Every year there are attempts to shift the focus of International Women’s Day to men. Let’s not stand for that. It’s one day of the year and needs to remain firmly about women and women’s issues.
IWD needs to bring attention to the violence and abuse suffered by women around the world. It needs to highlight issues of particular importance to women such as reproductive rights and sex equality. It needs to condemn current attempts to prevent women from organising politically as a sex class.
One of the most potent tropes of misogyny is the dismissal of women’s concerns as secondary to those of any other group. We see this all the time; people are rightly outraged by displays of racism or homophobia or ageism or ableism… but disregard similarly overt sexism and misogyny. It’s breathtaking in both ubiquity and scope.
Currently, women are being coerced into abandoning their safe spaces and services and the language they need to describe their oppression and to organise politically. Their concerns over this are being dismissed with extreme prejudice, cries of “bigot” and “TERF” and their erasure from the public square.
This must stop. Women must have the right to organise politically without pressure to include men. They must have the right to vital spaces and services free from adult males. And they must be free to describe their own oppression without being hounded from social media, their jobs or their homes.
This International Women’s day (8th March 2022), Why not watch Helen, Helen, Sall and Milli on The Mess We’re In at the unusual hour of 7:30pm (UK time) on Tuesday?
It should be great. I won’t attempt to give a full biography for these brilliant women but in case you don’t know them:
Helen Staniland is a feminist and software engineer who was involved with the successful campaign to end the publication of pictures of topless women daily on page 3 of UK tabloid newspapers. She’s a regular presenter, along with Graham Linehan and Arty Morty on the weekly The Mess We’re In podcast. Helen is most famous for The Staniland Question:
which drives trans activists and other gender identity enthusiasts crazy. She’s a tireless pursuer of women’s rights to single-sex spaces and services. She faces daily abuse on social media and responds with indefatigable clarity, wit and patience.
Helen Joyce is the executive editor for events business at The Economist with a PhD in Geometric Measure Theory and is author of the hugely successful Sunday Times Bestseller Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. Her book was described by Richard Dawkins as “Well-written, thoroughly researched, passionate and very brave.” Helen’s compassion, humour and clarity of thought are extraordinary, but she has been subject to a protracted smear campaign for her criticism of gender identity ideology. She recently agreed to debate the trans activist Grace Lavery who displayed all the cowardice expected of him by pulling out, describing Helen as a ‘fascist’ in the process. If you watch the video, I’m sure you’ll see that Helen is about as far from fascist as it’s possible to be.
Sall Grover is a former Hollywood screenwriter and founder of the female-only social media service Giggle. Giggle connects women and girls from 84+ countries for freelance work, roommates, activism, emotional support and more. It’s unique in verifying the sex of its users using AI, supported by a human team. Sall writes: “The idea of Giggle started with a conversation between me and my Mum. I had recently returned from almost ten years in Hollywood, where I had experienced everything the Me Too Movement represents. It was my Mum who said, “There needs to be a way for girls to help girls!” We decided that we would create an app despite having no idea how to do that. But we quickly learned everything we could and, within 7 months had raised almost $500,000 and the app was in development.” Sall is known for her insight and penetrating wit on social media. If you don’t follow her, you’re missing out.
Milli Hill is a freelance journalist and author of the bestselling The Positive Birth Book, Give Birth Like a Feminist and My Period, a book for pre-teens. She has written for the Telegraph, Guardian, ipaper, GoodtoKnow, MailPlus and Mother & Baby. In 2012, Milli set up a grassroots organisation called The Positive Birth Movement. This was a network of free meet-up groups for pregnant women aimed at changing the narrative about childbirth. She ran the network single-handedly until 2021 when she was forced to close it because, in part, of the extreme bullying she received from her own industry. This was due to her objecting to sexed language being removed from issues surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. In particular, she questioned the replacement of ‘women’ with ‘birthing people’. On 25th November 2021 – International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls – Milli answered a post on obstetric violence with the perfectly reasonable suggestion:
and has been relentlessly bullied by trans activists and people in her field ever since. But like Sall and the Helens, she refuses to back down.
So like I said, this should be a great show. I hope you enjoy it as much as I expect to.
As always, take a look at my fundraising page. I’m doing wheelchair half marathons (hopefully three this year, plus sundry 10k events) to raise money for nia, a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.