From persuasion to coercion...

I wrote about UKUncut, the intimidation of protesters, and what that says about the government's confidence in its own spending plans, in the Independent today. Read it here.

Urgent abortion support appeal: help a teenage girl in Northern Ireland

I don't normally do this, but I'm posting this verbatim from Mara, the convenor of the UK's Abortion Support Network, which provides assistance to women travelling to England from Northern Ireland to access safe, legal abortion. This is a very important appeal - please help by donating and/or cross-posting and tweeting this wherever you can. Solidarity, L.xx

Whether it’s a shortage of mange tout at the supermarket or a friend stranded abroad, we’ve all been affected by the cloud of ash from Iceland. But imagine if you had only a few weeks to navigate your way to England for a safe and legal abortion.

This week, we’ve heard from a number of women who were due to have travel to the UK this week for terminations, including a very young teen who is extremely close to the 24 week time limit for abortions in the UK. She had to miss her appointment earlier this week and is now coming next week by ferry and train – a roundtrip journey of more than 24 hours. Her mother solely supports her and her siblings with a part time job and now has to cover costs of £2,300 (procedure + money lost on cancelled flights + last minute ferry and train tickets).

Due to these extraordinary and extremely difficult circumstances, ASN has made a pledge to fund this young woman £500, much more than we usually commit to a single case. This is less than half of the costs she is facing. We would like to help more. If you would like to help cover more costs for her and women like her, please pledge to make a donation today.

You can do this by donating via PayPal (http://www.abortionsupport.org.uk/donate/), writing a cheque (email info@abortionsupport.org.uk for our postal address), or by making an online transfer (HSBC/Abortion Support Network/Sort Code: 40-11-18/Account Number: 64409302).

Please mark the donation “Iceland”.

Thank you in advance for any amount you can give – your donation will make a real difference to this family or to one of the other women who have had to re-purchase tickets to travel to England.

This is very interesting.

I can absolutely understand why many people around my age don't want to vote in the upcoming elections, as long as they can understand why they deserve a smack and a dose of Susan B Anthony: suffrage is the pivotal right. If you opt out of the one effort that makes you a relevant civic entity, you have forfeited your right to complain about anything the government does, and you have betrayed all the other young people who do want the right to be heard. Generations of suffragettes, civil rights protesters and trades unionists did not fight and die so that you could sit on the sofa thinking about how the government never listens to you.

But if you're stil parrotting the line that voting doesn't make a difference and politicians are all the same - implying that you've never actually looked too hard at John Redwood- there is now an alternative. You can give your vote to someone who does care, someone in another country affected by Britain's policies on trade sanctions, climate change and military interventionism, someone who doesn't have a voice in these elections, but who just might deserve one. No, really.

The Give Your Vote campaign is one of the maddest, most mind-boggling, most potentially revolutionary ideas to come out of the internet age in Britain so far. The concept is simple: if you don't see the point of using your vote yourself, as is the case for many Disaffected Yoofs, then you can sign up to recieve notification of how one real person in Ghana, Bangladesh or Afghanistan would vote in your place, if they could. And then you get off your arse and you cast that vote. Due to launch on Monday, this drive to combat voter apathy and build international solidarity has already gained several hundred Facebook followers, many of whom appear to be more than caps-happy flamewar faff-merchants, and several of whom have already pledged to donate their unused votes to people in developing countries whose livelihoods, homes and families have been imperilled by the decisions of British governments.

The scheme seems to be surprisingly thought through, with manifestos and focus groups in each of the target countries and an open-source system based on the efforts of volunteers to co-ordinate the proxy votes on election day. I spoke to the Give Your Vote campaigns organiser, May Abdalla, who is evangelical about creating a climate of global democratic involvement in an age where politics is disconnected from the reality of young people's lives:

"The internet means we can conceptualise communities that aren't just geographical, and start imagining democracy that isn't just limited to within borders," she said. "Young people understand that our 'neighborhood' is now global, but the campaign is aimed at everyone who feels passionately that people should be allowed to be part of the decisions that affect them. And we're not the first to have this idea. During the US election, people started questioning the breadth of US influence; when we see so many so-called international organisations dominated by a few countries, whilst at the same time 'democracy' is held up as something so valuable that our country will fight for another nation to get it, we have to question how there can be real responsibilty in their actions if those they affect can't hold them to account."

"Give Your Vote is the mobilising of a transnational civil society through new media," Abdalla explained. "People in Ghana and Bangladesh have respnded so well to the idea that they can represent themselves, rather than acting through an NGO that has its own objectives or requirements. The internet has a capacity to be used as a democratising force - because we can allow that diversity of opinions without the need for gatekeepers and be active in that process."

All very sweet and utopian. But aren't they worried about being slung in jail for electoral fraud? "It's entirely legal, because we are not forcing anyone to vote in a particular way - jut encouraging them to allow others to use their vote as a platform," explained Abdalla. "Anyway, David Cameron tells us who to vote for all the time."

