Lucy Watson - Transcript
“Former committee member of Green Party Women and Green Party Disability Group. Currently suspended for expressing my opinions, on the Party’s closed internal women’s forum, about Gender Identity Theory being made into law and public policy”
Speech for the Green Women’s Declaration: Green Women Speak Out.
22-01-24
Just going to start mine with a trigger warning, as this is not going to be a safe space for the next 10 minutes or so. I, and I’m quoting, ‘represent a risk to individuals or groups within the party’, according to the Witchfinder Generals, I mean Green Party Regional Council and staff, and they’ve suspended me from the Party with a No Fault Suspension. Inviting me to recant and apologise before letting me know what I even did! Finally found out my crime this time was posting a link to an article on survival instincts that the trans activists didn’t like. On the closed women’s internal forum of the party. I’d thought it was for posting some comments there, but that was another complaint by the same person on the same day. I got a third complaint from the same person today.
To put these suspensions and complaints in some context, a Green parliamentary candidate who violently ripped down this Declaration’s banner at conference hasn’t had any disciplinary action. It’s been business as usual for her. Nor did another Parliamentary candidate who posted jokes about paedophilia on public social media and plays out his sissy porn fetish in public.. The complaint I got today is because it’s alleged I was the one making obscene and disgusting remarks about him. Couldn’t make it up.
So yes, I’m guessing the more general reason I got suspended is that I dare to speak out, low key within the Party, about sex and human nature as part of the natural world, sex based rights, safeguarding children and the most vulnerable, and I’m a free thinker who sometimes calls out authoritarianism, corporate colonisation and corrupt politicians and organisations. I’m not going to go into all that here, but you should read Jennifer Bilek.
So, I thought I’d say a bit about myself to give an idea of why I signed the Green Women’s Declaration. I was born and raised in Bristol and have also lived in London, Brighton, Leicester, Amsterdam, Sicily, Italy, and Barcelona over the years. My parents were atheists, into 2nd wave feminism and were anti apartheid protesters in South Africa. I have early memories of CND protests, always been interested in language, expression, people and ethics and had a strong sense of fairness and justice, and always end up around the middle of the left liberal quadrant of that political compass test.
I’ve had my head in the war on women, the gender wars, the culture war, for 4 years or so, and still find it staggering that while I was politically dozing for a couple of decades, a movement shot into the mainstream that demands we upturn the global understanding of biological sex, material reality and commonly understood definitions of words, and replace it with post modern nonsense. Or nonce, sense, if you look at the academic theorists who cooked up Queer and Gender Theories. Incredibly dangerous nonsense that seeks to subvert social norms and erases boundaries, notably safeguarding ones. With an authoritarian regime of fear and punishment to those who dare not conform.
So while I was peaking, which is the term for when the scales fall from your eyes as to the realities behind these identity ideologies. I was seeing a guy who styled himself a progressive intersectional feminist. This was before I knew what I know now about those labels! He got very concerned as he thought I’d fallen into a far right trap and was surprised as he’d never had me down as akin to a Nazi before. Nor had I to be fair. He had a friend whose son identified as a trans girl, and they thought that as it was proving so hard for me to understand in the abstract (cos it doesn’t make any sense), I’d understand more by meeting and speaking with this vulnerable child, by the way he acts and dresses. I looked back on old messages when wondering what to say tonight and I’d msg’d in reply to him about how inappropriate that was considering my concerns were, and actually still are:
sexual abusers and predators exploiting the loopholes with self-id
conflations being made between sex and regressive gender stereotypes about how you act and dress. I grew up in the 80s – this battle had been won
having people dictate to me I must ignore reason, science and my own experiences and framings of reality to unquestioningly accept their beliefs, even when it makes no sense and puts people at risk
the attempted vilification of radical and female centred feminists, the terfs, that for some legitimises violence against us
aggressive intimidation being employed to try and quell free speech. Hello green party, it’s sounding familiar hey?
the language being employed in the public sphere instead of woman. Like ‘cervix haver’, ‘front hole’ (while men who call themselves women have the actual vaginas)’, person who bleeds’. Language referring to men isn’t being changed.
the objectification and degrading reduction of what it is to be a human female
the false belief that you can change your biological sex
the implications of what this could all mean for women and motherhood – after all, still need an ovum and a woman to create a human being whatever you label us as
I was failing to see why presenting the idea as fact that you ‘can be born in the wrong body’ is beneficial for children and why it was being injected into primary schools. It seemed confusing and damaging.
