So Calderdale was one of the local parties who scheduled an EGM to discuss Clegg’s leadership under §10.2(f) of the party constitution, in which an election for the leader can be triggered if 75 local parties call for one. If you’re looking for the result: sorry, but I’m not going to divulge it myself. This post should be read in conjunction with Sarah Brown’s post about her local party EGM in Cambridge, and is published in conjunction with it. So here’s the speech I wrote for the EGM: I got called for time near the very end, but I was still able to get the points across.
Politics
Appropriating equality
There’s been a flurry of news stories in the past week, most likely to coincide with the country’s first same-sex marriages starting next Saturday, regarding how the bill came to pass. Firstly, we had television personality Paul O’Grady describe David Cameron as a “twat” and state the Lib Dems were “as much use as men’s tits”. Then, a few days later, Ben Summerskill tried (very unconvincingly) to attack the Lib Dems for being “opportunistic” on same-sex marriage. And finally, Tony Blair said that “in hindsight”, he would’ve pushed for marriage equality whilst Prime Minister. All this leads me to think one thing: both Labour and Stonewall seem to be very keen to take the credit on LGBT equality, especially with a general election round the corner. But this credit is perhaps undeserved, especially as they both seem to have done everything they could to stall it.
My speech on digital freedom to the Liberal Democrat Conference
Making your first speech at a political conference is tough, especially when you know that the media are watching you as well as delegates there. That didn’t stop me, as a first-time conference attendee, from making a speech to the Lib Dem Spring Conference in York last Sunday, on the Digital Bill of Rights motion. Having been persuaded to by Julian Huppert and Tim Farron to mention digital freedom at Conference, I decided to make such a speech, which I reproduce below:
Section 28, or, how to start a revolution from your bedroom
As everyone will no doubt be aware by now, especially through the Independent’s front page on Tuesday, 45 schools stood accused of reintroducing the homophobic Section 28 through their sex and relationship education policies. Whether it’s through deliberate malice or lazy copy-and-pasting of outdated advice – and I’m strongly inclined to believe it’s the latter in most cases – it couldn’t come at a more opportune time, especially when eyes are on Russia for their similar (but much more enforced) law on “homosexual propaganda” and in the wake of a protracted marriage equality debate where several reactionaries were claiming, above NUT advice, that teachers were in danger of being forced to teach about homosexuality!
Equal marriage is a transgender issue
Something I note with some despair is the assertion that marriage equality is not a transgender issue. The argument goes that it’s primarily an LGB issue and trans people only get consequential benefits from it. Well, that’s not really accurate, as our history, and the history of others, shows.
The spousal veto is still a veto, even if you pretend it isn’t
So, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act got given Royal Assent yesterday and, while I’m happy at the general idea of people in same-gender marriages being able to marry, I’m not singing Dancing Queen and waving my pride flag just yet. Because the legislation contains a rather insidious prejudiced open secret: the spousal veto. The lovely Sarah Brown, who should be thanked for her tireless campaigning for trans marriage equality, has a brilliant blog post about it here. I don’t want to duplicate her too much, so if you haven’t read it, do so now. And while government ministers and even some opposition MPs alike are pretending it’s not a veto, the way it works means it is.
Are you Jason? Wotever, I don’t care.
Two weeks ago, fresh from presenting at the hate rally that was RadFem 2013, Cathy “Bug” Brennan made a trip with some fellow transphobes to a bar in London to watch some gay cabaret, at which point she was ejected for being a lesbian, as she claims. This in indicative of lesbophobia in British culture run amok, with the trans cabal of heterosexual men running the LGBT show.
Except, you know, that’s the opposite of what happened.
On owning your history
People who have known me for a while, who have read this blog, or have followed me on twitter will know that I’ve not always been the intersectional anarcha-feminist I try to be these days. I used to be, especially a couple of years ago, an apologist for the forces of austerity. And while I could go down the route of some campaigners on the Left, pretend I never said that, pretend I was born on a mountain with a double rainbow in the sky when the angels sang my heralds, it’d be duplicitive and untrue. I’m human, and I’m flawed. And I think it would be much more honest to own my history as an activist.
The Devil in the Details: Reading the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill
I would like to thank Sarah Brown, Jae Kay, and Zoe O’Connell for their analyses of the bill so far; I’ve had some time to read the bill over the past 36 hours and I’ve got my own comments.
Were I to grade the legislation, I’d give it 6/10, could do better. In the abstract, it’s a good bill, in so much as two people of the same gender will be able to marry. However, there are some seams in which the concept of equal marriage start to fray.
The Guardian’s Trans Hate Week
I’m fucking angry. And if you were in my position, you would be too.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, it’s been filled with an onslaught of articles from the nominally liberal paper The Guardian against the transgender community. And finally, thank god, it looks like it’s reached a point where cis people are saying it’s gone too far.