In light of recent open letters from academia and the arts criticising the UK’s Supreme Court ruling on sex-based rights, it’s possibly worth remembering that nobody sane believes, or has ever believed, that humans can change sex, or that binary sex isn’t a material fact. These letters do nothing but remind us of what we know only too well: that pretending to believe these things has become an elitist badge of virtue.

I often wonder whether the signatories of such letters have to quieten their consciences before publicly boosting a movement intent on removing women’s and girls’ rights, which bullies gay people who admit openly they don’t want opposite sex partners, and campaigns for the continued sterilisation of vulnerable and troubled kids. Do they feel any qualms at all while chanting the foundational lie of their religion: Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men?

I have no idea. All I know for sure is that it’s a complete waste of time telling a gender activist that their favourite slogan is self-contradictory nonsense, because the lie is the whole point. They’re not repeating it because it’s true – they know full well it’s not true – but because they believe they can make it true, sort of, if they force everyone else to agree. The foundational lie functions as both catechism and crucifix: the set form of words that obviates the tedious necessity of coming up with your own explanation of why you’re one of the Godly, and an exorcist’s weapon which will defeat demonic facts and reason, and promote the advance of righteous pseudoscience and sophistry.

Some argue that signatories of these sorts of letters are motivated by fear: fear for their careers, of course, but also fear of their co-religionists, who include angry, narcissistic men who threaten and sometimes enact violence on non-believers; back-stabbing colleagues ever ready to report wrongthink; the online shamers and doxxers and rape threateners, and, of course, the influential zealots in the upper echelons of liberal professions (though we can quibble whether they’re actually liberal at all, given the draconian authoritarianism that seems to have engulfed so many). Gender ideology could give medieval Catholicism a run for its money when it comes to punishing heretics, so isn’t it common sense to keep your head down and recite your Hail Mulvaneys?

But before we start feeling too sorry for any cowed and fearful TWAWites who’re TERFy on the sly, let’s not forget what a high proportion of them have willingly snatched up pitchforks and torches to join the inquisitional purges. Call me lacking in proper womanly sympathy, but I find the harm they’ve enabled and in some cases directly championed or funded – the hounding and shaming of vulnerable women, the forced loss of livelihoods, the unregulated medical experiment on minors – tends to dry up my tears at source.

History is littered with the debris of irrational and harmful belief systems that once seemed unassailable. As Orwell said, ‘Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.’ Gender ideology may have embedded itself deeply into our institutions, where it’s been imposed, top-down, on the supposedly unenlightened, but it is not invulnerable.

Court losses are starting to stack up. The condescension, overreach, entitlement and aggression of gender activists is eroding public support daily. Women are fighting back and winning significant victories. Sporting bodies have miraculously awoken from their slumber and remembered that males tend to be larger, stronger and faster than females. Parts of the medical establishment are questioning cutting healthy breasts off teenaged girls is really the best way to fix their mental health problems.

One seemingly harmless little white lie – Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men – uttered in most cases without any real thought at all, and a few short years later, people who think of themselves as supremely virtuous are typing ‘yes, rapists’ pronouns are absolutely the hill I’ll die on,’ rubbing shoulders with those who call for women to be hanged and decapitated for wanting all-female rape crisis centres, and furiously denying clear and mounting evidence of the greatest medical scandal in a century.

I wonder if they ever ask themselves how they got here, and I wonder whether any of them will ever feel shame.

Previous writing: « Women have fought (and are still fighting)

Next writing: Another day of lunacy in the Scottish courts »

Women have fought (and are still fighting) the single biggest land grab on their rights in my lifetime. Some have sacrificed their livelihoods and safety to combat a pernicious ideology that has infiltrated elite institutions, including government.

Women have been persecuted, harassed, smeared, roughed up and forced to take employers to court for discrimination. They’ve suffered severe detriments purely for believing what the Supreme Court has ruled to be reasonable and correct: that women are a definable biological class that has specific rights under the law to which males, however they identify, are not entitled.

Do these politicians have any shame? They sided with the persecutors, the issuers of death and rape threats, the violent men demanding access to women’s and girls’ protected spaces, including domestic abuse shelters, rape crisis centres and prison cells. Will any of them issue an apology or admit that they made a serious error in siding with well-funded activist groups lying about what the law actually said, and which had measurable, severe impact on some of society’s most vulnerable women?

