In a 2017 interview with Good Housekeeping, a woman called Kimberley Shappley described her initial response to having a male child who wanted to wear dresses and be a princess:

“I did everything I could think of to cut off that kind of talk. There were time-outs, so many time-outs. There were spankings and yelling matches and endless prayers. I even contacted the daycare Kai attended and asked them to put away every single ‘girl’ toy.”

It’s a story she repeated in various other outlets – the shouting, the exclusions, the physical assaults each time Kai asserted a desire to ‘be a girl’ (insofar as a three-year-old being brought up in a highly conservative family would understand ‘being a girl’). The narrative is meant to be one of learning and growth, although not, alas, in terms of how one might learn to not hit one’s child for any reason and to calm the fuck down about having a son who wants to be a Disney princess. It’s of how Shappley became an “accidental activist” by deciding her son was a girl all along, and that hence his true self ‘matched’ all of his mother’s prejudices. Problem solved! No more beatings required! (Although there would be plenty of other ways in which Kai’s body could be damaged, but what price a mother not having to deal with her own violence, sexism and homophobia?)

In an age which celebrated the ‘trans child’, Kimberley Shappley was permitted to present herself as someone who had seen the error of her ways, without having changed a single one of her original ideas about how a ‘real boy’ should behave or present. Along with Susie Green and Jeanette Jennings, Shappley did nothing to hide her bigotry or the way in which gender identity ideology allowed her to square the circle of maintaining her prejudices and ‘accepting’ her child, even at the expense of that child’s physical and mental wellbeing. These are stories of abuse, but no one is prosecuting these mothers. They’re stories of homophobic families medicalising their gender non-conforming sons – just as homophobic families have medicalised such children in years gone by – but no one is calling it conversion therapy. Instead, only those who point this out are being called names.

I’m not the first and won’t be the last to say that if the UK government were really committed to tackling conversion practices, they might want to address the transing of children who might otherwise grow up to be gay. As documented in Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think, many clinicians treating gender dysphoria have themselves been deeply concerned that they might be ‘transing the gay away’. But instead of acknowledging this particular form of conversion – or even not mentioning trans issues at all – the conversion practices draft bill lumps together sexual orientation and transgender identity, as though they are the same sort of thing. In this context, mothers such as Shappley, Green and Jennings are not “causing the individual (1) to have or not have, (ii) to believe they have or do not have, a sexual orientation” which the mother might find distasteful. They are affirming their children’s “transgender identity”. I still think it is abuse.

An abuse accusation is not something I would throw around lightly. One thing that has struck me when watching debates on the bill is the way in which the government’s approach – and that of defenders of the bill – manages to trivialise parental abuse both by ignoring it when it is happening and by seeing it when it is not there. Defenders have been completely unable to explain how a parent refusing to go along with a teenager’s belief that they are the opposite sex, or to buy them a binder, or to help them access ‘gender affirming’ care, would not constitute an offence if that teenager were to claim “serious harm” to their mental or physical health as a result. Any why wouldn’t they? Maybe they would really, truly experience it as that. As Helen Joyce has brilliantly argued, the bill does not, but should, distinguish between how adults treat each other and how parents or guardians treat children (“if my husband takes my phone away from me because he doesn’t want me contacting people, that’s coercive control. If I do that to my child, that may be responsible parenting”).

This failure to be clear about what really is abuse in the context of bringing up a child makes me quite angry not just in relation to debates about gender identity ideology. It shows a real lack of seriousness regarding what parental abuse is full stop. It plays into the hands of all abusive parents who really do like to tell themselves that ‘the state’ or ‘interfering do-gooders’ just want to prevent ‘loving parents’ from bringing up their offspring exactly as they choose. There are and should be limits on those ‘choices’ because parents have an inordinate amount of power over children. We need to take great care in defining what is and is not permissible within the confines of a family’s own culture or preferences. This bill, however, hasn’t tried at all. It doesn’t recognise that the level of a child’s distress at their parents’ actions is not necessarily a measure of whether the child is being unreasonably controlled. Some children do not experience or identity abuse as abuse at all because that is all they know; they might even think it is love. Others might experience ordinary boundaries as ‘abusive’ because outsiders are insisting they extrapolate to an insane degree. The abusive parent might like to tell him or herself that what is happening in his or her own home is just an example of the latter – if complaints are made, that’s because every child thinks everything is abuse these days.

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The BBC is making a documentary about JK Rowling, using her life as “a lens through which to explore three decades of profound social, political and technological change”. It will be split into two parts: Episode One will be Good Writer JK Rowling, who wrote lovely children’s books with a strong moral message, while Episode Two will be Evil TERF JK Rowling, who went completely mental and started advocating trans genocide.

Actually (and obviously) I made that last bit up. There are two parts, but it is expected that the supposed split will be presented a little more subtly. Rowling, we are told, “created a beloved global phenomenon and reshaped our cultural life before becoming one of Britain’s most polarising public figures”. Her “interventions on Scottish independence, feminism, free speech and gender identity” have placed her “at the centre of increasingly bitter online exchanges”, while “her unflinching personal beliefs have sparked a fraught and divisive dialogue that continues to this day”. Nothing in the promotional announcement is saying that Rowling is wrong per se, let alone evil. Even so, it still manages to imply that she is no longer one of the Good People. Words such as polarising, fraught, bitter, divisive, unflinching – they might be applied to “the debate” or “beliefs” or “exchanges”, but you know that they’re really supposed to attach to the woman herself.

