I’m from a working class background, and I owe everything I have and am to a window of opportunity that opened up for working class girls and women in the west, post WW2.
That window has not just been slammed shut, it has been bricked up, and a trompe l'oeil painted on it to fool people into thinking it’s still there and any failure to get through it is their own fault.
I started this year determined to move past the issue du jour – gender identity – and widen my focus. I failed, and recently a thing I've been gloomily predicting for some time has come to fruition – social and political ultra-conservatives have coat-tailed feminist concerns about the effects of gender self identification on women's sex-based rights, and a schism has opened in the movement.
Some seasoned feminists, as well as women new to feminism, have been persuaded that entering into an alliance with people who are their nemesis on every other issue, is both essential and sensible because gender identity is more immediately threatening than anything else – even the terrifyingly obvious threat of several converging social and natural crises, each capable of causing a global catastrophe.
Some people, on what can usefully be described as the left of Neo-liberalism (NLL), and with utter predictability, have seized on the now openly acrimonious schism within what has become known as “gender critical feminism” (GCF).
For those who don't know, GCF is a default name for various sorts and degrees of opposition to the “gender identity” movement and its political orthodoxy.
A straight-talking, spirited woman in the UK, who "boldly channels her inner Monroe", has emerged as a somewhat unlikely leader of a single-issue coalition which now ranges from radical lesbian separatists and radical feminists, to people who are on the political far-right.
A clever marketer, and unashamed populist, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (aka Posie Parker), has used the issue of gender self identification, with its negative connotations for women's sex-based rights, as a base on which to build an influential platform.
Seemingly oblivious to the part they have played in the rapid progression of this over the past five years, the NLL can’t resist having a dig at those left wing feminists who have been labelled as “gender critical” but who would and will not countenance entering into alliance with the far-right on this, or any other issue, and whose approach to gender (as in sex stereotypes) is to want to destroy it.
The schism runs along an older fault line and was inevitable but the NLL does not get to slide out from under its culpability in all of this.
In the UK, labelled "TERF Island" by TAs, the NLL leapt on gender identity as an excuse to divert away from the myriad and pressing feminist and traditional left wing concerns such as poverty and the life expectancy of poor working class girls dropping for the first time in a century, plus what anyone with half a political brain can see – the rapid advance of right wing authoritarianism globally which will hit women first and worst.
The NLL's preparedness to drop even the pretence of a commitment to class politics, and to declare gender identity to be the "preeminent human rights issue of the era", is to their eternal discredit.
The NLL – or people purporting to be leftists – have in fact helped KJK to build her platform by pushing socially conservative women to the political right via such unedifying tactics as calling them “deplorable cunts", or "Nazi adjacent,". If not actually stooping to telling dissenting women to “suck my big fat trans cock”, they defend or fail to challenge the almost always pseudonymous accounts which do so.
From where I stand, there’s a depressingly small number of mainly left wing, principled women and men who have held the line that gender identity is, and always was a diversionary politics, and a part of wider and more dangerous movements aimed at weakening the broad left, in the service of global corporate capitalism.
When did capitalism ever actively promote a movement which so much as threatened its profits, let alone its existence? What other movement in the history of opposition to entrenched power has been so rapidly and enthusiastically embraced by the capitalist power nexus and its governmental and NGO helpmates?
At best, the gender identity movement is accommodative politics; at worst, it’s among the most divisive ideological weapons capitalism has ever deployed.
Both the political principles and the praxis of gender identity politics were always going to provide fuel for the right to use to whip up fear and anger among the vast ranks of the socially conservative.
And sorry, all you white leftists and actual or would-be social trangressives, but socially conservative people are not just vast in number, they cut right across class, sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, and yes, even gender identity.
Make them feel really threatened, and you've turned up the heat under the mother and father of all moral panics. Even in a more stable world that would be dangerous; in a world in a state of growing social and natural disequilibrium, it's reckless beyond justification.
* * * *
On both the extremes of this most polarised and polarising argument are those who, for a variety of reasons, see it as the single, maybe the only issue that matters.
Gender critical feminism is a single issue movement which attracts a cross-section of feminists who see gender identity ideology and praxis as a major threat to women's sex-based rights, and to lesbianism. Within the ranks of the feminists involved in this, the essential divide for me is between radical, socialist, and liberal feminism.
Very broadly and simplistically, the first is female-centric and locates the oppression of women within patriarchal arrangements, and its political priority is destruction of the patriarchy. The second sees the liberation of women as a prerequisite of, and dependent on the liberation of all, and the third focusses on formal rights and parity with male peers within the existing socio-economic order.
Although she allies with radical and lesbian feminists, Posie Parker is neither a lesbian nor a radical feminist; she is purely and solely against gender identity ideology, and if she's any sort of feminist at all, it's a liberal feminist.
She now talks about the failures of left wing women to hold back the tide of transgenderism over the period since the “dead cat” of Gender Recognition Act reform was dropped Into UK politics by Tory spin doctors.
That’s the time she’s been building an increasingly populist platform, which she is now using to turn women against other women – some of whom have spent ten times that long working tirelessly for women’s and wider rights.
It's hard not to see her as anything other than sectarian; or an opportunistic bandwagon jumper who has dragged her supporters into covert and overt alliances with the political and religious right in pursuit of a perilously narrow political aim.
At best, she's well meaning but too narrowly focused; at worst, she has slipped into being (maybe always was), a tub-thumping, rightwing populist and ideologue who's using this issue to divide women, and to demonise the entire left, including left wing feminism.
That narrow focus serves only one set of political and economic interests – and it’s not the bulk of women, and it’s not the working class.
She’s not saying – “Let's unite to fight this one manifestation of Neo-liberalism as a priority, and use it to build a vast movement to tackle all the other issues that are grinding vast numbers of people into the ground, and threatening the entire planet".
What she's saying is – “Stopping people with a penis saying they're women and invading women’s spaces is the only battle that matters.”
In that, she has become the polar opposite of the other extreme of the gender identity divide which claims – "People with a penis are female if they say they are."
A key difference between KJK and the gender identity radicals is most of the latter at least pay lip service to some older left wing priorities.
Any working class woman who thinks KJK will take a stand against Tory austerity measures; any woman of colour who thinks she'll stand up against racism; any disabled woman who thinks she'll stand against the iniquities of an unravelling welfare system; any lesbian who thinks she’ll stand against the far right when it turns on the wider LGB population – needs to wake up.
And anyone who thinks any of this sectarian division is remotely good for anyone outside of the economic elite and those it deems to be currently useful, needs to think again.
The ruling class and its helpmates have spent centuries perfecting their divide and rule tactics. In over half a century of various forms of left activism, I’ve never seen anything quite as divisive of the left as this – or as useful and timely for those whose pappy, manicured hands are on the controls of the economic train that’s about to take us all over the edge of a precipice.
This isn’t a game or a drill.
