More heat, more light

On calls for 'calm' and 'nuance' in the gender debate

“You won – get over it!”

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.