Question time for Bindel

2 Feb 2010 | Uncategorized

Sometimes, arguments move on — and when they do, those who were once at the forefront of intellectual and political thought are left high and dry.

So it may be with Julie Bindel, and many of her supporters, who were outraged on Friday as a bunch of uppity “trannies” and advocates of other causes (from sex workers to gay rights) turned out variously to picket, leaflet and heckle her appearance on Queer Question Time at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

A great deal of hot air  has already been expended on this ruckus, so here are the edited highlights. Julie Bindel is controversial. To begin with she restricted herself to targets that fellow progressives agreed needed taking potshots and over the years she has been a staunch ally and campaigner on behalf of lesbians, gays, victims of domestic violence and trafficked women — amongst others.

Her influence for good cannot — should never — be discounted. However, to the dismay of some supporters, she has latterly turned her fire on those who might be considered her natural allies. Among other things, Bindel now says lesbianism is a lifestyle choice; gay men have just as much male privilege as straight men; and most controversially — most damagingly, some would say— she has also become a flag carrier in the cause against the right of transsexuals to exist, arguing publicly that “sex change surgery is modern-day aversion therapy treatment for homosexuals“.

That is radical stuff: it is also dangerous stuff in a world where cuts in public services are on the cards, tough choices need to be taken, and the next government is likely to be looking round for places where they can swing the axe with little fear of recrimination. Populist cuts, in this context, could spell the death knell — literally — for some transsexuals, as one of the key reasons that gender re-assignment is catered for by the NHS is the serious psychological trauma suffered by those forced to continue in a gender that is simply wrong for them.

Which brings us back to Queer Question Time. The venue is a place usually considered one of the safest “queer” venues in London: organisers of the demo against Julie Bindel claim that their intention was never to argue “no platform” — but rather to protest the insensitivity of inviting someone who denied their very existence into what had previously felt like their home.
The demo passed relatively peaceably: events inside rapidly descended into farce, as it seems that the event organisers had courted controversy — but not prepared themselves for its arrival.

Heckling — on behalf of many causes — rapidly turned vicious, and much interesting debate was drowned out and derailed.

The Guardian, which has in the past been accused of acting as house magazine for the Bindelite strand of feminist thought turned out Bea Campbell on Sunday to defend Ms Bindel against those who were being nasty to her — and to conflate the events at the Royal Tavern with a recent decision by NUS Women’s Conference not to share a platform with her in future. This, in turn, set the phone wires buzzing, and another piece landed on the screens of puzzled readers on Monday morning, as blogger CL Minou turned out to argue against giving Bindel air space.

Should Ms Bindel be denied a platform? If one reads her own views on the topic, she sees this as a vicious and inexplicable ad feminam campaign against her. In exchanges — on Facebook — with one of the demo organisers, she appears genuinely outraged that she, a “lesbian feminist jewish woman” should be accused of being partly responsible for the deaths of transwomen.

On the other hand, arguing against the right of a group to be recognised — to exist —goes beyond commentary that can be put down to a “just a difference of opinion”. Bindel’s Facebook comment typifies a certain strand of gender and sexual politics  and it may sound the death knell for her position at the forefront of that movement.

It is known as the “hierarchy of oppressions” and is the bad joke that sits at the heart of New Labour thinking on equality: the idea that certain groups and minorities are oppressed and others are oppressors — as opposed to a broader Human Rights approach that simply condemns oppression and discrimination wherever it rears its head. As one academic put it: “Equality is the framework that makes discrimination possible”.

Feminist academic Alexandra Dymock — reacting angrily to the Bindel-centred fuss —  wrote this weekend: “Ask your average feminist working in academia whose research has been systematically ignored or refused funding by Labour in favour of the socially conservative spin Bindel and co spit out that happens to back their policy plans up and they’re enraged and disillusioned. It also allows the general populace to dismiss any potentially progressive thinking about gender equality upon the logic that feminism means ‘female advancement’.”

For now, the argument is about whether an old guard feminist should still be allowed the space to speak – though through the traditional left-wing media, she still has a pretty powerful platform. The real story may be that this confrontation with the trans community may be the beginning of the end.

