I remember how it was -- JR
I’ve faced many dangers, but the screaming hate of campus woke warriors left me shaking with fear
JULIE BINDEL explains how female students are bullied out of hearing from feminists
In 2004 Julie Bindel wrote an article criticising transgender activists who tried to close a rape crisis centre which wouldn’t include transwomen as counsellors
She received criticism and abuse when she gave a speech on feminism at York University, and was labelled as transphobic
She says that she will now be giving up on the university staff who enable behaviour that has prohibited female students hearing from feminists
"Even as I accepted the invitation, I knew there would be trouble. The moment it got out that evil, monstrous Julie Bindel was to set foot on campus at York University, it was all entirely predictable.
In the old, logical days, long-standing feminist campaigners like me would often be invited to universities by student feminist groups.
But in 2004, I wrote an article criticising transgender activists who tried to close down a rape crisis centre which wouldn’t include male-bodied transwomen as counsellors, and ever since I have been dogged by so-called progressives who consider me ‘transphobic’.
As a result university feminist groups, which nowadays are stuffed with just these ‘progressives’ and barely focus on women at all, largely consider me persona non grata and demand that I be banned from all events.
It was a sign of the times that the group that invited me to give a talk on feminism at York was the university’s Free Speech Society. It was scheduled for February but trouble immediately materialised and both the feminist and the LGBTQ societies got it cancelled. But my hosts did not back down and, pledging to guarantee the safety of both students and speaker, rescheduled the talk. It happened last week, in an atmosphere I found both deeply disturbing and profoundly distressing.
The night before, I woke in the small hours dreading what I would face. I admit to feeling horribly anxious and on the verge of cancelling. I’d seen social media posts organising a protest and knew I’d have to go on my own. Stringent security measures imposed by the university meant that only students and staff could be present.
I heard the noise before I saw the crowd. ‘Bindel, out!’ ‘Not welcome on our campus,’ ‘Decrim(inalise) sex work now’ and the like. I could have cried. How has this mad transgender ideology so captured the female students who, just a few years ago, would have welcomed me warmly as a mentor?
There were four burly guards who told me they’d first have to do a sweep of the room for smoke bombs and weapons. No one was allowed water bottles, in case someone threw one at me.
My heart started racing and my mouth was dry. Here I was, a feminist preparing to give a talk on male violence, being told that I could well be attacked. At that stage I almost walked out, but I knew that the humiliation would be too much to bear.
I couldn’t let the bullies win. I told myself I had been through this before. Yes, at Edinburgh University in 2019 I encountered verbal abuse, and one individual who physically lunged at me, but there weren’t many protesters then, and a fair number wanted to hear me. This time was the worst I’ve ever known it. I’d been told most students had been scared away, so I’d be in a room with fewer than 20 people, while 100 were outside, screaming my name.
My hands were shaking. I could not let the protesters see how sick I was feeling, so I approached some of them and tried to speak to them, but was blocked by a man who kept pushing a sign in my face: ‘Not on our campus’.
Every time I tried to take a photograph to record what was happening to me, he would thrust the sign towards my face as though he was going to hit me with it.
Someone waved a ‘Kiss my man boob’ placard at me. There were explicit comments about what I should do to their ‘trans d***’. Students — and a few members of staff — shouted vile things at me through megaphones. Female students turned their backs on me. It felt aggressive and hugely, horribly personal. I have reported from war zones — these were just a bunch of students. And yet it was devastating to hear them scream at me.
The few young women I did manage to talk to told me that my presence was ‘literal violence’. They told me I was a transphobe and a ‘whorephobe’ (I campaign against the sex trade). They shouted that there were 1,300 ‘sex worker’ students at York, and that I was a danger to them. I could have sobbed at the injustice of it.
Back in the room, I began: ‘Imagine that you have heard nothing at all about me, do not know me by reputation, except that I’m a feminist who has fought all her life to end rape and domestic violence.’ I said this because I had noticed two students from the demonstration were there, glaring at me. The talk went smoothly, but I honestly couldn’t wait to get out.
Healthy debate is impossible in that atmosphere, but what makes me saddest of all is that the women who scream at me have such a poor understanding of feminism and of me and my work. They criticise a mad, mangled parody. And, yes, it really does affect me. I feel unjustly attacked.
I became a feminist activist aged 17. This was in 1979, when sexism was brutal, in your face and constant. I faced it as a cleaner in a pub. The landlord sexually harassed me, then tried to rape me. I escaped, and found sisterhood in my feminist group.
One of the first campaigns I was involved in was to criminalise rape within marriage, which only became illegal in 1992. Since then, I have set up organisations such as Justice for Women, which highlights the injustice of sentences handed down to women such as Sally Challen, jailed for life after killing her sadistically abusive husband.
Somehow this has led campaigners to believe that I’m inciting violence, peddling hatred, or even ‘literally’ perpetrating violence. It’s an upside-down world when I’m the one who is ‘dangerous’ and a ‘bigot’.
