Football’s Woman Problem

I haven’t witnessed this much good old-fashioned sexism since the NoMorePage3 campaign brought all the unreconstructed thugs out of the woodwork to call us ugly jealous prudes for wanting a public space for women free of soft porn. Yes, the Spanish women’s football crisis has reminded us that the old forms of sexism haven’t gone away, they’ve just been momentarily overshadowed by the new progressive form of sexism which calls women terfs and bigots for wanting a public space which is safe and fair for women. We’re back momentarily with the men who wouldn’t be seen dead in a ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T shirt. Their old-fashioned opinion, that women shouldn’t be playing football anyway, now has a very modern public platform for its expression so we can all witness the meltdown of the men who still view the sexually inappropriate behaviour of a man as proof that women should be kept out of the beautiful game. There is a palpable sense of ‘’We told you so!’ in tweets which say things like ‘women are delicate flowers who cannot be around men’ or ‘Women’s football has been a thing for five minutes and they’re already destroying the game with #MeToo’.

I try to avoid making absurd comparisons with extreme regimes, now that feminists are routinely compared to Nazis, but nevertheless there is a continuum between the belief that women should be banned from football for their own good because men will simply not be able to resist assaulting them, to the Afghan Taliban’s restriction on freedoms for women ‘for their own safety.’ Like the periodic suggestion of curfews for women when there is a serial killer on the loose, the punishment and/or control of women for the sins of men is a pernicious form of victim blaming.

Comparisons are being made between the Rubiales kiss and the kisses shared between male footballers, as if the power disparity and women’s experience of sexism make no difference to the experience. It reminds me of the oft-used example of the ‘Diet Coke ad’ during the NoMorePage3 campaign, to suggest that male objectification is on a par with that experienced by females, but men just cope with it better. There is a deliberate sex-blindness where it suits, coupled with a full-on sex-determined judgement on the problem and its solution. We are expected to accept that it’s ‘people’ who kiss eachother (so a man kissing a woman is no different to a man kissing another man), but it’s ‘men’ who play football (so women should back off).

A similar feat of cognitive dissonance is required by the new progressives who will campaign about the issue of consent when a woman is kissed on the mouth but look the other way when a woman is forced to accept the greater risks of playing her sport against a man. For them, there is no difference between males and females when it comes to fairness and safety in sport, but all the difference in the world when it comes to who should be allowed to kiss who without asking permission first.

It is being said that this is Spain’s #MeToo movement, but I rather hope not. #MeToo quickly became defanged by a liberal feminist determination to include men who say they are women in the movement. A woman’s experience of assault then becomes a battlefield between those who decry all male violence against women and those who claim that some men are not really male at all, on their say so alone. A victim can quickly be cast as a bigot in these circumstances, and sympathy for her becomes dependent on a man’s inner feelings about his ‘gender’. Spanish women deserve a better feminism than this, as do we all.

The behaviour of Rubiales towards all the other Spanish team players bordered on creepy: the kiss on Jenni Hermoso’s lips was just the icing on the cake. As a woman, watching all those hugs was quite uncomfortable. An older man in a position of power should be aware of the disparity between his own standing and that of younger women, especially in a game where their acceptance is still a matter of debate. In an (admittedly unscientific) Twitter poll I asked the question of women: ‘Have you ever been made uncomfortable by a hug from an older male relative/friend’s dad etc which felt more like a grope/went on too long/was hard to get away from/was more than just a hug…’ Of the 912 respondents, 89% said yes. There is good reason for women to view Rubiales’ actions differently to men, but even if lived experience didn’t play a part in women’s perceptions, there is still the issue of historic inequalities which are pronounced in the world of football and should be a consideration if women are to be respected in the game. For many years the focus has been on the very basic desire just to be taken seriously in the first place. All the people commenting (sometimes patronisingly) on the status of the England women’s team as ‘inspiration for young girls’ should also be aware of the effect on young girls of watching the disrespectful treatment of those role models by some in the male management of the game.

Like Page3 at the time, treating women as sex objects serves to put women back in their place. It can be a useful tool for men threatened by women encroaching on territory they thought was theirs: it’s a reminder of what they could do to us if they chose. A kiss, a grope, a lascivious stare, in a situation where women are being celebrated for their achievements, is more than just a kiss, it is a statement of who is still boss and it is demeaning to a woman at the very moment of her success.

There has been overwhelming public support for the Spanish women footballers, which is nice to see, though I can’t help feeling that it’s relatively safe ground for the ‘right side of history’ bunch. The old sexists currently having their moment will not last long; the new sexists will reassert themselves eventually, newly confident and patting themselves on the back for decrying the attitude of dinosaurs like Rubiales. Some of them, still too scared to comment on ‘the trans issue’ in sport, but invigorated by this very public opportunity to show off their feminist credentials, might even be dusting down their ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T shirts. But we won’t be fooled.

The Price Women Pay in the Gender Wars

The latest onslaught in the gender wars, and another final straw in this world full of final straws, comes from the NHS Confederation in their new trans and non-binary guidance for healthcare staff. Published in partnership with the LGBT Foundation, the guidance suggests that no patient is entitled to know the trans status of their carer, that in effect the sex of the health professional can be hidden from the patient if the staff member wishes it.

Patients with dementia are not exempt and ‘should still be challenged’ if they express ‘discriminatory views’, according to the guide – thus fully completing the cycle of female subordination to the trans project between the ages of birth and death. From young girls being told by school trans toolkits that boys in their changing rooms are really girls if they say so, to elderly women with dementia being called discriminatory if they recognise something as familiar as a man standing in front of them, there is something for every stage of life in this new progressive era of female oppression.

From the cradle to the grave there now exists a hydra-like sex-based assault on women’s rights which is increasingly difficult to avoid. You may be setting out on a sporting career, or have worked hard to become an elite athlete, only to find there is a man next to you on the starting line, and you will be told to adjust your sense of reality. Adjust! Adjust your perceptions to view this man, with his puberty-induced advantage, as a woman. You might be in politics, publishing, academia, the arts, science: professional careers full of lists and prizes and incentives for women and girls, and these lists may start to include men and you will be asked to adjust. Adjust! See these men, with the advantages of their male socialisation, as women, or pretend you haven’t noticed.

You might be a victim of rape or a survivor of male violence, and cruelly you will be expected to adjust to a man in your women-only counselling group or refuge. Adjust! Pretend your heightened antennae for maleness does not (should not) exist and if you’re finding that difficult, work harder at ‘reframing your trauma’. You might be in prison, locked up and lacking any means of escape and there might suddenly be a male locked up with you and you will be expected to adjust. Call him a woman and pretend there is no difference between him and the other inmates, it’s what everyone else is doing. There are sanctions if you don’t, and you have no power. Adjust!

You might be an expectant mother and your healthcare provider has started to use language which you find dehumanising, such as birthing parent or lactator. You might be eligible for screening or medical tests but the word ‘woman’ is never used any more so you’re not sure if it includes you or not. You might find yourself in a single-sex hospital ward where suddenly a man is put in the bed next to you. You might prefer a female nurse to do your mammogram, you might have a disability and require female intimate carers. If the female nurse or carer turns out to be a man, you must pretend it doesn’t affect you. It’s normal, your perceptions are wrong, it’s a small thing, it helps other people. Adjust! It is more kind and ‘inclusive’ after all, and anyway if you don’t comply you will be called a bigoted transphobe.

Any situation in day-to-day life where previously there has been an assumption of single-sex provision now requires women to adjust their expectations. Public toilets and changing rooms in shops and leisure centres will now be ‘single-sex’ in a ‘both sexes’ kind of way and you must adjust your feelings accordingly to accommodate any man who says he’s a woman, and increasingly, any man who says he’s non-binary. A natural instinct to mistrust any man who breaks the social code to enter a female space must be repressed. Adjust those natural instincts! Female knowledge and experience of male predatory behaviour needs to be unlearned. Only adjust!

As women, we are very good at recognising a male when we see one, but this ability is now routinely questioned by those intent on blurring the boundaries. The accuracy of our perception (it’s very accurate) is not the point though – the point is that every time we do correctly identify a male, we can now be told we are wrong, on the basis of his inner feelings. We must change our perception and tell his truth rather than our own. Adjust! Adopt his beliefs, not yours.

If you refuse to adjust, or you cannot adjust due to dementia, neurodivergence, a strong sense of material reality, religious beliefs or radical feminism, then the adjustment will be made for you. You will lose friends, jobs, funding, reputation, opportunities, prizes, records, scholarships, careers, and finally the words to say all this. You will probably lose your peace of mind and in extreme cases, your sanity. Women must change themselves or watch their worlds being forcibly changed for them.

This is a wholesale act of discrimination against women. In a society where sex is still an axis of inequality, it was predictable (and predicted) that allowing sex to be a choice would have an adverse effect on the oppressed class. For men the effects are piecemeal, experienced by individuals or smaller sub-groups such as gay men, in individual circumstances. But for women it is structural, it is built in and it exacerbates existing inequalities. The half of the hub of humanity which is female is being slowly turned, cog by cog, further away from equality, further away from safety, further away from fairness, dignity, privacy and comfort, in order to appease a tiny subset of men who wish to be seen as women. They are pulling the lever time and again, ratcheting a bit more, notch by notch, shifting us over, clicking the whole female demographic into a new unwanted, uncomfortable adjustment which we do not like and we did not choose.

