Monthly Archives: May 2012

A good week for misogyny

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It’s been a good week for misogyny. We had the Archbishop of York presenting the misogynist case against marriage equality. We also saw registration open for RadFem 2012, a “feminist” conference limiting participation to “women born as women living as women”. While at first glance it may seem that the issues here are homophobia and transphobia respectively, both are driven by deeply held misogynist beliefs.
John Sentamu’s piece is vague by necessity: if he were to actually spell out his arguments, it would become very clear very quickly that rather than “speak the truth in love” as he claims to do, his position is one of deep-seated misogyny and sexism. He argues that men and women are different and “one man, one woman marriage” respects and accommodates those differences in the best possible way – that extending marriage to same-sex couples would somehow undermine this, even if existing marriages of individuals would not, he admits, be negatively affected. Quoth the Archbishop,

The family is designed to meet the different needs of its different members in different ways. It is the model of the just society that responds intelligently to differences rather than treating everyone the same.

Note, first of all the use of the word “family”. The church has long claimed ownership of the concept of marriage, but the above is clearly an attempt to also define “family” the way it suits the church – one man, one woman, married to each other. In one sentence, John Sentamu has denied the families of the 1.7 million children growing up with cohabiting parents, the 2.9 million being raised by single mothers and the 300,000 being raised by single fathers. (Source, PDF, Table 2.5) Nevermind those of us cohabiting and childless, for our families too do not live up to the Archbishop’s standards.
And what of those “different needs” he speaks of? How exactly are men and women different in a way that is met by the “one man, one woman marriage” set-up, that justifies making that set-up exclusive to heterosexuals? Or is it perhaps that Sentamu wonders, if we let two people of the same sex marry, how he will know which one to chain to the cooker?

But there is another view, based on the complementary nature of men and women. In short, should there be equality between the sexes because a woman can do anything a man can do or because a good society needs the different perspectives of women and men equally?

Here is a revelation for the Archbishop: It is not that men and women are different; it is that individuals are different that matters. Yet in his deeply misogynist world view, Sentamu seeks to define women’s – and frankly men’s – roles and contributions to “a good society” based solely on their sex. A good society should seek to enable all individuals within it to fulfill their potential. It must not limit what any of them can do (and that includes whom they choose to commit to in a legally recognised relationship if we are to have such things) based on their reproductive organs.
Speaking of reproductive organs, the organisers of RadFem 2012 have really outdone themselves. Originally restricted to “biological women”, the phrasing was quickly changed to “women born as women living as women”. The words “reproductively female” were also brandished at one point, and I hope I don’t need to spell out quite how problematic that is. While I have some limited sympathy for the desire to create a women-only space, let us be clear on one thing: There is nothing radical about buying into the gender binary.
The language used by these so-called radical feminists reminds me of nothing more than this vile piece of hate speech in which Irish right-wing columnist Kevin Myers feels so threatened in his masculinity that he needs to define other people’s gender identities for them. Choice quote:

[T]he obstetric revelations about this pseudo-male were accompanied by examples of other “men” who have given birth, beginning with Thomas Beattie of Oregon, who is a serial non-man, having given birth to three children, and Yuval Topper, an Israeli “man” who also had a baby, and Scott Moore — and here, I’m afraid we truly enter a quite phantasmagorical world — a Californian who lives with “his husband”, and who gave birth to a child in 2010.

Defining people’s identities and roles in life by their reproductive organs is what men like Kevin Myers do – it’s what the patriarchy does. It is sexism and misogyny of the worst kind and has no place in feminism, radical or otherwise. Here’s a radical suggestions for the organisers of RadFem 2012: Step away from biological determinism and the gender binary and treat people as people. We’d all be better off for that.

[Elsewhere] Andrew Lansley and my cat

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I have had cause recently to compare private and public health care systems – with unflattering conclusions for both.
After a week at home with the flu and still not feeling the least bit better, I finally cracked and tried to book an appointment with my GP. The process normally goes something like this: I call at 8.29am, only to get their answerphone which tells me they don’t open until 8.30. I hang up and and redial, at which point the line is already engaged. I then proceed to redial every two minutes for the next half hour or so, until I finally get one step further – into the hold queue.
Read more over at the Scottish Times.

