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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The last decade has seen countless cases of women being fired, disciplined, protested or no-platformed for their views on sex and gender. Whether high-profile celebrities or previously unknown feminists, such women’s vocal non-belief in ‘gender identity’ as a universal human condition bears a high social cost. These ‘houndings’ are often presented starkly, clinically, in headlines or fleeting social media moments, stripped of the true cost of holding such beliefs.
But what is the reality behind the headlines and noise? What are the true consequences of holding – and living with - such seemingly now-heretical thoughts?
Hounded charts the often hidden and unspoken harms women face for prioritising and defending sex-based language and rights. Outlining the often-bewildering array of tactics used by opponents against such women, as well as the resilience required to refuse to be silenced, Lindsay presents a compelling argument for recognition of the individual and social harms that are being enacted under the auspices of ‘gender identity activism.’
This debut non-fiction book by award-winning poet and essayist Jenny Lindsay, whose own ‘hounding’ offers a unique perspective, is a solid, sane, witty but also compassionate account about the very human cost of this extraordinary cultural and political schism.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Epigraphs
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Notes
1. Core Beliefs and Their Consequences
Notes
2. Psychological Harms
Notes
3. Social Harms
Notes
4. Economic Harms
Notes
5. Democratic Harms
Notes
Conclusion: What If We’re Right?
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Epigraphs
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Begin Reading
Conclusion
End User License Agreement
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‘A shocking compendium showing how women from all walks of life have been disenfranchised, ostracized, threatened and worse for believing in the importance of biological sex, told in a compelling and compassionate way.’
Kathleen Stock, author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism
‘Herself a victim of hounding, Jenny Lindsay doesn’t let her scars get in the way, and tells the sobering story of women who paid a disproportionate price for speaking out against gender identity ideology. Riveting and meticulously researched, Hounded is an unflinching diary of the gender wars.’
Umut Özkırımlı, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and Blanquerna University, author of Cancelled: The Left Way Back from Woke
‘An excellent and profoundly angering analysis of the way in which women who have spoken out in the “gender wars” have been punished. The costs to women documented here – where the punishment is always the process – will be familiar to far too many.’
Sarah Pedersen, Robert Gordon University
‘Jenny Lindsay’s careful argument about the debate over gender identity theory is a model for progressive politics—passionate but carefully argued, and unstinting in its concern for women.’
Robert Jensen, Emeritus Professor, University of Texas at Austin, author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics
Hounded
Women, Harms and the Gender Wars
JENNY LINDSAY
polity
Copyright © Jenny Lindsay 2024
The right of Jenny Lindsay to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6364-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024941763
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
There are no adequate words to express my gratitude to Gerry Cambridge of The Dark Horse for commissioning me to write an extensive essay recounting my own experience of a ‘hounding’ in 2020. Without that opportunity for a ‘right to reply’ regarding my situation in Scottish poetry, I am not certain that I would have been emboldened to write this book today. Nor would I have been approached to do so, for which I extend thanks to Louise Knight of Polity, and early readers for their excellent feedback on my proposal. While their thoughts helped shape the subsequent book, all mistakes and misguidedness are my own.
Personal thanks to the following people who in different ways have helped me ‘keep the heid’, as we say in Scotland: Hannah McGill, Helen Donaldson, Jane Harris, Jess de Wahls, Laura Eaton Lewis, Nicole Jones, Shaun Milne and Rosie Kay. An extra special thank you to my mentor, friend and fellow Scottish poet Magi Gibson, without whom the past few years would have been especially isolating.
As I acknowledge in this book, being hounded takes its toll on those around you. I am grateful to those who have shown me patience, understanding and compassion over recent years. I thank my mother most particularly for being a steadying hand, accepting of my frequent despair, and equally enthusiastic about my finding ways through it. Ye cannae keep wummin from the Rebel Enclave down …
I have met so many courageous and inspiring women since I found myself in this battle – many are mentioned in these pages. I am grateful to those who spoke to me personally about the hidden costs of speaking out, as well as to those who have shared their stories publicly. The resilience such women have shown in the face of attack is remarkable. Their support has been invaluable during what has been an extraordinary experience to live through for all of those hounded in the numerous ways this book outlines.
