Other commenters are probably gonna cover all the other stuff like the fact British transphobic orgs are being funded by American fascists like the heritage Foundation as part of a trial run on how they intend to destroy queer rights in their own country.
I’d like to briefly spotlight the stratification of British society as a factor. In specific Bourgeois feminism.
CW: brief mention of CSA, homophobia and transphobia throughout.
Ok, so Britain isn’t a democracy, it’s a feudal theocracy with a parliament bolted on. Everything from the levers of power to who appears as an extra in the BBC’s latest drama about a morally grey cop on the edge, are all selected based on whether they knew some lord Sisterfucker or other during their time in boarding school. The private school nepotism is so endemic we have a slang term for it, jobs for boys.
Now Britain’s feminism has always been split into two opposing movements: grassroots, activist feminism and bourgeois, academic feminism. The latter has always been exclusionary whereas different waves of the former have had various degrees of intersectionality, for example bourgeois feminists during the fight for women’s suffrage supported the disenfranchisement of black people. During what’s referred to as second wave feminism, academic feminists in the UK got really weird about lesbians. You had political lesbians (who are too dense a mess to wade through in just this comment) but you also had what have retroactively been referred to as LERFs, because much like the TERFs of today, LERFs argued for the segregation of single sex spaces for the safety of women. LERFs would print homophobic zines about predatory lesbians in public toilets, claim lesbians were dangerous to their straight competitors in sports, any of the “protect women” moral panic stuff you’ve heard nowadays got its origins here.
As working class intersectional movements gained ground (such as with movements such as “lesbians and gays support the miners” causing unions to change their stance on homophobia and by extension drag the left of centre political parties with them), homophobia began to lose ground politically but still held ground within academic feminism. It’s at this point that intellectuals such as Germaine Greer began shaping modern academic feminism. Cliffnotes on Greer - she’s a pro-paedophilia, anti-gay, bourgeois feminist author, although her most famous work is about how the patriarchy structures the role of women in a way that denies their sexuality (it’s okay I guess but not particularly ground breaking). When she was doing a talk about that book “the female eunuch” she noticed a woman who’d asked her to sign her copy had hairy hands. Thus began Greer’s crusade against the existence of trans women.
Now former LERFs were having to disguise and tone down the intensity their homophobic views as they became increasingly marginalised, they found their target in trans people since they had not yet entered into the British zeitgeist outside of shitty jokes in sitcoms. Greer’s rhetoric was largely about trans women infiltrating and erasing womanhood and fit well into the transphobic milieu.
The kinds of privately educated failchildren who now fill the heart of this country’s liberal parties are the kindsa people whose views of feminism were informed by that milieu and hence these parties stance on social issues are shaped towards SWERF/TERF rhetoric. While the further right parties are filled with homophobes who’re using the destruction of trans rights as a wedge issue to attack the larger queer movement.
Opinion polls across the UK consistently trend towards a sorta live and let live attitude towards gender identity, but why step out of your insular bubble and see what people actually think when you can just do what you want and then yell “will of the people!” over dissenting voices?
“the female eunuch” she noticed a woman who’d asked her to sign her copy had hairy hands. Thus began Greer’s crusade against the existence of trans women.
lmao, so many eunuchs were historically trans people. imagine being like ‘wow im so gender divergent im basically like them’ then hating trans people
It’s a confluence of multiple causes.
Other commenters are probably gonna cover all the other stuff like the fact British transphobic orgs are being funded by American fascists like the heritage Foundation as part of a trial run on how they intend to destroy queer rights in their own country.
I’d like to briefly spotlight the stratification of British society as a factor. In specific Bourgeois feminism.
CW: brief mention of CSA, homophobia and transphobia throughout.
Ok, so Britain isn’t a democracy, it’s a feudal theocracy with a parliament bolted on. Everything from the levers of power to who appears as an extra in the BBC’s latest drama about a morally grey cop on the edge, are all selected based on whether they knew some lord Sisterfucker or other during their time in boarding school. The private school nepotism is so endemic we have a slang term for it, jobs for boys.
Now Britain’s feminism has always been split into two opposing movements: grassroots, activist feminism and bourgeois, academic feminism. The latter has always been exclusionary whereas different waves of the former have had various degrees of intersectionality, for example bourgeois feminists during the fight for women’s suffrage supported the disenfranchisement of black people. During what’s referred to as second wave feminism, academic feminists in the UK got really weird about lesbians. You had political lesbians (who are too dense a mess to wade through in just this comment) but you also had what have retroactively been referred to as LERFs, because much like the TERFs of today, LERFs argued for the segregation of single sex spaces for the safety of women. LERFs would print homophobic zines about predatory lesbians in public toilets, claim lesbians were dangerous to their straight competitors in sports, any of the “protect women” moral panic stuff you’ve heard nowadays got its origins here.
As working class intersectional movements gained ground (such as with movements such as “lesbians and gays support the miners” causing unions to change their stance on homophobia and by extension drag the left of centre political parties with them), homophobia began to lose ground politically but still held ground within academic feminism. It’s at this point that intellectuals such as Germaine Greer began shaping modern academic feminism. Cliffnotes on Greer - she’s a pro-paedophilia, anti-gay, bourgeois feminist author, although her most famous work is about how the patriarchy structures the role of women in a way that denies their sexuality (it’s okay I guess but not particularly ground breaking). When she was doing a talk about that book “the female eunuch” she noticed a woman who’d asked her to sign her copy had hairy hands. Thus began Greer’s crusade against the existence of trans women.
Now former LERFs were having to disguise and tone down the intensity their homophobic views as they became increasingly marginalised, they found their target in trans people since they had not yet entered into the British zeitgeist outside of shitty jokes in sitcoms. Greer’s rhetoric was largely about trans women infiltrating and erasing womanhood and fit well into the transphobic milieu.
The kinds of privately educated failchildren who now fill the heart of this country’s liberal parties are the kindsa people whose views of feminism were informed by that milieu and hence these parties stance on social issues are shaped towards SWERF/TERF rhetoric. While the further right parties are filled with homophobes who’re using the destruction of trans rights as a wedge issue to attack the larger queer movement.
Opinion polls across the UK consistently trend towards a sorta live and let live attitude towards gender identity, but why step out of your insular bubble and see what people actually think when you can just do what you want and then yell “will of the people!” over dissenting voices?
lmao, so many eunuchs were historically trans people. imagine being like ‘wow im so gender divergent im basically like them’ then hating trans people
I have never heard of LERFS before, that’s some helpful context.