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Josephine Brew vs. transgender people

Jo Brew is a British educator and anti-transgender extremist.

Brew has been involved in trans-exclusionary radical feminism since the 1980s. Brew is involved in Women’s Declaration International, an anti-transgender front group.

Background

Josephine Hilda “Jo” Brew was born in September 1964 and has also gone by Josy Brew at times. Brew grew up with two siblings and “mostly went to a girls’ school.”

Brew read geography at Christ’s College Cambridge. Brew was part of the collective that produced the feminist zine Shocking Pink in the 1980s. A colleague at the zine stated in 2023: “it was never a platform for transphobes and I cannot recall any transphobic content. Jo’s obsession with trans people is more recent.” Brew also worked on Spare Rib and edited the European Forum of Left Feminists newsletter.

Brew then did paid research for Labour Politicians in the European Parliament via the Dutch government. Brew also worked as a lobbyist on trade and development issues in Brussels for WIDE – Women in Development Europe.

Brew’s recent paid work is in the area of climate change and regenerative horticulture. Starting in 2008 Brew was a Director of Garden Audit Ltd. That business was dissolved in 2011.

Brew holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) and has taught in Mildenhall, Suffolk. Brew helps organize the community group Get Set Grow in Oxhey, Watford. Along with Oxhey Hall Horticultural Society, they run a kitchen garden at Bromet Primary School, as described in Brew’s 2013 pamphlet Recipe for a School Garden.

Anti-transgender activism

Brew was heavily influenced by early work of Mary Daly and Sheila Jeffreys.

Women’s Human Rights Campaign was cofounded in 2019 by:

They later changed the name to Women’s Declaration International (WDI). Their logo remained the same: XX to represent chromosomes, with the female symbol appended to the arm of the second X.

WDI paid to exhibit at the 2021 NGO CSW/NY event. The event’s online safety team told Brew they kicked WDI out because several members were making comments online that were deemed inappropriate.

Brew has hosted WDI’s weekly online Feminist Question Time webinars.

2+2=4: Radical Feminist Political Philosophy for the 2020s

This 2023 self-published collection of essays includes three that outline Brew’s contempt for “transgender ideology” in general and transgender women in particular.

  • 1. Engendering Consent (2021)
    • “Looks at the way transgender ideology forces women to choose a gender, which enables men to say women ‘consented’ to being treated as women. I suggest we are seeing the enforcement of a new ‘Gender Contract.'”
  • 2. Transgenderism – A New Operating System for Patriarchy
    • “The point of transgenderism is to fix glitches in the patriarchal system.  The women’s movement has made cracks in the operating system, undermining the smooth functioning of the professions and organisations that keep order, of the family as the basic site of control and extraction of labour, and weakening respect for god the father.”
  • 3. Golf is sublimated sex: Men subconsciously associate golf with sex
  • 4. Big Sister is Watching You!: A Radical Feminist Analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four 
  • 5. Transgenderism is the new Socialism
    • “A contention that is sure to annoy a lot of people, but the more you think about it, the more plausible it seems. Next we travel back four decades to a woman with great foresight. Following the line developed by Mary Daly in 1979, I argue in this essay that Transgenderism is best understood as a development of gynaecology, the mind and body attack on Western women that developed in the nineteenth century and continues now.”
  • 6. Girls, you are being schooled!
  • 7. Essay on Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas
  • 8. Women! Don’t Celebrate the Soccer World Cup. It’s a Global Celebration of Rape
  • 9. The Making of the Global Feminine Class

References

Women’s Human Rights Campaign (April 10, 2021). NGO CSW must reinstate wrongly removed WHRC exhibit hall and booth. https://www.womensdeclaration.com/documents/167/Press_release_CSW_NGO_10.4.21.pdf

Brew, Jo (1997). To be a woman in Europe: A country-by-country update. WIDE Women Studies Abstracts – Volume 26, Issues 1-4 – Page 78

Brew, Jo (December 8, 2022). The Making of the Global Feminine Class. Substack https://jobrew.substack.com/p/the-making-of-the-global-feminine

Brew, Jo (2023). 2+2=4: Radical Feminist Political Philosophy for the 2020s. Independently published. ASIN B0BVSXDHC3

GOV.UK Josephine Hilda BREW https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/hX8wIccYbo1fF_CelxIyzUNjFII/appointments

British Library. Timeline of the Women’s Liberation Movement. https://www.bl.uk/sisterhood/timeline

Shocking Pink (16 issues). via Grassroots Feminism https://www.grassrootsfeminism.net/cms/node/165

Media

Brew, Josephine (Nov 26, 2020). What has the UN done for the rights of women and girls in the last 50 years? YouTube / WDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn67KV6iExs

Marie-Josephe Deviller, Annet Birungi, Rachel Ara, Jo Brew (June 6, 2022). Gender ideology helps to keep the patriarchy going, by Jo Brew. [Brew presents “Transgenderism: A New Operating System for Patriarchy.”] YouTube / WDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0AmkfkwJEk

Thistle Pettersen (Apr 27, 2021). Jo Brew, Host of Feminist Question Time, speaks with WLRN. YouTube / Women’s Liberation Radio News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhTQSq-v4DI

Pure Lust by Mary Daly discussed by Jo Brew, Kate Graham and Marie Long A live webinar on Sunday 19th February 2023 

Resources

Substack (substack.com)

Twitter (twitter.com)

Facebook (facebook.com)