In 2012, a man called Ceri Fuller stabbed his three children to death, before committing suicide by leaping into a quarry. Days later, Fuller’s father-in-law Ron Tocknell wrote a piece for the Telegraph, in which he claimed there were “no villains” (though this did not prevent sections of the press from speculating on whether Fuller’s wife Ruth, the children’s mother, was really to blame). Fuller had a history of violence, including one occasion on which he had threatened to strangle Ruth with a telephone cord. The inquest into the children’s deaths heard he had been “jealous and possessive”, with the coroner concluding that he had “full capacity when he slit his children’s throats”. Nevertheless, Ruth Fuller used the example of her children’s deaths to speak out in favour of more mental health support for men like Ceri, arguing that her children would still be alive “if we were a society that helped people like Ceri instead of hating”. She considered her husband to have been “very ill”.

I do not recall any men’s rights activists objecting to this analysis.

The Fuller case is one I remember because it was local to me. The children’s primary school shared facilities with one where my partner worked at the time. There are of course many, many others. The vast majority of familicides are committed by men, with mental illness being considered a factor in a sizable proportion. Even if there is little prior evidence of mental disturbance the act itself may be treated as evidence that more attention needs to be paid to male mental health (as opposed to, say, domestic abuse). Male perpetrators do not need to be considered to be mentally ill, or to have have a formal mental illness diagnosis, for there to be sympathy for them. When Christopher Foster killed his wife and daughter before setting his home on fire, Jon Ronson wrote a lengthy piece for the Guardian musing on how terrible Foster’s fear of shame must have been (probably not so great as his wife and daughter’s fear of Foster).

To look at responses to the case of Lindsay Clancy, on trial for the murder of her three children, it would seem that many men (and some women) are completely oblivious to all of this. Clancy’s defence is that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings (I have written about this, and many women’s sympathy for Clancy, here). But to look at the outrage on social media, one could be forgiven for thinking men do not slaughter their families at all – let alone at a much higher rate than women – and that men never, ever rely on insanity as a line of defence. Feminist, it is implied, should be careful what we wish for. Haven’t we fought for women not to be considered mad, hysterical, controlled by our hormones, unable to stop ourselves from doing terrible things when we are not under control? And now, what – we’re saying Lindsay Clancy couldn’t stop herself from killing her kids because she was psychotic? How’s that work, exactly?

It’s such a painfully stupid argument. It makes absolutely no sense. “Women are not unstable creatures controlled by their hormones” does not mean “no woman ever suffers from severe mental illness”. Moreover, if the propensity to use an insanity defence after you’ve killed people were to stand as an indictment of an entire sex, an indicator that some people should not be granted any kind of authority or power, then surely men are the ones who ought to worry. As a group, they are both more likely to kill and more likely to suffer from psychosis.

It is funny how conversations about male mental health never seem to lead to the conclusion that men as a class are less rational or capable than women. The Clancy case, by contrast, is treated by some as an international referendum on female emotional stability. A mad man is a mad man; a mad woman is a representative of the madness of women. Female empathy with Clancy – empathy with a women who killed her children when she was ill, after months of begging for help – is recast as women wanting to be Clancy, as opposed to knowing that being Clancy is every mother’s worst nightmare. Male violence and male madness don’t, somehow, say anything about men in general, whereas female violence and female madness say everything about women.

Read more

While I was sitting my finals for my undergraduate degree, one of the examiners told me I talked about suicide a lot. As a judgment of me in general, it seemed a little unfair. I was talking about it a lot on that day, but it was my German oral exam and I was free associating, saying whatever popped into my head on the basis that silence had to be avoided at all costs. The discussion topic had been something along the lines of the power of literature to influence people and I’d found myself mentioning Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, then the spate of copycat suicides it had been accused of prompting, then something about social contagion, then something about the boy I’d known who’d killed himself when I was eighteen, and perhaps something about the way in which everyone thinks someone else’s suicide is their fault but it isn’t – or is it? Was it my fault? – and anyhow … I can’t remember what else I said, but it was not the great literary discussion the examiners might have been hoping for. Then I worried I’d frightened them, so I told them I wasn’t suicidal, just to be on the safe side. I doubt this was reassuring.

Afterwards I was mortified. The truth is, I don’t like talking about suicide very much (apart from when I start and then can’t shut up). It feels dangerous, as though the more you mention it – no matter how you mention it – the more likely it is to affect those close to you. It feels arrogant to assume it wouldn’t.

I am aware that this isn’t rational. There have to be ways to talk which help rather than harm. We know this, though it feels we are further away from it than ever. Every conversation about prevention puts me on edge. How can you be sure you’re pushing it further way? What if all you’re doing is loading it with yet more meaning?

When I was growing up, I used to worry constantly about a close relative killing himself. The threat was always there and I used to believe it was my job to prevent it. Years later, I’d think that was a terrible weight for a child to carry. Even more years later, it finally happened. I do not think it was my fault. Still, I have not read the note addressed to me just in case it persuades me otherwise. I might never read it. My curiosity is not as great as my fear of spending the rest of my life feeling I killed someone (and it would be a feeling, not anything true. I’d know that and it wouldn’t make the feeling go away).

As a Known TERF I have of course spent several years being told I am responsible for the real or potential suicides of gender-distressed children. There is a part of me that thinks, well, honestly – if you want me to have suicide guilt, I’ve got a lot more concrete, close-to-home stuff to dwell on first. I bet most people have (I have found when someone close to you dies that way, it is a bit like having had a miscarriage. You know, theoretically, that it is quite common, but still feel like the only woman experiencing it. Then almost every time you mention it to another woman, you find it has happened to her, too). Even so, there is a way in which even the convoluted you could be responsible for hypothetical suicides if we extrapolate endlessly to make disagreement mean denying the right to exist arguments can get to you. Because even if the logic is flimsy to non-existent, and even if the deaths are rare, what is worse than a death? Who are you to whinge about being wrongly accused of causing one? What’s your pain compared to that of the (potentially, hypothetically) bereaved? It feels as though one shouldn’t challenge it, that it’s callous to do so. But to fail to challenge it allows others to give suicide a political value, to the extent of making it desirable for a cause, creating a need for martyrs. I worry about the ease with which many feel they can recast the decision to take one’s own life as a kind of murder, providing the cause is considered righteous.

I worried about this during the trial against the ex-partner of Tarryn Baird, who killed herself having (it was alleged) experienced years of abuse. It felt as though the feminist thing to do would be to wish for a manslaughter conviction yet I couldn’t bring myself to do so. Partly it was knowing how often the threat of suicide is used by domestic abusers themselves to position the victim as ‘aggressor’. Mostly, though, it was thinking of how desperate a way that would be to have ‘justice’. I know that many victims of abuse feel there is no way out, and perhaps one could argue that, given the lack of protection available in the here and now, choosing one’s own exit is preferable to remaining prey. I think, though, that there has to be a way of understanding the act without positioning it as inevitable or suggesting that this is the thing, when all else fails, which will make everyone believe you.

There’s a way in which the treatment of suicides as validating a testimony, or proving a political point (as, for instance, in the case of teacher Ruth Perry) reminds me of arguments in favour of assisted dying for people who have severe mental illnesses or trauma from which they struggle to recover. Deciding the damage is irreparable is part of what makes it so, but anyone who suggests this can be cast as politically suspect and unwilling to acknowledge the extent of another’s distress (only someone who’d never been there could believe it would ever get better). It is implied that to really, truly empathise with someone who wanted to die, and to make a stand for the better world, one cannot suggest that he or she could have lived in this one, too. I find this such a dangerous way of thinking. It makes people more unsafe, regardless of how justified their initial distress may be.

In a piece on Jason Arday (whose death is assumed to be a suicide) Carole Cadwalladr compares an earlier piece of hers on suicide and social contagion to Arday speaking out against houndings of black academics, in some cases ending with them taking their own lives. It’s an odd comparison because the group behaviour or contagion Arday refers to isn’t that of the victims, but the bullies. It is Cadwalladr herself who reinterprets, positioning suicide as the thing that spreads. It is the kind of thing which, by the logic of her own earlier article, could be seen to trigger a kind of suicide contagion (“so much of the reporting was of the type identified as being the most dangerous: it sensationalised the story and romanticised the dead […] Did more people know where to find help? Or more people need it?”). I know that this is because Cadwalladr wishes to make a point about the behaviour of others, but does it have to be done this way?

Read more

One of the first pieces I wrote on this Substack was about the thinness of celebrities such as Ariana Grande. Following the release of the video for Grande’s song ‘Petal’, I wrote about it again for the Critic. Now, in an act of gross hypocrisy, I’ve decided everyone’s writing about it too much (but to multiply the hypocrisy, I’m writing about it again). It’s decades since I was at my thinnest and even I feel triggered by ‘the discourse’. What can it be like for those in the throes of self-imposed starvation? At the same time, I’m not sure how else anyone can respond other than to, well, respond. As I wrote before, I feel it’s otherwise like watching someone bleed to death right in front of you, or take a knife to their own heart, and saying nothing because, well, no one wants to be rude.

It doesn’t help if people say nothing when you’re doing this to yourself. Then again, it doesn’t help when people say something. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way in which someone insisting you’re too thin, overriding your self-perception to say “no, this is objectively wrong”, puts you under an even more intense spotlight. It can make it harder to change because other have decided you’re not fit to own your own body, prompting an even greater urge to reclaim possession. A formal anorexia diagnosis can make this particularly acute since it can be used as proof not just that you are ill, but that you are not credible. You can’t see your body as others see it. You lie about what you eat. Hey, maybe you lie about everything else. Best hand over all traces of personhood – body, mind – to the experts until you are deemed a reasonable subject again.

How can you change the shape of your own body, on your own terms, in such a context? This is especially hard if you are famous. You know how the press write about ‘normal’ celebrities who gain weight. The faux admiration (flaunting her curves! ditching the diet!, ignoring the haters!), the insincere pregnancy speculation, the side-by-side past-and-present photos. If you, an extra-thin woman, gained weight – if you were to emerge from hiding a perfectly unremarkable size – it would be noticed and it would be awful. I used to wonder why I (like so many other recovering anorexia sufferers) hated the expression “you look well”. I used to think it was because I saw “well” as euphemism for “fat”, and there is that, a bit. I also think it’s because I’d hear in it we’ve won. You lost. You gave in. It’s not your body. So much for that attempt at self-assertion!

And it’s so public. Your body is now a story and you can’t unmake it one. How do you control the narrative in such a way as to make it possible to be seen?

When I was in sixth form, one of my teachers asked me to speak to a girl a few years below me because she was suffering from anorexia. They thought because I’d had anorexia and was now ‘better’ (I wasn’t really) I could inspire her to recover. I didn’t know how to say no but I knew the whole thing would be ridiculous. I knew exactly how someone like her would see someone like me — as demonstrably ‘less anorexic’, so how could I possibly know how she felt? The only way to be ‘better’ was to never have been as ill as her in the first place. I knew it because I’d had a similar ‘recovered anorexic’ talk from a nurse while I was being force-fed and I hadn’t believed her (even now, I write ‘claimed’. I mean, obviously she had been ill, and she was actually one of the nicest nurses I encountered. It didn’t stop me looking down on her as someone who thought she got it but didn’t).

Anyhow, I gave the girl a book someone had bought me – Anorexia Nervosa and the Will to Change – and said it had really helped me (the only bit of it I’d read was the menu plan at the back). Then I thought I needed to come up with some story about how great my life was, now that it was “no longer controlled by food” (except it was). It was mortifying. I felt like I was trying to sound like the end bit of a ‘My Anorexia Hell’ feature in Take A Break or Woman’s Own. Look at me, living the dream!

Back then I couldn’t have pinpointed what I got out of anorexia – and in any case, it may have been vastly different to what she did – but I knew that the rules were that you pretended it was nothing. This was slightly before the trend of claiming anorexia was an ‘evil friend’ who took over all your thoughts – so whatever you were doing, it wasn’t really you doing it anyways – but you could present it as some massive psychological misstep. You were ill, what’s there to say? Only how do you then pitch being well as a choice? Because wasn’t that what the teachers were asking me to do? How was I meant to manage this conversation, logically and morally? I really think you’re ill – truly, I’ve been there – but also, could you not just have a fucking sandwich? In the end, isn’t that what I did? I didn’t say this. I can’t fully remember what I did say.

A few years ago, I looked the girl up on Facebook. She seems fine now. But I’m guessing no thanks to me.

I think anorexia – and increasingly I’m unsure how useful it is as a label, but anyways, whatever you call it – is fundamentally relational. It’s a version of your relationship with food, your body, your past, the people around you, what’s been done to your body, what might yet be done. It’s a relationship you can’t ever get out of, since without food or your body you don’t exist. Sometimes when people say you “never” get over anorexia, or that it’s always lurking in the background, I think they might believe some people don’t experience that relationship as a relationship, or that it isn’t potentially fraught for everyone. If it feels a negative relationship now, I don’t necessarily think it means I am still ill.

For a long time, I couldn’t have said this, though. Anorexia felt like, and was indeed treated like, a moral transgression, thought it also felt like an identity. I felt that to recover required not just giving up the identity (what would I think about all day long? In a world where female bodies are read as invitations, how could I not feel complicit in the things I’d wanted to reject?), but having some kind of alibi in place. I couldn’t say that if some people had felt rejected by my ‘illness’, maybe I had wanted them to. I couldn’t own the anger. I had to find a way so start walking myself back out of something that would kill me – and if not because it would kill me, then because I didn’t want to spend my entire life being force-fed and winning unsupervised trips to the toilet as ‘privileges’ – without looking like I could have done it yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that still.

I remember eating a roll at a group therapy session and not actually feeling that bothered about the roll on that day, but sensing I had to ramp up the performative anxiety. Otherwise, what’s this whole thing been about? How could I be wasting all this NHS money, causing all this worry, when it turns out I was capable of eating a roll the whole bloody time? I don’t mean to suggest I’d been pretending to be ill. I wanted to feel ‘normal’ about food (which is actually how I feel now, which isn’t anything like what I imagined ‘normal’ would be). It was more that I felt there was a script through which my choice to recover needed to be filtered, in order that it didn’t look too much like a choice. It had to look more like a demon to be vanquished. I needed to look heroic, otherwise, I felt, everyone would be angry with me.