There is a problem, I guess, with trying to create a radicalisation narrative out of someone continuing to believe the same stuff everyone else believed until five minutes ago (and most people still believe, even if some pretend not to). One might think it’s other people who’ve been radicalised, only you’re not allowed to say that. If you are a goodie – a nice, kind, inclusive person – you’re meant to think JK Rowling is bad. And if you can’t pinpoint the wrongness of her actual beliefs, your options are either to make stuff up (which plenty of people do, but probably a bit risky if you’re the BBC) or to point to the toxicity of the sex and gender debate and suggest it emerges, not from trans activists telling Rowling to die in a fire, but from Rowling just not shutting up. After all, she could do, couldn’t she? That’s what nice people do.

Just don’t think about it. Don’t say anything or, if you do, just recite the catechisms. Don’t be a mean, hard person who pisses on everyone’s party by asking the difficult questions. Okay, you might technically be right that female-only rape crisis centres ought to exist, or that medical experimentation on traumatised children isn’t a good idea, but honestly, why talk about that when you could kind of fudge things and suggest that trans activism is a kind of super-charged gay rights? Why mention male violence when you could be talking about rainbows? Why can’t you think nice thoughts?

There’s something about this that reminds me of the way in which family members or organisations respond to women and children who mention abuse. Even if you’re saying something everyone knows to be true, you’re still the bad person because you’ve started a conversation that everyone else would have been perfectly happy never to have had. You have “sparked a fraught and divisive dialogue”, as if the issues involved in said dialogue wouldn’t actually exist if you hadn’t named them. It gets to me as someone who’s experienced both varieties of this, always – whether it’s around the people I grew up with, or as someone involved in feminism – while wanting to be considered one of the nice people. Only you can’t be, not if to be a nice person means preserving the nice narrative. Trans activism and misogynistic beliefs in gender identity were a problem before JK Rowling said a single word about them. She cannot seriously be held responsible for real-world harms to trans people. She can be held responsible for making nice people uncomfortable and for some, that is the worst crime of all.

Watching this season’s The Celebrity Traitors, I’ve thought of how everyone seems warm and friendly and inclusive. I know they might well hate each other off-camera, but they put on a good performance of niceness. They make me and other people I’ve spoken to think it would be lovely to be in their club. Then I think “yes, but they’d probably hate me”.

Perhaps not at first. In my imaginary, highly improbable and narcissistic scenario in which the celebrity traitors all have some reason to get to know me personally, they might not have me marked down as one of the bitter, divisive, polarising people. Indeed, I might go to great lengths to showcase how opposed to prejudice I am. At first they’d consider me one of them, one of the goodies, totally oblivious to the fact that I am actually a total terf. The views I’d express on gender stereotyping would be completely at odds with what they might think a terf would believe. I might never actually mention the gender wars to them and for a long time, I’d count as nice. It does matter to me to count as nice.

It’s something I notice in real life, when I’m around ‘nice’ people who casually repeat trans activist arguments – arguments which, when I really think about it, and if they did, too, are quite offensive. Sometimes I find myself overly and unpleasantly aware of all the things I’m doing to show these people that in all other respects I am right there beside them on Team Nice. I check things off in my head (see, they can’t think you’re a fan a of Trump / someone who loves gender stereotypes / a homophobe because look, you’ve agreed with them!). It’s as if I think one day, should they discover that I do not think Rowling is evil – that actually, I think she’s right – they will revise their view of what a terf is. Because I’ve experienced the vicious, knee-jerk reaction to any woman who expresses the ‘wrong’ view on sex and gender so many times, I’m trying to gain credit before I’m ‘found out’. I know it is unlikely to work. People are incredibly invested in not engaging with gender critical arguments. They would rather decide that everything about a person that went before is a lie than that they’ve picked the side that’s doing the actual harm.

It’s irritating because in purely moral terms, I would say I (like so many feminists) spend rather a lot of time tolerating and making excuses for self-styled nice people who nevertheless think they can judge us the moment we question their position on gender identity. I try to be generous. Maybe they really do think it’s all about celebrating gender non-conformity. I’m giving these people a pass because yes, people can think different things for lots of different reasons. I still know from experience that they would condemn me in a way I’ve not condemned them. They can put their views in their email signature, whereas I’d never do that in a million years (not that I want to – I don’t think email signatures are the place for them). Still, it is never considered “divisive” or “polarising” for people to put pronouns in there; it’s only “divisive” and “polarising” to object. You are only considered to be making a point when it’s an inconvenient one.

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The concept of ‘treatment resistance’ for mental illnesses is a strange one. Faced with a patient who is not benefiting from whatever it is you are trying to do, the response is not to conclude that the treatment is inappropriate, or even that your understanding of the condition is flawed, but that their particular manifestation is ‘resistant’ to treatment. It creates the impression that the disorder is perfectly understood, but that this is a hardcore, super-charged version about which very little can be done.

I have a close relative with a ‘treatment resistant’ severe mental illness diagnosis. For years I didn’t really think about the impression the wording created, or about the oddness of continuing and even intensifying ‘treatments’ while simultaneously saying they weren’t working anyways. ‘Treatment resistance’ served as a justification to increase doses, take greater risks with side effects and create more and more dependency, as though one day it would all ‘break through’. Looking back, it was like shouting very loudly at a profoundly deaf person, or putting on a stupid accent for someone who speaks a completely different language. As Richard J Bentall writes in Doctoring the Mind, “instead of being taken as evidence that the drugs are ineffective, [poor outcomes] are interpreted as evidence that ever higher doses are required”, even in cases where side effects “can be threatening to health and sometimes the cause of premature death”.