I hope my small contribution to such an intense battleground goes part of the way to supporting an end to the most egregious harms I outline, and the strangest, most insidious backlash against feminist women that we could ever have imagined.
Prologue
Writers are often encouraged to imagine their ‘ideal reader’. A reader who will love what is written, engage with it wholeheartedly, reaching the concluding chapter with no criticism whatsoever. Given the provocation of my concluding chapter (‘What If We’re Right?’) it may be assumed that my ‘ideal reader’ is someone who belongs to that ‘we’. Given the blunt title of the book, ‘Hounded’, a reader may conclude that the ‘we’ are women who have had that experience.
My subtitle gives a clue about one of my motivations for writing this book. I have skin in the game, so to speak. Though neither famous, wealthy, nor a powerful, influential legislator, I am one of the countless number of women who have been negatively affected to the point of harm due to speaking out against gender identity ideology and activism. In my case, the hounding started in earnest in June 2019 after I strongly and publicly criticized the justifications made by a local activist for violence against women they deem ‘TERFs’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).1 The consequences of ‘cancel culture’, the illdefined but useful shorthand phrase for what songwriter Nick Cave has described as ‘mercy’s antithesis’, is something I have been living through for – at the time of writing – more than four years.2 From the summer of 2019 to the Covid-induced lockdown of 2020, I went from being a well-respected, financially precarious but reasonably successful poet, performer and freelance live literature events programmer to feeling forced out of my then home city of Edinburgh, a city whose cultural sector I had been contributing to for most of my adult life.
I have written an extensive account of my own experiences elsewhere, first in an essay for The Dark Horse, an international poetry and literary magazine, and then in a follow-up essay for the Daily Mail in 2023.3 In my essay for The Dark Horse, which is more than 8,000 words long, I start the third part of the account with the words ‘There is a very human cost to this …’. It is a sentence that is doing a great deal of work.
Like many women who gain some level of prominence in their specific sector or community when they become a target of gender identity activists, I have not spoken publicly about everything that has happened to me since I first spoke out in 2019. Suffice to say, many of the harms I recount in this book are ones I have personally experienced – to varying extents. I have no wish to centre myself and my own story in this volume, though it is inevitable that it will feature throughout. It would be disingenuous, however, for me to give the impression to my readers that I am not at least partly motivated by a sense of injustice at what I have experienced. I have empathy for women in this battle based on far more than mere agreement, where I do agree, with their specific views. I know the very ‘human cost’ of what they have faced.
Since the 2010s I have watched with growing unease as gender identity ideology mainstreamed, bringing with it extreme harms in itself but also baffling, disproportionate consequences for women who oppose it. I knew that the costs of speaking out could be high – personally, professionally and otherwise. Like others, I was nevertheless hopeful that people would trust that my motivations were grounded in genuine concern, and, like for so many others, those hopes have often been dashed. However, when clear-eyed and not befuddled by the psychological, social and economic consequences of experiencing what I call a ‘hounding’, it is possible to note the pattern of harm women such as myself face. Every woman faces treatment that is strikingly similar, though, depending on circumstances, it can differ in terms of visibility, survivability and scale.
I must state at the outset, to address possible criticism, that it would be impossible to recount the hounding, by name, in full detail, of every single woman who has been affected in the gender wars. When making a list of such women from around the world, I reached more than two hundred names – women whose cases I was already familiar with – before realizing that I must narrow the focus. My aim here is to highlight the pattern of harms being experienced. In the main, I will focus on women in the UK, dubbed, as it has been, ‘TERF Island’. I will also focus primarily on Scotland in my final chapter, ‘Democratic Harms’, as it is a useful case study in how ‘houndings’ are perpetuated due to the push for legislative reforms where the dominant political leadership takes a ‘No Debate’ standpoint on the controversial issue of ‘self-ID’.