I have deep empathy born from 1st hand experience with people who feel like their body prevents them from fully expressing who they feel themselves to be. A primary school teacher once wisely told children that feelings are like fish in a pool, and the trick is to identify as the pool, not the fish. Not encourage them to cling on to that feeling your body is wrong, base an identity and sense of belonging to a special glittery group around it and sell them “gender affirming care”, the promise of a cure that involves sterilisation and irreversibly damaging their healthy bodies and that makes them reliant on the medical industry for the rest of their lives. Plus constantly feed them the lie that everyone who doesn’t share their beliefs about themselves hates them.
Anyway, things didn’t last with that guy. I was also in an art group in Brighton at the time, and became increasingly alarmed and bewildered by the answers I was getting there too. Even those who agreed with me were sort of hush hushing me not to talk about it. I’m curious by nature so I didn’t stop looking into it, and read, watched and listened to all sides, even going on social media which I hadn’t had the inclination to do before. The more I learnt the more I realised I couldn’t just pretend this wasn’t going on and retreat back into happy ignorance.
I was in a close friend of mine’s kitchen in Bristol on new years eve 2020 relaying my bizarre experiences about this, and she’d a couple of months earlier told me how the Green Party, she’s been a member for years, had lost its marbles and was rejecting biological sex when we were discussing the General Election. So much for holistic views about nature and just societies! I remember the relief on her face as she realised I’d got it, I’d peaked as it’s called. And I got the reassurance that I wasn’t going insane, and the outlandish sounding demands to reject material reality and safeguarding were true and mainstream. The propaganda’s everywhere once you see it.
I was hearing people out but nobody was convincing me I’d turned into a monstrous far right bigot, suddenly driven by hatred and devoid of compassion and empathy, and that the progressive way of the future was to erase fundamental human rights and demolish safeguarding. One of the head honchos of the art group invited me to her place for a chat about it, with another tutor, her partner, bizarrely seeming to hide there to listen in, and as I left down the cobbled mews where she lived, she called “transphobe” after me…it was surreal like a film, which so much of my life is like actually.
The Party has a principle to always think the best of people. I’m the kind of person who does it naturally. I’m 47 now, and I tell you. I’m not going into it all here but it’s got me into some really dicey, unsettling situations in the past.
Especially as I’m officially clinically vulnerable, registered disabled, as was diagnosed with Juvenile Idiopathic arthritis when I was 6 months old, and it’s severely damaged pretty much all my joints. So I’ve never lived a day without being physically restricted and in pain. It means I’m experienced at the balance of wanting to sometimes disassociate from my physical body while understanding the importance to holistic well-being of staying in touch with it and definitely not rejecting it, and I’ve grappled from an early age with understanding the reality of nature, and that it isn’t cruel or personal, nor is it fundamentally within my control.
I didn’t want children until I was about 30, then suddenly biology took over. I knew it was going to be tough and pretty complicated for me, but the evolutionary biological drive overwhelmed the more cautious sensible rationales. I have two amazing children and though it was very tough I’ve never felt more animalistic and primal as the whole experience of having babies. It’s so raw and your body sort of gets overtaken and possessed as your biology does its miraculous but full on thing of its own accord. Breastfeeding I felt so close to being a mammal, and I found it powerful and intimately beautiful. There are profound human experiences and capabilities that only women, adult human females, can have. Imagine the horror of seeing the Green Party signing a public letter in solidarity with a man who calls himself a mother and shows off his nipple fetish on Instagram, plus pictures of him making his baby suck from him. Labelling anyone with a problem with it transphobic and deleting posts about it from Spaces, the internal Party forum. In whose interests is it to normalise dehumanising and fetishising women and children, and disassociating humans from our material reality and the natural world?
I had my children in hospitals, which brings me onto how grim it is that the postmodern identity movement is using hospitals and public health services as one of its ideological battlegrounds.There was that case a couple of years ago where a man identifying as a woman raped a woman in a women’s bay, and the powers that be deemed it impossible as the guy identified as a woman and women can’t rape. It’s a predators dream, this movement.
