OK Karen return - 100% toxicity free!

With added nuance, empathy and reasonableness

Hello!

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