Guest post: Standing for Women event today
Originally a comment by latsot in Miscellany Room.
I’m going to the Standing For Women event in Newcastle today. There are expected to be ‘counter-protesters’ there (by which I mean crybabies in masks) so there might be interesting things to report.
If you want to follow what’s happening on Twitter, the official account is @SFWnortheast and the most relevant tags are #LetWomenSpeak, #LetWomenSpeakNewcastle, #WomenTalking.
I expect footage of the talks (if they are allowed to take place) will be on KJK’s various spaces at some point. I’ll be filming what I can, but I won’t be able to get decent footage of the talks. I need my hands to get around so I’ll be using a chest-mounted camera and I’ll be in a crowd. And The mic isn’t great.
If you don’t know what these events are about, here’s KJK talking about the Newcastle one:
The video is up already!
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX4wq9quTak
Part 2: https://youtube.com/live/vgxjSGeCE4Q
The sound is a bit dodgy at first, but I’m told it improves.
It was good! It’s hard to count numbers from a seated position in the middle of a crowd but there must have been about 100 on our side and perhaps 150-200 TRAs. They were making a lot of noise but the police did a fairly good job at keeping them kettled into a space quite far from where the talks were happening. They did move forwards at least once (I think twice) and got louder and more threatening, but for the most part we could hear what the women were saying.
At one point, the TRAs were chanting “TERFs GO HOME”. Two random people walked behind me and one said to the other “why are they shouting let’s go home?” The other shrugged and they both walked off. So I’m not sure their message was entirely effective ;)
After most people had left, a TRA stole a TERF sign from a woman and knocked her and another woman down. He was arrested and the women were not, which makes a welcome change. Who knows, perhaps he’ll even be prosecuted.
Excellent! I saw a tweet about the man knocking the woman down and getting arrested, with a photo, but the photo didn’t show either (or you).
A good chant for the terfs would be “Let’s YOU go home!”
We went with “your mam’s a TERF.”
The assault happened at the end when most of us had left and the kettled TRAs were just being let out. I don’t know if anyone filmed or photographed it. I saw the police car arriving and wondered what happened, then bumped into a friend who saw the incident (it’s his friend who was knocked over).
Every time Kelly-Jay moved the camera around it panned past where I was… But someone was standing in front of me every time, fortunately for all. I was photographed by a journalist, though. It was probably because I was talking to a friend who was holding a tiny dog. The last thing her husband said when he dropped her off was “we don’t want you ending up on the front page, do we?” Oops.
I had to watch the video because at one point, a man in a dressing gown, silly hat and white knee-length leggings crept across behind everyone, on camera. Presumably he had some sort of protest planned but he bottled it because the police came to chase him and he scarpered. Anyway, nobody else seemed to have noticed this, miraculously, so I had to check I didn’t imagine him. Nope, he’s there in all his glory in the second video. I forgot to note the timestamp, though.
This is the flag the TRAs tried to steal. No wonder she didn’t want to let go of it.
https://twitter.com/StandingforXX/status/1614661044449812480
The TRA banners were either standard trans flags or “FUCK TERFS” scrawled onto a bit of cardboard.