Though my personal experience is of the way this battle has played out in the UK – particularly in the arts – this is a global issue: both the harms to women and the consequences of pushing back against self-ID in law and culture are replicated in country after country. Wherever gender identity ideology is mainstreamed, enshrined in law and thus resisted, the activist tactics of attempted silencing and reputational damage are the same whether one is a French bar owner, a Spanish politician, a Canadian feminist, a Norwegian lesbian filmmaker, or the most famous children’s writer in the world.4
The title of my Conclusion is inspired by J.K. Rowling’s comments on the podcast series ‘The Witch Trials of JK Rowling’, hosted by The Free Press. Rowling has become something of a lightning rod for the excesses of online gender identity activism, something she was aware would happen when she entered this battle in late 2019. The final episode of the podcast series is titled ‘What If You’re Wrong?’, which host Megan Phelps-Roper asserts is the most important question someone should ask themselves if they find themselves unquestioningly following any ideology or belief-system. A former member of the Westboro Baptist Church, whose tactics have included picketing dead soldiers’ funerals with anti-gay religious propaganda, Phelps-Roper is well placed to question people who speak with certainty about ideological issues.5 Rowling’s reply to being asked the question, in reference to those who malign her, was: ‘If I’m wrong? Honestly? Hallelujah. If I’m wrong? Great. People aren’t being harmed. But if you are wrong … you have created a climate, quite a threatening climate, in which whistleblowers and young people themselves are being intimidated out of raising concerns.’6
This book’s ideal reader is anyone willing to consider that they might be wrong. It is for anyone willing to consider that women hounded as, variously, ‘TERFs’, ‘bigots’ or even ‘fascists’, for views I will argue are perfectly rational, might just be, at least partly, right. It is for people who have become caught up in this battle – on all sides – and it is particularly written for those who simply have no idea what on earth is happening but who are curious, perhaps disquieted, by the fraught nature of this debate. It is also written for those countless women whose stories don’t tend to make the news, who lack the cultural or political power to find redress.
I write on the assumption that readers have a basic level of knowledge of this arena – at the very least that there is a cultural and legislative battle happening – but I have tried to write with the hopeful belief that some readers will not be familiar with all aspects of the topic; perhaps unfamiliar with the names and experiences of even some of the very high-profile women (to feminists and gender activists) whose cases illuminate the harms that I argue are being inflicted. Other readers will be very familiar with these stories; for them, I hope that condensing all these experiences together outlines a pattern that has been crystallized into a useful package for analysis.
While there are notable examples of men facing similar harms for opposing gender identity ideology, I justify my decision to focus specifically on the harms to women given the existential nature of this debate. Simply put, definitions of ‘female’ and ‘woman’ are not trivial matters. Women as a class are paying a far higher price than men for opposing gender identity ideology because it is our very category definition whose boundaries are being blurred. Our boundaries have had to be defended by generation after generation of women. The continuing societal problem of male violence against women is not something that has somehow been solved, and it is precisely as a protection from this that most ‘safe spaces’ for females – and females only – were created.
Women are harmed on three levels by gender identity ideology and its activism: by the demands of the ideology itself, and then for speaking out about it. On top of that, they are further punished for highlighting what activists do to them after they speak out, in an attempt to silence them on both counts. It is a heady experience for all women subjected to it.
Those who are most affected by the push to blur the definition of ‘woman’ include lesbians, working-class women, female prisoners, women working in, or requiring, rape crisis and domestic violence services, and disabled women who require intimate care.7 However, some of the most well-known women speaking out about these harms and about being ‘hounded’ are in middle-class and elite professions such as the arts, media, politics and academia. This is unsurprising. It is hardly out of character in the history of feminism for middle-class women to put their necks on the line, gain attention and be listened to – however ungraciously – by those of the same class, when defending the rights of those who cannot remotely afford the consequences or who lack the means to speak out in their own names.8 To put it another way, and to paraphrase Virginia Woolf in a different context, there is a reason why, on ‘gender critical’ Twitter, ‘anonymous’ tends to be a woman.
