TERFs are all just far-right religious conservatives anyway

  1.  We come from across the political spectrum
  2. Almost no one in the UK is “right-wing” by US standards, & very few people are religious
  3. So what if some of us are? Gender ideology is funded by big businesses across the world, the Gender Critical movement is a grass roots one. We aren’t the ones Big Pharma is rooting for. 

Of course, it is almost impossible to prove your political alignment, and tbh why should you? We have a Conservative government in the UK, as we have for most of the last 80 years; the population as a whole are consistently right of centre, and therefore if you ARE right of centre, you are in a majority position in the UK. There is no special moral purity attached to one side or the other. It is not worth dignifying this ad hominem attack with much on Twitter, so this is mainly for you to think over if this worries you.

Radical feminists, by definition, are left-wing – that’s what the radical bit is. So TERFs are not right-wing – your opponent will have to pick their means of attack, but they can’t have both. The hashtag #LabourLosingWomen will show you plenty of left-of-centre women.

Although many Gender Critical people are left-wing, equally, many are not. This issue transcends political boundaries, for the very good reason that not only does it make sense, but it is a matter of safeguarding and safety. Therefore, it is at a more fundamental level than our sense of belonging to a particular group – see Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, here in handy rainbow colours. What’s more, most of us feel that if this issue is not resolved in ways that preserve women’s and children’s rights, it will be hard to put right, so we will fight together on this point even though we might later find ourselves on opposite sides in politics.

It IS true, of course, that the main left-of-centre media outputs (in the UK The Guardian, but much of the mainstream press in the USA & Canada) are very sympathetic to the trans cause. So you might find that you are citing sources that you wouldn’t normally want to. However, it indicates a wider problem: the media (and big tech, and many academic journals) are censoring many facts. (Try finding the WiSpa video by google, for instance). Despite Owen Jones’ assertions, The Spectator isn’t a far-right extremist KKK outlet, and The Critic features left-wing journalism from Jo Bartosch & Andrew Doyle, for example. This doesn’t prove that we are all right-wing but rather that gender-critical people of all stripes are willing to work across parties on this issue.

The phrase “right-wing” means something different in the UK compared to the USA, where “right-wing” is often associated with being socially conservative, anti-abortion, etc. In the UK, it is worth remembering that s28 was comprehensively got rid of in 2003 and that the Conservatives formally retracted any opposition to that more than 10 years ago. Moreover, gay rights really aren’t an issue in the UK – it was under a Conservative-led government that gay marriage was introduced. And abortion isn’t an issue in the UK.

You might find this graphic useful as it shows some of the overlaps. We have no more in common with “religious conservatives” than the gender ideologists do. We share the idea that sex is immutable; they share the idea that gender stereotypes are helpful. On the other hand, we are “gender-critical” because we reject gender stereotypes and defend freedom of gender expression within the sexes, without medication or surgery or changing the meaning of words. Just literally be yourself, as a sexed being, presenting however you want to be: that is the second wave gender-critical position.

You can find information about the funding of groups like Stonewall in @STILLtish‘s brilliant blog. There is no evidence that “right-wing religious conservatives” fund any gender-critical groups in the UK. We aren’t on their payroll!

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