Warrior queens scared to speak out
Susan Dalgety in The Scotsman:
Why have I spent the last 24 hours sharing despairing texts with some of Scotland’s most successful women, each as bewildered as I am? Women who have won awards for their work, women who have spent their entire adult lives overcoming prejudice, women who are the social, economic, and political equal of any man. Warrior queens every one of them. And now scared to speak out.
I could point to a Coatbridge police station, where on Thursday, Marion Millar, a 50-year-old feminist, was charged with malicious communications after posting allegedly “homophobic and transphobic” tweets, but the story doesn’t start there.
I could direct you to Johann Lamont’s powerful parliamentary speech where she argued successfully for the survivors of rape and sexual assault to have the right to choose the sex, not the gender, of the person who examines them after an attack. But the story didn’t start there either.
See also Joan Mcalpine.
Women who argue that biology is real and that our sex is the basis of inequality are dismissed as bigots. Women who marched alongside their gay brothers and sisters in the campaign for equality are accused, by some of the people they marched with, of causing a moral panic by asserting their sex-based rights.
Women have lost income, been shunned by their professional peers and pilloried for standing up for their sex-based rights. And one woman now awaits trial in Glasgow Sheriff Court on July 20.
It is now, she concludes, time to fight back.
Feels like we’re back to the 1920s, when suffragettes were jailed just for standing outside the White House holding signs. Only this time in Scotland. (I don’t know much about the suffrage history of Scotland; they may have their equivalent; I imagine they do.)
I’m not much of a joiner, and even less of an organizer, but yeah, talking and writing about this stuff sure as hell doesn’t feel anywhere near adequate at this point. I just made a (somewhat more than symbolic) donation to Sex Matters. I also pre-ordered Julie Bindel’s upcoming book Feminism for Women which looks promising. Any suggestion for other ways to contribute are welcome.
I have recently cancelled my membership in the Norwegian Green Party as they seem to have gone all in on the gender id. bullshit. It breaks my heart to do so, but there has to be some real cost associated with riding the gender id. bandwagon or even people who actually know better will tend to go along with it as the path of least resistance. I ended my monthly donation to 350.org a while back for the same reason. I guess my vote in the upcoming election will be blank since every other option amounts to voting for no future or a future not worth having. It sucks that there is no way to vote for strong action on climate change without signing on to this garbage as well, but of course the list of things that don’t suck about the world is pretty much empty at this point.
If you want to talk about just things in general, and not political parties, I would nominate B&W for the list of things that don’t suck, making it no longer empty.
There’s always that :)
@iknklast #1
The term ‘suffragette’ was originally a reference to the British suffrage movement started by Emily Pankhurst in 1903. I’m not 100% on the details but I think that its use for suffrage movements in other territories is a recent thing. The name is not mentioned at all on the US suffrage movement wiki page.
Colin – I don’t know all the ins and outs of suffrage language, but I have seen the term mentioned a number of times in the histories I have read of the movement, including in America, where suffragettes and suffragists tended to be at odds with each other.