Most media outlets I've spoken to have dismissed Give Your Vote as a deranged student movement, and that, more than anything, is what excites me about the scheme. As a rule, any idea that makes nice people from both sides of the bourgeois political spectrum immediately and furiously dismiss you as a mental person generally has currency, because it almost always threatens unexamined orthodoxies. Orthodoxies like geography as the sole organising force for solidarity and fellow feeling. Orthodoxies like the inalienable right of the West to operate for its own profit or pride in the third world without being held to account by citizens of developing countries. Orthodoxies like East and West - them and us - rich and poor.

I will not be taking part directly, because I'm already planning to use my own vote to assist one of the liberal PPCs in Leyton and Wanstead. But if you're not planning to vote yourself, I absolutely encourage you to sign up to the Give Your Vote scheme. If you can't be arsed to tick one box once every five years to hold your government to account, you now no longer have the option of whinging that it won't make any difference, because if even a few hundred votes can be cast by proxy in this election by people in countries affected by British policymaking, that will send an important message about international solidarity. I say this as a British patriot - yes, I'm on the left, and I'm a patriot and I'm proud, a patriot who believes in no borders. I love the British, and I also love my planet, and I believe that global thinking and global policymaking are the only paradigms that will count in a world that is increasingly connected, facing more and more problems that cross international borders, and approaching the singularity threshold. I believe in an international struggle for the liberation of workers, of women, of the disposessed. And lots of other young people believe in it, too.

The Give Your Vote scheme is exciting because it's a whole new way of thinking about politics and online democracy, and that's frightening for the old people who are currently sitting on all the power and all the money in this country. It's frightening enough that this time round, Give Your Vote's impact will remain small, and they will doubtless be dismissed by everyone as a bunch of idealistic, utopian, lunatic do-gooders, which is precisely what they are. But so were the first suffragettes; so were the early civil rights activists; so were the Diggers, the Levellers, and all the weirdos and fringe gangs in this country and elsewhere who dared to dream of a freer, fairer world.

Most of the people reading this blog only have rights today because someone, tens or hundreds of years ago, had the crazy idea that we deserved them, and was prepared to be dismissed as crazy and hounded as a dangerous freak because of that powerful, paradigm-bended idea. Someone always has to do it first. And maybe, just maybe, this is another one of those first times.

More feminist cisfaff

[ETA: this post comes with an All About Me warning.]

Tonight I spent one bright, washed-out hour in a cafe in Soho talking shop and solidarity with two wise and steadfast trans activists, and am now feeling brave enough to stick my head above the parapet. Yes, I have been following the fiasco over Friday's protest against Julie Bindel's appearance at Queer Question Time, with her dangerously transphobic views in tow. Yes, I read and was tremendously upset by the casual transmisogyny of Bea Campbell's attack on the peaceful protests, including shaming the event organiser for using the phrase 'having the balls'. Yes, I'm glad that a retort made it into the mainstream press, and was delighted to see the Guardian giving space to C L Minou, who very graciously namechecked my recent F Word piece. But more than anything, I'm sick of this fight.

I'm sick of this fight, this childish, pointless, energy-draining fight to include our trans sisters within the feminist movement. Got home to find out that no, the anti-transmisogyny workshop that Sarah and Sally and I had worked so hard to push onto the agenda at Feminism In London 2010 will not be happening. Despite the fact that the workshop was designed as an expression of much-needed solidarity between transsexual feminists and the rest of the movement, despite the work we did to set it up as a signal that despite the many, many instances of transphobic speech and action by cisfeminists in recent years, the wider movement is ready to grow the fuck up and make room for trans people within our debate spaces, the workshop was not deemed a priority. We're still holding out hope that the workshop can be held on an alternative date, and maybe that will happen, and maybe progress can be made. I will never stop agitating within the movement for the vital importance of building solidarity with transsexual feminist women. But right now, I'm sick of this fight.

I get to be sick of this fight, you see, because I'm cis.

Because I am a cissexual feminist, I can divert my energies elsewhere and return to fight another day. Transmisogyny is my problem, because it's every feminist's problem, but when you get down to it, I can still walk into the lavatories or changing rooms assigned to my chosen gender without fear of punishment. Yes, I'm genderqueer and a bit of a weekend butch, yes, I have been and will continue to be privileged to act as a mouthpiece for transsexual women who are unable to bring their terrible Y chromosomes into cisfeminist 'safe spaces'. But when you get down to it: I am cis. I can walk away. If I disagree with my cissexual sisters, I will still be allowed to march alongside them and demonstrate with them and work on common issues and raise my voice in sisterhood and solidarity.

Because I am a cissexual feminist, I can put these issues to one side as the movement prepares for the massive right-wing backlash that's rearing on the horizon, whatever the result of the next general election. I can help strategise over how best to defend against Tory plans to limit equal pay audits, to "put marriage back on the agenda", to attack abortion rights. And I know without a doubt that when the fightback begins, trans women will be standing beside me.

I know without a doubt that next time we need to march on Whitehall to defend women's right to choose to terminate pregnancy, trans women will be marching alongside me - even those who, like many cissexual women, do not happen to have the capacity to bear children themselves. I know that my trans sisters will be there, standing up for the right of all women everywhere to decide what happens to our bodies, standing up for our right to control our own physical destiny even if that upsets the moral majority. Because when a shuddering, bone-crunching beast of patriarchal, hierarchial backlash is coming over the hill, solidarity has to mean something - doesn't it?