It is a doctrine that has become highly influential. The American Medical Association in 2023 laid down “best practices for sex and gender diversity in medical education.” Medical students are to be taught that both sex and gender are “[socially] constructed.” And “it is appropriate to affirm each individual’s self-determination regarding both sex and gender labels.” But are “male” and “female” really social constructs like money or like our 12-month calendar? Is that really the considered view of the American Medical Association? Are we seriously training a generation of young doctors to think that the sex of a patient is a matter of individual choice, not objective anatomical and physiological reality?

There are welcome auguries that the fashion is finally on the wane, at least in Britain. It is to be hoped that, in America, it will soon go the way of McCarthyism. The otherwise loathsome President Trump made the upholding of biological maleness and femaleness the subject of an Executive Order, as one of his first actions after taking office (perhaps the only good thing he has ever done). I could imagine future lawsuits against surgeons who, in violation of the first clause of the Hippocratic oath, have cut off the breasts of girls below the age of consent for no better reason than a subsequently regretted claim to have been “assigned” the wrong sex. What, after all, does “below the age of consent” mean if not too young to make permanent, life-changing decisions?

Two and only two sexes

How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes? Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? Sir Ed Davey, leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, is of the opinion that women “quite clearly” can have a penis. Words are our servants, not our masters, and he might claim that it’s open to him to say, “I define a woman as anybody who self-identifies as a woman; therefore, a woman can have a penis.” That is logically unassailable in the same way as “I define ‘flat’ to mean what you call ‘round’; therefore, the world is flat.” I think it’s clear that if we all descended to that level of sophistry, rational discourse would soon dig itself into the desert sand.

The question is whether a particular redefinition is helpful for any constructive purpose. The flat Earth example clearly is not. It’s simply perverse. How about the redefinition of woman (or man)? I shall make the case that the redefinition of a woman as capable of having a penis, if not downright perverse, is worse than unhelpful. I shall advocate instead what I shall call the universal biological definition (UBD) based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD because it’s the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms and all the way through evolutionary history.

Gametes come in two radically different sizes, the phenomenon of anisogamy. Female gametes are very much larger than male gametes, and that is how biologists define female and male. A human egg contains at least ten thousand times as much matter as a human sperm. In ostriches, the discrepancy is obviously even greater, by a very large amount. The UBD is universal in the sense that it applies to all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate. All plants, too, unless you count algae as plants.

The UBD has the virtue that, in addition to being universally applicable, it explains a diverse load of facts. And it’s grounded in a body of powerful and widely illuminating theory. Here’s how. It’s an argument that should appeal to economists. In the words of R.A. Fisher (1930), “In organisms of all kinds, the young are launched upon their careers endowed with a certain amount of biological capital derived from their parents.” When two gametes unite to make a zygote, they must, between them, provide this requisite quantity of expensive nourishment. In a fair and equitable world, you might expect the two parents to contribute equally, each bearing half the necessary costs. Such a system is known as isogamy. It doesn’t exist in animals and plants but can be found in some microorganisms and algae. Clever mathematical modeling by various scientists, including Geoffrey Parker of the University of Liverpool, indicates that, under plausible conditions, isogamy is unstable. It tends to be replaced, in evolutionary time, by its opposite, anisogamy: two different kinds of gamete, radically different from one another.

Imagine you are an individual in an isogamous system. If you produce slightly larger than average isogametes, each zygote will be better endowed and therefore more likely to survive. On the other hand, since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, you can only afford to make fewer zygotes. Conversely, by stinting on gamete size, you could contribute to making a larger number of zygotes, but they’d be poorly endowed and less likely to survive. Unless, that is, your smaller-than-average isogametes could somehow seek out larger-than-average isogametes to partner with.

Parker and others developed plausible models whereby, over evolutionary time, half the individuals produce gametes in ever-decreasing numbers but ever-increasing size. These gametes eventually evolve into eggs. The other half goes in the other direction. They evolve smaller and smaller gametes in larger and larger numbers, which eventually become sperms. You could, if you wish, say that the sperm producers exploit the egg producers. Or you could say that, being more valuable, eggs don’t have to go out of their way to seek sperms. They can just sit and wait to be approached. Sperms, therefore, evolved miniature outboard motors (waving tails) with which to actively seek out eggs. Both types, the macrogamete producers and the microgamete producers, flourish in the presence of the other.

The fundamental economic inequality of anisogamy illuminates a large number of biological phenomena, thereby justifying my claim that the UBD does lots of explanatory work. If you define females as macrogamete producers and males as microgamete producers, you can immediately account for the following facts:

1. In mammals, it’s the females that gestate the young and secrete milk.
2. In those bird species where only one sex incubates the eggs, or only one sex feeds the young, it is nearly always the females.
3. In those fish that bear live young, it is nearly always the females that bear them.
4. In those animals where one sex advertises to the other with bright colors, it is nearly always the males.
5. In those bird species where one sex sings elaborate or beautiful songs, it is always the male who does so.
6. In those animals where one sex fights over possession of the other, it is nearly always the males who fight.
7. In those animals where one sex has more promiscuous tendencies than the other, it is nearly always the males.
8. In those animals where one sex is fussier about avoiding miscegenation, it is usually the females.
9. In those animals where one sex tries to force the other into copulation, it is nearly always the males who do the forcing.
10. When one sex guards the other against copulation with others, it is nearly always the males that guard females.
11. In those animals where one sex is gathered into a harem, it is nearly always the females.
12. Polygyny is far more common than polyandry.
13. When one sex tends to die younger than the other, it is usually the males.
14. Where one sex is larger than the other, it is usually the males.

In all cases, the key is economics: large gametes cost more than small ones. In various ways, this inequality plays out. Large gametes are more precious, more worth guarding, more worth fighting for, more worth protecting against wastage through mating with the wrong species or wrong individual.

It is no idle whim, no mere personal preference, that leads biologists to define the sexes by the UBD. It is rooted deep in evolutionary history. The instability of isogamy, leading to extreme anisogamy, is what brought males and females into the world in the first place. Anisogamy has dominated reproduction, mating systems, and social systems for probably two billion years.

Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices, and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy. One sex produces gametes that are much smaller, and much more numerous, than the other. That is all ye know of sex differences and all ye need to know, as Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he’d been an evolutionary biologist.

Here are some apparently anomalous examples that test (the true meaning of “prove” in the proverb) the rule. Unlike most mammals, spotted hyena females are larger than males and socially dominant over them. They have a hugely enlarged clitoris, scarcely distinguishable from a penis. They can get erections. They have false testes made of fatty tissue. The sight of apparently male hyenas giving birth has given rise to numerous myths of hermaphroditism. Given that so many roles and signals are reversed or ambiguous, how can we even know what we’re talking about when we use the words “male” and “female” in describing the anomalies of hyenas? By the UBD, of course.

