Posts Tagged ‘Feminism’
Latest Gender Wars Reach the Labour Party.

Over the last few days the disputes about Gender have come back to the fore. These include the fallout from the closure of the Tavistock gender identity clinic and the transfer to early adopter hubs in London and Manchester (with others planned) , the continuing controversy about the impact of Stonewall’s line on gender identity, and some unpleasant right-wing protests against Drag Queen Story Hour for school children.
First reactions, the fact that the rows are dominated by the likes of the Spectator, the Mail, their sister web site, Spiked, Julie Bindel (who writes for the far right Mail these days), not to mention the LBG campaign (described as “a conservative hate group”), make one wish to brush the whole lot aside. And the Patriotic Alternative are extreme right, full stop.
That is to ignore them. We can be good ignoring, like – the unreadable – contrary attempts to synthesise ‘Marxism’ with Georges Bataille, in Transgender Marxism, Jules Joanne Gleeson, Elle O’Rourke.
We are very happy to be publishing this extract from the introduction of Transgender Marxism, published by Pluto Press.
Transgender Marxism focuses wilfully on that which others might dismiss as vulgar, inappropriate, besides-the-political. It aims to provide a materialist account of the distinctive conditions of lack in which we find ourselves, and to help us wriggle free through unlikely means.
“Meanwhile, brought back to the subterranean action of economic facts, the ‘old-mole’ revolution hollows out chambers in a decomposed soil repugnant to the delicate nose of the utopians.‘Old mole’, Marx’s resounding expression for the complete satisfaction of the revolutionary outburst of the masses, must be understood in relation to the notion of a geological uprising as expressed in the Communist Manifesto. Marx’s point of departure has nothing to do with the heavens, preferred station of the imperialist eagle as of Christian or revolutionary utopias. He begins with the bowels of the earth, as in the materialist bowels of proletarians.”
Following the mole’s tracks, Transgender Marxism unearths the base needs of trans proles and brings them above ground, into clearer view.
Much work remains to be done expanding the earthy, intestinal visions of Marx and his successors outwards, moving from the bowels towards the glands and receptors that make up our endocrine system. Transition, too, must come to be understood by revolutionaries as a response to its own form of hunger. The longings that drive so many to reforge lives for ourselves that leave us thoroughly proletarianised, or cast out, rendered surplus. Those cravings and cavings-in that clinicians have long attempted to desiccate under the catch-all term ‘dysphoria’.
I note simply – having read Bataille and have some of his books on the shelves – that “the notion of “excess” energy is central to Bataille’s thinking. Bataille’s inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the infinite outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses produced by life’s basic chemical reactions, as the norm for organisms. In other words, an organism in Bataille’s general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, normally has an “excess” of energy available to it.”
This is about as materialist and Marxist as Henri Bergson’s élan vital (vital force). As a concept wedded to “base materialism” and transgression it is so far from historically or socially explaining gender, or gender fluidity, not to mention patriarchy, and why there is such a thing as feminism, that it is hard to take seriously. This is a view this Bog has expressed before, and we refer to the ever helpful Google to find critiques to bear this out.
But: first there is this, in the liberal left of centre Observer today:
Don’t buy the Stonewall line on gender identity? Fine. You can’t be sacked for that now
“You might think the last place to harbour unlawful discrimination would be a barristers’ chambers that prides itself on “defending human rights and upholding the rule of law”. But the employment tribunal last week found that Garden Court Chambers discriminated against and victimised its tenant Allison Bailey on account of her “gender critical” beliefs.”
Apart from discussing the Allison Bailey case Sodha raises serious issues about Stonewall.
But by far the worst example has been in children’s healthcare. Gender ideology posits the view that when children express discomfort about their sexed bodies, this must be understood as an indicator of a fixed trans identity that should be immediately affirmed as the basis of any clinical treatment for gender dysphoria. Stonewall claims that children as young as two can have trans identities, which, given they can barely speak, is revealing of the extent to which adult identity politics is being imposed on children who do not conform to regressive gender stereotypes.
Non followers of Twitter may not know that the reference to children is from this:
In this context it is hard not to agree with this protest against the Labour Party decision not to allow a gender critical stall at the annual conference:
Spy-Cops, Helen Steel talks of “disgusting and inhumane abuse.”

There is a must-read interview with comrade Helen Steel in the Guardian today:
For years, undercover officers from the Metropolitan police deceived and manipulated female activists such as McDonald’s campaigner Helen Steel. Her new book reveals their callous tricks
With hindsight, the environmental activist Helen Steel, a key figure in the 1990s McLibel case, can see that her life with John Dines was suspiciously idyllic.
When they met, at a London Greenpeace meeting in the late 1980s, she was spending her free time protesting against nuclear weapons at Greenham Common, or staying in mining villages supporting striking miners. Soon he was enthusiastically joining her on hunt saboteur trips to disrupt grouse shoots in Yorkshire, or on demonstrations against the poll tax, and spending his weekends with her, helping to campaign against the environmental record of McDonald’s.