We should know by now that when a trans advocacy group writes guidance or gives evidence for legislative change, the rights of women and girls will be ignored. With the passage of time, the lack of will from the authorities to protect women’s rights has become established, and with it, confidence has grown amongst those who would ride roughshod over every piece of legislation designed to level the playing field and promote equality and safety for women and girls.

The great adjustment is demanded of women, not men. The men who benefit from the promotion of ‘progressive’ values know they will not be the ones to pay the price: the consequences will always fall squarely and disproportionately on women.

That Dick on the Telly

When is indecent exposure not indecent exposure? The argument is raging on social media as to whether the performance of trans comedian Jordan Gray on Friday Night Live could be considered a crime or a brave and stunning celebration of trans bodies. It’s a question which could well interest Jerry Sadowitz, whose second show at the Edinburgh fringe was cancelled after a rogue penis appearance, or John Barrowman, roundly condemned for historic penis antics on set which he denied amounted to sexual harassment.

It is also of interest to feminists. Indecent exposure, or flashing, is a uniquely male crime, notwithstanding the occasional female streaker at a public sporting event. However, what constitutes a crime in real life is not necessarily a crime when it appears on post-watershed TV, although a content warning would normally ensure that those who might be triggered by male full-frontal nudity could switch off in time. Trigger warnings are used willy-nilly these days, and the ones about willies are probably the most useful, considering the proportion of women who have suffered male sexual abuse and might be prone to a trauma response. 

The differences in opinion about Gray’s performance were marked not just by the trans issue, but by sex differences too. There is a distinct cultural difference between male and female nudity and between men’s and women’s reaction to it. We live in a world where power and danger can be signified by male anatomy, whether it’s through flashing, exhibitionist fetishes or the sending of dick pics. Conversely, female anatomy is used to titillate, whether in porn, in advertising or the entertainment industry. Men often have no idea of this imbalance in the power dynamic, nor the resulting difference in the way women might experience public nudity, so they are quick to accuse women of being prudes. References to Mary Whitehouse and moral panics have proliferated once again; it’s almost like being back in the time of the No More Page 3 campaign.

If it wasn’t enough for your senses to be assaulted by the piano-playing dick-waving bombshell at the end of Gray’s act, there were plenty of clues in the preceding song as to just how ‘empowering’ an experience this was going to be for female viewers. With lyrics such as ‘I’m a perfect woman – my tits will never shrink. And I’m guaranteed to squirt and I do anal by default,’ set to a refrain of ‘I’m better than you,’ made it clear that Gray identifies as a very niche subsection of ‘woman’ rather than the common or garden variety. Funny that. Well, no, it wasn’t that funny actually.

Maybe the assumption that an ‘edgy, subversive’ comedian on a ‘progressive’ TV channel will be anything other than aggressively misogynistic as default is a little naïve. Or maybe the joke’s on us and he was really sending up a type of narcissistic autogynephilic trans personality for laughs. Or maybe the ‘girldick’ popping up in an unexpected place is simply the trans version of ‘banter’ – yes, it’s offensive, but no, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a joke. Whatever the truth of it, women are conveniently either prudes or transphobes for objecting.

Gray has predictably been defended by trans allies, as if the meaning of an exposed penis changes if it is attached to a body with breasts. Trans allies determinedly see ‘a woman with a penis’ here, whereas most women will see a man with fake breasts – and they should never be sanctioned for saying so. As if all nakedness is ‘gender neutral’, Gray’s fans have been pointing out that Channel 4’s show Naked Attraction has been running for years without objection, so therefore any criticism of Gray must be transphobia, pure and simple. But people comparing this show to Naked Attraction are missing the point. This is not naked attraction; this is naked misogyny.

Festival Toilets are a Feminist Issue

In my decades of attending UK festivals I have experienced a huge range of different festival toilets and I have navigated them all, mostly with a cheery lack of concern. I’m at a festival for the music, I don’t much care about anything else, and I’m not very squeamish when it comes to other people’s mess and smell. I’m the person who will jump the queue to use the toilet everyone else is avoiding because it’s too disgusting. I put this down to cutting my festival teeth at Glastonbury, surely the worst of all in the toilet department. Much like learning to drive in London, once you’ve mastered that, everything else is easy by comparison. Except the Isle of Wight, obviously. That’s a bad one. I’ve never done Reading/Leeds but the toilet anecdotes there are enough to put me off, involving as they do crowds of youths setting fire to toilet blocks or even uniting to push a portable toilet over while somebody is still in it. That’s a step too far.

But in general I will put up with a lot in order to get my fix of camping and live music. The two festivals I attended this year however (with much gratitude that they went ahead at all, obviously) flagged up a few issues which seemed to be more relevant than ever considering our current quest to make everything ‘gender-neutral’. Festivals in fact are often quoted when someone wants to make the point that mixed-sex toilets ‘work’ and that we should embrace them wholeheartedly in every context. So here are are a few points to show that they don’t ‘work’ for women, and that what we are obliged to put up with for a few days in order to get to see our favourite bands should in no way at all become the norm for public toilets in everyday life. Festival toilet experiences actually serve very well to illustrate the point that it is not only (or even first and foremost) safety which is an issue for women in toilets, but accessibility, useability and hygiene. And equality with men.

The most obvious problem for women when hygiene is lacking is that we have to sit down every time we use the toilet and we have to use toilet paper. As soon as the toilet paper runs out in your nearest toilet block (halfway through the first morning of the festival usually) women are disadvantaged. It is not only that we need to wipe every time, but that before we even sit down we need a clean seat. I try to use a toilet vacated by a woman wherever possible because she will have cleaned the seat ahead of me in order to use it herself. Men leaving toilets are a sadly predictable bunch. When a man uses a festival toilet, if he just needs to pee he does not have to clean up first and he does not have to dirty his hands by lifting the seat, and if there is already a mess there is little incentive to take care, so he might as well relax and add to the mess. Somebody in the queue will have to clean up that accumulated mess and that someone will invariably be a woman. I spend a proportion of my festival time doing housework: cleaning up the pee (and sometimes worse) of strangers. The paper I have taken in with me in case the toilet roll is empty might all get used up before I even get to sit down on the toilet myself. Men are not doing this housework at festivals, they don’t have to. I am inordinately grateful to any man leaving a clean toilet behind when he vacates it, as I know that he has either taken the trouble to clean it or been careful enough not to soil it, and that is a rare and wonderful thing.

There is a way for a woman to use a toilet without sitting on the seat, but that involves a squat or a perch. It is achievable but it really helps if there is something to hold on to, otherwise the prolonged strain on the thigh muscles can make things very difficult. Men, with their superior muscle to fat ratio, usually have stronger thigh muscles and can squat for longer if they need to, and most of the time they don’t need to. The disadvantage of portable toilet design, with the toilet seat on a ‘shelf’, is also reflected in the fact that softer, fatter and more squashy female thighs easily splay over the edge of the plastic seat when sitting, and come to rest in the disgusting mess either side. It takes an awful lot of toilet paper to clean not just the toilet seat but also the shelf surrounding it before you can sit down.

At the (otherwise brilliant) Green Man festival this year all the usual portaloos had been replaced with compost toilets, a laudable idea and one which I fully support, but which made things even worse for women. The shelf was high (much more difficult to squat above when you’re in the class of people who are on average shorter) and the hole down to the drop was surrounded by such a flimsy toilet seat it may as well have been painted on. In the traditional portaloos at least the toilet seat is positioned on a moulded plastic ridge, raised slightly from the surroundings, and therefore some help in raising the backs of your thighs from the mess. The portaloo design also usually incorporates a vertical post set into a recess in the door, which can be used to hold on to whilst perching, but the eco toilets had no such feature to mitigate the higher shelf/inadequate seat combo, so the only solution was to use half a toilet roll each time to clean the large flat area covered with other people’s piss (and worse) before the toilet was useable. Not very eco-friendly, not very woman-friendly. (I wrote to Green Man about this and they wrote back thanking me for taking the time to flag up the problems).

Portable toilets made for festivals and events are clearly designed with a default male in mind, and this makes things unequal even with no added problems in the mix. Not all of us will even be ‘default women’ for the weekend: the fact is that at any one time there will be a sizeable proportion of women and girls who are menstruating, or suffering a particularly heavy period or a bout of thrush or a case of cystitis, or any one of a range of other infections which are exacerbated and even caused by a lack of hygienic facilities. None of these conditions has ever dissuaded anyone I know from going to a festival, but it means that a lot of women are being inadequately catered for, or even being put at risk. The lack of provision for sanitary disposal is the least of it. Interestingly, I have seen comparatively few used sanitary products floating in festival toilets over the years, even though I’ve seen lots of everything else you could imagine (or would rather not) in a toilet situation. It’s almost as if women and girls are considerate enough to wrap their used products in toilet paper or make sure they are adequately flushed away before leaving the toilet for the next person.

At the (otherwise brilliant) End of the Road festival this year there was an interesting variation on the male default theme. In a couple of locations on site there were toilet blocks rather than individual portaloos. The signage on half of them said ‘Urinals’ or ‘Men’ or had a male symbol displayed. The other half of the blocks were not signed at all. I can see the thinking behind this: if you speed all the men through the urinals you can shorten the queues for women and make sure their toilets are cleaner. However, there are men who need to poo. What to do about them? You can’t really put up a sign saying ‘Women. And Men Who Need To Poo’. So there were men in the women’s queue but it wasn’t really a women’s queue because it wasn’t really a women’s toilet, even though inside there were individual cubicles and mini washbasins and hand driers and a very confined space. The impression given was that men could be individually catered for, but not women, and it added to the feeling of the current social atmosphere whereby the word ‘woman’ somehow cannot be mentioned. The toilets were much cleaner though, and an absolute treat compared to the single portaloos elsewhere on the site. It made me wonder why it would not be possible to have dedicated women’s toilets on a festival site. I haven’t come up with an answer to that.

