In September 2017 Alexander McKellar drove his vehicle into cyclist Tony Parsons on the A82 in Argyll and Bute. He and his passenger, twin brother Robert, did not call for help. Instead they drove away and changed cars, before returning to clear up the scene. They buried Parsons’ body in a peat bog.

No one would know about this – Parsons’ family would be left forever wondering what became of him – were it not for the actions of McKellar’s ex-fiancée, Caroline Muirhead. After he confessed to her, Muirhead reported it to the police. What happened next is the subject of the Netflix series ‘Should I Marry a Murderer?’, a sensationalist title which doesn’t capture what the story is really about.

Muirhead is not endlessly dithering over whether she should still marry McKellar, weighing up whether the odd murder outweighs the power of true love. Having already decided to do the right thing, she is left to negotiate her relationship with her fiancé (and his brother) with little outside help. What follows is a study in survival skills, pandering and the way in which fear creates enmeshment. Indeed, fear can drive you mad – and if it does, well, then, aren’t you just the kind of crazy woman who’d be drawn to a killer? Doesn’t at least some of it rub off on you?

Muirhead is a doctor. She had not been with McKellar for long, despite their sudden engagement. These are two reasons given by the police for the absence of any support or protection for her following the brothers’ initial arrest. The assumption, seeming to come from people who’ve never met a criminal in their lives, is that she’s an intelligent woman – surely she can work out it’s better not to be near those two psychos? And besides, it’s not a proper relationship, not really. She can just walk away, can’t she? What’s the worst that can happen? She is told that her statement will remain anonymous, as though McKellars are unlikely to put two and two together if she were to break things off. The attitude of officers is that even if men who were willing to let a man die and pour bleach over his dead body should realise Muirhead has betrayed them, she’ll be fine. She’s got a degree and stuff. Anyhow, she could always run away (“I would have run a mile,” says David Green, Scotland’s head of homicide and crime at the time).

In the event, Muirhead does not abscond (given that it’s not safe to abandon narcissistic men even when you don’t already know they’re killers, this seems wise). Instead she appeases the brothers. At some points, she allows their three lives to become completely entangled, living in a drunken, drug-fuelled bubble while waiting for the investigation to progress. At the same time she secretly records conversations with them in the hope of providing the police with further material. When officers find out she is living with them, rather than worry for her safety, they almost blow her cover by lecturing her while the men are in earshot.

Much of what happens during this time Muirhead records on her phone, with plenty of clips appearing in the Netflix series. Many are unflattering to her – there are images of her looking spaced-out trying on her wedding dress, and drunkenly roaming the countryside trying to find the missing bike rather than turn up in court – and I wonder about the ethics of showing them, given her deteriorating mental health. In her present-day interview, she is openly admits she had lost her mind, and that the recordings are embarrassing, which makes sharing them seem like an act of self-harm. They make the narrative clearer – Watch her go from responsible citizen to madwoman! – but perhaps the viewer could have got the message on a lot less.

Still, it wouldn’t be quite the same story if it didn’t make you uncomfortable. In a Herald review of the series, Alison Rowat claims that making Muirhead rather than Parsons the focus of the film “invites the viewer to judge her. Her character, her choices and lifestyle or not on trial, but sometimes it feels that way”. Does it? It’s clear from the brothers’ defence counsel that had she testified, her behaviour would have been used against her, as though this could in some way diminish what Alexander and Robert McKellar did. It’s as though we are so used to using a woman’s breakdown to cast her as a liar that even when there’s no doubt she is telling the truth – and wasn’t even acquainted with the perpetrators at the time of their crime – there’s a sense in which her being ‘that kind of woman’ must still have a mitigating effect. The McKellars must, symbolically at least, be able to offload something onto her. It’s such a knee-jerk response it comes into play even when the original crime has absolutely nothing to do with the woman in question.

I found myself wanting Muirhead to be ‘better’, not to unravel quite so much. But that is what happens, I think, when you are in that particular risk management zone. It reminded me of everyday domestic abuse. The survival strategies you employ might not be the best ones but it’s hard to think straight because you are terrified. You pander in ways which humiliate you and make you feel worse and worse about yourself. You experiment with acts of resistance, then back away. You might go through phases of total enmeshment – you tell yourself that actually, it’s not him against you, but the two of you against the world – because it’s less shameful. Besides, if no one else thinks you’re at risk, maybe you’re not. Maybe it’s all in your head.

Because fear and trauma make us act in ways which seem irrational, it can be hard for an outsider to distinguish between self-preservation and self-destruction. The symptoms of trauma discredit the victim while granting credibility to the person who inflicts it. You look mad so why should anyone believe you? Why should you believe yourself? Cause and effect are reversed (she’s not mad because of what he’s doing – mad women are drawn to men like him. Wasn’t the last one the same?). These patterns can be hugely damaging to women when they are making accusations in both family and criminal courts. How do you differentiate between symptoms of stress and fear, and all-round unreliability? Even if you suspect the former, how can you be absolutely sure it’s not the latter? Similarly, how can you differentiate between complicity and coercion? How can you really know why she goes back to him? (This is one of the reasons why I have always felt so concerned about coercion in debates surrounding assisted dying. I don’t think people can be educated to ‘see’ coercive relationships when the worst ones are often invisible to those right at the centre.)

In the police and defence counsel responses to Muirhead – and in some of the responses to the documentary I saw on social media – there was the insinuation that she ‘didn’t do herself any favours’. It’s as if she could have known in advance the kind of man she was getting herself tied up with, or worked out from an early comment that McKellar was ‘mad’ that this meant ‘literally killing someone and hiding his body’ mad, not just ‘a bit of a wild one’. These kind of responses aren’t to a woman who was lying or even mistaken – there is absolutely no doubt the brothers did what they did, and that no one would have found out were it not for Muirhead – yet for some, their established depravity does nothing to offset her crazy bitch status. She is even blamed for them not getting harsher sentences due to her failure to take the stand.

Maybe with more support, she would have done so. Then again maybe, if she hadn’t taken the risks that got the case as far as it did, she wouldn’t have become someone it was so easy for others to judge.

Subscribe now

Further thoughts on the indignity of being frightened (subscriber only)

Read more

‘Is your feminism aspirational?’ sounds like the kind of question Man Who Has It All would parody. Is it sexy? Does it cleanse, tone and moisturise? Does it practise gratitude three times a day? Clearly this isn’t my kind of feminism (my books, placed side by side, read ‘unkind hags’ – not really selling it to the Glamour crowd). But there are some who think this is exactly how feminism should be.

During the past week a video has been re-shared by the X account @Terf_Rocks. It shows a clip from the comedian Grace Campbell’s Late to the Party podcast, filmed in June 2025. Campbell is discussing the For Woman Scotland judgment with trans activist Charlie Craggs. The two of them are very much against the ruling that adult human females should be recognised as a distinct class of people with their own words, spaces and boundaries. The women who are happy about this are, according to Craggs and Campbell, “ugly, with the worst hair and the worst clothes”, with Craggs going on to insinuate – in true MRA-style – that such women would never be sexually assaulted because “look at me and look at all the women outside that Supreme Court. You think I’m interested in them? If that’s their hair up there, what do you think it’s saying down there, girly?”

Lovely. Mocking feminists for being insufficiently feminine in their appearance is such old-school misogyny it’s almost not worth getting annoyed about. Indeed, women are not meant to get annoyed because that would be ‘vain’. Those who seek to belittle women by attacking their looks often use this ‘moral’ justification, as if they’re not the ones with the shitty value system but are merely throwing your own back at you. Campbell and Craggs take this to an extreme, justifying their mockery of gender critical women on the basis that these women are making it harder for ‘unfeminine’ women to access female-only spaces. Hoist by your own petards, mingers!

It’s nonsense, but very popular nonsense and it’s irritated me for a while. Therefore I thought I’d just spell it out. There are, it seems, only two ways of defining women in Craggs and Campbell-land:

1. feminine stereotype (they’ll say it’s ‘whoever identifies as a woman’, but in practice that’s always an identification with feminine stereotypes)

2. adult human female, but – as I remember a homophobic relative telling me in the 80s – it gets really confusing if women have short hair and don’t shave their legs and stuff, so if you want to be seen as an adult human female, you’d still have to look like a feminine stereotype.

It is unthinkable, somehow, that women aren’t in some way bound by feminine stereotypes. As Martha Nussbaum wrote in her masterful take-down of Judith Butler, “the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight”. Women just being human and female (with the emphasis on ‘human’)? Why, the very idea of it!

But back to ‘aspiration’. At one point Campbell declares that the women outside the Supreme Court are “just not aspirational in any way”. WTF does she mean by that? If it’s “that’s not the kind of woman I’d want to grow up to be”, then don’t worry, Grace – since you’re 32 already, it’s highly unlikely you’ll magically develop the independence and bravery that got Trina Budge, Marion Calder, and Susan Smith where they are right now. If it’s “I wouldn’t want to become the caricature of them I have in my head” – “posh white women” with “nothing going on” – then it’s probably a bit late to worry about that one. But should feminism be ‘aspirational’ anyhow? What kind of a value is that?

I wrote quite a lot about the idea of aspirational – and non-aspirational – feminism in Hags. Obviously feminism should want the next generation of women to have it better than those who went before. Nonetheless, looking back on my own early feminism I noticed this merging with the belief that my generation would become ‘better women’ than the ones who went before. If patriarchy prevented us from becoming the people we were meant to be – our full, true selves – then how could women like me not be an improvement on the women who’d set the changes in motion? Thanks very much, second wavers, but we’ll take it from here and improve on your somewhat drab, not-always-marketable approach.

So-called raunch feminism of the nineties half-accepted second wave critiques of the beauty industry and the sex trade but couldn’t resist ‘refining’ them. Weren’t we at risk of stigmatising the beauty practices women carried out just because they wanted to? Weren’t we at risk of denying that women enjoyed sex too? Weren’t we at risk of becoming massive ugly prudes with the kind of pubes Charlie Craggs would rightfully deride? Ha, just joking with that last one. We’d already agreed that women shouldn’t get called massive ugly prudes if they didn’t follow the beauty edicts of the day and do whatever men wanted sexually, therefore we could move on to celebrating women following the beauty edicts of the day and doing whatever men wanted sexually BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO, OKAY? (Sorry, but ever since the Lindy West discourse started up, I’ve been drawn back to all caps. Couldn’t stop myself there.)

I remember having the sense that second wavers, with their reticence about celebrating female sexuality and their bra-burning tendencies, just hadn’t marketed feminism very well. To be honest, I hadn’t really read any second wavers, which is why I was merely “having the sense”, but a lot of other women my age seemed to be having that sense too. It’s a trend Ariel Levy captured very well in Female Chauvinist Pigs, which I didn’t read for years on the basis that the title looked slut-shaming to me. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that feminism was a done deal, but I felt that the attitudes of my parents’ generation (and specifically my parents) were dying out, as if now that the argument that women were people in their own right had been made – as if it had never been made before! – no one would be able to go back on it.

This made me quite casual about what I saw as the more boring aspects of second wave feminism – the bits that focussed on children and housework and ageing and dependency. Yes, these were valid feminist issues – in the women of my own family, and in other families around me, I could see the impact of cumulative inequality wrought by the assumption that women’s unpaid labour wasn’t really labour at all. But all that seemed so breathtakingly obvious, and so easy to resolve (I wasn’t going to end up cleaning up after everyone! What kind of idiot does that?), I didn’t see why my much more attractive feminism needed to focus on it.

I discussed this issue with Mary-Ann Stephenson (then head of the Women’s Budget Group, now EHRC lead) in Hags:

‘When I was pregnant with my oldest,’ recalls [Stephenson], ‘my own mother said to me, “What you’ve got to realise is that nobody makes a decision to end up where they are. They make a series of individual decisions, all of which seem right at the time.” ’ Where a woman finds herself at forty, fifty, sixty, is not a direct expression of her politics, desires or inner self. It’s the result of a series of twists and turns: the jobs, the relationships, the pregnancies, the sick relatives, the dishes, the dust. […] Becoming the woman who’s torn between stressed teenagers, ailing parents and managing the menopause is not aspirational. Before you’ve become her yourself, it is easier to look at such a woman and think, as Stephenson puts it, ‘I’d never let myself get into that situation. There’s that sense, isn’t there, that somehow you won’t be as foolish.’

You? End up there? Never! So instead you’re Grace Campbell in 2025, cackling about those “ugly freaks” whose feminism, like their hair, is just so unattractive. Or you’re me in the nineties, convinced that middle-aged women only have their own conservatism to blame for having ended up so exploited. Or you’re Adrienne Rich, who wrote in 1976 of having looked at her own mother and thought, “I too shall marry, have children – but not like her. I shall find a way of doing it all differently”.

A feminism which ignores the salience of biological sex, and with it, issues such as dependency, lifecycle changes, the way in which femininity differs from femaleness, will always be more aspirational than a feminism which refuses to do this. To maintain such an ‘aspirational’ feminism throughout the course of your life you would have to be either very privileged or male. It’s a feminism which treats the vast majority of women as only temporarily worthy of it. It doesn’t want women as people, just as potential.

And yes, ‘aspirational’ feminism is easier to market. It doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t do anything beyond telling you the perfect, beautiful, fully liberated woman is just around the corner. It might be you! But then it isn’t and you’ve missed your moment. Time to join the “ugly freaks”.

Subscribe now

Further thoughts on feminism and ‘sex negativity’ (paid subscribers only)

Read more

Feminists, be ashamed! For we have let down actor Alan Cumming, an avid follower of the feminist movement for, ooh, ages. In a recent interview, Cumming revealed that feminism was “still a sort-of newish concept when I was a young man” (defining ‘young’ as, say, 20, and calculating back to 1792’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – new-ish, compared to Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1404) – this makes Cumming a fresh-faced 254). Until very recently, it seems feminism has been golden. Alas, we have disappointed the actor in his dotage:

“I always remember thinking it was about equality … Whenever anyone would ask me I would say ‘how could you not be a feminist?’ It’s like saying ‘I am against equality’. Right, so I’m a feminist, you’re a feminist … you want equality, you want everyone to have as good a chance as you have, as good a life as you have. Now it appears [smug fake-sad face] just not trans people.”

FFS, feminists. What was it about Wollstonecraft’s critique of “the absurdity, in short, of supposing that a girl is naturally a coquette” that you suddenly decided was incompatible with ‘Protect the dolls’?

To be fair to Cumming, thinking feminism is “just equality” is an easy mistake to make, at least if you haven’t bothered to think through how “equality” might be achieved. Feminists have often told anxious men that feminism is simply about everyone being treated fairly. I’m sure I’ve done this myself. It’s a way of saying that the objective of women’s liberation is not to swap male dominance with a female equivalent in the style of the Two Ronnies’ ‘The Worm that Turned’ or that Wicker Man remake with Nicholas Cage. The older I get, the more I feel revenge wouldn’t actually be that unreasonable objective, but it would be a lot of effort. I’d settle for things being fairer.

The trouble is, a lot of these men have mistaken this to mean ‘feminism means men don’t have to give up anything – in fact, they might even gain more stuff out of it’. Admittedly there are some feminists who have reinforced this misconception. In Unspeakable [actually very ‘speakable’] Things, Laurie Penny makes the following claim:

“Feminism has never just been about liberating women from men, but about freeing every human being from the straitjacket of gender oppression. For the first time, men and boys as a whole are starting to realise how profoundly messed up masculinity is — and to ask how they might make it different.”

To which I’d say, no – I think feminism should just be about liberating women. That’s not to say I don’t think men and boys are entirely unaware that masculinity imposes rules on them which they may at times (or all the time) find disagreeable. Nonetheless, ‘never letting women have one tiny thing of their own – not even their own liberation movement’ seems to be one manifestation of masculine entitlement that only a select (and much appreciated) few find troubling. It’s all very well to be freed from “the straitjacket of gender oppression” but what if that straitjacket – at least when it’s placed on women and girls – is the thing that keeps handing you the spoils of patriarchy? You might identify with keeping some of those.

Men rejecting the gender norms and roles which they find annoying is something, but it isn’t feminism, not even if they magnanimously tell women that they’re allowed to reject a few superficial stereotypes too. This is how we ended up, already in the 90s, with men deciding they didn’t have to give up their porn – they just had to ‘let’ women watch it too. They didn’t have to give up their disproportionate amount of leisure time or expectations of domestic servitude – they just had to ‘let’ women entertain similar expectations (without seeing them realised). They didn’t have to give up a man’s ‘right’ to sex and babies – they just had to find methods of economic coercion that went beyond traditional marriage. With this kind of feminism, men can get everything they got before, minus the irritating stuff like ‘having to like football’ and ‘not being allowed to cry’ (which women can apparently do all the time – just as long as they’re not crying about something which gets in the way of men getting their stuff, in which case it’s turning on the waterworks (pre-2014)/weaponising tears (post-2014), so stop snivelling, ladies).

This way of thinking perpetuates the invisibilisation of women’s labour because it never forces men to acknowledge what they gain from the “gender oppression” so many of them claim to hate. Behind it is a half-baked idea of gender, one which recognises the form (seemingly arbitrary set of rules about how women and men ‘should’ be) but not the function (to justify and facilitate the exploitation of female people by male people). Judith Butler is a prime example of someone who promotes this ‘misunderstanding’. It’s amazing to think that you can take an age-old feminist argument, chop it in the middle, discard bit that pissed men off, and make a fortune selling it as ‘new’.

I am not suggesting men shouldn’t reject gender norms, or that it would be bad for them to want to reject all of them. I’m just saying it would be pretty bloody unlikely for them to want to do the latter solely on the basis that it would be good for them. Wanting to be more involved in childcare, or to express your feelings more openly, are fine as far as they go, but shouldn’t be confused with giving up the deep-seated assumption that no matter where you stand in relation to other men, you’re still intellectually and physically superior to the other half of the human race. It is possible to embrace the crassest, most offensive stereotypes of femininity – to declare, as Andrea Long Chu does, that you are female and that femaleness is “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another” – and see no contradiction with your presumed right to define, demean, threaten and ignore the boundaries of female people around you (that is, totally disregard any desire of theirs). You’re smashing the gender binary, dick-first! Why aren’t those bitches more grateful?

