How should a feminist be?

I lived through the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s and it deeply affected me, as I believe it affected all women at the time. For a brief bright moment, feminism burst out of the niche and exploded into mainstream culture. And even though the male establishment ridiculed it, Germaine Greer and Kate Millett were on the evening TV chat shows outshining them with their sublime intelligence and sexiness.

I tried, tentatively, to find a women’s group to get involved with but was put off by the women’s loud self-confidence. I was a tight knot of rage and pain – a casualty of the system they claimed to be fighting. They had no time or patience for a girl as broken and difficult as me. At least that’s how it seemed.

The Gender Recognition Act consultation proves women are not full human beings (unless they are men)

After spending many depressing hours considering my response to the recent consultation into proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), I have come to the conclusion that the consultation itself and the way it was developed and handled shows that in this country women are still second class citizens and have not yet attained full human rights in practice.

The GRA enables someone to acquire a gender recognition certificate (GRC). This changes their legal sex, so a male becomes legally female, and vice versa. The consultation sought people’s views on making the process for getting a GRC easier.

Others have written eloquently about the inherent bias within the consultation itself, the biased way it was framed, and the bias of the Women and & Equalities committee inquiry that preceded it, so I will try and restrict myself to aspects that I haven’t already seen covered.

How I became a TERF

When it was announced that Julie Bindel had been shortlisted for the Stonewall Journalist of the Year award in 2008, the trans-activists went wild. Julie had written an article four years earlier in which they claimed she’d made some transphobic comments. Even though she’d apologised, they demanded Stonewall drop her from the shortlist.

On women, class and feminism

This post is based on some notes I contributed to a social media discussion about whether class is relevant to a feminist analysis of the sex trade. Someone suggested I make them more widely available, so I’m posting them here. They are a bit rough – but hopefully they might be of some interest.

Traditionally women’s class was determined by her father’s class, unless she was married and then it was determined by her husband’s. Of course it has changed somewhat now but not entirely. There are still those household surveys that more or less assume that if there’s a man in the household, his position determines the entire household’s economic and social class. This has been institutionalised by Universal Credit, which is paid to the highest wage earner – almost always the man in a straight household with children. This represents a profound defeat for women.

Another thing that is often overlooked is the enormous, huge, mountainous, decades-long workstream performed by the vast majority of women that is unrecognised and unpaid: bearing and raising kids.

Women for or against women?

Personal reflections on the theme of women’s internalised oppression in response to Sonia Johnson’s brilliant and important book, “Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation.”

Traduction Française

“I heard you’re running a sleep deprivation cult,” a leader of the US National Organisation of Women (NOW) said to Sonia Johnson when she visited their offices shortly after helping to organise a feminist retreat, where women – of their own volition – had stayed up late talking and singing.

I laughed when I read that. It reminded me of the many things that have been claimed about me – for example, being compared to Donald Trump, accused of bullying, of concealing important information that I had in fact shared appropriately, of being on an ego trip, of not speaking to survivors, of being “difficult” and “as mad as a box of frogs,” of having a personality disorder, and of using my own history of surviving incest and CSE, and my hearing disability, to “get my own way” in some unspecified way. Rumours have been spread that I did something (exactly what is never specified) that was so terrible in the past that several high-profile women (who barely know me) refused to sit in a room with me. And thus my years of quiet (unpaid) contribution to the feminist and abolitionist movement is disappeared.

Why I campaign against the sex trade

Nordic Model Now!

Not even that hot night when I was 19 and slept with the door to my stuffy windowless room open to catch the breeze caused the blinkers to fall from my eyes. The blinkers that blamed my recklessness in leaving the door open and not the man who walked by and saw my smooth body lying there in all its youthful sweetness. He knew he was the only one in the building still awake and so there was a high chance he could get away with it. As indeed he did.

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UK Puntering, Pimping & Trafficking Laws

The UK Home Affairs Parliamentary Committee is currently undertaking an inquiry into prostitution. Preparing a written submission to that inquiry led me to look at the existing legislation against punters, pimps, and trafficking. The more I looked into it, the more it seemed to me that the legislation is deeply flawed, ineffective, and does not meet our binding obligations under international treaties. In this article I reflect on the legislation and how it suggests that there never was an intention to make it an effective tool for tackling these appalling crimes. As women who see prostitution as both a cause and consequence of women’s subordination, we need to work much harder.

Note: The legislation varies between the different countries in the UK. This article focuses on the English legislation.

Do You Want to Decriminalise Murder Too, Dear Jeremy?

This is a slightly edited version of the email I sent to Jeremy Corbyn on Friday, 4th March, in response to the report that he supports the full decriminalisation of the sex industry. If you also want to write to Jeremy about this issue, the email address is leader@labour.org.uk.

 

Dear Jeremy Corbyn

I support what you are doing in many ways, so I was devastated to learn in the Guardian today that you support the full decriminalisation of the sex industry. You are reported as saying, “I am in favour of decriminalising the sex industry. I don’t want people to be criminalised. I want to be [in] a society where we don’t automatically criminalise people. Let’s do things a bit differently and in a bit more civilised way.”

Does this mean that you think murderers should not be criminalised? What about rapists? What about people who smoke in pubs?

On Torture and Male Pattern Violence

In this essay I argue that male pattern violence, and the patriarchal system it serves to uphold, cause severe pain and suffering to vast numbers of women and children and that this takes place within plain view of the state. And I argue that therefore male pattern violence is a form of state sanctioned torture of women and children. I also critique the analysis of the Persons Against Non-State Torture organisation.

I refer to male violence against women and children as male pattern violence in an attempt to depersonalise it and sidestep all the circular objections that inevitably arise when women attempt to name male violence, such as Not All Men Are Like That and Some Women Are Violent Too.

Sex-Segregated Sports & the New IOC Guidelines

It has recently been announced that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has issued new guidelines that transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in the Olympics and other international sporting events in their reassigned “gender” without undergoing sex reassignment surgery.

The main physical restriction the new guidelines place on males who transgender will be that their testosterone level must be below a certain level for one year prior to the event they are competing in.

This means that transwomen who retain their male sex organs (testes and penis) but who have some hormone treatment to reduce their testosterone level for a year will be able to compete with women (by which I mean biological females who were raised as girls).