Yes and no one argues that BAME women can't organise BAME only spaces or lesbians Lesbian spaces so I don't understand why cis women aren't allowed by some to organise or insist on cis only spaces sometimes?
Yes and no one argues that BAME women can't organise BAME only spaces or lesbians Lesbian spaces so I don't understand why white women aren't allowed by some to organise or insist on white only spaces sometimes?
i think some of the difficulty arises when these spaces are eg toilets. i don't imagine bame women would organise bame women only toilets or lesbians lesbian only toilets.
Yep. The question ten becomes about whether ciswomen's structural oppression remains in relation to transwomen.
False equivalence imo. White women aren't oppressed because they're white. Cis women face issues as cis women and trans women as trans women as well as both sets facing issues as women.
I tend towards agreement.
I don’t usually attempt to "correct" posters in these circumstances, but as I have previously had a very interesting conversation with BillRiver on this subject, I will point out that they have previously said that they wish to be referred to as they/them.
Isn’t this getting back to the point of why identity politics is ultimately unhelpful?
Apologies BillRiver I hadn't noticed the tagline and wasn't aware. When I was more regularly posting I tried to use they/them for anyone I didn't know.
I think the server that hosted their website is down as well, although it’s still archived elsewhere. Poor Edinburgh AF, putting that much effort into slagging off the old bookfair collective as much as they could, and then going down in history as “weren’t they that lot who wrote that statement in defence of the bookfair collective that was a bit soft on terfs?”
I think the slogan about “class war not race war” is probably a better comparison here – that slogan doesn’t deny that racial oppression exists, and it certainly isn’t opposed to bashing or confronting bigots, but it does still express that the general mission should be to defuse racial tensions rather than heightening them. So there’s another example of where you’d expect anarchist communists to act as conciliators as much if not more than a fighting force.
Yeah, that’s pretty fair, I just thought your earlier post seemed to be mixing up the symbolic and the practical a bit. But yeah, nothing wrong with symbolism, I think it would be good if the ACG also started using the trans flag more. Perhaps as the cover of a pamphlet called “Trans Liberation: A Contribution to the Debate: Perspectives on the Fight Against Transphobia: This Pamphlet is Now Available as a PDF”?
See, I tend to agree with you about NI being a good analogy for trans issues in some ways, even though I probably disagree with you about NI itself. But it seems to me that some of the objections to the ACG, at least coming from SE22/Binacg, is less about the points you mentioned and more just denouncing them for not being willing to say the other side are scum. I don’t know if the bookfair organisers share those objections, but when we finally got an opinion out of Rhyddical it did seem to point in a similar direction as well.
Chilango covered much of this above, but on the specific self-organised spaces thing: I think there are issues that will only affect people with specific biology, so for instance it makes complete sense to have classes for people who are currently pregnant and preparing to give birth, or sessions for people coping with miscarriages, or post-natal depression, that are only open to people who fit those specific categories. But those lines don't fit to cis vs trans, or AFAB vs AMAB, or whatever. Like, it would be weird for a trans woman with no experience of pregnancy to turn up at a class for expectant mothers and be like "I am a woman and so I expect access to this woman's space", but it would be equally weird, imo, for a cis woman who had never been pregnant to do the same thing.
I mean, to me that exchange seems like an illustration of why "identity politics" is an unhelpful term, but that's just me.
"I applied for a stall at the bookfair and all I got was pointedly ignored by the organisers, and also this lousy t-shirt"?
* Available in M, L, XXL and PDF
Not available in PDF until at at least a week later.
Definitions have varied across time, space, and context. But, in the west for the last few hundred years the terms have been widely understood to correspond directly to biological categories i.e. male and female (albeit those categories can be predicated on slightly different things e.g. chromosomes, hormones, anatomical structures, gametes, which, whilst overlapping in the overwhelming majority of instances, do have some exceptional edge cases). But, that's not a given; which definition we - as individuals or a society - subscribe too isn't an objective truth but a political choice.
