By FiLiA Trustees

FiLiA is a women-led volunteer organisation which seeks to build sisterhood and solidarity, amplify the voices of women and defend women’s human rights. We organise the largest annual grassroots feminist conference in Europe, bringing together women from around the world who organise and campaign on a wide range of issues. We support campaigns and projects which advance reproductive rights, work to end male violence against women and girls, celebrate lesbian lives, and challenge racism, classism, ableism, militarism and environmental destruction through feminism.

As a registered charity, we are reliant on donations to support the work that we do. We were therefore pleased to learn that Kevin Courtney – who also happens to be the joint General Secretary of the largest education union in Europe, the National Education Union (NEU) – had tweeted that he had just become a Friend of FiLiA (our regular donation scheme). FiLiA and the trade union movement are natural allies. Unions have played a key role in obtaining women’s workplace rights. 76% of the membership of the NEU are women. As a recent report co-authored by the NEU underlined, schoolgirls are facing an epidemic of sexism, sexual harassment and stereotyping which needs to be tackled urgently.

We were therefore dismayed to read an open letter written on 14 July 2022 by the NEU “LGBT+ Organising Forum” demanding that Kevin Courtney delete his tweet, and accusing FiLiA of being a ‘transphobic’ organisation. We are aware that a motion relying on the false claims made in this letter was passed at the NEU Executive on 16 July 2022.

The letter is fundamentally misconceived, with neither its authors nor its signatories appearing to have done the most basic fact-checking.

The letter claims that we “work to diminish the rights and recognition of trans women”. This is false. FiLiA supports sex-based rights. There exist some situations in which women need access to female-only spaces: in refuges, in recovery from male violence, in shared accommodation, sports, and of course in the right of our lesbian sisters to determine their own sexual orientation. Our stance on this reflects the current state of the law.

The letter confuses our stance on gender with our position on gender identity, actively changing and inserting words into quotes from our website. We do indeed state that “Gender is a patriarchal mechanism to justify the subjugation of women in order to benefit the domination of men”. It is a basic feminist principle that gender is a hierarchical social construct which produces inequalities. This is the definition of gender of the World Health Organisation. This is what is taught in GCSE Sociology. It is simply ridiculous to suggest that understanding “gender” as a process of socialisation which benefits men is transphobic.

The letter misrepresents various blogs which we host on our website, written by women within and outside of FiLiA with a diverse range of views. The letter presents these blogs as if they are the collective opinion of FiLiA, despite the fact that the blog page makes it very clear that “The opinions expressed here represent the views of each woman. FiLiA does not necessarily endorse or support every woman’s opinion, but we uphold women's rights to freedom of belief, thought and expression.” We maintain this approach, and would expect teachers to do so too, as a fundamental principle of living in a democracy.

The letter goes on to claim that FiLiA “campaign[s] against and deride[s] the work of both Amnesty International and Liberty”. Again, this is false. We have at times respectfully disagreed with both Amnesty and Liberty on their positions on the sex trade and on women’s rights and trans rights. We have also criticised Amnesty for supporting banners which read “suck my dick you transphobic cunts” outside our conference, just before a vigil to honour women killed by men and women who are survivors of sexual violence. We hope that members of the NEU would concur that such behaviour is highly inappropriate and offensive.

We wish we could say that we are shocked by this blatant mischaracterisation of our goals and attempt to shut down support for our vital activities by the LGBT+ Organising Forum. Sadly, like many feminist organisations and campaigners, we have become all too accustomed to women’s rights being attacked and women being silenced through false accusations of bigotry.

At the time of writing, the LGBT+ Organising Forum letter had 221 signatories. This is a vanishingly small percentage of the NEU’s 460,000-strong membership. Unions exist to defend the interests of all their members: their material interests and their right to freedom of expression. Questions around sex, gender and gender identity are of major societal importance and members’ views around them will be wide-ranging. By apparently endorsing this letter, the NEU Executive appears to be sending out a message to its members that those who question or criticise the operation of gender stereotypes and hierarchies in society are unwelcome: creating a hostile environment for those with the protected characteristic of holding a gender critical belief, whether they have ever made their views on the subject known or not. It is an extremely dangerous precedent to allow any faction to thought-police the lawful views of other union members. This is the very opposite of what a union should be.

FiLiA has worked successfully with unions in the past and will continue to do so. We would respectfully ask that the NEU:

• Share this letter with all members of the NEU executive and anyone else who was present at the meeting on Saturday 16th July, including any staff or observers so that the misrepresentation of our organisation can be corrected.

• Remove from the motion the false claims about FiLiA.

We encourage members of the NEU – and other unions – to find out more about us and our campaigns on our website. We urge union members, and anyone who cares about women’s and girls’ rights, to push back against the anti-feminist agenda which is resurgent in unions, schools, workplaces and political parties, driven by factions with narrowly focused, regressive and divisive ideologies.

Read the NEU response to our request for a meeting here.