It’s disturbing how many ‘progressive’ men cling to this understanding of feminism. They’re an extreme version of the self-styled ‘nice guy’ who thinks you owe him sex precisely because he doesn’t identify as the kind of guy who thinks women owe him sex. You only find out what these men really believe – how deeply committed they are to gender-as-hierarchy, if not to gender-as-thing-that-stops-me-doing-what-I-want-all-the-time – the first time you tell them ‘no’. Then suddenly, Progressive Man is showing his sad, disappointed face. This is not the feminism he paid for! WTF?

Back when the Onion was good (see here for one reason why it isn’t now), it wrote a couple of disturbingly sharp satirical pieces: ‘Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does’ and ‘Man Finally Put In Charge Of Struggling Feminist Movement’. Two decades on, the two have somehow merged together, as non-satire: ‘Women Now Empowered By Everything A Man Does’.

The lazy lumping together of women’s liberation with anything to do with liberation from gendered expectations has led to a situation in which women are expected to be grateful to men who challenge the most superficial of gender norms while reinforcing the most damaging ones. In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler insists that women should not make a fuss about trans-identified men who demand access to female-only spaces because these men “have already disidentified from traditional masculinity”. In what way have they done this? In a ‘wearing dresses’ way? Clearly not in a ‘respecting female boundaries’ one. As Kajsa Ekis Ekman points out in On the Meaning of Sex, women themselves cannot redress the imbalance by identifying their way into male-only spaces. The status of a female person in a male-only space is not that of a male person in a female-only one. All this leads to are “closed male spaces, open female spaces”. Men can literally go wherever they choose, whereas women might legally be permitted to, but cannot in practical terms. But women will be told that this is “equality”, an area in which the men who take their spaces are leading the way.

To take another example, there is nothing wrong – indeed, there is something important and valuable – in addressing issues such as men’s mental health. But increasingly this is treated not just as an adjunct to, but as though it is the same as addressing the terrible things unhappy men and boys do to women and girls. Series such as Adolescence neatly sidestep engagement with the ubiquity of pornography or the trivialisation of female inner lives in order to focus on the aspects of patriarchy the male writers could most easily live without. If men talk about incels and have a cry and make your murder all about their sadness, surely that’s feminist enough! Let’s make “freeing every human being from the straitjacket of gender oppression” all about male feelings, not female ones! All this is happening while women who are also trying to keep women safe – by defending female-only spaces and challenging the sex trade – are not just sidelined, but vilified. It would be one thing for men to focus on their issues while women prioritise their own needs, but women are being told that men doing the former is already covering all bases. Time for the women to shut up!

Men should no more have to be boxed in by stereotypes than women. I’m very happy for my sons to reject even the more superficial ones. But knowing that blue isn’t necessarily for boys, pink for girls – and that different times and places have had different ways of coding gender, including using colours – does very little to address more deep-seated ideas about how men and boys should be positioned in relation to women and girls. As we can see very clearly, trying to do that makes a lot of ‘progressive’ men disappointed. But feminism has always been that way. Ignoring this is just another masculine entitlement these men didn’t realise they were granting themselves.

Subscribe now

Further thoughts and sources (subscriber only)

Read more

According to [new/old/even older] research, [Gen Z/Millennial/Gen X] women have had it with going out to work. At long last, we’ve realised that the feminist movement conned us with its myth of [Girlboss/career woman/shoulder-padded ballbreaker] empowerment. Turns out proper work – the kind of stuff men do – isn’t the Barbie-with-a-briefcase fantasy we thought it was. Alas, being the kind of idiots whose brains can only manage ‘pottering about a bit with babies while doing a bit of dusting’, we let ourselves be brainwashed into viewing said ‘pottering about’ as oppression. Honestly, what are we like?

Earlier this week I spotted a tweet announcing that ‘Gen Z women are officially done chasing the “girlboss” grind’:

“A new poll shows 47% of Gen Z aspire to be a tradwife — married, with kids and the husband as the top earner.

Girlboss ranked 2nd, digital nomad 3rd, and a strong 14% aspired to be a trophy wife — the classic MRS degree.

The biggest lie women were told is that success comes from the workplace. Success is expanding humanity for its survival. The joy of motherhood is indescribable and better than any job title.”

Hear that ladies? You’ve all been lied to! Having babies is the best!

I feel I have been seeing variations of this argument my whole life. I was born in 1975, into a not-very-feminist family. I benefited from second-wave feminism’s fight for improved workplace conditions for women, without having to do any of the fighting myself. The backlash to this was ever-present. It’s never gone away, yet it always seeks to portray itself as something new.

Growing up, I noticed how men treated women who ‘didn’t work’ (or rather, did work, but not for any pay, or for lower pay than the men). I saw the way the disrespect extended to ‘housewives’ was matched by that extended to ‘working mothers’ (parasite or bad mother, either way you were morally inferior, especially if there was no man around). I watched all the ‘career women are bitches who’ll regret neglecting their kids, or become extra-bitchified by not having kids at all’ films that emerged in the late eighties and early nineties – Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Baby Boom, Immediate Family, Working Girl – that Susan Faludi takes apart in Backlash. The US-imported ‘mommy wars’ – supposedly pitching stay-at-home mothers against ‘working mothers’ – always seemed a pretty transparent way of telling mothers (and women in general) they were their own worst enemies, whatever they did.

When I started university in 1993, my dad commented on what a waste it was to see so many female students as “they’ll all go off to have babies” (I was never sure whether I counted as a “waste”. In any case, male students still outnumbered female ones in my college – which only started admitting women in 1980 – by three to two). In 2007, pregnant with my first child, I read Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels’ The Mommy Myth, which warned of the rise of “the new momism” – “a highly romanticized and yet demanding view of motherhood” – and sought to pitch this as ‘true’ choice and liberation for women:

“Central to the new momism, in fact, is the feminist insistence that women have choices, that they are active agents in control of their own destiny, that they have autonomy. But here’s where the distortion of feminism occurs. The only truly enlightened choice to make as a woman, the one that proves, first, that you are a ‘real’ woman, and second, that you are a decent, worthy one, is to become a ‘mom’ and to bring to child rearing a combination of selflessness and professionalism that would involve the cross cloning of Mother Theresa and Donna Shalala.”

Is this sounding at all familiar? Oh look – doing exactly what women did before (in 1950s adverts, at least) is the real feminist choice! And no, it’s not taken Gen Z women looking at their exhausted Gen X mothers to ‘realise’ this. Gen X and Millennial women have been told this all their adult lives, too. And still we keep getting paid jobs, as if we need money, and maybe even careers, as if there’s other stuff we’re interested in or good at, like the idiots we are.

At this juncture I should probably tell you how important my kids are to me and how being a mother is indeed the most important thing in my life etc. etc. (as Douglas and Michaels emphasise, “we adore our kids […] The smell of a new baby’s head, tucking a child in at night, receiving homemade, hand-scrawled birthday cards, heart-to-hearts with a teenager after a date, seeing them become parents – these are joys parents treasure”). But that’s just a bit insulting, isn’t it? Yes, I am quite aware a spreadsheet doesn’t love you back but honestly, why does this need saying? There is an enormous legacy of feminist work on how we can value motherhood more, and improve the experience of it more (I have a Fairer Disputations piece coming out on this soon), and it is incredibly frustrating to see generation after generation ignore this work and its recommendations in favour of “we’ll just tell women how lovely it is when your baby smiles at you”. Like we couldn’t have worked that out for ourselves!

There is so much to say about changing workplace, economic and family structures in order to make mothering better and easier. But what I think is often unsaid, but increasingly obvious to me, is the way in which the drive to push women out of the workplace – or at least out of jobs that men might want for themselves – trivialises and undervalues what women do as paid workers in much the same way that the work of mothers is undervalued and trivialised. It’s not so much that ‘women’s work’ or ‘motherwork’ is devalued – it’s that anything women are doing isn’t classed as ‘real’ work. That’s why infantilising caricatures of women playing at being workers, strutting around being ‘girlbosses’ or barging others out of the way with their shoulder pads, have been so enduring. As if men still do the real work but women, having had a major tantrum in the mid-70s, are being humoured and it’s time for them to give it up.

This is the story we are told: feminists – who invented feminism to compensate for their lack of properly feminine qualities such as maternal instinct and the desire to be soft and decorative – told other women – who apparently hadn’t ever worked outside the home before – that having a career would totes empowering and fun. Alas, these other women – who did have properly feminine qualities, which included being stupid – let themselves be duped into going along with this, with many of them forgetting to have babies. These women then found that being a worker, far from being like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, was really hard, and often quite boring. They hadn’t realised this because 1) men never, ever moan about work, being the superior creatures they are, and 2) women are eternal children, for whom ‘liberation’ is nothing more than some teenage ‘when I grow up, I can do whatever I like, and no one can stop me!’. Therefore it’s best they only have actual children for company, lest they go getting ideas (as an added bonus, being at home with babies and cooking for men, in addition to being the entire meaning of life for women, is also a piece of piss, so men don’t have to be particularly grateful for it or work out a system of rewards that grants stay-at-home mothers the same levels of financial freedom or social status).

It is true that when you are young, you might think that because adults have more choices, and because you wouldn’t make the same rubbish choices as the adults around you, growing up will be a wheeze. You’ll get your own place! You’ll earn your own money! You’ll show them all! The Girlboss Idiot narrative treats women as though they never grew out of it, while supporting the idea that 1950s imaginary housewives were pampered children who didn’t know how good they had it. We’re like petulant kids who decided to leave home, got to the bottom of the road, hung around getting cold in an attempt to save face, then eventually slunk off back to Mummy (and Patriarch Daddy).

I, too, find adult life is not exactly how I imagined it would be when I was five. Like absolutely everyone, I find adult life full of compromises I didn’t always anticipate, some of which might be remedied by making the kind of structural changes feminists (including maternal feminists) have been requesting since forever, and some of which are inevitable because you have to close some doors to go through others. When I look at the survey results triumphantly shared on X, it strikes me that I wouldn’t mind if my partner suddenly got a massive pay rise that made him ‘top earner’ – not because I strive to be subordinate him, but because we’d have more money (I wouldn’t mind if I got a massive pay rise, either). I wouldn’t mind having fewer mundane tasks to do – the kind of life where I could cherry-pick which bits I did and didn’t do. I wouldn’t mind having ‘a wife’, as Judy Brady Syfer’s classic essay put it. I wouldn’t mind things just being easier.

On paper, I’m someone who ‘left it late’ to have her third baby at forty, but I wanted a third child long before then (having two children full-time at nursery got us into debt, and made us put off having other children, for years. One of us staying at home would have made matters worse). I’m also someone who was ‘reckless’ when getting pregnant with my first child (not married, partner on a temporary contract, newly estranged from my family, so new to my own job I didn’t qualify for maternity pay). For women – particularly women who benefit from things that were not available to previous generations – the ‘making it up as you go along’ aspect of life is all too often recast as, well, was it the perfect choice? If not, blame feminism! But it’s never the perfect choice.

When everything women do is cast in this way, it masks the actual contributions women make, not just to their families, but in the wider world. Male workers are seen to deserve higher pay because they nobly commit themselves to hard graft (and being noble hard grafters is so integral to their identities, it’s selfish of women to take ‘their’ roles). Women, meanwhile, see work as a kind of accessory, like a new lipstick. Men work to provide for their families; women work instead of caring for their families (despite the fact that it is men who spend more on themselves). Whatever women do, they don’t ‘deserve’ as much as men. Either you’re outside the home, doing something contrary to your ‘true nature’ (so you can’t be doing it as well as a man), or you’re in the home, doing something that comes so naturally it isn’t really work.

Even if “the joy of motherhood” is “better than any job title”, mothers don’t just coast around on maternal joy, just as female employees don’t just coast around in a state of perpetual gratitude at being ‘allowed’ to work (or pretend-work, when it’s something the men want to do themselves). These are things women give, not postures we adopt. Whatever choices and compromises we make, it’s about time they were recognised as such.

Subscribe now

Extra thoughts on ‘the girlboss’ (paid subscribers only)

Read more

Gotta feel sorry for Moby. There he was, doing the Guardian’s ‘honest playlist’ interview, and he hit upon what must have seemed like the perfect chance to showcase his progressive credentials. ‘The song I can no longer listen to’, he claimed, was ‘Lola’ by The Kinks.

“[Lola] came up on a Spotify playlist, and I thought the lyrics were gross and transphobic. I like their early music, but I was really taken aback at how unevolved the lyrics are.”

The whole thing feels terribly contrived (let’s hope Mumsnet never ask Moby what his favourite biscuit is). The entire thought process seems to be 1) it’s a song about a transsexual, and 2) it’s from the days before Gender Trouble, therefore it must be bad. Pretending to be shocked by it must have seemed a no-brainer. What better way to demonstrate that – contrary to the evidence of your own memoir – you’re totally into smashing those gender norms?

Alas, this does not seem to have delivered as many cookies as anticipated. Kinks guitarist Dave Davies has quickly defended his brother Ray’s lyrics. “Why,” he asks, “is Moby being so rude about this simple song? We’re not transphobic. Why does he have to have a go at us?” Why indeed? It’s not as if the song even mentions single-sex spaces, women’s sports or any of the real evils we’re up against.

As many women – the factory-settings, non-doll variety – have pointed out, there are plenty of woman-hating songs that Moby could have chosen to be mock-horrified by. Indeed, there’s a part of me that always feels quite sorry for Robin Thicke over his ‘Blurred Lines’ cancellation. Yes, the lyrics are appalling, but the reaction feels arbitrary, one symbolic sacrifice to appease the Millennial feminist masses then it’s back to business as usual. A Robin Thicke version of me – a me without the feminism, but all the pettiness – would spend my days asking why Benny and Björn of Abba got away with so many ‘bit young, this one’ singalongs, or why Eminem now swans around as an elder statesman of rap, his ‘killing my ex’ fantasies treated as profound insights into the male mental health crisis. I’d ask, for that matter, why Pharrell Williams remains so untarred by the ‘Blurred Lines’ brush that he gets a LEGO film made about him. But anyways, there’s no point ‘no longer listening’ to anything lightly sexist. When you’ve got “all bitches is ho’s, even my stinkin’-ass Mom” (hey, perhaps she’s a TERF), you have to give the small stuff a pass.

When Moby decided to defend a particular type of woman – the male type – he was doing something few men, even self-styled ‘progressive’ types, do for mere adult human females. I actually think this is why attacking ‘Lola’, despite its benign nature, might have been so tempting. In trans women, ‘progressive’ men – the kind of men whose politics makes them feel contractually, if resentfully, obliged to be pro-feminist – found women towards whom they could be empathetic and kind without feeling undermined. Show too much consideration for female humans and it might look as though you actually believe you’re on a level with them. Make a massive great fuss of Jordan Gray or Monroe Bergdorf and not only do you get to own the TERFs but you get to emphasise that your manliness isn’t just down to you having a dick. It’s down to your masculine gender identity, the kind of thing a right-wing man might call his red-blooded masculinity only you’d be laughed at if you tried that. So you pretend it’s something different.

The past decade has been win-win for Progressive Man when it comes to being flagrantly sexist in the name of fighting the patriarchy. He can say he doesn’t just care about women – he cares about marginalised women! What’s more, he really gets them and listens to them, and there’s honestly nothing back-slapping or laddish about all those podcasts in which Owen Jones listens to Paris Lees explain why gender critical women are total cows who need to STFU. It’s all worked out so well! For a moment there, it looked like feminism might mean redistributing labour or giving up porn or some such shit. Thank god it’s all about protecting the dolls!

I was going to write that it’s sad to think of how feminism might have progressed had Progressive Man shown the same spirit in defending adult human females that he’s shown in defending trans women. Then I had an actual think about it and decided it would have been bloody ridiculous. Imagine if grown men had taken to the streets with placards containing rape and death threats at the very idea of us not having not only our own stuff, but access to everyone else’s too! Imagine if anyone who expressed the slightest misgiving about women having whatever we wanted was instantly dubbed a genocidal fascist! I don’t think women would have put up with that nonsense for a second. First, it would have been cringe, and second, we’d have known this had sod all to do with winning us any actual, meaningful rights. It would have been men performing for one another. There’s a reasons some groups like that and others don’t.

Moby would probably have got away with his own attempt at ‘being empathetic to women, but not those women’ if he’d implicated an actual woman somewhere along the way. Or made it all about MAGA somehow. But he implicated genius Ray Davies, which was a bit of faux pas. It broke one of the unwritten rules of progressive manliness.

Better luck next time, Moby. If the opportunity ever arises, choose that biscuit with care.

A few years ago, I met a fairly well-known radical feminist – one whose works I very much admire – and happened to mention to her that I had three sons. Her response was an instant “I pity you”.

To be clear, this wasn’t the kind of “I pity you” that you often get as a mother of sons, that jokey “omg, how terrible, bet you’re run ragged with their boisterous, rough-and-tumble antics etc. etc.”. That kind of “boy mum pity” I find irritating enough (my sons are individuals with their own personalities, not replicas of that ‘living his best life’ arsehole on the 2021 John Lewis home insurance advert). This woman’s pity was different. It felt far more sincere, as though it really was a terrible thing that I hadn’t been allowed to expose my male babies on a hillside or whatever it is a true convert to the feminist cause ought to do. As though I’d allowed myself to walk right back into the trap from which others had escaped and was now stuck raising the patriarchy instead of fighting it.

I don’t think having and raising my sons is something for which I should be pitied. They’re the most important people in my life and I am incredibly proud of them. I don’t think you have to pretend that motherhood is properly supported and valued, or that raising boys doesn’t bring specific challenges, in order to find joy in it. Nor do I think you have to believe all women should have babies, or that those who do shouldn’t do anything else in life, in order to think maternal bodies are amazing.

I didn’t say this at the time, though. I feared it just wouldn’t have sounded credible. To someone already predisposed to believe in the false consciousness of the mother of multiple boys, I felt I would have come across as protesting too much. Besides, the moment you start justifying your life, it just does start to sound a bit questionable. Yes, I might say I’m happy about this or that, but how will I know for sure that I’m not lying to myself? Isn’t the whole thing about lying to yourself that you don’t know you’re doing it at the time? And don’t I know from past experience that I have indeed lied to myself about situations that were miserable and/or exploitative, ones where it turned out that older, wiser feminists were right? So I could be doing it again (not that I’m doing it about my lovely sons. But I would think that, wouldn’t I?).