Talking about poo (I was, earlier) the biggest human poo I have ever seen was in a festival toilet, after a man had vacated it: it was perched atop the usual unflushable mound of soaked toilet paper and crap that accrues by the middle of an average festival day, and looking for all the world like a horse had produced it. I couldn’t help but reflect that the larger the species the larger the waste products, and that truly, on average, men are larger than women.

In a BBC report today the issue of having a period at a festival is tackled by some young women who want to see change, although unfortunately they are complicit in the current fashion of shunning the word ‘women’ and choosing to refer to ‘menstruators’ instead. Some people are more squeamish about the word ‘woman’ than they are about the contents of a festival toilet. But, importantly, it’s about far more than menstruation, as I have tried to set out above. As sex is a protected characteristic in the Equality Act, you would at least have half a chance of instigating change by proving indirect sex discrimination, if you wanted to use the law, which is on your side. ‘Menstruators’ do not have protected characteristic status, so the word is less than useful legally. By avoiding the word ‘woman’ you are therefore also avoiding the legislation set up to provide potential support for your claim of sex discrimination. I would not personally wish to use the law in the case of festivals, I just want to be their friend, but it helps to know it’s there and that it backs up your claims. With the push for more gender-neutral provision in other contexts it may become necessary to use the existing legislation to prevent women’s facilities becoming reduced even further. It helps to remember you have rights and that those rights are sex-based.

Gender-neutral toilets disadvantage women and girls. Trying to use gender-neutral language to talk about it shores up the inequality which the Equality Act was formulated to overcome. Festivals are brilliant, I’d put up with anything to attend, but even I can see that festival toilets are a feminist issue.

The Butler Did It – a Review of Material Girls by Kathleen Stock

Material Girls is the new book by academic philosopher Kathleen Stock OBE, professor of philosophy at Sussex University. It is an essential read if you want to understand what the current transgender debate is all about and why there is conflict with women’s groups and feminists. If you cannot understand why anyone in their right mind would consider it fair to allow a male person to compete against a woman in female sport, then here you will find the background to how seemingly impossible beliefs such as these have come to dominate certain sections of ‘progressive’ politics. If you are shocked at the sudden proliferation of ‘gender-neutral’ toilets where there used to be single-sex facilities, and wonder where that trend is coming from; if you are surprised at the increasing number of press reports on ‘female’ sex offenders; if you have noticed the use of dehumanising words such as ‘menstruators’ where the word ‘woman’ used to be, or if your favourite organisation, business or political party seem to suddenly be falling over themselves to be more rainbow-washed than the next one, here are some of the answers.

It’s a fascinating story, based in academia but so well written that it feels like reading a detective novel in places: what’s going to happen next?! The ‘eight key moments in the rapid intellectual onset of gender identity theory’ (as well as containing a delicious joke) is a tour de force. We get a whistle-stop tour of theories from the most influential thinkers in the field, including Anne Fausto-Stirling, Judith Butler and Julia Serano, and the results in some places are mind-boggling. When people complain about academics ‘sitting in their ivory towers’ and informing policy on the ground which is entirely divorced from reality, this is surely a case of that, with knobs on. Despite being an account of academic theories, for non-academics the writing is fresh and accessible and, most importantly in a debate which specialises in deliberately obfuscating meanings, it has clarity. Such clarity. Terms and concepts are defined. I can’t tell you how much of a treat this is.

Stock has both sympathy and criticism for the concerns of trans people and of radical feminists, and she brings her own philosophical speciality to the debate with her concept of ‘immersion in fiction’. This reframing of the transgender experience is original and thought-provoking, keeping a distance as it tries to do from any position which is so entrenched as to be non-negotiable. It’s so thought-provoking that I haven’t made up my mind about the idea yet, to be honest, but I am always happy to have a new concept to ponder. The aim as I understand it is to move away from the polarising positions of ‘Transwomen are women’ and ‘Transwomen are men’, (TWAW v TWAM) as taken respectively by transactivists and radical feminists. It is not, to my reading, a proposal of compromise in terms of women’s sex-based rights (Stock makes it clear as the book concludes that sex as a concept is crucial and necessary and we must keep it to do the job it needs to do). It’s definitely not a proposal of compromise as to the meaning of the word ‘woman’, which Stock defends for the same reason she defends ‘sex’. What it is though, is a proposal to clear some ground for debate, in order that some mutual concerns might have room to be addressed.

To this end, in the most unsympathetic part of the book for radical feminists, there is a critique of some of the ideas expressed by Julia Long. I am a big fan of Julia Long but she is a controversial figure because she speaks her mind, calls a spade a spade and won’t be made to shut up. That’s partly why I like her. Stock’s criticism sees Long as the ‘extreme’ end of a polarised debate, but many feminists would argue that the material truth is not an extreme position to take, and that enough linguistic and conceptual ground has already been lost. Still, there had to be some criticism of a feminist scholar in order to balance the demolition of practically every major queer theorist out there. Long’s work is quoted at length and some readers will hopefully be inspired to go and find out more. If part of the aim of mainstream feminist writing is to raise consciousness there will be some readers that Long speaks to and some that Stock speaks to. I, like many others, value the ideas of both.

There has inevitably been some feminist criticism based on this part of the book (which I now have to refer to as *that bit*) and some of it I agree with. I don’t for example accept that there is ‘frequent casual denigration of trans women’s characters.’ It may be that the overall criticism of transgenderism as a movement, as personified by the writing of Sheila Jeffreys and Julia Long for example, will of necessity be critical of the men within it, but it seems to me that there has been a huge effort on the part of the majority of ‘gender critical’ feminists to be respectful under conditions of extreme provocation. Stock has personal experience of this, having been subject to hateful campaigns against her both at her place of work and on social media, simply for suggesting that sex and gender are a suitable subject for philosophical debate. I understand that she may be criticising one specific branch of radical feminist theory here, and not the general conduct of women on Twitter, but it is hard to stomach nonetheless when the general level of abuse is so one-sided.

The claim that there is a ‘commonplace suggestion, without evidence, that any trans woman’s reasons for transition are likely to be malign’ has produced the most anger, particularly from groups such as Transwidows who have suffered the most personal, private and misunderstood abuse. In a book which is so thorough in the clarity of its language it is a shame that this one statement is so open to misunderstanding. The word ‘any’ here can be read as the suggestion that ‘all’ trans woman’s reasons are likely to be malign, whereas I think it actually means ‘any particular’ trans woman’s reasons are likely to be malign. I might be wrong here, and it may make no difference to some people, but I think it’s an important distinction because there is plenty of evidence for many of the claims being made and it is misleading to suggest that’s not the case. Not least because Stock herself in her conclusion calls on, amongst other things, more evidence to be gathered on the experiences of transwidows in order to define what their political needs are. I don’t believe she intended to belittle their experiences and I think this line has been misunderstood.

On balance though, this is a mainstream publication from an academic philosopher, and looking critically at both sides of an argument comes with the territory, or it should. So much of the debate has been shut down that this is a welcome development and a courageous project from the publisher. I suspect that the book will continue to upset trans activists far more than radical feminists because after looking with a critical eye at evidence from both sides of the divide, Stock comes down firmly on the side of material reality.

In my reading of it, this is not a book which asks for compromise, at least not in the area of women’s rights, including our right to define ourselves. It presents an alternative conceptual worldview to the TWAW/TWAM binary, without telling anyone to ‘be nice’. It presents the thorny question of language as a matter of common humanity rather than necessarily a political ‘gotcha’. The feminist use of TWAM has come about of necessity, in order to reclaim the truth in an argument over language which has up until now disadvantaged women. In that sense it can be defended: clearly in terms of material reality TWAW is false and TWAM is true. Take the language further than that though and you are in the realms of opinion pitted against opinion, or theory v theory, less easy to defend to a mainstream audience and some of it pejorative: for example ‘innate souls’ v ‘delusion’ or ‘marginalised minority’ v ‘men’s sexual rights movement’. In the area of children and young people there is an understandable wish to counteract the bland obfuscating language of ‘top surgery’ and ‘bottom surgery’ but in Stock’s view it is a mistake to go to the other extreme and use shocking terms like ‘mutilation’, if only because it can alienate the young people we want to reach. I see Stock’s argument here as one which seeks to take the emphasis of the debate away from this binary, to sidestep the two extremes, and to create a space of shared experience where the conversation can happen. As I believe the conversation needs to happen, and women need to be consulted as stakeholders in it, I see this as a positive suggestion.

This is absolutely not the same thing as asking for a compromise on rights. By analysing both sides so thoroughly Stock gives more, not less, credence to her conclusion that sex matters, and that where sex matters it really matters. The evidence for and against is laid out and the result is clear: gender identity as a concept cannot and must not take the place of sex as a concept. The book taken as a whole, notwithstanding *that bit*, succeeds to my mind in moving the Overton window of what it is acceptable to think in this controversial debate. Stock has very clearly positioned herself in the centre of the debate and in doing so she has shown that it it is the centre, not an extreme fringe, which supports women’s rights. The central ground, which a lot of readers will be able to relate to as the reasonable place to be, takes it for granted that retaining women’s right to self-define and the right to legislation based on sex is a starting point, not a negotiation. The brilliant thing is, she makes it all seem so obvious.

