Votes For Women

Update 89

We will win. Never give up the fight.

Obviously women do now have the vote ( thank you, the Suffragettes) but in elections now, whether local or national, we are once again having to look to vote for women’s rights. We didn’t expect to have to do that again, did we? We are also voting again for gay and lesbian rights. We didn’t expect to have to do that again either, did we? And we are voting for the safeguarding of children. We certainly didn’t expect to have to do that, did we?

It is prescient that Andrew Doyle begins his excellent book The New Puritans (which is not just about gender ideology) with the Witch Trials of Salem. He writes:

The first to be hanged was Bridget Bishop. She was a tavern-owner in her early sixties and had never met her accusers until she faced them in court.

…

The chief accusers were a group of young girls who would perform their histrionics in court to the horror of magistrates, ministers, families and friends. As Bishop took the stand, the girls writhed and screamed as though possessed, claiming that Bishop ‘did oftentimes very grievously Pinch them, Choak them, Bite them, and Afflict them.’

Bridget Bishop was hung on 10 June 1692. Obviously we look back on this now and say: ‘How crazy that people could have believed in witches and that all these patently false accusations could be believed!’ Welcome to our current world!!

Andrew Doyle continues:

The willingness of the villagers to believe the girls’ visions serves as a reminder of the human susceptibility to false narratives, particularly if they are more readily comprehensible than complicated truths. When bad ideas are allowed to spread unchecked they take on an illusion of incontrovertibility, and when figures of authority are captured by dangerous ideologies, resistance becomes a feat of courage that few will dare to attempt. …Such patterns recur wherever reason is abandoned and fear prevails, be that during the ‘Red Scare’ of 1950s McCarthyism, or the ideological capture of today’s major institutions and the trickle-down orthodoxies this has inspired.

And so to those of us on Terf Island who have local elections on 04 May. I have just e-mailed my local candidates starting with ‘what is a woman?’ and then moving on to all the other issues we are concerned with.

Women’s Rights Network in their latest News Review provide very useful suggestions about how to approach the local elections building on the Respect My Sex campaign:

We continue to ask politicians the difficult questions. Find out if your area is holding local elections on the 4th of May, and learn more about how you can influence candidates on our Respect My Sex Campaign site. We have leaflets you can distribute and posters you can use. 

Our focus this year is the safeguarding of children in schools. Here are questions you can ask: How will you ensure our local schools are teaching facts about the reality of sex? Are boys allowed in the girls’ toilets? Can boys compete in my daughter’s sports teams?

We encourage you to engage with candidates and show them this is an important issue on the door step.

Please do question your candidates if you have not already done so. Thanks to WRN for their very helpful advice and suggestions. Unfortunately the Party of Women is not yet in place for these local elections. When it comes to the general election us Terfs may have a simpler choice (?).

All thoughts gratefully received. And please let me know if any queries.

Barry Humphries

I reported yesterday on the great letter from Barry to Glinner:

https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/three-billboards

Alexander Larman in The Telegraph ( Dame Edna versus the trans mob 22 April) reports:

Perhaps Dame Edna’s strangest appearance came in the 1972 comedy The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, which Humphries co-wrote, about the bawdy exploits of a young Australian man in England: ‘Aunt Edna’, as the character was called, was played almost naturalistically, in stark contrast to her usual high-camp persona (“Hello, possums!”) and the absurdity of the rest of the film. Although Humphries pioneered a comic cross-dressing act decades before RuPaul’s Drag Race and its ilk – albeit one that owed a good deal to Arthur Lucan’s music-hall character Old Mother Riley – he flirted with outrage throughout his career before finally going for broke in 2016 by calling gender realignment surgery “self-mutilation” and Caitlyn Jenner “a publicity-seeking ratbag”. 

He claimed that he had been speaking in character, not as himself, but the resulting hoo-ha saw an award named after him at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival – ‘the Barry’ – have its name changed to the altogether less catchy Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award. Humphries remained unrepentant until the end of his life, saying in 2018 “how many different kinds of lavatory can you have?” and calling transgenderism “a fashion”. 

Good old Barry! RIP.

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