Years later I met a girl at college who told me recovering from anorexia was “the thing I’ve done that I’m most proud of”. She was slim and one of the stars of the postgrads. I was heavier, drinking too much, and mourning the self I felt I’d lost through getting bigger. I thought “what are you talking about? You have so much to be proud of and you’re telling me it’s eating more stuff that makes you most proud?”. I decided it was humblebrag, and that maybe she was suggesting to me that for her, eating was still a little bit hard – what with her being so much of a pure intellectual – whereas for a fat loser like me, it must be a piece of piss. On reflection, I think I was being uncharitable due to low self-esteem, which isn’t much of an excuse, but that’s pretty much how I was for most of the first decade of ‘being well’.

I don’t think I am particularly proud of recovery. Grateful to have recovered, but not proud. I sometimes hate that I still feel the need to forgive myself for getting there in the first place.

I meant to write something on ‘how you get bigger in plain sight’ but don’t think I have. I still don’t have that magic capacity to tell anyone who is trying to do this how to achieve it. I suppose what I’d say is you might think you need an excuse, or a cheery ‘turning point’ narrative, and there probably won’t be one. Bodies, especially female ones, are read as a story you’re not choosing to tell, and it can be hard not to try either to overwrite it or to force yourself to play along to ‘save face’.

I worry that the desire to validate illnesses that have been particularly stigmatised in women can lock them in stories that keep them ill. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? Outside the story, making it up as I go along. But all I can offer is that it’s a better place to be.

Subscribe now

“There definitely is a demonisation of rape, in the sense of it is a spectrum.” This disturbing statement was made by Q Manivannan, an MSP for the Scottish Green Party, in an interview a year ago. Yesterday it was shared on X, promoting much outrage. Surely, of all things, rape should be demonised?

Manivannan claims to have been misrepresented (though not misquoted). Looking at the full discussion, I would agree that the extract shared on X doesn’t capture everything, but not that it excuses him all that much. Part of what Manivannan is saying is uncontroversial, if quite trite (sexual violence takes place in different contexts and the rapist is usually known to the victim as opposed to some masked man jumping out of the bushes). It’s not as though anyone has made this observation before, other than literally every feminist for the past fifty years. However, by going on to say not just that the rapist isn’t always “some big burly man” but that “any individual is capable of rape” (to much agreement from his female interlocutor), Manivannan is directly opposing a feminist analysis of sexual violence, one in which sex matters. He is suggesting that women could just as easily be rapists as men, therefore there’s no need to view the rape of women, children or men within the context of a gender hierarchy. He is treating “people of either sex can commit rape” as the same challenge to stereotype as “husbands and boyfriends commit rape as well as big, burly strangers”. It’s the kind of thing where, if you’re new to feminism, or if you just don’t want to think about it too hard, you might be taken in. It’s akin to “boys can wear dresses” sounding the same as “boys can have vaginas”. It feels like the same logical manoeuvre is being made in both cases, when only one statement is actually true.

Obviously Manivannan is obliged to make this this move. He has to play these kind of tricks because he’s committed to denying the political salience of biological sex in all situations. What worries me is that it is part of a bigger dismantling of the feminist understandings of rape, trauma and power, one that has been done in the name of ‘progress’.

The phrase “demonisation of rape” instantly made me think of “weaponisation of rape”. The idea of rape being “weaponised” – not just actual experiences of rape being “misused”, but the victim being in some way responsible – has gained respectability in recent years. Men who have no concern for female bodies and boundaries – who may be rapists themselves – have long used “protecting ‘their’ women” from rape to justify hatred of men from other groups. This is not a new or particularly complex insight (though it hasn’t stopped many a self-styled ‘inclusive’ feminist from presenting it as the product of years of deep intersectional thought). It shouldn’t be difficult to treat the ‘concern for women’ of angry male mobs with scepticism while recognising that a genuine complaint of rape – even a ‘politically inconvenient’ one which can be exploited by said mobs – should be taken seriously. The complainant is owed compassion, regardless of whether the perpetrator belongs to a group that you don’t wish to be ‘made to look bad’. She should not be considered complicit in the construction of a harmful narrative or expected to keep silent for an apparent greater good. Nor should she be told that whether a perpetrator deserves punishment depends on how privileged or marginalised he is perceived to be in relation to her (her pain is not lessened or increased as a consequence).

Yet there is a supposedly ‘progressive’ politics that expects all of these things of the rape victim. In Me, Not You, academic Alison Phipps writes that “acts, threats and allegations of sexual violence are all tools of oppression”. She claims that “terror” can be generated when “impoverished white men [are] accused of raping bourgeois white women”. To be clear, she is not referring to false allegations, but real ones too:

“… being a victim and being a perpetrator are not mutually exclusive. Bourgeois white women can be victims of sexual violence, but we are also perpetrators of race and class supremacy.”

This is not exactly untrue, providing one is able to maintain the distinction being a rape victim and retaining racial and/or class-based privileges, even in relation to the person who assaulted you. Phipps doesn’t do this, blending the two things together to make the “bourgeois white woman” even more of a villain now she has “wounds” to exploit. In a blog post she compares the “punitive tendencies of the mainstream [feminist] movement against sexual violence”, asking for “more police, more convictions and longer sentences”, to “calling the manager”. Rape victims – especially “bourgeois white women” – are such Karens. Meanwhile, the sex-based privilege of the hypothetically “impoverished” perpetrator does not get a mention.

A feminist analysis of sexual violence is intolerable to anyone who believes that liberation means sex denialism and no one ever setting boundaries when it comes to male sexual entitlement. I think there have been three main tactics deployed by those trying to position themselves as ‘feminist’ and ‘progressive’ while essentially embracing the same “victims should STFU and stop ruining men’s lives” views promoted by the average MRA:

1. Focussing on ‘privileged’ victims and suggesting they ‘weaponise’ their assaults to consolidate their own privilege (as in the Phipps example).

2. Acknowledging the trauma of rape victims, but suggesting it ‘damages’ them in such a way as to make them bigoted towards subsets of men, victimising these men by casting them as potential rapists. An example would be Judith Butler in Who’s Afraid of Gender?:

“Sexual violence is real. The traumatic aftermath is also real, but living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality. In fact, the reality of the trauma we suffer makes it difficult to distinguish between what we most fear and what is actually happening, what happened in the past and what is happening now. It takes some careful work for those distinctions to emerge in a stable form for clear judgement. The obliteration of those distinctions is part of trauma’s damage.”

This is a long-winded way of saying that rape victims who want single-sex spaces are deluded about risk and in need of fixing. To give him credit, Mridul Wadhwa put it more snappily with “reframe your trauma”. Butler goes on to claim that feminists are “inflicting a form of psychic violence on [male] trans people” when they do not differentiate between them and other males. The ‘damaged’ victim becomes perpetrator.

3. Making an ‘anti-carceral’ case (as Manivannan does) and in doing so calling on – but never quite directly repeating – the age-old stereotype that victim who wishes to see her rapist punished is vengeful and vindictive. In The Right To Sex, Amia Srinivasan claims that “a feminist politics which sees the punishment of bad men as its primary purpose will never be a feminism that liberates all women”, as if such a feminism actually exists. Female rape victims feel compelled to showcase their progressive politics by not reporting their rapes (I do not see ‘progressive’ men doing the same thing, should they have been beaten up, robbed or indeed raped, presumably because in their case, they’re against punishment in principle but can say things aren’t yet in place for an anti-carceral utopia).*

Read more

My local newspaper has court news feature that bears the jaunty title In the dock! (their exclamation mark, not mine). To be honest, I only tend to half-read it when I’m using the paper to line the guinea pigs’ cage. Nonetheless, without even trying, I’ve spotted the same pattern in every issue. Case after case involving men accused of physical violence and/or sexual assault, interspersed with the odd, rare instance of a woman doing something much more trivial. “Men,” I tell my (female) piggies, “really are a massive problem.”

It’s not that I don’t already know that men are significantly more likely than women to be perpetrators of physical and sexual violence. I don’t need In the dock! to tell me this. Everybody knows this. You’re just not supposed to dwell on it too much. There is a difference between saying “male violence against women and girls is a problem” (permissible) and “the vast majority of rapists and killers are men” (decidedly less so). We can all feel sad about male violence against women and girls. We can feel sad for the victims, and even, à la Adolescence, for the perpetrators. We can worry about toxic masculinity and the dark web and religious radicalisation and all sorts of stuff to do with subsets of men rather than men in general. Thinking about plain old men in relation to women – male violence in terms of how men as a class are positioned in relation to women as a class – is less acceptable. You’re allowed to feel sad; you’re not allowed an actual feminist analysis of the problem.

Right and left will argue all day about which men are “the biggest threat” to women. I can see how saying “well, the main thing is they’re all men” can look a bit like stating the obvious, making a big thing of it, just to, what? Make good men feel bad? As if the most central thing is also an irrelevant thing. Yeah, we know they’re men – the main thing is, what sort of men? Which men can we blame and which can we exonerate? It’s as though women themselves aren’t worth mentioning, as if it our non-violence in comparison to men’s violence has no relevance to the space we should be accorded in the world, the protections we should have, the fears we should be allowed to express, the opinions we might sometimes hold about men themselves. As if naming violent misogyny only matters insofar as it sheds light on more important prejudices, leaving feminism to fight individual fires, never getting to the source.

Detective Constable Rachel Fletcher worked pretty close to the source. She was recently sacked for making remarks that were deemed sexist and transphobic (a crowdfunder for Fletcher is here). As Julie Bindel reports, the offending comments included “‘I hate men’, ‘fucking men’, and on one occasion, ‘all rapists are men’”. “Critics,” writes Bindel, “will characterise Fletcher’s remarks as straightforward misandry, and she herself accepts that some of what she said might be seen as offensive and inappropriate”:

“Her defence, though, is not that the remarks were acceptable, but that they were made in the context of investigating repeated male violence against women, and that they have been judged by a disciplinary standard not consistently applied elsewhere. Indeed, at a time when policing is still grappling with institutional misogyny, Fletcher’s case raises difficult questions about what misconduct forces choose to prioritize. Why was she deemed to be such a significant disciplinary problem?”

Why, indeed. And besides, how are women supposed to respond when their line of work confronts them with men – almost always men, very rarely women – doing the worst things to others? When the environment in which they work is also one in which male violence is tolerated? When supposed ‘good guys’ even joke about it? What’s a rational response? Politely pretend you don’t see a pattern that’s right in front of you? Are you never, ever meant to feel anything negative about men as a group, on the basis that this would be blind prejudice akin to hating women?

As others have pointed out, “all rapists are men” isn’t even a slur. Unlike the misreported quote “all men are rapists”, under UK law it’s just true. It’s not the same as “most women lie about rape”. One of the ways in which women are prevented from talking honestly about male violence is the way in which unpleasant truths about men are granted the same status as sexist stereotypes about women. Even if you accept all rapists to be men, it is treated as something you would only say to hurt the men who aren’t rapists, not because it is in any way important to make this distinction between women and men when making decisions about women’s rights and needs.

“A witch,” says the narrator of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, “is always a woman”:

“I do not wish to speak badly of women. Most women are lovely. But the fact remains that all witches are women. There is no such thing as a male witch.”

Only witches don’t exist. Rapists do. They’re not the same sort of thing.

In 2020 French feminist Pauline Harmange published her treatise Moi les hommes, je les détèste (‘I Hate Men’). In it she claimed that misandry could not be viewed in the same way as the misogyny to which it is a response:

“Anger at being treated as an inferior is not remotely comparable to the violence committed by the men who humiliate, rape and kill us, or even the violence committed by the men who ignore us, turn their backs on us and mock us. […] We don’t injure or kill men, we don’t prevent them from getting a job or following whatever their passion is, or dressing as they wish, or walking down the street after dark, or expressing themselves however they see fit. And when someone does give themselves the right to impose such things on men, that person is always a man.”

Ralph Zurmély, a special adviser to France’s ministry for gender equality, attempted to get the book banned, claiming it was “incitement to hatred on the grounds of gender” (he failed, and the controversy boosted the book’s sales).

I have read the I Hate Men. I don’t find it particularly extreme (The SCUM Manifesto it is not). Harmange is not arguing in favour of women doing to men as men do to women. She is arguing that hatred of men is a rational emotional response. She’s arguing for the right to feel it (I’m not even sure she does feel it herself. It’s certainly not something I feel, but Harmange’s arguments are logical and clear).

Almost five years after the publication of I Hate Men saw the trial of Dominique Pelicot and his fellow rapists. One of the most disturbing things about it was the diversity of the men involved. It turns out men of all ages and walks of life will conspire to rape an unconscious woman. Men the woman knows, men she doesn’t. Men of different races and classes and religions. Ordinary men. Even the ones who didn’t take up the offer of raping Gisèle Pelicot didn’t see fit to report what was happening. And then it turns out that this was not one strange, isolated occurrence. There were similar cases in the UK. For years the women had had no idea what was happening. When you read these stories, solidarity with these women seems to require the acceptance that if they didn’t know, why would you know? You think you can trust men, but so did these women. Is it prejudice to feel more doubt? To find yourself thinking more often of Germaine Greer’s “women have very little idea of how much men hate them”? Men share images of naked women, taken without their consent. Schoolboys put the names of female classmates on ‘rape lists’. There’s the misogyny we see, then there’s all that goes on behind our backs. Given the context, isn’t it a small thing to say ‘men are more violent than women, and society should recognise that, without women needing to specify which subset of men we mean’?

I wonder if Ralph Zurmély really felt I Hate Men was an “ode to misandry” or just fancied taking some uppity woman down, with the added kick of using gender equality legislation against her. Similarly, I can’t help thinking many of Fletcher’s male colleagues who declared themselves hurt by her speech actually found it a bit of a lark to vilify a woman who did tremendous work in tackling sexual violence and child sexual abuse. I imagine much back-slapping and bants in the aftermath of her sacking.

I don’t hate men and I don’t think many feminists do. There are times, though, when too much trust feels foolish. What we’re left with is having to describe the world as it is but also having to have hope. Not all men hate women, but it doesn’t feel safe to underestimate the level of hate. Greer’s quote might sound a little as though women are naïve or even stupid, but how can we possibly know?