13/05/2021 Edited to include this screenshot because I keep having to explain it wasn’t my joke. Full credit goes to Kathleen Stock. It still makes me laugh.

Objections to ‘Cis’

Many women have written eloquently over the years about their objection to the word ‘cis’. According to those who wish to impose it on us, it is just the equivalent of using the word ‘straight’ to define yourself if you are not gay: without this word some people might be tempted to use the word ‘normal’ for their sexuality, thus positioning the other as ‘abnormal’. So far so understandable, but there’s a fundamental difference in the function of the words ‘straight’ and ‘cis’. ‘Straight’ has a definable meaning, which is ‘heterosexual: attracted to the opposite sex’. Even if homosexuality did not exist, heterosexuality would still be a meaningful definition – you don’t have to believe in homosexuality for heterosexuality to exist.

‘Cis’ however, does depend on a belief system to make it meaningful, and it is this which makes it more than a neutral descriptor. Cis is short for cisgendered, and the usual definition (apart from ‘not trans’) is having ‘a gender which matches your sex assigned at birth’. Immediately there are two major assumptions to challenge: sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth, it is recorded, and ‘gender’ is a concept which is rejected by many people and is in any case impossible to define. Calling me cisgender does not just say I am someone who is ‘not trans’, it ties me in to a belief system I don’t share and which I see as actively harmful, especially to women and girls. This is a perfectly understandable reason to reject the word ‘cis’ and that should be the end of it… but there’s more.

The unwanted labelling of ‘cis’ is enforced whether you like it or not. Many women object to being demoted to a subset of their own sex class, when previously the word ‘woman’ was sufficient and carried meaning. For a movement dedicated to the idea of always believing that people are what they say they are, there is a notable lack of acceptance of the position ‘I’m not cis’. According to the ideology you have to be either cis or trans, and this imposition of gender is one of the things that is most regressive about trans ideology. I didn’t spend a lifetime trying to escape the confines of the feminine gender box only to be forced into the restrictive cisgender box instead.

If you’re forced to accept the word ‘cis’ then you have to concede that women come in both male and female varieties. ‘Cis’ is the other side of the coin to the ‘transwomen are women’ mantra, in that it ensures the category of women contains both sexes. In this system a ‘transwoman’ is a male woman and a ‘cis woman’ is a female woman, and these are now equal subsets of the category ‘woman’. Cis is doing the job of letting men into the female sex class, and it means you can no longer be just a woman, you have to make a choice over what sex of woman you are.

An argument I have been seeing more frequently when women object to men in their spaces, is that it’s not ‘cis men’ who will be allowed in, but ‘transwomen’. Cis works here to differentiate between the men who are really male (cis men) and those who are really female (transwomen), and at the same time it puts ‘transwomen’ and women into the same category. However, without the belief system which says that women can come in both male and female varieties, it is not always possible on the ground to tell the difference between a ‘cis man’ and a ‘transwoman’, especially now that the bandwidth of ‘trans’ has been widened so exponentially. In accepting the word ‘cis’ you have lost the means to differentiate between men and women, because they both now come in both sexes.

Question: “What is the difference betweeen a cis man and a transwoman?”

Answer: “His say so”.

Once ‘cis’ has done its job of mixing up the sexes into a new gender-determined classification, a much bigger problem becomes clear. The two subsets of women (cis and trans) turn out to be not so equal after all. Cis is being used to posit an axis of oppression which subverts the usual order of things and places females as the oppressors of males: if women come in both cis and trans varieties it’s the cis ones who have the privilege. Cis privilege means that cis people oppress trans people, so it naturally follows that males are the most oppressed of all women. Once that’s established, then it’s clear that female women, with all their privilege, can no longer be allowed to organise alone without their male ‘sisters’. Groups like ‘Sisters not Cisters’ have sprung up to make sure we can never have anything just for ourselves ever again.

The result is that women are increasingly being called out when they prioritise ‘female women’, or leave out ‘male women’, in activities which were formerly perfectly well-understood as women-only. What once would have been celebrated as progressive for centering women, helping to promote justice, level the playing field or correct the male default, is now a sign of ‘transphobia’. Karen Ingala-Smith suffers periodic abusive Twitter pile-ons because her ‘Counting Dead Women’ project does just that, and Jean Hatchet endures a similar fate for her ‘Ride for Murdered Women’ fundraising bike rides. The Twitter accounts of ‘Women’s Art’ and ‘Great Women of Mathematics’ have had similar attacks from trans allies who cannot bear to see the word ‘woman’ being used without the inclusion of men. International Women’s Day has become just another opportunity on social media to insist that males must be included in the category of women.

It’s a double bind: we are apparently expected to adopt the categorisation of ‘cis women’ but then we are not allowed to organise as ‘cis women’.

Trans people on the other hand are allowed to have meetings and days of rememberance, days of visibility, and all manner of trans-only events and celebrations, without bomb threats or violence or protest. ‘Inclusion’ of other categories is not demanded of trans groups, it’s only demanded of women. When we are lambasted for ‘excluding’, there is no recognition that we are losing something we are entitled to, and often something we rely on. ‘Women-only’ has meant a place of safety or of sanctuary or of healing ever since second wave feminists fought for our rights as women, decades ago.

The Women’s Institute is the latest women’s organisation to come out as trans inclusive, which means it is no longer women-only. It is not just the case that women’s organisations have the choice whether or not to include males, it is now the fact that any which decide not to are hounded until they give in, or forever have to accept the label of bigoted transphobes. We are very nearly at the point where whenever we do anything for women we will have to include men. Many women are happy with this, actively wishing to include men who identify as women, and this is their choice. The choice though, for women who don’t want to, or can’t, include men, is dwindling. These women are often the most disadvantaged and vulnerable: sexual abuse or domestic violence survivors, prisoners, women who need refuge and women of particular faiths for example. For other women it’s just a matter of preference: the presence of males in the room makes a difference: men dominate, they talk louder, they interrupt more; sometimes you don’t want that; increasingly it’s being forced on you.

The implications of this are far-reaching. When services are advertised as ‘women-only’, or expected to be so because of social convention, then a possibility arises that a woman needing a male-free environment, for whatever reason, will at some point come across an unexpected male, possibly when she is in a state of undress or otherwise vulnerable. Very few women in this position will know what the new rules are. Not everyone is on Twitter. No woman can say on behalf of any other woman that it is now ok for ‘women-only’ to mean ‘both sexes.’ Nobody has that right. Each woman gives consent for herself and herself alone.

The equality law in the UK works by protecting certain characteristics that have traditionally suffered discrimination. Although ‘sex’ as a protected characteristic can be used to protect either sex, in reality sex discrimination mostly discriminates against women. The fundamental basis of women’s rights is a distinction between the sexes, allowing single-sex spaces and services where this is ‘a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.’ It is the service which is judged by these criteria, not the individual wishing to use it, and up until now the aim of providing a healing space in which to recover from male violence has always met those criteria. Single-sex spaces are therefore ‘allowed’ by the law, even if the provision of them discriminates against another protected group.

It has been suggested many times (as a serious argument) that the aim to keep women’s toilets and changing rooms women-only would entail a policing of people’s genitals at the doorway, as if we were not very good at determining the sex of anyone we come across without checking their chromosomes or looking inside their pants first. Pictures of ‘passing transwomen’ are rolled out as a ‘Gotcha’, as though the successful feminisation of a single man disproves the male and female sex binary. It doesn’t though; quite the opposite: it highlights just how difficult it is to escape the confines of biological sex, with its combination of obvious and subtle visual differences. The problem is that you may say ‘transwoman’ but we see ‘male.’

What’s the difference again, between a ‘cis man’ and a ‘transwoman’?

His say so.

There is no definition of ‘ciswomen’ in law. ‘Ciswomen’ is not a protected characteristic. Choosing to use the definition ‘cis’ turns ‘woman’ into a two-sex category for which the law cannot deliver single-sex protection. Arguably, that’s the whole point of it. The protected category of sex becomes unworkable, and with it women’s basic rights. Distinct rights for women become impossible if ‘women’ includes ‘men’. If the use of the word ‘cis’ becomes normalised, then as females we will always be yoked to males.

Every manifestation of the word ‘cis’ is detrimental to women. There are no benefits. We have everything to lose. Don’t give in, don’t use the term ‘ciswomen’.

Why Can’t Women Just Be Nice?

How nice do women have to be?

Well, very, it seems, if we want to hold on to our rights. I’m talking about the rights which are already enshrined in law, by way of the Equality Act 2010, updating and incorporating the sex equality legislation from the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. Rights for women are based on sex, and they always have been, because there is no other legal or material or commonly recognised way of differentiating between men and women. Despite recent assertions from many lobbyists, we have never had to resort to looking inside someone’s pants to distinguish one sex from the other. The common understanding of what male and female categories mean, and the difference between them, has always sufficed to ensure that laws intended to level the playing field for women are actually used to benefit women. They may not always have been adequate to the task, but it’s always been clear who they’re for.

Women are expected to be nice in all walks of life, it’s true, and female socialisation works to prop up this expectation by a system of rewards and punishments as girls grow up. However, recently there has been a ratcheting-up of the demands that women be nice specifically in the arena of defending women’s rights. Being nice has become the number one demand made of feminists, above being fair or knowledgable or determined for example, and I wonder why it’s so important now?