It is very difficult to criticise this kind of thing, though. Indeed, a sufferer might embrace the designation. ‘Treatment resistant’ sounds hopeless, but it also sounds validating. It’s not casting doubt on how terrible you feel or how desperate things are. In such a situation, the only bad people are those who seek to leave a door open hope. By doing so, such people are trivialising your suffering, denying it its true status as every bit as bad as an incurable physical illness. ‘Treatment resistant’ sounds authentic, evidence-based, scientific, even if the checklist via which your particular diagnosis was reached was based on things that are a little more subjective. Once you are in the land of treatment resistance, no one is allowed to speak of such irrelevances as trauma, social relations or the possibility of a life that is endurable. All that becomes the equivalent of telling someone with terminal cancer to think positive and eat more greens. Even if the drugs that the treatment resistant person is prescribed risk causing premature death, so be it; the very fact he or she being prescribed them ‘proves’ there’s no other way.

This is how you can reach a point where telling a mentally ill person “yes, your life will never have value and might as well end” can be seen as an act of kindness. Although if someone were to tell you that your whole life it could be the thing that made you ill in the first place. When it comes to cause, effect and coercion, it’s important to get the timing right.

Last week the Canadian government voted to indefinitely exclude mental illness from its medical assistance in dying (MAID) programme. Like many people, I have mixed feelings about assisted suicide for terminal illnesses (don’t want people – myself included – to die prolonged, agonising deaths; think many assisted dying supporters vastly underestimate and misunderstand the nature of coercion and the broader social impact of any law change). Proposals to extend assisted dying to mental illnesses are just insane, though. I don’t see any nuance here. It’s simply creating a suicide service for suicidal people.

As has been the case with the UK debate about assisted dying for physical illnesses, a tactic of supporters has been to suggest that no one with any misgivings can have possibly witnessed a painful death, or know anyone who lives with the threat of such a thing. It’s reminded me of the way in which, whenever you criticise psychiatric treatments or mental illness diagnostic practices, there will be someone on hand to tell you that you’re just thinking of mild depression and can’t have met anyone with extreme, enduring psychosis, otherwise then you’d know. In both cases, this is nonsense. You can have witnessed all of these things and still believe that responses to them are wrong, even if they can be credited with validating the suffering itself. The problem isn’t that you don’t believe in the suffering. With mental illness in particular, the obsession with validation starts override both the possibility of hope and any willingness to look at the broader impact of ‘validating’ policy choices.

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“Regardless of the outcome in the Cornell civil lawsuit and the reopened criminal investigation, young women must take responsibility for their actions. Everyone at that Cornell party – including the alleged victim – made mistakes, from drinking too much to taking drugs to partaking in unwise sex. Why should the men involved be held to a higher standard?”

Ingrid Jacques USA TODAY

I wasn’t going to write anything about the Cornell University frat house rape investigation because I couldn’t think of much to say that hadn’t already been said. It reminded me of the Steubenville case of fourteen years ago, one that was (ridiculously) considered some kind of turning point in how victims, especially drunk ones, are treated. I didn’t think I could be more angry than I am whenever I think about such things, but it turns out I was wrong.

Somehow, a story about an alleged sexual assault involving seven male students and one alleged victim has turned into one about young women “taki[ng] responsibility for their actions”. That the woman involved did not behave like some imaginary perfect victim – that she did not even identify herself as a victim at first – is considered by some to be proof that women just aren’t owning their own mistakes. Want freedom, ladies? Gotta take the rough with the smooth. Allowing someone who’s been harmed to behave as though she’s been harmed is apparently a concession too far.

I am so tired of this absolute crap, which tells me so little has changed since I was at university in the nineties. Seven men taking turns on one woman, having advertised “free pussy” to their mates, is not everyone “partaking in unwise sex”. Men do not randomly decide to message women to apologise for “partaking in unwise sex”. Consenting to sex with two men, then finding yourself with seven, is not pretty much the same thing anyways. To portray this as a scenario of equally vulnerable, equally misguided people – when any man could have left at any moment, and that sole woman could not – is to pretend you know nothing whatsoever about human beings, how they behave when cornered, and what they might do in the aftermath.

If he is/they are going to do it anyway – if he/they have done it anyway - how do you preserve what little of yourself you have left? Why is it that raped women, abused girls, all traumatised female human beings magically become incomprehensible, totally unworthy of any understanding, when they respond to threat and its aftermath in the same way any male human being would? Why aren’t women accorded the sense of pride - the need to preserve one’s own self-image - that might lead them to deny abuse in the immediate aftermath?

It is not infantilising or hypocritical to note that someone who has been sexually abused may immediately respond by imposing a narrative on it which recasts it as chosen. When her abuser apologises, she may well say, no, I wanted it. Why not imagine a better version of it? It may take her time to drop this charade (which will then lead to her being accused of saying she now “regrets” something she chose freely, as if that makes any psychological sense. As if we’d all go through the humiliation of reporting a rape for something as trivial as regret).

Many women and girls don’t let go of the “I chose it” myth as quickly as the Cornell student did. I certainly didn’t. In the adolescent psychiatric unit where I spent a good part of 1987-88, many of the “promiscuous” girls I encountered were re-enacting the abuse which had led to them being there in the first place, “putting themselves at risk” (as the staff would call it) in order to “prove” they’d always been in control. Young victims of rape gangs have likewise been seen as having chosen to repeatedly return to abusers, leading to those who should have protected them to dismiss them as having “made bad choices”. The feeling that if you go back again and again, the last thing you experience will overwrite the first, making everything just what you wanted all along, can be very powerful. This is not women and girls being stupid or not “taking responsibility for their choices”. It is a rational, psychologically protective response when you believe – with good reason – that no one will protect you and it will happen again anyways, no matter what you do.