As another public wave of death threats is issued against women because of the Supreme Court ruling, their silence has become deafening. I’m just one of millions of women disgusted by the lack of accountability or remorse. We will not forget.

The shamelessness is not confined to the aforementioned.

The following images are related to this writing

Previous writing: « Janice isn’t claiming to speak for all women…

Next writing: In light of recent open letters… »

Janice isn’t claiming to speak for all women, @PennyRed, but given that you aren’t one (‘the category of “woman” does not fully describe my lived experience’) it’s hard to see why you should be speaking for any women at all.

Literally nobody thinks the Supreme Court ruling ‘legislates trans people out of existence.’ Trans people have exactly the same rights and protections they had before the ruling, and unless they’ve mass combusted while I wasn’t paying attention, I’m fairly sure they continue to exist.

If some trans-identified people in the UK are currently experiencing rage and disappointment because the Supreme Court clarified that they don’t have rights they believed they had, the responsibility lies firmly with activist groups and sections of the media who’ve persistently argued, falsely, that gender transition turned a person into the opposite sex for all practical purposes in the eyes of the law.

You can personally take some responsibility for that state of affairs, of course, because you’ve spent the last few years enthusiastically championing the removal of single-sex spaces for women and girls. Indeed, you went so far as to tell the mother of a fifteen-year-old who asked how her daughter was supposed to feel on discovering a penised stranger in the girls’ changing rooms, ‘I’d tell her it’s rude to stare at other people’s genitals.’ That anti-woman, anti-safeguarding quip puts you right up there with every male creep who’s spent recent years insisting women and girls have no right to privacy, dignity or safety.

You’ll undoubtedly continue to offer your contributions to the debate, but don’t be too surprised if a lot of old-school women (the boring kind who’ve been deprived of the fascinating experiences that make you non-binary and genderqueer) find it supremely easy to disregard anything you’ve got to say on the subject.

Previous writing: « The fringe idea that we all have a ‘gender identity’…

Next writing: Women have fought (and are still fighting) »

The fringe idea that we all have a ‘gender identity’ that may or may not match our biological sex is the whole point of this discussion. Trans activists act as though the existence of ‘gender identity’ is a settled, self-evident point, when to the vast majority of the world it’s unevidenced, quasi-religious, pseudoscientific nonsense, which has been imposed top down on our society with serious consequences for vulnerable women and troubled youth in particular. Meaningful discussion about competing needs and rights cannot happen inside an elitist ideological bubble where everyone is forced to adopt gender ideology’s approved jargon, accept its self-contradicting slogans as fact and pretend fact-light assertions and feeble sophistry are critical thinking. You tell us to ‘educate’ ourselves, by which you mean, ‘adopt our beliefs unquestioningly,’ but at this point, most of us know your arguments off by heart. These include, but are not limited to: feelings trump facts and unless we agree we’re ‘erasing people from existence’; women and girls aren’t definable entities, so why should they be entitled to their own sports and single-sex spaces; clownfish and people with DSDs mean sex is ‘on a spectrum’ and ‘woman’ is a set of stereotypes associated with the female sex class, so it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a penis, if you identify with those stereotypes you’re ‘valid’. The reason we haven’t been won over by these talking points and remain so tragically ‘uneducated’ isn’t that we’ve failed to grasp the sophistication of your world view. It’s that we think you’re talking unadulterated bullshit and making fools of yourselves.

Previous writing: « Lumos 20th Anniversary

Next writing: Janice isn’t claiming to speak for all women… »

This ‘why do you care about a tiny fraction of the population?’ line is, and always was, utterly ridiculous.

Gender ideology has undermined freedom of speech, scientific truth, gay rights, and women’s and girls’ safety, privacy and dignity. It’s also caused irreparable physical damage to vulnerable kids.

Nobody voted for it, the vast majority of people disagree with it, yet it has been imposed, top down, by politicians, healthcare bodies, academia, sections of the media, celebrities and even the police. Its activists have threatened and enacted violence on those who’ve dared oppose it. People have been defamed and discriminated against for questioning it. Jobs have been lost and lives have been ruined, all for the crime of knowing that sex is real and matters.