One of the current attacks on women’s rights has taken the form of denying that women exist at all, at least as a distinct category. In normal circumstances this would be laughed out of court but it has gained traction because it has been linked (nefariously) to the supposed oppression of another group (trans people) and the campaign for trans rights has been so successful. To facilitate the demands of trans activists, women have been painted first and foremost as an obstacle to, and gatekeepers of, all the good stuff (including biology itself). The reason that women need sex-specific rights in the first place has been deliberately obscured, minimised and forgotten.

When Alice Roberts, scientist, posts on Twitter an article which posits that somehow, because of clownfish, it is impossible to accurately categorise binary human sex characteristics, feminist Twitter responds en masse. Feminist Twitter includes a lot of scientists and biologists. Many many women gently put Alice Roberts right. Some do it with impatience, some are critical, a tiny minority call her stupid or some such insult, but largely what we get is an astonishingly informative thread about human biology. With lots of evidence. This doesn’t stop people referring to it as ‘a pile-on’ and if Alice Roberts doesn’t post for a few days she will be said to have been ‘hounded off Twitter by trolls.’ Roberts herself says this:

When Jo Maughan, barrister, pontificates on Twitter about the right of trans-identified males to be housed in the female prison estate, feminist Twitter also responds. Feminist Twitter is full of lawyers, barristers and law students who really understand the law. They produce an informative thread, disagreeing with Maughan, based on the provisions in the law as it stands. One or two of them get irritated with his refusal to listen or to take on board any points they present as evidence. There might be the odd insult. Largely though the thread is an education on current UK equality law. Maughan thinks these women, rather than presenting their (very knowledgeable) side of the argument, are simply being bigoted:

When Billy Bragg, socialist, argues on Twitter for the right of men who identify as women to be included in women-only spaces and sports, feminist Twitter responds again. Feminist Twitter is full of socialist and trade unionist women, grounded in class-based analysis and feminist history. They calmly put Billy Bragg right, based on a socialist analysis of women as a sex class. Occasionally there is a swear word, sometimes a tweeter sounds a bit exasperated, many women express their disappointment with him, but largely Bragg is repeatedly told facts. He responds by telling all these highly intelligent and caring women that they are lacking in compassion:

In the years since the 2015 Trans Inquiry, during which trans demands have been promoted and women’s rights have had to be defended, many grassroots women’s groups have grown up to do the work of protecting women in light of the fact that no one else was doing it for them. Over time there have been many meetings, blogs, tweets, speeches, essays, articles and submissions to government enquiries, all from women and women’s groups keen to protect their existing rights. An overriding sentiment, voiced repeatedly, is that trans people should of course have all the rights that everyone else has. Women have bent over backwards to ensure that the defence of women’s rights is in no way seen as a desire to reduce trans rights. All women’s groups want trans people to be free from abuse and to enjoy equal treatment in healthcare, employment and housing, and they frequently say so.

Woman’s Place UK state this:

Fair Play for Women are clear on this:

Women and Girls in Scotland say this:

These sentiments are commonly and routinely expressed on social media by individual women too. It could not be clearer that the fight for women’s rights (which means existing rights, already fought for, well-researched and evidenced, and finally won) is not at the expense of trans rights and is not an attack on trans people. In comparison, no trans advocacy group (Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence, GIRES, Mermaids, TELI, Trans Media Watch, Allsorts and countless others) has once expressed the corresponding wish that the changes they are fighting for should not come at the expense of women and girls. There has never, in all their public campaigning, ever been a concern that other people’s rights might be affected by their demands, despite the fact that these demands do involve a rolling-back of women’s rights. To use a technical term, none of them actually gives a shit about women and girls.

This is, after all, what Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence and the Scottish Trans Alliance are fighting for:

But nobody is telling them to be ‘nice.’

At the same time as this complete disregard for women’s rights is being promoted as progressive, the insults, abuse and threats, as well as physical assaults, intended to silence women, go unremarked by the same prominent figures who implore women to be nicer, be kinder, be quieter.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown up in stark relief the need for women to have single-sex spaces to provide refuge from male violence. Domestic abuse has increased markedly during the lockdown all around the world. Other traditional inequalities such as low-paid work and family roles conribute to the worse effect of the lockdown on women. If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: the effects on women of being the subordinate sex according to their ‘gender’ include greater risk, greater violence and greater poverty. These gendered assumptions of the value (or lack of value) placed on ‘women’s work’ are part of the structure of gender that feminists have been fighting forever. We don’t like gender, we reject it and we are not hateful for doing so. It’s sensible; you can see that now. It is gender that disempowers women and girls.

Equally clearly, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the sex differences between men and women. Men are much more likely to die from the virus, and this is because of their sex, not because of their ‘gender identity.’ To science and biology deniers, for whom ‘transwomen are women’, the virus tells a different story. Initial studies show that women are more likely to catch the virus, because of their greater exposure, which is a result of the inequality of gendered roles and occupations, but men are more likely to die from it once they do catch it, because of their sex.

Is it still ‘unkind’ to insist that there is a sex difference between men and women and that it is straightforward (and vital) to categorise it? Is it still ‘lacking in compassion’ to analyse and assess a woman’s greater risk of harm according to gendered norms visited on her sex class? Is it still ‘bigoted’ to ask that women continue to be protected in law when these sex and gender differences in outcomes for men and women are now being highlighted so clearly?

Well, apparently yes.

We have everything to lose, and I’m beginning to think that this is the point. The demand that women be ‘nice’ and ‘kind’ goes further than just being a matter of tone policing, it has an impact on what women are allowed to say, and how much we can expect to be listened to when we say it. Women are not just expected to be nice whilst fighting for our rights, we’re expected to be nice instead of fighting for our rights.

Here’s an idea: just for a change the world could try being nicer and kinder to women.

Have Women and Girls Got Too Many Rights?

Do you think women and girls have got too many rights? Should some of these be rolled back now? Are we too equal? Too safe? Too represented? Too visible? Too powerful? Do you believe there should now be a reduction in women’s rights? Has it all gone too far? Are women actually the oppressors now? Would you support policies which would curtail some of those rights? Do you believe that women should have fewer rights?

Well, if you do, you’re in good company. It’s not just Men’s Rights groups who agree with you: there are increasing numbers of public institutions and businesses who believe that women and girls are so equal now that we no longer need the legislative and social protections which were fought for and won by previous feminists. We are so safe now we no longer need the provisions in law intended to ensure our safety. We have such a major voice now that we no longer need the mechanisms intended to increase our political representation. We have so much recognition for our work that we no longer need women-only prizes and awards. We are so equal in opportunity to men and boys that we no longer need any special treatment to level the playing field.

Do you agree? Lots of people do.

Women have so many rights in fact that we can afford to share them. We are not yet required by law to share them, but a combination of female socialisation, the post-Trans Inquiry Guide for Service Providers, and a rampant disregard for the Equality Act from trans advocacy groups, means that we are being compelled to share them. Or bullied into sharing them. Or coerced, or guilt-tripped, or emotionally manipulated. There are many ways.

The result of the Trans Inquiry and the Trans Report is that in public life the issue of trans self-ID has essentially all but been decided, without the need for the upcoming government consultation, and without any debate. Many institutions are already putting self-ID into place, and women and girls are already feeling the effects.

GirlGuidingUK for example, have implemented a transgender policy which effectively changes the organisation from being single-sex, and allows trans-identifying boys to share showers, tents and private spaces with girls, without informing parents first. Topshop has designated its girls’ changing rooms as unisex, based on a complaint from one man who identifies as non-binary. Hampstead Ladies Pond has decided to admit trans-identified males, based on self-ID, after they had some ‘trans-awareness training’. Cabins on the Caledonian Sleeper are suddenly to be separated along the lines of ‘gender identity’ rather than sex.

GirlguidingUK, Topshop, Hampstead Ladies Pond and Caledonian Sleeper are just four examples of what is becoming a trend. Businesses know they need to do a bit of diversity training, they get in their local friendly trans group for a trans awareness day, and suddenly the women working there, or the female customers, have fewer rights than they did beforehand. Many other institutions have come to the conclusion that women and girls no longer need the same degree of protection we once did. We have too many rights, we really don’t need them all. Some can surely therefore be removed without the need to consult with us first. A recent example of female protest, in the form of the group ManFriday, resulted in Swim England retracting their new transgender policy in favour of having a consultation. I have yet to come across a company which sees the importance of consulting with women before changing their policies.

In schools there is a definite move towards ensuring that girls grow up with fewer rights than their mothers had. A recent story from Transgender Trend documents the methods used to ensure compliance at one school in Essex, which was coerced into converting its girls’ toilets into unisex toilets, after a campaign led by local trans group Transpire. The Equality Act specifically warns against giving one protected group rights at the expense of another, but when this is trans rights versus girls’ rights, trans groups are ignoring it and misleading schools into putting trans rights first. It is always girls who lose out.

Trans advocacy group GIRES has this advice in their factsheet about trans inclusion:

The advice to schools provided by LGBT support group Allsorts, in Brighton, follows the same pattern. This is from their East Sussex Schools Toolkit:

This advice was written in 2013 and since then the toolkit has been listed as a resource on the Mermaids website, and used by many schools across Sussex to inform and educate staff on trans inclusion. The aim to teach girls that a boy can be ‘in every other respect a girl’ clearly makes absolutely no sense, and moreover it conflicts with all other initiatives in schools designed to empower girls to respect and assert their own boundaries. It also compromises safeguarding practice. The sentence about the trans pupil’s rights under the Equality Act is a straightforward lie.

