Why Feminists are Fighting Back
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 talk at universities by student feminist groups. I love nothing more than engaging with young women about the struggles they face today, and their ideas on bringing about positive change. But in 2004, I wrote an article for a national newspaper in which I criticised transgender activists who tried to close down a rape crisis centre when they refused to include male-bodied transwomen as counsellors, and ever since I have been dogged by so-called progressives who consider me ‘transphobic’. This means university feminist groups, which nowadays are stuffed with just these ‘progressives’ and barely focus on women at all, largely consider me persona non grata. According to the dictatorial and censorious regime that has taken hold in UK universities, indeed, the opinions of older feminists like me are ‘unacceptable’. Our views, our talks and our books must all be banned, they shriek.
It was a sign of the times, then, that the group that had invited me to give a talk on feminism at York was the university’s Free Speech Society. It was scheduled for February but the predicted trouble immediately materialised and students from both the Feminist and the LGBTQ societies got it cancelled ‘until we can guarantee the safety of students and the speaker’. Yet my hosts did not back down and the talk was merely rescheduled. When it went ahead last week, security arrangements included four burly security guards doing a comb of the room for smoke bombs and weapons, and a ban on bottles of water in case they were thrown at me.
When the security guards told me about the security measures, I was aghast. As they combed the room, looking under seats and on chairs for weapons, I told myself to keep calm, and that I had been through this before. But actually, this was by far the worst, because I had been made aware that most students had been scared away from coming to hear me, so I would be in a room with less than 20 people, when a hundred more were outside, screaming my name. I could hear them, and I knew that they would be shouting all the way through my presentation. As the students came in they were not frisked, but the security men kept a close eye on them.
The night before, I woke in the small hours dreading what I would face. I was on the verge of cancelling my talk. I had seen the social media posts organising a protest and, sure enough, I arrived on campus to witness an angry mob of more than 100 students, and even members of staff, shouting ‘Go home, Bindel’, ‘Blow jobs are real jobs’, ‘Decrim(inalise) sex work now’ and the like. The placards, waved in my face, had slogans such as ‘Feminism is for everyone’, ‘Dykes against Bindel’, and ‘Hate speech is not free speech’. My favourite was ‘Bindel, you are not being silenced, you are silencing US’.
I had to go to the event on my own. Because of the stringent security measures, the University had imposed a rule that only students and staff could be present. I was met off my train by one of the organisers, and as we drove up to the campus, I could hear the noise before I saw the crowd. "Bindel, out!" “Not welcome on our campus.” I thought back to the times that I had been warmly welcomed on campus when coming to speak with feminist societies, before this mad transgender ideology captured the vast majority of female students. I couldn't cave into the bullies, but all I wanted to do was run away. I was met by a radio producer who was recording some audio for a program we are making together, and she could not believe how hostile the crowd was.
I could not let them see how nervous I was feeling, so I walked up to the crowd to try to speak with any of the students, 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 so that I had a record of what was happening to me, he would push the sign towards my face as though he was going to hit me with it. As I walked up to some female students, they aggressively turned their backs on me, began chanting more vile slogans.
I told myself that I shouldn't be scared. After all, I have reported from war zones, I have been undercover in really dangerous situations, and these were just a bunch of students. But even so, being screamed at by a large crowd felt absolutely devastating.
A person waved a ‘Kiss my man boob’ placard at me. There were some very explicit comments about what I should do to their ‘trans d***’. Students and a few members of staff shouted through loudhailers that I was not welcome on ‘their’ campus (a public institution). ‘We are paying for this!’ yelled one student. She wasn’t, unless she meant that paying tuition fees entitled her to police who spoke on university property.
Finally, somebody agreed to speak with me. She was a member of staff, and hostile. She told me, without catching my eye once, that my views on trans people and "sex work" were dangerous. I thanked her for her time, but she just turned her back on me and walked away.