When the smoke clears, it will be only too evident that this was never about a so-called vulnerable minority, notwithstanding the fact that some very vulnerable people have been harmed. The power dynamics underpinning our society have been reinforced, not dismantled. The loudest voices throughout this entire fiasco have been people insulated from consequences by their wealth and/or status. They aren’t likely to find themselves locked in a prison cell with a 6’4″ rapist who’s decided his name’s now Dolores. They don’t need state-funded rape crisis centres, nor do they ever frequent high street changing rooms. They simper from talk show sofas about those nasty far-right bigots who don’t want penises swinging around the girls’ showers, secure in the knowledge that their private pool remains the safe place it always was.

Those who’ve benefited most from gender identity ideology are men, both trans-identified and not. Some have been rewarded for having a cross-dressing kink by access to all spaces previously reserved for women. Others have parlayed their delicious new victim status into an excuse to threaten, assault and harass women. Non-trans-identified leftybros have found a magnificent platform from which to display their own impeccably progressive credentials, by jeering and sneering at the needs of women and girls, all while patting themselves on the back for giving away rights that aren’t theirs.

The actual victims in this mess have been women and children, especially the most vulnerable, gay people who’ve resisted the movement and paid a horrible price, and regular people working in environments where one misplaced pronoun could see you vilified or constructively dismissed. Do not tell me this is about a tiny minority. This movement has impacted society in disastrous ways, and if you had any sense, you’d be quietly deleting every trace of activist mantras, ad hominem attacks, false equivalence and circular arguments from your X feeds, because the day is fast approaching when you’ll want to pretend you always saw through the craziness and never believed it for a second.

Previous writing: « This astounding paper reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil

Next writing: Lumos 20th Anniversary »

This astounding paper reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil: ‘The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, ‘normal’ knowledge.’

[Link: https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12910-024-01143-8]

We’re all used to the obfuscatory language gender activist medics and their cheerleader, insist upon. ‘Gender affirming care/treatment’ is so much nicer sounding than ‘sterilisation, surgical mutilation and provision of toxic drugs to troubled minors’.

But this paper breaks new ground. It acknowledges that by the usual medical standards (‘old normal knowledge’) transitioning minors has not been found to be the unqualified success many have claimed. The proposed solution? Jettison the old knowledge. Redefine success.

‘Yes, some young people given irreversible surgeries and hormone regimes regret it. Yes, some have complex problems that transition doesn’t fix and may worsen. But hey, they wanted it and were given it. That should be the new metric of success!’

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a better example of what Arendt described when analysing those determined not to break ranks, yet who felt the need to justify their participation in atrocities: ‘self-deception, concealing a ruthless desire for conformity at any price.’

Previous writing: « GC movement hasn’t ever been a monolith

Next writing: This line is utterly ridiculous. »

What you call the GC movement hasn’t ever been a monolith, but a loose collection of separate political movements and individuals, some of whom have literally nothing in common but the belief that sex is real and matters. This has been both blessing and curse.

On the positive side, real, lasting solidarity has been forged between women in different political parties who’ve worked collaboratively to fight back against the massive assault on their rights. On the negative, left-wing feminists are being lumped together with people whose attitude towards gender expression is as regressive as that of hardened trans activists (‘if you want to wear lipstick and a dress, you’re a woman’/‘dresses and lipstick are only for women’).

I will say this, though. Many, many women who wouldn’t have thought twice ten years ago about asking for help from a gorgeous young man in lipstick working at the MAC counter have now been on the receiving end of so much aggression and so many direct threats from men in lipstick that they’ve developed a conditioned response, an instinctive wariness, where formerly there was complete indifference.

I’ve experienced this personally. I was approached in the street by a pink-haired young man with what I’ll call very exuberant dress sense and my adrenaline shot through the roof. For a second I thought, ‘this is where I finally get punched.’ And he couldn’t have been sweeter, wanted to talk Harry Potter and get a selfie.

Ten years ago my immediate response to somebody with his style would have been purely appreciative, but no longer, sadly, and the change in me, and in a lot of other women, has been brought on by a tsunami of threats and rage, not because we think there’s anything innately wrong with men wearing make up.

