I struggled with my discomfort and thought I was being intolerant and bigoted

I care because I’m a woman and a lesbian. After the T crept onto the end of LGB, I struggled with my discomfort and thought I was being intolerant and bigoted, but thankfully radical feminism and attendance at a meeting of WPUK in Sheffield, where I heard Michele Moore speak with passion and compassion, changed all that.

I care because definitions matter. Sex matters. Being same SEX attracted matters. I care because gender needs to be eradicated as far as possible, not cemented in an ideology that constrains us all and forces us into rigid stereotyped roles. I care because adolescence is hard enough, but telling children their discomfort is because they’ve been born in the wrong body is homophobic at root and conversion therapy at worse.

Many of my friends, including my partner, would have been ‘transed’ as teenagers if they’d grown up now. I care because women’s oppression is because of our sexed bodies and it’s not something we can identify out of.

I’ve attended WPUK meetings, spoke about the Labour Women’s Declaration at the meeting in Leeds in November 2019 and I attended the WPUK conference last October. I have leafleted for Women’s Place UK. I spoke to a small and partially very hostile local Labour Party women’s forum on this issue. I have raised the issue at a Labour Party-run Women’s Development Programme.

I have peak transed a number of friends who thought they supported self ID through discussion and argument, in real life and online.

I am a founder member of Labour Women’s Declaration and remain part of that working group, writing social media posts as part of that group and on my own Twitter and FB accounts in order to raise awareness and share information.

I have met with my local MP about the GRA reforms and written to government ministers, the Labour leadership and other bodies about this issue. I’m part of a local Resisters group; we petitioned our local council and spoke at a council meeting about same sex facilities. I attended a Resisters residential gathering in September 2019, and am a member of a number of secret online forums. I am part of my local feminist network and am setting up a local group of gender critical women in the Labour Party across my city to support getting motions through CLPs (on hold currently because of Covid 19). I have had face-to-face discussions with someone I know who moderates a national Labour Party forum about ‘my problem with trans women’ but whose mind I have yet to change.

I’ve had tweets reported to and removed from Twitter and for which I’ve refused to apologise, so have had to serve out my suspended sentence. I’ve had posts either not shared or removed from national Labour Party forums with no explanation, and I’ve got into protracted arguments with trans activists on Twitter and FB on this issue, including Morgan Oger. But the worst consequence was a spat within my local CLP FB Forum on which a local Labour Councillor less than half my age (who consequently signed the Trans Labour Pledge) told me to f*ck off out of the LP, called me a transphobe and a bigot, set her mum and her partner on me and the result was that I left the forum and I no longer engage at all with local LP politics; I put what energies I have into the national LWD campaign because I am frightened of this becoming too personal. I admire those women who do put themselves out there locally and receive a great deal of trouble for their trouble.

Flabuless, a socialist realist, I worked in higher education for most of my working life and lament the ‘safe space’ it has become in order that no one’s feelings get hurt or brains get challenged