I write this not because I have a particular opinion on what should happen in the Cornell case. I don’t know if it meets a standard of proof for prosecution. Having seen the impact of cancel culture on people I care about, I can’t support attempts to get these men fired as a form of mob justice. I am just really furious about the efforts taken by some – including some who claim to be feminists – to turn this into a “well, women can’t have it both ways” scenario. I am furious about the insinuation that this is a situation in which a proper, grown-up woman would just brush herself down and not make a fuss, as if that’s how you prove you have agency, as if that’s not how women in violent marriages, girls being sexually abused in and outside the home, women and girls forced into the sex trade, have always been taught to respond. Don’t be a baby. Chalk it up to experience. Don’t give me that “I thought he’d kill me if I said no”. What kind of a pathetic loser are you? (There’s so much we tell ourselves is okay because we don’t want to feel like losers.)

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I’ve always felt uncomfortable about Labour’s pledge to “halve violence against women and girls in a decade”. Obviously the less violence there is, the better, and pledging to eradicate it completely is unrealistic. Still, there’s something about “halving it in a decade” that makes it sound as though there’s a compromise to be made regarding how much abuse women and girls should take. As if physical and sexual assault are inevitable outcomes of the world in which we live now and we can’t expect people to change too quickly. Whoever is doing this violence will have to wean themselves off it gradually. Can’t just go cold turkey! In the meantime, there’s a number of deaths women will just have to take.

I know that in practical terms, this is all one can hope for. I wonder, though, about the impact of saying it out loud, especially with the word ‘male’ missing from most statements on the topic. Reluctance to identify any perpetrator changes it from something some men choose to do --- and other men choose to ignore, downplay or exploit – into a thing that happens to women, something to which we’re susceptible, a problem to do with us and our vulnerability. It makes male violence feel like a natural phenomenon. Misogyny is free-floating and men have nothing to do with it, not really. Divorced from any radical feminist analysis of why men harm women and what they gain from it, ‘not being a victim of violence’ starts to feel like ‘wearing trousers’ or ‘getting a job in a previously male-dominated field’. It’s about who you are, not what he does.

Yvette Cooper avoids the word ‘male’ in announcing “a public health approach to the violence against women and girls epidemic”. The proposal is a good thing, but if I were a men’s rights activist reading it – or even just an average man – I’d see it as a benefit being offered to women as opposed to an indictment of how much smaller male violence makes women’s lives. The absence of ‘male’ makes it sound like breast cancer screening or maternity leave, things that women get offered because their bodies are different from men’s, not because anyone is choosing to make these bodies suffer in a particular way. Of course, one might add that when it comes to screening for women’s cancers these days, the word ‘women’ is often missing, whereas for male-specific cancers, the word ‘men’ is front and centre. When men are hurting women, though, they disappear from language.

Both phenomenon – gender neutralising language to avoid any positive (aka ‘exclusionary’) definition of ‘women’ (while maintaining a positive definition of ‘men’), followed by a shift to passive language when describing the harm men inflict on women – make a coherent analysis of male violence against women and girls impossible. We can’t talk about where these two groups stand in relation to one another and all of the things that maintain a hierarchy in which one exploits the other. We can’t talk about what all men gain from some men’s violence against women. We can’t imagine a world without male violence against women if we can’t even place it in the broader context of relations between women and men. We end up like “real feminist” Nicola Sturgeon who, when challenged on the Isla Bryson case, claimed that the risk to women was from “predatory men”. It’s only the predators who are predatory, only the violent men who are violent, only the rapists who rape.

There was a similar avoidance of male-mentioning when Minister for Women and Equality Bridget Philipson declared “we should come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who carries out violence against women”. Perhaps it’s a personal thing, but I hate this kind of chest-beating language. To me it sounds insincere – we’re, like, totally against the baddies! They’ll regret messing with us! – and especially ridiculous when unaccompanied by a refusal to specify who this “anyone” might be. The avoidance of the word ‘men’ in Philipson’s description of “the poisonous attitudes that blight women’s lives” is a strange mirror image of the avoidance of ‘women’ in articles on menopause or childbirth. Boasting of sending misogyny “back to the dark ages” just sounds silly. The problem is not that misogyny is old-fashioned. It is not a misunderstanding. It is part of a system in which men appropriate women’s labour and resources, one which, rather than attempting to eradicate it, many parts of the left are attempting to update and rebrand through prostitution and surrogacy. Philipson claims that “as a whole society, we can and must be better” – here, misogyny isn’t no one’s fault, but everyone’s! But it might as well be no one’s.

I understand the fear of making men feel as though they are being held collectively responsible for the crimes of a few (though not that much of a few). Liberal feminism sought to sell women’s liberation as something that would benefit men, too, without them having to give up a thing. You don’t have to give up your porn, your disproportionate leisure time, your expectation that there will be some womb, somewhere, ready to grow your progeny. Radical feminists were onto this. As Adrienne Rich wrote in Of Women Born, “it is all too evident that the majority of ‘concerned’ or ‘profeminist’ men secretly hope that ‘liberation’ will give them the right to shed tears while exercising their old prerogatives”. Ending male violence against women and girls would fundamentally change how non-violent men experience the world. They would not be able to use the (allegedly worse) violence of their political opponents as a threat to bring women into line. They would witness women truly taking up space and saying the word ‘no’ without fear of consequences. I don’t think this will ever happen but I think it should be imagined.