Many species of fish are livebearers. As listed above, it is usually the female who gets pregnant. But in seahorses, it’s the male, in the sense that he has a pouch for holding the fertilized eggs, and he gives birth from his pouch. How do we know it’s the male? Couldn’t we define the female as the one that gets pregnant? We could, but then, “In seahorses, it’s the female who gets pregnant” becomes a tautology that leads nowhere.

Some worms and snails, and many plants, are simultaneous hermaphrodites. They are capable of producing both micro- and macro-gametes. Not a problem: the UBD is easily applied, and sex remains binary. The earthworm has organs appropriate to both sexes defined by gamete size. Enthusiasts for fluidity of “gender” love anemone fishes, also known as clown fishes. They, along with many other creatures, are sequential hermaphrodites. The largest, most dominant fish in a group of clownfish is female. If she dies, the dominant male becomes female. But what does that even mean? By what definition of male and female? On the UBD, it’s very simple. When the dominant egg-producer dies, the largest sperm producer starts to produce eggs instead.

Relative gamete size is the only way in which the male/female distinction is defined universally across all animal phyla. All other ways to define maleness versus femaleness are bedeviled by numerous exceptions. Especially with respect to the sex chromosomes, where you can’t even speak of a rule, let alone exceptions to it.

The way the sexes are defined (the UBD, universal and without exception) is separate from the way an individual’s sex is determined during development (variable and far from universal). How we, in practice, recognize the sex of an individual is yet a third question, distinct from the other two. In humans, one look at a newborn baby is nearly always enough to clinch it. Even if it occasionally isn’t, the UBD remains unshaken.

Gender

A watered-down version of the ideology concedes that sex may be binary, but “gender” is not. The word gender enters the discourse trailing clouds of confusion. To grammarians, gender is clear. It is a classification of nouns by how adjectives and pronouns agree with them. French nouns fall into two genders, English and German nouns into three. Kivunjo, according to Steven Pinker, has fifteen genders. French genders could have been named A and B (la table, le tapis), English and German genders A, B, and C. As it happens, all males belong in gender B, all females in gender A, and that same neat separation occurs in most languages. It is, therefore, convenient to use “feminine” and “masculine” as names for two of the genders, rather than A and B. This perfect correlation permits the use of “gender” as a coy euphemism for sex. Alex Byrne, in Trouble with Gender, and Kathleen Stock, in Material Girls, both make valiant attempts to sort out the confusion. In the mind of this reader, accustomed to scientific standards of rigor, the confusion remains. Stock herself sensibly tries to avoid the term, replacing it with “concrete, clearer terms that do whatever jobs I want them to at the time.” For the same reason, gender is not a word I normally use except in the grammarian’s sense. If you want to speak French properly, you really do need to respect every noun’s preferred pronoun.

The current fashion for transsexualism belongs in a cluster of inter-related vogues, sometimes called “woke,” partly stemming from a sincere concern for social justice, largely well-meaning but misguided and scientifically ill-informed. The cluster includes “identitarianism” and the view that alternative “ways of knowing” (women’s ways of knowing, indigenous ways of knowing, personal lived experience) are just as valid as objective science in understanding nature.

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Is this the end of genderism?

By Kathleen Stock

Transsexualism has strictly no necessary connection to whether sex is “binary” or a continuously varying spectrum, although, in practice, the same people are often partisan with respect to both. Those of us who argue that there is no spectrum of intermediates between male and female — that sex is “binary” — should not be seen as threatening to transsexualism. Whether or not there are “intersexes” with ambiguous genitalia, or abnormal sex chromosomes, is irrelevant to transsexualism because no trans person claims to be intersex. A trans woman insists that she actually is a woman; a trans man, that he actually is a man. Neither claims to be hermaphrodite. Rather, the claim is a psychological one. There’s a disjunct, or so it is claimed, between a person’s biological sex and the gender that they feel themselves to be.

There are many dimensions along which human personality can be measured. They might include assertiveness, ambition, empathy, aggressiveness, selfishness, methodicalness, volatility, perseverance, affection, bossiness. A mathematician might see each person as situated in a multidimensional space defined by these dimensions. We are all amateur psychologists who gossip about each other. Without being mathematicians, we implicitly classify each other along dimensions such as those I have listed. Perhaps there is a psychological dimension of masculinity/femininity, which is more or less correlated with some of the other dimensions listed. In defiance of much hard-won feminist progress, you might invoke sexual stereotypes in an implicit invocation of such a dimension. “Cecil is effeminate. Ros is butch. Lizzy is a tomboy; she doesn’t like dolls, loves climbing trees, and plays with wheeled toys.”

We can situate ourselves along such personality dimensions, including the perceived dimension of masculinity/femininity. We may even go so far as to wish we had been born the opposite sex. We might phrase it as being trapped inside the wrong body. It’s a version of dualism, a belief in a kind of disembodied soul, the real you, who is of a different sex or gender from the body in which the “real” you lurks. If that is how you are inclined, it might take little encouragement from the surrounding culture to push you over the edge into full-fledged belief. And today’s surrounding culture — doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, political leaders, lawyers, and perhaps above all school friends — gives more than a little push. Sex “assigned at birth” is arbitrary, we are told, and you only discover whether the real you is male or female by introspection.

An early account of what it is like to feel you are trapped in the wrong body is Jan Morris’s Conundrum. As what she called a “true transsexual,” she had little time for “the poor castaways of intersex, the misguided homosexuals, the transvestites, the psychotic exhibitionists, who tumble through this half-world like painted clowns, pitiful to others and often horrible to themselves.”

A feeling of being in a body of the wrong sex seems to be a real psychological condition. Such “dysphorics” can feel genuine distress. When anorexics look in the mirror, they see an emaciated body that they think is too fat. “Gender” dysphorics look in the mirror and see the wrong genitals. Both deserve sympathy and understanding. Nobody is phobic about anorexics. Why should anyone be phobic about gender dysphorics? “Trans- phobia” is a pernicious fiction.

Partly influenced by Jan Morris and partly out of normal politeness, it is my custom to refer to people by their preferred pronouns. But I draw the line at the belligerent slogan, “Trans women are women,” because it is scientifically false, a debauching of language, and because, when taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women. It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons, and so on. So powerful has this “postmodern” counterfactualism become that newspapers refer to “her penis” as a matter of unremarked routine. Even the Times, Britain’s traditional newspaper of record, could begin an article (Jan. 18, 2023) with these words: “A transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis as she went on trial at the High Court in Glasgow.”

If the journalist had said “with his penis,” the Times could have been in trouble with the police for “misgendering.” In 2020, Humberside police descended on the workplace of Harry Miller to warn him that one of his tweets “was being recorded as a hate incident.” What did the offending tweet say? “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” A neat joke, in my opinion, and pretty gentle when compared with the satire of, say, Evelyn Waugh, Tom Lehrer, Ricky Gervais, Tim Minchin, Monty Python, W.S. Gilbert, or Jonathan Swift. Evincing an almost superhuman inability to take a joke, the police recorded it as a “hate incident” and threatened the satirist. Have the British police become George Orwell’s Thought Police? Will it come to that? The resemblance occurred to Mr. Justice Knowles, before whom the Harry Miller case came up. “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.” Well said, M’Lud! I hope the Humberside police officers have learned their lesson. Perhaps somebody might take them aside and patiently explain about this thing called satire.

