The Owen Jones misogyny roadshow

A personal response to Owen Jones' misogyny by JL (apologies for the repost)

Owen Jones joked that ‘transphobes’ (by which he means the women who dare speak up in protection of our sex-based rights) should be legally prevented from watching It’s A Sin, Russell T Davies’ new TV series set during the 1980s and featuring a group of young gay men whose lives are touched by AIDS.

Of course, it behooves Owen’s agenda to paint gender critical feminists like myself as pitiless and unfeeling bigots who shouldn’t be allowed to watch a series like this since we couldn’t possibly have any empathy or compassion for its characters. And it behooves Owen’s agenda to elide the current trans debate with past struggles for gay rights.

But even he must see how ridiculous it is to compare the fight for people to be able to love their own sex with an ideology that maintains sex doesn’t exist at all, and straight men who identify as women are actually lesbians.

Something else Owen might bear in mind is that, unlike him, many of us ‘TERFs’ were around during the AIDS crisis. Unlike him, we not only remember but battled fiercely against the appalling homophobia and inhumanity suffered by those men who contracted this brutal disease.

Unlike him, we did what was right, not what was easy.

We fought like tigers for the rights and dignity of our gay male friends; we supported them when they came out, we took them in when their families rejected them, we campaigned against discrimination and for equality and we nursed and cared for them if, God forbid, they contracted the illness cruelly dubbed ‘The gay plague’.

Many of the women who cared for the gay men with AIDS were lesbians. When even clinicians and hospital staff were refusing to treat and care for patients with HIV and AIDS, lesbians stepped up to help.

Historian, Jad Adams, researched and produced a documentary about the role of activists during the HIV epidemic. Speaking to Dr Kate Lister for an article in 2018, he stated, “In the USA and the UK throughout the 80s and 90s, lesbians were active and much appreciated for their caring role in looking after men with AIDS – hospital visits, social security forms, befriending and so on…”

In the same article, a man who’d lived in San Francisco during the HIV outbreak in the 1980s spoke of doctors being too scared to enter the hospital rooms where his friends were dying. “Suddenly, the hospitals were full of lesbians who were volunteering. Volunteering to go into those rooms and help my friends who were dying. I remember being so moved by them because gay men hadn’t been too kind to lesbians.”

One of the few female characters in It’s A Sin is a girl called Jill who is friend and flat mate to some of the young men caught up in the AIDS epidemic. She is selfless, compassionate and unconditionally caring, providing emotional and practical support to the men who need her. She is a depiction of the many women who, in reality, stood by their gay friends at the worst time of their lives. No doubt Owen would have commended her as a shining example of allyship and kindness.

But fast forward 40 years. Jill is heart-broken that the female-only pool where she used to swim in peace and safety now has to admit males. Jill is trying to console her teenage granddaughter who has just lost a place on a sports team to a trans-identified male who runs much faster than she can. Jill is worried for her lesbian friends being attacked for refusing to date male bodied partners.

What would Owen say to Jill now? He’d call her a TERF, he’d call her anti-trans, he’d call her a bigot. He is the embodiment of a new misogyny and homophobia that sees women as less than human, and doesn’t see lesbians at all.