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It is almost eighteen months since the For Women Scotland judgment on the meaning of ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the 2010 Equality Act. At the time, responses of MPs tended to be a mix of the following:

1) Welcoming the ‘clarity’ brought by the judgment (a clarity they couldn’t have fought for themselves because reasons)

2) Volunteering to ‘respect’ the judgment (as if obeying what has been the law for the past fifteen years is optional, not to mention an act of great generosity)

3) Reaching out to trans and non-binary constituents (on the basis that adult human females being recognised in law must be deeply distressing)

4) Offering thanks to Trina Budge, Marion Calder and Susan Smith for stepping in and doing their job for them (just joking! It is a fact universally acknowledged that if women organise to protect sex-based rights this is evidence they are either privileged so don’t need rights, or funded by dark forces meaning whatever rights they want are bad ones. The only time it’s legitimate for women to organise to protect rights is when they’re not actually doing it, or something)

The judgment reflected what many MPs had, for years, been insinuating was the law anyways, apart from when it wasn’t, and anyhow, why were these women making such a fuss? If you suggested that it might still be useful to recognise that adult human females were a distinct class of people, with specific needs and rights to specific resources, you would be treated as though you were being churlish, if not a little paranoid. Of course people recognise sex-based rights! They just recognise other stuff on top of it, and overlaying one definition with another doesn’t take away the original definition. It just kind of adds to it! And besides, meanings change! Dazzled by the non-logic, you were supposed to think that not having a word for adult human females was fine, just as long as the word ‘woman’ still applied to someone. Protecting the word was important; the humans it originally described, not so much.

The ‘sex and gender issue’ was one that many MPs desperately wanted to fudge, largely because one side was completely illogical, only this side claimed to be on the right side of history and would trash your office and call you a Nazi if you didn’t do what they wanted. Meanwhile the other side were mainly middle-aged women, who were annoying because they were low-status, non-violent and kept asking questions you couldn’t answer (which you started calling “gotchas” to try to make the women look bad). It was hard to ignore the women completely, even as you chanted the trans activist slogans and sought to suppress the feeling that actually, this wasn’t really just like gay rights, only better. The women would write their books and articles, and organise their little speeches, and maybe you’d pretend to have listened by saying you recognised “people had strong feelings” (unlike your nuanced, measured self). You’d offer something about “more light, less heat” then suggest – as though no none else had ever thought of this – having “a proper conversation, away from all the shouting”.

Watching the way MPs of both sexes and all parties have behaved around this issue has been a lesson in the utter disrespect that many in these positions have for voters in general, and older women in particular. That many MPs have no interest in informing themselves about the things constituents might want to discuss is not especially surprising. The difference here the dishonesty and the willingness to smear those asking for help. Throughout the debate on the definition of ‘woman’ – which should never have been a debate – members of parliament have been staggeringly rude towards gender critical campaigners.

I do not believe anyone genuinely fails to see that respecting single-sex spaces and allowing gender self-ID are incompatible propositions, yet gender critical women have been told this incompatibility is all in their heads. Or rather, we have been told there is a solution, if only we would sit down and have the “proper conversation”, which apparently we haven’t been having for the past decade (women talking and analysing and making proposals isn’t a “proper conversation”. A “proper conversation”, as far as I have been able to work out, is women shutting up and accepting that single-sex spaces and resources can be mixed-sex spaces and resources at one and the same time. Quite why we don’t see this as a compromise is a mystery).

Intelligent women have been treated as though they are stupid. Well-informed women have been treated as though they are obsessive. Principled women have been smeared as bigots. Left-wing women have been told they are right-wing, and right-wing women have been told they are fascists. Lifelong feminist campaigners have been told they are in league with abusive men. Most of these women have been incredibly patient on the basis that trying to get their point across is more important than taking offence. The rudeness matters, though. There is a problem when so many of those close to power would behave in this way.

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The Commander’s Wife hurries in, in her ridiculous white cotton nightgown, her spindly legs sticking out beneath it. Two of the Wives in their blue dresses and veils hold her by the arms, as if she needs it; she has a tight little smile on her face, like a hostess at a party she’d rather not be giving. She must know what we think of her. She scrambles onto the Birthing Stool, sits on the seat behind and above Janine, so that Janine is framed by her: her skinny legs come down on either side, like the arms of an eccentric chair.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Of course Lena Dunham would buy a baby one day. It’s the inevitable conclusion to the ‘millennial feminism’ story. By which I don’t mean ‘the feminism of any woman born between the years 1981-96’. I mean the online, celebrity-soaked, cancellation-fixated ‘feminism’ of fifteen or so years ago. Earlier this year many were declaring its demise at the publication of Dunham and Lindy West’s memoirs, but no, it’s this. Rich woman rents out the womb of poorer woman in order to acquire offspring. A ‘happy ending’ of sorts.

Reading Dunham’s description of the birth of her baby to order, I found myself thinking of both the birth scene and the ‘ceremony’ in The Handmaid’s Tale:

Above me, towards the head of the bed, Serena Joy is arranged, outspread. Her legs are apart, I lie between them, my head on her stomach, her pubic bone under the base of my skull, her thighs on either side of me.

The Handmaid’s Tale

I sat on a hospital bed, between the legs of a woman I hadn’t known a year ago, waiting for a glimpse of this person who I had been waiting for with something related to patience, but also none at all.

‘Lena Dunham Is a Mother! The Sweet, Singular Story of How She Prepared’, Vogue

It’s not quite the same thing, I know – and maybe it’s just the mention of legs – but there’s that sense of intrusion on the body of the woman you’re exploiting, as if somehow, with enough magical thinking, she might as well be you. Millennial feminism was big on The Handmaid’s Tale but as I and others noted at the time, it seemed eager to bypass the surrogacy side of the story, instead deciding Offred’s plight should only be linked to the threat to abortion rights. Apparently, beyond the world of fiction, there was no growing, monstrous trend of wealthy women insisting that with enough power and privilege, they could claim ownership to the life growing inside another woman’s body. Because choice (although as Offred herself writes, “nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose”).