I am sorry to say it looks horribly as though otherwise sensible and certainly well-meaning political leaders are pandering to an intimidating lobby, militant activists ever ready to pounce on what they see as heresy. Such activism is especially dominant among young people. Several senior publishers have confided to me that they are under strong pressure from young employees to censor, or even suppress, books that they perceive as “transphobic.” I hereby place on record my regretful suspicion that some otherwise respected scientists, too, are betraying science in a desperate attempt to curry favor with “the kids,” perhaps especially their own.

If your science is so weak that the best you can do is yell that your opponent is a “Transphobic bigot,” a “TERF,” or a “full-on MAGA alt-right Trump-supporter,” you’ve already lost the argument. Sometimes the name-calling goes further and becomes overtly threatening. At a London Pride demonstration in 2023, “Sarah Jane” Baker (previously Alan Baker) told a cheering crowd, “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face.” I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say that such language is more typical of the sex that “Sarah Jane” claims to have left than the one she aspires to join.

Sky News (January 23, 2023) had a picture of two Scottish Nationalist Party politicians, members of the British Parliament and the Scottish Parliament, respectively, at a transgender demonstration in Glasgow, grinning inanely in front of a large, colorful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “Decapitate TERFS.”

Threats of violence have no place in decent society. “Decapitate TERFS” is not only horrible. It’s pathetic. So is an exhortation to punch a TERF “in the fucking face.” A position should be supported, or refuted, by rational discussion informed by evidence. People who terminate an argument by resorting to threats or name-calling are ignominiously signalling that they’ve lost the argument.

The human conceit that personal feelings can change reality signals an extraordinary elevation of humanity in a kind of species-level solipsism; a vain hubris in the face of the eternal and universal verities of science. And yet science is the jewel in humanity’s crown. We have every right to take pride in it. But pride as we uncover nature’s truths should be tempered by humility. Let us hope we don’t take too long to come to our senses.

This essay is extracted from ‘The War on Science’, edited by Lawrence M. Krauss (Post Hill Press).

It was sadly inevitable that the AIDS crisis would exacerbate this ancient prejudice. A headline in The Sun declared that “perverts are to blame for the killer plague”. And while a writer for the Express held “those who choose unnatural methods of self-gratification” responsible for the disease, letters published in its pages followed suit. One reader called for the incarceration of homosexuals. “Burning is too good for them,” wrote another. “Bury them in a pit and pour on quicklime.” Someone had been reading his Dante.

I happened to come out in a much less hostile climate. In the early 2000s, we were enjoying a kind of Goldilocks moment, neither too hot nor too cold. We weren’t generally on the receiving end of homophobic slurs, but nor were we patronised by well-meaning progressives. My memory of this time was that no one particularly cared, and I was more than happy with that. Being gay for me has never been an identity, it’s simply a fact, as unremarkable as being blue-eyed or right-handed.

And so it has been troubling to see a resurgence in the last few years of the kind of anti-gay rhetoric that was commonplace in my childhood. Of course, it could be argued that the rise of social media has simply exposed sentiments that were previously only expressed in private. As Ricky Gervais has pointed out, before the digital era “we couldn’t read every toilet wall in the world. And now we can.”

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Yet the most virulent homophobia appears to be coming from a new source. Whereas we have always been accustomed to this kind of thing from the far-Right — one recalls Nick Griffin’s remark on Question Time about how he finds the sight of two men kissing “really creepy” — but now the most objectionable anti-gay comments arise in online spheres occupied by gender ideologues, from those who claim to be progressive, Left-wing and “on the right side of history”. The significant difference is that the word “cis” has been added to the homophobe’s lexicon. Some examples:

“Cis gay men are a disease.”

“Cis gay men are truly some of the most grotesque creatures to burden this earth.”

“I hate cis gay people with a burning passion.”

“If you’re a cis gay man and your sexuality revolves around you not liking female genitalia I hope you die and I will spit on your grave.”

“Cis gays don’t deserve rights.”

“There’s so many reasons to hate gay people, most specifically white gays, but there’s never a reason to be a transphobe.”

“It’s time to normalise homophobia.”

Of course, any bile can be found on the internet, but these kinds of phrases are remarkably commonplace among certain online communities. Even a cursory search will reveal innumerable examples of gender ideologues casually branding gay men “fags” or “faggots”, praising the murder of gays and lesbians, and claiming that the AIDS epidemic was a positive thing. Many thousands of examples had been collated on Google Photos under the title “Woke homophobia: anti-gay hatred & boxer ceiling abuse from trans activists & gender-identity ideologues”. The site was taken down last year, presumably because it violated Google’s policy on hate speech — or perhaps because it revealed the toxicity of the ideology the company has spent so long promoting.

If such ideas were restricted to the demented world of internet activism, we might be justified in simply ignoring it. But we now know that the overwhelming majority of adolescents referred to the Tavistock paediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. Whistleblowers have spoken out about the endemic homophobia, not simply among clinicians but also parents who were keen to “fix” their gay offspring. And of course there was the running joke among staff that soon “there would be no gay people left”.

And now a series of leaked internal messages and videos from WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), has revealed that clinicians in the leading global organisation for transgender healthcare have openly admitted in private that some teenagers mistake being same-sex attracted for gender dysphoria. The result of the “gender-affirming” approach has amounted to what one former Tavistock clinician recently described as “conversion therapy for gay kids”. Homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organisation’s list of psychiatric disorders in 1993, and yet here we are medicalising it all over again.

So how did we reach the point where gay conversion therapy is being practised in plain sight by the NHS? Much of the responsibility has to lie with Stonewall, a group that once promoted equal rights for gay people but now actively works against their interests. It has even gone so far as to redefine “homosexual” on its website and resource materials as “same-gender attracted”. It should go without saying that gay men are not attracted to women who identify as men, any more than lesbians should be denounced for excluding those with penises from their dating pools. What trans activists call discrimination, most of us call homosexuality.

Indeed, activists often claim that “genital preferences are transphobic”, or that sexual orientation based on biological sex is a form of “trauma”. The idea that homosexuality is a sickness was one of the first homophobic tropes I encountered as a child. Now it is being rebranded as progressive.

As for Stonewall, its former CEO Nancy Kelley went so far as to argue that women who exclude trans people as potential partners are analogous to “sexual racists”. She claimed that “if you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions”. It is worth remembering that Stonewall is deeply embedded in many governmental departments and quangos, as well as corporate and civic institutions. Anti-gay propaganda is being reintroduced into society from the very top.

Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service has been meeting with trans lobby groups such as Mermaids and Stonewall to discuss changes to prosecutorial policy in cases of sex by deception. Since these meetings — only revealed after sustained pressure from a feminist campaigner who submitted Freedom of Information requests — the CPS has recommended what Dennis Kavanagh of the Gay Men’s Network has described as “a radical trans activist approach to sex by deception prosecutions that would see them all but vanish”. In trans activist parlance, the barriers to having sex with lesbians and gay men are known as the “cotton ceiling” and “boxer ceiling”. Now it seems the establishment is attempting to support the coercion of gay people into heterosexual activity.

Consider a recent post on X by Stephen Whittle, OBE, a professor of equalities law at Manchester Metropolitan University. In a reply to LGB Alliance’s Bev Jackson, Whittle took issue with the notion that “love is all about genitals” (an argument that Jackson has never made). Having dismissed this straw man as “a very hetero/homo-normative perspective”, Whittle then claimed that “a lot of gay men can’t resist a young furry ftm [female-to-male] cub”.

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By Julie Bindel

While it is true that there are some bisexuals who identify as gay, it is simply not the case that homosexual men “can’t resist” certain kinds of women. As Jackson rightly noted in her response, this is rank homophobia, “disturbed and disturbing on every level”. Yet it has been expressed by an individual who has been described as a “hero for LGBTQ+ equality”. With heroes like these, who needs villains?

Another example is Davey Wavey, a popular online influencer, who has encouraged gay men to perform heterosexual acts in a video called “How to Eat Pussy — For Gay Men”. It may as well have been called “Gay Conversion Therapy 2.0”. We are firmly back in the Eighties, where gays are being told that they “just haven’t found the right girl yet” and lesbians are assured that they just “need a good dick”. And yet now these demeaning ideas are being propagated by those who claim to be defending the rights of sexual minorities.

The Government’s recent guidance on how schools are to accommodate trans-identified pupils — in which biological sex will take precedence over identity — has been met with horror from gender ideologues. One of the common refrains one hears from activists is that it represents “this generation’s Section 28”. But this is to get it precisely backwards. Gay rights were secured on the recognition that a minority of the population are same-sex attracted. In dismantling the very notion of sex and substituting it for this nebulous concept of “gender identity”, activists and their disciples in parliament are undoing all of the achievements of previous gay rights movements.

The widespread homophobia of the Eighties, epitomised by Section 28, was based on the notion that homosexuality was unnatural, dangerous and ought to be corrected. Present-day gender identity ideology perceives homosexuality as evidence of misalignment between soul and body. In other words, it seeks to “fix” gay people so that they fit into a heterosexual framework. It is no coincidence that so many detransitioners are gay people who were simply struggling with their sexuality. Gender identity ideology is the true successor to Section 28.

The proponents of this revamped gay conversion therapy dismiss our concerns as “transphobia” and “bigotry”, or as part of a manufactured “culture war”. Worse still, the new homophobia is being cheered on by those it will hurt most. While prominent gay figures continue to feed the beast that wishes to devour them, we are unlikely to see this dire situation improve any time soon. It was bad enough in the Eighties, when gay people were demonised and harassed by the establishment. Who thought we would have to fight these battles all over again?

By the time Sacco landed at her destination and regained access to the Internet, her life had been turned upside-down. She had been branded a certified Bad Person by almost the entire Anglo-Twittersphere, including a reality TV star named Donald Trump. She was ultimately dismissed from her job.

Looking back, Sacco’s tweet may be seen as a world-historical pivot, Ground Zero for the cultural developments that characterised the 2010s: the return of Nineties-style “political correctness”; the swift destruction of lives by online mobs; the instantaneous capitulation of employers ; above all, the obscuration of important sociopolitical and material crises by a pathological obsession with language and offence-taking. Sacco, in short, inadvertently called forth the Woke Moment.

Now, nearly a decade later, the Post-Woke Moment is here. It’s a tenuous achievement, to be sure, and the woke still wield enormous political, economic and cultural power. Still, there are unmistakable signs of “a vibe shift”. In Britain, gender ideologues have suffered major setbacks, as authorities crack down on the malpractices of gender clinics. In the United States, the teaching of ahistorical nonsense in schools has run up against a wall of parental outrage. Even Netflix has told its censorious culture-managers to shut up or find another job.

The question is where we go from here. The two most plausible paths are restorationism and radicalism. (Many of the potential “third ways” ultimately collapse back into one of the two.) By restorationism, I mean an effort to turn the cultural clock back to roughly where things stood before Sacco self-destructed her life and career in 52 carelessly typed characters. The fundamental instinct of this path is that the matrix of social, economic, and cultural policy and practice that prevailed roughly a decade ago was sound. Into that happy arcadia of free speech and free markets was suddenly and for no reason injected the virus of Left-identitarianism, which conjured as a reaction the even more dangerous virus of Right-wing populism. The battle, then, is between individualists and “collectivists” of various stripes. Now that wokeism is faltering, restorationists feel, individualism must reign again.

The restorationists are essentially cautious conservatives. They believe that the sex-liberationism and gender-nominalism that have characterised the last 20 years were fine — a healthy and organic development of classical-liberal doctrine — but then suddenly things went too far with the “gender stuff”. Likewise, the liberal censoriousness of that era was fine, but then the far-Left adopted the same methods and went too far with “cancel culture”.

The dividing line between the authentic fruits of modern society and its freakish excesses was always blurry, and remains so to this day. The bigger problem for the restorationists is that, to paraphrase Mitterrand on 1968, the pre-Woke Moment contained in it many of the elements that gave rise to the Woke Moment. Restoring 2013, even if it were possible, would mean restoring the same internal contradictions — not least an obscenely unequal society, in material terms, that desperately needed the fake egalitarianism of wokeness as a legitimating ideology.

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The second path is radicalism. By this, I don’t mean extremism, but a cold appreciation for the fact that the Woke Moment was rooted in, rather than a departure from, the class rivalries and material conditions of modern society. The contradictions that gave rise to wokeness, in other words, won’t be resolved unless we work for a decent and more materially equal society — a process that will require political confrontation and compromise between the three major classes: the asset-rich few, the managers who service their affairs, and the asset-less many.

Both of the post-woke camps — the restorationists and the far less numerous radicals — must contend with a powerful woke remnant. Even more so than the restorationists, the woke are fundamentally conservative. As I have argued before, by changing how we talk about society, and altering its managerial hierarchies, they seek to preserve the existing power structure. Only now, with a backlash brewing, they must change tack.

Anand Giridharadas’s new book, The Persuaders, is representative of this subtle shift in the woke camp. In it, he aims to “reinvigorate the idea of persuasion” at a time when too many Americans view each other as “alien, menacing, and, therefore, unchangeable”. He says he wants to reverse these trends — but mostly ends up replicating their logic, in page after interminable page of saccharine prose that recalls nothing so much as a piece of corporate diversity messaging. Giridharadas is a wokester trying to strike a restorationist-liberal pose.