Read more

I have a disabled older sibling. Without going into the details of his life, I think it could have been more fulfilling and more connected to others than it has been. It’s a difficult thing to claim, not least because I know he wouldn’t want to think that. What would be the point? So I try not to say it too often. Nonetheless, I just don’t think anyone is born to be on the outside as much as he has been.

I don’t have a precise picture of what another life would have been like. I know my parents had this image of ‘the non-disabled version of him’ but that isn’t what I mean. I’m thinking of earlier, more informed diagnoses. The possibility to work, in a job with sufficient support. More options to share his perspective, not in some amazing memoir or novel which ‘shows what it’s like to be me’ (one that shows that he is, in fact, a genius beneath it all). Just more friends his own age. Nothing dramatic, just not ‘people who are born this way are destined to have sad lives’. Why can’t they have ordinary, bog-standard, up-and-down lives?

Obviously many people prefer miracles and stories of triumph over adversity. They prefer to think that as long as you don’t write people off and find ways to get them to believe in themselves, you can discover ways in which actually, their challenges are what make them extra-brilliant. Far more satisfying than turning the whole of society upside down only for the people you’ve been trying to help to have mundane lives, albeit ones in which additional care and attention is constantly required. This is the thing that’s been bothering me about the Jason Arday debacle (even more than the ‘everyone plagiarises when writing their thesis’ defence – I bloody well didn’t!). It’s the way in which none of the disability element says anything about people like my brother. None of it ever did – I can’t think of ways in which Arday’s ‘nonverbal at 11, only learned to read at 18’ story did much for anyone else in a similar situation. It was a hero story, not a lesson for carers and families. It flattered people who thought they were facilitating the rise of someone who’d faced extraordinary odds when all it shows is, they just weren’t the same odds that others in a superficially similar situation face. I don’t think this story was constructed without everyone involved knowing that it failed to differentiate between lifelong, extreme difficulties and less devastating ones, all the better to boot Arday’s status.

I think it is harmful. It feeds into the message that if your life’s not extraordinary, what’s the point of you with your special needs, your extra demands, your endless, endless struggles? Aren’t you meant to provide some insight for the rest of us? Throughout his life, my brother has been taught that somehow, he’s not the person he’s meant to be – that another, more ‘successful’ self should be there in his place. For those who want hidden geniuses, valuing people for who they are is reframed as writing them off. There are nonverbal autistic children who will be nonverbal for the whole of their lives, without there being a secret, supposedly existence-justifying narrative within them.

Obviously I may be over-personalising and reading too much into this. But just as the Salt Path scandal showed how people want to believe a degenerative disorder can be ‘walked off’, and the Jack Monroe scandal showed people want to believe poverty can be solved with ‘thrift’, I think this one shows – amongst plenty of other things – that people want to believe ‘accepting’ someone is actually believing they’re someone else.

I finally got around to reading Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, the “smash-hit tradwife satire” that BBC Culture has declared “2026’s most divisive book”. Actually, I didn’t read it – I had it on audiobook while driving to and from work (which is why this post will be short on any actual quotations from the book). I tend to chose audiobooks on the basis of ‘not sure I’m committed enough to read it, but will give passive absorption a try’. Anyhow, I ended up really enjoying it, so much so I listened to the end when not even in the car (something I very rarely do – the last time, I think, was with Emma Donaghue’s The Wonder).

Perhaps I should hand back my feminist card now. The impression I get is that no true feminist, regardless of her particular flavour of feminism, is supposed to like this book. If you lean towards the more liberal side of things, you will find it trivialising, insufficiently engaged with the political darkness of tradwife culture; if you are of more ‘reactionary’ leanings, you will feel it misunderstands what drives women towards domesticity. A full-on radical feminist might find it completely irrelevant, a made-for-Hollywood cardboard cut-out feminist ‘dilemma’. Added to that, the portrayals of male violence are ambiguous, to say the least. I still liked it, though.

The truth is, I’ve always liked novels with monstrous female characters, women whose monstrosity comes from the fact that they know the rules for ‘being a good woman’, judge every woman around them for coming up short and harbour unbridled fury at the thought that their commitment to ‘goodness’ – their taking it all too extremes – might be insufficiently appreciated by the rule-makers (and that other, lesser women might find happiness in ‘failure’). The particular womanhood model can be different – Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal, Jess’s mother in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. It’s not that I like or admire these characters, but there’s something about that sense of “yeah, well? Aren’t women supposed to hate other women? Aren’t they supposed to follow every command to the letter? Isn’t that what it looks like?” that I find very engaging (which may well say something terrible about me. I’ve often thought this about anorexia as well, insofar as anorexia could ever be a message: “isn’t that what the world wants? Don’t go complaining about it now”). It’s that clash of performative compliance and total aggression, that fuck-you submissiveness that seems the end point of having a standard that only functions if no woman can meet it. Except some women do, then they’re hated for being the monsters they’ve become. I think there are times when, in the character of Natalie Heller Mills, Burke captures that rage very well.

Yesteryear is perhaps not as well-written or as psychologically complex as the other novels I’ve mentioned. There is a certain trashiness to it, but it’s a well-executed trashiness. Were one to judge it by the standard of ‘feminist classic’ novels such as The Women’s Room or Wide Sargasso Sea, it would obviously fall short. One could argue that the central ‘problem’ within it is crass – does one seriously have to pitch tradwife extremism against the sad, lonely ‘career woman’ lifestyle that Natalie imagines for her former college roommate Reena? Indeed, the whole tradwife vs ‘career woman’ ‘debate’ is crass. It ignores decades of feminist thought on valuing maternity and care work, favouring whatever the mainstream media has seen fit to highlight in order to problematise any decision a woman makes. It blows my mind that decades after the so-called ‘mommy wars’ I can look at social media and instantly encounter bullshit about women being duped into choosing “a mediocre salary and PowerPoints” over snuggling up with their babies. As Faludi documents in Backlash, women in the 1980s were already inundated with messages telling them that feminism has made them unhappy by fooling them into believing they could ‘have it all’. I’m 51 and can remember being annoyed by this from about the age of 12. So when Natalie expresses this, it’s not exactly original, and nor is the way in which – inevitably – one side (Natalie’s, in this case) has to be punished to create some sort of resolution. Even so, this is not a crass, idiotic war of Burke’s making, and one might as well get a gripping novel out of it. As a victim-villain, the tradwife influencer is compelling. Is it for a novel alone to answer the question ‘who made her?’

I started writing regularly through mummy blogging in the early 2010s. I don’t mean this designation in a ‘little old me and my little old blog’ way, though I imagine that’s what could be heard through the term. My oldest children were four and two, and yes, sometimes I was going out of mind with boredom. I’d compose pieces in my head and bash them out later, about parenting, gender stereotypes, feminism. I started writing guest blogs for Mumsnet and spoke on a couple of their BlogFest panels (one was a total nightmare, but that’s another story). I even got shortlisted for a BritMums Brilliance in Blogging award. Which is to say, I wasn’t imagining that I was a mummy blogger because I was a mum who wrote. That’s who you were if you wrote about that kind of thing. You might be writing about postpartum depression, maternal isolation, male violence, birth injuries, raising children in a world riven with prejudice and economic inequality, but to people outside of the ‘mummy blogging’ bubble – to whom ‘mummy blogger’ was a pejorative term – you might as well have been writing about the best way to puree your organic carrots. Indeed, you really should have stuck to carrots. As Sarah Pederson describes in The Politicization of Mumsnet, the ‘mummy blogger’ was seen as someone who was stupid and trivial because all she cared about was boring old mummy stuff, then vilified the moment she stepped out of her lane and wrote about something serious, because what the hell would a boring old mummy know about that? Shut up, stupid mummies with your stupid mummy thoughts! Especially the ones where you try to relate important things (politics, economics, violence, power) to your experience of motherhood!

For me, as to many others, this kind of environment, and the judgement to which ‘mummy bloggers’ were subjected, was radicalising. When women on Mumsnet started debating gender self-ID, it was informed by concerns about the impact of gender stereotypes on children, shared experiences of male violence, and a sharpened awareness of the salience of biological sex. Naturally this did not stop critics from viewing this as evidence of the stupid mummies being brainwashed by outside forces. Just being a mother who thought motherhood mattered politically – because of course, it does – marked you out as reactionary (no matter what your actual thoughts were on how and why it should matter).

It increasingly felt to me that to continue to be seen as someone worthy of involvement in public life and debate, you were expected to downplay the relevance of motherhood (not to mention the female body) to feminist and indeed any broader politics. As Elisa Albert put it in her 2015 novel After Birth,

“Heaven forbid it might be true that female bodies are different. Heaven forbid we might admit that living in these female bodies is different. More terrible and more wonderful. Because, what? We might lose the vote? Because we might get veiled, imprisoned? Best deny it, deny it, make it to the Oval office, win, win, win.”

To the degree that you were allowed to talk about motherhood and femaleness, you were expected to strip it of any politics relevant to the thing in itself, and fill it with politics from elsewhere, things that might be more relevant to men, to anyone who wasn’t just some stupid mummy. There are different ways in which one might respond to this.

I don’t think a retreat into reactionary pro-natalist politics – this is what you think I am, so I’ll be it anyways – is a necessary or productive answer (though in the case of Yesteryear, it can be an entertaining one). For me, feminist writing on re-evaluating motherhood in ways that invite a re-evaluation of male-dominated power as a whole – Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Susan Maushart’s The Mask of Motherhood, Mary O’Brien’s The Politics of Reproduction – started to influence how I saw other political issues (assisted dying, social care, surrogacy, sexual exploitation). Maternal feminism is not a reinforcement of the status quo, with a few extra pats on the head for the mummies thrown in. I think people who believe it’s progressive to tell mothers to shut up about motherhood don’t really want to save them from tradwife hell; they just want mothers to shut up.

When the ‘tradwife’ movement (if one can call it a movement) first began to be discussed, there was a part of me that thought “funny – that’s how all mummy bloggers were seen. That’s the same kind of crap that was written and said about us, only now it appears to be accurate”. And there was a part of me that felt a little bit protective of these types, whoever they were, whatever they believed, because I sensed that part of the anger directed at them was of the “shut up, mummies” variety, not the “this is anti-feminist nonsense” type. Even if it was anti-feminist nonsense. Which it was. Then I wondered whether I should feel that way, since even if the mummy bloggers didn’t deserve it, maybe on some level, these women did.

Read more

“She says no; he claims it means yes. He names her ignorant, then forbids her education. He does not allow her to use her mind or body rigorously, then names her intuitive and emotional. He defines femininity and when she does not conform he names her deviant, sick.”

Andrea Dworkin, Pornography

Defining women in terms of femininity – as opposed to femaleness – is not just about presentation or behaviour, or even what women are for. It goes deeper than that. It’s about what women are supposed to desire. The feminine woman is submissive, masochistic, self-objectifying, and that is how she wants to be. She might claim otherwise, but that’s part of the game. Wanting is bound up with not-wanting. That’s why her ‘no’ really means ‘yes’.

In case this isn’t clear, I’m suggesting —as so many have done before — that defining women in terms of femininity is a bad thing. It legitimises the abuse of women by implying not just that it is ‘natural’, but that it is secretly desired. It suggests that women who protest are in denial about their true natures — or even that they enjoy the protesting. It has shaped responses to male sexual transgression: she’s asking for it, loves it really, if she didn’t, she wouldn’t look/act/speak that way (even though not to look/act/speak that way brings its own accusations of deviance). That feminists should find this objectionable shouldn’t be remotely controversial.

Yet more recently, thanks to gender identity ideology, this critique of femininty has been recast as neutral, or even positive. Paris Lees writes of loving being “catcalled, sexually objectified and treated like a piece of meat by men”; Andrea Long Chu defines the essence of femaleness as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”; Jacob Tobia asks “if sexual objectification is so categorically awful, then why do I want it so badly?” All of these writers are male but claim not to be men. As men have always done, they castigate women (the adult human female type) for not understanding who they truly are and what they truly want, which is denigration. Whereas the traditional misogynist sees female moral and intellectual inferiority as the reason why women need their own desires explained to them, his ‘progressive’ equivalent cites ‘cis’ privilege as the reason why women refuse to acknowledge the joys of humiliation. She doesn’t know she loves it because she’s always had it. Lucky her.

Every woman who calls herself a feminist is nominally opposed to the idea that women ‘ask for it’ and ‘love it really’ (whether ‘it’ be objectification, shaming or outright assault). It’s an absolute basic. Yet for many, there is an unacknowledged contradiction between this and the claim that women are not female, but feminine. There’s an unwillingness to engage with what the latter really means, despite the fact that the ideological associations have not exactly been hidden. ‘They love it really’ is not just a thing men say to justify what they’ve already done. It’s used both to excuse the act, and to present complaint as an extension of the ‘loving it’. She’s seeking attention; she’s weaponising her trauma; the act of complaining is a form of re-enaction because she wants nothing more than to return to it, over and over again.

There are men who have always mocked the idea of women being sexually assaulted – and then daring to complain! – on the basis that women enjoy every bit of it. As a child of the seventies and eighties, I’d watch James Bond films in which Bond’s ‘conquests’ didn’t want it (but then they did!) and, more prosaically, I’d watch the Benny Hill Show’s closing credits ‘chase’, with its if only men could get a bit more of the old harassment! ‘joke’. At a time when second-wave feminists were raising their voices about sexual violence, men sought to trivialise the complaint itself. Accidentally brush past a man, or even compliment him: Ooh, she’s assaulting me! I’m feeling a bit objectified here! Women, eh? The things they moan about! Sexual harassment? Chance would be a fine thing!

‘Progressive’ narratives on sex and gender have not challenged this; on the contrary, they’ve made it more explicit. It’s an extension of the age-old well, I wouldn’t mind it if it was happening to me, with those who say it now being treated as authorities. They know more about womanhood than the mere females, because the mere females are like fish who don’t know what water is. Mere ‘cis’ women take femininity for granted. The authors of Females or Whipping Girl, by contrast, truly appreciate degradation.

That these narratives have emerged alongside and even embedded themselves within the same feminism that embraced #metoo is something of a problem. How do you make a stand against women being treated like a piece of meat while treating ‘person who enjoys being treated like a piece of meat’ as a perfectly acceptable definition of ‘woman’? Obviously you can fudge it a bit. You can say “well, it’s a bit much to say defining women by gender means defining them that way. It’s much more wibbly-wobbly”. Only the evidence says otherwise. Perversely, you have to pander to the idea that being treated like a piece of meat is bad because it wouldn’t be validating to those who like it if everyone said it was good. So you have to play a double game, reciting all of the femininist principles – we don’t ask for it, we don’t love it really – while avoiding any criticism of your allies who are saying the exact opposite. You must direct it at their critics instead.