I write this not as a seasoned Dunham hater. I’ve never been that taken with her writing – there’s something about her ‘honesty’ that feels confected to me, as though she’s decided what to feel before feeling it – but I watched and liked the first two episodes of ‘Girls’ (I was on a plane – I would have watched more but don’t think I had access to the right TV channels back home). Hannah’s ‘voice of a generation’ statement seemed so obviously mocking and self-aware – of course you’re meant to think she’s being a wanker! – that I couldn’t believe all the ‘Dunham thinks she’s the voice of a generation’ takes that followed. That said, I’m not sure I’d have ever defended her. I saw her being hounded for not being sufficiently pure and inclusive at a time when most feminists I knew seemed to be struggling to decide whether to be meek, privilege-checking, #DoBetter types or to say “hang on, this is all starting to feel pretty sexist” (I did the first for a bit but could only hold out for so long). So I might have tweeted one or two mean things about her because everyone else was doing it, before deciding everyone else was an arsehole (but not me, obviously).

During the height of ‘that kind of feminism’, famous women, especially those who’d aligned themselves with feminism, were being shamed online every week. Their infractions could be incredibly minor. They were privileged, entitled, oblivious. Being famous meant they had a platform which they were obliged to use responsibly to elevate others. The slightest misstep constituted ‘punching down’. In her 2014 essay ‘Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars’, Michelle Goldberg described how “the expectation that feminists should always be ready to berate themselves for even the most minor transgression … creates an environment of perpetual psychodrama”. She also noted that “preening displays of white feminist abjection … are not the same as respect”. There was nothing, really, that someone like Dunham could do right. Everyone would know that your latest apology for your latest sin had been forced, so no one believed it anyways. By 2017 ‘Lena Dunham apologising’ had even become “a hilarious meme on Twitter” (if you’re the kind of person who finds bullying people, then ridiculing them for doing exactly what you’ve demanded of them, hilarious).

Watching this – especially if you were a non-famous feminist who’d finally fallen off the ‘trying to be perfect’ wagon – it was hard not to think “just tell them all to fuck off, Lena!” It’s something I routinely think about quite a lot of famous women who’ve ended up trying to please a crowd who see virtue in never being satisfied (see also: Taylor Swift). With Dunham, you could see how trying to please the online scolds – the self-declared experts on sex, gender, race and power, many of whom were bog-standard white middle-class men with fancy pronouns – put the brakes on her capacity to tell the kind of jokes and make the kind of observations that she’d started out with. Why bother if you know they’re going to be misunderstood? How can you write or say anything risky without hearing the hot take misrepresentation that will follow? As Sarah Ditum wrote following release of her series ‘Too Much’, “Dunham has got warier”:

“… In her 20s, she was a blazing talent, and she was despised for it — ripped apart by well-intentioned liberal girlies pouring the petrol of righteousness on their own jealousy. That girl-on-girl violence broke her in some ways.”

She threw her lot in with a ‘feminism’ that doesn’t particularly like women, one which was obsessed with privilege-shaming yet never achieved the objective of elevating the most marginalised women. It was a feminist that prioritised identity over class while claiming to tackle both at once. What I find ironic now, though, is that however much it demonised women like Dunham, in other ways it let them win. A woman who’s been privileged shamed doesn’t become any less privileged, even if you’ve made her feel bad. The worst thing about Serena Joy wasn’t that she had a TV show.

Dunham’s Vogue article is mainly about ‘preparing’ for the birth of her child by choosing lots of fancy baby clothes. It doesn’t feel very convincing to me, more a chosen hook with some feelings retroactively tacked on. It’s the kind of thing which should have driven the online feminist privilege-shamers insane, at least if they’d ever been serious about wanting to take down a ‘feminism’ that entrenches hierarchy and exploitation by allowing a tiny minority of women to use others to get what they way. Obsessing over baby clothes while commissioning someone else to produce a baby is fine, though. ‘Inclusive’ feminism isn’t anything to do with female bodies anyways.

The way in which sex denialism slotted into millennial feminism’s bogus attack on privilege has obviously benefited men, but it has also benefited wealthy women by masking their protection from the reproductive and sexual exploitation of other women. Denying the salience of sex difference – and sneering at others, as Sophie Lewis does in Full Surrogacy Now, for being fixated on “the inside of a woman’s body” and “explicitly linking the violence of surrogacy not only with sex work but with transfeminine identity” – repackages privilege denial as a kind of ultra-sophisticated refinement of privilege awareness (you’d only get it if you were really clever and asking too many questions is a mark of intellectual and moral inferiority). Focussing too much on the female body – or on the female body at all – would mark you out as regressive, conservative, spoilt. Trans activism, according to a 2023 account of millennial feminism, posed a “major challenge” to the feminism of “Dunham and [Amy] Schumer”: “by continuing to proceed as normal, they risked aligning themselves with the growing trans-exclusive radical feminist (TERF) movement that seemed to champion vaginas over everything else”. Who’d want to do that? How perfect that ceasing to care about the extent to which patriarchy exploits the bodies of poorer women as female humans marks you out as a better, not worse, person yourself.

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On the first day of our family holiday in Wales, the government sent out its severe alert regarding UK wildfires. The Welsh language version arrived several minutes before the English (though ‘severe alert’ was in English, just to keep us on our toes). Until that point I’d been thinking about how the wooden chalets where we were staying reminded me of those in Sarah Moss’s Summerwater. Following the alert, my thoughts turned to dying in an apocalyptic version of a novel I wasn’t even sure I liked. Not knowing what the ‘severe’ thing was, I felt we should at least be in a room that wasn’t near any windows (there was no such room). I sat on one of the beds and concentrated on panicking, in the hope that this would ‘earn’ me some kind of reprieve.