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By David Samuels

The book starts out promising enough, with a discussion of the Russian troll farms that many liberals to this day blame for catapulting Donald Trump to the Oval Office. For Western elites struggling to explain rising populism, it couldn’t be that Trumpers, Brexiteers, and Gilets Jaunes revolted over legitimate grievances with progressive rule. No, it must have been Kremlin mind-control that propelled them. Where once it was chiefly the politically uneducated prole on the street who unreasonably suspected elites of conniving with nefarious foreigners, today it’s as often elites who imagine the common people are foreign agents or automatons.

Observing the workings of the troll farms up-close, Giridharadas draws a different conclusion: that the Kremlin’s influence operations merely exploited existing social discord. “As tempting as it may be to view the Russian operatives as instigators,” he writes, “to witness these moves is to witness a mission of amplification.” Even in 2016, this should have been apparent to anyone with enough faith in Americans to question their susceptibility to St. Petersburg-hatched memes depicting the Lord Jesus hugging Trump. Still, that a former New York Times columnist is now prepared to voice the obvious signifies something.

That something is, in a word, weakness: the yawning sense that despite their conquest of major institutions, progressives are alienated from broad swaths of the public. Big Tech and Hollywood, the HR department and the Central Intelligence Agency — all now speak in their vernacular. Yet comedians have begun to mock their inanities with impunity, the GOP is making electoral hay of the 1619 Project, and suburban moms are mobilising to defend the right of their sons to become merely gay men, rather than eunuchs.

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That’s where Giridharadas comes in, bearing both a warning and a hopeful omen for progressives. The warning is that unless the Left changes rhetorical course, its language and purity-policing will leave it isolated from the masses, its political causes moribund. The good news is that the Left can overcome this obstacle by making accommodations for those less enlightened than themselves. “Persuasion,” in other words, is just a matter of cultural progressives being a little nicer to the benighted many.

That, supposedly, is the great achievement of Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American feminist who in the aftermath of Trump’s election helped organise the Women’s March. Viewed through the lens of social class, the Great Pussy-Hat Uprising of 2017 was a movement of gentry wokeism, by gentry wokesters, for gentry wokesters. I would venture to say that it “persuaded” not a single true-believing Trumpian. So why does Giridharadas single her out as an exemplary “persuader”? Well, you see, Sarsour and her Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory made “a bet that a lot of their fellow activists and movement allies might not have made”: namely, working with ignorant, all-too-privileged, liberal white women.

Sarsour & Co. had to contend with the fact that it’s “difficult to deal with these white women”. But they did it all the same — a great sacrifice. Trump’s rise had thrust “white supremacy” into the spotlight but, nevertheless, the magnanimous, committed Sarsour was prepared to work with white women. In doing so, says Giridharadas with unspeakable earnestness, she defied Audre Lorde, who had insisted that women of colour shouldn’t seek to “educate white women… as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival”. Doing so, the great intersectional sage taught, “is a diversion of our energies and a tragic repetition of racist, patriarchal thought”. Nevertheless, Sarsour & Co. persisted.

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Likewise, we are supposed to cheer Sarsour for mildly questioning her fellow activists’ ruthless enforcement of gender pronouns. She told them:

“Everyone’s pronouns should be respected. But [for some of the activists] who are here, English is not their first language, and this is a very new concept for them. So I would ask for forgiveness, and I would ask if that would be something that maybe we’ll do next time when we’re together as we get these women through this process.”

Note that the pronouns themselves aren’t up for debate — or even a matter of persuasion. Everyone should adhere to the linguistic demands of gender ideology. It’s just that some people are new to these norms, and Sarsour’s great persuasive act lies in asking “for forgiveness” as she helps the ignorant “through this process” of mastering them.

Everyone is on a “journey” — a word that appears so frequently in Giridharadas’s text, it made me never want to leave home again. The destination is the same for all, but the author and his cast of characters are generous enough to allow that, for some, the “journey” might take longer or more circuitous paths. Giridharadas’s great persuaders are those brave few prepared to guide lesser beings to the higher gnosis of current Left commitments. Yet the rightness of the gnosis itself is never up for questioning. Thus, we meet another Left-wing activist who declares that masks are about keeping “my neighbours safe” (Giridharadas implicitly agrees, since he never introduces the slightest critical distance from his subjects). The activist’s “persuasiveness”, we are made to understand, lies in trying to find common ground with even those who don’t share this (unscientific) view of masking.

Another activist, a proponent of police abolition, encounters a woman of colour who wants more policing in her neighbourhood. She is not unusual: wider polling data shows that very few black and brown Americans want less policing in their neighbourhoods. Our activist, however, is held up as a model of persuasion because, rather than writing off the woman, she badgers her relentlessly, until she comes around to the view that maybe policing is bad.

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Again, persuasiveness lies in “educating” the benighted, rather than genuinely listening to what they might have to say. Setting out to persuade progressives to be more persuasive, Giridharadas merely ends up ratifying the movement’s unbearable smugness. So much of what the author characterises as “persuasiveness” involves Left-liberals offering something like political-cum-psychological therapy to other Left-liberals. There is a camp, for instance — called Transracial Journeys, naturally — which offers guilt-ridden white parents a way to navigate their hang-ups over adopting black children (“I like to tell people that I’m a recovering racist,” confesses one mom).

Giridharadas’s account of persuasiveness reinforces the progressive tendency towards depoliticisation: contests over material conditions give way to therapeutic journeys for those at the top, with working-class people cast as the oafs and bigots in need of being coerced — if gently, as the author would have it — into enlightenment. It all ends up benefitting the culture-war Right and the restorationists, who are equally uninterested in improving the oiks’ material conditions, but at least don’t condescend to the many and call it persuasion.

This leaves it to the radicals to pursue a different politics, one that pays due attention to material reality and breaks through the culture-war deadlock. As one of the proponents of this approach, I admit that it is by far the more arduous alternative to merely restoring the status quo of 2013. Tech bros who think chief restorationist Bari Weiss talks good sense might be alienated and angry, but they’re not going to agitate against their own material interests. The suburban moms who are lacerating their woke school boards will never sign up for economic populism.

At best, the Post-Woke moment will be defined by a messy and unstable admixture of restorationism and radicalism, now countervailed by the regnant woke, now able to return the pressure with the help of pseudo-populist politicians — who would discipline Disney for pushing gender ideology, but not for underpaying its workers. As Justine Sacco no doubt did before her fateful flight, we would all be wise to buckle up.

One could hardly call that efficient. But for patients today, my experience is the stuff of dreams. Waiting lists have ballooned out of all recognition. My former GIC in London is candid: “We are currently offering first appointments to people who were referred in January 2018.” Those people have waited four and a half years, merely to get to the starting line. But dig a little deeper into the data and the forward projections look even worse. In May 2022, there were 11,407 people languishing on the waiting list; just 50 of them were offered a first appointment that same month. This figure seems typical: in April it was 56, and in March it was 33. At those rates it will take between 17 and 28 years to clear the backlog. Typically, the clinic receives around 300 referrals every month, so with each month that passes, those waiting lists get even longer.