Anyhow – before I get into a pointless spiral on the nature of mauvais foi and insult my kids in the process – I just want to stress that I know what it’s like to have a choice pitied for its supposedly unfeminist nature. There is no definitive way of proving the pitier wrong. Even if you never lived to regret your decisions, they could just say you died too soon to reach enlightenment. And yet I don’t think this means that the act of pitying someone without their acknowledgement that pity is merited is inherently wrong.

This isn’t another post about Lindy West’s polycule (indeed, there have been so many pieces about Lindy West’s polycule that I’m now kind of embarrassed that I thought it worth sticking my oar in, too). But it is prompted by reading West’s Substack response to said pieces, subtitled ‘I Am Not the Victim of My Marriage’. It is very much in the ‘not exactly helping here’ vein, but there’s one section that struck me in particular:

If believing that I am a brainwashed, abused woman helps you process your own traumas in some way—or even if you just find it fun—I guess that’s simply a different facet of how people have always used my work.

It’s an argument I have encountered so many times within feminism over the past decade. Feel sorry for me, or that woman over there? Well, maybe it says more about you than me/her! Maybe you’re just projecting! It goes beyond the realms of protesting too much into a kind of attempted shaming (a bit like if I’d told my own pitier that she was taking out her own longing for boy children on me – I have absolutely no evidence that is the case, and would be incredibly surprised if it was). The problem isn’t only that this response is not very convincing. It’s that it’s become deeply embedded within a certain form of feminist discourse, more often than not to justify suffering and/or exploitation on the basis that the presumed victims aren’t unhappy.

This short-circuiting of pity has become a way of stopping us from ever feeling concern or compassion for women and girls when it’s politically inconvenient for us to do so, on the basis that we can’t ever enter their heads. It reminds me of both the old-style patriarch insisting “the wife doesn’t mind, do you?” (and the wife nodding along) whenever you question his behaviour, and the stereotype of 1990s choice feminism in which a woman is now empowered by anything a woman does, only it’s more insidious than both, positioning the very questioning of a woman’s situation as maladjusted and invasive.

Only aren’t some women brainwashed and abused? Aren’t some women in positions where they can’t speak, or in which it doesn’t feel safe to even acknowledge what is really happening around them? Don’t we already know that it can take years for an abuse survivor to ever acknowledge they were in an abusive situation? And while it is not necessarily helpful to take away whatever psychological survival strategies a woman is using to get through a situation while she is still in it, I fear that the tendency towards constantly problematising or even pathologising feminist pity for other women offers an alibi for those who exploit and abuse. Sometimes, we just have to say what we see without always being told that we are the ones who do not know our own minds.

In my book (Un)kind (paperback out now!) I argue that one of the ways in which #BeKind conditioning harms women and girls is by telling them not just to be highly sensitive to the feelings of others, but to switch off their own feelings: feelings of fear, disgust, panic, distaste, injustice, desire. Don’t think about it. The good girl educates herself about which emotions are inconvenient to others. They know better than you.

It is of course a bit more complicated than that. Not all compassion for others is highly valued – especially when compassion is directed (or ‘misdirected’) at women and girls rather than towards men and boys. As Kate Manne writes in Down Girl, a woman may be punished when her mind “appears to be oriented to the wrong things, in the wrong ways, to the wrong people – including herself and other women”. I think this is true, although I also think Manne writes from within a feminism that stops short of extending sympathy towards women whose exploitation has been made into a progressive cause. Traditional patriarchy doesn’t want us to feel sorry for any woman if her suffering stands in the way of traditional male entitlements; pseudo-progressive feminism feels sorry for women as long as to do so will not make us question any of the new (or to be more accurate, rebranded) male entitlements: porn, prostitution, multiple female partners, gender self-ID, wombs to rent. Should you feel sorry for the wrong sort of women, women who are not victims of the right sort of men, then you will be told your pity is confected, a projection, something that says more about you than it does about them (in her own contribution to the West debate, Laurie Penny insists critics of Adult Braces are “not coming at her because they care about her”).

This kind of pity-shaming fits well with the kind of privilege-shaming that benefits the privileged – namely, it allows self-identified feminists in positions of relative comfort to withhold concern for vulnerable others when to do so might put said feminists at risk of cancellation. It’s not that these superior, non-pitying feminists don’t care about prostituted women or poverty-stricken surrogates – it’s that they care for them too much to treat them as victims. It’s not that they’re scared to question any man’s right to purchase a female body for any use he sees fit – it’s that they are not, to quote Sophie Lewis in Full Surrogacy Now, dressing up “disgust and paranoia” as “righteous feminist rage and as pity”. Lewis, and others such as Victoria Bateman in Naked Feminism, have a tendency to cast all feminist compassion for sexually exploited women and girls as a kind of performance. What’s really going on is that middle-class, repressed, usually white ladies (they’re always ladies, never just women) hate ‘non-respectable’ women, and are probably also worried their husbands are visiting sex workers, and actually, these ladies might even be jealous of the girls on OnlyFans, but whatever – they’re just pretending to see these women as victims. As Lindy West might suggest, the ladies really need to work on their own issues! (Maybe via a road trip.)

Who does this line of thinking benefit? Andrea Dworkin claimed that the right sees women as private property, while the left sees us as public. In many ways I find the ‘progressive’ feminist withholding of pity for women in prostitution, surrogacy and abusive-but-woke relationships very similar to the withholding of pity for women in abusive-but-traditional marriages that I encountered when growing up. Back then, there was always that suggestion that young women like me – those who went to university and got ideas, a kind of right-wing equivalent to being the pearl-clutching, middle-class white lady –feigned concern for women in bad, exploitative marriages but were actually just looking down on them (and were possibly even jealous of tradwife types but couldn’t dare admit it). The idea that we might just see something wrong and feel for other women as fellow human beings was dismissed because everything was seen only in relation to imagined issues about our status in relation to males (our only true concern).

Once you start to see how frequently a woman’s concern for another women is treated as mere cover for her own prejudices (loosely defined as “beliefs which get in the way of stuff men want”), you see it everywhere.

Do you know who I really, truly feel sorry for? Elliot Page. I feel uncomfortable using that name, as though I am endorsing something I consider deeply harmful, but to use Page’s old name feels like kicking someone when they are down. On an individual level, what’s the point of pity now? Why rob someone of the narrative they need to survive when for them, there’s no going back? The reason, of course, would be that it’s not just about Page. Believing you are the opposite sex and subjecting your body to extreme, harmful modification, in the aftermath of years of abuse, misogyny and lesbophobia, is not something that should be sold as a happy tale of self-realisation. The problem with Page is the suffering and the prejudice that led to this are staring everyone in the face but you’re not allowed to feel pity. Oh no. If you do, that says more about you than it does about Page, who is living his best life.

If you think this is self-destruction in plain sight – a massive indictment of Hollywood’s absence of safeguarding and bigotry toward lesbians and gender non-conforming women – you will not be believed. You will be accused of just using this as cover for the fact you hate trans people. Or it might be suggested that you’re jealous of Page because, while you might claim to be a gender non-conforming woman or butch lesbian, you’re really refusing to come to terms with the fact that you’re a trans man. If like me you have suffered from anorexia in the past, and see similarities with Page’s own eating disorders and rejection of female body markers, you will be told to stop projecting your issues onto someone who has finally found the right body for them (indeed, maybe you should do that too! If you hate your breasts so much, why do you still have them?). If you think “I grew up in this really predatory, homophobic, misogynistic environment in which women are infantilised and objectified to within an inch of their lives, but this has absolutely nothing to do with me rejecting femaleness entirely” sounds a bit fucking ridiculous, you will be ignored. The suffering is there for everyone to see, but you’re simply not allowed to.

One of the worst harms of #BeKind – as opposed to just being kind – is this pressure to suppress feelings for others in this way. Don’t notice it, except when it’s useful to do so. Convince yourself that what you think are feelings of compassion are in fact secret traces of bigotry. If you were an accepting person, you would accept things as they are (unless you’re dealing with someone from the other side, politics-wise. ‘Their’ women are utterly consumed by false consciousness, which is the only reason they see things any differently to you).

We shouldn’t want to close ourselves off to pity. Feminism needs it. It needs it even when it might, at times, feel misdirected. When women say they care about other women, as taboo as this is, why not take them at their word?

I’ve never watched the film Love Actually all the way through and don’t suppose I ever will. Most of what I know I learned from Lindy West’s brilliantly silly, utterly furious Jezebel piece from 2013: ‘I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You’.

In addition to eviscerating what sounds like a truly terrible film (“This entire movie is just straight white men acting upon women they think they ‘deserve.’ This entire movie is just men doing things”), West’s piece is a classic example of early 2010s blog feminism. This was an exciting moment for feminism – unless you were a radical feminist with a serious theory of patriarchy and a healthy scepticism for REVOLUTION VIA ALL CAPS. But I wasn’t, so I rather enjoyed it for a bit. In March 2012, when my eldest children were small, I started my own ‘feminist mummy blog’ and joined Twitter, where I shared my rants with like-minded angry women. Fun times!

My now-defunct blog was called Glosswatch, on the basis that many of my targets were glossy magazines (this is also why my twitter/X handle is Glosswitch. Look, it seemed a good idea at the time). In my defence, many very successful sites – the aforementioned Jezebel, Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslet’s the Vagenda – were also taking aim at mainstream popular culture: Blurred Lines, Beach Ready Body ads, ‘woman laughing while eating salad’ stock photos. Yes, it all seemed pretty obvious, but that didn’t make it any less fun, or less impressive when – as in West’s case – the critique combined humour and rage in just the right measures.

The feminist argument made in many of the articles arising from this period tended to be the same. This cultural item claims to be selling women romance / empowerment / self-expression / sexual liberation, but look! This is bollocks! It’s actually telling you to be thinner / more compliant / more sexually subservient AND thinking you’re too stupid to notice! Fuck that! It was a very satisfying argument to make, partly because it was so clearly correct, but also because it was relatively safe. It wasn’t like attacking hardcore porn or the sex trade or anything else that might appeal to the nice, ‘progressive’ man with whom you shared a desk, a seminar or a friendship group. If you took this feminism to its logical conclusion, you would end up attacking these things, too, but many of its proponents didn’t. This became a problem – both for those of us who did start to say the quiet part out loud, and for those who set about trying to make hating on Page Three ideologically consistent with defending gang rape videos in order not to ‘kink shame’.

Where is blog feminism now? It is one thing – and a good thing – to attack the appropriation of feminist narratives of liberation in order to tell women what to do. But what if you end up constructing a ‘feminist’ narrative which is so inconsistent – so incoherent – it makes the work of appropriation entirely unnecessary? What if you end up doing the work of the appropriator all by yourself?

I thought this when reading West’s recent interview on her relationship with her husband and his girlfriend, a relationship to which she has adapted not least due to the deployment of certain ‘progressive’ dictums (hating on polyamory is conservative, and maybe even a bit racist! No one else should make assumptions about your agency!). These remind me of very tricks women’s glossies have always used (it’s not a diet, it’s a detox! It’s not a coercive relationship, it’s a fluid, queer polycule!).

The thing is, you know what’s being done to you. You’re not stupid. You might still go on a diet and tell yourself it’s a detox because you can’t will a world in which you’re not judged for your body size into existence and calling it a diet feels more humiliating, but still – you know. You might find it less painful to insist your desire just happens to match that of your cheating partner than to be alone, but still – you know. I understand how these things happen. But is it the job of feminism – or a writer who claims to hold feminist views – to endorse self-deception? Are we even allowed to call it that now?

*

In Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman, Tabitha Kenlon includes women’s magazines and self-help guides as modern-day iterations of conduct manuals, books which, from the fourteenth century onwards “provided printed details about what the ideal woman should and should not do”. As with fairy tales, the kind of stories and examples they offer can be read as straightforwardly sexist – “they always state quite plainly that their purpose is to tell women what to do” – but they also serve a practical function. They tell women and girls about the world as it is, and how they need to shape themselves to fit in it, not comfortably, but as comfortably as possible. The lesson is not in liberation, but in adaptation – how to live as successfully as possible within the current confines. If you push it further, it becomes how to convince yourself that even if you were totally free, you would choose your situation all over again. It’s your nature, or your desire, or your sheer good fortune just to be the kind of woman who wants what a woman in your position is meant to want. Like realising you want nothing better than to live the tradwife dream. Or falling in love with the woman your husband is already shagging anyways.

In the aftermath of second-wave feminism, glossy magazines switched their messaging without changing many of the underlying expectations made of their readers. It is true that some of the causes championed by the glossies were feminist – reproductive rights, workplace equality, an end to (some) sexual harassment And it would have been unrealistic to expect them to come right out and say “bad luck, ladies! You won on the equal pay bit – at least in a superficial, in principle if not in practice way – but lost out when it comes to tackling hardcore porn and female body ideals! Here are some tips to help you adapt to the misery!” Instead they worked hard at telling readers that, in the name of empowerment and choice, they were finally being ‘allowed’ to want all the crap that was coming their way regardless.

Early blog feminism excelled at pointing out what a total swizz this was. Yet something similar happened within that same feminism. If Glamour and Cosmopolitan repackaged diet and beauty industry misogyny as wellness and self-expression, then blog feminism – particularly the US version – repackaged male sexual entitlement as sexual freedom and gender non-conformity. It provided cover for ‘progressive’ misogyny by creating narratives to facilitate adaptation. The thought-terminating clichés that came for this feminism – sex work is work, trans women are women – essentially boil down to “male desire must be prioritised at all times”. But it is possible to misrepresent them as messages about the rejection of gender norms. Even if the tiniest moment’s thought would reveal this as nonsensical, the point isn’t to make women ask questions. It’s to offer them a way to justify not doing so.

West insists that it is a coincidence that she, too, fell in love with the woman her husband started sleeping with behind her back. It is not impossible, I guess. Maybe it’s coincidence that it looks so much like the language of liberation being used to justify the age-old process of female adaptation to male desire. Good job you wanted it anyways! Good job male demands – the demands of the males you like, anyways, the males on your ‘side’ – can always be accommodated as long as their female counterparts are willing to educate themselves!

It’s always possible to tell yourself you wanted it. It’s possible when it comes to the very worst things, things even worse than having a shit husband. What I don’t think is possible, though, is a world in which female desire is fully realised without ever treading on the toes of male desire. ‘Conservatism’ and ‘gender norms’ are not the only things standing in the way of a male sexual utopia. There’s also the fact that female desires, when fully respected, don’t magically shape themselves to accommodate male ones. They exist in their own right.

*

If Lindy West’s current situation had been depicted in Love Actually, what would she have written about it? Or would the West who wrote Adult Braces even be able to write a similar article today? Who is Lindy West to know what the silent women of Love Actually want? “IT NEVER FUCKING MATTERS WHAT WOMEN SAY,” writes West. Well, MAYBE THEY DON’T WANT IT TO MATTER. Who are you to say they’re not happy with things just the way they are?

“Women’s obedience,” writes Kenlon with regard to old-style conduct manuals, “is prized more highly than men’s decency.” But as long as we don’t view it as obedience, that’s okay.

Who are we to question anything at all?

A New York Times poll has revealed that many Democrat-voting Americans do not support every single trans activist demand. This has prompted much soul-searching on the part of activists and allies. Alas, said soul-searching has not taken the form of questioning whether the doubters are in fact right. It has been more a case of questioning whether the correct approach was taken in persuading the doubters. “You’re a genocidal fascist if you don’t agree with me” seems to have run its course.

It would, it seems, have been perfectly fine to keep insisting male rapists can go to women’s prisons, that male sports advantage is a myth and that left-leaning feminists are evil terfs who need to be burned at the stake if this stuff still worked. The issue here isn’t one of logic or morality, but of strategy. Turns out the “normies” are too thick to get with the programme, now that they know what the programme actually is. Therefore their betters need to explain it more clearly and patiently, perhaps with some bits emphasised, others edited out. Die in a grease fire, TERF scum was fun while it lasted but all good things must come to an end. Ditto No debate and #JustBeKind.

Obviously one could argue – and I, a stupid “normie”, would – that insisting that any leftist woman who expressed the slightest misgivings about being rebranded a cis privileged menstruator had to be a far-right Trump supporter wasn’t just a tactical error. It was dishonest, gaslighting behaviour. One could even argue that said woman is the one who’s remained loyal to truly leftist values, prioritising mutual dependency and relational identities over the Trump-esque tantrumming of “I am whoever I say I am, regardless of where I am situated in relation to anyone else”. One could consider whether the issue is not that said woman is an idiot who can’t comprehend the genius of Judith Butler and therefore needs to be spoon-fed some entry-level trans activism before everything gets too complex for her tiny TERF brain. One could do all of this, but I am guessing that nobody actually will.

Instead, there is a pretence that the left – the goodies – didn’t get things quite right on trans issues and the meanie, bastard right took advantage. There’s no consideration that maybe, those who branded every leftist who warned of this – for years – right-wing TERF scum aren’t the goodies either. I mean, seriously. You spent over a decade calling many a left-leaning lesbian feminist a far-right gender essentialist yet you still think it’s reasonable for you to self-ID as progressive? As the self-appointed goodies, you still presume to lecture others as though the issue isn’t that your arguments were flimsy and incoherent, but that others – dumb, immoral others, ripe for having their heads turned by baddies – were too stupid to grasp your beliefs in their rawest form. You’ll grudgingly considered you could have made your point better, but at heart the assumption remains that the stupid normies misunderstood you, not that they understood you perfectly well.

Maybe you’re just wrong.