Letter to Nick Brown, MP on marriage equality

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I find myself in the odd position of responding to government consultations and writing to my MP on an issue that I feel – at best – lukewarm about.
Marriage is not a social institution I feel has any relevance to me (not until I hit the inheritance tax threshold anyway, which is a long way off), and I have for a long time now felt that we’re doing the whole thing wrong. I also strongly object to David Cameron and Theresa May taking this opportunity to lecture me about the best possible set-up of my private life and family relationships. Even within the limited context of LGBT rights I believe there are bigger and more important issues than marriage equality.
On the other hand, I understand that marriage is hugely important to a lot of people – both heterosexual and not. It strikes me as a no-brainer that if we have an institution available to one part of the population and not another, this is discriminatory and unjust. So if we have to have marriage in its current form, I do believe that it should be available on an equal basis to all. With that in mind, I have today sent the below letter to Nick Brown, MP for Newcastle upon Tyne East. Mr Brown and I don’t often see eye to eye, and he has a record of only replying on issues he agrees with me on. Let’s hope this is one of those where I get a response.
Dear Nick Brown,
I am writing to you with regards to the government’s ongoing consultation to extend civil marriage rights to same-sex couples.
The current set-up which makes civil partnerships available to same-sex couples while reserving marriage only for heterosexual couples is problematic on several levels:
1. It clearly creates a distinction and inequality between heterosexual and LGBT people and the legal recognition of their relationships. This inequality is arbitrary and discriminatory.
2. It is also particularly harsh on transgender people seeking legal recognition of their gender, as under current rules they have to dissolve an existing marriage or civil partnership to obtain such recognition. This is an expensive, bureaucratic process that is extremely emotionally traumatic at an already difficult time in a person’s life.
3. Finally, it was only two years ago that there were more countries in the world where homosexuality was punishable with death than countries where same-sex couples could get legal recognition of their relationships in the form of marriage. Yet over the last few years we have seen more and more countries embrace marriage equality, and now there are countries on four continents which do so. It is disappointing that the UK is lagging behind countries perceived as conservative and staunchly Catholic, such as Spain, Portugal and Argentina, on this issue.
While an actual marriage equality bill is some way off, it would be helpful to understand your position on the issue. The Coalition for Equal Marriage is tracking MPs’ stance on this at their website and it would be great to see your support reflected there.
Yours sincerely,
Milena Popova

Electoral Reform – R.I.P.

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…in which I am bitter and say “I told you so” a lot…
A year ago today, I spent the day stood outside my local polling station, trying to convince people to vote for a change to the Alternative Vote. We all know how that went.
We all know that the No campaign made up numbers about the cost of AV. We all know that we lost by a landslide. Through six months of campaigning not only didn’t we appear to capture a single undecided vote – from the final numbers it looks like we actually lost people who at the start of the campaign had said they’d vote for us.
Frankly, the Yes campaign was run so badly, we deserved to lose. There are two anecdotes that will give you enough of an insight into both the national and the regional campaigns to understand quite how abysmally the show was run. Firstly, on a national level we had the right to send out a direct mailing to every household in the UK that would have been paid for by the Electoral Commission. Yes, that would have been free to us. We didn’t. Read that again. The national campaign failed to get its act together sufficiently to send out the free mailing. In the meantime the No campaign cheerfully took advantage of their free mailing to send us leaflets telling us that no tax payers’ money had been used in sending said leaflets. Some households received four or five pieces of literature from the No campaign and none from us. Secondly, with 15 days to go to polling day I attended a staff meeting at the North East campaign office to discuss the plan for the remaining campaign time. The extent of the plan was “We have to do something every day”. And frankly, we didn’t even manage to do that.
No sooner were the results in that everyone who was anyone in the Yes campaign started writing their memoirs, pointing fingers at everyone else while completely exonerating themselves. Some of them remembered to thank the volunteers in the process; most didn’t.
All of that, however, is water under the bridge. The one bone I still have to pick is with all those people who voted against AV because it wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t PR/STV/insert acronym of your choice here. It was a “miserable little compromise” (thank you, Nick Clegg). It is thanks to those electoral reform purists that the electoral reform agenda has now been buried for the foreseeable future. The really sad thing, dear purists, is that you were played. You were played from start to finish.
We were all dealt a crap hand – that was the whole point. We were given the option of keeping the status quo or making a minor change, a change that was a compromise, that no one in the pro-reform camp really saw as an ideal state; a change that the man who at the time could arguably be seen as one of the strongest pro-reform voices had gone on the record calling a “miserable little compromise”. We were given that crap hand deliberately and instead of taking it and making the best of it, we played it about as badly as we could have.
Having sown division in our ranks from the start, the Conservatives and other supporters of the outdated voting system we have were free to stand back and watch us tear ourselves apart. The LibDems were so terrified of the impending local election doom that they completely failed to support the AV campaign appropriately. Faced with practically certain obliteration in many councils, they still chose to throw their resources down that hole rather than take a long-term view.
The Yes campaign consisted of a fragile coalition of pro-reform groups with barely enough experience and clearly not enough resources between them to get a campaign going. We failed to reach out convincingly beyond the small group of dedicated activists we already had. We failed to build bridges with other groups whose interests potentially overlapped with ours, including the nascent anti-cuts movement, student occupations and other campaign groups. In a political climate increasingly hostile to the government, we kept harping on about the expenses scandal – a message that had played well 18 months previously when someone had had money to conduct the research, but had pretty much stopped being relevant by the time our campaign even started.
All of this time some of the strongest supporters of electoral reform in general opposed this kind of electoral reform in particular, because it wasn’t good enough; because in their eyes it was going to block the path to further reform. Yet somehow they never saw that a no vote would close the door on reform for good. I guess they got what they wanted.
So where are we a year down the line? The only mention of electoral reform over the past 12 months was at the Conservative Party Conference, where speaker after speaker triumphantly declared that the British people had said that FPTP was the best thing since sliced bread. The LibDems are now licking their wounds after another set of spectacular losses in local elections up and down the country. I spoke to a LibDem activist a few weeks ago who said most of them felt too bruised still from the AV campaign to even contemplate electoral reform again. The fragile coalition that was the Yes campaign has died a quiet, and frankly unmourned death, with a lot of bad blood between the different organisations and no clear direction for anyone left in this space who would like to continue to fight for electoral reform.
If you wanted PR and didn’t ruin a good pair of shoes campaigning for AV, didn’t even bother to vote for AV, I hope what you got is what you hoped for. It sure isn’t what I hoped for.