Judith butler terf2/13/2024 ![]() ![]() Thankfully, the Supreme Court shot them down – this time. So – in the most high-profile recent ‘GC’ legal initiative in the UK, transphobic feminists collaborated with a long-standing Christian conservative activist, in an attempt to destroy the law that informed, competent teenagers need for access both to trans healthcare, and to contraception and abortion. Keen-Minshull is no fringe outcast but a regular protest organiser, associated with other prominent British ‘GC’ feminists such as Maya Forstater, Venice Allan and Helen Staniland. That is, ways to stop pregnancy other than respecting girls’ rights to make their own informed choices about abortion and contraception. … We need to find other ways to stop teenage pregnancy.” Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (AKA Posie Parker) – one of the UK's most well-known transphobic feminists and a protest leader – agreed, saying: “My idea, from now on, is that maybe we need to repeal Gillick, or we need to re-examine it.… We have decided that children really can consent, and I don’t think they can. Īfter their defeat on appeal, Conrathe said that they would seek to take the case to the Supreme Court on the basis that “the Gillick competency test is no longer fit for purpose”. ![]() His previous efforts include multiple cases attempting to restrict abortion access or undermine the validity of consent to abortion ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) a challenge against equalising the age of same-gender sexual consent opposition to the ‘No Outsiders’ LGBT+ equality education programme at Parkfield Community School in Birmingham and a challenge to the BBC’s broadcast of the ‘blasphemous’ Jerry Springer – The Opera. Bell’s solicitor, Paul Conrathe, is an Evangelical Christian leader with a record as a conservative legal campaigner. Undermining or overturning Gillick is therefore a goal for reactionaries, from anti-abortionists to anti- vaxxers, who want to extend the ability of conservative parents to deny their children (particularly girls) the right to make informed choices about healthcare.Īngela Driver explained in Solidarity ( 1, 2, 3) how the Bell v Tavistock case revolved around Gillick competence and the ability of trans teenagers to access puberty blockers. Since then, it has been the legal basis on which under-16s have been able to access contraceptive prescriptions, as well as other treatments including abortion and vaccination. Gillick is a precedent set in a case where a right-wing religious activist tried, and failed, to block teenagers’ access to contraception without parental agreement. Gillick competence is the legal principle that children under 16 can consent to medical treatment if the medical professional assesses that the child has “sufficient understanding and intelligence to understand fully what is proposed”. Most of this is not original research but draws heavily on work by other activists, linked in the text for readers wishing to follow up. Being a sampling of examples, it is not an exhaustive, systematic mapping, and does not attempt to cover the longer historical roots of this cross-political convergence and coordination. I hope it will be useful to comrades who may not have encountered the problem before, or who may have assumed it marginal. ![]() This article is intended to demonstrate the unfortunate and shameful existence of these alliances. When Judith Butler wrote in The Guardian that 'GC' feminists were allying with the worst sorts of reactionaries ( 1, 2), some left-wing activists were genuinely surprised or sceptical to hear such an accusation. To confront the current resurgence of transphobia requires that we acknowledge and understand the phenomenon of collaboration between many prominent transphobic feminists (who now often describe themselves euphemistically, and inaccurately, as 'gender critical' feminists) and the hard right. Transphobic feminist Julia Beck on the far-right Tucker Carlson's show
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