In 2020, Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece that is a classic of the “I won’t engage with feminist arguments against trans activism but will pretend they’re stupid instead” genre. The too long, don’t read version is “women who have any issues with men declaring they’re women are unsophisticated Karens who haven’t spent enough time in San Francisco hanging out with drag queens,”. We’re all scared of male humans in a bit of lippy, you see. We dress it up as reasonable concerns but scratch the surface and you’ll find that, unlike Edgelord Rebecca, we’ve just had ridiculously sheltered lives:

“That I grew up and spent most of my life in San Francisco I consider one of my greatest strokes of luck, because it was in its heyday the loudest, proudest queer town around. Even as a straight girl, maybe especially as a straight girl, I benefited endlessly from that. I went to my first gay bar here when I was about 14, with a gay man who was the kindest person in my adolescence. The drag queens who were his friends were also kind, and fortysomething years later my life in and around the queer community has been largely an experience of kindness. Of kindness and liberation, because all these people made it clear to me that gender was what you made of it, and biology is not destiny, and that was really helpful.”

Guess you got me there. I grew up in Penrith, Cumbria (of ‘Withnail and I’ teashop fame, even though it wasn’t even filmed there and the fabled Penrith teashop doesn’t exist). What can I possibly know of kindness and liberation? What could the long-departed Toppers Nitespot and Southend Road car park’s Blues club (ladies’ night every Thursday!) teach me of gender non-conformity? (On the plus side, I might know more than Rebecca about Lake poets and sheep.)

Seriously, though – to pretend every man who claims to be a woman is some kindly drag queen teaching you how to do mascara in the ladies’ betrays a naivety on the part of Solnit, not anyone else. It shows a (deliberate?) refusal to acknowledge the darker reaches of male entitlement – at least when it’s politically inconvenient to do so. Women such as Dr Karen Ingala Smith, author of the brilliant Defending Women’s Spaces, cannot be browbeaten into thinking a change of pronouns and clothing makes a male person no more of a threat than a woman. On the contrary, one of the key feminist arguments against gender self-ID has been that while not all men are violent and predatory, we don’t know which ones are. Nonetheless, there are red flags one might look out for. These include, but are not limited to, demanding unlimited access to women’s spaces and resources, reducing female identities to porn stereotypes, threatening to kill others or yourself if women fail to comply. Women do not need educating out of noticing the this the minute a male person declares himself female.

It is trivially true that when someone like Donald Trump speaks of protecting women and girls, he is not speaking in favour of protecting women and girls from men like him. His argument is not the feminist one. But it is beyond stupid to decide that therefore, the feminist argument does not exist. That’s the argument you need to address, and you can’t.

There’s something almost sweet about declarations such as this:

Oh, so all you have to do is make your case properly, like other those groups did? Genius.

What this tends to miss is that yes, there was an era of “no debate”, which is a very sanitised way of saying there was a very long period during which people (many of them feminists) faced horrendous abuse and sanctions for trying to engage with trans activist arguments. This doesn’t mean that said people didn’t keep looking for the arguments and doing their best to make sense of them, even while having “genocidal fascists!” yelled in their faces. Believe it or not, we wanted to be wrong because the response towards us was so extreme, so threatening, so utterly bizarre, it would have made life a whole lot easier to accept it was our fault (in much the way, now I think of it, one tries to cope with an abusive relationship by attempting to work out why one brought it all on oneself). We really, really tried. Therefore, when it comes to many “normies”, you’re not dealing with people who don’t know your “real” arguments yet. We do, and many of us bent over backwards trying to tidy them up for you.

Here, in no particular order, are the kinds of arguments we’ve already ploughed through (and god, I’m so bored thinking about them. I’ll lose my mind if anyone tells me defining women as adult human females reduces them to baby-making machines one more time):

- Deliberately misunderstanding Simone de Beauvoir in order to try and make it sound as though defining women as a bunch of regressive stereotypes is one in the eye for biological essentialism (see: Laurie Penny, Amia Srinivasan)

- Admitting that none of it has any coherence, but claiming that really, living with incoherence and inconsistency is proof that you’re cleverer than everyone else and going on about things making sense is a bit basic and right-wing (see: Ruth Hunt, Maggie Nelson)

- Repackaging noughties neurosexism to make it sound like a moral cause and telling any woman who questions you that she’s not just a flat-earther, but a bigot to boot (see: Agustín Fuentes)

- Merging conservative gender essentialism with feminist gender abolition into one big, murky ‘anti-gender’ package, after which you somehow pretend people who think all female humans, as women, should be feminine tradwives are the same as people who don’t think female humans, as women, need to be feminine at all. Then chuck in some stuff where you conflate personal boundaries with geographical and racial ones in order to make anti-rape activists sound like Trump (see: Judith Butler, Sophie Lewis)

- Getting your (metaphorical or non-metaphorical) cock out and swinging it in women’s faces. I mean, what are they going to do about it? It’s, like, performance and totally not the same as some bog-standard bloke doing it! Or is it? No one knows! So deep! So edgy! So confusing! (see: Jordan Gray, Andrea Long Chu, Grace Lavery)

There are more, of course. But the fact is that none of them work. Moreover, we understand that “trans women are women” has to be supported with no exceptions. Them’s the rules, right? Otherwise they’re not women, just people whom we pretend are women some of the time in order to keep them happy. So suggesting that maybe, for instance, you make fewer demands about male participants in female sports isn’t going to pass muster.

The funny thing is, if you really do want a vaguely coherent-sounding defence of trans activism, I think the average terf could write a better one than the average trans activist. Because we’ve tried really, really hard to make your arguments make sense. Plus we understand our own arguments, so wouldn’t have to misrepresent the opposition. It still wouldn’t be a great defence – can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear – but it would have some substance.

Of course, it would be bitterly hilarious if those who have spent years harassing gender critical women turned out to have some killer arguments up their sleeve which they just haven’t used because, well, die, TERF was doing the trick. If that’s the case, bring them on. It wouldn’t erase the bullying of the past decade but it would be fascinating to discover there’s something we’ve missed. In the meantime, though, don’t expect some non-threatening, toned-down bullshit to work where full-on, rage-filled bullshit didn’t. Other people just aren’t that stupid.

Are female students just nicer and kinder than male ones? In The Myth of Mars and Venus, Deborah Cameron explores the way in which certain typically ‘feminine’ ways of communicating and behaving may not necessarily demonstrate more innate ‘niceness’ on the part of girls. Rather, being viewed as ‘the nicest’ – the kindest, the most empathetic – can be way for girls to achieve the same thing boys do via more directly aggressive tactics: status:

“Girls are no less competitive than boys (and their peer groups are no less hierarchical); but the ideological opposition between femininity and power gives them less freedom to ‘jockey for status in an obvious way’”.

This rings very true to me. I know women and girls who’ve been good at performing niceness as one aspect of performing femininity – and as with all femininity, there’s an artificiality to it. I don’t really feel it, but I want to be seen as it. There have been times when I’ve tried this myself. Actually being kind is less rewarding, at least in terms of any status boost. A woman’s kindness is one of those things which, to quote Katrin Marçal, is “just a logical extension of her fair, loving nature”. It isn’t valued when it’s real.

When the actress Olivia Colman decided to hold forth on “transphobes”, the ‘kindness’ seemed to me to fall clearly into the performative, artificial category: cost-free, status-boosting, lacking in any analysis or justification:

“It’s really important to tell everyone’s story and to do it from an empathetic point of view … Stories can, even if it’s in a small way, change people’s perceptions sometimes for the better. But then someone who is anti-trans and against trans rights is someone who – I don’t know how you explain to them what understanding and kindness is. And now I don’t know what’s the right way to do it.”

The false bewilderment is a giveaway. She is baffled – baffled! – as to how some people can be so far removed from ordinary human “understanding and kindness”. That is how much better than them she is.

To be fair, Colman does not spell out what she means by “anti-trans” and “against trans rights”. Perhaps she genuinely does mean someone who wishes to discriminate against trans people, as opposed to someone who merely holds the core beliefs Jenny Lindsay expresses in Hounded:

“Women are materially definable as a class of human being […] Women (as adult female humans) are culturally, legislatively and politically important, with their own sets of needs, rights and concerns […] Where social, cultural or legislative trends are under way – ones that may diminish women’s rights and/or liberation – then women have a right to meet and discuss freely that which affects their lives profoundly.”

Maybe Colman is okay with all that (though I doubt it). But even if she means people with genuinely discriminatory views, there’s something deeply unsettling about advertising your total inability to comprehend them. It reminds me of the way in which people think of past atrocities and always picture themselves in the role of victim or saviour, never perpetrator or bystander who did nothing. You have to be able to entertain the possibility that you could have been the baddie (something so many who share that Mitchell and Webb clip seem not to grasp). You have to consider whether, rather than you being too off-the-scale kind to understand the meanies, there may be something you have missed.

Really, though, I suspect by “someone who is anti-trans”, Colman means someone who questions trans activist demands in any way. In her environment, to do so means risking a significant drop in status. This means empathy must be switched on to some people, switched off for others. In his book Against Empathy, the psychologist Paul Bloom describes empathy as “a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now”:

“[…] spotlights only illuminate what they are pointed at, so empathy reflects our biases. […] It’s a spotlight that has a narrow focus, one that shines most brightly on those we love and gets dim for those who are strange or different or frightening.”

I know that some would argue that trans people are “strange or different or frightening” and that therefore putting the needs of trans identified men before those of gender critical women is actually an overcoming of self-interest. I don’t think this is remotely true in the privileged spheres in which Colman operates. Working-class nurses or female prisoners are more strange, different and frightening – more low-status, less worth supporting – than the likes of Eddie Izzard or your actor friend’s non-binary child. “Whether or not you feel empathy,” writes Bloom, “depends on prior decisions about who to worry about, who counts, who matters – and these are moral choices.” It’s not enough to tell everyone how much you are feeling – who are you feeling it for, and why?

**

Yet kindness – in a true, non-performative sense – still matters. Whether most women are ‘naturally’ kinder than most men is difficult to prove. What is certainly true is that girls are conditioned to be more selfless, empathetic and giving than boys. There is a double standard in terms of expectations.

Not only that, but as Carol Gilligan noted in In A Different Voice, “the very traits that traditionally have defined the ‘goodness’ of women, their care for and sensitivity to the needs of others, are those that mark them as deficient in moral development”. Today we see a very clear example of this in right-wing men’s attacks on liberal women’s supposed “suicidal empathy” (some may well include Colman in this).

Conservative men who believe very much in ‘essential differences’ between women and men – in women being soft, gentle, compliant, men being hard, aggressive, dominant – have found a way to use “woman as empathiser” (as they would very much like her to be) to justify the sidelining of women in politics (because she’s too empathetic – suicidally so!). These overly empathetic women are putting women’s – their own! – safety at risk by refusing to embrace right-wing men’s overtly racist methods of ‘protecting women’ from other men (but not, you understand, themselves).

You see the double bind women face. Some early feminists sought to capitalise on the idea that women were kinder than men by suggesting this was the reason to grant them greater involvement in public life. Women’s emancipation, wrote Frances Power Cobbe, was “a means, a very great means, of doing good, fulfilling our Social Duty of contributing to the virtue and happiness of mankind, advancing the kingdom of God”. No self-interest in play here! Except men who believe ‘masculine’ qualities to be essential to access power are unlikely to fall for it, even as they impose ‘feminine’ qualities on women. Women must be feminine, but institutions that matter must never be ‘feminised’.

“Much of traditional morality in our society,” wrote Mary Daly, “appears to be the product of reactions on the part of men— perhaps guilty reactions— to the behavioural excesses of the stereotypical male”:

“There has been a theoretical one-sided emphasis upon charity, meekness, obedience, humility, self-abnegation, sacrifice, service. Part of the problem with this moral ideology is that it became accepted not by men but by women, who hardly have been helped by an ethic which reinforces the abject female situation.[…] A mark of the duplicity of this situation is the fact that women, who according to the fables of our culture (the favourable ones, as opposed to those that stress the “evil” side of the stereotype) should be living embodiments of the virtues it extols, are rarely admitted to positions of leadership.”

Women’s “goodness”, argued Daly, was also treated as a “tragic flaw”, confining them to “moral imbecility”. I think the link between this (written in 1973) and current complaints about women’s empathy supposedly having corrupted politics, HR departments and academia are obvious.

It’s not that I don’t think some #BeKind rhetoric is a problem – I’ve written a whole book on it (paperback out 6^th March!). But there is a distinct (one might say deliberate) failure to distinguish between the type of ‘kindness’ that is ambition and status-boosting in disguise, and that which arises from an understanding of relationality and mutual dependency – the latter being the sort upon which our economies and social structures depend, but for which women receive little reward or recognition. The world would fall apart without this form of kindness, which is a challenge to any individualistic, non-relational politics (whether this be the I am whoever I say I am of capitalism or that of ‘progressive’ identitarianism).

It’s ironic to see male violence and predatory behaviour become a focal point of justifications to exile not men, but women from political discourse and campaigning, on the basis that some women ‘let’ men from the ‘other side’ do whatever they want. It is insincere and opportunistic. There is nothing “suicidally” empathetic about the performative kindness which allows some women to push others into the firing line, nor is there anything irrational about the genuine empathy which drives some women to put their own selves on the line for the sake of others.

In both cases, though, it makes no sense to talk of suicide when women are not killing themselves. It is men killing women. No women, however sincere or performative, ‘enable’ this. Only men can choose to do it.

Subscribe now

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in the Royal College of Psychiatry’s Women and Mental Health Special Interest Group Conference. The day ended with an excellent talk by Liz Kelly, under the title ‘First we saw it then we didn’t – how institutions loose sexual violence’.

Towards the start, Kelly mentioned Beatrix Campbell’s book Secrets and Silence, on the Cleveland child sex abuse scandal of the late 80s. It reminded me of the first time I’d heard of the scandal, and how the framing had unnerved me. The broadly accepted narrative was that two paediatricians, Dr Marietta Higgs and Dr Geoffrey Wyatt, had vastly over-diagnosed cases of child sexual abuse in Cleveland. I remembered overhearing a conversation about it between my father and a friend of his, a male social worker. I was struck by how scathing they were of Higgs in particular, how convinced they were of her craziness, taking all those children from ‘decent’ families. I told myself the men must be right, because that was what most people seemed to think – that you would have to be insane to think child abuse was so common. It bothered me, though, and I wasn’t sure why. Some children were abused, weren’t they? It was a thing, wasn’t it? So why were people so much more riled about the idea of a conspiracy against decent parents than abuse itself? In conversations like these and in much of the media reporting, there was a strange degree of pleasure taken in bringing down whistleblowers. It was a restoration of order.

Reading Campbell’s book now, it does not surprise me that things were not quite so one-sided. The first account Campbell gives is that of ‘Minnie’, a ‘Cleveland child’ and survivor of genuine, horrific abuse (of Higgs Minnie says “everyone was demonising her, everyone was saying she is a bad person, a bad person. But to me, she was my saviour”). That Minnie’s stepfather abused her and her brother is not in question; even before her stepfather’s arrival, her mother’s mistreatment of her was being monitored. Nonetheless, at one stage, at her mother’s insistence, a social worker took her to a party hosted by advocates for accused adults (‘Parents Against Injustice’).

There’s something about these stories that is so, so bad, it’s almost fantastical. Freud, as Kelly noted in her talk, backtracked on believing the accounts of sexual abuse given by female patients – recasting them as imaginings – on the basis that there just couldn’t be that many. More so even than adult victims of sexual assault, victims of grooming and child sexual abuse always seem to be on the backfoot precisely because it feels too appalling to be true, but also too close for comfort. Even in a culture which sexualises youth and vilifies female ageing, CSA counts as something absurd – something which must be projected back onto the victim (a ‘troubled’ child, or a ‘fantasist’), or minimised as happening only to a tiny minority (not so many families!), or only within certain groups (not those families!), or as an outcome of certain self-contained attitudes and motivators which don’t apply to ‘ordinary’ men (it’s that religion, or that racial group, or the powerful, or the marginalised – it couldn’t happen here, anyways).

It is not surprising in the least that the Epstein abuse scandal is already being cast by some as drifting towards the realms of ‘moral panic’. Such things always do. We are told that Cleveland became a moral panic; Operation Yewtree became a moral panic; #MeToo became a moral panic; grooming gangs became a moral panic. It’s funny how often that happens. Look, no one’s saying abuse doesn’t happen at all but could it be this widespread, could so many people be implicated, could it be so normalised at a time when people – often the same people who are implicated – know to denounce real abuse? Shouldn’t we focus on the real baddies, who are teeny tiny in number?

In an entirely predictable article (the kind you can imagine being written in template, with examples being shoved in later), Brendan O’Neill wearily concedes that “Epstein was a venal character whose abuse of young women was appalling”:

“But there’s a medieval vibe of finger-pointing and rumor-mongering to this latest stage of the Epstein affair. Innocent people look set to be devoured by the bloodlust of the digital mob that can’t get enough of all the tall tales about a vast pedo ring that secretly runs the world.”

Oh no! Who wants to be part of the mob? Believe in baddies, yes, but don’t go looking like some mental person who thinks it’s any more organised or socially sanctioned than that.

As I wrote in my book Hags, it’s women, usually older women, who take the risk of looking like the crazy people who believe in the terrible thing. Accusations of moral panic and hysteria (a word used by Freud to reframe the suffering of patients and by Noam Chomsky in his correspondence with Epstein) function to shame and discredit, and often they work. In her memoir Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Giuffre tells of multiple experiences of sexual abuse, starting in the home, long before she encounters Epstein. I have seen this used in attempts to discredit Giuffre, on the basis that this shows, not how prevalent abuse is at all social strata, or how abuse victims can be made more vulnerable due to responses to the initial trauma, but that Giuffre was the sort of person who liked to tell these sort of stories (if it were all true, she would have, you know, toned it down). This is not too far from the line – another common one – that abuse is traumatising, yes, but trauma makes women unreliable, and maybe women who have been abused as children become the sort of women who see abuse everywhere, so best not listen to them. If you want to be believed – and what victim doesn’t want to be believed – there is pressure not to see too much or tell too much, and certainly not to implicate too many people. Otherwise you’ll look like a conspiracy theorist. We’ll still feel sorry for you, but not for the reasons you want.

