Harry’s Place

This is a guest post by Sarah Brown

Back in October, David T wrote about a row which had erupted between LGB campaigning organisation, Stonewall, and some members of the UK transgender community, as well as some of our LGB and straight supporters and allies, over the nomination of Julie Bindel for Stonewall’s “Journalist of the Year Award”.

It may be worth taking a few moments to clarify why many trans people are so upset with Bindel. To hear her side of the story, one would imagine it was all about her 2004 article, “Gender Benders Beware”, where she pandered to negative stereotypes about us, suggested that we were all gay people who transition to avoid the social stigma of a same-sex relationship, and said that a world inhabited by transsexual people would “look like the set of grease”. She would also, I suspect, point out that she apologised for the tone of that article, and that she is only interested in honest debate.

The view from the other side of the “debate” is rather different. I am a trans woman (i.e. I transitioned from male to female) who is also a lesbian, and was one of the many people who chipped-in to make what ended up being the UK’s largest ever trans-rights demo, when around 150 protesters gathered outside Stonewall’s awards ceremony on a cold November evening, happen. My objection to Bindel has nothing to do with her pandering to negative stereotypes about me and people like me. Her 2004 article was ludicrous, it’s true. Transsexual people are not the stereotypes she portrays us as, we come in all “shapes and sizes”, just like the rest of society (girly girls and macho men, to butch lesbian trans women and effeminate gay trans men who sometimes enjoy a bit of drag).

The suggestion that we transition to avoid being seen as homosexual is also ridiculous. While it’s true in Iran, there are cases of people using gender transition as a last, desperate way to avoid execution for being gay, the UK is not Iran. Being visibly transsexual, a stage that most of us occupy for at least the early part of transition, if not forever in some cases, is to invite constant stares and threats of violence to a point where it’s a struggle to avoid having ones spirit crushed. It also ignores the rather inconvenient (for Bindel) point that after transition, transsexual people identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual in a far greater proportion than the rest of society.

No, where I have a real problem with Bindel’s work is with the stuff she hasn’t apologised for, much of which is far nastier than merely insulting a whole group of people in a national newspaper. Listening to Bindel talk about this (and she does, at length), one may form the impression that she’s invented her own version of transsexualism in her head. One where instead of us begging and fighting with doctors and NHS bureaucrats to obtain the one thing that helps end the pain of gender dysphoria, she pictures gender psychiatrists luring unsuspecting effeminate men and butch women into gender clinics. There they use their psychiatric mind-control powers, presumably accompanied by glowing, spinning eyeballs, to talk us in to having our willies or breasts “cut off”. This is because, so Bindel’s argument goes, transsexualism was invented in the 1950s by psychiatrists, motivated by a desire to make everyone conform to culturally oppressive gender roles. Since Bindel suggests gender (and here she seems to lose the distinction between gender identity and gender roles - a distinction which is crucially important for trans people) is simply a tool to oppress women, it follows that transsexualism is a medical plot to keep women down, presumably by maintaining a nice wide gap between “male” and “female” gender roles.

This too is ludicrous. For a start, the numbers involved simply do not add up - in the grand scheme of things there are hardly any transsexual people (5000 transsexual people in the UK is a figure that’s often quoted, although most agree this is an underestimate) , and far from being instrumental in enforcing gender barriers in society, we’re usually presented as figures of fun or contempt, sad pathetic people who are “fooling” nobody, or subversive deceivers who “trick” unsuspecting men into having “gay” sex. We have about as much influence on gender norms as a cork bobbing about in the wake of a supertanker has on its course.

But Bindel doesn’t stop there. She seems to be on a crusade to end this horrible conspiracy. In the summer of 2007, I sat in the audience for BBC Radio 4’s “Hecklers” debate in which Bindel took on four panellists in order to argue that “sex change surgery is unnecessary mutilation”. I listened to her paint a picture suggesting people like me are pathetic Emily Howard type characters, obsessed with girly shopping trips for blouses in pastel shades, and also say that “sex change surgery should not be available”, and that we “should be offered talking cures instead”.

