3/1/2021 It has also unleashed a wave of misogynist rage which I haven't seen in my lifetimeRead Now A few years ago, I was a paid up UK Labour member, was member of a union, and went out canvassing for Labour. I care about environmental issues, social and economics justice issues, and land reform. I have worked in unions and in left-wing think tanks. In short, I was and still am left-wing, and have consistently voted Labour or Green.
However, I can no longer do that, sadly. I have been shocked at the speed with which many in the Labour party and the Greens have embraced gender ideology, and turned against women who are critical of it. From the Greens hustings in which candidates debated 'what is a woman' (answers included 'an attitude', 'a state of mind') to Lisa Nandy's appalling Piers Morgan interview. The disgraceful so-called trans rights pledge which called for gender-critical women to be ousted from the Labour party. Oh and how could I forget Dawn Butler saying that 'children are born without a sex'. The list goes on. If it wasn't so dangerous, this would be hilarious. However it is dangerous. This ideology is unscientific and untethered from reality. It insists that we view ourselves as having a 'gender' rather than a 'sex' - which makes invisible the reality of sex. It undermines women's rights and harms children. It has also unleashed a wave of misogynist rage which I haven't seen in my lifetime. And the worst of it, from what I've seen, has come from left-wing men. So no, I haven't left the left, but the left has left me. I won't be voting for Labour or the Greens again until they regain their senses. Profoundly depressed by the tick-box nature of political debate and now feel utterly dispossessed and unfranchised as a result of where I stand on this so called “debate”. I was a local councillor for the Liberal Democrats until July last year. There were more aggravated reasons for my departure from the job and resignation from the party but was becoming deeply troubled by where the party was going on women’s rights and for that matter how any of it related to representing my local residents. I share nothing with right wing parties but they must be rubbing their hands seeing how the left is eating itself up over this non-issue and at the same time putting women in their place.
I left the Labour Party shortly after the 12-point pledge went into circulation (in spring 2020) and was signed by most of the Labour shadow cabinet. I realise that Keir Starmer signed a pared back 10-point pledge but he still signed up to the claim that ‘Transwomen are women, and so I no longer trust the party, under his guidance, to protect single-sex provisions.
Moreover, I was disgusted at the party’s treatment of Rosie Duffield. Hardly any of her colleagues stuck up for her when she was slandered as transphobic. Not surprising, though, given that many in the shadow cabinet thinks Labour should follow the Liberal Democrat’s example and eject party members who claim that trans women are not women - which is a basic observance and a matter of scientific fact. The Left is my natural home as my focus is the environment and human rights...universal health care...free education...rigorous scientific research. Feminism is an integral part of my life.
I was a Greens candidate a few times and a leader in this region for over a decade. But the Greens and the Left in general have abandoned women and have sold out their environment policies to multinational companies that are being permitted to rort the Paris Agreement, via offsetting and carbon credits. Rainforests are being destroyed via this scheme, for palm oil plantations. Women are being erased by transgender ideology and the Greens and the left are the biggest offenders. I have not swapped political sides as I have little in common with the right...but more conservatives are speaking up for women’s sex based rights, than Progressives. Who could have predicted that upside down turn of events? I now realize that the Left/Right divide in politics is equally as much a social construct as transgender ideology. Each issue must be researched and examined on their own merits and groupthink can be a very dangerous thing. They are both engineered to cause division and heartbreak. Gullible, well meaning people follow both blindly. I hate terminology now but it is true that I find myself politically homeless along with my so called ‘radical feminist’ sisters. I will not vote unless I can find one of them to vote for. 2/28/2021 all she did was parrot back a load of dubious trans rights blurb without a single mention of women’s rightsRead Now I left the Labour Party after Lisa Nandy and the other one signed a pledge to say women who support Women’s Place UK should be expelled from the party. I wrote to my MP explaining this and all she did was parrot back a load of dubious trans rights blurb without a single mention of women’s rights. Which is what I wrote to her about in the first place. She didn’t even ask me to stay... or reconsider. I won’t vote Labour again (lifelong member and voter) until this is fixed. I am now politically homeless.
I can’t used mixed toilets. I had a lucky escape some years ago. Toilets are not safe when men can access female toilets.
I hate what men are doing to women, they are not defending trans rights. They are misogynists that want to eradicate women’s rights. I am a woman, not something by any other name. I will not vote labor or greens and unless the liberal party stands up to defend the rights of natural born women and girls I will just scribble over the ballot papers and lodge a nil vote. ... I left the Labour Party in January 2020 when it became apparent that a member of the Trilateral Commission was going to become the leader. It wasn't a hard decision after the Neoliberal war mangers responsible for the Iraq invasion used IdPol extremism as a stick to further their politics agenda..
I left the Labour Party when the leadership candidates in early 2020 endorsed a pledge to expel people like my partner and friends from the party as "transphobic" supporters of a "hate group" (WPUK). This FB post sums up my thoughts.
