millicentfawcett

You might find this interesting. It happened a few years ago in the UK but highlights what you are observing. It's too long to fully quote but I've picked out some relevant bits.

https://www.feministcurrent.com/2018/03/23/leftist-women-uk-refuse-accept-labours-attempts-silence-critiques-gender-identity/

Lucy Mcdonagh grew up working class, raised by a single mother. Her life as a young woman was marked by addiction, abuse, poverty, and mental health issues. She managed to escape a relationship with an extremely violent man at 32-years-old, after being partnered with him for 10 years. “My experience of being a working class woman and the level of trauma carried by many working class people has been my driving force since I was young,” Mcdonagh told me.

“All I have ever wanted to do is to try and empower working class people into supporting ourselves and, in doing so, empower our community. Being working class isn’t just about poverty. It’s about resilience and an unspoken understanding of violence. We don’t talk about our struggles because that places us at greater harm.”

That reality is suddenly of great interest to those who wish to coopt (or “parasitize,” if you will…) the struggles of oppressed groups as a means to gain social, cultural, or political leverage.

Mcdonagh had been forced to close the holistic wellness centre she was running in Deptford after leaving her then-partner, due to the trauma and subsequent breakdown she experienced during the police process. Once back on her feet, Mcdonagh co-founded The Deptford People Project, which not only feeds people, but, in her words, “created a family for those who were ostracized from the community.”

“We eat together, we played music, laughed and talked… We were not offering a service, we were offering an opportunity to become part of a community again. There was no ‘helping the poor’ — we are all poor and ran the project together. It was amazing.”

Not long after this project took off, Deptford was gentrified, and working class people like Mcdonagh were no longer welcome. “Working class people can be quite scary to white middle class people not from the area,” she explained.

“We shout and swear and take the mick out of [tease] each other. We speak a different language. One that is often mistaken for aggression. We’re not [politically correct] because most of us have never really believed that politics is anything more then a rich man’s game to get richer. But we’re not unintelligent — we’re just not academic.”

Gentrification brought a sudden increase in “very posh, white, ‘social justice’ groups and movements.” Now, the local groups who claimed to support the most marginalized seemed, to Mcdonagh, to be little more than “a social gathering for privileged students, using the community as a trendy trademark.”

“They used weird pronouns and called themselves ‘they,'” Mcdonagh said. She didn’t think this “rich kid’s trend” would affect her work so didn’t concern herself too much. “We were too busy trying to keep people fed, off the street, and out of prison.”

Though purporting to support the oppressed, Mcdonagh felt these students had no concept of or empathy toward the real experiences of actual marginalized women. “In reality [they] were supporting themselves via a complex new ideology and language that only they speak,” she said.

Mcdonagh was similarly nonplussed after meeting with a new domestic violence organization, also run mainly by young middle class students. The language this group used struck Mcdonagh as nonsensical and unhelpful to women actually suffering due to male violence. “The list of trigger warnings and safe space policies included a whole load of new gender terms that I had never heard of.” She adds, “I don’t know what a safe space is but I’d like to know where there is one for working class people in our area.”

In particular, all the focus on “gender identity” confused her. “Why were all the most publicized [social justice organizations]… suddenly centering their [work] on a group of people I’ve never come into contact with?”

At this point, Mcdonagh discovered the proposed changes to the GRA. She had some close friends who were “transsexual,” so understood how the GRC worked. She told me:

“I had never been concerned about a trans person who had medically transitioned entering a women-only space. To my knowledge it wasn’t a big thing. Only about 5000 people have a GRC in the UK. So you can imagine that doesn’t really cause any major issues.”

But during a discussion with Goldsmiths students about a community housing project, things blew up. Mcdonagh was verbally attacked by students after rejecting the new language being imposed on her community, called a “white cis woman,” then a “bitch and a “cunt.” A young male student tagged her in a post online arguing that the Women’s March should not allow women to focus on “the vagina” as it was “transphobic.” When Mcdonagh asked how he was defining “woman,” the man responded, “Anyone who says they are.”

This is when, she says, it all fell into place. “That’s what ‘self-identify’ means: anyone can say they are anyone… So, rich, privileged people can claim to be marginalized.” Beyond that, she asks, “How can we keep working class women safe if anyone can be a women legally?”

Mcdonagh became more troubled when “a middle class teenage boy identifying as women [was] given a woman’s officer position in the Labour Party” and when she observed a woman she knew suspended from the party for “refusing to say that a male person with a penis is a woman.”

She tells me there is “a very real lack of understanding about female victims of abuse, their need for sex-segregated spaces, and their need to be protected from predatory men.” But it has become impossible to debate or even discuss these issues. “Suddenly (mainly) white middle class students were shouting down and abusing working class women for expressing concern,” she says. “These people were bullying real victims into [submitting to] their ideology — women who have spent their lives being forced to accept situations they don’t want.”

Mcdonagh says she doesn’t believe that “a rich white boy” can “understand the needs of a working class ex-care system woman, raped and abused for decades by many different men — a woman living in a world that won’t ever feel safe again and who is bringing up children in a community that is suffering [due to] poverty, abuse, and trauma.”

“I couldn’t sit back a watch this final episode of ‘Gentrification Deptford’ invade the only thing that working class women have left: their experience.”

Mcdonagh and her group were concerned about how the proposed changes might affect services for women like her and those she worked with. Yet the questions they have are not being answered. They worry about how they will be able protect the women they work with from males who need only self-identify as female in order to access women’s spaces and about whether or not a “small, unfunded, grassroots organization [will be able to] challenge the law for the greater good if needed.” They also want to know whether challenging such a law could jeopardize their access to funding in future.

“Working class women know the lengths that abusers will go to get access to their victims,” she said. “We know this because we have lived it.”

“I fear that just the possibility that a male-bodied person [whether a client or staff member] could access a women-only service would be enough for, for example, our Muslim women’s community to avoid those spaces,” Mcdonagh says. “We are still trying to access hard to reach women and this would definitely make it more difficult.”

While she doesn’t believe “trans people” are inherently a threat, Mcdonagh believes very strongly that victims of male violence need women-only services and that women should be prioritized in terms of staffing these kinds of services as well. “We have already seen that trans-identifying males tend to apply for women-only positions and job vacancies as a way of reinforcing their gender identity,” she says.

“The first thing Lily Madigan did upon receiving their GRC was to apply to volunteer for women’s refuge. This is a white, middle class, 20-year-old male (who has not medically transitioned), who took their school to court to be able to wear a skirt. Lily wasn’t applying to volunteer because they felt they had something to offer victims of domestic violence. Lily was using women’s refuge to validate their identity and enforce transgender rights regardless of the effect on female victims.”

“When we are being verbally abused and called fascists because we are concerned about the effects of policy change on marginalized people, it is a direct attack on working class women and grass roots organizations.”

It’s bad enough that women are being fired, ostracized, bullied, and threatened for trying to speak about an issue that affects their lives, rights, spaces, and movements in so many ways. That it is largely young, white, middle and upper class individuals, bullying marginalized women, who have worked in these movements for decades, makes the situation all the more shocking and hypocritical.

Mcdonagh says:

“I want to tell those people who have gentrified our whole existence that our safe spaces are not for sale. That our experience is not for them to redefine. I want to let those people know that they are complicit in the victimization of already victimized people. Mostly, I want to start a conversation about social privilege and how the trans political and social movement is driven through [academia] and is suppressing the rights of working class women.”