That’s getting to the nub of why I, and many others, find Bindel’s views and agenda so objectionable; trans people represent an inconvenient diversion on the road to her genderless utopia (where everyone presumably “does gender” in the one true approved, vaguely masculine flavour of largely chaste grey androgyny). If we really are who we say we are, then we blow some of her vital assumptions about gender out of the water. Therefore we cannot be who we say we are - we must be deluded, the victims of a medical conspiracy.

And we have to go, for the good of the revolution.

While trolling the Facebook group set up to talk about the Stonewall protest, Bindel said that she did not support reparative therapy (the type of treatment favoured by the US religious right to “deprogram” LGBT people):

“I can confirm that I am strongly against ‘reparative’ or ‘aversion’ therapy, full stop.”

…but she refused to clarify her oft-stated position that we should not be allowed to have access to medical transition, that we just need to be talked out of it. I think she’s playing word games. She doesn’t “support” reparative therapy because she doesn’t believe what she’s advocating is reparative therapy; it’s not a duck, even though it quacks, waddles and can be found scrounging bread on urban riverbanks the length of the country.

Bindel likes to play the victim, to protest that everyone is harassing her. Presumably she believes that our programming by the evil psychiatrists is so pervasive that we can’t recognise her hand of friendship for what it is, and so bite it instead. She wants us to understand that she just wants to have a “debate”.

And that’s my second big problem with Bindel - the way she seems to think we owe her. She assumes our audience and participation in a debate she wants to have about whether we should be allowed to exist. It’s an academic exercise for her, but for us, this “debate” is about our lives. There seems to be absolutely nothing in it for us; we get to fight a rearguard action, justifying our right to exist, with the best possible (and extremely unlikely) outcome being that she stops being quite so gratuitously offensive towards us in her Guardian columns. Big deal.

One of the complaints many feminists have about the way men tend to behave towards women is the assumption that women will just drop what we’re doing to follow the agenda of a particular man who might be, for example, trying to chat us up (you were having a bad day, reading a book, just wanting to be left alone, none of that matters, can I pester you to have a cup of coffee with me? Oh, you’re a lesbian! Can I watch?) Bindel’s behaviour here is tragically ironic.

Even then, some of us decided to call her bluff. A forum was created in the Facebook group for this “debate” to happen in. A few of us asked questions. One woman asked:

1) Do you believe that ’sex change surgery is unnecessary mutilation’?
2) can a trans woman be (a) a woman; (b) a lesbian; (c) a feminist?
3) can/should we be ‘cured’ with talking therapies?
4) should we be denied hormone treatment?

In the same thread, I posted my questions:

1) Have you attempted to educate yourself on contemporary trans feminist thought by, e.g. reading Whipping Girl?
2) Do you know how easy oestrogen is to get without a prescription, and that there are non-UK surgeons who will operate with few questions asked?
3) What do you think of legal regimes which deny women legitimate routes to obtaining healthcare, thus leaving people such as back-street abortionists as the only route available?

Bindel did not respond to anyone. So much for her “debate”.

After the protest, she wrote an article in the Guardian where she declared she wanted nothing to do with other parts of the LGBT community. In it, she conflated queer people with those into “kinky sex” and said:

I for one do not wish to be lumped in with an ever-increasing list of folk defined by “odd” sexual habits or characteristics. Shall we just start with A and work our way through the alphabet? A, androgynous, b, bisexual, c, cat-fancying d, devil worshipping. Where will it ever end?

I just want to be left alone. I am not in your gang, I did not ask to be, so please don’t tell me I am one of yours, and then tell me off for offending your orthodoxy. Let’s have an amicable split, instead of ending up carrying on like The Judean People’s Front.