I will show that while the harms of prioritizing gender identity ideology over sex-based thinking fall most heavily on the most marginalized women in society, the ideology itself is most embedded and pushed most heavily in these more elite arenas, often – surprisingly to many – by women, though women who will arguably never have to experience the worst material harms that are an inevitable result of the ideology where it operates practically.
This book is not about the harms of the ideology itself; those harms have been addressed at some length by others.9 One does not need to vocalize one’s opposition to these ideas to be harmed by them. This book is specifically centred on the harms to those women who have publicly and vocally opposed gender identity ideology and its activism. The two intertwine, of course, but in a cultural atmosphere where such women are often accused of causing ‘harm’ to trans-identifying people by expressing their words and ideas, it is long past time for a recentring of focus. The aim is not a tit-for-tat comparison, and it is certainly not a quest for victimhood – quite the contrary. I write due to a felt need that the reality of what has and is still being done to such women should not be underestimated or forgotten as the gender wars gather pace, particularly as certain legislative battles seem to have stalled – in the UK at least – in women’s favour.
I am not immune to the frustrations that are being experienced by those who, for want of a better phrase, are ‘on the other side’ of these arguments. Many people who adhere to gender identity ideology’s central precepts are undoubtedly experiencing a level of exhaustion that women such as myself can sympathize with. For those who hold gender identity beliefs and identify as trans, I can imagine that feeling constantly under discussion causes psychological and emotional distress. It is a feeling that I and many women share when ‘What is a woman?’ is used as a ‘gotcha’ question when put to legislators by journalists, and they stumble, fudge a response or are sometimes unable to give a straight answer.
Feeling constantly under discussion as a category of human being, feeling misrepresented and often maligned, is not a healthy experience. While recognizing this (indeed, while living it as a frequently lambasted TERF), I will argue that it has been made nearly impossible for women who do not share gender identity beliefs to assert their position without causing offence (often framed as ‘harm’), since the ideology has an in-built aversion to the use of sex-based language and, as a result of the activism, any use of such language is seen as ‘transphobic’ in and of itself.10 While my prime motivation in this book is not necessarily to seek to convince any reader of the entirety of my – or any other woman’s – position, I hope to convincingly argue that this is a particularly unreasonable treatment to mete out against feminists for whom advocacy on the basis of sex is the entirely legitimate aim.
This book therefore takes the position of Jonathan Rauch in his 1991 book Kindly Inquisitors, that ‘there is nothing whatever wrong with offending – hurting people’s feelings – in pursuit of truth’.11 As the importance of pursuing truth will be a recurring theme throughout, I will regularly refer to people’s biological sex alongside their ‘gender identity’ where it is necessary, which is most of the time. This is a book about a very gendered issue – the hounding and silencing of women. This has a long history. When such things are being enacted by, or are in deference to, males, this is not something that can be overlooked. I am aware that gender identity activists find this ‘misgendering’ unacceptable; however, given the context, there is no way around that. The intent is not to wound but to give clarity.
A further note on terms: I refer to ‘gender identity ideology’ and to ‘gender identity activists’. While ‘trans activist’ is a more common descriptor, it is my personal view that this terminology risks allowing gender identity adherents who are not trans-identified to present as if they are not espousing an ideology but are simply speaking out for or ‘allying’ with ‘trans people’. I do not believe this to be accurate. I further believe that gender identity activists who identify as ‘cisgender’ enact a great deal of the worst harms in this arena, at least as it pertains to the topic at stake: the hounding and harms inflicted against vocal women. This will become clear throughout subsequent chapters.
When arguments are made that it is permissible or indeed desirable to hound women who assert a disbelief in gender identity ideology, the justification at root must be that such women are deeply wrong or at least very misguided – otherwise, activists would be immediately and wholly discredited or ignored. As they demonstrably are not, I must start by laying out such women’s core beliefs. I must also present the root arguments of those who oppose them. There is an inherent trickiness in this, as explained in Chapter 1, but the idea is to present the root arguments, then, while not asking that a reader agree with those hounded, to ask throughout that they attempt to understand the consequences of holding those beliefs – which are firmly held – in this cultural and political climate.