To sound like a conspiracy theorist (I was going to write “at the risk of sounding like”, but what’s the point?) I think most people do not want to acknowledge how widespread grooming and CSA are because they sense just how much the culture around us enables them. By this, I don’t just mean “the culture of the powerful”. There are people who will say the Epstein scandal is not a moral panic, but that other scandals – grooming gangs, for instance – are moral panics. “Look who’s NOT in the Epstein files” can become another way of minimising the ubiquity of abuse, and with it, the credibility of victims who may have abusers whom it is less fashionable or comfortable to denounce. The family of someone like ‘Minnie’ would never appear in the Epstein files, but the beliefs about what women and children are for – and what men should be allowed to do to them while still being seen as ‘good’ – are everywhere. Within the context of the average home, “the powerful”, the one who can act with impunity, is not a billionaire. Usually he just has to be a man.

Like many, I worry that the Epstein scandal will be neatly packaged away as a story of wealth and power. I also worry that in wanting it to be seen in the broader context of how men groom and abuse children with the knowledge, if not approval, of other adults, at all strata of society, I become someone who wishes to de-contextualise, to strip out all the specifics. The financial and political power matters, certainly. Abusive men who come from more marginalised settings aren’t the ones influencing policies, including ones that shape how we even talk about sexual violence. When abuse legitimisation is right at the top, it feels particularly hopeless. Every global effort to ‘empower women and children’ starts to feel like cover. The world is more clearly split into the wealthy who matter, and other humans, reduced to meat.

It’s not just about that sort if power, though. What has been ‘uncovered’ is also something that feminists and other whistleblowers have been trying to expose, in different settings, for decades. When one of my teenage sons said of Epstein, “it’s like a conspiracy theory, but it’s true”, I couldn’t help thinking that’s what feminism has always been up against. Until the madness ends, we’ll be the ones who look mad.

My first feminist protest occurred in a junior school sewing class. I wanted to make a pencil case. Girls, I was told, had to make samplers. Pencil cases were for boys.

I’m not sure who thought of this particular rule, but my teachers took it very seriously. If boys had to do sewing these days, at least one could temper the emasculation by letting them make something practical. Only I wanted something practical, too. I wanted something I could use, not just a decorative piece of cloth. My request went as far as the head and eventually it was approved. Following that, it turned out plenty of other girls wanted to make pencil cases, too.

I’m aware that on the grand scale of sex-based injustice, being asked to make a sampler barely ranks at all. Far worse things happen to girls every day (indeed, worse things had happened to me). Nevertheless, I simply didn’t understand why the boys could do that one thing and I couldn’t. Surely there was nothing about being female that ought to put pencil case-making off limits.

As is so often the case, my childhood feminism started with the bleeding obvious. I didn’t grow up around feminists and I didn’t get my initial ideas from books or speeches. I just got it from noticing – as many of us do – that there was a difference between being female and so many of the behaviours, feelings and (in)capabilities that were associated with “being a girl”.

Why was I not supposed to like the things my brother was meant to? Why, when I wanted to do “masculine” things (and he so often didn’t), were both of us told that wasn’t allowed? Why, in the families I knew, were mothers not supposed to work – or at least not in a way that brought in much money? Why were mothers then judged for obeying these rules, while fathers got to use the fact that the money was “theirs” to make every decision? Why was I pushed to like certain things – dolls, beauty rituals, the colour pink – which were simultaneously presented as evidence of some innate triviality? If the things boys did and liked were so much better – so much more serious and valid – why was I told it was wrong for me to do and like those things, too?

I’m not sure I’d have put it in those words at the time. I only remember it in snapshots, as feelings. It’s not as though I ever sat down and separated out what I knew about sex differences that were real and all those differences that I sensed to be exaggerated, if not entirely confected. Nor did I think very clearly about the way in which supposedly random stereotypes – why should girls like this and not that? – were not that random after all. My first impression of gender, as opposed to sex, was of an oddly enduring misunderstanding, with no particular intent behind it. People thought women weren’t equipped to play football or vote or drive cars or refuse to have sex with their partners because … well, maybe women hadn’t said anything about this stuff until five minutes ago?

As time went on, though – and as even the pencil case / sampler binary suggested – I began to feel there was more to gender than an arbitrary doling out of stuff. Even if particular sex-role stereotypes changed over time, things associated with boys tended to be coded one way (practical, active, hard, dominant, rational), those associated with girls another (decorative, passive, soft, compliant, frivolous). It wasn’t that I thought all male-coded things were better, or even that I imagined that without stereotypes, different qualities would be equally dispersed between the sexes. It was that the overall picture sent a message about human beings – how men stood in relation to women, who mattered most, who deserved the most resources, whose work mattered most, who owed what to whom. Men are useful, women are decoration.

“All the fuss about femininity (and to a lesser degree masculinity) is obviously not about inherent differences between the sexes,” wrote Janet Radcliffe Richards in 1980:

“It must, therefore, very differently, be about what it is thought that the sexes ought to be like, and about what measures need to be taken to achieve whatever that is. […] much of what is believed about women stems from what is wanted from women.”

Externally imposed, coerced differences between men and women can feel random and silly but they’re not. This is important, even if samplers and pencil cases are not.

Radical feminists did not invent the distinction between sex as a material reality and gender as a social hierarchy any more than human beings – or eighteenth-century colonialists, as some trans activists would have it – “invented” biological sex. They were identifying a phenomenon that was already in existence. I didn’t imagine a childhood being told that some things – thoughts, feelings, abilities – were inaccessible to girls, despite the fact that these were things I could think, feel and do. Nor did I imagine this being clearly different to having a female body and not a male one. When I heard my grandma speak of things I could do which she’d been told were only for men, neither of us were under the illusion that this included “grow a penis”. Or were we meant to accept that no woman should ever get a mortgage or a university degree lest it lead to confusion over whether there was such a thing as femaleness at all?

My friend Marina has described a phenomenon she calls “she who smelt it dealt it” feminism, whereby feminists are blamed for somehow bringing into being the very things they describe. This happens, for instance, with violence against women in the sex trade (if only radical feminists would shut up about it, there’d be no stigma, so men would stop raping and beating prostituted women, or something). Right now, we are seeing it happen with trans activism’s assault on women’s rights. Self-styled rational voice-of-reason men are swooping in to tell us that if only “we” (all feminists) hadn’t made such a fuss about separating socially constructed feminine qualities from biological femaleness, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now.

It’s as if, by cutting femininity loose from the female body, we only have ourselves to blame if it took on a life of its own and supplanted adult human females in terms of defining what women are. As if, since we hadn’t been willing to accept being sampler-makers – or being “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes” – as merely part and parcel of being biologically female, it’s our fault if these qualities should become all women are, with the female biology bit tossed out of the window.

An example of the “logic” is here:

The argument – as far as I can work out – seems to be that if you reject the patriarchal version of “woman” in the sense of rejecting socially constructed feminine norms, that’s kind of, if you squint a bit, the same as rejecting womanhood in the sense of saying you’re not a woman because you’re not a representative of socially constructed feminine norms. Certainly, Judith Butler seems incapable of telling the difference between these two things – even though they’re MASSIVE OPPOSITES – so it must be true (who cares about logical coherence when you can blame feminists who objected to sexism for sexism itself?).

The thing that really annoys me is, I knew the difference between these having a vagina and being required to do “feminine” things when I was eight years old, back with my pencil case. I wouldn’t have had the words to describe it, though. Four decades later, I do.

If only Simone de Beauvoir hadn’t tried to be so fancy with her language. What if, instead of writing the following:

“ONE IS NOT born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychical or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilisation as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine.”

she’d written something more like “human females are subject to intense socialisation and the end product is then used to define what women are, regardless of what the human female is at birth”. Okay, maybe something better than that, but certainly not with that first sentence which gets constantly misread to mean “anyone can become a woman, regardless of their sex”. Fucks sake, Simone. Now look what you’ve done. What feminist has the right to expect people to read more than one sentence of their work before declaring they’ve understood it?

If you do read The Second Sex – and not just that one line – you’ll notice that Beauvoir knows exactly what a female body is. You’ll also notice that unlike the average porn-addled ‘progressive’, she doesn’t regard femininity as some luxury state which should, quite rightly, take the place of femaleness (“for a woman to accomplish her femininity she is required to be object and prey; that is, she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject”).

What second-wave feminists believed about sex and gender can’t be boiled down to a line or a paragraph. As someone who reached adulthood in the nineties, I encountered the backlash – the parodies, the caricatures, the misrepresentations – years before I read any second-wave feminist writing. The story seemed to go as follows:

second-wave feminists – those bitches, not like you nice third-wave ones, with your agentic tits out for the (very progressive) lads – thought every difference between men and women came down to evil patriarchal socialisation and that men and women would be literally the same in every way apart from genital differences. They were total blank slatists, completely anti-scientific and unwilling to engage with the idea of difference. Plus they hated men and babies, the utter cows.

It’s fair to say this was not what feminists actually thought (they thought and continue to think lots of different things). However, the most annoying thing with that argument was that if, like me, you’d grown up with one of your objections to gender being “women can’t do science or rationality”, you found yourself in a double bind. If you didn’t agree with “science tells us women can’t do science and that’s not patriarchy, just facts”, you looked like a woman who couldn’t do science (it’s fair to say I still see a lot of “showing the men I accept women have different brains, thereby proving MY brain is just like the men’s” in certain female commentators today).

The feminist debate on sex, gender and socialisation was far more nuanced than this. For instance, although Richards critiqued the way in which “social arrangements, institutions and customs which defined the relative position of the sexes were designed to ensure that women should be in the power and service of men”, she also considered it “quite compatible with feminism to think it would be pleasant to have, other things being equal, a society where men and women tended to choose what was traditionally associated with their sex, and enjoy the differences traditionally associated with the other”. It’s the “other things being equal” that was the real issue here. ‘Difference’ feminists such as Carol Gilligan were open to the idea that there may be particularly “female” ways of thinking and behaving, while at the same time questioning the construction of femininity to disempower women and serve male ends. Maternal feminists explored the relationship between female reproductive capacity and cultural beliefs about what ‘real’ women could and couldn’t do.

If feminist political writing and philosophy were taken as seriously as it should be these arguments would never been reduced to “silly wimmin thinking everyone’s the same”. What emerges, on the contrary, is curiosity about human possibility. In The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, Anne Koedt described women as “crawling out of femininity into a new sense of personhood”. In Greer’s The Female Eunuch, the enemy is the straitjacket of femininity, not the female body. What so many anti-feminists done is taken the shoulder-padded anti-maternal ballbreaker of eighties films (already taken apart in Faludi’s Backlash) as a suitable shortcut to engaging with the complexity of feminist thought.

Of course, we’re now at a stage where ‘blank slatist’ isn’t the worst insult that’s being thrown at feminists. Indeed, those who caricature feminism in this way will claim they are on our side in the terf wars – how about we show them some gratitude for their willingness to acknowledge that female bodies exist at all? After all, isn’t the current situation a “direct and logical consequence” of what they believe us to believe, and there’d have been nothing for them to believe we believed if we hadn’t had beliefs of our own to start with?

This, seriously, is the kind of “logic” that we are left with. I am truly tired of it.

In the late nineties and early noughties, the backlash against the feminist distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender often took the form of popular science and psychology books which claimed that many perfectly benign differences between women and men – e.g. women being shit at reading maps and running countries, men being shit at doing the ironing and not killing people – had been rendered unspeakable by those evil blank slatist feminists (who were never actually quoted in said books). One well-known example was Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference, in which a distinction was asserted between “systemising” and “empathising” brains. The former was associated with male brains and the latter with female brains.

Whether more female humans than male humans – other things being equal, as Richards put it – might be better at empathising even without socialisation or power imbalances isn’t quite the point (in any case, Baron-Cohen doesn’t really acknowledge the relationship between “feminine” qualities and disempowerment). Baron-Cohen already knows that some people with vaginas can be “systemisers”, just as feminists had been saying. He still wants to re-conflate biological sex and sex-role stereotypes, though, and he does so by deciding the latter are another way in which we can tell what sex a person is:

When you think about your sex, you have to distinguish five different levels:

- Your genetic sex: you are male if you have one X and one Y chromosome (XY), and you are female if you have two X chromosomes (XX).

- Your gonadal sex: you are male if you have a normal set of testes / (producing male hormones), and you are female if you have a normal set of ovaries (producing female hormones).

- Your genital sex: you are male if you have a normal penis, and you are female if you have a normal vagina.

- Your brain type: you are male if your systemizing is stronger than your empathizing, and you are female if your empathizing is stronger than your systemizing.

- Your sex-typical behaviour: this follows from your brain type. You are male if your interests involve things such as gadgets, CD collections, and sports statistics, and you are female if your interests involve things such as caring for friends, worrying about their feelings, and striving for intimacy.

A question: does those last two points sound like they come from feminist analysis? The very analysis that has been pointing out that women and girls can like gadgets and statistics and men and boys can also care for friends? Or do they sound a bit more like classic sexism, a way of getting around the fact that sex = gender has been disproven (for instance, by women not shrivelling up and dying every time they read a map or open their own bank account) by saying “well, it still equals gender if you rebrand all the gender things sex things. Checkmate, feminists!”?

I did the quiz at the end of Baron-Cohen’s book. Apparently I have a systemising – aka male – brain. The idea that this makes me less female – less of a woman – than a female human with a higher empathiser rating strikes me as nonsense. It also strikes me as the kind of nonsense a trans activist would come out with. Indeed, it is the people who seek to deride the feminist distinction between sex and gender – who seek to re-establish the conflation of the two by saying “liking girly stuff is still female, even if you have a penis” – who have the most in common with modern-day trans activists. The beliefs of the latter are not a distortion of feminism. They’re an extension of traditional patriarchal beliefs about which sex is “supposed” to do what.

See, for instance, Agustin Fuente’s 2023 sex-denialist rant Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary:

We know that humans exhibit a range of biological and behavioral patterns related to sex biology that overlap and diverge. Producing ova or sperm does not tell us everything (or even most things) biologically or socially, about an individual’s childcare capacity, homemaking tendencies, sexual attractions, interest in literature, engineering and math capabilities or tendencies towards gossip, violence, compassion, sense of identity, or love of, and competence for, sports. Gametes and gamete production physiology, by themselves, are only a part of the entirety of human lives. Plentiful data and analyses support the assertions that sex is very complex in humans and that binary and simplistic explanations for human sex biology are either wholly incorrect or substantially incomplete.

This is the same tactic deployed by Baron-Cohen – the merging of “biological and behavioural patterns”, as though liking a gossip and having ovaries are the same sort of thing. Sexists who think sex is binary and immutable engage in this, and sexists who think sex depends on whether you like sports or baking engage in it too. To go back to the charge made by Konstantin Kisin above – “feminists created the concept of gender and pretended it can be separated from sex” – well, yeah, we did. Except we weren’t pretending because “interest in literature” and “math capabilities” can indeed be separated from maleness and femaleness – regardless of how much weight you give to actual reproductive difference.

What, then, to make of those who call themselves feminists while embracing gender identity ideology? Isn’t that some sort of proof that trans activism is a logical consequence of the feminist distinction between sex and gender (even if we can’t trace the logic)?

I’d say not really. After all, such feminists are pretty clear about how wrong they believe earlier feminists to have been.

For instance, in The Right to Sex ‘trans inclusive’ feminist Amia Srinivasan picks up where the noughties neurosexists left off:

We inspect this supposedly natural thing, ‘sex’, only to find that it is already laden with meaning. At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned. Some of these bodies are for creating new bodies, for washing and clothing and feeding other bodies (out of love, never duty), for making other bodies feel good and whole and in control, for making other bodies feel free. Sex is, then, a cultural thing posing as a natural one. Sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise.

Like Baron-Cohen, like Fuentes, she is smushing together stereotype and biological difference. Noticing that a body is female and can get potentially get pregnant is not the same as deciding it is “for creating new bodies” – reproductive potential is not the same as social purpose, just as defining bodies by sex is not the same as defining bodies by whether they should be “washing and clothing and feeding other bodies”. These ought to be feminists basics, yet they are too politically risky for Srinivasan to acknowledge. Note the last sentence – “sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise” (admittedly I cannot read this without hearing the 80s advert for Transformers – sex difference! Gender in disguise! Which doesn’t make it true).

In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler likens feminists who distinguish sex from gender to conservatives who conflate sex with gender on the grounds that both groups argue women are biologically female and that bodies matter. Both groups she calls “anti-gender”, refusing to acknowledge that one is opposed to gender as a social hierarchy which insists women must be feminine, men, masculine, while the other is very much okay with that as a proposition (as is Butler herself – she just offers any unwilling adult human females, herself included, the supposed get out clause of saying they’re not women after all). In much the same way Baron-Cohen refuses to stop at identifying systemising and empathising brains, but has to call such brains “male” or “female” – regardless of whether they appear in male or female bodies – Butler claims that “the critique of the gender binary” has given rise to “a proliferation of genders beyond the established binary versions”. But why are these “genders” and not just “personality types” or “interests” or “ways of thinking and feeling”? Why does Butler have to situate all “genders” (however many she claims there to be) in relation to maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity? Why can’t she let maleness and femaleness be? She may try to pretend what she offers is a refinement of the feminism that distinguishes between sex and gender. “Self-definition,” she declares, “is an age-old feminist prerogative.” But you would have to be an idiot – or displaying the same bad faith she does – to read her version of “self-definition” as an extension of the argument that an adult human female should not be defined as feminine or that one’s sex should not determine one’s position in a social hierarchy.

I can think of many reasons why Butler argues what she does, and why she gets away with it. Femininity has been used to position female humans as inferior, but it has also been eroticised under patriarchy – the idea that women love degradation and dehumanisation really has made it, to some male people, an enviable state. This is made very plain the writing of trans-identified males such as Paris Lees, Grace Lavery, Julia Serano and Andrea Long Chu. They think they’d love it too (but never actually experience anything other than a play-acting version). Butler knows she wouldn’t love it, so she says she’s not a woman. “For Butler,” wrote Martha Nussbaum in her brilliant take-down of 1999, “the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight.” You could use the word “personalities” instead of the word “gender” but where’s the power imbalance? Who’d be turned on by that?

In this way, I think the ‘feminism’ of Butler – and trans activism in general – could be read as a logical conclusion, not of second wave feminism, but of patriarchy’s eroticisation of female subjugation. It’s been made so appealing that male people don’t want to be excluded from it, in turn making ‘woman’ an intolerable status for any adult human female who doesn’t enjoy being treated like dirt. It’s patriarchy for the porn age. If anyone is to blame, it’s hardly the feminists who put their lives into rejecting gender in the first place.