So imagine our surprise when, a few days later, trans campaigning group, Press for Change (who, despite having met with Stonewall’s supremo, Ben Summerskill to talk about the Bindel nomination were completely silent about the protest, and actively hostile towards some of those of us involved in making it work) announce that they are to be hosting “The Transsexual Debate” in Manchester on the 5th of December, between renowned US trans feminist academic, Susan Stryker, and “Stonewall award nominated journalist, Julie Bindel”.

Many of us can’t quite believe PfC are doing the very thing we were protesting about - giving Bindel the credibility that comes from being nominated for Stonewall’s Journalist of the Year and giving her another platform from which to conduct her “trannies as roadkill” agenda. Her opponent, Susan Stryker, is a formidable figure and I have absolutely no doubt that she will eviscerate Bindel’s position, but that doesn’t really matter. The mainstream press all but ignored the UK’s largest ever trans rights demo on the 6th of November outside the V&A, with the exception of Julie Bindel, writing in the Guardian. I’m not a betting woman, but if I were I’d put money on the only mainstream report on “The Transsexual Debate” being by Julie Bindel, in the Guardian.

One doesn’t have to read between the lines very much to realise that PfC feel that their noses have been put out of joint by the grass roots demo against Stonewall. There have been suggestions that they see the whole thing as some sort of a power grab against them (it’s not - we wanted their help, but they ignored us). I understand that within PfC circles, those of us involved are now being referred to as “those sort of people”. What comes as a shock is that they’re apparently willing to help such an unrepentant transphobe like Bindel push her agenda to reassert their dominance.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

The light beige Ayman al-Zawahri  have spoke his brains:

Ayman al-Zawahri said Mr Obama was not an “honourable black American” but a “house negro” - a demeaning term implying that he serves white people.

Here is a “heat map”, showing the regional concentrations of BNP members.

Somebody has also plotted individual BNP members onto Google Maps.

This is a guest post by Garvan Walshe

It was March 14, 2005. One million Lebanese – Sunnis, Christians, more Shia than would admit it now, and Druze too gathered in the largest peaceful anti-government demonstration ever in the Arab world. In proportion to population, it was the largest anywhere, ever.  The whole world was watching, and the secret police of Assad Junior, ophthalmologist and dictator, were forced out in a bloodless revolution, known as the ‘independence intifada’.
 
But now the “Syrial Killer” (as some of the placards on that demonstration read) rises again. The foreign secretary, David Miliband, gave an interview from Damascus yesterday. Would he bring up human rights, he was asked, twelve pro-democracy activists had just been arrested. “I’m sure it will come up” he said reassuringly. Doubtless the gangly Bashar, pouring his guest an twenty-second cup of sweet  tea, would take the chance to boast “Have you seen what my mukhabarat did just the other day? We arrested ten filthy opposition militants. We hauled them in. We’re talking to them  downstairs.”
 
Whatever happened to the Miliband who insisted ‘the rule of law in a democracy is the best long term defence against global terrorism and conflict?’ I doubt he feels emasculated after being caught in flagrante with that banana. More likely it’s realpolitik. For the wise heads of the foreign policy establishment have reached a consensus – that splitting Syria (GDP less than Ecuador) from Iran will reshape the Middle East. 
 
But Syria’s price is high and the international community’s means of enforcement doubtful. Mr Assad has two demands, the return of the Golan and the reoccupation of those parts of Lebanon not under Hizbullah’s control by his own army and secret police: make me stronger, and I’ll leave you alone. Why do we keep falling for that one?
Even without an open Syrian presence, March 14 supporter after March 14 supporter has been murdered. Should the intelligence services return, those left can expect slow, deliberate, vengeance.
 
A few hundred miles south, in a country of seventy million, that once dominated the Arab world but is now poorer per head than Armenia and El Salvador smaller numbers of Egyptians gather, from time to time they shout “Enough!”   - Kifaya - to protest against one of the moderate Arab states whom we insist are allies against Islamist radicalism, just as we used to believe that the Shah was a bulwark against Khomeini.  Kifaya are up against the Egyptian Government, and also against the theocratic Islamist  Muslim Brotherhood, erroneously portrayed as ‘moderate’.  Torture of the opposition is ‘routine.’
 