Had I had any presence of mind, I’d have put the message into google translate. My partner did this, which means my panic can’t have lasted very long at all. At the same time one of my sons was messaging his friends back home to ask what it meant (naturally they told him it meant he had to light a barbeque). Once the panic was over, I checked online to see if anyone else had been freaked out by only receiving the message in Welsh. It turned others had, prompting yet others to lecture them on how it was their own stupid fault for being monolingual. My annoyance at this – I speak several languages! I have a PhD in German! I’ve spent most of my career working in languages! – did at least distract me from feeling scared. I wondered whether, come the real apocalypse, I’d die screaming “well, do you have a fucking GCSE in Esperanto?” (though to be fair, Welsh would have been more useful, not just in that particular situation).

Perhaps I was more panicked than the rest of my family because I’d recently finished reading Annie Jacobsen’s Biological War: A Scenario, the follow-up to her equally terrifying Nuclear War: A Scenario. Presumably AI Apocalypse: A Scenario is in the pipeline, providing publishing schedules can get ahead of the actual AI apocalypse deadlines (at least the nuclear and biological threats don’t seem to be quite as precise as “before the end of this decade”). Naturally my partner and sons wonder why I read such things, given their effect on me. Partly it’s a kind of morbid curiosity. I try to plot out what I would do to survive (before deciding there isn’t anything, though maybe I should stock up on tinned goods all the same). Partly it’s thinking that if I know the very worst things that could happen, they won’t actually take place. This trick gets less powerful the older I get. There are too many times when I’ve told myself not to be such a drama queen, only for the thing I’ve been fearing to happen in exactly the way I imagined it would. Being aware isn’t being protected. At the same time it’s not as though I can do anything practical. Jacobsen’s books are full of quotes from people right at the very centre of decision-making, fully aware of what is at stake, many of them terrified, yet unable, it seems, to make things any safer.

Yet reading about the latest apocalyptic threat, I always get the sense that ignorance would be dishonourable. These are the things you “should know”, warnings you “should heed”, even if there isn’t any exact guidance on where all this knowing and heeding ought to lead. At times I detect something quite smug, almost snobbish, in the messaging, yet this doesn’t stop me from finding it shaming. There you are, trudging along in your little life, worrying about all those trivialities – work, bills, loved ones, illnesses and deaths in strictly single figures – when actually, the entire human race is at threat. Sure puts your petty concerns into perspective! What’s the point of your thoughts of the future now? There’s the sense in which no matter which form of annihilation gets to us first – environmental, biological, nuclear, AI-driven, probably a mixture of all at once – it will be because we all had our backs turned, stupidly obsessing over the minutiae of everyday life (too busy being unimportant!). As if somehow this makes us deserve it and the absolute least we can do now is think about it all the time, ideally while frozen by fear.

I’m really good at this. I wish it served some actual purpose.

As a child of the eighties I was generally ignorant of politics. I knew of the miners’ strike, the Falklands War, the Brighton Bombing and Greenham Common, but not in ways that made any particular sense. I’d try to connect things up based on domestic life, which made me assume that the miners’ strike and Greenham Common were a kind of “his and hers” deal, and that Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot were in some sort of rocky, sitcom-like marriage. By the end of the decade I was sufficiently aware of environmental issues to write to Thatcher expressing my worries about the greenhouse effect (to which I did get a response, claiming that Mrs Thatcher very much appreciated my thoughts about planting more trees). But all in all, I assumed political stuff was beyond me.

The first political event that really gripped me was the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’d just started learning German and I’m sure it’s what led me to become so immersed in the language and culture. To me it looked beautiful, positive, hopeful. I romanticised it, not always considering the complexities. In the mid nineties I spent a year in Sachsen Anhalt – of current ‘fallen to the far right’ ‘fame’ – and I did then start to notice that I’d be moved to tears by events which left people who’d actually grown up in the GDR distinctly dry eyed. Nonetheless, I retained a sense that I’d started to notice the world at just the right time. I used to think what a relief it was that I’d been oblivious to the Cold War – with what little awareness I had coming from watching the videos for Genesis’ ‘Land of Confusion’ and Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’ on Top of the Pops – to actually worry about nuclear war. Why, had I known what was really happening, I’d never have slept!

Decades later, I find myself talking to my sons about threats to humanity in the same way I might talk to them about TV channels or dinosaurs. Back in my day, there were only a few that you knew about. Now there are just too many to categorise. If I were a character in a children’s book from years ago – “mum who thinks the world is about to end and worries we should be storing tuna and baked beans under the stairs” – I’d be a comic or tragic figure. Today, though, I see headlines that make me wish I was the crazy one. I have not read all of Gerard Baker’s piece in today’s Times ‘Be afraid: everything is escalating out of control’ (subhead: ‘From the planet’s two major wars to the threat of AI, there’s a logic to this ratchet with little real leadership to stop it’). Apparently, “if you aren’t alarmed yet, you should be”. It’s a tone I hate. I am alarmed! But what good is my alarm right now? The level of fear that really, truly believing in these articles provokes is the kind that might make you want to believe conspiracy theories, so long as they’re telling you that none of it’s real. It’s not that I believe people should take no interest in politics or responsibility for making change. I absolutely think we should. At this point, though, it seems to tip over into causing deep distress while suggesting – maybe it’s just me, but I definitely feel it – that the naivety of people just living their lives, even doing good things, somehow led us here. What is the psychological cost of articles like Baker’s, given that it’s unlikely Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin will be reading them and experiencing the requisite alarm? I can’t help feeling the people who need to feel these things the most feel them the least, and vice versa.

If you could bottle existential panic, and it served any actual function in preventing disaster, I could make a fortune (although I wouldn’t actually make a fortune, as that would be morally reprehensible. I’d give my panic away for free, then bask in the knowledge I’d saved the human race). It doesn’t do any good though. I can’t bear thinking my sons might not have a future (but god, how selfish to think of one’s own children. If only one could focus on everything and everyone, always, all the time). There has to be a point at which you’re permitted to push panic away, not because you don’t believe threats are real, but because constantly dwelling on them is psychologically ruinous. There has to be hope, rather than what I’m increasingly coming to think of as hope-shaming (look at you, with your silly little belief that things might yet be okay!).

