Trouble in the Chat

What to do with message group politics

We again have a round of drama in the GC world after feminist Lippy has released a recording of gay activist Rudy engaging in vile misogynistic, verbal abuse where he suggests that feminist activist Aja could suck the sperm out of his penis as an apparent punishment for her resistance to whatever the men had decided was the right way to go. Let’s have a chat about chat groups.

I’ll declare my bias first. It is not the first time I have mentioned Rudy on my substack. As the good friend of Dennis Kavanagh, Rudy got involved in a pileon I was on the wrong side of for an opinion I expressed about women using gendered pronouns for trans identifying men in public discourse.  Rudy tweeted that I was Fascist and Nazi adjacent and that tweet was liked and defended by Colin Wright among others.

I won’t rehash the debate, but at the centre was a trans identifying man that Dennis had vowed to defend to his dying breath, and he did just that. What I want to highlight, is that in the GC world, men are permitted to speak in any way they please, while women are disciplined for speech by co-ordinated groups of men who often gather in message groups, sometimes with sympathetic women.

I am not proud to say I was one of those women who sympathised with the “vulnerable” men and watched without a word as women were targeted. As they say, hear me out.  

During the great pileon, where I was banished from the cool inner circle, Colin Wright claimed I was feigning injury, the honest truth is that I have been injured, but it has been by my own stupidity. 

Colin Wright was one of my first high profile followers when I wrote for Quillete the first time.  In those heady days, I genuinely thought that when a survivor spoke of their oppression, good men would listen with tender care and lend their social media capital to the cause in order to elevate the voices of survivors who have important things to say.

I didn’t quite see that I had to stay in that victim lane, and not branch out to general commentary. Commentary and analysis is to be left to the men of course, and the women with opinions that the men like.

I was first welcomed into a GC Gay male chatgroup a few years ago by a gay guy who is no longer around. It was a little strange at first because I am a middle aged married Christian woman and I wasn’t used to seeing so many men talk about their dicks quite so frequently.

It was in that group that I became friends with Dennis Kavanagh and we began to message privately with commentary and jokes, none of which I would ever release publicly, nor would I think he would do so, even though I was very annoyed with him. 

What I will say here about Dennis is publicly known, and commentary from our friendship that he wouldn’t have any cause to deny, and speculation about the nature of ally-ship that you can chose to accept or reject.

Dennis was at the time good friends with a gay man by the name of Kurtis Tripp, who was styling himself as a bit of a star of the gay GC scene with little funny videos and witty commentary.  Kurtis was in the group when I first entered. As it happened, Kurtis began to revel himself as a shocking misogynist and then a full trans activist with no regard at all for women’s rights. 

As the trajectory of Kurtis was becoming obvious, and what he was saying could not be defended by any decent person, the rhetoric in the group (that he had by that time left) was that Kurtis was falling back into drug addiction, that he was a vulnerable person, and that he couldn’t help himself. Gay men naturally have a sympathy for the weakness of gay men, which is why they make the perfect activists for gay men.

The women that Kurtis was targeting were given very little sympathy and labelled willy-nilly as “radfems”. In the group “radfem” was general term of abuse for women who were misandrist and had taken feminism altogether too far. We see this on “big twitter” as well, so I don’t think I am telling any tales out of school.

At the time I was pretty new to the gender critical scene and was having my own issues with some radical feminists in my local area.  One radical feminist had asked me to edit my work to her liking, and when I refused, she accused me of being unable to be an ally to women because I’d been sexually abused, and that I was lashing out at women in lieu of my abuser.  That woman then told other radfems that I was a disrupter of some sort. A prominent Australian radfem challenged me in a Facebook group about the issue, suggesting that my falling out with the local woman was due to my own disrespect, I told her to “go fuck herself”. I stand by that response.

I am ashamed to say now, that the word “radfem” was becoming an acceptable term of abuse in my company and the rhetoric of some of the men was getting past me because I was gaining a bias.

I became easy friends with gay men along the way because of my sympathy for gay men. I have many times before talked about the gay cousin that I grew up with who took his own life in the 80s, and how the abuse of gay men at that time had a profound impact on me.

During our time of friendship Dennis challenged me to highlight the issues of gay men that he knew I had sympathy for.  I did so in a few articles including a story of a man we both offered support to, who was going through a difficult time of homophobic bullying.  

The message group gave me an opportunity to become closer with a few of the gay men on GC twitter and many of those friendships maintain. I support now, as I always have the protection category of “sexual orientation” in law and believe that the definition of sexuality in that category should be tied to sex, and that this is vital for the ongoing protection in law for homosexual men who have a vulnerability to oppression in society.

I believe homophobia is at the root of the transitioning of feminine boys and I see it as a great evil that I will fight to my dying breath.

