Women's Fightback, Feminism

Free Sarah and change the left

Ryan ( Solidarity 682 ) is right to advocate that “Sarah Jane Baker should be released immediately”. Claureen also poses some good and important questions. He then ignores existing answers to these questions; instead throwing out a handful of straw men. In the article that Claureen replied to, and in both call-outs at Workers’ Liberty events for the campaign for Sarah’s release, the operative part of the speech was criticised. What she said in it — “if you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face” — was wrong. More on that below. Claureen requests that “[i]f we say parole was really revoked...

The New Section 28

The government is due to release guidance for schools around trans pupils, but it has been repeatedly delayed due to concerns it will not comply with the 2010 Equalities Act. What was initially meant to be advice for single-sex schools regarding the legality of refusing to admit trans pupils, now looks to be much wider ranging and incredibly alarming for trans youth and school staff. The guidance is likely to compel schools to inform parents if a child discloses that they are trans or questioning their gender; to establish the need for parental consent for a child to socially transition or...

Choose Life — Have an Abortion: The story of Justyna Wydrzyńska

Since January 2021, Poland has had a near-total ban on abortion. Before this, Poland already had some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, which only allowed for abortions in a small number of scenarios: if the pregnant person has been raped or the pregnancy has resulted from incest; if their life was in danger; or in cases of severe foetal abnormality. The ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal declared the last of these no longer valid. In 2020, there were approximately 1,000 legal abortions. Following the introduction of the new law, that number fell by 90%. Justyna Justyna...

If the Barbies aren't scissoring, is it even Barbieland?

• Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023) — BEWARE: SPOILERS! I went to see Barbie wearing pink. My friends were wearing pink. When we arrived at Peckhamplex in South London, almost everyone else was wearing pink. People walking past the cinema to do something else were wearing pink. Not since 'The Queue' has London given itself over to such an all-consuming cultural event. Variety reports that the marketing budget allocated to Barbie was a staggering $150 million — $5 millionmore than the film's production costs. Indeed, much of the film’s success can be put down to the fact that before it hit...

Sheffield's First Radical Pride

On 22 July over 300 people descended on Barkers Pool in Sheffield for the city ’s first ever Radical Pride. The organisers, Sheffield Radical Pride, are a group of grassroots activists from across the city. Their mission is to reclaim Pride and make it an anticapitalist protest again, without the presence of corporate pinkwashing or the police. The march set off, headed by blocs made up of QTIPOC (Queer, Trans, Intersex, Black and People of Colour), sex workers, migrants and refugees, as well as a bicycle bloc whose role was to block off streets and stop cars whilst the march progressed...

25,000 March for Trans Pride

Workers ’ Liberty activists joined tens of thousands of protesters marching in support of trans rights at this year's London Trans Pride on 8 July. The protest was an emphatic rejection of the Tories’ transphobic culture war and a vibrant show of solidarity with the UK trans community. At its peak, the demonstration was so large that organisers reportedly altered the route to accommodate the brightly dressed, politically-charged crowds which filled the streets as they marched from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park Corner. Placard highlights included “no borders, no binaries, no Tories” and (in...

An achievable average, being a woman of colour around the world

“Be the most interesting person in the room.” The Instagram ad, designed to inspire and excite, was surely wasted on me. From being a minority in my native Singapore, to a brown woman in Beijing, to bringing a rare dose of melanin to Moscow, and then falling directly into the ranks of "suspicious category" in Montenegro, and finally to Luxembourg, where being a person of South Asian descent is hardly unusual, my journey has taken me many places where I was, for better or worse, the most interesting in the room by default – or at least the one who drew the most attention upon entering. After a...

The liberating power of monstrosity

While the horror film genre exploits the female body as a site of terror, women artists can weaponise the same theme as a powerful creative source. Here, Liliana Pavier examines fine art objects through the lens of the horror film genre. WANGECHI MUTU: MYTHMAKING Wangechi Mutu is a self-proclaimed “irresponsible anthropologist and irrational scientist” and uses the canonically exploited black, female body as her point of departure. She fragments and distorts with collage and mixed media, splicing cuttings from magazines with medical diagrams. Mutu’s collages merge monstrous mythology with the...

Poetry: Nadia Drews

Describing herself as having been "brought up by women with house bricks in their handbags", London-based poet Nadia Drews says that she "has always known femininity with a hard edge when unclasped". Her poems, she says, are like the girls she grew up with, bleeding but bolshy. Nadia's poems have been published in various fanzines. She is a regular performer on picket lines and at fundraising gigs organised by Poetry on the Picket Line. Cassie Clusky ’s come for tea It’s okay ‘cos she’s asked her mum Her mum says ‘get home ‘fore it’s dark’ That’s when the bad lads with slavering dogs come They...

How Bermondsey's women joined the great unrest

“Wild factory girls… half-drunk and yelling the lowest music hall songs, and dancing like wild creatures”. So said the Bermondsey Parish magazine in 1900. Such sententious accounts of young working-class women’s behaviour were widespread as women gained limited independence through factory work. In the workplace they were seen as “cheap and docile labour”, and in the trade union movement they were largely invisible. Will Thorne, a leading trade unionist at the time, declared that “women do not make good trade unionists.” And yet, the young factory women of Bermondsey, in the hot August of 1911...

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