It doesn’t surprise me that the very feminists who first sounded the alarm on gender identity ideology have ended up being blamed for it. The traditional patriarch thinks he has us over a barrel. In his film ‘What Is A Woman?’, conservative misogynist Matt Walsh detailed all the ways in which sex denialism is idiotic – as if he was the first to notice – while suggesting that denying boys have penises is the same sort of thing as thinking boys don’t need to play with guns. The message was that if you don’t like men in your changing rooms and rape crisis centres, you’d better accept a return to traditional values. Choose your sexism, ladies! There is no third way.

I find it devastating that so many supposedly ‘progressive’ people have gone along with this. The right-winger threatens the loss of our boundaries if we don’t accept his sex-acknowledging conflation of sex and gender; the ‘progressive’ threatens the loss of our abortion rights if we don’t accept his sex-denialist version. Neither seems to think we deserve anything more. A trans activist version of my pencil case / sampler story would have the narrator claiming that being told to make the “wrong” item was evidence, not that the items were needlessly categorised, but that they themselves had been wrongly categorised. It would endorse rather than reject sex-role stereotypes (it shouldn’t need to be stated that endorsing something is not the “logical conclusion” of rejecting it).

I can’t help feeling much of this comes down to a belief, shared between conservative and ‘progressive’ sexists, that female equality is a lie. A belief that women aren’t really as intelligent, thoughtful, rational, human as men, and that the feminist critique of gender stereotypes was just something everyone else went along with without actually believing women didn’t still have fluffy ladybrains filled nonsense. What I hear when feminists are blamed for sex denialism is “well, what did you expect? You got us all to pretend gender stereotypes are nonsense, so you’ve only yourselves to blame when people start pretending sex isn’t real, either!” Because too many men - whether they’re driven by religion or by ‘traditional’ values or by porn - can’t let go of the conflation of femaleness and femininity. They just don’t believe we’re more diverse than that (and when that message is so powerful across the political spectrum, it’s hardly surprising some women reject femaleness. If you can’t wrest womanhood from femininity, flight can seem the only option).

Yet the feminist rejection of sex-role stereotypes, of femininity, of masculinity, is not naïve or incoherent. It’s essential, I think, that feminists who understand this do not apologise for other people’s mistakes. The sex-role stereotypes we reject can seem trivial (the thing we make in sewing class) or they can be enormous (the role we play at work or in relationships). Either way, we shouldn’t bow down. Our bodies matter, but our minds do, too.

Ever since last Thursday, when the UK supreme court ruled that the legal definition of woman is to be based on biological sex, I’ve been hearing that phrase – so often aimed at disgruntled Brexiteers – in my head. As a fully paid-up TERF I’d been terrified that things might go the other way (though not as terrified as some lesbian friends I spoke to beforehand). Why, then, do I feel so pissed off?

Partly it’s that release of breath. When you’re so busy being scared, outrage is a luxury. I had a similar feeling following the publication of the Cass Review. Partly it’s seeing photos of the viciously misogynistic rallies organised in response to the ruling – so much male rage at the very idea that female people get so much as a single word for themselves.

So there’s all that, but it’s not the main reason for my pissed-off-ness. The misogyny – and the utter failure of politicians to condemn it as misogyny that is intrinsic to a misogynistic movement – is terrifying, but it’s hardly a surprise. In truth, the thing that is really getting to me is reading about Keir Starmer “urging MPs to ‘lower the temperature’ in debate on gender ruling”; seeing pious requests that “society” work to get things right “with care and compassion, rather than indulging in score-settling”; being told that there has been “a toxicity on both sides”; finding articles in which people who’ve thought about this issue for two second flat propose “taking the heat out of the trans debate”:

““The gender/trans debate has been just one of many polarising issues of the past decade, which have seen two increasingly irate camps attack each other ever more viciously, while the rest of us duck our heads and try not to express any opinions […] Whatever the rights and wrongs of the latest ruling, or of the situation more generally, it’s a sad state of affairs when the space for proper debate has been squeezed out by all the noise and anger.”

When I read things like this, I want to throw things. Noisily and angry. Perhaps also while appearing irate.

It’s not that I am against calm, rational debate. However, gender-critical feminists have encountered some significant problems when it comes being seem as offering “more light, less heat”. The first is the enormous (and highly gendered) double standard that governs ‘the trans debate’. The pattern tends to be this:

- Feminists painstakingly amass research and present it in as careful, tactful way as possible

- Trans activists threaten to kill us (sometimes while also suggesting that carefulness and tact are fascist dogwhistles)

- Self-styled voices of reason mutter about how toxic and polarised everything is

Or there’s:

- Feminists present evidence that trans activists are threatening to kill us, hoping to get a little help

- Self-styled voices of reason tell feminists off for sharing things that make a vulnerable group look bad, before once again muttering about how toxic and polarised everything is

And there’s even:

- Gender-critical children’s writer produces a book on how nice it is to like your body, and how great diverse bodies are, and doesn’t mention trans people at all

- Trans activists condemn said book as actual violence (perhaps while threatening to kill said author, which isn’t actual violence)

- Self-styled voices of reason continue to fret about polarisation, but find some comfort in the fact that the author’s career is destroyed

It is, as you can imagine, quite hard to shed light in a situation where all feminist light is instantly reinterpreted as feminist dogwhistle heat.

In addition to the double standard (which you’re not meant to notice is gendered, because that’s misgendering, which also counts as hate), there’s the way in which “more light, less heat” replicates the both sides-ism that many women encounter when trying to complain about male violence in other areas of life. For many women this can be highly triggering and distressing. It brings to mind the way in which female accusers are dismissed as crazy bitches caught up in “volatile relationships” – the kind of relationships where, if a man actually does kill a woman, he will have primed his audience enough for many to claim that he was provoked. I often think that if and when extremists act on their threats of violence – and some have already – no one will say it was down to their fundamental hatred of outspoken women. They will blame “the toxicity” or “the polarisation”, as if the woman is a contributor the hatred that leads to her demise. It makes me, and I’m sure lots of other women, feel very alone.

There’s a third reason, though, why I hate “more light, less heat”. The fact that no light is ever enough – that no matter what we say, as long as the response is “die, terf”, we’re seen as toxic, too – means we can get into a spiral. We watch our words so, so carefully, trying so, so hard to please the voices of reason, hoping that one day we might meet their exacting standards. I tried this for years. Earlier this week I was discussing with a friend the cost of this desperate self-censorship, a cost that is so rarely acknowledged. It’s painful and it’s degrading. You keep trying and trying and then eventually, the moment some women – after so much work – make some progress, it’s “have any of you considered being more nuanced? Less polarised? Less shouty?”

Yes, we fucking have. But have you ever consider what all this trying has taken from us?

1

I never thought men who claim to be women actually were women. There was no logic to it – or at least, no logic that wasn’t, once you’d pulled the thread right to the end, profoundly sexist. The trans definition of ‘woman’ always came back to regressive, highly pornified, stereotypes, though to be fair, I didn’t factor in the porn to start with. Initially I thought something along the lines of “these are very gender non-conforming men who find it intolerable to move through a highly gendered world in the masculine role, and for whom life is much easier if they are allowed to be called women”. My general feeling was “oh, well – live and let live”. After all, I knew plenty of people who held religious beliefs I found sexist. As long as they didn’t expect me to believe them – or the world to be organised as though these beliefs were true – I thought we could get along.

Even then, I found the whole thing annoying, particularly when trans ideology started to encroach on how feminists were expected to write and think about patriarchal oppression. There we were, trying to dismantle the gender hierarchy collectively, for everyone, and there were these other people, strengthening the conflation of sex with gender while claiming to ‘smash the gender binary’ (for themselves, personally, if not anyone else). What annoyed me most was the way in which this narrowed rather than widened the options for female humans, aka the sex class formerly known as oppressed (and eventually, the sex class formerly known as a sex class). Either you were a cis woman – the prefix ‘cis’ denoting both that you identified with the feminine status assigned to you and that, within the category ‘woman’, you had privilege over males – or you weren’t a woman at all. And if you weren’t a woman, then you weren’t oppressed as a woman. Either way, you were deemed to have privilege over the ‘most oppressed’ women of all – the male ones.

This seemed to me a bit of a swizz, to put it mildly. Nonetheless, I tried to be polite about it. Really careful, really nuanced, and if I don’t sound nuanced now, it’s because the memory of all that trying pains and embarrasses me today. In 2013 I wrote a piece for the F-Word using gender-neutral language to discuss abortion. Even at the time I knew the piece wasn’t working – that I was continually undercutting my own argument by pretending ‘pregnant people’ did not belong to a broader category, one that experienced exploitation at all life stages – but I kept being told this was what ‘being inclusive’ meant. The whole experience bothered me. I spoke to other feminists about it – in private – and they were bothered, too. So a year later I wrote what I thought was a very tentative piece on the rising discomfort I felt around the concept of ‘cis’-ness and how it impacted on women’s ability to express our own discomfort with gender and our bodies, and to present a coherent analysis of the relationship between sexed bodies and exploitation. Note this was not about ‘denying anyone’s right to exist’; it was about affirming women’s right to continue understanding our own lives on our own terms.

In this piece I described my experience of anorexia, and the intense anxiety I felt around starting my periods and ‘becoming a woman’. I strove to be a privilege-checking voice of reason, though, including lines such as “the privileges enjoyed by cis people are vast and generally unacknowledged” and treating “misgendering” as the moral equivalent of “deeming cis women to be ‘a waste of pussy’”. I am not sure I meant any of these things. Or rather, I know I didn’t. Even then, I knew what I really believed, but I was trying not to think too much, to half-perceive reality. “Women whisper,” wrote Andrea Dworkin. “Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know.” I was doing all of that, in the hope of finding some common ground. I truly wish I hadn’t bothered.

Shortly after publishing my piece, the New Statesman published a response by the trans activist Roz Kaveney in which I was castigated for my terrible lack of understanding. “Empathy,” the piece begins, “is at the same time one of the most useful bridges we have between different types of people and a source of some dangerous misunderstandings”:

“You look at someone else, and find what you have in common, and you say “Oh, I get what that feels like” – to put it crudely, you look at a friend with depression and you remember how once you were sad about a love affair for weeks at a time and you think you understand. You remember how you got over it, and you think they can and should, in a week or two. Your attempt to understand is praiseworthy, but it leads to you becoming even more irritating, and potentially oppressive, than if you hadn’t bothered.”

Perhaps you can tell where this is going. How dare I compare my pitiful gender sadfeelz to the monumental agonies of the Trans Woman! I got over my silly little starving phase, didn’t I? If not, where were my top surgery scars? Clearly, the kind of unhappiness ‘cis women’ feel is “sadness about a love affair” compared to trans women’s actual depression, meaning that when we try to empathise, we end up being “irritating, and potentially oppressive” (got that, #bekind contingent? I hope you’re making notes – empathise, but not in a way that makes you an irritating, oppressive cow).

Kaveney allows that someone like me might get it into her head that her own, lesser experiences of distress might “give her some share of what trans people go through”. Not so fast, cis lady!

“being trans isn’t about finding a way of expressing your feels, it’s about not having a skin that metaphorically itches all the time”

That section – the playing off of “expressing your feels” (so trivial, so frivolous) versus “having a skin that metaphorically itches all the time” (so serious, so tragic) – was the point where I started to feel genuinely, deeply upset. I’d exposed my own trauma for no reason whatsoever. How could I possibly know true suffering? And it’s at that moment that my understanding of gender moved on a step. I’d never encountered a piece of writing that was so obviously male. Perhaps it stood out precisely because Kaveney was claiming not to be what he so clearly was. It was all so “I am the Subject, you are the Other”. So “I have a very complex, mysterious inner life, you are a boring open book I can read any time I like”. So “I experience pain and agonies the likes of which no female will understand, you witter on about having fat thighs or whatever it is factory-settings women whinge about these days”.

I cannot bear having discomfort with the sexed body mansplained to me. It’s true, I don’t go on about mine all the time. I have found ways to cope that don’t involve lying to myself and demanding the rest of the world play along with my personal delusions. Again, this is often the difference between men and women cope with pain, and again, this leads men to believe we hurt less. Yet Kaveney believed that his piece was “not an attack […] it’s an attempt to get where [the writer] is coming from”. Well, it failed. It didn’t just fail – it hurt me, and I couldn’t tell anyone how much it hurt because I knew that if I were to accurately describe the gendered dynamics, I would be the one who was judged.

One thing I would also mention – many radical feminists didn’t like my New Statesman piece either. They hated pompous lines such as “right now I see a huge amount of tension between trans activists and radical feminists”:

“Calling for a truce is, I suspect, futile. As ever, the noisiest people tend to be the most unwilling to listen.”

Get 2014 me! Out-Starmering Keir Starmer long before he’d ever been asked whether or not a woman had a penis! Many of these women felt I’d sold them out to try to pass as ‘nuanced’. They were right, and they expressed a lot of anger on social media. Here’s the thing, though – their disagreement, even when expressed crossly, didn’t prevent me seeing their viewpoint. This was partly because none of them were telling me to die in a grease fire – which some trans activists were doing – but also because they were correct. In order to position myself as ‘in the middle’, I’d create a false equivalence between radical feminists and trans activists. People are still doing this even now (as one feminist commented, “in the future, everyone will have fifteen minutes as the voice of reason in the trans debate”). Does anyone who does this ever really mean it?

The immediate aftermath of my ‘cis’ piece was terrible. I still see myself, sitting in the car after school drop-off, or in the toilets at work, crying because I’m being called a fascist and told to suck dick by a mob of angry males and I can’t even call them male because that would only prove them right in the eyes of women I’d thought of as my friends and I can’t tell other friends or colleagues or even my partner because no one – not even your own partner – thinks a bunch of poor, vulnerable trans women would call you a fascist for no reason … ‘The trans issue’ had not exploded into the mainstream back then (the ‘progressive’ male writers and comedians who now call women like me evil were still busy making hateful ‘tranny’ jokes on social media). I’d only got involved because I wanted to write about pregnancy, abortion, eating disorders etc. from a feminist perspective, and I kept encountering trans ‘feminists’ who were not, let’s be quite clear, “just quietly trying to get on with their lives”. I could not talk to anyone I knew outside of feminist circles because none of them knew a first thing about the situation. I was sure they would think that either I was an insane conspiracy theorist, or that I must have done something – said something – more than I was letting on (a lot of people did think this).

The type of threats that were on display last weekend have been around for a very long time. Feminists have set up websites to document it, but politicians have ignored them (the very act of documenting is viewed as abusive, an attempt to make ‘all trans people’ look bad). Back in 2014, it was tremendously disorientating to witness women who called themselves feminists siding with the men who were sending such awful messages. Yet at the time, I didn’t call them ‘men’. I thought ‘men’ – it’s very hard not to in such a situation – but I didn’t dare write or say it. I knew that the moment I said ‘men’, I’d magically become the aggressor (more fool me for my earlier false equivalences). Indeed, in 2018, the Guardian’s Gaby Hinsliff wrote a piece in which she sneered at “dark mutterings about why a minority of trans activists adopt such aggressive, bullying tactics on social media”:

“The unspoken, inflammatory inference is: huh, just like a man. But men don’t have a monopoly on boorish Twitter behaviour, any more than women have a monopoly on vulnerability.”

I found arguments like that incredibly painful to read. What a bitch I was, thinking of the males who sent me rape threats as violent males! So inflammatory! This is the kind of ‘feminism’ cuts off any woman who is targeted by a male perpetrator deemed too politically embarrassing to acknowledge (multiply the isolation I felt by 100,000, and you’re getting close to what trans widows have to endure).

What bothers me now, though, is that I went through all that for a piece that wasn’t even very good. It was hardly a brave statement of My Truth. I got damned for an article that made so many concessions, none of which were appreciated by those towards whom I was extending the olive branch. “Have you ever thought of taking the heat of the debate?” Well, yes. I was really fucking trying. Women, when faced with very difficult men, usually are. It embarrasses me to think of how much I was holding back in that piece, bending myself out of shape, abasing myself, refusing to say what I actually felt was most important. It embarrasses me to think of how much I was trying to appease, and how willing I was to sacrifice such a basic thing – my own truth – in search of a middle ground that was never on offer. If I’d been being honest, and brave, and not so cowed by the pressure to #bekind (that is, not be like those witches, the radfems), maybe what I’d written would have been more like this:

I find the concept of gender identity sexist and fundamentally incompatible with feminism, but understand that for many people, claiming to be the opposite sex is the most comfortable way for them to live their lives. I have no interest in questioning their choices, but think it’s important that feminists are not ordered to go along with a belief system that undermines so many of our beliefs and analyses. I think my own perception of female experience matters and do not wish to describe myself as ‘cis’, let alone own up to ‘cis privilege’, because that contradicts everything I feel and have experienced. Please let women have our stuff (including our one and only political movement), as that’s only fair. The End.

Yes, it would still have provoked the same degree of abuse, but at least I wouldn’t have messed around pretending to believe that trans women really were a sort of women, just not the same sort, or that if you squinted a bit, you could see trans ideology as potentially pro-feminist, too. I wouldn’t have tried to align myself – “see, we all feel this pain!” – with people who, as it turned out, really didn’t like feminists, like some pathetic little kid who ignores all his real friends in order to win the approval of the bully.

What a total waste of time. It didn’t stop me trying to write other, better bent-out-of-shape pieces, again and again.

2

A few years ago, I found the diaries I kept in my teens. What I remembered of myself back then was largely negative – self-obsessed, mentally ill, socially inept, total twat. My home life had been unhappy, sometimes violent, but I didn’t think about it much, or when I did, I blamed myself. I thought when I re-read my words decades later I’d find them darkly funny and, hopefully, confidence-boosting. Look how far you’ve come! You used to be so worthless and now you’re almost a proper person! Instead I was shocked by how non-mad I actually sounded.

Teenage me wrote a lot about experiences of violence. I’d spend a lot of time trying to work out ways to avoid them happening in future. I was trying to crack some code in terms of how I spoke, how I presented myself, what I knew, in order for situations not to escalate. So many diary entries were devoted to this. There were moments – and they came back vividly – when I knew a situation was going to escalate, and it would be long before any violence actually occurred. I remember trying to think very, very fast, to try and hit on the right tone of voice, the right way of looking.