It was the Brotherhood’s great Ideologue, Sayyid Qutb who famously laid down the challenge: 

“Western civilisation is unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind. It knows it does not possess anything which will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence.”

The more we appease the Syrian regime, and so abandon the Lebanese who stood up to it in the name of universal ideals, in the name of freedom, and of democracy, the more Qutb will be believed.

Yes.

I suppose that it is possible, theoretically, that somebody might join the British National Party, being wholly ignorant of its racist policies, its racist membership criteria, and the convictions for violent and racist crime of a good number of both its rank and file and senior leadership.

But, come on! The whole point of the BNP is that it is a racist party. That is its unique selling point.

Have any of you ever read the BNP’s Constitution? Here you go:

SECTION 2: MEMBERSHIP

1) The British National Party represents the collective National, Environmental, Political, Racial, Folkish, Social, Cultural, Religious and Economic interests of the indigenous Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norse folk communities of Britain and those we regard as closely related and ethnically assimilated or assimilable aboriginal members of the European race also resident in Britain. Membership of the BNP is strictly defined within the terms of, and our members also self define themselves within, the legal ambit of a defined ‘racial group’ this being ‘Indigenous Caucasian’ and defined ‘ethnic groups’ emanating from that Race as specified in law in the House of Lords case of Mandla V Dowell Lee (1983) 1 ALL ER 1062, HL.

2) The indigenous British ethnic groups deriving from the class of ‘Indigenous Caucasian’ consist of members of: i) The Anglo-Saxon Folk Community; ii) The Celtic Scottish Folk Community; iii) The Scots-Northern Irish Folk Community; iv) The Celtic Welsh Folk Community; v) The Celtic Irish Folk Community; vi) The Celtic Cornish Folk Community; vii) The Anglo-Saxon-Celtic Folk Community; viii) The Celtic-Norse Folk Community; ix) The Anglo-Saxon-Norse Folk Community; x) The Anglo-Saxon-Indigenous European Folk Community; xi) Members of these ethnic groups who reside either within or outside Europe but ethnically derive from them.

3) Membership of the party shall be open only to those who are 16 years of age or over and whose ethnic origin is listed within Sub-section 2

This is the very definition of a racist party.  

Yes, the BNP is legal. I would oppose its criminalisation. Being a racist is not a crime. Neither is it a crime to discriminate unlawfully against somebody, or campaigning to make discrimination against section of the population, merely because they are members of a “racial” minority group, lawful. It is not a crime to want to thrown citizens out of this country, because they are not members of the Norse-Celtic-Cornish Folk Commuity.

But that is utterly disgusting behaviour, is it not?

Have a look at section 55 of the Data Protection Act 1998

55 Unlawful obtaining etc. of personal data

(1) A person must not knowingly or recklessly, without the consent of the data controller—

(a) obtain or disclose personal data or the information contained in personal data, or

(b) procure the disclosure to another person of the information contained in personal data.

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply to a person who shows—

(a) that the obtaining, disclosing or procuring—

(i) was necessary for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime, or

(ii) was required or authorised by or under any enactment, by any rule of law or by the order of a court,

(b) that he acted in the reasonable belief that he had in law the right to obtain or disclose the data or information or, as the case may be, to procure the disclosure of the information to the other person,

(c) that he acted in the reasonable belief that he would have had the consent of the data controller if the data controller had known of the obtaining, disclosing or procuring and the circumstances of it, or

(d) that in the particular circumstances the obtaining, disclosing or procuring was justified as being in the public interest.

(3) A person who contravenes subsection (1) is guilty of an offence.

(4) A person who sells personal data is guilty of an offence if he has obtained the data in contravention of subsection (1).

(5) A person who offers to sell personal data is guilty of an offence if—

(a) he has obtained the data in contravention of subsection (1), or

(b) he subsequently obtains the data in contravention of that subsection.

