Jean Hatchet

Jean Hatchet wrote about anti-trans campaigners taking money and help from far-Right American groups The Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom. Her blog post has been taken down, after being widely shared among trans people. For the moment, there’s an archive link here. I have evidence of a soi-disant “left-wing” feminist taking far-right American money here. The amount Jean Hatchet named was $15,000.

She wrote, I don’t care what these people think about trans ideology. That cannot be separated from the things they do and advocate that specifically harm women. She named opposing abortion, supporting Mr Trump, and opposing divorce because it “causes social problems”.

There is a radical feminist argument against trans inclusion. I don’t accept it myself, but I see the intellectual basis for it. However these people paying the far-right money only care about excluding trans, and their ideas why are quite different. Most people don’t delve into those arguments: they don’t care about the specific arguments why men and women are different, and the result is to affirm the hard-right beliefs about those differences, which is the intention of those right-wing groups: differences of gender, of natural and normative personality and gifts, rather than of reproductive biology. That’s why the Times, Spectator and other media devote so much space to monstering trans women. The hard right campaign against trans people harms feminists, even gender-critical ones.

Jean Hatchet’s blog still contains her speech to the “We Need to Talk” anti-trans campaign. Trans rights campaigners should read it.

For women – their experience at the hands of violent men is not science fiction. They don’t wake one day and find themselves in the wrong body. They wake up and find themselves fighting for their lives. Or being raped. Or shielding their children from attack. They wake to find they are still facing a day where they will be humiliated and degraded and shamed and stripped of their confidence and human dignity by a man who hates them. He hates them because they are – not born in the wrong body – but born in a woman’s body. Domestic violence is overwhelmingly a male on female crime. Not a “gendered” crime. A “sexed” crime.

She quotes another woman’s experience: I hope one day [my story] may help others. My first encounter with male violence was at 6 months old, my dad damaged my skull after he punched me, violence continued against me until I was 3, when he then locked me in a bedroom and set fire to our house. Thankfully I was rescued by the fire department, but was immediately put into care. Things were fine until I reached 9, that was when the sexual abuse started. I was living in a care home. One of the carers was male. He abused me until I was able to leave at 16. After that I met my husband, from the start he beat me, raped me, and financially Destroyed me. But at that point I thought I deserved it, after all that has happened through my life I convinced myself that something was wrong with me, and this was all my fault. So I went along with it, I was defeated. 10 years later, I happened to find Mumsnet, and from that I found you, you changed all that for me, you gave me strength I never knew possible, you showed me this wasn’t my fault.

I can answer the error in her speech. She says, A piece of paper – a legal document downloaded from the internet will get determined, violent men like these easy access to a refuge if they want it. Not true: Layla Moran MP refuted it. See here.

The great triumph of the right-wing has been to set left-wing campaigners against each other. We have aided it ourselves- too often campaigning groups campaign for their own rights not for those of others, and some feminists campaign about the number of women on FTSE 100 boards rather than women in refuges. Trans women need to campaign on wider feminist issues. I am grateful to lesbian campaigners such as in Stonewall who recognise that the campaign against trans people will harm all queers, not just us. My cycling speed and endurance is probably nowhere near Jean Hatchet’s, but, whatever her views on trans rights I need to support her campaign against male violence.

December 2019: I see she’s been out successfully seeking notoriety by trying a bra on in a men’s changing room!!!

Shock, Horror!!!

It seems she was treated with the same bemused tolerance as the British use to other eccentrics, even trans women.