I attempted to talk to some young women, but they told me they were afraid for their safety, and that my presence on campus was ‘literal violence’. Bearing in mind that I have been attacked by men, either because they didn't like my feminism or the fact that I'm a lesbian, it felt horrendous to be condemned by a group of women who I support and defend. I could have sobbed with the injustice of it, bearing in mind that these young women should be picking up the mantle and becoming the next generation of passionate feminists defending the rights of their sisters.
I asked what it was they were protesting and they told me I was a transphobe and a “whorephobe” (because I campaign against the sex trade). They shouted that there were 1,300 ‘sex worker’ students at the university, and that I was a danger to them.
I began my talk with a question; "imagine that you have heard nothing at all about me, do not know me by reputation, except for that I'm a feminist who has fought all her life to end rape and domestic violence.” I asked if they would put their prejudice aside and listen to what I was going to say. I said this because I had noticed two students from the demonstration were in the room, glaring at me in a hostile fashion. I picked up my stride, and the talk went relatively smoothly. I honestly couldn't wait to get out of that room and off the University.
I have to admit that I take this unfair criticism personally. 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 where I worked, as a cleaner in a pub. The landlord relentlessly sexually harassed me, and then tried to rape me. I managed to escape, and found support and sisterhood in my feminist group. I refused to blame myself for what had happened and understood how important it was that we refused to let men get away with sexual assault. One of the first campaigns I was involved in was to criminalise rape within marriage, which finally 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, who was jailed for life after killing her sadistically abusive husband.
Somehow – I’m not sure how – this has led these campaigners to believe that I’m inciting violence, peddling hatred, or even ‘literally’ perpetrating violence against them. It’s an odd upside down world when I’m the one who is labelled ‘dangerous’ and a ‘bigot’. How can I engage with this kind of rhetoric? How can I answer the charges when they are so at odds with reality?
I began to wonder, listening to the students shouting hateful things about me, if my life's work has been for nothing, and I will be remembered by this generation as a hateful bigot. I felt profoundly distressed imagining that.
One twenty-something activist at York 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 forty years? It feels like they are looking at me through a fun house mirror and using my distorted reflection to mock my life’s work. And yet it is me that they accuse of hate speech.
Everything I have done has been ignored, subverted and presented to the students as though I hate women and trans people when I have fought all my life against oppression of all marginalised people. You might as well argue that lifelong campaigners against child poverty are in fact stealing bread out of the mouths of babes, or that climate change activists are deliberately throwing plastic into the sea.
I’m an established journalist, with over 40 years of campaigning behind me. If I have to steel myself to face this anti-democratic, censorious bullying, what hope do young women stuck on campus have? If this is allowed to continue, universities will become nothing more than a breeding ground for men’s rights activists.
Maybe you think that this type of treatment shouldn’t affect me by now. As is often said to me, I am an older media professional with a successful career and public profile, and they are just students, exercising their right to protest. 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 have spun lies about me. Yes, that does cause me distress.
After this hideous ordeal at the university, I went to meet with colleagues in another part of the city to talk about feminism and the way forward. I was delighted to have a lovely conversation with a group of young women after my talk at York. We talked about feminism. Real feminism. Ending prostitution. Ending male violence. Protecting women’s spaces. Those young women gave me hope, but I also felt very angry they had to sneak around hiding when all they were doing was talking about how to cope with the dreadful challenges of their daily lives, about issues like sexual harassment and rape on campus, to name just two that were flagged up. It’s a huge shame, and a disaster for feminism, that many female students are being bullied out of hearing from feminists who have actually achieved things.
At the moment, academia feels like a closed door to feminists like me, and I feel profoundly distressed at the fact that I have given so much of my time and energy, unpaid, to students over the years, particularly female ones, seeing me as a threat and danger on campus rather than someone that they might actually learn something from.
After running the gauntlet at York, however, 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.
 | A guest post by
|
So disheartening. I support your bravery, persistence and crystal clear thinking!