If an AI Apocalypse book comes out, I probably will read it. I suspect I won’t be able to stop myself. If the requirement is to be alarmed, believe me, I’m right there. Plenty of people are. I’m just not sure insufficient fear is really the problem.

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A central tenet of the never-ending backlash against feminism is that feminists are hypocrites. They might say they want equality – to be treated exactly the same as men – but actually, they just want to have it both ways. One minute they’re saying women are strong, the next they’re claiming they’re vulnerable. One minute they’re demanding inclusion in male-dominated spheres, the next they’re insisting on having their own spaces and boundaries. One minute they’re saying a female body doesn’t make you a workplace liability, the next they’re wanting time off for maternity leave. Women, eh? Picking and choosing when and where the similarities with male human beings start and end! Don’t they realise that either you’re a completely different species – fit only for domesticity and/or sexual objectification – or you’re a small, penis-less man?

Obviously this argument is rubbish, rooted in the conflation of sex and gender beloved of traditional patriarchs and adopted wholesale by their more ‘progressive’ counterparts (the ones who tell us that even the slightest acknowledgement of sex difference reduces women to tradwives). Feminists sometimes stress sex difference because sometimes it does matter. As Caroline Criado Perez demonstrates so brilliantly in Invisible Women, ignoring the differences that matter entrenches inequality. ‘Feminists want it both ways’ treats structures which favour male bodies and lifecycles as a norm to which feminists claim to aspire, only to say ‘but not like that!’ as soon as they find they don’t fit. Except the ‘not like that!’ is entirely legitimate when one is dealing not with a human norm, but a default male model. It does not mean feminists want women to have ‘special treatment’ rather than fairness, or that differences which are socially constructed are ‘actually’ just as real and immutable as biological sex. Physical vulnerability (the fact that women are smaller and not as strong as men) does not equate to physical inferiority (women live longer than men and gestate and birth every single human). That men have claimed spaces for themselves on the basis of imagined intellectual superiority does not mean that women have claimed spaces for themselves on the basis of imagined threats. Male violence is real; female intellectual inferiority is not.

If that sounds like picking and choosing, it is because both the traditional and the ‘progressive’ misogynist line has been that you can only be entirely different or entirely the same. In both cases, this leads to people talking nonsense about what women are. Idiotic arguments – such as “how can women claim to be strong and play the victim?” when women say “no” to men who want to enter female-only spaces, or “how can women say men are a threat when they want us to protect them?” when the thing from which women want protection is other men – rely on the idea that women either pretend to be vulnerable (in order to manipulate or exclude) or pretend to be strong (in order to mask their inferiority). It can’t possibly be that weak and strong mean different things at different times, and that difference must always imply hierarchy. Yet the difficulty of stressing this – the fact that the conflation of sex and gender is so ingrained, and that pointing out nuance can sound a bit of a swizz – means that some feminists just don’t try. A friend of mine once found herself castigated by a certain coterie of very online US feminists for suggesting that breakdown services ought to prioritise lone women. This was reinforcing the ‘myth’ that women are ‘helpless’. A similar line is often used against women having female-only sports, as though admitting that women cannot beat male records in the 100m is ‘admitting’ that women are ‘biologically inferior’. Of course, these arguments do not make lone women in broken down cars any safer, or make women run any faster. It merely justifies a failure to provide resources specifically for women on the basis that female difference cannot be anything other than female inferiority.

The ‘feminists want it both ways’ argument has been out in full force of late, in response to the Lindsay Clancy trial. Apparently, recognising that a tiny minority of women suffer from a form of psychosis from which men do not suffer – and that this suffering is real – is basically the same as admitting that all women are crazy bitches at the mercy of their hormones, ready to kill their children at any time. I’ve lost count of the number of arguments I’ve seen – some from women I considered fellow feminists – along the lines of women have fought for years not to be considered irrational, insane, hysterical, yet here they are, feeling sorry for Clancy, even admitting that many of them had intrusive thoughts postpartum. Can’t have it both ways, ladies! You’re only ever allowed to go insane in the exact same ways men go insane, or else you’re basically saying all women are potentially insane because they’re women, and therefore women shouldn’t be allowed any positions of responsibility ever! I am not joking about the positions of responsibility bit.

It is being claimed – by misogynists who’ve always wanted to claim this anyways, and some women who genuinely seem to believe that this is what is at stake – that the Clancy trial is a judgement on whether women are too emotionally unstable to have basic rights.

This is because when men go mad and kill loads of people – which they do far more often than women – that is just ‘people’ going mad and killing loads of people. When women suffer from postpartum psychosis, this is all about female hormones and the fragile female mind – at least, if you’re going to suggest Clancy isn’t full-on evil.

This drives me mad – in a non-hormonal way – for several reasons. One of the ironies of the supposed ‘horror’ at women empathising with Clancy is that these women aren’t all desperate to kill their kids; they think killing kids is a bad thing and should be prevented. Similarly, feminists tend to think male violence is a bad thing and should be prevented. Yet when we suggest, however tentatively, that socialisation could play a role, the same men wanting to deny women the vote are all for hormones and biological essentialism when it’s their violence that’s in question. It’s testosterone! Men are natural aggressors! Can’t do anything about it, therefore it would be outrageous to deny men the vote or the power to start wars or any form of responsibility whatsoever on the basis they might lose it one day and kill someone! Asking men to calm the fuck down is trying to ‘feminise’ them (because women aren’t violent. Except when they are, which is so significant all women should lose all rights in response to it).

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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.

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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?

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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.

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“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).*

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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?

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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?

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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”.

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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”.

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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.

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