It was only decades after their relationship ended that she began to understand that they got on so well because Dines was using a battery of grooming techniques perfected by colleagues in an undercover police division. The undercover officers in Dines’s unit presented themselves as vulnerable and alone in the world; often they would say they were recently bereaved or estranged from their families, preying on the women’s good nature, inviting their sympathy and love.
…
“The public inquiry has been bending over backwards to protect the privacy and feelings of the former undercover officers. There is no concern for our privacy and our right to know,” Steel says. “We all want answers. If the police want to raid someone’s house, they have to apply for a warrant and they have to set out the reasons why they need to search the house. But with these relationships, no warrants needed to be applied for. They were living in our houses and they had access to everything we had in our homes; they had access to the contents of our heads. They could ask us whatever questions they wanted and we would answer – believing they were our trusted partners, not an undercover cop trying to get information. It was disgusting and inhumane abuse.”
The full story of how Helen Steel and other women were deceived into relationships with undercover police spies is only now being told.
By Mark Metcalf
Deep Deception: The Story of the Spycop Network by the Women who Uncovered the Shocking Truth is published by Ebury
When McLibel campaigner Helen Steel was finally able, in Sydney in 2016, to confront John Dines, the undercover police officer who tricked her into a long relationship in the early 1990s, she still retained remote hopes he might have had genuinely loving feelings for her during their time together. Perhaps he even shared some of her anti-capitalist beliefs.
“I said to him that he knew I was in a really bad state when he left and asked why did he still pretend to care for me rather than put me out of my misery and say he was never coming back,” says Steel.
“‘What did I have? All I had was a van,’ was his initial reply. When I pressed him further he responded dismissively by saying: ‘I’m sorry, I had a really shit time too. It – the whole thing – messed my head up and I just wanted to put it behind me and make a new start.’ I had this realisation that he was a completely selfish bastard and he had not cared one bit for me.”
Now the full story of this abusive relationship – and the cases of four other campaigners conned by officers of the highly secretive Metropolitan Police unit the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) into similar relationships, all sanctioned at the highest levels of the state – is being told in a new book.
“To my surprise, and after years of finding nothing, a document popped up with his signature on the bottom.”
The title Deep Deception was collectively chosen by the five women. “From amongst many possibilities it best conveys our experiences. The level of deception and the discovery of it really had a serious psychological impact on everyone,” explains Steel, who has though courageously fought back. The widespread use of the officers from the SDS, formed in 1968, to undermine movements of social justice, environmental campaigns, trade unions and political organisations continues to be exposed at the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI).
When Steel first met Dines in late 1987 at London Greenpeace, he claimed he was John Barker and infiltrated the environmental group after the exit of SDS officer Bob Lambert, a Greenpeace member from 1983 to 1987.
“Lambert, or Robinson as we knew him, was involved in writing the 1986 anti-McDonald’s leaflet that me and Dave Morris were sued over,” says Steel. “John was involved in the anti-McDonald’s campaign, and in the McLibel Support campaign and our legal defence.”
The leaflet alleged that McDonald’s exploited children through its advertising, promoted unhealthy food, paid low wages, was anti-union and was responsible for animal cruelty and environmental damage. The libel campaign was the longest such case in English history and lasted over a decade. At the conclusion some of the leaflet’s contested claims were found to be libellous and others, such as McDonald’s endangering the health of workers and exploiting children, were true. The company also paid its workers poorly and inflicted unnecessary cruelty on animals.
Deep Deception reveals that Dines waited two years before asking Steel to go out with him. He had slowly been building up a relationship with Steel, a gardener, by dropping her off last in his van when he drove fellow activists home from meetings. It was a common tactic by undercover officers, including Mark Jenner, who was to have a five-year relationship with Alison, a political activist at the Colin Roach Centre in Hackney. The case of Jenner, known as Cassidy at the time, has been explored in a series of Big Issue North articles dating back to January 2011.
“John told me in Sydney that he was tasked with reporting on everything that was going on in the North London anti-capitalist, animal rights, poll tax and environmental movements – everything that was a bit alternative. I did not go out with him until 1990. If I had known he was using me to spy on groups of people whose politics I shared then I would never have had a relationship with him,” says Steel, who now lives in the North.
As the relationship became more intense, Barker told Steel he wanted to have children. It was a con. After a period when he would mysteriously disappear for short periods, citing his mental state, the undercover cop left permanently in late 1992. Steel was distraught.
In the book she describes how in early 1993 “I felt both physically and mentally spent. John’s disappearance still consumed my thoughts every day.” Her attempts to find him floundered.
Read Full Article via above link.
It is deeply unfortunate that forces hostile to the values of the left, the labour movement, and socialism are still attacking, sometimes violently, Comrade Helen Steel and her friends for their present-day feminist ‘gender critical’ views.