Given the demonstrably high cost of writing and speaking on this issue, I would not be writing such a book if I did not think it to be profoundly important. I ask leeway for a certain bias: I am of course making a case that outspoken women are being deeply harmed by the gender identity debate itself, including those women who do not agree with gender identity ideology but who do not or cannot speak out. Remaining silent comes with its own set of harms, which many women experience – in some cases for many years – before they reach the point that they feel they must speak – or speak louder. I am sure such women will be amongst my readers. I was once one of them, to a certain extent.
This book is written in the hope that, regardless of the lens one is bringing to it, whether ‘gender critical’, ‘radical feminist’, ‘concerned bystander’, ‘gender identity activist’ or, indeed, ‘completely baffled’, it can be recognized that the harms women face for speaking out are both disproportionate and anathema to the project of social, liberal democracy, which in itself is a necessary precondition for valuable, meaningful feminist advocacy. Those who do not value – or who wish to upend – liberal democracy and/or feminism, may not find much to agree with in my conclusions, but for those who strive for both, I hope this book proves to be a useful aid.
Notes
1.
Cohen, N. (2020) ‘The hounding of a Scottish poet by trans activists’,
The Spectator
:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-hounding-of-a-scottish-poet-by-trans-activists/
.
2.
Cave, N. (2020) ‘What is mercy for you?’
The Red Hand Files
:
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/what-is-mercy-for-you/
.
3.
Lindsay, J. (2020) ‘Anatomy of a hounding: Fear and factionalism in Scottish poetry’,
The Dark Horse: Scotland’s Transatlantic Poetry Magazine
(45th edition):
https://www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com/anatomy-of-a-hounding-lindsay
. Lindsay, J. (2023) ‘Hounded in a free speech witch hunt I know we should all fear the toxic reach of Scotland’s new cancel culture’,
Daily Mail – Scottish Edition
:
https://www.mailplus.co.uk/scottish-edition/news/278497/hounded-in-a-free-speech-witch-hunt-i-know-we-should-all-fear-the-toxic-reach-of-scotlands-new-cancel-culture/
.
4.
Gluck, G. (2023) ‘FRANCE: Vandalism, death threats from trans activists force closure of lesbian bar’,
Reduxx
:
https://reduxx.info/france-vandalism-death-threats-from-trans-activists-force-closure-of-lesbian-bar/
. Sanchez, R.R. (2020) ‘Expelled by the left: The case of the Spanish Feminist Party’,
Woman’s
Place UK
:
https://womansplaceuk.org/2020/02/28/expelled-by-the-left-the-case-of-the-spanish-feminist-party/
. BBC News (2019) ‘Meghan Murphy: Canadian feminist’s trans talk sparks uproar’:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50214341
. Bunyan, R. (2022) ‘Gay Norwegian filmmaker faces three years in prison after she said male-to-female transgender women cannot be lesbians’,
Daily Mail
:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11545859/Gay-Norwegian-filmmaker-faces-three-years-prison.html
.
5.
Phelps-Roper, M. (2019)
Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope, Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church
(London: Hachette).
6.
The Free Press (2023) ‘The Witch Trials of JK Rowling’,
Audible
:
https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Witch-Trials-of-JK-Rowling-Podcast/
.
7.
Murray Blackburn Mackenzie (2021) ‘MBM factcheck on claims made about women’s sex-based rights and gender recognition reform during the 2021 Holyrood election campaign’:
https://mbmpolicy.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/mbm-fact-check-2021-election-final.pdf
, pp. 3–5.
8.
See Pankhurst, E. (2015 [1914])
Suffragette: My Own Story
(London: Hesperus Classics).
9.
See Stock, K. (2021)
Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism
(London: Fleet). Joyce, H. (2021)
Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality
(London: OneWorld).
10.
Stock,
Material Girls
, p. 31.
11.
Rauch, J. (2013 [1993])
Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 22.
