They wrote in an email to What The Trans:
To whom it may concern,
I am a representative of BASH BACK, a trans led direct action group devoted to tackling the rising tide of transphobia in the UK. As I write this, actionists are conducting our first action at Wes Streeting’s office in Ilford North.
Wes Streeting, as you well know, is responsible for a heinous ban on puberty blockers for trans youth, as well as a swathe of other restrictions on transgender people’s healthcare rights.
He is also, according to at least one legal professional, personally responsible for covering up reports of the deaths of trans young people under the care of NHS England. Every day, trans people are dying as a result of his policies and his inaction.
As trans people, we refuse to take this lying down any longer. We have chosen to take action to demonstrate that we will not be victimised or scapegoated by Streeting and his ilk any longer. We will not allow more of our loved ones to be to be harrassed, to be legislated, to be excluded, to be denied healthcare, to be murdered. We are trans and we BASH BACK.
Maybe I should repeat that.
The Suffragette campaign was a total failure.
It was abandoned in 1914 shortly after the outbreak of war, with the WSPU turning its efforts to the recruitment of soldiers for Empire. By November 1917 Emmeline Pankhurst had changed tack and now operated within the political system, founding the Women’s Party (with a manifesto commitment to require all civil servants to provide verification of race purity for national security). This was obviously well before the Representation of the People Act 1918 extended the franchise to the first women, and the Act of 1928 making suffrage equal. By this time of course, the senior Suffragettes were mostly getting well stuck in to the British fascist movement.
As to their methods, they had the effect of poisoning the political world and the public against the vote. The painstaking work done over many years by the Suffragists to build consensus in Westminster was obliterated by the violence. Things weren’t helped much by the murder of two naval sailors, two attempts to assassinate the Prime Minister, and a prolonged letter writing campaign aiming to hound all Jewish MPs out of office.
As for the public, the arson campaigns focused on sporting pavilions, schools and hospitals. In many towns vast crowds turned out to burn down the local Suffragette office in retaliation. Bombs were left on commuter trains (making the TfL’s decision to name a line after them hilarious), attempts were made to blow up a canal to flood a town, and an attempt to demolish the biggest sorting office in the country with 200 workers inside. One of the aforementioned attempts to kill the PM was to burn down a crowded theatre. These seemingly confirmed the opinion of those who claimed women were too unhinged to trust with elections.
Most at the time who weren’t Suffragettes agreed that they had put the cause back by decades, and it was only a catastrophe the scale of a world war that put it back on track.
Yeah, and that’s why women now have the vote.
Or perhaps Parliament just felt like making those changes for no reason?
Yes, the “no reason” that occurred 1914-18, and the decades of consensus building by the Suffragists. The Suffragettes had abandoned their agitation in 1914, then completely disbanded in November 1917, as I said to allow Pankhurst to focus on setting up an ethno-nationalist political party. The bill to extend the vote to the first women passed in February 1918, three and a half years after the violent campaign had concluded.