Elsewhere, the story is much the same. A GIC in Sheffield is offering first appointments to those referred in March 2018, while one in Exeter has seen nobody referred after June 2016. Behind this data, there are people stuck on waiting lists: almost 4,000 at Exeter in a queue that has stopped moving. The message from the clinic is stark: “Please do not contact the clinic to enquire about waiting times as our staff are very busy and we cannot provide any more information than is provided here. Thank you.”

With NHS services grinding to a halt, it’s not surprising that private clinics have sprung up to provide a faster alternative. Some clinicians are moonlighting alongside their regular jobs for the NHS. Consultant psychiatrist Dr Stuart Lorimer was brutally honest about his reasons: “Doctors have mortgages too, and my partner was on the verge of retirement… I was looking for ways to generate more income.” A tidy income, it seems — Lorimer charges £300 per hour.

Meanwhile, the London Transgender Clinic, a private practice, was established by plastic surgeon Christopher Inglefield in 2015, “in response to a noticeable increase in enquires from transgender and non-binary patients. Many of these patients were unable to access quality and timely care from the overwhelmed NHS gender services.” But his fast-track pass comes at a cost. LTC’s guide price for the management of hormone therapy is £849 for the first year, and £468 per annum subsequently. And that doesn’t include the drugs: “LTC is not a licensed dispensary, therefore, we advise that you take your private prescription to your local pharmacy.” It’s a far cry from the NHS, where a prescription prepayment certificate costs just £108.10, and that covers all your medicines for the year.

While NHS surgery is free to the user, private patients pay the full cost themselves. LTC charges from £27,000 for male-to-female gender surgery, rising to at least £32,000 if a section of colon needs to be used. LTC is perhaps on the pricey side, but their fees are not off the scale. The Parkside Hospital in Wimbledon told me that, “it’s £23,000 for a vaginoplasty”. Alongside their private patients, Parkside has a contract to treat NHS patients — 132 of them in 2019. This suggests the NHS is paying north of £3 million per year to treat around a dozen patients each month.

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This model is hardly sustainable, with the London GIC alone currently receiving more than 300 referrals per month. Even if the clinic somehow increased its capacity to assess those patients in a timely fashion, what happens next? While it is perhaps feasible for the world’s pharmaceutical industry to step up production of hormone therapy and blockers, surgery is a different matter. Vaginoplasty is a skilled job that few surgeons can do. In 2016, GRS surgeon Phil Thomas pointed out that “there are simply not enough people in Britain who know how to make a vagina”. His colleague Tina Rashid said, “attracting new surgeons into the speciality was extremely difficult… GRS is a very niche area.”

As a result, the NHS system of Gender Identity Clinics is not only failing to deliver at present; it’s hard to see how it could ever deliver in the future. Even if, say, £100 million could be found every year to fund around 5,000 surgeries, it is futile if there is nobody to do them. A totally new model is needed, and we do not need to look hard for it.

Last month, the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust announced the closure of their Gender Identity Development Service for Children and Adolescents (GIDS), the clinic for children who think that they might be trans. It was perhaps inevitable after the Cass review criticised the clinic as: “Not a safe or viable long-term option in view of concerns about lack of peer review and the ability to respond to the increasing demand.” It will be replaced by regional centres offering more “holistic care” with “strong links to mental health services”.

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Adults deserve no less. Patients who should be assessed, screened for comorbid psychological disorders, and perhaps offered counselling are instead being consigned to seemingly endless queues — and told not to bother the staff. Adult Gender Identity Clinics are another broken system in need of replacement.

There is a certain mystique surrounding NHS gender clinics, but they are NHS services like any other, where clinicians meet with their patients and discuss their treatment plans. At the GIC the options are limited, or at least they were for me. I spent less than four hours in that consulting room. After two one-hour initial assessments, the clinic wrote to my GP to recommend hormone therapy: oral estradiol valerate and an injectable GnRH agonist — a “blocker” — that desensitised my pituitary gland, which in turn shut down the production of testosterone in my testes. Whether this is safe or not, nobody really knows. The drugs are not licensed for these purposes.

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I had four further half-hour consultations. During that time, I was referred 200 metres up the road to Charing Cross Hospital for gender reassignment surgery. And that was that. No psychotherapy, and no psychiatry of note. Less than two months after surgery, I was discharged to the care of my GP. If any long-term research is going on, I am not part of it. I’ve had no contact with the clinic since 2016.

If gender dysphoria needs to be treated — and I think it does — then psychotherapy should be the first approach. It seems madness to proceed otherwise. Surely, we need to explore the issues thoroughly with a counsellor before considering hormones and surgery. Therapy can be provided locally and close to home; it certainly shouldn’t need a whole day out in London. And if surgery is what’s needed, it shouldn’t require choosing whether to pay a year’s salary or sit on seemingly endless waiting lists, with no support from the staff. A rigorous, judicious and efficient service is what’s needed. At the moment, it’s failing on every front.

But the barrister and lesbian Allison Bailey may have put a stop to this. Yesterday’s ruling in her case Bailey v Stonewall and Garden Court Chambers found that she had been victimised and discriminated against by her employer for expressing gender critical beliefs. Such was the oppressiveness of Garden Court’s actions against her, she was awarded aggravated damages: £22,000. These are only granted where a discriminator’s actions are particularly unnecessary, high-handed or oppressive.

Bailey also sued Stonewall for inducing, instructing or causing some of GCC’s actions — she had accused the charity of “trans-extremism” — but she didn’t win that aspect of the case. As a result, Stonewall and its supporters, including Owen Jones and Pink News, are celebrating. In their blinkered view, she has lost. However, this is to disregard the consequences of interrogating the extreme ideology and methods perpetuated by Stonewall. Bailey’s tribunal has tracked the ideological trajectory of what was once the foremost activist for gay rights, and put the absurdity of its activism under the spotlight.

Back in 2018, Bailey complained to her chambers when they signed up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Programme (DCP), which gives training and guidance on how to be “inclusive employers”. At the height of its power, more than 950 organisations were signed up to what Bailey and many others have called the “protection racket“. But she, along with many other lesbians and gay men, objected to the charity’s stance on trans issues, which included its uncritical promotion of self-ID. Such was Bailey’s disenchantment, she helped set up the LGB alliance which advocated for the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. This, in turn, was labelled a “hate group” by trans activists.

There can be no doubt that Stonewall, in its aggressive and uncompromising support for extreme transgender ideology and a refusal to discuss or debate alternative viewpoints, helped fuelled the fire already raging against Bailey for her gender critical views and support for the LGB Alliance. In 2019, Kirrin Medcalf, Stonewall’s Head of Trans Inclusion, emailed the heads of GCC accusing Bailey of “making and retweeting multiple transphobic statements online”. Examples included “liking and writing posts referring to trans women as men”, and “writing tweets calling for trans people to lose their current legal rights”. The latter was because Bailey was protesting the fact that male-bodied sex offenders were being placed in women’s prisons.