(6) For the purposes of subsection (5), an advertisement indicating that personal data are or may be for sale is an offer to sell the data.

(7) Section 1(2) does not apply for the purposes of this section; and for the purposes of subsections (4) to (6), “personal data” includes information extracted from personal data.

(8) References in this section to personal data do not include references to personal data which by virtue of section 28 are exempt from this section.

Furthermore:

• “data” means information which—

   

   

  (a)

  is being processed by means of equipment operating automatically in response to instructions given for that purpose,

   

  (b)

  is recorded with the intention that it should be processed by means of such equipment,

   

  (c)

  is recorded as part of a relevant filing system or with the intention that it should form part of a relevant filing system, or

   

  (d)

  does not fall within paragraph (a), (b) or (c) but forms part of an accessible record as defined by section 68;

• “personal data” means data which relate to a living individual who can be identified—

   

   

  (a)

  from those data, or

   

  (b)

  from those data and other information which is in the possession of, or is likely to come into the possession of, the data controller,

For good measure:

2 Sensitive personal data

In this Act “sensitive personal data” means personal data consisting of information as to—

(a) the racial or ethnic origin of the data subject,

(b) his political opinions,

(c) his religious beliefs or other beliefs of a similar nature,

(d) whether he is a member of a trade union (within the meaning of the [1992 c. 52.] Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992),

(e) his physical or mental health or condition,

(f) his sexual life,

(g) the commission or alleged commission by him of any offence, or

(h) any proceedings for any offence committed or alleged to have been committed by him, the disposal of such proceedings or the sentence of any court in such proceedings.

I think this probably means that it is improper to publish, or to post links to, this material

Accordingly, I will be editing this site to remove links. Sorry.

…but on the other hand

LC in the comments below says:

The European Court of Human Rights has held in its judgment in The Sunday Times v. The United Kingdom (no.2) and the Observer and Guardian v. The United Kingdom that the state may not
punish people for publishing information already in public circulation, even though the initial leaker is punishable under law.
So if the government should attempt to punish people for reading the membership list online, it’s in for a very negative ruling from the ECHR.
Since the HRA incorporates the court’s interpretation of Article 10, the mitigates the reach of the Data Protection Act to the latter imposes a disproportionate punishment for publication of publicly available information.

The BNP will not be the only political party embarassed by the publication of the far-right party’s membership list. So will the Green party.

I wrote recently about the Green’s unfortunate tendency to attract crackpots and nutters. I urged strongly that the party - many of whose members I count as friends - as a matter of priority investigated how racist moonbats got selected to stand for the party in elections and even act as media spokespersons.

Well, here’s another one.

There is a name of person on the list who stood as The Green Party’s parliamentary candidate in the 2001 election and the last general election in 2005.

Yes, Keith Bessant has stood for The Green Party in Cheltenam is the last two general elections. He has also acted as a spokesperson for the party.

It now transpires that he is a member of the BNP.

How the hell does this happen? How does a left-leaning party manage to select a person like this as a candidate? It there no screening process? Or did he go quite mad in the last two years and become a far-right racist?

Come on Greens. An internal review! Now! Don’t delay! Fix this! Fix it now!

Al-Jazeera’s 15-part documentary on the 1975-1990 Lebanon civil war is available online.

Hat tip to DaveM, who writes:

Now it’s biased towards Syria and against Israel (as you’d expect) but apart from that it’s an exhaustive thorough study into the war. Personally I bought it in Beirut and used it as the way to learn Arabic by covering up the English subtitles and learning the sounds.

Having been acquitted, he was sacked. But he is suing. Here is his statement:

Derek Pasquill, the Foreign Office Official who was acquitted of six charges of making disclosures damaging to international relations under s.3 of the Official Secrets Act 1989, has been dismissed by the FCO.