How can I answer the charges when they are so at odds with reality? I speak all over the world on the global sex trade and its harm to women and girls, including at the United Nations. I have campaigned with sex trade survivors to change the law so that women convicted of prostitutionrelated offences have their records expunged.
Yet one twenty-something activist felt moved to mischaracterise my beliefs to her social media followers in this way: ‘Bindel is an advocate for the Nordic model. This is a model that criminalises sex-working individuals and denies them worker rights, which has been proven to put them at an increased risk of rape, murder, and coercion.
‘Bindel’s whole career is founded in supporting the mass homicide of sex workers.’ Mass homicide? Of women I’ve campaigned alongside for 40 years?
It feels like they are looking at me through a funhouse mirror and using my distorted reflection to mock my life’s work. And yet it is me that they accuse of hate speech. Maybe you think the treatment I suffered at York University shouldn’t affect me by now. I am an older media professional with a successful career and public profile, and they are just students, exercising their right to protest.
My life’s work has been trashed by lies
But this is as callous as it is disingenuous. I am not a robot. I have feelings. My life’s work, much of it activism and therefore unpaid, has been trashed by these protesters who spin lies about me.
After my hideous ordeal, I met a group of young women who were keen to talk about the real issues — sexual harassment, rape on campus — and it gave me a sliver of hope.
But how angry it makes me that they have to sneak around and hide their views; that female students are being bullied out of hearing from feminists who have actually achieved something and can help.
I went to bed feeling deeply depressed, unable to sleep. This time was different. I’m still not over it. I feel upset when I think about it. I think I always will. At the moment, academia feels like a closed door to feminists like me. After running the gauntlet through a hail of horrid insults and damaging untruths, I made a decision.
I won’t be giving up on young women — far from it — but for now, I will be giving up on British universities whose staff enable such behaviour
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As Parents Resisted Transgender Push, Teacher Suggested Sending in Child Services
If Erin Lee had known what her 12-year-old daughter would be exposed to during an afterschool “art club” last May, she would have never allowed her to go.
It began innocently enough. Lee received a text from her daughter asking if she could stay late for an “art club” at Wellington Middle School near Fort Collins, Colorado.
What happened next, though, would change their lives forever.
The “art club” was actually a meeting of the school’s Genders & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) club, a group dedicated to supporting homosexuality, transgenderism, and other nontraditional ideas about gender and sexuality.
When the leader told Amanda (name changed to protect the minor) she must be “queer” if she didn’t feel sexually attracted to anybody, and that she must be “transgender” if she didn’t feel fully comfortable in her own body, the shy little girl suspected something wasn’t right.
According to Amanda, that same leader told her not to tell her parents about what would be discussed that day.
The woman in charge, Kimberly Chambers, who works as a “health equity initiatives coordinator” for Larimer County and director of the pro-LGBT organization SPLASH Youth of Northern Colorado, also handed out her personal contact information to the children and urged them to contact her anytime.
Chambers’s organization has boasted of teaching children ages 12 to 16 about “polyamory”—relationships with multiple sexual partners simultaneously—and other controversial ideas.
During the afterschool GSA club, according to Amanda, Chambers explained to the children that their family homes may not be a “safe space,” but that there were “resources” available. She also handed out transgender flags and stickers that Amanda understood were supposed to represent the children in the club.
As soon as Lee picked up her daughter at school, it was clear that something was “off,” the mother told The Epoch Times in a series of interviews about the incident.
Amanda, looking confused, showed her mother the transgender paraphernalia she had received from Chambers. The transgender flag represented her, Amanda told her mom.
“My heart started racing and my mind blacked out,” Lee recounted. “I was in so much shock that I struggled to get out any words.”
Even though the GSA leader at school had told Amanda it was OK to lie to her parents, Amanda knew better. Over the days that followed, she told her parents everything, Lee said.
Amanda’s parents could hardly believe what they were hearing. Lee, who has described herself as an “ally of the LGBTQ community” and said she has a history of voting “pretty progressively on social issues,” was appalled.
But that would be just the beginning of an ordeal that continues to haunt the family.
The Fallout
Amanda never went back to the school after that. Instead, her parents put her in a local Christian school, even though it meant Lee would have to work nights to afford it. But as Lee and her husband saw it, there was no other choice.
Despite that Amanda was pulled out of Wellington Middle School, the family’s difficulties grew.
After the lesson, Amanda began to wonder whether she might truly be queer and transgender. Her mental state began to rapidly deteriorate, her mother said.
Multiple family members confirmed to The Epoch Times that prior to what Lee describes as the “grooming” of her daughter at school, Amanda never showed any signs of “gender dysphoria,” the term used by psychiatrists to describe discomfort with one’s biological sex.
Afterward, though, it was hard for the girl to shake the idea.
Lee and her husband, who was outraged by the ordeal, struggled for months with how to talk to their daughter about what had happened.
“We didn’t want to say something that would push her further into this dark hole or further into this transgender label,” Lee said. “And we did exactly what the trusted adults who indoctrinated her told her we would do. We played right into their narrative.”
Weeks after the incident, as her mental state got worse, the parents decided to take Amanda to a therapist. The therapist also ended up being “queer” and sought to affirm the young girl’s confusion about her gender.