1Core Beliefs and Their Consequences
It bears stating from the outset that feminism is a broad church. There are splits and schisms within it, usually pertaining to what constitutes useful, meaningful action towards women’s liberation. It is, however, to put the cart before the horse to start by ploughing into these furrows. One does not have to be a feminist to become one of the ‘hounded’, though to be a feminist at all arguably requires agreement with the trio of Core Beliefs that follow. For the sake of both clarity and brevity, these three Core Beliefs are identifiable as the beliefs that are at question when a woman – feminist or not – is targeted for opprobrium in the gender wars.
Core Belief 1: Women are materially definable as a class of human being. That means that the category definition ‘woman’ describes those humans who are adult and female. The only criterion for being a woman is to be a female girl who survives into adulthood. No other criteria are necessary: no personality traits, no interests, no adornment or style of dress, no mandatory life choice must flow from this definition. This is the realm of category definitions and not value judgments.
Core Belief 2: Women (as adult female humans) are culturally, legislatively and politically important, with their own sets of needs, rights and concerns. On the basis of being female, such women assert the need in particular for female-only spaces, sports, and other services on the basis of privacy, dignity and/or safety – or, simply, in recognition that equality and social justice cannot be achieved where males and females are included together with competing interests in whatever space is under discussion.1
Core Belief 3: Where social, cultural or legislative trends are under way – ones that may diminish women’s rights and/or liberation – then women have a right to meet and discuss freely that which affects their lives profoundly. As such, when women’s events are protested disproportionately via attempts to shut them down or to intimidate attendees, the women involved will respond with even more rigorous calls for debate and a reassertion of their right to freedom of speech and assembly.
To a lay reader, unfamiliar with this battle, this trio of views may not appear to be particularly controversial. Such readers can be forgiven for wondering what they have missed here. That women are materially definable, legislatively and culturally important, and have the right to freedom of assembly and expression are, after all, fairly banal core beliefs. Given that such women have been branded as ‘transphobic’ and none of the three beliefs seems to say anything about trans-identifying people at all, there is clearly something missing.
There is, and there isn’t – there is still much to unpack here – but whenever a woman has been hounded in the gender wars, it is for expressing or acting upon one, two or all three of this trio of beliefs.
* * *
To someone who holds gender identity beliefs, everything I have written above contains several problematic phrases often referred to as ‘dog-whistles’.2 Core Belief 1 uses the sex-based language of ‘adult human female’, which explicitly excludes ‘trans women’ (males who claim a ‘female gender identity’) from the definition of ‘woman’ and which further implies that adult ‘trans men’ (females who claim a ‘male gender identity’) are included. That sex is immutable and binary in mammals is itself questionable for many activists, but moreover what matters is gender identity.3 After all, some individuals identify as ‘non-binary’, i.e., outside the ‘gender binary’ of male and female (more accurately, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’) and therefore should be viewed, as they wish, as neither male nor female.4 The trio of beliefs does not allow for this conception of the human condition and is therefore inherently transphobic.
I said in the Prologue that there is a ‘trickiness’ in summarizing the root beliefs of those who believe in gender identity ideology. This is because there are competing claims and definitions from different quarters. Unhelpfully, some gender identity activists do not elaborate coherently on their fundamentals other than to say that TERFs are wrong (and other far less mild insults). Some gender identity activists claim that nobody is denying that biological sex is real and important, it’s just a lot more ‘complex’ than we have been led to believe.5 Others, such as transgender author Shon Faye, insist that due to the surgical and hormonal measures that males who identify as female sometimes undergo to appear as women, they should, as a result of such efforts, be included in the category of ‘female’.6
Regardless, there is no doubt that ‘adult human female’ has become ‘problematic’ in recent years. It has become an emblem of what is known as ‘gender critical feminism’, with a great deal of this highlighted by the activism of – and backlash against – women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen and her organization Standing for Women. Though not herself a feminist, Keen has galvanized a great many women over the past few years by organizing open-air open-mic sessions around the world where women can speak about the effect that gender identity ideology is having on their lives, as well as other issues pertaining solely to women. There is fervent opposition to Core Belief 3 from gender identity activists, shown by the fact that it is rare for these events to go unheeded, ordinarily attracting protests, some of which have been violent.7
Using sex-based language to define ‘woman’ has been deemed ‘trans-exclusionary’ for decades by gender identity ideology adherents. Many of the arguments now deemed to be a mainstream divisive ‘culture war’ have in fact been battled over in some lesbian, ‘queer’, transsexual and feminist circles for decades.8 But it is unarguable that Keen’s activism has proven extremely provocative to gender identity adherents in the current gender wars, alongside the mainstreaming of the push for women to be ‘inclusive’ of trans women (males) in their category definition and, subsequently, their feminist activism.
