Transing sisterhood
The feminists that aren’t feminists:
Sisters Uncut — founded to campaign against cuts to domestic violence services — claims that the same “white supremacist patriarchy” oppressing feminists is “murdering Palestinians”.
It appeared to play down the massacre of 1,300 Israelis by Hamas terrorists on October 7, saying: “The violence of the oppressed must never be equated with that of the oppressor.”
And of course both come stamped with labels so that we can all know instantly which is which.
Explaining its alignment with the Palestinian cause, Sisters Uncut said: “As intersectional feminists we know our struggles are connected; nobody is free until we are all free. The same colonial logic of white supremacist patriarchy that oppresses feminists the world over is murdering Palestinians right now, through isra*l’s [sic] racist apartheid settler-colonialism.”
Meanwhile there are zero racist or sexist Palestinians and we know this because of the careful stamping (see above).
More recently, the group has campaigned for the rights of transgender people and minorities. On its website, the group describes itself as “women and gender-variant people who live under the threat of domestic violence”.
And thus, finally, we are told that these “feminists” are not feminists at all.
In July it supported Sarah Jane Baker, a transgender rights activist who told a Pride event to “punch a Terf” [trans-exclusionary radical feminist]. Baker had previously spent 30 years in prison for kidnap and attempted murder. Baker was later acquitted of a charge of inciting violence in connection with the Terf comment.
Even though he was in fact inciting violence with the “terf” comment.
Since the Hamas attack on October 7 Sisters Uncut has repeatedly posted on social media about the conflict. One video showed protesters holding a Palestinian flag next to a banner that said: “Trans liberation, trans revolution now.”
Makes me nostalgic for the good old Nazi-Soviet pact.
The manichaeism of oppressor vs. oppressed cannot be explained rationally. It is a form of religion. All that is good is on one side; all that is bad is on the other side, and we can always tell them apart. For folks who scream about the sex binary, they sure do like their binaries.
Was Adolf Hitler an oppressor or an oppressed?
When Adolf Hitler met with the Mufti Amin al-Husseini of Jerusalem and they made common cause to kill all the Jews in the Levant, was Hitler working in favor of the oppressor or the oppressed? How about the Mufti?
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-mufti-and-the-f-uuml-hrer
When al-Husseini accepted 750K DM a month for the purposes of exterminating Jews, was he an oppressor or was he oppressed? When Himmler praised the Mufti’s efforts in doing so, was Himmler an oppressor or an oppressed?
Hamas is pursuing the exact same goal – eradication of Jews from the Levant – that Hitler paid the Mufti to pursue, and which Himmler congratulated al-Husseini for doing. It is a continuation of the Nazi goal, and the same Muslim Brotherhood which helped al-Husseini escape arrest after WWII gave birth to Hamas. They still have the same beliefs, which precede the establishment of Israel:
-Al-Husseini, November 1943
How very oppressed he sounds.
The justified, pre-emptive assault of TERFs is nothing next to bigotted, TERFy, misgendering, stickers, and leaflets, and should be considered righteous self-defence against trans genocide and worse.
[…] a comment by Papito on Transing […]
If we don’t draw the line at violence, we can’t draw a line between oppressor and oppressed.
I would note some striking similarities between the misters of the Sisters Uncut and the misters of Hamas but both being equally oppressed is NOT one of those similarities.
“Sisters Uncut”? Sounds like the name of a TIM “lesbian” group …
Because, of course, women would fare so very, very well under an Iranian-backed Hamas-ruled regime…..
@Sastra:
Surprisingly, though, “oppression” is not about violence, indeed it’s not even about “oppression”. It’s about outcomes. In woke ideology, the only explanation for unequal group outcomes is “oppression”.
Hence, drawing a line between oppressor and oppressed is done straightforwardly by looking at outcomes and seeing which groups are successful and which are not.
If life is better for a kid in Tel Aviv than a kid in Gaza City, then those in Gaza are “oppressed”, regardless of history, regardless of violence, regardless of the roles of Hamas and/or Israelis, and regardless of actual oppression.
Hence, the Oct 7 attacks where Hamas deliberately targeted civilians and killed 1200 or so, make no difference at all to who is being oppressed.
I expect the day will arrive soon when, after every interscholastic sporting event, the winners must sit quietly while the losers excoriate them for being oppressors.
The Women’s March posters featuring Linda Sarsour in head covering made a dent in my enthusiasm for that particular movement and underscores the shallowness of what we refer to as “intersectionalism.” While the women in Iran are sacrificing themselves to beatings and imprisonment in order to shed the headcoverings, here she is wearing a symbol of her submission. I mean, if men under the strict rules were required to wear head coverings, we could say “okay, then.” But, it’s a bit of a stretch to embrace misogyny and fight for women’s rights all at once don’t you think?
