The vile slogans used by trans activists at FiLiA 2021

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

A version of this article first appeared in MailPlus on 19th October 2021

In a packed room at Portsmouth’s Guildhall, there’s an electrifying atmosphere to hear Julie Bindel speak. Most of the women, myself included, are there because they know about Bindel’s contribution to feminism - a solid fight back against male violence and exploitation of women spanning over four decades.

But Bindel barely has the mic in her hour and a half long session. Instead, she offers it over, first to audience members in their twenties and thirties to tell the room about the issues they feel are affecting women today, and then to Zemzem Mohamed, a refugee from East Africa.

Zemzem is there to tell us about genocide in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, a hidden humanitarian crisis, in which women and girls are suffering the most, with over 62,000 reported rape survivors and many thousands more facing famine.

As the room leans in to hear Zemzem talk about her mother, seriously unwell, trapped in Tigray and unreachable, and about how she is putting all of her personal savings into helping Tigrain refugees in Sudan because, whilst she cannot help her mother, she can help these people instead, a group of protestors in the square outside begin audibly chanting, “Trans women are women!” and, “Blow jobs are real jobs!”.

Bindel’s talk forms part of the FiLiA conference, an annual event that began in 2013 and is now the largest grassroots feminist conference in Europe. This year activists tried to prevent the event from going ahead, on the basis that some (but by no means all) of the speakers and talks were focused on what they see as two controversial issues: women-only spaces, and ending prostitution.

Led by local independent councillor Claire Udy, and claiming to be supported by Amnesty International, their protest ‘Standing Against Transphobia’ objected to women gathering to discuss the legal implications of accepting that anyone who says they are a woman must be unquestioningly treated as one. They also assert that ‘sex work is work’ and that anyone who feels that prostitution exploits women is a narrow-minded bigot.

Udy was reportedly joined in the square by members of academic staff from the University of Portsmouth, including a Dean, which is concerning against the backdrop of the current attacks on Kathleen Stock at Sussex University, and on one of the FiLiA conference speakers, Professor Jo Phoenix, who has announced she is suing the Open University for a similar campaign of vilification and harassment.

The contrast between the behaviour of the protestors and the actual content of the conference, highlighted so starkly during Zemzem’s moving talk, seems particularly revealing. The women inside the Guildhall were listening to speakers from Afghanistan, India, Russia, Zimbabwe, migrant women, activists, almost all with ending violence against women as their key focus.

On the second day, the Emma Humphrey’s Memorial Prize, set up by Julie Bindel and others in 1998 to celebrate those who work to end violence against women, honoured the work of a wide range of women, including the lesbians of Block 13 of the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, and ‘Daisy’, a woman conceived by rape who fought for nine years to bring her birth father to justice.

You couldn’t help feeling that if some of the protestors had come inside, they could not have failed to be moved by the work of the women being platformed. And yet instead, they were outside busy with their chalk, drawing multiple large penises on the square alongside messages such as ‘F*** TERFs’, ‘Transphobes can suck my pink strap’, and holding placards with choice slogans such as ‘Suck my d*** you transphobic c****’.

Women had to stand on their messages for Saturday evening’s femicide vigil. On the protestors facebook page, Claire Udy objected to the privilege afforded to the vigil holders of being allowed the large screen in the square to display the names of murdered women, and quipped, ‘they better not touch our chalk drawings!’.

Everyone has the right to champion or protest a cause, but observers also have a right to judge the priorities of the activists. While the FiLiA delegates prioritised remembering and naming dead women, the protestors were more concerned with protecting obscene and puerile graffiti. While women in the Guildhall spoke about rape as a weapon of war, the protestors told us we should ‘suck their d***’.

This is the same age-old sexism that women like Bindel have been fighting tirelessly for decades. The protester’s placards, supplied by Amnesty, bore the slogan, “I am who I say I am”. They said they were ignorant misogynists, keen to intimidate women into silence. I believe them.