Ideas that were once radical are becoming more mainstream: and a new, queer, non-heteronormative debate is breaking out around sexuality and gender. Its out of the box — and won’t go back inside, no matter how hard its opponents push.

Jane Fae also writes as John Ozimek: her blog may be found at janefae.wordpress.com

Could Trafigura and Terry signal the demise of the superinjunction?

1 Feb 2010 | Uncategorized

This article first appeared in Media Guardian

‘John Terry dumping toxic waste?” went one of the many wisecracks circulating on the internet after it was revealed that the Chelsea and England captain had failed in an attempt to gag reporting of his personal life. Until the widespread uproar over Trafigura‘s attempt to gag pretty much everybody last year, few people knew about superinjunctions. In fact, we still don’t. At a meeting of parliament’s joint committee on human rights last year, politicians asked the assembled journalists, lawyers and human rights workers how widespread the problem was.

How could we possibly know, given that neither the courts nor any public office keeps records? We can ask individual media organisations how many injunctions they labour under, but because they can’t tell us what the injunctions concern, we can’t collate accurately without risk of duplication in the figures. The best-educated estimates put the number somewhere between 200 and 300 superinjunctions at any one time in the UK.

It is a measure of how deeply the Trafigura fiasco affected the public psyche that much of the anger (and humour) directed at Terry online on Twitter and other social networks concerned his legal representatives Schillings’ use of a superinjunction, rather than his alleged extra-curricular activities.

But was Terry right to claim (anonymously, it turns out) that his Article 8 right to “respect for his private and family life” would be breached by publication of these allegations about this private life? One could argue that no one’s sex life should be subject to such scrutiny. But there is clearly an element of public interest when the England football captain is alleged to have been up to no good, especially one who was voted “dad of the year” by one poll last year. That said, Mr Justice Tugendhat did not straightforwardly rule that Terry’s right to privacy is trumped by the public’s right to know. He made it clear that “intrusive” material would potentially be subject to an injunction.

The judgment is not in the same vein as Lord Woolf’s in the case of the footballer Garry Flitcroft in 2002. The then Blackburn Rovers captain attempted to stop the People reporting on his extra-marital affairs with a nursery teacher and lap dancer. In a court of appeal ruling, Woolf declared that the prohibition represented an “unjustified interference” in press freedom. While this was seen by many as setting a precedent, Friday’s ruling follows a line defined by Mr Justice Eady in the case of X v Persons Unknown, where it was stated that some aspects of people’s lives are “naturally accessible to outsiders”. In other words, perhaps, some people know, and eventually more will know, so is there any justification in attempting to stop people knowing through legal means?

Tugendhat also stated that “in the language of defamation, the information would be capable of lowering [Terry] in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally”. He was right to extrapolate that this alone is not enough to block publication, but the mention of libel points to something darker.

Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights enshrines the right to privacy. But Index on Censorship is concerned that this right is increasingly used as a pre-emptive alternative to a defamation suit. In some ways, a superinjunction works better than a libel suit: after all, in libel cases, the allegations must be published first, and there is a chance (though only slight) that the litigant may actually lose.

Meanwhile, ever more bizarre decisions are made: in France, Roman Polanski recently won damages in a Paris court after a picture of his wife, the actor Emmanuelle Seigner, was published. This may not seem unusual, but the picture published in Voici magazine merely showed Seigner walking in the street. The European Court of Human Rights set a precedent in 2004, when Princess Caroline of Monaco established that the publication of pictures of her grocery shopping was a breach of her right to privacy.

The increasingly aggressive pursuit of privacy actions is often an attempt to entirely dictate what is published about a person (or in the case of Trafigura, a corporation). Friday’s ruling, combined with Trafigura’s epic failure to suppress information, suggests that courts may be less willing to issue such injunctions in future. And perhaps sensible solicitors will be less willing to seek them.

Britain: Perverse logic

28 Jan 2010 | Comment, News, United Kingdom

Despite the odd absurd anomaly, such as an attempt to prosecute for a depiction of a woman having sex with a cartoon tiger, the UK government’s “extreme pornography” laws have not have proved to be the threat to free expression says John Ozimek
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