Read more

He looked at me for a second, then he picked up the specimen-jar, but it slipped from his fingers, fell to the floor and smashed. He gave a nervous laugh, bent, and stood back up holding what had been inside the jar. He held it out for me to see, but I was looking into his face. He closed his hand, then opened it again, like a magician. He was holding a pink ball. Not a testicle: a pink ball, like a lump of plasticine. I stared back into his eyes.

‘Tell me,’ I said.

So he told me.

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

Apologies for the massive spoiler if you’ve not read this book (still worth reading, mind). I’ve been thinking about The Wasp Factory ever since reading Baroness Hilary Cass’s recent justifications for continuing with the Pathways puberty blockers trial.

Frank, the narrator of Banks’ novel, is a girl whose father has led her to believe she is a boy whose genitals were destroyed in a dog attack. Upon discovering male hormones, tampons and the missing genitals – in fact candle wax – in a jar, Frank starts to suspect that her father is a woman, only to learn that he has secretly been dosing her with testosterone: “when Old Saul savaged me, my father saw it as an ideal opportunity for a little experiment, and a way of lessening – perhaps removing entirely – the influence of the female around him as I grew up”. This, the reader is in no doubt, was a bad thing, and not just because of all the terrible things Frank has done to others, driven by a sense of being mutilated and denied. The experiment was always impossible, an act of gross cruelty and deception.

The book was published in 1985 and one wonders how it might be received today. Would Banks be accused of transphobia? Genital obsession, at the very least? Certainly, being a boy or a girl is understood in terms that would lead to misguided accusations of biological essentialism. What, after all, is Frank’s gender identity (everyone has to have one) if Frank has always understood herself to be male? Why would it change on being told her father lied to her about her body (a mere container for her gendered soul)? How could she now, at 16, instantly switch to understanding herself as female? That’s not how gender is supposed to work! Or at least, that’s not how it’s supposed to work now. If you’ve lied to a child and they believed you, their identity is apparently fixed.

In a recent speech defending the Pathways trial, Baroness Cass gave the example of ‘Jo’, “a biological male, socially transitioned at two and a half by his parents”:

“At eleven, she – which I say advisedly because the chances of her reverting to her biological gender is vanishingly remote – she has been in stealth and will not go to secondary school because she is so afraid of being outed in that environment. She’s now refusing to come out of her room except very rarely and she now has weak bones, not as a result of puberty blockers but through inactivity. I ask the noble lady the minister should her subsequent treatment be decided by politicians or by the clinicians who are looking after her?”

As many have pointed out, this reads like a case of child abuse. A two and a half-year-old child may have a strong awareness of gender stereotypes and personal preferences, but no sense of sex constancy (the fact that people don’t change their sex when they change their appearance or habits). By age six or seven they are better at working this out. If a child still believes they are the opposite sex and that their body can be ‘fixed’ to match what it ‘really’ is, it’s because what they’ve been told about sex and gender isn’t true. One doesn’t have to think children are blank slates – or that actual gender non-conformity shouldn’t be supported – to know that misleading a child in this way does enormous harm. What Cass describes is a point – similar, I think, to that reached in many cases of fabricated or induced illness (FII) – where telling the truth will also be incredibly harmful and destructive to a child’s sense of self and security. It’s not a reason to keep on lying, and especially not to go one step further, loading lifelong physical damage on top of the psychological kind.

Subscribe now

Yet Cass has doubled down on this in a letter to peers and MPs. She brushes off the question of “why safeguarding procedures would not have been initiated when ‘Jo’ was a toddler” with the argument that “these children are frequently living in stealth (i.e. those around them do not know their biological sex) and do not come to medical attention until much later as puberty looms”. In other words, if parents have warded off any form of scrutiny and intervention, there comes a point where you just have to let them have their way:

“They [the child] are not making a decision to be a girl – by that time they just believe themselves to be a girl and have no frame of reference to think differently. Even with input from the very skilled therapists in the new services, encouraging them to think more flexibly about their identity is rarely successful, regardless of what their natural trajectory would have been if they had not been socially transitioned at that very early stage.”

Every time I read this, it sounds even madder than it did the first time. The child in question is an eleven year old, with an as-yet unharmed body. They have been lied to in a way which is going to harm them whatever decisions are made in future. There is no backing out of that. To maintain the pretence that they are ‘really’ the opposite sex would require increasingly conscious self-delusion, and adherence to the belief that anyone who thinks otherwise, or so much as hints that an alternative path was possible, must hate them. To abandon it would be bewildering, for why would those closest to you, and others in authority, go along with the lie? How could you ever trust anyone again? Again, I think the comparison with FII is apt. If your entire understanding of yourself is as a sick person, and of the adults closest to you, heroic protectors standing between you and a hostile world, wouldn’t it destroy you to let it go? For some time, at least. Not forever, I’d hope.

There was a time when, even in crazily dark novels, it was widely agreed that parents who deceive you about your sex – either out of malice or their own misguided sense of ‘doing the right thing’ – were doing something bad. What Cass is demanding is not a reckoning with the harm, but a form of collective complicity – we must all go along with it because hey, for some kids, the damage is already done. What timescale is Cass even thinking of when she claims that “encouraging them to think more flexibly about their identity is rarely successful”? At what age do you write off a child’s ability to live honestly with themselves and their bodies after years of being misled? (A question relevant for all forms of abuse, not just this.) There is, one would hope, a lot of life to live after the age of eleven. Is she picturing this child at 20, 30, 40 etc.? What kind of quality of life will they have if their ability to think flexibly about themselves in relation to others was dismissed before they’d even hit their teens? And how far is this supposed inability to “think more flexibly about their identity” being reinforced by those who tell them that anyone proposing flexible thinking is a bigot?

Read more

What does Amnesty International have in common with Donald Trump? And is this even a fair question to ask? Like many feminists who have endured countless accusations of being “just like Trump” because we, too, know sex is real and immutable, it feels a little discomforting to be flipping the question around (aren’t we better than our accusers, Amnesty amongst them? Isn’t it a bit “I know you are, but what am I?”). Still, there are times when the similarities between the US president and those who push gender identity ideology are just too on the nose.

Take the World Cup, for example. This week saw the scandal of Trump successfully lobbying Fifa to suspend US player Folarin Balogun’s one-match ban following a red card when playing Bosnia and Herzegovina, enabling Balogun to take part in Monday’s game against Belgium. It was the kind of thing where, had you just known about the suspension, you might think “hmm, that seems a bit dodgy”, then wonder if your Fifa conspiracy theories were getting carried away. Only Trump had to make the dodginess entirely visible, admitting to his intervention on the basis that “[Balogun] didn’t do anything wrong. And he’s our best player […] And [the referee] gave them a red card. I didn’t know what that meant”. Once he did know the rules, Trump decided they shouldn’t apply, at least not for his team. He got his way – what are you, the rest of the world (and the Belgium team in particular), going to do about it? And besides, even if you found this reasoning somewhat crude, there were others on hand to repackage it as “shouldn’t the Belgians want to play the full US team? By wanting a Balogun-free opposition, weren’t they, when you really think about it, the ones trying to cheat?” The bullies break rules because they can, then their back up team offers the ‘moral’ justification for the rules being wrong.

Predictably, the kind of men who tell women to calm the fuck down about wanting fairness in their sports were in uproar about the Balogun decision. What struck me, though, was how similar the situation was to that in which feminists find themselves when faced with trans activists not just in sports, but political, professional and academic environments. One or more boorish men make ludicrous demands because they can, doing nothing whatsoever to hide their entitlement and disregard for other people – and their status means they get away with it. Others are at the ready to recast opposition to these demands as the real examples of bullying. Like Trump making his corruption absolutely obvious, these men make no effort to hide their misogyny. The invulnerability – the extreme trolling – is part of the point. Women know their complaints will be characterised as mean, churlish, even hateful. The legitimacy of the argument doesn’t matter, because who cares about rules and arguments now? Win as many court cases as you like, ladies. We’ll ignore you anyhow, and a bunch of self-styled ‘reasonable’ people will present some half-arsed arguments as to why this is totally fine. They’d be too embarrassed to back out now.

Anyhow, back to Amnesty, who have just produced a report – ‘A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK’ – which attempts to reinforce the “actually, I think you’ll find it’s the feminists and LGB activists who are like Trump” argument. In its utter disregard for law and logic, it is – ironically enough – Trumpian. It’s there in the silly attempt to characterise whole swathes of people as “anti-rights”, not even stating which rights. Just “rights”. Some people hate rights per se (like the people who hate “freedom” or “justice”, presumably. Gotta hate those hatey people! They’re the worst!).* Like Butler in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the authors of the Amnesty report cannot risk any form of engagement with feminist critiques of gender as a social hierarchy. Instead they have to pretend that feminists and LGB activists who wish to dismantle gender roles actually love gender roles, and if that doesn’t make any sense, who cares? STFU, haterz!:

“Anti-rights actors seek a society in which women and men have fixed and distinct roles, based on what they view as ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’. These actors perceive the idea that gender is socially constructed as a threat because it suggests that gender roles can, and do, change across societies and over time. In fact, progress in the rights of women and LGBT+ people has been underpinned by changing understandings of gender and social roles. Anti-rights actors refer to this perceived threat as ‘gender ideology’, portraying it as an attack on national traditions, family structures, marriage and religious freedom.”

I cannot be arsed to go into why someone who knows sex is immutable and also thinks female humans must conform to a fixed set of feminine gender roles is not the same as someone who knows sex is immutable and also thinks femininity is imposed on female people as a mechanism of oppression. Nor why someone who thinks sex isn’t immutable but also conflates womanhood with femininity has more in common with the first group than the second. I’ve written about this here, but honestly, so many feminists have been writing about this since forever. JK Rowling was clear about this in her ‘infamous’ blogpost. There’s no engagement on the part of Amnesty with the feminist critique of gender – as a set of rules which facilitate one group’s oppression of another – because Amnesty has taken the side of people who like the rules (and pretend that maintaining the rules, as long as there’s some superficial alteration to the window dressing, is the same as ‘changing’ them). I don’t think this invention of what feminists believe is a misunderstanding. It’s “I’m doing it because I can”.

Subscribe now

Amnesty lists a number of organisations which it wishes to see isolated and excluded from recognition, status and funding by the charity commission, the NHS and “institutional donors and grant makers”. Many of these are LGB rights groups (and if you find that homophobic, hey, what can you do about it? You’ve already been told that if you think sex matters, you’re the same as the right-wing homophobes, so looks like you’re over a barrel). The list also includes Beira’s Place, the woman-only sexual assault support service set up by JK Rowling, and Trans Widows Voices and Children of Transitioners, grassroots groups created by victims of men for whom gender identity ideology provides a means of masking and perpetuating abuse and coercive control. Are these groups ‘anti-rights’? Well, they are insofar as they oppose the ‘right’ of men to abuse, and the ‘right’ of men to deny women single-sex support in the aftermath of abuse. One might note that the traditional men’s rights activist has always had a similar understanding of ‘rights’. All it took was a way to present this as ‘progressive’.

In truth, self-styled ‘progressive’ men have always sensed that feminism – actual feminism — is a threat to their ‘rights’. They want to be better than the ‘bad’ men without giving up the perks which the ‘bad’ guys obtain by force, and without enduring any of the inconveniences involved in adhering to rules the ‘bad’ guys follow. Sex denialism, queer theory and liberal pseudo-feminism tell men they can still have sex on demand, as many babies as they want, the conflation of femaleness with subjugation, maleness with dominance – all the ‘rights’ – but without having to follow any of the boring old rules the traditional patriarch bothers with. Trans activism turbo-charged this mindset. The same blackmailing – nice abortion rights, shame if something were to happen to them – is in place, but with added threats of violence, ostracism and moral shaming. The subtle coercion of don’t be a prude is replaced with the hardcore coercion of be kind, or I’ll tell the world you’re a genocidal bigot.

In 1983’s Right-Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin describes how “on the Left, women will have abortion on male terms, or women will not have abortion except at risk of death”. In their 2026 report, Amnesty situate opposition to a male sexual rights movement within “the anti-abortion landscape”. Shut up about your women-only rape crisis centres! Shut up about your abusive partners or fathers! Do you want women experiencing crisis pregnancies to die? I just don’t think you can care very much about women being denied abortions if these are the conditions you set. The denial of abortion rights isn’t seen as a tragedy, just leverage against uppity women.

One of the most disturbing things about the rise of extreme trans activism is witnessing how readily supposedly ‘progressive’ people can embrace the most extreme misogyny. All they need is a loophole. They know, I am sure, how weak the arguments are. It doesn’t matter as long as you have a cover argument, no matter how flimsy it is. This is how women aren’t believed – or rather, how they are, but people pretend not to see or understand. You wanted to justify the sale of sex and be a good guy. You wanted to believe there was something special about being a man – and something inherently degrading about being a woman – and be a good guy. You wanted to know you could use money to exert reproductive control and be a good guy. You wanted to get off on the idea that women love pain and be a good guy. You wanted to tell women who complain of abuse to STFU and be a good guy. It is very hard to believe those who slander feminists now have not always wanted this. It feels like a mountain of pent-up shame and rage being unleashed.

That such a massive global organisation feels comfortable smearing a group such as Trans Widows Voices feels to me especially significant. It’s a prime example of the way in which victims of domestic abuse are vilified by those who claim to be against all forms of abuse – as long as the perpetrator is someone they would want to attack anyways. It’s a human rights organisation behaving no better than a family court judge who always believes the man insisting his ex is a crazy bitch who only says these things to wind him up. Or he doesn’t really have to believe it. What can she do about it, anyways? As one man once said, with regard to grabbing women by the pussy, “you can do anything”.

Read more

Like many people, I grew up in a house where one person was assigned the role – or rather appointed himself – Owner of Truth. Other people might have had different experiences and perceptions, but only one had the final say on what was real and what was right. If you dug in with your own narratives, this was a sign of badness or madness (or both). Supporting the Owner of Truth was the Curator of Stories – the one who defined what it was acceptable to remember, and the things that had to be forgotten.