In addition to this, girls should get used to the idea of having fewer rights to compete equally in sports:

In a tortured attempt to spin the language, Allsorts believes that girls who object to a male competing with them should be ‘supported to do a different activity’. We all know that that really means ‘be chucked off the team’ though. This is a blatant and intentional misrepresentation of the Equality Act. Girls and women are protected under the category of sex, but trans groups going into schools and workplaces are providing materials which deliberately hide that fact in order to prioritise trans people. Women and girls are always the ones adversely affected.

Trans groups providing guidance for schools and businesses include Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, GIRES, Educate and Celebrate and the Intercom Trust, as well as Allsorts and Transpire. They all believe that girls and women don’t really need all the rights they currently have, and some of these should be rolled back. It is no longer necessary for girls to enjoy bodily privacy as they grow up, for example, or to expect a level playing field in sporting activities. These are unnecessary cherries on the cake of female equality, and can be removed with no consultation and no impact assessment.

Sport at an elite level fares no better. At the University of Brighton in March, Professor Yannis Pitsiladis introduced a talk by Joanna Harper, at an event entitled ‘Beyond Fairness: The Biology of Inclusion for Transgender and Intersex Athletes’. Harper, a trans-identified male, delivered a shockingly biased talk which suggested no possible disadvantage to women from allowing men into their sports. The research evidence was extremely limited in size and scope, but was nevertheless used to ‘prove’ that there was no physical advantage to be gained from having a male body. Harper suggested that it was ‘traditionalists’ who believed sports should be separated by biology, but that ‘others’ believed gender could be self-identified, as if these two positions carried equal weight, and also as if Team Biology was just a bit old-fashioned.

Professor Pitsiladis had introduced the event as being the first in a series of hopefully informative debates on trans inclusion in sports. If the goal is proper debate then a powerful advocate for trans rights should always be matched with a powerful advocate for women’s rights, as it is always women who will bear the brunt of any changes. This did not happen and there did not appear to be any plans for it to happen in future events. Follow-up reading after the event revealed that Harper’s flawed research was the very research used by the International Olympic Committee to inform their policy on trans inclusion. There are already male trans athletes winning against women in sports such as cycling, boxing and weightlifting. There are already trans sportsmen taking the place of women in team sports such as football, Australian rules football and basketball. The uncomfortable truth is that for every trans person who wins a place on a team there will be a woman who will have lost hers. We can’t just pretend that’s not true.

Once again the views of a minority interest group have been allowed to inform policy which has a profound effect on women, without consulting women first. The IOC obviously take the view that women no longer need a level playing field in sports. We’ve had equality for ages now. For example women’s football is no longer banned by the FA. We have little left to complain about. No, women have had too much equality and too many rights, and some of these are no longer completely necessary, and should be taken away and given to someone else. Women after all are supposed to be good at sharing.

Feminists who have concerns about the erosion of the rights of women are currently being characterised as ‘anti-trans activists’ in an attempt to discredit them. It is clear from the examples above that there are many ways that women and girls lose out when trans rights are given precedence, but there is deliberately no acknowledgement of this from trans activists: it is more useful to them to characterise feminists as haters and bigots than to admit there might be a conflict of interest. In fact, to acknowledge a conflict of interest at all would be to acknowledge that there is a difference between women and ‘transwomen’ and this transactivists cannot do. The law itself does differentiate: it allows sex-based exemptions to the equality law where women’s safety, privacy or dignity is concerned. Biological differences are enshrined in law. Trans activists will never accept this: in their view ‘transwomen are women’. This mantra is used frequently to shut down any argument. Here’s a classic of the genre:

The repetition of this mantra is not just used to shout women down, it is also used as a justification for not conducting proper impact assessments. If ‘transwomen’ ARE women then there is clearly no need to look at the impact on women of any change in legislation because changes to help ‘transwomen’ will help women. The purpose of ‘transwomen are women’ is not just to be ‘nice’ to trans-identified males and show solidarity and support, as many people seem to think it is. Its purpose is to deny the whole notion of women having separate rights, because it is in this way that trans activists can get every change they want passed without any opposition. It’s almost as if a Trojan Horse dressed as My Little Pony has landed smack bang right in the middle of the women’s movement and now Men’s Rights Activists are pouring out of it intending to get their own way.

If ever there was a reason for avoiding the language of ‘transwomen’ this is it. Using the phrase ‘trans-identified males’ instead works for women because it serves to clarify the boundaries of the conflicting groups, and leaves no doubt as to the necessity of impact assessments for women and girls before changing legislation for trans people. When most of the rights enshrined specifically for women involve biology to one degree or another, and usually safety, privacy and dignity as well, this is an essential distinction to make. If we are not allowed to make it we can’t fight for our own rights. This is why it has become the preferred language for many women: we have been told ‘transwomen are women’ once too often, and it is never to our advantage.

Feminists are pro-women, not anti-trans. Feminists do not attack and assault trans people, we just know that for women sex-based rights are crucial. When the trans movement is deliberately intent on misleading schools, businesses and institutions, to the detriment of women and girls, the time for being ‘nice’ is over. We have to be honest instead. We have to defend our rights. In every new case of changing trans policy, if there is anyone who needs to budge up, shift over and lose out, it is women and girls. The only way this could be acceptable is if you believe that women and girls have too many rights already. Do you?

Are All-Women Shortlists Transphobic?

A controversy around the subject of trans-inclusion is currently rumbling in the Labour Party: the question of whether trans-identified males, with or without a Gender Recognition Certificate, should be able to access women-only shortlists or become Women’s Officers, or take advantage of initiatives such as the Jo Cox Women in Leadership programme to encourage women into politics. A crowdfunder has been set up to legally challenge the Labour Party’s acceptance (without consultation or debate) of trans self-ID, and there is now a counter-petition accusing all those involved of transphobia. This has been followed by what seems to be a hit-list giving details of Labour members with ‘transphobic’ Twitter accounts, and two women have already been suspended from the party based on this evidence.

What is sometimes forgotten in this argument is the reason that women-only initiatives exist in the first place. AWS and similar schemes are necessary in order to correct a historic imbalance in female representation, but it is not just about helping individual women to pursue a career in politics they may otherwise have been unable to do. The reason women need equal representation is that women have different needs to men and that these are often overlooked by male politicians: when male is the default setting women inevitably lose out.

The status of women as second class citizens is perpetuated by a majority male government who, with the best will in the world, do not always see or consider women’s perspectives on law, healthcare, science, education, crime, and all the other areas of policy which affect women and girls differently to men and boys. The reasons for the sex difference fall into two categories: female biology and female socialisation. Politically we need to talk about, amongst other things: the mental health and aspirations of girls, menstruation and the tampon tax, pregnancy and healthcare, reproductive rights, prostitution and porn, childcare and education, FGM and VAWG, emotional labour and caring, and the menopause and pensions. There is a component of female biology or socialisation, or both, in all these areas, and it is generally accepted that having men make all the policy is not best practice. Not all women feel the same way about any of these areas of policy, but the more women there are in positions of power the more likely it is that they will at least be addressed from a female perspective.

The difficulty when considering transwomen in these posts is that they do not share the two aspects of female experience which inform and prop up inequality – that is, biology and socialisation. However much the desire is there to support trans people within the party, to do so via the use of mechanisms designed to promote women must result in disadvantaging women. Female socialisation ensures that many women will support this, seeing transwomen as women and welcoming their inclusion, but is it fair to do this on behalf of the many other women who are trying to escape the socialisation which tells them to put other people’s needs first?

The mantra ‘transwomen are women’ has been used for years to silence the debate about trans inclusion, but now it is also being used as a form of gatekeeping over who is on the right side of the debate. ‘Do you believe transwomen are women?’ is increasingly being asked as a sort of test of your progressiveness, and there is only one right answer. Many women have been happy up till now to refer to trans-identified males as women, largely out of courtesy and respect, sometimes out of sympathy, but not because it’s actually true. Many of these women now feel that the courtesy and respect has been thrown back in their faces by transwomen acting with what looks suspiciously like a very male sense of entitlement.

The preoccupation with ‘passing’ is an indication that within the trans community itself it is actually acknowledged that transwomen usually look like men. The instinct to recognise sex difference lies very deep within us all, and despite the attempts to discredit feminists, there never was a call for, or a need to, examine someone’s genitals before letting them in to a women-only space. We all know what a man looks like: we can’t not know. It is asking a lot of women to pretend otherwise, but of course we will do so if treated with similar respect in return. What some of us won’t do is be bullied into it.

A good illustration of the attempt to bully women into it was the recent performance of India Willoughby on Celebrity Big Brother. India’s extreme rage and threatening body language, complete with jabbing finger, were very ‘male’ to a woman’s eye. The accompanying repetition of ‘I am … A WOMAN!’ was very like the mantra repeated endlessly on Twitter, and the response from the women was very much that of appeasement towards a violent man. Many of us will recognise that moment when a woman’s expression becomes slightly glazed over in an attempt to do nothing to provoke the man who is angry with her. All the women in the Big Brother House wore that expression. That kind of bullying is employed every day on social media towards gender-critical feminists, and also in real life when feminist meetings are violently disrupted.

If men who identify as women have to go to those lengths to procure compliance then it is very clear they don’t ‘pass’. This means that, when it comes to privilege, they have had the advantage of a lifetime of being seen as male and treated as male. However different you feel inside, the way you are treated depends on what other people can see. However much ‘gender’ is claimed as innate and real, it doesn’t show. Men can have no experience of what it’s like to be a girl growing up, either through socialisation or biology, and this limits how much they can understand the needs of girls and women, even if they identify as women themselves.

