserving of parliamentary time, if you ask me.
What you might not know is the name of the woman who collects those names. She is Karen Ingala-Smith and she runs the Counting Dead Women project, which does exactly that.
When Ingala-Smith isn’t counting and naming dead women, she runs a charity that provides refuge for women who have suffered physical and sexual abuse. In that capacity, she has given evidence to parliamentary inquiries, briefed politicians and worked with major corporate sponsors on issues around the murder of women. She’s won prizes from such sources as the National Diversity Awards and is doing a PhD in sociology in her spare time.
She was a Labour member for a long time but left the party in 2018 because of Jeremy Corbyn. Now that Corbyn has moved on she applied to rejoin.
And guess what the Labour party said to Karen Ingala-Smith? No. There is no place in the party for you.
Why? Why would Labour reject the membership of a woman who has devoted more than 25 years to protecting women from abuse and violence, and fighting for officials to focus on the abuse and murder of women?
We know why. It’s because men who say they are women are far more important than mere women who campaign to end violence against women.
In a letter dated March 24th, the Governance and Legal Unit at Labour HQ informed Ingala-Smith that she was not welcome in the party:
‘The information brought to our attention is that you have engaged in conduct online that may reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility based on gender identity.
Your application for membership of the Labour party has therefore been rejected.’
There you have it. It could hardly be any more stark. Men who claim to be women matter, and women who work to end violence against women do not matter. Pretend-women are everything and real women have to either bend the knee to them or be shunned.
It’s disgusting.
You’d think that at some point, someone would do the math and realize that the tiny number of people whom you are attempting to appease do not merit the power, attention and influence they are being granted. Having been given this much, they will demand more. If Labour haven’t yet reached the point where their Purity has moved them into the realm of diminishing returns, then it soon will. Few will be found to be Pure enough. You have been warned…
Throwing over HALF THE POPULATION is a pretty good start at whittling away your support to the point of political obscurity and powerlessness. If you want to come in second place to the Left-Handed, Albino, Esperanto-speaking, Bee-Keeping Billy Bragg Fan Party, then so be it. If you are unwilling to save yourself from this takeover by a tiny band of vindictive, toxic narcissists and their useful idiots, fine. Screw you. Just don’t pretend to be “feminist”, “socilaist”, “working-class,” “sensible”, “compassionate” or “progressive” while you do it.
I don’t think the “don’t pander to such a small minority” argument carries any moral weight (as opposed to political.) If there were a large number of Labour members who wanted those with severe acne confined to their homes, or argued that people with Laplander ancestry shouldn’t vote, we wouldn’t focus on the proportionate numbers of each, but on what these views revealed about the character and reasoning of those who hold them. If gender critical beliefs were based on nothing but a hatred for the weak, there’d be a point in excluding the gender critical regardless of which group is larger.
It’s not, so not.
True, but on the other hand if both Chicago and a tiny village were on fire and you had only one fire truck you’d send it to Chicago first. The relative numbers don’t have moral weight on a personal level but it does gall that such a new and niche form of claimed oppression has so swiftly put the oppression of women on the backest of back burners.
Is the oppression of women even on the stove? Hell, except for making sammiches, I’m not sure it’s in sight of the kitchen.
A TRA article on Huffpost last week was crying about how the Idaho legislature was being so cruel to people suffering in this pandemic because the legislature held a vote on a bill to keep boys out of sports competitions for girls. It was all “as the world burns, these awful right wing bigot spend their time doing this??????”
Now, my take is that if the Idaho legislature had the power to vote COVID-19 out of existence, then, yes, that should have been their first priority but, yeah, mean old reality strikes again. That bill protecting the rights of real girls had been in the works for months and why not continue doing the work they were elected to do?
Not holding my breath to hear the same TRAs whining about how Labour is choosing to spend precious time and energy now. You know, punishing real women rather than actually doing anything to help stop the spread of the virus or help those in need.
I was talking with someone last night who was complaining that white gay males were the oppressors of the LGBT community. I said I know some lesbians who would agree with him. He brushed off the lesbians. No, he meant they were oppressing the trans. I wanted to say WTF? But right now the relationship is more important to me, though if the trans dogma continues, that could change. I hope he hits peak trans soon.
Hostility based on gender identity: banned.
Hostility based on sex: banned also… at least, if you ask them about it I’m sure they say it is, but their actions reveal that this is only so long as it does not conflict with the former. They chose to reject someone campaigning against the latter for precisely that conflict.
I agree with Sastra here. The fight is really not down to which group is bigger, it is down to the basic demands being made.
Several of the TRA demands would still be quite illegitimate if they somehow ended up as the majority of the population.
For example, the demand that people be willing to date trans individuals, or be considered bigots.
The “gender critical” demand in this case is simply, “Don’t try and police my sex life.” Which is the more reasonable demand here?
The way I see it, it doesn’t really come down to an issue of a village burning versus a town burning and which you prioritise. If it was like that an argument could be made that you’d save the village because that’s what you’ve got the resources for, and trying to save the town is a lost cause.
Instead I think it really is that there is far too much going unexamined in the TRA’s case, thus there is far too much ideology which they think sounds pretty and inclusive and all of those nice things, which doesn’t really stand up to critical thought because it never really has to.
Slight aside, but I this story shows that party membership in the UK is a deliberate act, requiring an application and I gather a fee, all sent to party headquarters. In the US, party registration, if offered at all, is at the state level, and involves nothing more than checking a box on a voter registration form. It’s likely impossible to reject someone for membership in a party. In many states, party affiliation is either non-existent or irrelevant for selecting a ballot for primary elections. I think UK parties function better, and some of these are points in their favor.
I imagine that people are rejected for party membership rarely if ever, though, which makes the actions taken against Ingala-Smith stand out more.