If you live in such an environment, you can push back for a while, but in the end it is much, much easier to go along with it, no matter the cost to your own sense of self. Then it gets to a point when, even if you find yourself outside of it, there’s no point in saying “no, it wasn’t that way” – because you went along with it, didn’t you? You learned to second-guess the expected truth, to prioritise it over whatever you might have thought you knew. Except the Owner of Truth might not have always been consistent. He can change the rules at will, and each time you fail to catch up with him, there is more proof of your own unfitness to have a reality of your own.

“All families,” wrote Laing and Esterson in Sanity, Madness and the Family, “have a story about themselves”:

“… a defining narrative through which they affirm where the authority lies, who plays which role, who supports, who obeys, and who holds key information about the past. Through this story they present themselves to the outside world – not just a set of individuals living under one roof, but as a body with a collective life.”

The families of the women they treated, they wrote, “have secrets and are chronically ashamed”:

“They live with the fear that the story that protects them might crumble. They hide from themselves; the truth is circled, ducked, disguised.”

A mental illness diagnosis, Laing and Esterson claimed, was a highly effective way of discrediting family members who might challenge the official line. I think this is true, which is to say, I don’t think everyone with a severe mental illness diagnosis is actually in touch with a higher truth, or that psychotic delusions are actually profound metaphors, exposing the things no one else wants to see. But I do think a self-appointed Truth Owner can use a diagnosis to discredit every single challenge to his own world view and the more fragile his sense of self – the more he is aware that he too could be found wanting – the harder he must work to ensure no one listens to other voices. No one can tug at the threads of his narrative lest it all unravel.

I also think Laing and Esterson are correct about the role of shame and the importance of protecting the story. These are often driving forces in ‘nice’ domestic abuse – the kind of abuse no one sees until something objectively tragic happens, whereupon everyone puzzles over how such a quiet man surrounded by such contented people could have done such a thing (men don’t talk about their problems, they will say, oblivious to how much tip-toeing around male feelings has taken place over the years). The extreme end of this might be seen in family annihilation, whereby a Truth Owner, driven by a need to avoid confrontation with those truths he has denied might decide that he is ‘sparing’ those he takes with him from the same shame that he fears. They’re not really people to him – in the sense of individuals capable of existing in relation to the rest of the world without his presence – but consciousnesses that cannot outlive him, not now that everything needs to be tidied up. It terrifies him to think of minds that might go on thinking – about him, about what he did – when he’s not around to set the boundaries regarding what can be believed and what cannot.

Being denied your own perceptions of who you are and where you stand in relation to others is a form of psychological annihilation. This is not the same as being denied the ‘right’ to demand others endorse these perceptions at the expense of their own. In abusive relationships, this understanding is flipped on its head. The abuser believes himself to be annihilated by the refusal of others to participate in their own annihilation in order to bolster his own sense of self.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote of women serving “all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size”. This is often read as a commentary on women’s obligation to flatter the male ego. I think it’s also a commentary on women’s obligation to prioritise men’s account of what is real, particularly when it comes to this section:

“The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine.”

Reflect my version of reality back at me, or I’ll stop existing. My existence depends on your reinforcement of everything I want to believe about myself. The very possibility that you might have a mind of your own is a threat – therefore any punishment is justified, on the basis that you, just by thinking your own thoughts, have the potential to do far worse to me. (I remember this so well, the conviction that if I couldn’t get the story right – couldn’t think the right thoughts – I would somehow be responsible for destroying those who were weighed down by all the pressure of knowing what was right and true, my own perceptions polluting the purity of everything they were protecting on ‘my’ behalf).

It can take a long time to realise what a pointless project this is. The more you suppress your own perception of reality in order to pander to a Truth Owner, the more insecure and fragile he becomes. Because he’s relinquished his own responsibility for having a stable understanding of himself. Other subjectivities threaten the narrative and the harder he tries to manage this – you can stop people speaking, but thinking and feeling? – the more disempowered he feels. Men like this will start to see ‘disapproving’ or ‘insolent’ eye movements where there are none; they will start to find silence as offensive as speech; they will think you are questioning them when all you are thinking is “please don’t let me get this answer wrong”. But there is no right answer, not as long as you continue to show signs of independent thought.

Read more

Perhaps we should count our blessings. Andy Burnham as ‘Labour’s first female leader’ isn’t quite as bad as ‘Donald Trump as the US’s first female president’. The latter was proposed by Caitlin Moran in a piece written before Trump’s re-election (“The candy-floss blowdry. The mad, teenage girl fake tan. The copious use of Touche Éclat on his under-eyes […] He’s very bitchy. He’s very catty. In the way e.g. cowboys aren’t, but Jan in accounts is”). At least the qualities that Burnham is being associated with, by whatever “senior figure in the party” chose to list them, are positive.

Then again, the Moran piece is a joke aimed at puncturing Trump’s own masculine aspirations (albeit at the expense of endlessly stereotyped ‘lowly’ women, such as mad teenage girls and ‘Jan from accounts’). Whether Burnham being a “female leader PM in all but sex” is humour is harder to establish. According to said “figure in the party”,

“The reason Labour have always craved, but also been cautious about, a female leader is because, in a Labour government, she could have an unashamedly female agenda, focused on health, education, family finances and issues like safer streets, social care, online safety for kids, that are disproportionately important to women. [This would be] unlike the Tories’ female leaders, who are under internal pressure – and the weight of history – to show how tough they are on traditionally male issues.”

I feel I have already heard this argument a million times. You can’t sell woman-friendly policies if you have a woman leader, and you can’t sell a woman leader if she has woman-friendly policies. Therefore, all women aspiring to lead will either fail (Clinton, Harris) or be ‘men in all but name’ (Thatcher), so best sacrifice that particular priority if you’re a true feminist. Which is convenient for men but what can you do?

The “female leader PM in all but sex” certainly feels like trolling, only with a pretentious edge. It reminds me a little of an essay one of my sons was asked to write about Othello believing himself to be white at the start of Shakespeare’s play. Obviously we’re not supposed to think Othello is confused about his own skin colour – it’s about the position he (possibly) believes himself to occupy in relation to others, which turns out to be illusory. Clever people should know these things aren’t meant to be taken literally. You can be ‘white’ or ‘female’ in symbolic, relational terms. Only I don’t think this kind of switch quite works in the Burnham example, not least because the image is that of a member of dominant group getting to replace a member of a subordinate group precisely because he doesn’t have the low status of the latter. Only a man can be a “female leader PM in all but sex”, so never female at all. The “unashamedly female agenda” can only be channelled through him precisely because he is not female.

In this way, “traditionally male issues” are pitched against “unashamedly female” ones in a play-off which excludes actual women. The framing made me think of Tanya Modleski’s 1991 book Feminism Without Women, in which she explores (mainly through contemporary film criticism) a move “to relocate the struggle of feminism against patriarchy to a place entirely within patriarchy and within the psyche of the patriarch himself”:

“… however much male subjectivity may currently be ‘in crisis’, as certain optimistic feminists are now declaring, we need to consider the extent to which male power is actually consolidated through cycles of crisis and resolution, whereby men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it.”

Left-wing or ‘progressive’ men (supposedly) stand for softer policies, and in doing so can simultaneously earn credit for taking a stand against toxic masculinity and stave off the threat of emasculation by pushing women into second place. It’s a coping strategy that enables men to preserve the differentiating function of masculinity while dispensing with the mean, hard features they may not like. I think this is a lot of what the ‘crisis of masculinity’ is about – men battling it out among themselves, working out a way to feel good about themselves without ‘being masculine’, whereby ‘feeling good about themselves’ means ‘still knowing themselves to be superior to female humans’.

Yet women and girls are supposed to witness this and not feel insulted. We’re meant to feel sorry for them, and we’re meant to feel grateful.

I recently watched Russel T Davies’ series Tip Toe, which explores the rise of hate and radicalisation through the story of Clive, who ends up leading a mob who hang his gay neighbour Leo from a lamppost. The series includes a ‘gender critical’ character in the figure of Leo’s friend Stephanie. As I wrote here, the portrayal isn’t actually that bad (which is why it has really annoyed the most misogynistic of Davies’ fans). Still, as the pitching of Clive against Leo would suggest, the central conversation – about sex, gender, sexuality, masculinity, power – is essentially one between men. They’re the ones whose inner selves are on the line, the ones who – unless their selfhood is appropriately tended and managed – could lose it and destroy everything. Women are background noise: support humans (Leo’s employee Judy), support bigots (Clive’s wife Marie), support thinkers (Stephanie).

As with Adolescence, it’s not that the analysis of masculinity is entirely off-mark. It’s that it offers an entirely male-centric view of the problem with gender and power – and in doing so maintains the view that male people are the people who matter the most, and that if we are to solve their masculinity crisis, we must do so in a way that doesn’t make males feel reduced to the status of flesh-and-blood females. Early on in the series, Leo tells Clive that he cannot complain about preferred pronouns because bigots like him are to blame for male people identifying as women, what with bullies calling feminine boys ‘girls’ anyways (“we did exactly what you wanted and still you don’t like it”). Whether or not girls themselves have consented to this ‘solution’ is immaterial. It made me think of the football coaches my sons used to have, who’d call boys who weren’t playing well ‘girls’. While girls are punished for being insufficiently feminine or ‘not real girls’, ‘boys’ hasn’t really taken-off as an all-purpose insult for them. The assumption that ‘woman’ is a lower, open category – that we should be thankful if higher-status humans want in on it – goes unquestioned. Presumed proximity to femaleness is an insult, one for which men must devise workarounds (of which suggesting ‘womanhood’ has nothing to do with ‘femaleness’ is but one). But women – old-style women – aren’t supposed to feel affronted while the men sort it out.

The male-centric reading of gender claims that men such as Leo, Clive and his sons are victims of masculinity, whereas women such as Stephanie, Judy and Marie are only victims of sexism, which is in any case a by-product of masculinity. Hence it’s probably best if the women keep quiet rather than drop in their unhelpful comments about pronouns and shit. In George, Clive’s gay son, we see a character who finds a male-centric version of femininity offering hope for liberation, only for the haters to get in the way. It’s a classically male understandings of femininity as a refuge from the complexity, pressure and trauma of being a man. As Andrea Long Chu writes in Females, poor, pre-transition males find life hard, but the post-transition male such as Gigi Gorgeous “has sanded her personality down to the bare essentials”:

“She laughs at what is funny, she cries at what is sad, and she is miraculously free of serious opinions. She has become, in the most technical sense of this phrase, a dumb blonde.”

That this is profoundly offensive to women – and women are punished both for their triviality if they conform, and for their deviance if they don’t – is not considered. Or rather, it is, in texts such as Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, only for women to be scolded for their ‘femmephobia’ and lack of appreciation for how privileged the life of a passive object can be. Women are not meant to complain about men’s mischaracterisation of female experience. We’re meant to think about how hard, cold and sad male experience can be, then welcome men with open arms to the Barbie pool party that is being us. Isn’t sidelining ourselves as the ones who got handed all this on a plate the very least we can do?

“A bunch of nasty bastards who hated making love were making war. A bunch of boys who liked flowers were making love and refusing to make war. These boys were wonderful and beautiful. They wanted peace. They talked love, love, love, not romantic love but love of mankind (translated by women: humankind). They grew their hair long and painted their faces and wore colorful clothes and risked being treated like girls. In resisting going to war, they were cowardly and sissies and weak, like girls. No wonder the girls of the sixties thought that these boys were their special friends, their special allies, lovers each and every one.”

Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

I don’t think you have to deny that masculinity brutalises men – as a mother of boys becoming men, I worry about this constantly – to also think that this is being framed in a way which reinforces the idea that men are more human. As though just by bearing the ‘insult’ of being compared to women and girls, men – whether they’re Andy Burnham or a gay character in a TV series – are doing women and girls a favour, risking that inevitable drop in status in the name of ‘being themselves’ or ‘doing what’s right’. What a dent to the male ego! I don’t want men to feel sad at the thought of being ‘unmanned’ by association with female humans, but I am tired of us being asked to appreciate all of their ‘workarounds’, none of which get to the essential truth.

You’re not better than us. Deal with it.

Subscribe now

On Andy Burnham and professional northern-ness (paid subscribers only)

Read more

This week I thought my period was going to start but it didn’t. At my age, it’s getting harder to keep track (with even the odd thought of ‘will this be the last one ever? Or have I already had that? How will I know?’).

This may be too much information for a Substack post. Then again, were a Green party proposal for 36 days paid leave per year for ‘workers who menstruate’ to become a reality, colleagues might always know when you were menstruating. Except, how would it work in practice? What if I’d taken today off – when actually, I had quite a lot to do – only to realise I should have waited? How much notice are you meant to give for such regular – but not necessarily predictable – absences? Would it just be accepted that one week out of every four, or thereabouts, it’s not worth expecting much from me? Only I couldn’t tell you, with any accuracy, which week. It might be a three-week gap, then five, then two. Anything requiring mountains of preparation is probably best left to the non-menstruators.

Maybe I wouldn’t want to take the leave. But would that single out those who did, as not just workers who menstruate, but workers who have genuinely difficult periods? I wouldn’t have needed menstrual leave in my early twenties, when an eating disorder meant I didn’t menstruate – but could that have made employers suspect I was pregnant? And what about the times when I actually was pregnant but didn’t want everyone to know just yet? Would it be wise to pretend to be menstruating for a bit? What if you didn’t, then had a miscarriage or a termination, and didn’t want anyone to suspect? What if I was pretending to be having my period but also really worried about falling behind at work with all this time off, so stealth working at home? Actually, I can see myself doing that even if I was having my period. Not actually having 36 days leave, but belonging to ‘the menstruators’, the class of people who are off so frequently and unpredictably it may just not be worth employing them.

Still, at least if you didn’t employ them, it wouldn’t be discrimination against women because anyone can have a period once you take away the word for ‘members of the female sex class’. The more I consider this proposal, the more it seems to be a natural consequence of considering women – adult human females – not as a distinct group of humans whose personalities and aptitudes largely overlap with those of men, but who also have specific physical capacities and experience distinct lifecycle changes, but as a disjointed series of physical ‘events’: menstruators, pregnant people, birthing people, chestfeeders, [no word for older female humans, because what’s even the point of them?]. Why would you consider the broader consequences of making it known who menstruates when? If you’re the kind of person who has forgotten, for the political expediency, that menstruators, pregnant people and the post-menopausal are the same class of people, you might well think that the only reason people worry about it being known that they’re menstruating is, like, stigma, and stigma is bad (it is perhaps not surprising that the proposal was submitted by a male party member).

