Another frenzy
The Working Class Movement Library in Salford (across the river from Manchester – I’ve been there, just barely, having crossed the bridge near the People’s History Museum in Manchester so I could say I’d set foot in Salford) is putting on an event with Julie Bindel.
We are pleased to welcome journalist, writer, broadcaster and researcher Julie Bindel to speak as we mark LGBT History Month. Julie has been active in the global campaign to end violence towards women and children since 1979, and has written extensively on topics such as rape, domestic violence, prostitution and trafficking. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at Lincoln University.
Julie’s 2014 book on the state of the lesbian and gay movement in the UK, Straight Expectations, has been praised for being thought-provoking and challenging.
Admission free; all welcome.
It’s a volunteer-run organization, with no money.
The event page has filled up with screaming outrage from people who heard from someone who heard from someone else who read in a Facebook comment once that Julie is an Unapproved Person. “Screaming outrage” doesn’t even describe it – it’s frothing raving deranged hatred, along with threats and dedicated efforts to damage both Julie and the Library.
The subset of the Green Party that calls itself LGBTIQA+Greens has posted a ridiculous account of this venomous explosion:
5 January 2017
February is the time of year that we remember and celebrate the achievements of LGBT people, which, let’s face it, are frequently swept under the carpet in discussions of the past.
To mark this year’s LGBT History Month, The Working Class Movement Library in Salford has announced that they are hosting Julie Bindel to speak at their event.
Julie Bindel has a long and troubling history of making transphobic and biphobic comments. In December 2012, she wrote an article titled ‘Where’s the Politics in Sex?’ where she rolled out tired and harmful stereotypes around bisexuality, including such sentiments as “if bisexual women had an ounce of sexual politics, they would stop sleeping with men.”. In 2004 she published an article called ‘Gender benders, beware’ in which she referred to a trans woman with quotation marks around “woman” and her pronoun “she” as if to suggest that her identity was invalid and something to be mocked.
This week, Bindel has even ridiculed trans people’s pronouns and the right that everyone has to choose their own in a tweet that read: “Pronouns – Martini/whitewine/Negroni.”
And that’s it! That’s all they offer! That’s all they offer by way of evidence for claiming she “has a long and troubling history of making transphobic and biphobic comments” and by way of justification for doing their utmost to bully the WCML and Julie into giving up this event. She made a joke about “pronouns” and they consider that justification for trying to destroy her.
The bullshit gets bullshitter every week. It’s sickening.
Yeah, shocking. Next thing you know people will be calling Nigel Farage racist.
But by bob, the day has yet to come when anyone calls you silent!
/s
“if bisexual women had an ounce of sexual politics, they would stop sleeping with men.”.
I don’t think she needs to be no-platformed for this, but I hope we can agree it’s wrong.
Silentbob @ 1 –
It’s not simply a matter of calling her the equivalent of “racist” (which would still be bullshit), it’s a matter of swamping an event page for a talk on a different subject hosted by a tiny non-moneyed all-volunteer library of working class history.
Also – Julie is not the equivalent of Nigel Farage. That right there is why this whole thing is so poisonous. That was a poisonous thing for you to say.
Dan @ 3 –
Why? Why do you hope that? What’s at stake? Why does it matter whether or not “we can agree” that one expressed political opinion of Julie Bindel’s is wrong?
I’m well familiar with how this works. Not as familiar as Julie, because I’m much more obscure than Julie, so I get correspondingly less of this kind of bullshit, but I certainly did get some of it. Suddenly it became a matter of urgency to find out what my every opinion was in order to find something suspect in it.
I haven’t read the context in which she said it, but at a guess the context was lesbian separatism. Do I agree that that’s “wrong”? No. Just for one thing I don’t agree that it’s as simple as “wrong” or not wrong.
But then I also have absolutely zero interest in appeasing the sharks of shunning by listing all the ways I can find to disagree with Julie.
Agreed, being full of shit (on one or more things) does not a monster make and in the context of this event it’s entirely irrelevant.
And anyway it’s simply ludicrous to claim it’s full of shit or so self-evidently “wrong” that all decent people should agree that it’s “wrong.” It’s a political view. Marginalized groups have reasons for seeing separatism as a valid approach. It’s a highly debatable political view, obviously, but that doesn’t make it simply Wrong.
Gee! You’d think she was Hillary Clinton. How slavishly gullible are pseudo-progressives? Their ‘bubbles’ make the Murdoch/Limbaugh/Fox entente look like a Socratic symposium.
Look, I am a *straight* woman, and I can understand the concept of going on a sexual strike against men. The idea is as old as the play “Lysistrata”. Maybe the idea seems obviously wrong to a *man*, but don’t tell us women that we should have to agree it’s unthinkable.
Funny how it’s the women they do tell though, isn’t it.
Some context on the remark about bisexual women:
She goes on to describe Lesbianism as a political choice. I don’t agree with everything she says here myself, but framing opinions like Bindel’s as “harmful,” attempting to unplatform her everywhere, and comparing her to Nazis are the acts of fragile emotive polemicists with totalitarian tendencies.
Okay, it might just be me being dimmer than usual, but could somebody please explain how that tweet is supposed to ridicule trans people?
You know, Acolyte, it is impossible to ridicule those who say “of course you can claim pizza as a gender”. To me, it appears this tweet is ridiculing that position. She may ridicule the whole “he/she/it” debacle, where you can get screamed at for accidentally using the ‘wrong’ pronoun, but at the same time, there is nothing in gender white wine that doesn’t fit with what some activists are claiming.
I guess the ridicule is that it “hurts” people who claim your gender can be pizza. It makes them look, well, silly. Except, of course, they did that to themselves.
How it’s supposed to ridicule trans people, i.e. by the kind of buffoon who writes this kind of finger-pointing garbage, is that it makes a joke of the wholly sacred subject of pronouns.
In reality, of course, people who make pronouns a sacred subject ridicule themselves.
Or, what iknklast said. I had the page open for a few minutes while I read something else.
It seems to me, as an outsider*, that anyone who claims pizza as a gender deserves to have hot flashes. White wine must be soo much cooler. Let’s not even talk about meat balls!
Oh, have I now unplatformed myself from the Oslo conference? ;-/
* and a coward in any food fight
iknklast, Ophelia, thanks for clearing that up. Turns out I wasn’t being dim after all, it’s merely a case of the offence is in the eye of the beholder.
Well, if gender is such an abstract concept as to allow pizza into the club, I think I shall start to identify as ‘incomprehensible’.
[…] That talk by Julie Bindel at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford (across the river from Manchester) went off without a hitch this afternoon. Friends who went say it was terrific. […]