I get that girls and women are taught from a very young age that for a man to see them without headcovering would bring them shame, and so I don’t support the practice in France of publicly forcing women to remove their covering. I do think that accepting the cultural norm undercuts the aims of feminism, so it was hard to take Deedra Hill Abboud completely seriously as a Democratic candidate for Senate in Arizona. (She had been a fundamentalist Christian who converted to Islam when she married a Muslim and decided to adopt the headcovering, and as a Sanders Progressive made a quixotic try at challenging Sinema in 2018 for the Dem nomination.)
I suspect that the embrace of Palestine on the left is an affect in part from Trump’s Muslim immigration ban in 2017. Certainly, I don’t claim that is the only cause, but the outrage at the treatment of a class of people for their religion somehow morphed into an acceptance of even the abhorrent practices mandated by the religion. Tolerance can be taken too far, and I have discovered to my chagrin that criticism of a religion is taken as an attack on all those who practice it. (I had to block Abboud on Facebook because she went on a tirade after I questioned the embrace of burkinis in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition. I had opined that it was a double-dose of sexism.)
Mike, I think Trump’s anti-Muslim antics might have entrenched and exacerbated the left’s support of Palestine, but it’s been a strong feature of the left long before Trump. By the time I reached college in 1978, it was already present, and has grown stronger over the years. It was pervasive during my stay in the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Oklahoma in 1989, with the youth wing in the ward vocal on the subject and abusive of anyone who expressed a single word of support for Israel. Much as I love to blame Trump for things that go wrong, I can’t blame this one on him.
iknklast, I grew up in a Leftie household but Israel/Palestine was never a topic. We were more focused on workers’ rights.
My first clue something was wrong came at age 13 when my Egyptian Jewish teacher of French with the Greek surname could not contain her joy over the 6-day war she abandoned an entire French class to talk about Jewish oppression and fight back.
I’d say the War on Terror and 180ism was a factor; I 100% would’ve cheered on the Hamas attack if it’d taken place in 2003, but this was back when I thought religious pluralism was an unalloyed good.
Now I find myself wondering why I should care what religious conservatives do to each other… I don’t like any of them, though I support the US fulfilling its commitments to its allies and preventing regional escalation.
@Blood Knight:
While Israel does indeed have a large number of religious conservatives, large swathes of Israelis are not religious and not conservative. I suspect that few religious conservatives attended the rave that Hamas attacked.
Well sure, but what do you think the split in Gaza is? Hence why I’m at least marginally on the Israelis side on this one…
@Blood Knight:
I’d say that Gaza is pretty much 90% or more religious extremists. Islam doesn’t really do “moderate” religion.
In saying that I’m adopting the same standard for “extreme” religion that I would adopt for (say) white Christians. If a religious person thinks that (in their idea of a perfect society) leaving a religion should be legally punishable, or that criticising a religion or drawing satirical cartoons should be legally punishable, then they are (in my eyes) extremists.
Even the Westboro Baptist Church don’t hold to doctrines that extreme, and by that standard most Muslims are extremists.
Islam doesn’t do moderate religion, but some Muslims do.
Rev, I grew up in a fundamentalist conservative household, and it was never a discussion, but how to remove regulations and get rid of welfare was. But…I recognize my sample size of one there, and try not to extrapolate from that, if not in part because I do prefer to believe my family was abnormal. It’s better for my mental health that way, even though as an adult I have realized that they are much more normal than I am…if we count normal as regression toward the mean, or what there are more people doing than not doing.
My set in high school, however, was a different story. And when I got to college, the support for Palestine was broad and palpable. Again, probably not a great sample because not representative; the circles we hang out in are representative only of our preferences, and are not selected at random.
In short, I could be wrong. But I do know that leftist support for Palestine was there long before Trump, even if it was limited to my particular circle of friends and the magazines I read (such limitation being highly doubtful, but perhaps representative of only a tiny, tiny minority…but since one of those magazines was the Nation, I suspect sort of wider).
iknklast,
I’m roughly the same age, and my memory matches yours. At least since the mid-70s, it seems, Israel has been perceived as the bad guys among many on the left. I think a lot of the criticism is valid, especially of the settlements in the West Bank and the way Israel is conducting the current war, but if you try to point out that the Palestinian leadership shares a lot of the blame for the misery of the Palestinian people, you’re just an apologist for colonialism and/or genocide.