I can see how ‘menstrual leave’ might seem like a bit of a bone to throw at the AFAB masses who might think you’re too focussed on the needs of the be-penised. It sounds as though it’s recognising that those bodies that we can’t actually name do still matter a bit. Not so much that you’d recognise or celebrate them, but problematise them, sure. And anyhow, it is absolutely true that female bodies and female pain have been neglected in a male-default world. But does blanket time off for all menstruators resolve this? Not least when for some of us, it just isn’t necessary – which indicates something requiring more targeted exploration and treatment. Medical misogyny is rooted in not seeing the female body in its entirety. It is not a male body that intermittently malfunctions. It is not some indefinable, blurry concept, so indistinct that having ovaries is no more meaningful than liking lacy thongs. The fact that you can ask for a ‘designer vagina’ but struggle to get help with the most common birth injuries is not down to neglect of ‘birth injured people’. It’s not unrelated to how long it takes to get a diagnosis of endometriosis, or how mystifying the menopause can still seem (despite all the mega-marketing surrounding it). If you are invested in breaking up female bodies into random ‘problems’ and denying they can be understood in terms of continuity and change, you’re not interested in creating a world that is genuinely as suited to them as to male bodies.

The last thing is, what about weekends? If you work Monday to Friday, say, and keep getting your period on a Friday or Saturday, do you still get the full 36 days? Are you meant to be considering heaviness of flow when you choose which days to take? Could you swap a heavy flow day for a light one if the latter had lots of childcare clashes? There’s so many details here, and so little actual consideration for what female bodies and lives are.

Subscribe now

This week I was going to take part in a (nominally) feminist podcast. I found out last night that the invitation had been withdrawn due to my views on sex and gender, aka due to me being a feminist. I’m not going to mention any names because nothing about it feels very specific to this particular podcast. It’s not the first time this has happened to me (though it always seems odd that people would send invitations without having joined the dots on what I actually think first. Same goes for ‘declare oneself a feminist’ without having considered the logical implications of this re sexed bodies and gender stereotypes).

I don’t feel cancelled or particularly ‘silenced’ by it, though I do wish they’d not bothered to get in touch to begin with. It’s been suggested to me that it could be discrimination on the basis of belief but I’m not sure about this. If you’re running a political podcast you’re necessarily selecting guests on the basis of what they believe, and if it turns out they believe things which you consider hateful or offensive, why would you want to host them? What bothers me is that I know – and I suspect the hosts do, too – that feminist beliefs (including ones relating to female bodies and boundaries) aren’t hateful or offensive. Alas, “I shouldn’t have to host hateful people” can be used to smear anyone you like as hateful, simply because look, they’ve been added to the group of people you’re not hosting for supposedly moral reasons, because you’re a good person and they’re not. It bothers me because it’s insulting. You have the right not to invite or include me; you don’t have the right to consider me your moral inferior, or to imply that your decision is based on some imaginary principles you have and I don’t.

I thought of emailing back to say that I hadn’t realised the podcast hosts held views that I consider harmful to some of the most marginalised women, and that if I’d known, I’d never have said yes. I wanted to push some of that moral shaming back where it belonged. I didn’t, though, on the basis that this would have sounded a bit “well, I was going to dump YOU first!”, and anyhow, if someone were capable of being more concerned about women in refuges and prisons than the status of their podcast, they wouldn’t need me to tell them. But also, it wouldn’t have been true. Of course I would have still been willing to talk to people who supposedly take a more ‘inclusive’ position than me – with, in essence, people who look down on me. Feminists do it all the time. If you want to persuade people – and if you’re open to the idea that you might be persuaded, too – that’s what you have to do.

Of course, there are limits (which is why I didn’t go begging to my now-very-dodgy-looking MP). It is always humiliating to engage with people who are busy worrying they might be tainted by any association with you. Always humiliating to wonder whether, when the conversation’s over, they’ll try to impress their misogynist mates by bitching about what a loser you are (so old! So backwards! Such a pearl-clutcher!). Always humiliating to feel they have no idea that you already know how little they think of you, that, in the name of at least trying to keep the conversation going, you’re prepared to look naïve and oblivious. Always humiliating to have to be so polite to people who hand-wave the worst kind of misogyny, as long as it’s only directed at you and not them (or at least, so they tell themselves, clinging on to their temporary reprieve). Always humiliating to bend over backwards to show them that look, you too hate Andrew Tate and Donald Trump! You, too, can do fish-in-a-barrel feminist principles! You could be just like them, if only you’d switch off your brain and your conscience a little bit more!

Subscribe now

Read more

Cameron Thomas is one of the signatories of the Early Day Motion condemning the EHRC’s Code of Practice regarding the implementation of the Equality Act 2010. He’s also my local MP.

A few days ago I might have written ‘my local Lib Dem MP’, only he is currently suspended from the party, having been arrested on Wednesday evening. He is being investigated on suspicion of assault and controlling and coercive behaviour. Obviously these allegations may or may not be true. In any case, as many victims know, such things can be incredibly hard to prove (perhaps it’s not “workable” to expect otherwise. Perhaps, whatever the truth of the accusations, Thomas should table a motion for disregarding these laws as well).

Before this happened, I’d been thinking of writing to Thomas regarding his opposition to women having their own changing rooms, toilets, refuges, prison cells etc. and to gay and lesbian people having their own sexual boundaries. I didn’t think it would achieve much. I just had that feeling of ‘well, if you’re going to moan about it, no point just doing it for people who agree with you already’. I felt it was somehow hypocritical of me to rant here or on social media and not at least try to engage with the opposition elsewhere. I also thought ‘I’ve thought about this really, really hard. I am good with words. I know exactly what I want to write’. Only I couldn’t bring myself to do it. On reflection, I am glad I didn’t try.

I didn’t try because I knew exactly what would have happened. I would have bent myself into pretzels trying to show how good, how empathetic, how kind, how brilliantly progressive I am. I’d have worked so, so hard to explain things clearly, and it wouldn’t have mattered. I’d have got back some template email telling me I had nothing to worry about with regards to women’s rights – he bloody loves women, he does! – but that he (unlike me) also cared about marginalised people and inclusion. That familiar double-punch of denial (no one’s trying to take away your rights, you idiot!) and moral shaming (why are you so mean and exclusionary?). Meanwhile, I’d know that if another constituent had written to him claiming terfs were denying their right to exist, he’d have been very, very sorry for them. No ‘don’t be so ridiculous’ for them!

There was a time when I thought that, because so many MPs had clearly got on board with gender self-identification and trans rights rhetoric without really giving it a second thought, on the basis that it sounded like gay rights, only more hardcore, all that was needed was that you explain things to them. You just tell them that no, it’s not like this, because of the following reasons, and then they’d say, oh, that makes sense, and then we could all make some progress. There was a time – I’d say about ten years ago – when this was almost working. Groups such as Woman’s Place UK were coming together and feminists would share articles that painstakingly explained why telling people their sexed bodies should match their personalities wasn’t really any better than telling them their personalities should match their sexed bodies, or why having no language that linked ‘menstruators’ with ‘birthing people’ or ‘post-menopausal women’ could be an issue for feminist analysis, or why male people who identified as female could still be experienced as male by women themselves (note that none of these examples are ‘why you should hate this marginalised group’). An MP or academic might re-share one of these articles, or perhaps they’d DM you saying they understood it, and you’d think “yes! It’s getting through! We just need to be patient with this!”. Except a few days later – it reached a point where feminist I knew would bet on how many days it would take – they’d retract. They’d un-share the article and tell everyone that they’d been listening to people who’d persuaded them that actually, everything you’d written was secret code for hate. They’d never say that your arguments were wrong, not exactly. It was more a case of they’d ‘learned’ these weren’t really your arguments. If you want to be on the right side of history, don’t listen to the terfs.

What really saddens me – as I’ve written before – is that I and so many others tried so hard to get beyond this. I’d tell myself I’d find a way to say it better. I’d crack the code eventually. If I was really, really good, and thought really, really hard, I’d get there in the end. As I’ve also written before, this ended up reminding me of responding to abusive, controlling behaviour in the home by telling myself I just needed to ‘crack the code’ of what the abuser wanted. I have diaries that are full of this, in which I’m completely oblivious to the fact that there was never any ‘code’, so absorbed was I in the delusion that the problem had to be me not communicating correctly. It took me such a long time to see that that door was closed and that I’d never be able to open it. In the end, I felt like that with MPs who’d decided women like me were terf scum and that was that. By the time JK Rowling wrote her ‘infamous’ blogpost of 2020, and there was that weird gap of a day or two where you could see that ‘good’ people waiting to be told by trans activists what was actually wrong with it since they couldn’t see it themselves, I really couldn’t be arsed to try. I mean, obviously, I’ve not stopped trying to get my point across. I just don’t think those EDM signatories care about anything I or women like me have to say. If we are nice, we are cloaking our bigotry in respectability; if we are informed, we are obsessed; if we are traumatised, we’re weaponising it. And it is hurtful and humiliating to keep going if you know this is what you’ll get back.

So this, really, is why I didn’t write to Cameron Thomas. But what might I have written, had I tried?

Dear Cameron,

Well, first I’d have told you that I voted for you, like the fucking idiot that I am. Because I’m not right-wing and I knew there was no point voting for any other non-right party in this constituency, as your leaflets kept on reminding me. I’d have made a huge deal about not being right-wing, even though you’d have had the get-out of thinking ‘well, it’s even more sad that middle-aged biddies like her become dupes of the right’. I’d have done this even though some women I know, and certainly many family members, do vote for right-wing parties and are not the devil incarnate. Still, I’d have been happy to smear them as beyond the pale, practically Donald Trump himself, in the hope of convincing you my politics weren’t rooted in ‘hate’.

Perhaps I’d have then gone to great pains to make you know how nice, inclusive, generous I am, how open-minded I am with regard to gender expression, how I let my sons wear dresses and play with dolls, all of that. I’d have gone on about how awful it is when people experience harassment for being different, as if somehow you had the right to assume I thought otherwise – as if, the moment a woman wants one measly space of her own, you’re judge and jury over whether this secretly means she’s plotting trans genocide. I’d have really abased myself, tying myself in knots to show you I agreed with you about how important it is to be kind to everyone. At no point would I have suggested that maybe you, as a man who takes an offensive stance on women’s rights, were not fit to judge me. I’d have humiliated myself instead.

I might have considered writing about women who’d experienced trauma, or lesbians who’d been terrified about losing the right to organise, or women who needed single-sex spaces for religious reasons. I’d have been careful, though. No one likes a trauma weaponiser, do they? One wrong word – or not even that – and you could say I was vilifying a vulnerable group by so much as suggesting a single one of them could do any harm. You’re not under any obligation to empathise with terfs. That’s not how #BeKind works.

Would I have linked to other things I’d written? Would that have shown you I’ve actually thought this through? Or would it have just let you see me as obsessive? Maybe I could have linked to things other women wrote – but no, that would be obsessive, too. Would there have been anything at all I could have written that would measure up to ‘I have a trans constituent who is sad’? Maybe you don’t have a trans constituent who is sad, who knows. There is no limit on the number of sad ‘terf’ constituents you’re able to tolerate.

Anyhow. I didn’t write.

I didn’t write, and I am so glad. Whatever Cameron Thomas has or hasn’t done, if I’d written I’d have gone along with the lie that I’m here to be judged by men who can, when all is said and done, think whatever they like about women, then trot out the line ‘trans women are women’ and think they’re better than those of us who ask them to listen. And still, if I’d got the stock #BeKind response, some part of me would have felt I’d done something wrong. If only I’d phrased it better. I’d still have thought the problem was me.

Edit: Since writing this post, I have been sent an actual response from Thomas to a constituent (who wishes to remain anonymous). It includes all the classics:

• trans people need “dignity, safety and inclusion” whereas women just need boring old “rights”

• bags of empathy for “trans, non-binary, and intersex people, who understandably fear that this statutory guidance could lead to them being shut out of vital services and unable to go about their daily lives”. Absolutely no mention of women who require single-sex services and their need to “go about their daily lives”, or of any “increased threat of being harassed, abused and attacked” to women by the presence of male people. It’s moral shaming for women all the way

• feigned concern about people being challenged for not conforming to gender stereotypes, the logical conclusion of which is no woman can ever challenge anyone she thinks is a man in a female-only space because that’s, like, policing and really hostile and “a completely unacceptable step backwards”

• “the threat of complicated and expensive legal cases against organisations who are just trying to do their best” - note that complicated and expensive legal cases are totally fine when organisations are denying other vulnerable groups their rights. Just not women, who are mean and should feel more sorry for these hard-pressed organisations, who wouldn’t have to do anything if women could all just shut up

• nonsensical commitment to keep sex as a protected characteristic while only wanting “to strengthen the provisions in the Equality Act to ensure inclusion and that everyone’s rights are protected”. So women can have single-sex spaces as long as other people’s right for them not to be single-sex spaces is ‘protected’

The overall impression is that one group —trans people (no distinction between the very different subgroups, some much more hostile to women than others) — are vulnerable, while another — women who want sex-based protections — are fussy, unrealistic and maybe also a bit stupid (since they haven’t realised what a problem ‘gender policing’ will be for them). Note also that there are no practical suggestions for doing things differently, because what is really wanted is to make things self-ID. Only you can’t say so and still patronise women about respecting their rights.

Still glad I didn’t bother (but very much appreciate that someone else did at least try).

Subscribe now

The two MPs I did write to (and who didn’t respond to me) (paid subscribers only)

Read more

I recently watched the BBC documentary ‘The Mother of All Cons’, which tells the story of Megan Bhari and her mother Jean O’Brien, who founded a charity for children suffering from severe or terminal illnesses. The two of them claimed Megan herself had a brain tumour, only this wasn’t true. When two of the parents who’d been involved with the charity raised suspicions, they were disbelieved and vilified. It was only after Megan’s death at the age of 23 – from fatty liver disease, her brain perfectly normal – that the truth came out (despite the fact that some family members had suspected it all along). A safeguarding review later concluded that it was likely that Megan had been a victim of fabricated or induced illness (FII), also known as Munchausen’s by proxy.