Don’t flinch, because that’s annoying.

Don’t let your voice get high-pitched with fear, because that’s manipulative.

Don’t try to reason, because that’s supercilious.

Don’t say nothing, because that’s disrespectful.

Don’t try to walk away – you can’t just provoke someone and swan off (always thinking you can swan off)

If you are grabbed, try to find a way of being dragged that does not look pathetic, because that, too, is annoying.

Don’t curl up in a ball, like a coward.

Just don’t. Yeah, I get that. But what do you do?

If there was anything that sort-of worked – and it only sort-of worked, and only before you reached the point of no return – it was willed ignorance. Chosen submission to someone else’s perception of reality. A kind of self-infantilisation. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. I developed the persona of being clever at schoolwork – because that was required – but “bloody useless at life” because that seemed to appeal the most. “You’re bloody useless, you!” was said with a kind of affection. Don’t look smart; never think too hard. I cultivated bloody uselessness until I believed in it. It followed me around for years (one of the worst rows I had with someone at university was due to them not understanding why “you’re great at exams but truly stupid at everything else” was not, in fact, a compliment).

It disturbs me how much I misremembered the teenager I was – how eager I was to write her off as a stupid, crazy girl. My older self mistook a survival strategy for innate stupidity, perhaps because the alternative – to see ignorance as a choice – is even more mortifying. I can justify the disjuncture between the way I behaved and the things I wrote in private, but there’s a part of me that hates myself for the fact that I pretended to be such a fucking idiot. I understand why I did it, but I hate it. I hate the fact that there is no way I can go back and brief outsiders about what I was really thinking. Sometimes I try to think of alternative strategies I could have adopted. I haven’t found one – being “bloody useless” probably was the best thing – but it’s a game I still sometimes play.

The worst thing is that when you forgive people – when you let them have their reality – they don’t thank you. They think your forgiveness is an apology. They are resentful, believing the space you gave up was theirs all along.

This is how I have often felt when attempting to do feminism which offers sufficient “light”.

3

Misogyny is a feature, not a bug, of trans activism. There is no way of curing with the rage of trans activists – or the sadness of their less violent, woman-envying peers – without acknowledging this. Once it is acknowledged, it transforms the framing of the debate. Stop asking women to ‘be kind’ – that is, deny a little bit of their reality to satisfy the demands of envious males. It won’t work. They will take it as confirmation that women should be giving up more.

Right now, in response to the supreme court ruling, a lot of women are pretending to be very, very stupid. Or maybe they’re not pretending. Maybe they started out pretending and now they’ve forgotten. Who knows. In any case, I do not find it credible that such a large number of women, many of whom have intellectually demanding jobs, are incapable of understanding that defining women as biologically female is not biological essentialism. Or that human behaviour can be enforced by social norms rather than active policing. Or that if you are going to define a tiny subset of male people as less likely to attack you (simply because, in mathematical terms, they are a minority), maybe you could start with ‘men called Derek’ or ‘male people who like budgies’ as opposed to ‘the one group of male people actively demanding special access to female-only spaces and throwing a massive tantrum when denied it’.

Stop it. You know better than this. You are degrading yourselves.

There is a way in which, looking back to 2014, I was wrong and Roz Kaveney was right. I didn’t get it, not about pain – female pain can stand toe to toe with male pain – but about motivation. I did myself a disservice in trying to imagine that both of us were at war with gender norms, albeit in different ways. I might have been; trans activism is in thrall to them. Women who start to tug at the thread and don’t stop until it’s all unravelled – who “think their thoughts through to the end”, to quote Helen Joyce – become women who know too much, and consequently have far more that they are supposed to not write, to not think, to not say.

When it came to trans activism, I read the books I was told to read. Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, Andrea Long Chu’s Females. It’s as though you’re meant to read them, though, and not actually understand them (this may be why many of the women currently being most vocally, performatively stupid don’t appear to have read them at all). As Sarah Ditum points out, if you do read these writers, you are not supposed to have noticed all of sex stuff: “It’s not ladylike to comment on indecent things”:

“A male writer can self-disclose with impunity, but when a woman draws attention to it, suddenly everyone gets uncomfortable. The quotes must be “out of context” — surely Chu can’t really mean the essence of woman is an “expectant asshole”?”

Trans activists – by which I mean some of the absolutely mainstream ones, Paris Lees, Grace Lavery, Dylan Mulvaney – have not been remotely reticent about their willingness to associate femaleness with objectification, masochism and subjugation:

““There’s also the fear that what I write will be used against trans people in some way,” sighs Lavery, before jumping in anyway and describing the desire to be “fetishized… as a slutty girl is” and “assaulted as a girl is”.”

Yet women are supposed to pretend none of this is being said or written, certainly not when it comes to the question of which male people we are permitted to not want in rape-crisis centres or prison cells. We’re not supposed to be completely ignorant of it, though, otherwise these books would never be published. It’s forced knowing/not knowing. Writers such as Chu, Serano and Lavery know that the ultimate sin for a gender critical feminist would be to quote their misogyny back at them. They’re allowed to say it, you’re not. This is true even if some of these works, such as Whipping Girl, are waved in our faces as supposed feminist classics.

I feel the pressure not to notice this, not to think about it, not to say anything. To write what I would have written in 2014, knowing what I knew then, but to go no further, certainly to stop at “but trans women are still male” and not extend it to “perhaps there is something specific about trans ideology which attracts misogynists”. We are meant to pretend posters calling for the hanging and burning of non-compliant women are the result of a “polarised debate”, a “toxic” atmosphere in which there are strong feelings on both sides. Bullshit. I think there is so much hate directed at those of us who define woman as “adult human female” – that is, a non-pornified, non-feminine, fully-formed subject with her own inner life – because modern-day trans ideology gets its narrative for what a woman should be from porn, and porn is fuelling a global surge in misogyny. Why do trans activists continually tell feminists we are old, ugly, that our tits sag, that we’re hate-filled bigots? Because youth, beauty, tight tits, compliance – “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes” – are meant to be the essence of femaleness.

I am quite aware that observations such as these will not be viewed as “taking the heat out of the trans debate”. We are meant to pretend that things are not as they actually are. “It isn’t impossible to imagine a world where we start from two fairly reasonable statements”, writes the author of one ‘voice of reason’ piece, “– that women have rights that need to be protected, and that trans people, particularly trans women, have rights that need to be protected – and then we work out through reasoned debate how to manage this carefully at the points where these two things interact.” Gee, thanks, King Solomon. There’s just the problem that ‘trans people’ are a vast, varied group, with teenage females suffering from gender dysphoria having very little in common with middle-aged males who’ve watched too much sissy porn. There’s also the problem that the middle-aged males who’ve watched too much sissy porn tend to really hate feminists, yet somehow seem to be positioned as the leading voices on what all trans people need. I, too, would like to resolve a debate by re-creating a starting point out of thin air, one in which I re-imagine the positions of both sides, making them both fairly benign, then kind of synthesise the two together. That would be great! I hate to spoil the party, but that’s not actually possible (I know - first she says people can’t change sex, and now she says you can’t resolve a political conflict by pretending it involves a completely different, entirely imaginary set of ideas and people! What a spoilsport!).

I am not suggesting that, since a peaceful debate cannot be imagined up, toxicity is the only way forward. What I am saying is that “more light, less heat” is not helpful. Telling women everything they write and think and say could be too “inflammatory” (even if it is true) affects how much light they can shed. It makes them feign ignorance, or confess to privileges they don’t actually feel they have, or express sympathy for suffering that does not seem any worse than their own. And those listening do not appreciate that women are doing this. Instead they think “these women really are stupid and privileged, and I really am a victim. So I’ll shout at them some more”.

Sometimes I feel, very deeply, the humiliation of having tried to engage in “reasonable debate” with people who actually think women like me – factory-settings women, all “leaky boobs and the school run” – are inferior beings. I feel ashamed at having played dumb when it came to the misogyny right in front of me, even pretending to mistake it for gender non-conformity. Most of all though, I feel anger at being told to go through that all over again. At all of us being told to do so. I’ve not even got over doing it in the first place.

I want to feel happy at the gains women have made – and I am indeed happy at them – but we also need our anger and our truth.

“You could have chosen not to say anything.”

Exchange between nurse Sandie Peggie and Jane Russell KC

“… the myth of care as an inexhaustible natural resource that we can reap from feminine nature is unshakeable. Because we need it to be.”

Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?

When feminists speak of the ‘invisibility’ of women’s work, what they usually mean is not labour that is literally unseen, but acts which are not classified as ‘work’. They’re things women are assumed to do naturally, out of love, out of instinct, just because they want to, hence there’s no need to reward them for it, and certainly no need to assign any economic value to them. Sure, there would be an enormous cost if all the mothers of the world downed tools, but as long as that unpaid labour keeps coming, it doesn’t have to be counted. As Katrine Marçal puts it, the housework and care work a woman provides can be written off as “just a logical extension of her fair, loving nature”.

There are some things, though, which cannot strictly be described as activities. They’re non-acts. Women’s work consists of the things we do, but also the things we don’t. It’s the things we don’t say, the complaints we never make, the fears we never express, the spaces we don’t take. If it is hard to quantify housework and care work, counting this ‘not doing’ is harder yet.

How do you keep track of things that never happened, things that, as far as anyone else is concerned, were never even possibilities? How do you assign a cost to something which, to the outside world, looks utterly effortless, a simple expression of your passive, contented nature?

In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin describes women’s response to the public censure that follows should we “speak without apology about the world in which we live”. Women, she writes, “lower our voices”:

“Women whisper. Women apologise. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back.”

All of this comes at a cost to women’s self-respect and emotional well-being, but it’s a cost that goes unnoticed by the beneficiaries of our silence. As with the housework, this labour is only really appreciated the moment it is no longer provided – the day the silent, unapologetic woman speaks and is no longer sorry.

Because it has already been decreed that her silence costs her nothing, she will be regarded as having no excuse for her rebellion. She cannot be doing it due to the unbearable cost of constant self-suppression, since none of this ever bothered her before (and plenty of other women don’t mind shutting up). She must therefore be doing it out of cruelty and spite.

I thought of this when reading the exchanges taking place at the employment tribunal of nurse Sandie Peggie. Peggie was suspended from her job at Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy, after complaining about having to share a female-only changing room with a man. I’m using the term “man” because that is Peggie’s perception (and mine, too), though the man in question claims to be a woman, and had wanted to be referred to as such by everyone, Peggie included. Peggie has had to fight for her right to refer to Dr Beth Upton as a man in her tribunal, arguing, quite rightly, that this is the very reason why she did not want him in the women’s changing rooms. This has not stopped Upton and NHS Fife positioning this request as harassment and bullying. As far as they are concerned, Peggie has two choices: call Upton a man and look like the kind of bigot who doesn’t respect other people’s identities, or call Upton a woman and look like the kind of bigot who thinks only certain women are allowed in female-only spaces. Essentially, anything other than Peggie shutting up, trivialising what she knows, shrinking, pulling back, is bigotry.

The barrister acting on behalf of NHS Fife, Jane Russell KC, has been unremitting in her attempt to position Peggie as acting out of malice as opposed to basic self-respect. This exchange in particular caught my attention, referring to Peggie’s choice to challenge Upton after encountering him in the changing rooms for a third time. Peggie explains that she is trying to make Upton understand why she wants a space of her own; Russell counters that Peggie “could have chosen not to say anything”. After all, she’d said nothing up to that point. She could have continued her nothingness work, which is apparently no work at all.

There is no credit given for all the times Peggie didn’t speak, all the times she stepped aside, allowing Upton’s self-perception to define reality. The male “power of naming”, writes Dworkin, “enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, to control perception itself”. Peggie’s nothingness work is only ever acknowledged to use it to claim that she could have carried on doing it indefinitely – that it is, in fact, her role, and not Upton’s, to make space for and absorb others. It is not cruel for Peggie to be denied the right to describe the world on her own terms – even when the maintenance of her own boundaries depends on it. It is, on the other hand, bullying and harassment for Upton to even have to listen to Peggie use the language she needs (at no point has anyone told Upton he must use the same words as her).

From Upton, there is no “thank you for saying nothing the first two times”. No “the fact you didn’t speak up at first must have cost you something”. No “I didn’t realise I was making you feel this way”. No “how many others feel this way, too, and are saying nothing just to please me?”

It’s not Upton’s job to think any of these thoughts. Just “you shouldn’t have said anything. You’ve done it before. How hard can it be? (For you, obviously. Never me.)”

***

When I was a child, the adult men in my family – and, learning from them, the younger ones, too – would frequently disparage the appearance of famous women. They’d discuss who was fat, who was ugly. Many a woman earned the designation “double bagger” (“you’d need to put two bags on her head in case the first fell off”). Very occasionally I would protest about this, whereupon I’d be told “it’s just the truth” (or some Northern bullshit “ah speak as ah find” version of this). As if that justified it. As long as it’s the truth – if the woman you are calling fat is not in fact thin, if the woman you are calling old is not young – you’re allowed to point it out, again and again. Of course, when I developed my own fears of being similarly disparaged, this was nothing to do with their comments, merely proof that I – like all girls – was frivolous and vain.

I don’t think the fact that something is true necessarily means it should be said. What matters is the purpose it’s serving. There’s that poster in many a primary classroom: THINK before you speak. Is it True / Helpful / Inspiring / Necessary / Kind? This has always seemed to me too high a standard. Speaking out can sometimes be necessary without it being inspiring or kind. I even think that sometimes, a lie can be justified. Facts might not care about your feelings, but we are surely sophisticated enough to make judgements about which facts matter, and the consequences of saying something as opposed to letting it go.

Another exchange from the Peggie tribunal:

Russell: - do you accept that calling [Upton] a man, that not a woman is likely to cause immense distress

Peggie: - when I'm in the situation, feeling intimidated and embarrassed, I needed to explain that he was a man

Russell: - did not answer my question, is it offensive

Peggie: - it's the truth

Peggie is saying something which, from Upton’s perspective, may not be kind but is entirely necessary. Otherwise how can she explain the cause of her discomfort and distress? It is not his ‘transness’ but his maleness. It is justifiable for women to want spaces away from men. It is not justifiable for women to want single-sex spaces which exclude a certain type of woman for nebulous reasons, which is what Russell would like to force Peggie into saying. If Peggie’s definition is offensive to some people, one might also ask whether it is it offensive to others to define women, not as adult human females, but a bunch of random feminine stereotypes. Is it offensive when the trans writer Andrea Long Chu writes “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”? Does anyone in that courtroom even care? (It would seem not.) When Peggie says “it’s the truth”, she is not aiming to cause hurt. Her access to a single-sex space in which to get changed at work depends on this truth being recognised.

Yet Russell treats it as though Peggie is behaving no differently to my male relatives plonked in front of the TV in the eighties, passing judgement on the width of a woman’s thighs or the state of her jawline. Why say it? Why say it, when you could just not? Why use the truth to be mean?

Russell: - the truth is it is profoundly offensive to call a TW a man, it undermines her dignity

Peggie: - my dignity was also undermined by DU being in the DR

Russell: - you've ignored by question about DU's dignity

Peggie: - my dignity as a female is important to me

Note that Russell pretends not to understand the point that Peggie is making with reference to her own dignity – that for hers to be respected depends on an acknowledgement of Upton’s sex. This is not ‘ignoring’ any displeasure caused to Upton. It’s saying that this is outweighed by the cost to Peggie of not stating the truth. Russell speaks as though Peggie’s “truth” is no different to the “truth” of mocking someone’s appearance, just for kicks. “My dignity as a female” isn’t a thing. It isn’t allowed to be. It would only get in the way.

***

In The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan is scathing about lesbians who do not wish to “share womanhood itself with the ‘wrong’ kinds of woman”. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? Until you realise she just means men. She’s having a go at lesbians who don’t want to sleep with males (she claims to find the “reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling”. One does not need to imagine where that sort of thinking leads). Srinivasan’s position seems to me politically unforgiveable, not to mention cruel, yet her choice to frame it as a refusal to “share” with the “‘wrong’ kinds of woman” turns the moral expectation on its head. Hey, aren’t those lesbians nasty? Couldn’t they just not object to sleeping with male people? Failing that, couldn’t they keep it to themselves and choose not to say anything? (In a world where corrective rape remains a thing, who needs a clear definition of lesbianism anyways?)

Elsewhere in her essay, Srinivasan complains that trans women “often face sexual exclusion from lesbian cis women who at the same time claim to take them seriously as women”. What hypocrites those lesbian cis women are! A similar point is made in Lorna Finlayson, Katharine Jenkins and Rosie Worsdale’s essay ‘I’m not transphobic, but …’, with reference to arguments for female-only spaces:

“When keeping women’s spaces for cis women only is held to be safest for cis women, or ‘females’, is the tacit assumption that trans women are not (‘really’) women, and hence not a population which feminism needs to represent? If so, it would certainly be good to have this claim out in the open, since feminist opponents of inclusivity sometimes claim either to regard trans women as women or to be ‘agnostic’ on that issue.”

Yeah, ‘feminist opponents of inclusivity’! Just say what you really mean!

What these arguments utterly fail to acknowledge (even though I doubt very much that their authors are unaware of it) is that these supposed ‘hypocrites’ may well not see trans women as ‘real women’. The fact is, they’re being kind. They’re doing precisely what everyone tells them to do. They’re making a sacrifice. They’re putting aside their own feelings and beliefs in instances where, as women, they can – and so often do – reason that their own dignity and self-respect can take a hit. They are only withdrawing their services – services to which no one should have any entitlement in the first place – when the stakes become too high. When it’s not a matter of flattering his ego, but ceding your space to him, undressing in front of him, fucking him. At that point, the woman becomes, not someone who’s been pushed too far, but a bitch who’s been lying all along.

This dynamic is everywhere (think of Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person), even if liberal feminism only wishes to acknowledge it in certain circumstances. We’ve all been there. Sod it, we think. I’ll indulge him. I’ll smile at him. I’ll laugh at his jokes. I’ll use his words. I’ll pretend I don’t mind. I mean, how important is it really? What does it cost me really? If it makes him happy, what kind of nonsense is ‘my dignity’ anyways? We are never, ever thanked for this, only punished when we reach the point of saying ‘no’. It costs nothing to smile – well, only a little self-respect – but that smile will be taken as a promise.

