A thread from personal experience, regarding sharing the platform with women from all walks of life:

I'm Serbian from Croatia. We have a long as well as recent history of civil wars, religious wars and class wars. Different nations and religions slag each other off. Women are aligned with men's politics even if they hurt other women and even themselves.

We have women who deny genocide against Serbs in the WWII. Other women deny war crimes committed by their own side in the recent war in Yugoslavia. There are women who advocate for abusing pregnant teen mothers on account of their "sin". Other women campaign to deny abortion.

Some women abuse non-Muslim women on the streets of Sarajevo because they aren't "sufficiently modest". Typically, in every former republic, many women will be sceptical and even advocate expulsion of women from a targeted nationality.

Racism seems somewhat endemic to the Balkans, especially toward the Roma, and the skin colour among what are essentially Caucasians also results in prejudice. Ditto for interracial and inter-nationality marriages.

Single mothers are universally badly treated. Ordinary, impoverished, vulnerable and disabled women are despised by many women who are excessively privileged. We are a bit of a backward country in a social sense, especially since the war.

Many of us and our families have suffered persecutions and even war crimes by "the other side", and many women on this "other side" have no empathy for us. Nor - often - we for them. We are suspicious of each other especially along nationality, religion and class lines.

Perhaps the most animosity right now exists between socialists and nationalists. The two are mutually exclusive and we can go on for days pointing out how nationalists will cut off their noses to spite their faces (similar to UK Leave/Remain).

My point is, many women where I come from hold their noses in each other's company, once our religion/nationality/class/beliefs are known to one another. So I get it. However, there is a space there for recognising a fellow human female.

In times of strife and in times of plenty, we're all as vulnerable as each other to male oppression and sexual, reproductive, physical, verbal, psychological, economic violence. So some Balkan women come together to fight it. It's the only way to protect our sex-based rights

Feminism is sort of like a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, where all sorts of relatives and their significant others come together with the same purpose. The only way we can make it work is if we agree to focus on the goal, and leave our other beliefs/prejudices at the door.

Sometimes a homophobic/racist Auntie just can't keep her mouth shut and ruins it for everyone. Are the rest to blame for her mouthing off? Should everyone write an essay in advance so that their beliefs can be assessed prior to admission?

Or is there a space for knowing where we each are coming from and coming together to meet a certain goal, be it celebrating the end of a year or uniting to repeal the biggest threat to women's rights in recent history of the West.

By preemptively excluding a certain kind of woman - anywhere in the world - before hearing what she has to say on the topic we are discussing, we're playing into our enemy's hands. Men like to gaslight women into an ever-diminishing circle they will approve of

It starts by calling conservative women "Nazis" and deteriorates into false accusations of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, ableism levelled at any woman who ever dared say the same thing about sex-based rights as a woman who separately holds bigoted views. This is unsustainable

This guilt by association is designed to destroy our ability to fight. We are a sex class, half the population, which means many in our ranks will inevitably not hold progressive and liberal views - this is human nature and the same can be said for male sex class.

We mustn't give our oppressors the power to grant us validity based on the varied characteristics among us. We can police our own Thanksgiving dinner. We can recognise the connection between us and it is up to us - not men or TRAs - to negotiate terms amongst ourselves.

The brilliant thread that inspired my own: twitter.com/EcceMandy/stat…