"WHY DO YOU KEEP POSTING ABOUT THE ERASURE OF THE SEX BASED RIGHTS OF WOMEN AND GIRLS?" A friend asked so I will answer. I do post a lot about this. Almost always I simply repost the hard work of an awesome network of feminists that I would encourage people to fund and support. I post in part because of my partner. When Debbie and I met in 1980 she was working in a Rape Crisis Centre. As students, our courting days - giving my age away there - included evenings of direct action, shall we say, on certain male-centred venues in the city. Our shared books were not just Trotsky, Serge and Luxemburg but Dworkin, Brownmiller and Rowbotham. I post in part because we have a daughter and we think the world will be less safe and less free for her if this "gender identity" revolution is nodded through. But I keep posting about this mostly because I am 58 and, hand to heart, I really can't think of anything comparable to this happening in my lifetime. In fact I am struggling to think of anything comparable in history. What i mean is I can't think of another example of such a huge REVERSAL of the hard-won rights and protections of any group of oppressed people (half the population, in this case) once those rights have been established, in many cases for some decades. (I could add: outside of a counter-revolution, which this is of course.) And I certainly can't think of a comparable reversal happening in 5 minutes flat, sweeping over the entire liberal democratic world, with almost no serious discussion, against the will of huge majorities of the populations, and *with the active support of the left*. Ideas and policies which one could not imagine being proposed at all a mere five minutes ago are becoming law, enforced by the courts and police. In the blink of an eye it has become dangerous to hold views that were near-universally held just five minutes ago. - dangerous to believe in the material reality of biological sex. - dangerous to believe in the centrality of the material reality of sex to women's oppression. - dangerous to call women 'women' - an entire lexicon is taking its place: 'uterus havers', 'chest feeders', 'vulva havers', 'pregnant people' and so on (but we never hear of 'testicle havers', do we?). - dangerous to believe in the right of same-sex attracted lesbians and gay men to BE same-sex attracted, without being pressured to have sex with people they do not desire, or being attacked as "transphobic" and "genital fetishists" and compared to the KKK when they politely make their desires known, or when they object to their boundaries being disregarded, from their dating apps to their summer camps. - (and excuse me, but if you do not understand that there is a group of men waiting in the dark web to slipstream behind the notions of 'the cotton ceiling' (i.e the claim that men-who-have-identifed-as-lesbian-women are being oppressed by lesbians who wont have sex with them) and the 'boxer ceiling' (i.e. the claim that women-who-have-identified-as-gay-men are being oppressed by gay men who wont have sex with them) then, forgive me, but you are an idiot. Go ahead and define people who demand sex from other people, but are refused it, as the *oppressed* to be supported, and the refusers as *oppressors* to be assailed and, well, just you see how you get on with *that* slippery slope, and who you meet there). - dangerous to believe (in a world still entirely saturated by predatory male violence and male sexual violence) in the need and the right of girls and women to sex-specific toilets, locker rooms, refuges, crisis centres, sports, and resources; - dangerous to say it is not fair that a 6ft 8inch 52 year old man who identifies as a women is taking a place on a women's college basketball team. - dangerous to point out that it is unsafe when a man who identifies as a women participates in women's MMA and literally *breaks the skulls* of the women they fight. - dangerous to challenge the idea that we should not return to the prison cell of a Janet and John world in which boys who like pretty dolls and spangly bracelets are 'really girls', while girls who like guns and mud are 'really boys'. - dangerous to point out that a girl who isn't old enough to decide her own bedtime should not really be allowed to make the decision to have her own breasts cut off (yes, it's age 15 in Oregon) - dangerous to pursue gender critical research in our universities, or even to express gender critical views there, as a student or a lecturer, lest you be sent to Coventry, denied advancement, excluded from committees, and smeared as "transphobic". Also unprecedented is the violence, real, threatened and verbal, that has accompanied this change at every step. The rape threats. The 'kill a terf' incitement that saturates social media, with its elaborate descriptions, sometimes with photos attached, of the violence to which the 'terfs' are going to be subjected to by 'my girl dick'. The physical assaults on feminists holding public meetings. The cancellations, from JKR to Julie Bindel to Selina Todd to all the rest. The sackings. The doxing. The hanging from trees of effigies of feminists who have dared to oppose gender identity ideology. I do not post because it is unprecedented that this kind of madness has the active support of almost the entire far left Hell, the history of the far left could be told as a series of ideological manias accompanied by violence against this season's designated 'enemy'. I post because of what IS unprecedented: bar a number of brave, slandered, barely tolerated, and threatened-with-expulsoon feminists aside, the entire left has acted as nodding dog and cheer leader for all this. No, it's more than that: the left are this counter-revolution's organisers and militants. Anyone on the left opposing gender identity ideology is being driven out of "the community of the good', as David Hirsh called it, smeared as "transphobic haters", from brave women Labour MPs to brave rank and file activists. What is also unprecedented is the spineless, craven silence of men on the left who know it's all madness. They will tell you in private that they too think women's and girls rights and needs are being thrown under a bus, and they accept it is a disaster. But they will not say one word in public. They act as if they are being asked to storm Omaha Beach on D Day, for Christ's sake. After years of waiting I now say this: they are useless cowards and I have contempt for every one of them. Comrades, no more. All that. All that is why I post about it so much. 2/26/2021 The left wing has failed lesbians totally, and they are taking our votes for grantedRead Now I was a Green Party member for several years, but planned to vote Labour from now on.
I think I will be voting Conservative to shock the other parties into action until they change. The left wing has failed lesbians totally, and they are taking our votes for granted. I won’t rejoin the Labour Party until the stance on women’s rights changes. At the next election I am likely not to vote for the first time in my life.
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