It is with great sadness that we demand your shunning
LGBT+ Labour has put out a stupid bullying “statement” on Labour MP Rosie Duffield who had the unmitigated temerity to say that it’s only women who have a cervix.
Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community, and the trans people, and trans individuals, and all trans people, and trans groups, and trans collectives, and each and every trans person, and all the trans people, and every single trans person, and have we said it enough ways yet?
But solidarity never with women. Fuck women; women are the enemy. Karens.
It is with great sadness that we have decided to put out this Statement on Rosie Duffield.
Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community.
LGBT+ Labour would like to express our deep disappointment in the actions of Rosie Duffield. We believe that her previous tweets and lack of apology is absolutely unacceptable.
Rosie Duffield’s initial comments which sparked concern claimed, “only women have a cervix”. This statement is very troubling as it ignores both trans men and numerous non-binary people’s existence. Many Labour activists, especially from the trans community, raised their anxieties over this exclusionary language and were met with hostility. With already rising levels of hatred towards the trans community, the bare minimum to expect from Labour MPs is full solidarity and support.
Furthermore, Rosie Duffield then shared a Spectator article that referred to the “trangender thought police” and described the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights as “authoritarian… petulant youngsters”. It is clear that this has contributed towards a situation where our party has become a space where trans and non-binary members do not feel as safe and protected as they should.
The cause for trans rights should be integral to the Labour Party, as the party of equality in our country. Trans rights are human rights, and are workers’ rights, and LGBT+ Labour will always defend our members.
We have spent the past few days reaching out to Rosie Duffield and her office to attempt to initiate steps towards an apology and reparations. Since we have approached Rosie Duffield, she has continued to like and share tweets from people known by the trans community as hostile to their rights. Unfortunately we have not reached a conclusion that our committee sees as an adequate response for her repeated actions.
We are deeply disappointed, and know that in order to regain trust in our party from the trans community, we must now publicly call on the leadership of the party to take measurable action on this situation. We will be writing to Keir Starmer on behalf of our members to ask for a response.
Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community.
These people are such sniveling sniffing creeping pointing whining demanding poking prodding oily creeps I wouldn’t want anything to do with a party that has them in it. If this is Putin’s work he’s a genius.
Liking and sharing tweets! Oh no! What an awful thing to do! There must be The Apologies and The Reparations! There is no other way!
I was just listening to a mediocre Part 1 of a NYT podcast on cancel culture. This would be a much better example that what they’ve been discussing. They seem not to get to the idea that maybe the people being “canceled” are in the right, have valid points, and should perhaps be part of the conversation rather than automatically shunned and forced to apologize.
Sorry, meant to include a link.
https://tunein.com/podcasts/News–Politics-Podcasts/The-Daily-p952868/?topicId=156404722
That’s the ‘bare minimum’, is it? Funny, because that sounds like a demand complete compliance to me. I mean, if that’s the minimum expectation then what would doing more than the minimum entail? Authorising death squads to eliminate all non-compliant party members?
Bunch of spoilt, demanding, selfish, narcissistic, misogynous brats.
Mebbe they ought to consider just why levels of hatred towards the trans community are increasing (if that is indeed happening at all).
Okay, trans activists, once more you failed basic communication. F-. Now, try again:
She did not deny anyone’s existence. She did not deny anything except fantasy that you are entitled to have but not entitled to demand she share. Her views were basic biology.
She did not deny the existence of anyone. She only denied that men have a cervix. That does not deny your existence, only your weird ideas.
Just like with the goddists…who seem to think my being an atheist is a direct denial of them. No, I don’t deny them, I might even like them (if they’re likeable). I only deny that what they call god is in fact a really, truly, incarnate, ethereal, spiritual all at once existing thing.
I do not deny the existence of trans people. I merely deny that they are the sex/gender/whateverthehelltheywanttocallittoday they say they are.
Repeat after me:
I believe you exist. Rosie Duffield believes you exist. We just do not believe you are women/men/neither/both/zombie/werewolf. There is no way we could deny your existence, as loud as you shout and as big a megaphone as you have.
Except that’s a lie, isn’t it?
You don’t express solidarity with Debbie Hayton, Blaire White, Rose of Dawn, Buck Angel, Scott Newgent, or any other members of the trans “community” who deviate from TRA dogma. No, they are excommunicated from the fold. And why? Because you’re cowards, too afraid and too weak to speak truth to the narcissistic abusers, the rent seekers, the deluded, the well-intentioned but mistaken, the social engineers, the sociopaths, the psychopaths, the emotionally unstable, the damaged, and the confused. You are not Longfellow’s smith, with arms strong as iron bands, whose smithy stands under the spreading chestnut tree. Oh, you’re standing under a spreading chestnut tree, but it’s not Longfellow’s tree; it’s Orwell’s.
Re ‘denying their existence’:
‘Do you believe in full immersion baptism?’
‘Believe in it? Man, I’ve actually SEEN it.’
Hundreds of thousands of people joined Labour under Corbyn, probably most of them because they wanted socialism, but a sizable minority seem to have joined because they wanted to feel smug and virtuous. People whose politics is about making themselves feel both righteous and transgressive are attracted to the far left even if they don’t really get it. I don’t think Putin has anything to do with that impulse. To a shallow person, socialism can be very sexy and Alternative. It might also be right, but that’s not what’s important to such a person.
