Senator Paula Simons🇨🇦Last week, I had lunch with a political acquaintance, who told me right-wing parties in this country are using transphobia as a wedge issue - going into mosques and gurdwaras and temples, to "warn" parents there that trans activists are going to exploit and seduce their children. I wasn't sure whether to believe that. And then I saw how very many young Muslim women with children were part of the anti-trans protest in Ottawa today. The wedge seems to be working, alas. #TransRightsAreHumanRights
I wanted to go up to those young Muslim mums at the anti-trans rally on Parliament Hill today - to explain that these right-wing transphobes are NOT their friends, that many of them probably dislike Muslim women in hijabs almost as much as they dislike queer/LGBQT people. I know politics makes strange bedfellows. But if we don't stand together to protect each other's rights - even when we disagree - then we stand nowhere. #cdnpoli #Ottawa #yow #TransRightsAreHumanRights
TJ Radcliffe@Paulatics Historically, Islam has always had a significant appeal to the far right. While it might not in the US, Canada is not the US. So my expectation is that this alliance will have considerable staying power, and your argument will fall on deaf ears. The far right does not use the kind of ideological litmus tests that are so destructive to solidarity on the left: it is united against the modern world, the Enlightenment, & much more, and will ally with anyone opposed to them for any reason.
@tjradcliffe A sharp analysis.
Herb v/d Dool@Paulatics @tjradcliffe I insightful. If only the groups on the left could find common cause and put aside the differences to fight against these bigger problems. I've finished reading Rorty's Achieving our Country where he saw many of these things growing even in the 1990s, the rise of fascist groups, splits on the left, but also pointed back to an era when a coalition on the left could make a difference.
@herbdool @Paulatics The most extreme case of fracture on the left leading to victory on the right was in Germany in the early '30s, when the SDP and the Bolsheviks (both Marxist parties in those days) couldn't make common cause against the NSDAP: they literally hated each other more than they hated the NAZIs. Left-wing solidarity is sadly more of a myth than a reality, because too often leftists look like what Orwell was warning us against: seekers of power for its own sake, cloaked in moralism