Ahead of the recent Women’s March Munroe Bergdorf admonished women for wearing pussy hats because ‘not all women have a vagina’. Bergdorf, a transwoman who ironically benefited from a platform on BBC Woman’s Hour recently to talk about ‘how women are silenced’, tweeted: ‘Centering reproductive systems at the heart of these demonstrations is reductive and exclusionary’. This is an opinion which is mainstream within the trans activist community. (Some of the march organisers tried to ban the wearing of pussy hats after last year’s complaints). If biology itself is seen as exclusionary amongst trans people, then it could be argued that transwomen are actually less useful even than men in representing women politically, because their needs are in direct opposition to women’s.

Coincidentally, it is not the case that transmen are spending much time publicly telling men which body parts they can or can’t talk about, almost as though transmen don’t feel a sense of entitlement over a whole other class of people.

There cannot be a clearer example of how ‘feeling like a woman’ does not necessarily give you a female perspective, and does not give you the ability or experience to represent women’s issues. Notwithstanding all the slogans and mantras in the world, sex will out. If it’s the case that ‘only trans people can talk about trans issues’ (a good reason for aiming for more trans-inclusion in the first place) then it is surely also true that we need more female representation to talk about women’s issues, and that this has to come from women born and socialised female, because otherwise we just defeat the object.

 

When Women’s Rights Are #NotaDebate

When there is conflict between trans rights and women’s rights (such as whether toilets and changing rooms should be segregated by ‘sex’ or ‘gender’) an open debate should be encouraged to ascertain how best to accommodate the rights of both parties. This hasn’t happened, and it hasn’t happened in a big way, so it’s worth looking at how and why the debate has been stifled.

The Gender Recognition Act 2004 gave trans people a right to be legally recognised as the opposite sex. The Equality Act 2010 gave the characteristic of ‘gender reassignment’ a protected category status. At that time ‘gender reassignment’ essentially meant ‘sex change’ – the language used in the Act refers to transsexuals, and people understood ‘trans’ to mean a transition of some sort, usually (at that time) from male to female. The Act was for a person who was ‘…proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex’. Although biologically impossible, sex change was recognised in law as it was the only treatment which could alleviate the suffering of a minority of people with gender dysphoria.

Things have changed greatly since 2004, and the pace of that change has accelerated since 2010. The use of the word ‘trans’ no longer necessarily indicates any kind of transition, the word ‘transgender’ has replaced ‘transsexual’ and ‘sex change’ has disappeared altogether in public discourse. An Act which was formulated to protect a tiny minority of people who experienced such discomfort with their biological sex they would risk invasive surgery to fix it, became an Act which protected a larger minority of people whose ‘identity’ fell under the ever-widening trans umbrella, whether or not there was a medical diagnosis or any kind of transition. The Act itself didn’t change but the definition of ‘trans’ did. Arguably the biggest change was the insistence that now a man who believed himself to be a woman was actually a woman, and had always been a woman.

The disadvantage of formulating a protected category with indistinct boundaries is that it can grow and grow until it hardly resembles the original definition at all. There should be public unease about protecting the ‘rights’ of a cross-dressing middle-aged man to get undressed in the same changing room as a teenage girl, but this aspect of the proposed changes to the GRA has been largely ignored. On the contrary, any mention of the potential risks will result in the accusation of inciting hatred against a marginalised community. The wider public perception of transgender as ‘sex change’ has remained back in the times when the original Act was drawn up to protect it, but the contents of the category itself have moved on.

The Act is therefore no longer fit for purpose, but not for the reasons that trans advocacy groups would have you believe. The view of activists is that the Act needs to be updated to take away any ‘gatekeeping’ of trans identities, such as doctor’s reports, surgery or treatment of any kind, or even a ‘binary’ understanding of sex in the first place. A person’s gender, it is said, should be entirely theirs to define, and so gender self-definition is being promoted as the only humane way for the Act to go. The problem with this is that without any gatekeeping at all, there is a much greater risk to women from predatory men misusing the new definition. This side of the argument has been almost entirely closed down, despite the fact that women are still supposedly a protected category based on sex, and therefore should have been allowed a voice in the debate.

The new meaning of trans is currently being cemented into public consciousness by some very simple ideas used in a rather emotionally manipulative way. These ideas have been promoted so widely as to have reached the status of ‘self-evident’:

• Trans people are ‘Born in the Wrong Body’
• Gender is innate
• Around half of trans people will attempt suicide
• Trans people suffer abuse more than any other group
• Only trans people can talk about trans issues

There is no evidence for any of this, and plenty of evidence against. ‘Born in the wrong body’ is a feeling or a belief so it cannot be proved or disproved: it relies solely on the say-so of the speaker and whether or not they are being honest. (Imagine if the same criteria were applied to people with disabilities applying for disability benefits!) Innate gender would rely on there being a male or female brain, an idea disproved repeatedly by modern neuroscience, or on there being a male or female ‘essence’ or ‘spirit’, which is akin to a religious belief: again, unprovable and unmeasurable. The suicide stats have been debunked in several different studies but are still used repeatedly as though they are fact, despite the risks outlined by the Samaritans of associating suicide ideation with one particular cause. The crime stats for the UK show that trans people are actually less likely to be the victims of homicide than the perpetrators. And on gender issues trans people are not the only experts: there is a huge body of work on the subject by feminists, partly because gender is one of the social structures used to keep women in their place and uphold the Patriarchy. Women have a stake in this.

Possibly because there is a lack of evidence to back up trans ideology, there has been a sustained campaign to rule feminists out of the debate, and it has been done partly by ensuring there is no debate to start with. The hashtag #NotaDebate is routinely used to protest against feminist meetings and to suggest that people who want to debate are actually trying to deny trans people’s right to exist. Just to want a debate at all is framed as transphobic.

In 2015 the Trans Inquiry, led by Maria Miller and the Women and Equalities Committee, invited contributions from trans groups and other interested parties to give evidence. There were 208 written submissions from groups and individuals, including trans advocacy groups and women’s groups. Of these a number were called as witnesses, to provide further evidence and answer questions from MPs. Fifteen of these were trans people or groups, a further handful were health professionals (mostly working in gender identity settings) and absolutely none of them were women’s groups. On the subject of prisons for example, this led to the anomaly whereby no mention was made of the nefarious reasons that a male prisoner may wish to begin transitioning in prison (listed by the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists in their written evidence), whereas a question about strip-searching prisoners precipitated a collective bout of amnesia from both expert witnesses, and was then not pursued by the questioner. A women’s group may have had something to say about the right of a female employee to refuse to strip search a male body, but no women’s groups were there to do so.

The Trans Inquiry legitimised the notion pushed by trans groups that only trans people should be allowed to speak on trans issues. Amongst the groups invited to give verbal evidence were Action for Trans Health, GIRES, Trans Media Watch, Gendered Intelligence, Mermaids and the Scottish Trans Alliance. Since then these same few groups have been allowed a near monopoly on trans discourse, consulted by everyone from the BBC to the NHS, the NSPCC, the EHRC, schools, prisons, the Girl Guides, universities, political parties and the media. Some of these organisations then recommend all the same groups for their members or customers to go to for ‘more information’. The same mantras are being repeated on an endless circular self-reinforcing loop because nobody has been allowed to challenge them. All of them, it goes without saying, are to the benefit of the trans community. No consideration is given to any other protected groups. Not women, not children.

The Trans Report, published that year, was therefore predictably one-sided. Not only had women’s groups been excluded, but Maria Miller herself made a little dig about ‘purported feminists’ in her dismissal of those expressing criticism. In spite of the government’s cautious response to the report, a Guide for Service Providers was published in November 2015, in association with Gendered Intelligence. It was written as if the recommendations of the report had already been implemented. Service providers were told that the definition of trans included ‘transsexual, transgender, a cross-dresser (transvestite), non-binary and anyone else who may not conform to traditional gender roles’. This had changed considerably from the original Act’s definition. Services such as shops and leisure centres were advised that they must ‘Assume everyone selects the facilities appropriate to their gender’. This amounts in practice to something very close to gender self-ID. No laws had been changed to achieve this, and no impact assessments had been undertaken. Essentially at this point the UK government had given away the word ‘Woman’ without asking us first.

{Last week it was announced that Topshop had made all its changing rooms gender neutral, to appease a male customer who identified as trans non-binary, after he had complained in a tweet that he had been refused access to the women’s changing room. Topshop is a fashion retailer whose customer base is largely teenage girls and young women. Service providers now seem to think we have a law which protects young adult males from the indignity of being refused access to a teenage girls’ changing room. Meanwhile the Saturday girl, probably on minimum wage, has responsibility not just for the number of garments taken in, but also for the policing of which men should be allowed access. I hope they put her wages up.}

It wasn’t just the government who was keen to push forward trans rights. In 2014 the LGB support group Stonewall decided to add transgender people to their remit. From then on all LGB groups became LGBT groups, a move which tapped into the public support for LGB people at a time when same-sex marriage was in the headlines. Trans organisations have always been keen to make it clear that transgender is not a sexuality, probably because they wish to distance themselves from the evidence of autogynephilia (a sexual paraphilia associated with cross-dressing men), the highlighting of which is unlikely to foster much public support (although, unlike the accepted myths like ‘born in the wrong body’ there are decades worth of research and evidence to back it up). Trans people have benefitted from being a part of a group intended for minority sexualities, with its existing support base and funding, and have gained a much wider platform from doing so. One of the benefits has been that now anyone criticising trans rights can be accused of ‘attacking LGBT people’, and this has been very successful as a means of silencing women who want to support lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Lesbians have borne the brunt of the new trans activism: a lesbian refusing to accept the idea of a male-bodied potential sex partner is increasingly seen as transphobic by LGBT allies, and lesbians are attacked rather than supported by the organisations meant to represent them.