By December, between the COVID isolation and the questions surrounding her gender, Amanda’s mental state was spiraling downward, Lee said.
The pediatrician immediately prescribed powerful psychotropic drugs for depression—medications that Amanda has since been weaned from—in an attempt to deal with the crisis.
“I don’t know if that fear will ever go away,” Lee said about her own concerns. “I don’t expect to ever stop being struck with sadness about what happened.”
Fighting Back
The more she thought about the whole ordeal, the more Lee realized she had to do something.
First, she contacted Chambers, the woman who Lee says “groomed” her daughter and who also sometimes works as a substitute teacher for the district. “Her response was alarming,” Lee said. “It was delusional. She doubled down on her actions.”
Next, she contacted the principal, who seemed empathetic but confirmed that secret GSA meetings with children were an intentional part of creating a “safe space” at school.
There are more than two dozen self-proclaimed LGBT children in the small middle school, according to social media posts by SPLASH. And the district is determined that they be “affirmed” without parental involvement, Lee said.
After all that, Lee spoke out at a school board meeting and contacted all its members by email. None responded. When she was finally able to sit down with two of them, they both “supported everything that transpired and refused to address any of my concerns.”
Finally, exasperated and realizing her first call would have been to the police if this had occurred on a playground or any other setting, Lee contacted the sheriff’s office.
While law enforcement was deeply sympathetic to her plight, and urged her to speak out loudly, there was nothing they could do from a legal perspective, Lee said.
District officials, meanwhile, saw nothing wrong with what had occurred, she said. Indeed, some expressed shock that a parent would be upset over the incident.
As Lee fought back, school officials were working on their next move.
Among other tactics, documents and communications obtained by The Epoch Times revealed a discussion about the possibility of reporting the parents to child-welfare authorities.
When Chambers was informed by the art teacher that Amanda’s parents had not been sending her to school since the incident, Chambers wrote back urging her to consider filing a report and have child-protection officials visit the home.
“If that persists, you’ll want to talk to admin about doing a well-child check or whatever is within the policies of the school,” Chambers wrote, describing upset parents as “barriers” and citing an “extreme case” in which a family did not allow their transgender child to leave the home unsupervised.
Lee was flabbergasted after receiving the documents.
“I knew this woman was evil, but I didn’t see this coming,” she said. “This teacher and Kimberly [Chambers] forced us to pull our child out of school by creating an unsafe environment, then discussed sending CPS into our home because we pulled her out, at our most vulnerable moment as a family—that they caused.
“If my child had indicated that we were not affirming her pronouns and trans identity, I believe the authorities would’ve taken our child away. And everyone involved knew this.”
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Transgender Infusion Takes Over School Systems: Enter the Pronoun Pin
That is the vision according to the Oregon Episcopal School website. That’s right-Episcopal. In this new age of gender-awakening and fluidity, the Director of the school’s Center for Learning and Teaching, Asha Appel, is taking full advantage.
The new push is “pronoun pins,” the latest stop on the road to inclusivity. Available to all OES employees, students, and their families, there are three pin messages: He-Him, She-Her, and They-Them—and they come in a handful of different colors. “OES teachers want students to know that their classrooms are spaces where students have voice and agency,” says Appel. “A teacher wearing a button declaring their own pronouns creates an inclusive classroom for kids who are working on their identity.
By wearing a button, the teacher is saying ‘you can safely share your pronouns here.” ‘All-School Equity Coach’ Willow McCormick added the following : “If we are trying to create an atmosphere of belonging, where every child at OES feels seen, known, and accepted, then it’s the impetus on adults to set the tone and conditions for that sharing of self. What I’ve seen in other places is the burden falls to the student who doesn’t exist within the gender binary to educate all of the adults about who they are and that the gender spectrum exists.”
With seemingly no hesitation or limitations, this training continues throughout academia as well all over our nation, many times with or without parental knowledge or consent, leading to a singular, sobering conclusion: this is more prevalent than most would dare consider, and more deeply rooted than most would dare believe. How did we get here?
Changing Definitions
In 2004, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary listed the term, “Trans-gender” this way: “having personal characteristics(as transsexuality and transvestism) that transcend traditional gender boundaries and corresponding sexual norms.” Even then, the individuals cited were generally adults (and by and large male) who had made this decision as an adult, and rarely if at all, sought to change his sex. In addition, the Williams Institute records that only 0.6%, or about 1.4 million identified as such based on a 2016 report.
However, something has changed.
Within the last few years, a relatively new trend has begun; not just in our homes-but in our schools. An unprecedented surge in girls, not boys-questioning their sexuality, as well as their gender, and seeking to change it. This is being done in most cases, or in many cases, WITHOUT parental endorsement and assistance. This was predominately an area that had been long since dominated by males not females. Nevertheless, the encouragement and push urging questioning girls to become transgender men is at an all-time high. While this was once an anomaly-it is now by and large a well endorsed part of our social construct-and academia has clearly taken notice.
https://theblacksphere.net/2022/05/transgender-infusion-takes-over-school-systems/
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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