The following images are related to this writing

Previous writing: « The rewriting of history begins

Next writing: This astounding paper reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil »

Opponents of gender ideology haven’t merely ‘endured unsparing criticism’. I haven’t simply had been told I ‘betrayed real feminism’ or received a few book-burning videos.

I’ve been sent thousands of threats of murder, rape and violence. A trans woman posted my family’s home address with a bomb-making guide. My eldest child was targeted by a prominent trans activist who attempted to doxx her and ended up doxxing the wrong young woman. I could write a twenty thousand word essay on what the consequences have been to me and my family, and what we’ve endured is NOTHING compared to the harm done to others.

By standing up to a movement that relies on threats of violence, ostracisation and guilt-by-association, all of us have been smeared and defamed, but many have lost their livelihoods. Some have been physically assaulted by trans activists. Female politicians have been forced to hire personal security on the advice of police. The news that one of the UK’s leading endocrinologists, Dr Hillary Cass, was advised not to travel by public transport for her own safety should shame everyone who let this insanity run amok.

Lest we forget, gender apostates have been targeted for crimes such as doubting the evidential basis for transitioning children, for arguing for fair sport for women and girls, for wanting to retain single sex spaces and services, especially for the most vulnerable, and for thinking it barbaric to lock in female prisoners with convicted male sex offenders.

Now the political landscape has shifted, and some who’ve been riding high on their own supply are waking up with a hell of a hangover. They’ve started wondering whether calling left-wing feminists who wanted all-female rape centres ‘Nazis’ was such a smart strategy. Maybe parents arguing that boys ought not to be robbing their daughters of sporting opportunities might, sort of, have a point? Possibly letting any man who says ‘I’m a woman’ into the locker room with twelve-year-old girls could have a downside, after all?

Mealy-mouthed retconning of what has actually happened over the past ten years is predictable but will not stand. I don’t doubt those who’ve turned a blind eye to the purges of non-believers, or even applauded and encouraged them, would rather minimise what the true cost of speaking out was, but ‘yes, maybe trans activists went a little over the top at times’ takes are frankly insulting. A full reckoning on the effects of gender ideology on individuals, society and politics is still a long way off, but I know this: the receipts will make very ugly reading when that time comes, and there are far too many of them to sweep politely under the carpet.

Previous writing: « John Oliver

Next writing: GC movement hasn’t ever been a monolith »

Nothing about this feels good, because John Oliver generously gave his time for my charity Lumos and I liked him very much when I met him, but God knows, if you ever need an example of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, this video’s for you. An undoubtedly intelligent person spouts absolute bullshit to support something he wants to be true, but isn’t.

According to the UN, female athletes have lost nearly 900 medals to trans-identified men competing against them in women’s sporting categories. Girls have been ousted from teams to make way for boys. Women have suffered serious injury playing against trans-identified men (see Payton McNabb, mentioned below).

Again and again I’ve come up against men who argue exactly what Oliver does here, using the very same talking points. With a straight face, the ‘believe the science’ guys will say ‘actually, we don’t yet have enough data to say whether men and boys are stronger and faster than women and girls’. The ‘be kind’ crew can’t see what the issue is. ‘Why are you bothered, it only affects a tiny minority of females?’

To prove to their progressive credentials – and (coincidentally, I’m sure) indemnify themselves against repercussions from cultural elites in the media, academia and publishing who’ve showed themselves more than ready to kick people to the kerb for failing to mouth the approved mantras – people with a lot to lose are currently prepared to make idiots of themselves. They’ll stare unabashedly into a camera and insist that their audiences’ eyeballs are incapable of seeing what’s plain as day, and that there’s something wrong with the great unwashed for believing that girls are being robbed of opportunities and put at physical risk.

If you want to tell the world you’re happy to watch females suffer injury, humiliation and the loss of sporting opportunities to bolster an elitist post-modern ideology embraced by a minute fraction of the world’s population, fair enough; you’re allowed your opinion. But if you’ve just told girls they don’t deserve fair sport, maybe rethink using all too real and common sexual predation against young women as a punchline for your ‘edgy’ closing joke.

Previous writing: « I’m a left-leaning liberal

Next writing: The rewriting of history begins »