Actually, I’d known most of this before watching the documentary, having listened to the 2023 BBC sounds podcast ‘Believe in Magic’. These stories fascinate me, partly due to a more general obsession with scammers (a couple of my favourite books are John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, on Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes, and Beau Donelly’s The Woman Who Fooled The World, on fake wellness guru Belle Gibson). I find it eases my impostor syndrome to know that even if I get ‘exposed’ as every bit as useless as I think I am, at least I’m not as bad as them. It’s not just that, though. I’m particularly interested in FII from both a feminist and a personal perspective. I think subtle versions of it are probably very common – but it’s very hard to talk about without finding yourself in the firing line, just as the ‘Believe in Magic’ whistleblowers did.

Who, after all, wants to be a mother-blamer? Not least when medical professionals disbelieving mothers – dismissing them as hysterical or overbearing – is a recognised issue, with potentially fatal consequences? And surely not when there’s a history of ‘refrigerator’ and ‘schizophrenogenic’ mothers being held responsible for doing too much or too little, causing the sickness in their child? Ridicule of the mother who always wants to be the centre of attention, basing her entire identity around being needed, frequently overlaps with disregard for the work that mothers actually do (I have vivid memories of the adult men in my family chuckling along to the sitcom Sorry! – look at how Timothy Lumsden’s mother infantilises him! – while still expecting to be waited on by their own mum). That motherhood can simultaneously be socially and economically disempowering, but also give women a phenomenal amount of control within one very specific, highly dependent relationship, is extremely difficult for feminists (or anyone) to negotiate. That real illness, and even external threat, can co-exist with enmeshment and forced dependency is hard to acknowledge. It doesn’t quite fit with the language we have to talk about abuse, especially not as it is perpetrated by women.

The argument that if you make children and motherhood the only ‘acceptable’ outlet for women’s ambition and identity, distortion will occur, has been made by some feminists, although not always successfully. It can be seen as an attack on mothers in general. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan’s concern for women who can only live through their children ends in outright homophobia (the woman “who attaches her son to her with such dependence that he can never mature to love a woman” will, Friedan writes, turn him gay – something she clearly believed to be a terrible thing). More recently, criticism of mothers of ‘trans children’ has led to the claim that many are ‘munchie mums’, deliberately putting their offspring on a path to lifetime medicalisation so that they can claim to be keeping them alive in a world where everyone else supposedly wants them dead. I’m not sure this is always true (some parents really are put in an impossible situation). Nonetheless, there’s something very disturbing about mothers who have no qualms about reinforcing absolute terror in their children – even their favourite author wants to commit trans genocide! – while locking them into a narrative they themselves can’t back out of without dismantling their mother’s identity, too.

To me, there similarities with FII are clear. If your sickness – or your vulnerability – is your mother’s life, being well – or strong – could destroy her. And if culturally (and within feminism) we have agreed that it is progressive and kind never to question diagnoses, or to place the idea of ‘care’ in question, what does that do to those in relationships where maternal heroism could mask something much darker?

Megan Bhari and her mother were obsessed with Disney. According to friends, Bhari also spoke in a childish voice. These elements – the maternal enmeshment, the childishness, Disney – reminded me of women I’d known in treatment for anorexia. Myself, a bit, but not just me. This was quite a thing.

I am not suggesting that a load of mothers were making their daughters anorexic. I know eating disorders don’t have simple explanations, and that however much symptoms tend to calibrate when sufferers get together, that doesn’t mean they are all suffering from exactly the same condition. A diagnosis is a shorthand, and often a necessary one. I do, however, think that relationships with food and the body are inseparable from relationships with other people, past experiences, popular cultural narratives and the wider world. The ‘illness’ – the ‘being ill’ – is not a performance in the sense of being faked, but it is a role within a group. It shapes status and interactions. It colours what you mean to other people, and it colours your own responses. You get a sense of what is expected of you. It is sometimes the case – and it was definitely the case for me – that you cannot get better without in some way removing yourself from these expectations (in Good Girls, Hadley Freeman recounts moving away and even temporarily taking on another name as part of her recovery).

Since the emergence of ‘terminal anorexia’ as a potential diagnosis for extreme cases, and the broadening of criteria for assisted dying in some countries, I have read stories of mothers supporting their anorexic daughters in choosing to die which have raised major alarm bells for me. I won’t link to them because of course, I could be wrong, or rather, I think it is subtle. I don’t think these mothers are lying, or that they are not devastated, or that the illness didn’t extract a terrible toll. But I am not convinced by the inevitability of death, and there is something about presenting one’s acceptance of such a death as love, indeed the deepest love, something to be fought for in the face of uncomprehending outsiders, that I find terrifying. I don’t see how you separate the entrapment within the illness from the entrapment within the relationship. It’s as though this love is one step further than the ‘mere’ love that sees ordinary mothers trying to keep their children alive, and I fear where this leads. There is enormous pressure on anyone encountering these stories to showcase their own empathy by not asking any questions. You weren’t there, were you? How could you know how bad the pain was? And when it’s something like an eating disorder – as opposed to a brain tumour – no one can do an autopsy and say that actually, they could have lived all along.

Jean O’Brien has faced no legal consequences for her actions. Perhaps, moreover, it’s true that on balance, it’s better for mothers to be believed than doubted. We have choices, though, about how we present devotion. O’Brien benefited from the unquestioning elevation of her status over those of more ordinary carers. Her love was the best love, until it was the worst.

Subscribe now

Why don’t those who see it say something? (paid subscribers only)

Read more

Not long before the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland, I met with some feminists in Oxford, following Julie Bindel and Helen Joyce’s session at the literary festival. Naturally there were conversations about what might happen with the ruling, and genuine fear, particularly among lesbians, about what a loss might mean. This fear is something I think about whenever it is implied that those who celebrated the judgment were delighting in some imaginary opportunity to punch down on a vulnerable minority. There’s never any acknowledgement that what we were seeing was real relief, and no sense that these women might have been terrified about what they stood to lose.

Over a year later, a group of MPs are attempting to block the EHRC’s draft revised Services Code of Practice. It is, apparently, “unworkable” and “not fit for purpose”. Alongside much handwringing over trans constituents not being allowed to get on with their lives – for some reason, women having their own toilets makes this impossible – there’s an attempt to suggest that affirming the law as it stands is too complicated. Some have pitched the problem as being caused by a refusal to “listen to the trans community” and giving in to “online fear-mongering and vitriol” instead. Others generously concede that while there may be some sort of balance to be found between competing rights, the current guidance doesn’t achieve it. The trade union Unison has, on the other hand, gone all out in demanding that the law itself should be changed.

What has struck me is that in none of these responses is there the remotest engagement with what the guidance means for women, girls and same-sex attracted people – in particular, members of those groups who actually care about being recognised in law and having the access to single-sex spaces and resources. It’s as though they don’t exist. There are just sad trans people on one side – one undefined mass of sadness, lumping together gender distressed teenagers with middle-aged men who’ve found their true selves in the ladies’ – and a mean, exclusionary code of practice, created by mean, exclusionary people, on the other. Nor is there any acknowledgement that a great deal of thought – far more, I would argue, than is really deserved – has gone into justifying and qualifying why women, girls and LGB people might have a right to identify and organise on their own terms. The response is fundamentally dishonest. It suggests to me that if the For Women Scotland side had lost, MPs who currently claim to support single-sex spaces – just not like this! – wouldn’t have cared at all.

I would really appreciate it if MPs who oppose the EHRC guidance could, just this once, express their opposition solely in terms of what it means for female constituents. Just say directly “you shouldn’t have this”, and “it’s wrong for you to expect that”. List everything that’s unacceptable. Name what, if anything, might be aside for the class of humans whom it is perfectly easy to define when doing a PornHub search or looking to hire a surrogate, but not so, apparently, when said humans are wanting to be left in peace. Is there any space on earth in which female humans should be able to congregate without the potential presence of male humans? And no, this isn’t about the practicalities of keeping men out. It’s about the principle – should it be permissible? Is it morally right?

Is it hateful and exclusionary for a rape survivor to want female-only counselling? Is it hateful and exclusionary for lesbians to want to organise on the basis of same-sex attraction? Is it hateful and exclusionary for girls to want their own sports teams and changing rooms? If you think it, you should say it. The ultimate questions: is female humans having anything of their own – including the words “women and girls” – hateful and exclusionary? If so, why? And no, “they can have some stuff but in exceptional circumstances which I’m not going to discuss or describe because now’s not the time or place, what with everyone being all heated and extremist while I’ll being mature” is not an acceptable answer. If your response includes the terms “unworkable” and “not fit for purpose”, please explain whether this applies to the entire concept of sex-based rights.

The MPs opposing the EHRC guidance only speak in terms of trans rights because they do not dare express open, direct disagreement with feminists. They wish to hazily imply that if there is a feminist argument floating around somewhere, they, as good people, agree with it too, only in a nice, inclusive, thoughtful way, not a vitriolic, spiteful way. They will not own the harm that they would inflict if they got their way and effectively dismantled the meaning of sex in law. They do not know how frightened many women were at the prospect of this happening one year ago.

What we won then was the absolute bare minimum. If you want to take it away, you should at admit it.

Subscribe now

Further thoughts on spaces, consent and ‘unworkability’ (paid subscribers only)

Read more

In the mid-nineties I worked as a languages assistant at a school in Germany. I was truly terrible at my job, mainly because I was scared of the students. There was no real reason for this. I was 21 and they were aged 14-18. There were no particular behavioural problems, beyond the usual teenage stuff.

Still I felt sick whenever I was alone with a full class. I’d think “but what if they turn on me? There’s loads of them – and they’re mostly bigger than me – so why should they do anything I say?” I couldn’t ask for anything, let alone raise my voice, because where do you go once you’ve done that? So instead I asked nothing of them, finding each lesson mortifying, wanting only for them not to get cross with me.

What exactly did I think they’d do? I don’t even know. It’s not as if I hadn’t gone to school myself. I knew perfectly well that most of the time teenagers don’t turn on teachers just because, in terms of potential for physical dominance, they have the upper hand. Still, though … they could, couldn’t they? How would you actually police it? Yes, you can have the threat of long-term consequences, but what’s to stop them if they really wanted to?

I used to think that people could turn on me all the time, at least if I wasn’t careful. I suspect it is related to growing up in a house where ‘people’ (men) did, and where the sense of threat was nevertheless deflected onto the outside world. You can believe the person who hurts you is kind and generous if no one else would put up with you and outsiders would be so much harder than me if they knew what you were really like.

For years, I was hyper-focussed on the fact that whatever the law said, there was nothing in practical terms to stop those who were bigger and stronger than you coming for you if you pushed them. There were nominal consequences for them, but nothing that might actually stop them doing it in the first place (and no one need believe you afterwards).

When I was studying for my PhD, the intellectual intimidation I felt regarding my supervisor – not a remotely aggressive man – translated into a kind of physical fear. After I’d rung his bell for a supervision (he’d have to come down a staircase to let me in) I’d think “he can’t hit me, he can’t hit me, he can’t hit me”. Even if I’d written the most stupid thing in the world, he couldn’t physically assault me. There was nothing about him that indicated he’d ever assault anyone, but I’d still think it (to calm myself down, I’d sometimes try to equate him coming down the stairs to Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss coming down the books to share his wisdom, with the plinky-plonk tune in the background).

All women’s lives are made smaller by an awareness of what men could do to them if they so wished. I used to have a very exaggerated perception of this – one stripped down to the bare mechanics of it – which failed to take into account the fact that most of the time, this is not how men actually behave. The fact that someone could do something does not mean that they will. You have to know this or you’d never leave the house – or indeed remain in it. There’d be nowhere on Earth left for you.

What’s the point in having laws prohibiting men from doing things to women if men can do them anyways and get away with it? To see the response to the new EHRC guidance on single-sex spaces, you’d think this was some brand-new, unique conundrum, not something which applies to plenty of laws. But how are you going to police it? What are you going to do, have genital checks? If a man wants to follow you into a woman-only space, he’ll do it anyways! Stupid women, thinking there’s any point in having boundaries when men will overstep them all the same. Isn’t easier to re-educate yourself not to care about boundaries at all?

This argument has always reminded me of arguments against marital rape and date rape. It’s the same but how would you even prove it? Do you understand what ridiculous measures we’d have to tale? In the nineties – when I wasn’t busy hiding from totally harmless students and supervisors – I remember seeing plenty of hot takes explaining that the next thing feminists would want would be contracts in the bedroom, to be signed before and maybe even during every sexual encounter. How romantic! The aim was to ridicule any woman who felt that all rape should be illegal. Women were meant to feel they were being, at one and the same time, misandrist for wanting to cast such a shadow over interpersonal relationships and naïve for not understanding that men were going to take what they wanted anyhow. The logic seemed to be that if your husband forced you to have sex, it would only be rape if the law said husbands could rape – so wouldn’t it preferable if the law said they couldn’t? That way you could get on with the serious work of adapting to the world as it is (and isn’t easier when we don’t talk about what men could do, if they wanted? When you don’t push the envelope? Don’t you want to pretend you’re equal?).

Encountering these arguments – straight after encountering the fact that I’d spent the first sixteen years of my life in a country where it was legal for husbands to rape their wives – inspired a real feminist fury in me. It did so even though, in my day to day life, I was irrationally fearful of everything. I nevertheless had a very strong sense that women were people, too. It struck me that those who opposed the criminalisation of marital rape weren’t so much fighting to maintain a male entitlement (since they insisted it would happen anyway). They wanted to maintain a particular definition of what a wife was, as someone who did not have independence or any entitlement to bodily privacy in her own right. On some level, I think opponents of the criminalisation of marital rape understood that changing the definition of wives would necessarily have long-term implications for how wives understood themselves, and how the world understood them. It was about changing the social and cultural status of married women. Of course many men still ignore this (consider Dominique Pelicot) but I would like to think we would now consider it absurd so say “therefore we might as well not consider it wrong”.