The criminal proceedings were dropped when the Judge was told that internal Foreign Office documents which had not previously been disclosed to the CPS actually undermined the prosecution case to the extent that the prosecution could not show that the alleged disclosures has been damaging to international relations. Despite this, FCO have taken this punitive step.

At the time of his acquittal Mr. Pasquill said:

“I have now been completely vindicated in my actions in exposing dangerous government policy and its changing priorities”.

Mr. Pasquill was alleged to have breached the Official Secrets Act by disclosing documents to the Observer and New Statesman relating to Foreign Office policy in the wake of the London bombings.  He was alleged to have leaked documents and memos relating to the government’s attitude to secret rendition flights and radical groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.  When the internal memos supportive of Derek’s case were disclosed to the CPS, they dropped the case and Derek was acquitted on 9 January 2008. Questions were raised at the time as to why the FCO had allowed the prosecution to take place when they were in possession of the very evidence that ultimately caused it to collapse. Derek Pasquill had been subjected to an 18 month long investigation and months of court proceedings before the FCO finally disclosed the undermining documents to the CPS which eventually brought the case to an abrupt halt.

Despite this, he was dismissed summarily on the grounds of gross misconduct on 21 August 2008. Due to the FCO’s failure to mediate Mr Pasquill will be issuing proceedings in the Employment Tribunal on the grounds that he was victimised for making public interest disclosures.

Mr. Pasquill disclosed the relevant documents in the belief that the public had a right to know about what he felt were policies that undermined the “fight against terrorism”.  He felt that government policy was contradictory and unsafe.  For example, on the one hand officials and minister were advising that human rights abuses ought not to form part of policy dealing with terrorism, but at the same time participated in rendition.  He also felt the public needed to be made aware of what he felt was a covert policy of appeasement.

Mr. Pasquill was suspended for twenty three months. He was then dismissed summarily eight months after he had been acquitted.  Amongst the reasons for justifying his dismissal the FCO stated that the “leaking of information ….. is never justified”.  Mr. Pasquill appealed against this decision on the basis that no account had been taken of the fact that such disclosures were in the public interest and had been made in good faith. Indeed, he asserted that many in the FCO felt the disclosures were not damaging as had been accepted by the CPS.  He believed that he had been suspended and dismissed in retaliation for his disclosures, rather than any damage to international relations.

Shah Qureshi, Mr. Pasquill’s solicitor and employment law partner at Bindmans LLP said:

“The criminal case was dropped against Derek Pasquill because the disclosures were not shown to be damaging to international relations. That view was held by many experts in the FCO itself.  My client feels it is far more likely that he has been victimised, contrary to the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, for making disclosures which he believed were in the public interest.”

Mr. Pasquill has tried to reach a resolution with the FCO without the need for legal recourse by appealing against the decision to dismiss him and attempting to engage in mediation.  However, the FCO has refused to mediate and Mr. Pasquill believes he has no other option but to issue proceedings.  His lawyer Shah Qureshi said:

“Derek Pasquill feels that he has been backed into a corner by the FCO’s belligerent stance. He made his disclosures in good faith with no benefit to himself. As a result, he has been subjected to criminal prosecution, stigmatisation and the loss of his livelihood for doing what he thought was ‘the right thing’. He will be issuing proceedings under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 which was introduced to provide public interest whistleblowers with protection against such victimisation. Nevertheless the door remains open for the FCO to engage in meaningful discussion.”

Good luck Derek!

The full story is here, on Lancaster Unity and The Register

The BNP blog, North West Nationalists are freaking out. As one of them puts it:

How can Griffin run a country if he can’t run a membership list?

Update: The BBC has the story

Further update: It is in all the papers. From the Guardian:

The British National party tonight vowed to take legal action after its entire membership list was published online in breach of a court injunction.

The party blamed disgruntled former employees for posting details of the names, postal and email addresses and ages of more than 10,000 supporters.

The Telegraph observes:

The spokesman said Mr Griffin alleges that publication of his members’ details violates both the Data Protection Act and the Human Rights Act, legislation his party has said should be repealed.