Helen Joyce on that meeting in Manchester and what happened afterward.

The event was a follow-up to the Sex Matters board meeting, which we held in late June, in a lovely private room that the museum hires out. I wrote about what happened afterwards in issue 53—in brief, after an online mini-whingefest from about three-and-a-half people, the museum abjectly apologised for renting us a room. It put out a statement in which it begged to be given time to rebuild the trust of the “wider LGBTQI+ community and all people who face marginalisation” and promised to “learn from” its terrible error in accommodating an organisation that does not “share its values”, an error it promised never to repeat.

Hey I have an idea. How about “the wider LGBTQI+ community” tries to rebuild our trust. How about we call a halt to all this dementedly overwrought and disproportionate alarm and panic and anguish whenever anyone says “boo” to trans ideology? How about we get a share of all this concern for a change?

They chose the People’s History Museum for their board meeting because two of their board members live in Manchester and because…

it’s lovely, and about precisely the sort of history we feel part of. It holds one of the most important collections of Suffragette materials, including the Pankhursts’ “First in the Fight” banner. The battle for female suffrage was a story of female courage and a too-small number of male allies, on the one hand, and male supremacy and female complicity, on the other. I’m sure you can see why that period resonates.

But this is now, and somehow women don’t matter any more, and our courage is mere terfery, and we’re the oppressor, and we’re evil, and we deserve taunts and threats and even violence. The denunciations got going as soon as the board meeting was in the past, so…Sex Matters booked a room again. The tickets sold out in three hours.

Very depressingly, the museum then took a series of steps to signal its ongoing capitulation to those complaining about us exercising our legal rights. It came off social media. It took down the bookings page from its website. And, most extraordinarily, it rewrote its entire mission statement, in the process removing any claim it had to be a fit home for the most important archive on the Suffragettes.

See Helen’s post for the changes. The new version talks about “standing in solidarity with people who face persecution and discrimination” by for instance “dismantling racism, championing trans inclusion” etcetera yet somehow women didn’t make it into the etcetera. Women are the new Domineering Wicked Overlords, and all other people are their victims.

So the meeting happened, and afterward the Energetic Display of Hatred took place, with the demonstrators following Helen and Maya down the street, shouting abuse.

I wonder how different things would have been if the museum had simply ignored the initial complaints, instead of responding with abject apologies for letting women who were barely better than Nazis into the building. Because after that, its response to everything that followed was foreordained. How can you tell protestors to keep the entrance clear, and keep the museum open and call police to eject any troublemakers, when you think the protestors shouting obscenities through megaphones are the good guys and the nasty women talking about human-rights law are the baddies?

And in fact how can the protestors realize their protests are wrong-headed at best and viciously misogynist at worst when everyone keeps telling them they’re both miraculous angels and the most persecuted people in the history of the world?

The videos I and others took show both myself and Maya smiling broadly. That was obviously partly bravado—but also a feeling of incredulity at the sheer ridiculousness of the whole thing. Here’s that tosspot Billy Bragg’s take, just for a contrary view. This is a man who has signed the White Ribbon promise to “never use, excuse or remain silent about men’s violence against women”.

Promise broken. Promise smashed into a billion sharp wounding pieces.

H/t guest