According to Medcalf, “her actions… threatened the positive relationship that Stonewall and GCC have built with the trans community”. He accused Bailey of making trans people feel “unsafe” if they were to even catch a glimpse of her while visiting GCC. Medcalf stated: “For Garden Court Chambers to continue associating with a barrister who is actively campaigning for a reduction in trans rights and equality, while also specifically targeting members of our staff with transphobic views on a public platform, puts us in a difficult position with yourselves: the safety of our staff and community will always be Stonewall’s first priority. I trust that you will do what is right and stand in solidarity with trans people.”

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According to Bailey, the charity appeared to be threatening to distance itself from GCC if GCC did not make the decision to cut ties with her. During the six-week hearing, at which 30 witnesses in total were cross examined, Bailey claimed that some GCC barristers were invested in trans ideology, and that if the relationship with Stonewall were to become fractious it would be difficult for chambers to take on potentially lucrative trans rights cases.

As a result of Stonewall’s complaints, Bailey was asked by heads of chambers to remove the reference to chambers on her Twitter bio, which she did. However, without her knowledge, GCC then tweeted that the criminal barrister was under investigation by her chambers, which implied she had done something wrong.

An investigation into the complaints about Bailey, including those by Stonewall, was ordered by GCC management and carried out by Maya Sikand QC. Seeking advice from Cathryn McGahey QC, Vice Chair of the Bar Council’s ethics committee, she was informed that two of Bailey’s tweets were “probably over the borderline of acceptable conduct”.

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One concerned a trans activist named Morgan Page, who had recently been hired by Stonewall. In 2012, Page ran a workshop entitled “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women”. The “cotton” is a reference to women’s underwear, and a number of lesbians had taken serious offence at the notion that male bodied transwomen had attended workshops in order to overcome difficulties in accessing sex with lesbians.

Bailey, on discovering that Page was working with Stonewall, tweeted that Page is “a male-bodied person who ran workshops with the sole aim of coaching heterosexual men who identify as lesbians on how they can ‘coerce’ young lesbians into having sex with them”. At the tribunal, Stonewall attempted to deny that Page’s actions had anything to do with coercing lesbians into sex; in evidence, though, Bailey was convincing in her arguments that it was precisely that. Stonewall’s Chief Executive, Nancy Kelley, was revealed, in a leaked email to the BBC, to have described those women who resisted cotton-ceiling indoctrination as “sexual racists” because expressing preference in sexual partners was “discriminatory”.

In giving evidence in the tribunal, McGahey defended the concept of overcoming the “cotton ceiling” and compared it with initiatives to promote racial integration in post-apartheid South Africa. McGahey, at the conclusion of the 2019 investigation, decided that Bailey’s use of the word “coerce” was unfounded and directed that Bailey should delete her tweet. Bailey refused.

Complaints about two separate tweets were upheld — the cotton ceiling tweet, and also one in which Bailey wrote, following a report in The Sunday Times about the investigation she was subject to, “I and many other women are grateful to The Times for fairly and accurately reporting on the appalling levels of intimidation, fear and coercion that are driving the Stonewall UK trans self ID agenda.”

Both tweets were castigated even though they were true.

Although GCC claimed that the language used by Bailey went beyond the belief that sex rather than gender is fundamentally important, the tribunal found that all of Bailey’s pleaded beliefs, not just the belief that “woman is sex not gender”, are protected (this protection was established by the Employment Appeal Tribunal in the case brought by Maya Forstater).

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That’s why it was found that GCC discriminated against Bailey when it published its statement on Twitter that she was under investigation. It was also found that in upholding Stonewall’s complaint against her, GCC victimised Bailey. Vitally, the tribunal held that Bailey’s protected gender critical beliefs also include the belief that “Gender identity theory as proselytised by Stonewall is severely detrimental to women and to lesbians” and is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010.

The fact that a chamber full of experts in human rights law did not adhere to the Equality Law 2010 is staggering; it’s a stark example of how workplaces and other institutions can be influenced by the definition of “transphobia” exhorted by Stonewall.

It has long been known that Stonewall exerts undue influence and instills fear in so many institutions and workplaces when they step out of line on the trans ideology it promotes. This is one reason why it is difficult to take Stonewall seriously when it claims: “The case heard by the Employment Tribunal did not accurately reflect our intentions and our influence on organisations.”

Bailey spent all of her adult life fighting sexism and homophobia and was horrified when she first pushed back against the Stonewall dictats to find that women questioning the new orthodoxy were being labelled Terfs, bigots and fascists. She, too, found herself on the receiving end of death threats; it cost her enormously to stand up and fight. Regardless, Bailey, with Maya Forstater and other courageous truth tellers, has lifted the lid on institutions and individuals who should have known better.

Upon hearing the Tribunal decision Bailey said: “I did not win everything, but I won the most important thing: I have brought Stonewall’s methods into the public eye, and I have shown them for what they now are.”

Stonewall had become as impenetrable and unaccountable as its namesake. But Bailey made sure it was finally held to account and will no longer be able to act with impunity when it comes to peddling its trans ideology and misinterpretation of the law. Organisations that put “Stonewall Law” before Equality Law will now be aware that they could now be acting unlawfully. In removing Stonewall’s right to silence she exposed them for the immoral parasites they have become.

When she was in her twenties, a man in her friendship group hit her and raped her when she was barely conscious. But when Sarah told her female friends, they insisted that he was a nice guy who wouldn’t do that. She told herself her friends couldn’t cope with the truth, and she learned to hide the panic attacks she has suffered ever since.

Last year, when Sarah walked into her weekly rape crisis support group in Brighton and saw a male sitting there, she felt anxious — but she had long perfected the art of suppressing her feelings to accommodate others.

“I thought, ‘It’s fine, I just won’t speak this week,’ because I didn’t want to talk about my rape in front of a male. But the group’s facilitator asked me to speak, so I did, because I felt under real pressure to make this person feel included. It’s so ingrained in women to do what’s expected of you,” she tells me from her home in Brighton.

But this time, Sarah’s body rebelled. She suffered a panic attack in the group, although she stayed until the end of the session, because she didn’t want to cause awkwardness.

“When you experience sexual violence, you often set aside your own needs and don’t set boundaries, and I couldn’t understand why I was being asked to do that in therapy,” she says. Having to describe the repercussions of her rape in front of a male, Sarah says, “felt like a third attack, and it was the final straw”. Previously in the group, she and the other women had talked freely about men’s feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies and spaces and found comfort in their shared experiences. No longer. Afterwards, she asked Survivors’ Network, the Brighton-based government-funded charity for victims of sexual violence that ran the group, if there could be a female-only group.

“It seemed like a reasonable thing to ask, because they had a group for trans women, and a trans-inclusive group for women, so two groups for people born male, but none just for females,” she says.