But it’s not just a problem with predatory men. You can’t properly recover and heal while in a state of fear or discomfort. Sex based care and spaces and safeguarding boundaries are exclusionary by nature, and the overwhelming majority of attacks on women are by men, however they identify. Both leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, when defending the party’s ongoing battle in the courts to erase sex based rights, have stated boundaries can be policed on a case by case basis. I think that’s unfeasible nonsense that says a lot about them.
When I was about 15, I had to have surgery that meant bed rest in a hospital ward for 6 weeks. I shared a bay with some amazing old Bristolian women. The woman opposite me breathed through a ventilator mask most of the time that was pretty noisy and she could only mainly communicate through winks and stuff. But one day, even though it was really difficult for her to speak, she told me a story about how in her youth she’d once dated the actor David Prowse and he used to pick her up and shed zoom off on the back of his motorbike. Imagine my 15 yr old delight , that this woman who usually breathed through a heavy sounding machine used to date Darth Vader. The actor. Anyway! That story is nothing to do with the Declaration, but maybe helps get the picture that while bed rest is horrendous, a delicate sense of camaraderie can develop when you’re sharing such intimate, intensely vulnerable and raw spaces and times, and there were illuminating experiences.
I couldn’t move off my back for 6 weeks so my period came round. There was a 20 something year old male nurse or healthcare assistant, I don’t remember which. And one time he came to help me change my sanitary towel. I didn’t mind, none of my instincts were finding him threatening or uncomfortable. But as he was doing it, I realised that the women on the ward who had kindly let me know it was OK to insist on a female if I felt more comfortable knew what they were talking about. It was something about recognising he had no personal experience of menstruating and dealing with the blood so was coming at it from a completely different angle, not just physically but a sort of self consciousness that women simply didn’t have. I’d ask for women in future if it came to it from that time on. Nowadays, my safety could be compromised and id be socially shunned and demonised by some as a transphobe for not be willing to let a man who calls himself a woman administer intimate care, or validate and centre his feelings over my own. The aggressive, hate fuelled zealousness of gender activists is infamous and they use fear and coercion as a weapon.
In my experience, the majority of men don’t want to make women feel uncomfortable and try and avoid it. A good friend of mine has paranoid schizophrenia, and he got sectioned about 10, 20 years ago. They ran out of beds in the men’s section, so they moved him to the women’s because they said they could trust him. He had no choice, and felt incredibly uncomfortable. Because he knew his presence there was making the women feel uncomfortable and he wasn’t OK with that.
My fella went to his son’s drama school recently in London and there were ‘progress flags’ everywhere and only unisex toilets, that included showers. He felt uncomfortable. The men who DONT care about women’s comfort, consent and boundaries are precisely the men safeguarding boundaries are set to keep out. Everyone knows what sex they are, including those who try and identify out of it. Good men stay out so bad men stand out. However they identify.
It’s not a benign demand to expect everybody to validate your own view of yourself and prioritise your feelings over theirs. If you rely on strangers to validate your existence, that’s really on you. Not everyone else. A small group who have had a spectacular, rapid influence on governments, media, institutions, charities, corporations, the tech giants, and public policies…a small group like that isn’t a marginalised minority. It’s an elite.
A lot of men who call themselves women say they became aware of their inner womanly essence via porn. In their own words. People say ‘listen to trans people’ – I have. There seems a lot of deeply ingrained sexism, misogyny and homophobia, an essentialising of regressive gender stereotypes and pathologising of how you act and what you wear, a lot of young women who hate their bodies and porn addled men who fetishise women.
So thank you to the courageous, principled and brilliant women who got this Declaration together, and thanks to the everyone who’s signed it. History will show you were right all along, because material reality and nature will continue and persist however the present day political power bases try and spin it for their own ends. The virtue signallers and those in politics who substitute principles for pats on the head, and call human rights violations “fringe issues” are really showing themselves up.
And we see you, showing us that fundamental human rights like free speech, belief, safety, expression, dignity are fringe and ignorable in the society you are trying to create. As Martin Luther King Jr said, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” I think there’s something in that, though I’d include women.
Thanks for listening