Practical Politics for Bold Women: Proven Methods to Organize and Be Heard

By Natasha Chart

Are you one of the growing number of women who feels betrayed by political parties and mainstream feminist organizations who can no longer define what a woman is, let alone represent women's interests? Practical Politics for Bold Women is for women's rights campaigners who want to be heard, but may not be sure where to start. If you've ever gotten anyone else to agree to work with you towards a common goal, this book lays out steps you can take to build towards political achievement and influence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737856511

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Copyright © 2021 Natasha Chart

This book was produced by

Chart Consulting LLC, Rochester, NY

www.natashachart.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Although the author has made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions. No representation in this book constitutes legal advice.

Electronic Edition

ISBN: 978-1-7378565-1-1

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all the people who’ve blessed my life with friendship, patience, and love, and to the generous, volunteer reviewers who supported this work with over 600 comments and editing recommendations. Thank you.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Are We Winning Yet?

The Road to Full Citizenship

There’s No They Who Know Everything

The Basic Ingredients

Government

Starting a Charity

Businesses

Political Parties

Engaging With the Media

Here, There Be Dragons

Politics and Statesmanship

Fix Where You Are

Further Reading

Checklists

Foreword

T

he first time I tried to write an introduction it turned into a chapter. This is my second attempt.

I’m on the autism spectrum and was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, so I may have issues with knowing when to keep my mouth shut for my own good. As my sister said, we don’t just have issues in our family, we have a subscription.

You know there’s a problem though.

Some men stood up and said they were women. They asked everyone for support in facilitating their desire for full-time external validation. Because they showed up this time with rich, powerful friends, a good strategy, and a culture that wanted to bend over backwards to prove its own tolerance, they got the drop on the rest of us. 

They’re close to being able to erase sex in the law all over the world, with disastrous consequences.

These men put in the time to recruit supporters, capture major institutions, and shift the culture before most people knew what was happening.

But what was done once can be done again.

In fact, what they did has been done before, for other issues. They used tried-and-true organizing tactics and plugged away at them for years.

It wasn’t magic, hypnosis, or putting something in the water.

It was a buildup of social pressure and mostly indirect economic influence that went uncontested for too long by any comparable opposing force.

Consider that when the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) puts together a $7.1 trillion Business Coalition for the Equality Act,1 much of the economic incentive is indirect. The businesses get public relations benefits, a social justice halo to wear, and maybe some good press. 

HRC probably has good corporate donor relationships with those companies, but likely nowhere near what the companies would pay a public relations firm on retainer for brand management. The real value HRC gets is to be able to leverage the political influence of major employers in state and federal legislative fights.

The most significant influence and power exchange is therefore largely indirect, but that doesn’t make it small.

This buildup of social pressure also found a good foundation in the benevolent misogyny of the left and secular society. It found worshipful supporters among porn-addled boys and men, also among girls and women desperate for a way out of the Kafka trap of womanhood.

It can seem like people are being irrational, but they’re following the logic of social conformity and cognitive bias, which very often leads to adopting individually irrational beliefs to protect social cohesion.

It’s not weird how people are adopting new fashions in popular nonsense. What’s historically weird is how many present-day societies don’t execute people for heresy.

No country is composed of people fundamentally different in temperament or capacity than the people of Afghanistan. We’re truly one species.

People are social before we’re logical. This makes sense because most of the immediate good—and a lot of the bad—we get in life comes from other people. Other people are usually more interested in our quality of relationship with them than our capacity for symbolic logic.

It all makes sense. It could be funny if the outcome were not so dire.

If you see the problem too, this book is my call to you to be part of the solution. You showed up, you understand, and that’s at least half of the qualification.

This is a lot to ask. Who else is going to do it though? 

Maybe the kind of person who would buy a book on political organizing by a modestly infamous radical feminist?

So, I’m asking you to do more. Let’s get going.

Are We Winning Yet?

The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win.

-Matilda Joslyn Gage, National Citizen & Ballot Box (1880)

T

aking your activism to the next level may include starting or joining a local activist group, incorporating a new nonprofit or social welfare organization, running for office, or just committing to calling your elected representatives more often. But whatever you do, please step up and do more than you did last year.

Every woman who steps up encourages others to come forward, brings more attention to these issues, and makes it harder for others to succeed in having gender critical presenters, writers, vendors, etc., be cancelled, fired, deplatformed or silenced. 

When will you know it’s enough? When we win. You’ll know. 

Until we win, please do more.

Since most people understand that sex is a fixed characteristic, there is likely a lot of unrealized support that could be organized among those who don’t understand that we’re in the middle of a war against stating basic facts of reproductive biology.

If you are in the US, this guide includes specific tips and recommendations that may make your work easier. If not in the US, many of the basic principles will carry over with help from a specialist in your own country’s rules on charitable or political work. 

Because rules about US civil society work vary from state to state, and change depending on whether you’re talking to state or federal officials, everyone should seek more specific guidance on putting these suggestions into practice for where you are and what you want to do.

Though as a disclaimer, I’m not a lawyer, and this book isn’t legal advice.

This is not a book of feminist theory or a book documenting the atrocities of gender identity’s harms to women’s human rights. Several such books and websites exist from various points of view and are valuable resources for understanding different schools of thought. This is not a book about comparing those schools of thought.

This text is about organizing. How to do it, how to help others do it, and how to think about it to be more effective. 

I was blacklisted from mainstream feminism and progressive digital organizing and was left having to rebuild a professional life and activism network over again from scratch in 2015. I later got the ball rolling and took steps to make sure that there would be at least one incorporated radical feminist group in the US, the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF.)

For several of those years since it was incorporated in 2016, WoLF was also the only incorporated radical feminist charity in the world. To the best of my knowledge, it remains the largest at the time of this writing in 2021, and it’s small for a US political organization, where it’s still the only incorporated radical feminist charity in the country.

The US women’s movement could use 51 such organizations, with one for each state and Puerto Rico. After all, there are that many ACLU chapters. For strong momentum, we could use 200 to cover 50 state governments, and our many county and local governments, comprising roughly half a million serving elected officials.

Globally, there are thousands of organizations directly or indirectly advocating for the erasure of sex in the law based on gender identity. With a US administration supporting gender identity in office, some of those organizations will have funding and political support directly from the US State Department. 

Any effective fightback needs to be very large in order to win, so I really mean it when I say everyone who can needs to stand up and start the public outreach