Another example from the Peggie tribunal:

Russell: - you would refer to DU using female pronouns while on the ward at work, and when other people were around

Peggie: - yes, when I could remember

Russell: - but when no one was watching you felt free to call him a man

Peggie: - it was appropriate in the situation I was in, I felt he could understand

Russell: - isn't that classic bullying behaviour - one way, when people around another in private

By that definition, every woman who has ever humoured a man who has made her feel fear, disgust or pity is a classic bully. Peggie’s choice not to insist on her dignity being respected at all times – her willingness to defer to Upton’s worldview in public, to not make a fuss, to “trivialise what [she knows]” – is not appreciated as generosity, or even as work that is expected of her but not of him. Instead, it’s treated as evidence that Peggie is dishonest and manipulative. The patriarchal dynamic forces women to lie – telling us that our truths, such little things, don’t matter anyways – then castigates us for being deceitful.

There is no way to win. Women can be kind but our kindness – that “logical extension” of our “fair, loving nature[s]” – will be unappreciated and unacknowledged until the moment it is absent, whereupon it will be used against us. We’re not meant to be ugly, but if we care, we are vain. We’re not meant to have inner lives, but if we reveal them, it only shows all those years of accommodation – all that silence – was a sham. It is often said that femininity is a double bind insofar as women must choose between being punished for not conforming to its standards, or conforming, which is a punishment in and of itself. The situation is worse than that. The moment we don’t conform, we receive an additional punishment for having ‘deceitfully’ conformed in the past.

It would be good to have things “out in the open”, Finlayson, Jenkins and Worsdale claim. Only it wouldn’t. You’d only say that proved you right.

***

We have all heard stories of nice heterosexual couples who have been together for a very long time when all of a sudden the man just “snaps”. It is then claimed by those who knew them – especially if both have died – that there was never any violence before. It is a mystery, a tragedy, poor them.

I tend to be doubtful about these claims. There is so much violence that goes unseen, and so many places men know to hit that won’t be seen by others. I don’t think it’s impossible, though, that in some cases the fatal blow was the first blow. In those cases, I can’t help suspecting that what others see as “peace” was actually just silence and compliance, of the sort that can go on for years. The nothingness work of letting him define the world, until one day, you can’t stay silent any more, or silence is no longer enough.

I think men who know your compliance is coerced can eventually get even angrier for it. They know you don’t mean it, and it shames them, and that shame has to be projected back onto you. I think there are dead women who spent their entire lives doing the work of keeping the men who killed them happy, soothing their egos, saying whatever words these men demanded, and this work will never be appreciated. No one knows they did it. At best, the man who “snaps” will be recalled as a tortured soul, his victim, a docile, simple, untroubled wife who happened to get in the way. What can she know about dark nights of the soul? Perhaps there will be another discussion of men’s mental health, and why he never gets to discuss his problems. Her? Well, she had nothing to say. She could have kept her mouth shut and look, she did.

The attitudes displayed in the courtroom during the Peggie tribunal are not, I think, unrelated to the way in which women’s privileging of male worldviews goes unseen until the moment we are punished for not doing it any more. Sometimes the truth comes out in arguments. “Now the mask is off!”, a man might say. “See, now we know what she’s really like!” And this will be understood, not as evidence that we have not been permitted to be what we are “really like” at other times – evidence that we have needs that are unrecognised, experiences that are ours alone. It’s just evidence that we are vindictive. We’re bullies. We’re spiteful. We “could have chosen not to say anything” yet here we are.

A final exchange:

Russell: No-one else complained?

Peggie: No one else has come forward and they don’t want to be in my position

Why can’t you be more like the others, the quiet ones? It doesn’t bother them. Not that we’re thanking them for this.

It’s just what they’re there for. It’s just the way they are.

It’s over two years since I last sent an OK Karen missive - so long that when I attempted it today, I discovered that TinyLetter no longer exists. So I’ve moved onto Substack to write this, a special non-toxic comeback letter.

The reason for the silence is partly writing elsewhere (I wrote one book, then another, and also started writing regularly for the Critic), and partly waiting for something to make me so furious that I’d need my own ranting space. And that something came in the form of … Kirstie Allsopp.

Over the past few days, in the fallout from the Cass Review — during which people who cheered on the sterilisation of autistic and gay children have been deciding whether to dig in and insist it’s still fine or to claim they never all that into it — an entirely predictable defence has been offered by those who refused to support the whistleblowers. Picking up on Cass’s observation that “the toxicity of the debate is exceptional”, certain people have decided this means “toxicity on both sides”. This was entirely predictable, but still. To hear the host of Kirstie’s Homemade Home insist that it was always possible to “discuss issues around gender politics openly”, given the price so many paid for doing just that, is unbearable.

So I thought I’d rise above it and not think about it. Which, in true “don’t think of an elephant” style, led to me thinking about nothing but it, writing 3,000 words and opening a Substack account just to share them.

Why is the trans debate so toxic?

1

Most friendships destroyed by the gender wars go out with a whimper, not a bang. No argument, no threats, no insults. On the contrary, two people might discuss the topic once or twice – calmly, with curiosity – and find themselves largely in agreement.

Then one person has a close relative, usually a son or daughter, who identifies as trans. Suddenly, the relationship becomes untenable. It doesn’t matter if everyone uses the pronouns demanded. It doesn’t matter if the topic is never raised again. A good trans ally cannot be close to someone who has doubts, even unspoken ones. That other person must be forgotten entirely, or when they are remembered, they are remembered as bad.

There is a particular strangeness about just how intense and – to use the language of the Cass Review – how toxic debates over sex and gender have been. Let me be clear: in writing this, I have no desire to repeat the nonsense claim that there has been “toxicity on both sides”. No. It has not been that way at all.

I am, frankly, bored of that lie, an endless reversioning of the “bad as each other, volatile relationship” bystander equivocation with which every victim of domestic abuse will be familiar. As I have written before, early whistleblowers on what is, quite clearly, a scandal on multiple levels have been judged by the logic of “how hard he hits you is the measure of how bad you are”. People chose to look away, and they chose to victim blame, and now, when they can no longer be silent, they pontificate about “vitriol” (this, by the way, is vitriol – but I guess me linking to that is “incendiary”).

In any case, it is true that the level of not just anger and hate, but fear, has been bizarre. What isn’t true is that this has been down to two warring sides pushing one another ever-further towards extremes, while nice, reasonable people in the middle felt incapable of making their nice, reasonable opinions heard. It is essential to recognise this, not just because it is grossly unfair to keep blaming those who made the greatest sacrifices, but because otherwise, we will never get to the heart of the problem. For the past decade we have been dealing with a constant escalation of threats, tantrums and ludicrous accusations from trans activists. It is a feature, not a bug, of trans activism.

2

“Trans women are women” started out as a polite lie. It’s one that many of us repeated. Even if we didn’t believe it – and even if we found it somewhat offensive to be pandering to a male person’s claim to a female interior life – we told ourselves trans people were a tiny minority, and that the cost to them of hearing the truth was greater than the cost to us of playing along with the lie.

One of the great ironies of the past decade’s “gender wars” is that many of us who have been vilified as “on the wrong side of history” were way ahead of the vilifiers when it came to meeting trans demands. “The privileges enjoyed by cis people,” I wrote in 2014, “are vast and generally unacknowledged.” Alas, that particular article got denounced as transphobic all the same. There is a reason why, from the very beginning, rather than target actual transphobes, trans activists targeted women who wanted to be kind, but who also made it clear that we were thinking about the logical implications of gender identity as opposed to merely nodding along. Contrary to the “both sides” narrative, critics of gender ideology weren’t singled out for being extremist, but for being too reasonable. This was viewed by trans activists as particularly threatening, and in a way, they were right. We didn’t threaten their livelihoods and safety; we threatened the careful tending, maintenance and growth of their lie.

3

As a child, I lived with someone who had severe compulsive obsessions and delusions. Because of this, I was not supposed to touch certain household items: door knobs, light switches, household electrical items, the living room sofa. There were concerns that I might contaminate them, crease them, “knock them out of position”. Every space in the house could, potentially, be ruined by me.

As I would later with do “trans women are women”, I attempted to go along with this, using the exact same reasoning: the cost to me of prioritising his perceptions was less than the cost to him if I prioritised mine. Only there were problems with this. One was that the cost to me was actually quite high, particularly as more and more items got added to the “off limits” list and my own space got smaller and smaller. Another was that by pandering to the delusion, I inadvertently reinforced it. The more I avoided certain things, the more I confirmed that I was indeed toxic and that something terrible would happen the day I forgot to follow the rules. This belief even started to embed itself in me, until I developed my own rituals to do with arranging objects and smoothing creases in order to feel “safe”.

This may or may not be why, having been an early follower of the “listen to trans people” command, I started to hear alarm bells early on. The pattern felt incredibly familiar. “Be kind” to the deluded person, then watch as the two of you pass the delusion back and forth. Watch it grow, watch it take over everything, and marvel as somehow you both feel less safe, not more. At some point, one of you has to disrupt the performance, show that yes, the world will not fall apart if we respond to it as it actually is. This is part of how we treat most delusions, but clearly not all. 

No one ever told me that the repeated action of me not touching door knobs or light switches made it objectively true that I was a potential contaminant. No academic paper has ever asserted that my behaving as though my relative’s delusions were real made them so. The same cannot be said for the claims of trans activists, which have been granted, not the lowly status of the delusions of the mentally ill, but the lofty status of mystic insights from Planet Gender. We have seen unimaginative academics and jaded social justice activists alike fall over themselves to reject the notion that we were ever just pretending trans women were women in order to be kind (besides, what’s pretending? What’s a woman? What’s a body? What’s anything?). To these people, the whole thing has all felt incredibly edgy and exciting. They haven’t really had to believe the lie themselves; it has been more of a case of pretending not to pretend. And if the delusions of their appointed oracles grow more extreme? Well, what’s the harm in that, as long as everybody plays along at all times?

According to the philosopher Amia Srinivasan, “sometimes by saying something often and persuasively enough […] we can make it true”. One of the examples she uses for this is “trans women are women”. It is of course trivially true that language evolves and the socially agreed meaning of words alters over time through variations in usage. For instance, if the word “light switches” were used “often and persuasively enough” to mean “anything other than the objects formerly known as light switches”, my relative might have felt more comfortable with me touching light switches. Then again, he would not have felt any better about me touching the things on the wall that you press to make electric bulbs go on and off. This has always been the problem with the “trans women are women” magic trick. Whatever you call them, female people exist and a male person cannot ever become one. No surgery, no medicine, no legal document can ever change that. All you can do is force people never to speak of it, which is difficult when there are multiple real-world consequences to pretending that humans can change sex.

The “trans women are women” mantra has made the trans identity incredibly fragile, more fragile than if there were general acceptance that transsexuality was a social concession made for a very small minority of men (Andrea Dworkin described transition under patriarchy as “an emergency measure for an emergency condition”). To be blunt, those such as Srinivasan – and indeed every unthinking ally claiming #bekind cookies – have made some deluded people even more unwell. They have not helped those who struggle to live in their sexed bodies. On the contrary, they have made maintaining the balance between truth and lie even more high stakes and fraught. It’s not just that certain truths (biological sex is politically salient, only one sex class gives birth etc.) have become unspeakable. It is that even if no one ever speaks them, there’s a part of you that will know that other people know them, and this can unbearable. If trans is all you are, other people’s perceptions – their very private thoughts – are potentially destroying you.

This is enough to drive some people mad, and it has.

4

If trans women are women in every single way, then there is no reason – other than prejudice – to deny them anything to which women are entitled. There is no reason to prevent them from competing in female-only sporting categories. There is no reason to deny them access to women’s refuge, toilets, changing rooms or prisons. We wouldn’t do this to any other subcategory of women, so why them?

The problem with any form of compromise in the trans debate is that it implicitly acknowledges that trans women are not women in every single way. When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie responded to the question “are trans women women?” with “my feeling is trans women are trans women”, she was vilified. Note: she did not say they were men. She simply stated a truth: they are different. Only that was not permissible. As one male lawyer recently tweeted, “the starting point for a reasonable and compassionate debate is acceptance that trans people exist. That trans women are women and that trans men are men. Everything flows from those truths”. But if these are truths, there is no need for debate. Indeed, how could it be reasonable or compassionate to think otherwise? To do so is to immediately place “these truths” in question.

It is infuriating to witness – from those now suggesting that it was always possible to advocate for compromise – the absolute refusal to address the fact that if you say anything that suggests trans women differ from other women (beyond them being the most marginalised women), you have already committed a sin so heinous it will be used to justify the most violent punishment. It does not matter how polite you are in making your case. Indeed, politeness will be viewed as “dogwhistle hate” because trans activists will correctly infer that you are nevertheless still noticing that male people are not female people (that you are being generous enough not to say this directly is viewed as devious, in a manner not dissimilar to the way in which wives who lie to appease abusive husbands tend to called manipulative). Every single person who has ever lectured a feminist on the need for “more light, less heat” needs to grasp this: the last thing people who have staked their entire identities on a lie want is light, even when passed through the softest of filters. That’s why, whenever organisations such as Woman’s Place UK sought to discuss a way forward, trans activists responded with more and more heat. Light, to trans activism, is an existential threat.

This is why every reasonable, carefully worded assertion made by feminists, clinic whistleblowers, LGB activists and others had to be translated into something deeply sinister. Pointing out that other people may not perceive you as the sex you wish to be perceived is “denying my right to exist”. Noting that puberty blockers may not be life-saving treatments is refusing to “protect trans kids”. Suggesting that female people ought to be allowed their own sporting categories is reframed as “stopping trans people from playing”. Thinking mastectomies for minors are probably a bad thing is “taking away trans people’s healthcare” (as if refusing to remove the healthy breasts of a traumatised teenager is no different to refusing her an emergency appendectomy).

Constant hyperbole is necessary to trans activism. It perpetuates the spiral. Were the spiralling to ever stop, you would have to acknowledge that the problem is not that some mythical bunch of women on Mumsnet want you dead. It’s that your sexed body, no matter what you do to it, is the same sexed body it always was, and how others perceive you depends on uncontrollable, ever-changing relationships, not blanket endorsement. One of the saddest responses to the Cass Review was written by a trans man in the Guardian. This person clearly needs to believe that the real problem is that there is a “powerful coalition of politicians, journalists and, indeed, healthcare workers who are motivated by an anti-trans ideology”. They will always need to believe this, always need to feel this hated, because the alternative would be to face the limits of their own delusions. This is why transition regret is a poor measure for whether transition ever achieves the desired effect. It is always possible to blame an “anti-trans world” -- that is, a world in which sex remains immutable and politically salient – for the fact that you remain unhappy. Alas, this world is the only one we have; reframing it as “anti-trans” is a profoundly maladaptive response to the fact that we’re all just human beings, not seahorses or clownfish. God knows, people have tried to rewrite the laws of nature to make trans people happy, but it will never be enough.

It’s important to add that the hyperbole is also embraced and encouraged by those who don’t depend on it in the way that a vulnerable child or someone attempting to justify the extreme things they have done to their body (or their son or daughter’s body) might. Left-wing men adore it because, after years of frustration at not being able to publicly hate women in the way their porn tells them to, they can scream in women’s faces, protest their gatherings, even assault them (after all, none of that is as bad as denying someone’s right to exist – these men are punching up!). Judith Butler can avoid any confrontation with the flimsiness and dire consequences of her own arguments by conflating feminists who think male people shouldn’t be in women’s prisons with far-right “anti-gender” politicians who hate trans people, feminists and gay people in equal measure. For her, fanning the flames and ensuring her acolytes feel more insecure and dependent than ever is a career move.

There is no way out of this impasse that does not involve tackling the problem at the root. The concept of gender identity places off-limits any recognition of our existence as social beings whose identities are constantly co-created through how we stand in relation to one another. Trans activism is anti-social (in the most fundamental sense) and relies on a toxic grievance model to avoid falling apart. If anyone doesn’t agree that you are whoever you say you are – even if you are a small male child growing up in a homophobic household, or an autistic female teenager who despises her body – then you must insist they are literally killing you. Hilary Cass is absolutely right that gender confused children have been “used as a football”. The last people to blame are those of us who sought to end the game.

5

When Stella Creasy – of “a woman can have a penis” fame – stood up in parliament to emphasise the anxiety of gender confused children and families in response to the Cass Review, I felt such deep contempt I could barely breathe. Why are these children so scared? Why are these families so confused? Who made them think they were in the middle of a war in which women like me wanted to kill them, and that if we didn’t get to them first, their own changing bodies would destroy them? Who made these children believe that if the entire world couldn’t reflect their internal perceptions of themselves – and it won’t, because it can’t – they might as well be dead? You, Stella Creasy, have been part of a culture that made desperate children more frightened and desperate. You might be able to look at yourself in the mirror, but many parents of ‘trans children’ may not be able to right now.

When parents of gender confused children distance themselves from lifelong friends who might cast any kind of light onto this issue, these parents are choosing heat. They need the heat, because a part of them knows that their child is not being helped by the trans lie, and they cannot bear to think of the long-term consequences of this. Far easier to dismiss a friend as a bigot than to acknowledge your own complicity in harming your child. Wallow in the toxicity, lest reality catches up with you.

This is a tragedy. To go any way towards fixing it, we must be honest about how it came about. The situation is toxic, yes, but the toxic people are not the whistleblowers, people who faced years of abuse not for their extremism, but for their lack of it. There has always been light as well as heat; too many people just couldn’t stand to see it.

Other things I’ve been reading/listening to (if you have got this far)

The Redfem podcast take on the Cass report and the left’s altogether appalling attitude towards child safeguarding is brilliantly, righteously angry. As is Gia Milinovich’s post on all those who watched friends and family members face tremendous abuse for speaking out and did nothing to defend them.

So, altogether quite maddening. So I will end on a cheerier note with the cover of Hags in Swedish:

Until the host of another festive crafts series annoys me again,

Victoria