Organisers say that they no longer have “the appetite or the energy” to stage next year’s London Anarchist Bookfair, following fraught scenes at the event last month. A group of feminists were confronted by other activists who accused them of distributing “transphobic” leaflets that promoted prejudice against transgender people.
The acrimony follows highly publicised splits in universities, women’s organisations and political parties over the issue. Lily Madigan, a 19-year-old who has just won a vote in Kent to become Labour’s first women’s officer from a transgender background, has been at the centre of a row within the party.
The executive committee of another constituency Labour party resigned this month in solidarity with Anne Ruzylo, a women’s officer who claimed she had been the focus of complaints by Madigan and others.
This weekend it emerged that Madigan is applying to join the Jo Cox Women in Leadership programme, launched after the murder of the MP to encourage female participation in politics.
Meanwhile, the Women’s Equality party has confirmed that its executive committee is considering complaints about one of its members, Heather Brunskell-Evans, an academic whose invitation to speak at King’s College in London was cancelled after she took part in a discussion on transgender issues on Radio 4. On the programme she called for caution to be exercised in relation to children who expressed confusion over their gender. Brunskell-Evans said the party told her that three members had alleged her “conduct” on the programme had “promoted prejudice against the transgender community”. She is also alleged to have said on Twitter: “we have to #ROAR about the harms of transgenderism for children and young people”.
The leaflets handed out at the
Anarchist Bookfair suggested that predatory men might be among those
who choose to call themselves women, and might abuse the system by
gaining access to women-only spaces such as refuges. Trans activists
say the issue is being used by opponents – some of whom they label
“terfs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) – to sow the
seeds of hatred.
The increasingly angry disputes follow government proposals to
streamline the process for how people can change their gender, under
the Gender
Recognition Act (GRA). A public consultation is to be held on
speeding up and demedicalising the process, with the current need to
be assessed and diagnosed by clinicians seen by some as intrusive.Choosing whether one is a man or a woman is a matterof self-identification, trans activists assert.
For full Guardian story go to: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/26/transgender-anarchist-book-fair-transphobia-row
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