Joyce activated, issue 53
In which your intrepid author commits hate crimes or experiences belief discrimination, depending on whom you listen to...
I often think of the saying that one “dog year” equals seven human ones, since it seems about right for those of us who live in TERF world. Every week so much happens it seems like it cannot possibly be just a week that has gone by. I sometimes feel punch-drunk—and often change my mind several times during the course of the week about what I want to write about in this newsletter, abandoning my plans for something step-back and instead focusing on whatever has just happened.
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This week things have moved so fast that I have something like travel sickness. It ended with Maya Forstater getting her “remedy judgment” (the decision about money) in her belief-discrimination case against the think-tank where she worked—the end of a four-year legal odyssey. You can read her response here.
I’ll have more to write about this once the dust has settled, and once I’ve had the chance to chew it all over with lawyer friends. For the moment, I’ll just say that I’m so happy for Maya that this slog is over, and that a six-figure payout (and much more in legal costs) is the clearest possible sign to UK employers and service-providers that discrimination on grounds of “gender-critical” belief will be punished just as severely by UK courts as other types of discrimination, such as that based on religion, race or sexual orientation.
Which makes the other unfolding story of my past week pretty ironic, really.
It started last weekend, when Sex Matters had what I think is its first-ever in-person board meeting, in Manchester, where two of the board members live. We combined this with going out for dinner with the Manchester branch of the Women’s Rights Network the night before. Maya and I arrived in Manchester a littler early for that dinner, and so we met up with board member Dr Emma Hilton, who works at the University of Manchester. She suggested we visit the “gay village” for a drink.
We went into Via Manchester, a well-known pub on Canal Street—and as we were ordering we were told to leave. The stated reason was the t-shirt I was wearing, which I had put on for the journey with the intention of changing into a blouse before dinner (it was a very hot day).
I have only three t-shirts, all of which were presents from my husband and sons, and all of which have “TERF” slogans. The most hardline, emblazoned with MAN-HATER/ FEMINAZI, is pictured below on Angela Wild, who designed both it and my other two.
You can buy them and many others at her excellent Wild Womyn Workshop (as endorsed by J.K. Rowling, no less).
Sometimes a T-shirt just speaks to you...
(From https://t.co/hhOu3fO1rg, in case you know a witch who'd like one 😉) pic.twitter.com/T4E9OCMCMI— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 22, 2020
“This witch doesn’t burn” is my very favourite, but on this occasion I was wearing a “21st Century Suffragette” design, which includes the word “TERF”—here I am in it later on at dinner with local women, mugging with a sad face, on which more shortly.
When the doorman at Via noticed the t-shirt, he asked me: “Are you a TERF?” At first I was puzzled, and when I realised he was looking at the t-shirt, I said “yes”—not exactly accurate, since I exclude all males and no females from the category of “woman”; it’s nothing to do with identity, and I’m not a radfem, but we all know what we mean. He then said that “TERFs aren’t welcome here” and “other patrons would find your t-shirt offensive”, got the barman to pour away our drinks and escorted us out. (The picture at the top of this newsletter was taken shortly after this, and honestly I didn’t know what to do with my face. Which I think comes across!)
The next day we had an excellent board meeting in the People’s History Museum (PHM), which has fantastic displays of fliers, leaflets, banners and newspaper archives on key moments in the labour and democracy movements, in particular the Suffragettes. Manchester was where the Pankhursts lived, and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded in their home in 1903. It took the sort of direct actions—disrupting political meetings, smashing windows, chaining themselves to railings and hunger strikes—that the less radical Suffragists had rejected. They also held conferences and produced a newspaper, Votes for Women. In 1908 they founded the Women’s Press. You can read more on this fascinating history and the PHM exhibits here and here.
The exhibit on the Suffragettes was charming. Maya and I donned hats and sashes, and held up Votes for Women placards in front of the Manchester Suffragette Banner, acquired by the museum in the run-up to the centenary of (some) women getting the vote in 1918. More photo ops, of course!
The meeting went well, the museum staff were lovely, we took a group photo in the lobby and went home, and the next day we tweeted the various photos, tagging and thanking the museum.
And then the Twitter barracking started. A local Green politician and they/them expressed himself “disappointed” in the museum; others called them to task for hosting a “hate group”. Instead of keeping its head and ignoring the nonsense, on Thursday the museum folded. It tweeted one of those hostage-video-style apologies we’ve all become so miserably familiar with in the age of internet shaming and put out a statement saying it knew it had lost the community’s trust and would take time to regain it.
The response to that played out in the familiar way, too. Most of those replying to its tweet were critical of what looks like an explicit promise to commit unlawful belief discrimination in future, a couple praised it—and about half a dozen said it hadn’t gone far enough.
By Friday morning, the senior management seemed belatedly to have worked out that the museum had screwed up. The tweet was deleted and the statement removed from its website “pending legal advice”.
Sex Matters has emailed asking to book a room for another meeting. Here’s its statement.
Statement on the People’s History Museum - Sex Matters
Let’s see what happens next [popcorn emoji].
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