I’m certain that Corbyn and his associates do not believe in authoritarian wokenesss. They didn’t disavow it, however, probably because they couldn’t afford to lose support. I note that current leader Keir Starmer doesn’t seem to be giving into pressure to condemn Rosie Duffield. That’s good but I’m not sure he would need to. Unlike Corbyn, he doesn’t need the support of the party membership (or not as much) because he has the support of its MPs and some of the media. However, he had to earn that support through his willingness to participate in the cancellation of the left of British politics by means of thought policing and identity politics.
Corbyn and the left have now been effectively cancelled in Britain by means of a cynical conflation of socialism with antisemitism. The whole of the British media and most of the political class have participated in this cancelling of Corbyn’s Labour party. There are some interesting parallels between the hounding of leftists out of public life in the name of anti-racism and the hounding of women out of public life in the name of trans human rights.
A minor point, perhaps, but I hate this kind of dishonesty.
“Anxieties” sounds so much more hurty than “concerns”, doesn’t it, and much less Kareny than “complaints”.
A transparent need to manipulate is a fairly reliable sign that there are no clothes on the emperor.
If something is rising, that means there is a change going, somebody is losing an argument.
So what is causing this change, where there are rising levels of hatred towards the trans community? It isn’t gender critical feminism that’s doing that, gender critical feminism has been around for decades before these “rising levels of hatred”, and in all honesty had faded in its cultural impact.
What if the arguments being put forward by TRAs, and the censorious nature of TRAs, have built a backlash that otherwise wouldn’t be there? Or at least, could have been safely ignored?
So lets get in a time machine, go back to when our host was on FTB. What would have happened, if nobody cared what Ophelia Benson liked on Facebook? Would Ophelia Benson be as interested in trans issues now, without the harassment and threats that followed from that?
I’m going to venture, probably not. She wasn’t interested in it before, but it became very interesting after the bullying started.
Now lets say that JK Rowling’s response to trans issues was met with “That’s, like, your opinion ma’am” – would Rowling be a rallying point? Probably not, a lot of people expressing solidarity are doing so precisely because of attempts at cancelling Rowling.
And the additional examination of TRA ideology has highlighted other issues.
https://anticap.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/why-human-capital-is-not-capital/
So why am I linking to Humpty Dumpty’s point on words and their meanings? Because the last line in that passage is actually pretty damn important to what we’re talking about now.
What is the definition of woman? What is the meaning of oppressed? What is violence?
These questions come up because they are forced upon us, by people who are evidently not prepared to give real answers. Hence the calls to cancel, because that’s all the TRA’s have got.
Emotional blackmail in the form of suicide threats are not an answer. Baseball bats are not an answer. Calling people names for daring to ask these questions is not an answer.
And it isn’t necessarily wrong to engage in activism before having these questions answered. Sometimes questions come up when the issues are brought up, but there has got to be work done on finding answers.
You can’t find the answers to these questions, if people can’t ask them. Trying to silence the questions, builds the hate because the rest of us look at it and we don’t see someone who is vulnerable and hurting, we see someone who is threatening a sixty-year-old woman with a baseball bat for saying something that someone doesn’t like.
This is part of the problem with safe spaces in general, and why the so-called “alt right” were actually correct about them, and it kills me to say that. The safe space, as a conceptual thing, is great, but not every space can or even should be safe. Cancel culture is colonising the unsafe spaces that we need to discuss such issues.
A safe space is supposed to be a respite from the world, not the world itself.
A library should not be a safe space, if a feminist books a talk at one, and that feminist is a “TERF” – that space is not a wokester’s living room. The woke don’t own that space, it isn’t theirs, and yet they demand that it be subjected to the rules that make them feel safe, and then wonder why so many people object to this colonisation of the public sphere.
The same thing goes with inviting speakers to universities, the fact is that these spaces are not supposed to be safe ones, they’re public spaces, and trying to enforce rules which belong in a private space on a public space breeds resentment because of the extreme narcissism involved.
The world does not rotate around whoever can yell “I’m offended” the loudest. Is this fight over what is to be woman, or a fight over what is to be master? Who gets to define what is and isn’t allowed on the public forum? And how do we square somebody claiming that authority, also claiming to be oppressed?
Because if you’re the one who gets to decide what other people are allowed to say or think in the public sphere, that sounds less like someone who is amongst the downtrodden, and more like the one doing the treading.
With just a little bit of tolerance, with just a little bit of a sense of apathy, these questions wouldn’t come up, but they’re forced to the forefront and they’re questions the TRAs are not prepared to answer. It isn’t wrong to be an activist, the same things could be said of any cause including all the just ones, but you’ve got to have the answers, and you’ve got to have some mechanism for finding those answers, if you do not people will turn on you, and they will be right to turn on you.
And remember: this is the party where the moderates/old Labour members are wondering “Why aren’t people voting for us? The Tories are trashing everything as usual, but why is nobody helping us fix everything?!”
The problem is the “Junior Anti-Sex League” here.
Maybe everyone could congratulate them on their total failure to understand that 1984 wasn’t an instruction manual?
Bruce Gorton #10
Well put! Also this:
Seriously. Trans activists have got uncritical support from elite universities, major corporations and most of the mainstream media. Yet whenever their narrative is criticized, they pull this argumentum ad misericordiam and claim to be “hated” and oppressed.
Isn’t that the foundation of intersectional activism? It’s all constructed upon a series of oppressor/oppressed binaries that can multiplicatively combine to generate moral desert in an overarching paradigm that derives truth from moral desert.