They’re going to do it anyway arguments are also made about laws against smacking children, with a side order of and some of the time when they do it, they’re not even wrong. Who wants to criminalise a loving parent issuing a loving smack? I don’t actually believe there is such a thing as ‘a loving smack’ but nor do I believe that having laws against smacking would criminalise countless ‘loving parents’. I just think they’d change the status of children, the smallest, most vulnerable people yet somehow the only people whom it’s legal for an adult to physically assault. I think that matters in terms of creating a society in which children are safer. My own dad never stuck to the letter of “reasonable chastisement”, whereby one is not supposed to leave bruises, but he’d refer to it all the same – the implication being, I suppose, that the law as it stood was for “reasonable” responses to “reasonable” misbehaviour whereas he was adjusting for additional unreasonableness. But the law is not very specific on what kind of behaviour merits even the most loving of smacks. That, you can make up as you go along. All it means is that a child is a hittable thing.

In practical terms, it is very hard to control what goes on in the home. Ironically, women who ask for single-sex public spaces are often lectured on this, as if not only is caring about boundaries in such spaces pointless, it’s also frivolous, since the odds are much better when you’re out and about. But wherever a woman is, she is less safe when she is defined as ‘member of the half of the human race who isn’t permitted to say “no”. No one who says but how would you police it? really cares about the policing. They care about the definition. They care about defining you as ‘the people who don’t have boundaries’ rather than defining themselves as people capable of change.

Subscribe now

More on defining men as ‘the only people allowed boundaries’ (paid subscribers only)

Read more

“Three or four times a year,” writes Joan Smith, “we in Britain go through the ritual known as Outcry Over Judge’s Remarks In Rape Case”:

“What usually happens is that, faced with an offender who has terrified or beaten some poor woman into having sex against her will, a judge imposes a ludicrously light penalty with the observation that the victim’s ordeal wasn’t really so bad—or, indeed, that she should have known better than to get herself into the situation in the first place.”

I’ve put “writes” but actually, this is a quote from almost forty years ago, taken from Smith’s 1989 classic Misogynies. And yet, here we are.

To be fair, one might argue that there have been some changes in recent years. The conviction rate for rape remains woeful and the treatment of victims in those cases which do get to court mean many would rather not go through the ordeal. Openly vilifying victims – examples mentioned by Smith include a child victim deemed “no angel” and a woman described as “guilty of a great deal of contributory negligence” for getting a lift with her rapist – is possibly less acceptable than before. If so, however, it is more than counteracted by sympathy towards rapists themselves, which might not be a new phenomenon, but is subject to constant reframings and revised justifications.

In 2019’s Down Girl, Kate Manne defined himpathy as “the flow of sympathy away from female victims toward their male victimizers”. “When our loyalties lie with the rapist,”, she wrote, “we add profound moral insult to the injuries he inflicts on his victims.” Something of that profound insult was surely inflicted on the two girls whose rapes were filmed by three boys who, in the view of Judge Nicholas Rowland, did not “need to go to prison today”. As one of the victims told Laura Kuenssberg, “the decision to spare them jail sentences was like a ‘rock straight to my face’”.

The rapes took place on separate occasions. One girl “has been threatened with a knife after becoming separated from her friends”:

“Forced to leave her mobile phone and AirTag in a shop so her movements could not be tracked, she was made to walk to a secluded field, where she was raped by two of the defendants as they filmed the incident.”

The other victim was lured to meet one of the boys “for what she thought would be their first date after chatting to him on Snapchat”. They then recorded her ordeal for 90 minutes. These boys planned these assaults and knew perfectly well that their victims were not willing. In spite of this, Judge Rowland felt “he needed to remember the boys were ‘very young”, had low intelligence, a ‘limited understanding of consent’ and ‘peer pressure played a large part in what went on’:

“‘I think of you as very young and none of you have been in any big trouble before,’ he said. ‘You have all done very well with the restrictions put in place throughout the trial.’”

In the words of one of the victims, Rowland’s decision “almost made it seem as if what the boys did was not OK, but it was OK in the eyes of the law”. This kind of positioning – the choice to direct the empathy spotlight at the boys, to emphasise some imagined vulnerability on their part, to praise their ‘good’ behaviour – is not neutral. It is setting a standard for what rapists who plan and threaten and terrorise apparently deserve. The greatest harm it does is to victims themselves, but it extends far beyond that. It is a statement of what is apparently reasonable, compassionate even, in the context of sexual violence: that you can hold a knife against a girl, lure her away with lies, film the attack, and yet be considered to have “a limited understanding of consent”. It goes beyond even the age-old ‘it’s confusing if girls don’t fight back / don’t actively say no / let you buy them a drink that one time’. Now we’re onto ‘it’s confusing that a girl’s consent isn’t something you’re meant to override’. It’s confusing that girls are supposed to be treated people, too.

Poor boys, subject to laws which don’t match how they – and many members of the legal system, one imagines – really feel about the other half of the human race. Who can blame them for getting it wrong?

In 1975’s Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller described a world without rapists as “a world in which women moved freely without fear of men”:

“That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent. […] Rather than society’s aberrants or ‘spoilers of purity,’ men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.”

The man who assaulted me is not all men. I do not think all men are like him. I think many men – including my partner and sons – are good people, better people than I am. But that one man changed how I move through the world and made it smaller, locations feel different, exchanges feel not worth the risk. The actions of some men mean all men live in a world in which women and girls do not take up as much space as we might otherwise claim for ourselves. I am not sure most men would like the “world in which women moved freely without fear of men”. They take the one in which we don’t for granted, only noticing or objecting to our fear when it places restrictions on where they might want to go.

Brownmiller describes “shock to liberals in 1971 when the women’s movement first began to discuss rape”:

“I remember the looks of incredulity and the charge, ‘Why you’re on the side of the prosecution,’ as if that per se was evidence of racism and reaction.”

The belief that women who want men to be prosecuted for rape are somehow anti-progressive, bigoted, on the side of the enemy has not gone away. On the contrary, it has grown, and frankly I wonder at what the real distinction is between it and Judge Rowland’s deep concern for not ruining the lives of the boys who “do not need to go to prison today”. Is there any, both in terms of what it means for victims and for the broader enablement of rape culture? In the face of himpathy, the rape victim, writes Manne, “is envisaged not as playing her part in a difficult criminal proceeding, but rather as seeking personal vengeance and moral retribution. What’s more, she may be seen as unforgiving, as trying to take something away from her rapist, rather than as contributing to upholding law and order”. But what truly progressive woman wants to uphold law and order anyways? If those in charge of law and order don’t want to uphold it either, shouldn’t she be glad?

In her 2021 book Me Not You, academic Alison Phipps claims that “acts, threats and allegations of sexual violence are all tools of oppression”:

“Sexual violence is terror; so is the way it is tackled and policed. And (white) ‘women’s safety’ is used to justify violence against marginalised communities. This is a challenge for mainstream feminist movements against sexual violence, which are dominated by bourgeois white women.”

Going back thirty years, in Right-Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin had the measure of this tactic, pointing out that there was no configuration of perpetrator/victim which, in the ‘progressive’ communities, entitled women to any type of justice:

“When rape—obvious, clear, brutal rape—occurred, it was ignored, often for political reasons if the rapist was black and the woman white. […] When a white man raped a white woman, there was no vocabulary to describe it. It was an event that occurred outside the political discourse of the generation in question and therefore it did not exist. When a black woman was raped by a white man, the degree of recognition depended on the state of alliances between black and white men in the social territory involved: whether, at any given time, they were sharing women or fighting territorially over them. A black woman raped by a black man had the special burden of not jeopardizing her own race, endangered especially by charges of rape, by calling attention to any such brutality committed against her.”

The ‘counterculture’ mirrors the tactics of the ‘culture’: rape matters and should be taken seriously only to the degree to which the perpetrator belongs to a community you wish to vilify. Otherwise the accuser is an aggressor against Phipps’ “marginalised communities”, or it didn’t happen at all. In any case, I think it is quite something for “allegations of sexual violence” to be aligned alongside actual acts of sexual violence as “tools of oppression”. One could say Judge Rowland doesn’t want the boys to be ‘oppressed’ by the truth of what they’ve done, either.

I don’t know the race of anyone involved in the current case. Nonetheless, it is clear that the judgement is seeking to frame the boys as marginalised – ADHD, lower IQs, young, peer pressure, limited understanding – in order to ask what kind of monster would punish them? Their victims are young too, of course. Whatever difficulties the girls might have had negotiating the world before this happened are not mentioned. Certainly they will now have more than they had before. There is no meaningful distinction between the edgelord feminist who recasts accusers as bigoted aggressors (or prissy “bourgeois” ladies) and the male judge who recasts perpetrator as poor, confused lads who shouldn’t have to suffer for what they’ve done. It’s the same dominant culture, the same air we all breathe. Rapists are people, too, girls! It’s a bit much to ask them to think the same of you.

Subscribe now

Further thoughts on ‘progressive himpathy’ and rape culture (paid subscribers)

Read more

This is an old post from July 2021, back when this was a Tiny Letter newsletter. I was thinking of writing something about the ‘obsessed with genitals’ line when I saw the Greens’ Rachel Millward take it in response to Piers Morgan asking the (not very difficult) question “can a man have a penis?”. Then I thought, can I be arsed to explain what’s wrong with it again? (Though there’s a slightly different, homophobic edge when the ‘obsessed with penises’ charge is aimed at straight men — something that those doing it no doubt excuse as ‘that’s the kind of thing that would bother them because they’re the homophobes here’). Anyhow, I thought I’d publish this again because this argument still isn’t going anywhere and feeds into a culture that shames and silences those who most need to be heard (which probably doesn’t include Piers Morgan, to be fair, but it’s about the overall message …).

Earlier today, I witnessed the following twitter exchange between a well-known liberal feminist and a less well-known (proper) feminist:

[LWKPF] “I have a 15 year old daughter. If she was in a woman’s changing room and someone with a penis came in and took all their clothes off near her, how do you think she would feel and what would you advise her to do?”

[WKLF] “How am I supposed to know how she would feel? I haven’t met your daughter and I’m not her parent. But I’d advise her not to stare ay other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude.”

Do not worry. The rest of this is not all about penises. Because that is not the issue. The issue – highlighted in another of well-known feminist’s tweets today, in which she told feminists who think biological sex is politically salient “your feminism is bad and you should feel bad” – is making other women feel ashamed of their feelings, their fears, their boundaries, their entire inner lives.

This is not about trans people. It is not about questioning the authenticity of someone’s self-perception. It is not about gender identity, or genitalia, or “being one’s true self”. It is about something far bigger than that. It is about the absolute patriarchal basics: power, shame, blame and control. It is about rape culture, domestic abuse, coercive control. It’s about all the things certain feminists claim to want to stop, then go on to reinforce.

When you recommend shaming a young woman for any potential discomfort – when you insinuate that it is somehow strange, rude, obsessive not to want to be in close proximity to the naked male bodies of strangers – you are doing what abusive men have always done to women and girls. Victims of sexual and domestic abuse endure years of shame not least because they are told that their very discomfort suggests something dark and manipulative about them. Stop dwelling on it. Maybe the reason you think about it so much is because you wanted it really. You love the drama, and the pain. You love the idea of yourself as a victim. What is a feminism that endorses this message all over again?

I think of it as a kind of abuser feminism, a feminism that replicates the tactics of those who hurt women the most. It’s a feminism that focuses on making women feel bad about feeling bad, as though this might lead to the ultimate cure for female suffering: that women just stop having feelings at all. If only women felt nothing – or, failing that, if only they could resolve never to acknowledge or express their own pain – then we might see an end to all the struggles. Come on, girls. Just give in.

Don’t cry; your tears are manipulative, deceptive, the weaponisation toxic femininity against people more vulnerable than you. Don’t speak; don’t be a Karen complaining to the manager, exploiting your experience of trauma to prop up carceral norms. Don’t acknowledge distress at the things that are done to and taken from your body; it’s all just penetration, just gestation, just meat, just nothing at all. Don’t respond to your own fears, your own panic, your own shame, in the face of any threat. This fear, this panic, this shame, make you a bad person. Perhaps you will never stop feeling. The least you can do is hide it, then no one knows how bad you are.

I grew up feeling like this, convinced I was a terrible person because of things that were done to me, because somehow, when I talked about them, I talked about them the wrong way, made it worse. Feminism was a refuge from this, until it wasn’t. I am furious at the cruelty of this current strand, with women – many of whom, I am guessing, did not grow up with the same shame – encouraging other women and girls to believe they are awful people. It taps into everything an abuser teaches you. It tells you, “no, he was right. How could you ever have thought there was an alternative view?”

The shonky raunch feminism of the nineties and early noughties told young women they could own their own objectification. We were taught that the way out of the bind we found ourselves in was to tell ourselves we’d chosen it all along. What we have now is worse. We are told to own our own abuse, become our own abuser. If someone exposes themselves to us, we must lecture ourselves on how perverted we are to have noticed. If someone rapes us, we must remind ourselves never to report (carceral feminism!) and never to tell (weaponisation of trauma!). Whatever happens to us, we are always the privileged bitch who might, potentially, exploit it; in that sense, every assault is another trump card. Every time our stomach tightens or our breath shortens, every time a freeze or flight response sets in, we have yet more physical evidence of how awful we are. For fuck’s sake, Karen. Who’d want to rape you? Or, if you are raped, well, so what? They’re going to do it anyway. Stop clutching those pearls.

This is a dismantling of the most basic principles of feminism: that women matter. That we have a right not to feel pain, and a right to express it when we do. That our voices and feelings are not shameful, dangerous, violent, cruel. That we do not, secretly, want all the things that are done to us to keep being done because deep down, trauma is just something us soulless bitches love to exploit.

I see women absorbing these lessons, believing there might be virtue, some ill-defined liberation, in following these heartless rules, never putting themselves first, but never putting other women first, either. Vying to be the best at not feeling anything, condemning those who foolishly slip up. It is so cruel, and so rooted in active dislike for women as people. It is also rooted in class privilege. The women who are charged with doing the most getting over themselves – the most denial of feelings – are not privately educated career feminists. They’re women in refuges, prisons, surrogacy hostels, brothels. Women who, presumably, aren’t always classy enough to know not to be “rude”. Thank god their betters are on hand to advise them.

As feminists, loving women is the most radical thing we can do. Telling them they are bad people is much easier. Feminism would indeed be a much easier project if women’s feelings didn’t matter. That’s not really feminism, though. Whatever this is, it really has to stop.