This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, one of the high points of the Black-led proletarian civil rights struggle that overturned Jim Crow and decisively changed social relations in the U.S....
Saturday, July 17, 2021
Freedom Rides built fight to topple Jim Crow segregation – The Militant
Women’s rights at stake in fight over men in female spa area – The Militant
....Amie Ichikawa, one of the women who met up with Chapman, was targeted by antifa thugs because she was wearing a T-shirt featuring the dictionary definition of a woman — “Woman: a female adult human.”
Chapman said she was quickly surrounded by around 20 people shouting, “We don’t talk to Terfs,” an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminists. It is used to denigrate women’s rights supporters they disagree with. “They hit me with a piece of cardboard,” she said, “and tried to prevent me filming.
“They were shouting ‘get out transphobe,’ and they pulled my glasses off and knocked my phone out of my hand, pushed me, threw water at me. It was nasty,” Chapman said. She reported on Twitter that she has since been threatened with being “doxed,” that is, having her personal information, including her home address, widely publicized to encourage further harassment.
Ichikawa said she came to meet up with some women’s rights activists and wasn’t expecting the level of vitriol directed against them....
For unconditional recognition of Israel! Protest every time Jew-hatred raises its head! – The Militant
The Socialist Workers Party calls for unconditional recognition of Israel as a homeland for Jews. We urge unions and all organizations of workers and the oppressed to join actions like today’s rally to protest growing antisemitic violence and bigotry in the U.S. and elsewhere....
Saturday, July 10, 2021
Tribunal: Forstater’s stand for women’s rights was free speech – The Militant
....At Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland, law student Lisa Keogh faced an investigation from the college’s disciplinary board after she said during an online class that women are born with vaginas and “the difference in physical strength of men versus women is a fact.” Keogh said men who identify as women shouldn’t compete against women in martial arts. It took the university administration two months to determine that she had not harassed or discriminated against anyone. Keogh won backing from the Free Speech Union of which she is a member.
“It was a modern-day witch hunt,” Keogh told the press when she was cleared. “No woman should face discrimination in the way I have because she believes in sex-based rights.”
“When I worked in a garage, men would help me because I wasn’t physically as able as them,” Keogh told online magazine Spiked. “I have equal rights to them and to men in general, but I cannot be a man.”
Accepting the reality of biological difference between sexes is a precondition to advancing working-class solidarity against bosses who seek to pit men against women.
The opposite class view is widely promoted by companies and state bodies that sign on to the “Diversity Champions” program put forward by the British group Stonewall. The list includes the Scottish government. Some 500 organizations fork out the 2,500 pounds ($3,500) annual membership fee to be graded by the group for their “diversity.” Measures used to determine this include whether companies lobby for legal changes to let people “self-identify” their sex.
Anti-scientific notions that “men” and “women” are merely subjective categories to be changed at will are frontal assaults on conquests won by the movement for women’s rights.
“Women and girls lose out on privacy, safety and fairness if males are allowed into changing rooms, dormitories, prisons, sports teams,” Forstater has pointed out.
In a related matter, a man who says he is now a woman has been admitted to compete on a woman’s team at the Olympics for the first time. Despite the obvious advantages of having gone through puberty with male testosterone levels, 43-year-old Laurel Hubbard will be competing against women in weightlifting for New Zealand this summer. Hubbard did not make the grade as a senior international competitor until announcing he was transitioning to become a woman, at the age of 35.
This is a blow to women’s sports, which depend on separate competitions for men and women, and a blow to hard-fought gains for women’s rights.