Labour Women's Declaration is an organisation dedicated to protect women’s sex-based rights. At their meeting on Monday night, masked protesters organised by a trans activist group calling themselves London Bi Pandas screamed obscenities, intimidated the attendees, and let off smoke bombs. This was right by Grenfell Tower, so the smoke bombs were a classy touch.
London Bi Pandas said: “We need to hold our hands up and apologise for the smoke bombs in our protest.
“We realised too late the insensitivity of using them in close proximity to Grenfell.”
Nice. But smoke bombs are of course fine against a group of women in a meeting.
Joanna Williams was there:
Trans activists and their allies, including senior figures in the Labour Party, would love nothing more than to write off those opposing their agenda as hysterics who talk about free speech only to fuel a right-wing agenda. But speakers at the meeting, including Selina Todd, Julie Bindel, Debbie Hayton, Paul Embery and Kiri Tunks, (co-founder of Woman’s Place UK), positioned themselves firmly on the left and within the trade-union movement. Their fear is that the Labour Party is now in thrall to the trans lobby and that this threatens women’s hard-won rights. When Dawn Butler can announce on national television that babies are born without sex, when leadership contenders fall over themselves in their rush to declare that trans women are women, and when the male Lily Madigan can become one of the party’s national women’s officers, these fears are clearly not groundless. As Debbie Hayton pointed out, being male is the defining feature of being a trans woman – and socialism is supposed to be built on material reality. [...]
Bev Jackson of the LGB Alliance used her right to free speech to point out that biological sex is binary and immutable, unlike gender, which is a social construct. She argued that lesbians, by definition, are attracted to members of the same sex. Groups like Stonewall that once fought for lesbian and gay rights are now at the forefront of arguing for gender self-identification, she argued – a move that defines lesbians out of existence. Stonewall – every mention of which was greeted by boos from the audience – also came under fire for the curriculum it has produced for teaching relationships-and-sex education in schools....
Booing at Stonewall was fun, but it underscored a very real sense of betrayal. Women on the left have long considered Stonewall, the Labour Party and the trade-union movement not just to represent them, but also to belong to them. Kiri Tunks traced the history of women’s involvement with workers’ struggles from the matchgirls’ strike of 1888 through to the Dagenham dispute in the 1960s and Grunwick in the 1970s. Women’s contribution to the labour movement, argued Tunks, was not incidental, but fundamental. Although, as she noted, ‘these struggles took place before or in spite of the trade-union movement’. Nonetheless, her message to Labour’s current hierarchy was clear: ‘The disregard with which this movement has treated us is a disgrace. You ignore us at your peril.’
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