In October this year a meeting was held at Garden Court Chambers in London entitled ‘Progress and Challenges in Advancing Equality for Trans People in the UK’. It was hosted by the Human Rights Lawyers Association and the speakers included Bex Stinson from Stonewall and Michelle Brewer from TELI (Trans Equality Legal Initiative). Bernard and Terry from GIRES were in the audience and were also asked to speak. It was to be expected that the talks would focus on trans rights but nevertheless the extreme level of female erasure was breathtaking. When discussing the experience of trans people in prison for example, much was made of the human rights of a male bodied trans person to be strip searched by a person who matched his ‘gender identity’. One of the lawyers there had represented such a prisoner and had won the case. The word ‘dignity’ was used a lot. Not one human rights lawyer there even considered the dignity of the female prison staff asked to perform such an intimate task as part of a day’s work. In a similar vein, two of the speakers talked about the trans suicide rate in prison and both of them mentioned the most recent case, ‘just this last week’,  to hushed and respectful silence. The trans prisoner they referred to was a man called Martin Eatough who was serving a life sentence for violently raping a fifteen year old girl. He had begun his ‘transition’ in prison and was taking hormones but had not yet had any surgery. The sympathy shown to this rapist because he now came under the trans umbrella obscenely overlooked the rights of his victim.

No suicide in prison should be tolerated, whatever the offence or the sex of the perpetrator. However, due to the tireless work of Trans Media Watch, it is now increasingly the case that male crimes are being reported as female ones. So it seems from reading press reports that a man can be a woman when committing rape or murder, but that he becomes trans again if he commits suicide. It’s a double whammy for his victim: if a crime which she has experienced as male violence cannot be named (does she have to refer to him as ‘she’ for fear of committing a hate crime?) and then his suicide is elevated in the press due to his trans status (most other prison suicides are not reported individually) then where does that leave the rights of the victim to be treated with dignity, respect or sympathy?

An evening spent with human rights lawyers highlighted how large a disparity there is between trans support groups and women’s support groups. The tactics of  trans rights groups and allies to smear, no-platform and threaten people who do not support the dogma 100% has put women’s groups in an impossible position. Groups which cater for women, and are technically able to remain women-only under the current legislation, have in practice become overwhelmingly trans-inclusive. The mantra ‘transwomen are women’ is repeated ad nauseum to close down any argument, and women’s groups risk losing not only friends, but also jobs, and in some cases funding, if they voice any uncertainty. The trouble threatened by trans rights activists is often more than a small women’s centre can deal with.

High profile cases of no-platforming or public reprimand, such as Julie Bindel, Germaine Greer, Dame Jenni Murray, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Linda Bellos have shown us that anyone can be a target of trans hate. They serve as a warning to us all. Best not to speak up.

On social media there is a constant stream of abuse from trans advocates and allies towards women who don’t believe everything they are told, as documented by the website terfisaslur. Some trans Twitter users seem to be making a career out of reporting feminists to their employers for stepping out of line. This has real life consequences such as the recent case of Anne Ruzylo, Labour party women’s officer in Bexhill and Battle. Accounts which challenge the trans narrative, such as transcrimeuk, are routinely shut down after mass reporting. The website was set up to collect data about trans crime because no public body is monitoring it. Trans lobbyists would prefer that you didn’t know these stats which contradict their own statements, and the press and prison service are colluding with this spreading of misinformation by recording crimes by gender identity instead of sex. This does not stop the majority of sexual crime being committed by males and the majority of victims being female, it just means we can’t talk about it. Claims by trans groups that there is no risk to women from male-bodied trans people are disproved by the number of male sex offenders in the UK currently identifying as women –  EITHER ‘transwomen’ have male rates of violent criminal offending OR males will pretend to be women when it suits them. One of these has to be true. Women have a right to be worried.

The highly-respected academic Heather Brunskell-Evans was recently made the subject of a disciplinary investigation by the Women’s Equality Party over her comments on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze. She had expressed her view that caution was needed when diagnosing children as transgender. This resulted in complaints from trans members of the party, and the party was ‘quick to act’ in raising a complaint with the Executive Committee. The opposite view meanwhile, that ‘trans kids’ should be affirmed and celebrated in their chosen identity, is being taught in primary schools by groups such as GIRES and Mermaids, despite there being no long term evidential base for diagnosing a child as transgender. Feminists have not yet succeeded in even getting consent education added to PHSE lessons in schools, but a trans dogma that can lead to a lifetime of medicalisation and sterility is being added with no public consultation and little parental awareness.

The Labour Party supports the updating of the GRA to include gender self ID and has recently appointed a nineteen year old man who identifies as a woman as its Women’s Officer in Rochester. The Green Party refers to women as ‘non-men’ in order to include trans and non-binary people in the category, although the category ‘man’ remains unaffected.  The Conservative Party is planning to push through gender self-identity after a consultation on changes to the GRA in the new year. Trans activists at the Anarchist Bookfair attacked women handing out feminist leaflets about the impacts of the GRA. It seems there is no longer a political home for women.

Along with the slurs and public shaming meted out to women who don’t agree with the new gender identity rules, there has been a refusal to debate the issues publicly by trans activists themselves. Meetings of women wishing to discuss the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act have been disrupted, even though speakers have been invited from the trans community (and subsequently failed to attend). A refusal to debate by trans spokespeople like Paris Lees has led to the cancellation of slots on BBC Newsnight, and, even more worryingly, a consultation by the NSPCC was cancelled after representatives from the trans community refused to debate with Sarah Ditum, calling her a ‘notorious transphobe’. (Top tip: call a woman a transphobe often enough and you can then justify calling her a notorious transphobe). Ruth Hunt, CEO of Stonewall, refused to answer questions put to her by Times journalist Janice Turner, for an article she was writing about trans children. Feminists have always wanted this debate to be balanced and transparent and public. It’s beginning to look as though trans activists have something to hide.

The outcome of the tactic of #NotaDebate is that when there is a conflict of interests which needs to be talked about there is little public understanding of the issues. Facts are hidden and simple mantras take their place. Trans people can call on the support of not only trans groups but also LGBT groups, human rights organisations, political parties and even women’s groups. Women have effectively been left with nothing. Not only that but the protected category of sex, intended to protect women from discrimination, has been neutered by the inclusion of men. Groups and political parties set up to support women and level the playing field now have to be ‘inclusive’ in order to survive, despite the fact that the sex category ‘women’ is by definition ‘exclusive’. Prizes, awards, sports and jobs reserved for women are being awarded to men in the name of inclusivity.  This is the natural consequence of giving away the word ‘woman’. We could still exclude trans-identified males from spaces reserved for women, if only we could name them as trans-identified males. Feminists are now increasingly adopting this choice of language in order to reclaim ‘Woman’ as a sex-specific category that belongs to us. We have to be able to assert our own boundaries.

The argument we have to contend with from trans activists and allies, is that  transwomen are women, and not only that, but they are the most oppressed and marginalised of all women so they deserve more support than the rest of us. The fact of male anatomy, biology and physiology evidently doesn’t change this and nor does the fact of male socialisation. The argument usually made is that ‘transwomen’ do not benefit from male privilege as they have never felt ‘male’, but aside from the fact that privilege does not work in that way, it is irrelevant anyway: what men benefit from is female socialisation. When women are brought up under the constructs of gender they are socialised into wanting to please, to be nice, to be kind, to care about other people. Stepping out of line is painful, and also it is punished. Women who speak out about gender are called TERFs and TERFs are the same as Nazis and Nazis deserve violence. At least, that’s the view peddled by Action for Trans Health (remember? The group invited to give evidence at the Trans Inquiry?)

When trans activists say trans lives are #NotaDebate what they really mean is that they refuse to discuss women’s rights and they refuse to discuss child protection issues. The focus on listening to trans people has proved to be indulgent and infantalising towards the people it is meant to help, and it has led to an extreme level of entitlement amongst activists, evidenced by the level of verbal and physical violence deployed.

It’s sometimes difficult to remember, amongst all the arguments, exactly what women stand to lose here. The sex category ‘female’ is being asked to absorb the sex category ‘male’. What women are being forced to accept could literally not be any more extreme.

So, that’s the point we’re at. Changes to the Gender Recognition Act are due for consultation in Spring 2018. Grassroots groups of women are springing up everywhere as more and more women realise what’s happening. On Facebook, on Twitter and on Mumsnet, increasing numbers of women are finding groups where they are allowed to debate, and real-life groups are forming off the back of these. Unfunded and voluntary for the main part, ordinary but extraordinary women are working together to protect the rights of all women. Our voice is finally being heard in the mainstream media. There will be a tipping point where the number of women refusing to be silenced will overtake the number of women too scared to speak up.

If you want to find out more, or join in, go and look at Fair Play for Women, Transgender Trend, A Woman’s Place, Mayday for Women, Youth Trans Critical Professionals, the Lesbian Rights Alliance, Socialist Feminist Network and more. Come and join us. Remember, as a clever feminist recently coined it, what TERF really stands for is Telling Everyone Real Facts. And someone’s got to do it.