As for Core Belief 2, gender identity activists do not believe there is any reason why trans-identifying male people (‘trans women’) should not be included in all areas pertaining to women’s cultural and political importance. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Trans women should thus be included on all-women shortlists for political representation; should be included in all arts awards set up to address female’s lack of representation in various creative industries; should always have access to any and all single-sex spaces, whether changing rooms, prisons, toilets or rape crisis services; and should be able to compete against females (‘other’ females, so to speak) in women’s sports.9
Trans women are women. Trans women are women. This slogan has been repeated and shouted in chorus by hundreds at march after march, rally after rally, and this should mean an ‘intersectional’ feminism should include trans women (males) in its movement and aims, despite their not having been born female. And, gender identity activists ask, ‘why not?’. After all, ‘cis’ women do not share any common experiences that make them a coherent category anyway, it is asserted.10 TERFs’ insistence that ‘being female’ is somehow an adequate unifier of all women is therefore dismissed.
Some women are ‘cis’, and other women were ‘assigned male at birth’ and then ‘become’ women, to misquote Simone de Beauvoir (as so often happens in this discussion).11 Though no ‘cis’ woman has ever had a penis, and 90–95 per cent of trans women do, to focus on genitalia is disturbing, obsessive and bordering on perverse. While some gender identity activists might concede that certain body parts may indicate one’s ‘sex assigned at birth’, a penis on a trans woman is ‘her penis’ and, at any rate, to bring up such personal, private matters is offensive.12
There are two central claims/demands of gender identity activists that determine how they respond to feminist or gender critical women. The first is that ‘woman’ is/should be viewed as a social category rather than a biological one.13 This is asserted in various ways but at core amounts to the claim that anyone who ‘identifies as’ a woman is a woman. Literally. This is the entire basis of the legislative push for ‘self-ID’: to have recognition of one’s desire to be viewed other than the sex one is granted both culturally and legislatively with as few loopholes as possible and ideally none whatsoever.
Second, trans people are/should be a core part of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) community. Officially the ‘T’ was only added to the ‘LGB’ by the (at the time) leading LGB organization Stonewall in 2015, but any group that focuses solely on LGB rights and needs, such as the LGB Alliance, and argues that sexual orientation and gender identity are two very different things, must be opposed.14 Similarly, to exclude trans women (males with a ‘female gender identity’) from lesbianfocused advocacy, as The Lesbian Project does, is to insist that a lesbian is same-sex attracted – this is equally something that must be protested loudly.15
It is possible that, to a lay reader, all of this may sound either unlikely, ridiculous or simply unbelievable. Certainly, I sometimes wonder how someone who fell asleep in, say, 1995 and woke up today would respond. To them I would say that at times it is not clear whether an individual gender identity activist truly believes ‘woman’ is not materially definable, or at least a little bit culturally or legislatively important, but the collective push is certainly to act as if that were not the case.
To understand how gender identity ideology has managed to grip the imaginations of so many, we need to talk about ‘gender’ and the consequences of holding a feminist-thus-hounded woman’s conception of ‘gender’ versus a gender identity activist’s interpretation, at least as it pertains to how one should think and thus act.
The two broad, competing conceptions of ‘gender’ I set out below reflect a fundamentally different way of looking at the world and how we understand ourselves as human beings. I appreciate that this may sound grandiose for now, though perhaps it won’t by the time a reader reaches the concluding chapter.
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It is my contention that everyone, at some point in their life, usually fairly early on in childhood, will become aware that human beings are either male or female, that you are one or the other, and that this fact is important and unchangeable. Dis-
