London Anarchist bookfair 2020

Sounds like a fair summary of what a plan C member had to say about the name.
Corbyn wasn’t anywhere near as significant when they formed.

 

London... Anarchist...

 

Great pub that used to be my local

 

In short, the previous bookfair collective refused to add transphobes to the list of people not welcome after the 2017 Bookfair where transphobes shared out transphobic leaflets.
They decided not to run a bookfair anymore after this for a variety of reasons and invited others to take up the challenge.

We've taken up the challenge.
Some people are upset because we've added transphobes to the list of people not welcome.

Thats a policy every other Anarchist bookfair has btw.

 

I don't think it's the list as much as it's the definition that is getting used.

And portraying it as just about people being 'upset' is bollocks. Some people think it's politically a dodgy direction to be going down. After the 2017 Bookfair there were all sorts of people making demands that X and Y were banned for all sorts of reasons.

And the previous Bookfair collective took a pragmatic decision not to enforce bans on people as it was impossible to police, partly as every year they got a quite number of requests for certain people to be banned and dealing with that would have been massively time consuming, disruptive, and not actually their responsibility.

Are you changing this and having a list of banned people? If so what's the criteria for someone being added?

 

oh this will end well

 

Having not been there, I’m going assume part of the disagreement is going to be over definitions of transphobia. That’s something which has rumbled on here on these boards in recent times. Having stated my position, I have no interest in rejoining that particular fray.

The wider subject of identity politics is something we’ve also tussled with over the years. There’s a thread in our philosophy forum that I started, and which has had new posts in recent days. It’s an area I don’t think consensus can be reached. I think people are using similar terms to mean different things.

I’ve got some recent related reading to get through that a comrade kindly sent me, which I hope to get around to when real life allows. But while I can see the importance of these topics, I don’t know how much energy I want to spend further debating them.

For what it’s worth, this post from a long running thread I’ve now ducked out of is a précis of where I am on the trans debate: https://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/we-need-to-talk-terf-bigots.359235/page-70#post-15614485

And here’s the ID Pol thread:

Identity Politics: the impasse, the debate, the thread.

I’m guessing the version I’m told about what went on with the London bookfair will depend on who is telling me.