Having said all that, obviously I am not a gay rights activist. I am a feminist, and have more than enough to focus on in the evils of the attack on women and girls from gender.

Eventually the group I was in disbanded after it was infiltrated by women sympathetic to the activists being targeted. Messages against the “radfems” leaked, and they were less that flattering.  At the time my sympathy was with the men, and I thought the women who had leaked them were pretty terrible.

A mythology was promoted in the group, and in other forms of GC discourse, that there is an element among the women of GC feminism that needs to be taken out for the good of the broader movement.  Apparently anonymous feminists have the ability to harm the resistance to gender that misogynistic gay men don’t.

This strange narrative was repeated to me by Andrew Doyle just days before he blocked me on X, when I assume I was deemed to be in the “element”. Andrew Doyle told me that he had been contacted by a number of GC gays (I bet I could name them) about the homophobia of Anna Slatz from Reduxx, he said “I don’t care if she hates gay men. I just care that the GC Movement generally will be undermined by that kind of thing”. 

Of course you won’t get Andrew Doyle concerned about the feminists being undermined by the likes of Rudy or Kurtis, because the behaviour of men is not allowed to be used to paint over the work of other men in the way as women are smeared with the errant behaviour of troublesome women. 

I had know that Anna was a particular target of certain GC gays for some time.  You will never hear the misogyny of a gay main mentioned on gender critical twitter without someone eventually mentioning Anna, as if she is the Holy Virgin that can remove all gay men of sin with her wickedness.  

Fred Sargeant told Genevieve Gluck to “fuck off” when she tried to defend herself and Anna, against accusations that Anna was homophobic and that Genevieve was shielding homophobia. 

I am a fan of Anna’s work, but I have never been a fan of Anna’s online style.  She once told me that I heard about intersectionalism from Tucker Carlson.  She deducted this from my photo, clearly indicating that I was a middle-aged white woman. She was not to be persuaded when I told her I graduated with First Class Honours in cultural and political theory, so I unfollowed (that was years ago when she was on another account), and I have never followed her since.  We don’t all have the same style.  But she is where she is because of her work and the support of the women. Men, gay or straight, don’t get to dictate to women who are allowed to be in our movement.

There would be no point in explaining to the gay guys that Anna is young or that she may have vulnerabilities and that may lead her to some of her more edgy takes, or that she has been subject to the most vile of online abuse by gay men, which she has. The fact remains that gay men just don’t have the sympathy toward women that they have toward other gay men, and that’s not even something we should seek to change about them. 

Gay men are men and historically men have sought to take over every single thing women have ever done, they just can’t help themselves.  Follow my 100 days of feminism on X to see that generation after generation of men have exclude women from public life, sport, recreation, free living in society and of course political organisation.  Men cannot see women do anything without trying to tell them how to do it. 

The reality is Reduxx doesn’t need Anna to be a target, being feminist is enough. James Lindsay, one of the truly dumbest shit-posters to ever become a famous political commentator, gave this little prize to Genevieve Gluck telling his followers to block the popular and important feminist publication.

The mythology that there is a mean girl group of women who are going to destroy the work of good women is an old trope that women should chose not to accept. The mean girls don’t even like each other, they are not going to organise effectively enough to bring down the gender resistance. What men like Doyle are saying is that we ae too stupid to tell a lie from the truth.

I had a long argument with Dennis before he targeted me openly on X, he had made a choice to defend David Hayton, and I was never going to. He has a sympathy for a man that I cannot muster. Gay men sometimes complain that women show a sympathy towards trans identified females that we don’t have for trans identified men.  Of course we do, we are feminists, and they are women and girls. Can we please be honest about this?

In the end I sided with the hated “radfems” and in the end it was the radical feminists who stood up for me, even knowing full well that we don’t agree on a range of issues. I was delighted when Genevieve Gluck said publicly that “Edie Wyatt is obviously not a fascist”, or words to that effect.

As GC activism grows there are going to be both women and men who have nothing better to do than stir up trouble, gather receipts and take shots at various characters. Try to be careful to not sound like a creepy rapist in a message group is good advice for everyone. But It is important to keep an eye on the wider dynamic of men trying to take control women’s activism.

Grace O’Malley has been labelled by many as top mean girl, and she certainly knows how to stir the pot.  O’Malley has outed herself as the leaker of the Rudy audio, and has vowed to continue to infiltrate men’s message groups and out misogyny. I think they should take this as a warning.

Message groups inevitably gain a culture, they gain power with the addition of higher follow accounts. When they are targeted at the TRAs, politicians and Stonewall, they are all fun and games. but when false narratives start to take hold, message groups can be destructive.

The accounts that are commissioned to come against women like me, women like Aja are not the ultimate problem.  Ultimately Rudy is just a pawn, another one will come along.  What we need to do is refuse to cancel women on the say so of men. Women need to take control of the women’s movement and own it, warts and all.