Cathy Brennan’s Gender Identity Watch supports ‘feminist’ bombing of American infrastructure

Maryland attorney and purported “radical feminist” Cathy Brennan founded and runs Gender Identity Watch (GIW), a TERF collective. Until now, the group’s support of real-life violence was only a matter of speculation. However, GIW has come out in support of another TERF organization, Deep Green Resistance (DGR).

DGR also self-appointed itself “radical feminist” and propagates TERF ideology as if it were radical feminism. They enjoy quotemining radical feminist icons (who support trans people) like Dworkin and Mackinnon to support their TERF dogma. DGR cancelled it’s trans inclusive policy in 2012. A few years ago, DGR was in the news, clutching its perls, because a group of queer activists confronted the group at a left wing event. The group apparently had 1 or 2 trans people in it. The group put a few marker smudges on some of the group’s terrorism manuals and one DRG rep got a quarter-sized marker smudge on her hand. Apparently DGR later confronted the queer group and a half-eaten burrito may have been lobbed at the DGR rep. Apparently all of this – in the minds of TERFs everywhere – proved that trans women as a whole were violent. In all the public concern trolling, TERFs hid the fact that DGR is a terrorist organization and the books the queer group marked up were manuals that laid out a specific plan for bombing American infrastructure by groups of ‘feminist’ armed militias.

Here’s DGR calling for lone wolf bombings of American infrastructure that everything from airport control towers to hospitals rely upon to keep people alive:

Here’s an audio clip of the manual the queer activists marked up. Be sure to note that the reader is laying out a specific plan for organizing armed ‘feminist’ militias who will target power plants. Here’s where DGR notes that thousands if not millions will have to die (‘at first’) to achieve their fundamentalist naturalism utopia:

When someone says, “A lot of people are going to die,” we’ve got to talk about which people. People all over the world are already enduring famines, but for the most part they are not dying of starvation; they’re dying of colonialism, because their land and their economies have been stolen. It is true that the urban poor would be worse off at first, because the dominant culture, like any good abusive system, has made its victims dependent upon it for their lives. That’s what abusers do, whether they are domestic violence abusers, or whether they are larger scale perpetrators… Yes, life would be much harder at first. But in the long run, the urban poor would be better off. Most of the urban poor are people who live in third-world slums. The authors of this book are not blithely asking who will die. In at least one of our cases, the answer is “I will.” I have Crohn’s disease, and I am reliant for my life on high tech medicines. Without these medicines, I will die. But my individual life is not what matters. The survival of the planet is more important than the life of any single human being, including my own.

Here’s a page from the book the queer activists violently “vandalized” with a marker smudge:

Upon hearing of DGR’s plans to start a terroristic war to bring down America (in the name of “radical feminism,” of course) some of us were concerned and alerted the authorities of DGR’s current support of lone wolf terrorism against US infrastructure that keeps planes in the air and hospitals running. Of course, GIW alerted DGR:

We ensured that GIW’s twitter account was aware that DGR is currently encouraging lone wolves to blow up US infrastructure. GIW tweeted that they support what DGR is doing and asserted that trans people – not the group trying to get things blown up, resulting in the death of “millions” – were the “real” terrorists:

The following is an Earth First critique of DGR’s brand of violent totalitarianism:

DGR describes assassination as a “major underground tactic,”[41] and advocates individual sabotage, along with “coordinated large-scale actions.”[42] The authors also attempt to distinguish between terrorism and “resistance intimidation” by claiming that terrorism attacks human targets[43]—a blatant falsity, given the philosophy of groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF). The RAF virtually defined the term “terrorist,” and adopted Carlos Marighella’s advocacy of “urban guerilla” movements, which includes minimizing harm to civilians. In fact, the RAF believed that they could increase the state’s violence against the population in order to reveal its fascism, and in an amazingly ironic turn of events, one of their members actually became a fascist after the dissolution of the Baader-Meinhoff group. But more on this later; suffice it to say that, while ostensibly remaining outside of the strictly-Leninist ambit by rejecting a formal, hierarchical organization, DGR maintains the most problematic element of vanguardism adopted by groups most commonly identified as “terrorist,” while hypocritically advocating the same strategies they criticize. To map this out, DGR’s strategy maintains:

A.) An Advisory Board consisting of Jensen and Keith, which appears to exist as a non-hierarchical entity, but wields ultimate power and authority—as seen during the collapse of the organization when Aric McBay and Premadasi Amada were forced out.[44]

B.) A generalized critique of cultural forms of resistance like Romanticism, as seen in the examples of the Wandervogel, youth movements, and the communal movement.[45]

C.) The advancement of a “direct action” strategy that proposes small, conspiratorial cells, which will attack infrastructure through large-scale acts of property destruction, like the Earth Liberation Front, but with a more sophisticated organizational structure—incidentally, this is the precise form of “resistance” that was part of the quasi-Romantic movement influenced by the conspiratorialism of French revolutionary, August Blanqui, and acted out by the revolutionary group, Narodnaya Volya.

The problem, immediately, is that, while a and b suggest a hierarchical, vanguardist model that disguises itself in language of “advisorial” relationships, which actually fit a more patrimonial description, c stands out as a direct contravention of the ultimate direction of a and b. A and b seem to be against Romanticism, but c proposes an autonomous revolutionary strategy that has been its fellow traveler throughout history. The untenable nature of this ideological confusion led to the split between the strategy of DGR (represented by McBay and Amada), and its organizational stronghold developing out of their bizarre, cultish compound near Crescent City, California. It is wise to carefully note that, their ability to continue to deny their own authoritarian structure, despite their critique of Romantics, helps them retain the same type of youthful, idealistic cadre that they seem to critique, because they have failed to move beyond Romantic hero worship in practice. Hence, instead of following through on much of the strategy organized at first with Amada and McBay in the organization, which calls for grassroots, aboveground activists who “organize people for civil disobedience, mass confrontation, and other forms of direct action where appropriate,”[46] the group has developed into little more than an especially-rabid book club full of Derrick Jensen fans who abide by a leadership structure from which they hope to attain power and credibility.

DGR moves between two contradictory points where it both departs from, and reunites again with, traditional authoritarian vanguardism: (1) the self-organization of the proletariat is useless without “underground” attacks on infrastructure to bring about collapse, and “rapid collapse is ultimately good for humans—even if there is a partial die-off—because at least some people survive;[47] (2) the toppling of the system can only happen as “more radical and grassroots groups continue to establish a community of resistance, but also establish discrete organizations and parallel institutions,”[48] even though those participating in the movement would have to factor in the high probability of “large-scale human suffering” into their ethical calculus.[49] The obscenity of this position is staggering: we must encourage below- and above- ground activism,[50] but we ourselves are the vanguard, which stands above the ignorant masses and are unable to carry out illegal actions given our importance to the movement. While we may appear unpopular at first, as we continue our isolated and inexplicable assaults against infrastructure, jeopardizing lives in the process, the masses will gradually join us, in spite of what McBay refers to as “[human] die-offs,” and not be discouraged at the fact that hospitals lost power killing their child, or a bridge their family was driving on was blown up.[51] This theoretical leap of faith is fatal. Historians have seen it fail time and again, its arrogance laid bare in the ruins of those who follow. The irresponsible cowardice of its arrogant leaders and vanguard affords them the right to take strict oaths that they will not break the law, even as they encouraging others to carry out assassinations, bombings, and other attacks.

See the Earth First piece for full citations.

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