According to the Equality Act, sex is a protected characteristic, meaning that the provision of single-sex spaces is lawful where it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. But in correspondence seen by UnHerd, Survivors’ Network told Sarah that a single-sex group would be “problematic as we do not police gender”. Sarah had to leave the group where she had found, for the first time in her life, support, help and understanding. Survivors’ Network suggested that she get individual therapy, and was advised there was a two-year waiting list, then heard nothing further about that. They also suggested she seek help from “other services in the city”, but Survivors’ Network is the only service of its kind in the whole of Sussex, and she couldn’t find any group just for women. Sarah is now taking them to court for sex discrimination.

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The backlash against her has been immense. Aside from the usual misogyny that happens every time a woman stands up for her rights (“The bitch suing [should be] made to pay all court and legal costs,” wrote one delightful gentleman), high-profile women on Twitter have pilloried her, with one saying: “If she really cares this much about women’s rights she wouldn’t be suing a rape crisis centre.” “If the anti-trans agenda has SO much money and SO much support and is SO right, why haven’t they set up their own services?” another tweeted, apparently unaware that in 2019 Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre, Vancouver Rape Relief, tried to stay female-only, only to then be stripped of its funding for refusing to accept trans women.

To a degree, Sarah agrees with her critics. “It sounds absolutely awful to sue a rape crisis centre, and a part of me asks, ‘What am I doing?’ Especially because I’m the most anxious person in the world and the anxiety has been awful since this whole thing started. I worry about how this will affect my job prospects, my partner’s job, everything,” she says.

For that reason, her name and any details that might reveal her true identity have been disguised. So why has she pursued this case, given the stakes against her? “Because this whole situation is so wrong and Survivors’ Network is not fit for purpose. It’s telling women to put aside their feelings in order to access help. Of course I’m not saying trans women shouldn’t be helped by rape services, and it’s great there are mixed-sex groups for people who feel comfortable with that. I don’t want to stop that at all. But there should also be single-sex ones. This is a government-funded service. We deserve to have the support we need.”

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Survivors’ Network declined to give a comment for this article but instead directed me to a statement affirming their commitment to trans-inclusive feminism: “Trans women are women and as such they are welcome in women-only spaces.”

Until that day in her rape support group, Sarah had little interest in arguments about gender ideology. “You’d have to be living under a rock to not know discussions were happening online and in the media, but I wasn’t that involved. If pushed, I’d have described myself as an ally. I marched at Trans Pride and thought of trans women as my sisters. But I assumed there was respect for rape crisis groups and no one would try to cross that boundary. It seems quite naïve now,” she says.

When Sarah researched Survivors’ Network’s peer support group she discovered it was trans inclusive. She asked an assessor whether the group she would be attending was female-only and the assessor hesitated before saying yes, it was, so she was left unsure what to expect. “When I started at the group, it was all-female, so I then assumed that Survivors’ Network had a group for women and a group for trans women, and that’s how they were able to be inclusive but also treat women. That’s partly why I was so taken aback to see a man in the group two months later,” she says. The “man” was a self-identified trans woman, but, Sarah says, there was no indication that they were socially or medically transitioning — they looked simply like a man.

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The reaction to Sarah’s case has been “enormously eye-opening”, she says: “The levels of anger and vitriol against me, all because I asked for a single-sex rape support group. I just don’t understand it.” To see so many women online empathise more with the trans person’s possible sense of exclusion than with her trauma felt, Sarah says, like when her female friends refused to believe that their male friend had raped her because they liked him. So many women care more about the feelings of men than the needs of other women.

Arguments over single-sex spaces have raged over the past decade as gender ideology —which argues that a person’s gender identity, which is how they feel inside, is at least as significant as their biological sex — has taken hold. Over the past few months, sports organisations, including World Rugby and FINA, the International Swimming Federation, have banned trans women from competing against female athletes, after years of protests from feminist campaigners and multiple women athletes. But sport takes place in public, meaning outsiders can see that women are at an obvious physical disadvantage against people who have gone through male puberty. The issue is easier to ignore when it comes to prisons (where trans women can be incarcerated with female prisoners) and rape services, as they aren’t under any kind of public spotlight, and people tend to have less interest in female prisoners and rape victims than in elite athletes.

Since Sarah launched her case, Survivors’ Network have doubled down on their stance and in April they co-wrote an open letter to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission criticising them for saying that single-sex spaces are lawful. Survivors’ Network wrote that it is “very unusual for cis service users to object to trans women joining a support group”; the EHRC, they say, “frames the needs of cis women as more important than the support needs of trans people”.

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Gender activists claim that trans people are the most oppressed minority in the world, therefore women’s spaces need to include them, and any woman who objects is putting trans people at risk. It is true there are high rates of violence against trans women in Central, South America and North America, especially among trans sex workers. In the UK, it’s a very different story. The ONS says the sample size of people who identified as transgender and were victims of sexual offences is too “insufficient” to record; Channel 4 News has said that, on average, one trans person was murdered a year in the UK between 2008 and 2017. By contrast, a woman in this country is murdered by a man every two days and one in four women is sexually assaulted as an adult. The perpetrator is invariably male, because 98% of sex offenders are male. Multiple studies have shown that patterns of offending do not change just because the male person has transitioned their gender. So while certainly not all trans women are predators, just as not all men are predators, they are far more likely to commit a violent crime than women, just as men are.

Last August, Mridul Wadhwa, the head of one of Scotland’s biggest rape crisis centres who is herself transgender, said that any victims of rape who were fearful of transgender women in women’s organisations needed to “reframe your trauma”: “If you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature, we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma, but please expect to be challenged on your prejudices,” she said.

I ask what Sarah thinks of Wadhwa’s argument. “I was abused by a man, I was raped by a man. I think it’s quite a healthy response to be wary of men, and to not assume they always have the best of intentions, because I made that mistake. I think that should be encouraged by rape crisis centres, rather than them telling us to take down our boundaries and ignore our instincts. It feels like an inconvenience to Survivors’ Network that lots of women have PTSD caused by men, so therefore don’t want to talk about it with men.”

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In an article last month, a woman called Janey Starling, who says she “supports survivors of domestic abuse”, wrote a piece titled “Why Trans Women Belong in Women’s Spaces”, in which she compared abused women’s fear of males to anti-black racism. I ask Sarah about this commonly cited argument. “Black people don’t commit over 90% of sex crimes. No race does. But males do,” she says.

But gender activists would say that trans people are so marginalised that it doesn’t matter that they’re male: women should accommodate them. “I’m sure they are marginalised in some places, but where I live there are ten organisations with dedicated groups for the wellbeing of trans women, and none just for women. So I wouldn’t say they’re marginalised here,” she says.

It took a long time for Sarah to stop denying to herself that she had been raped, and even longer to understand what had happened to her as a child. “But when I understood that, I started to think, oh, maybe I can trust my instincts, maybe I do know when something isn’t right, because I’d suppressed that for so long.”

She has also started to understand how her experiences have affected her psychologically in the long term. “I didn’t know that, as a woman, I could say no, which sounds really stupid, but I didn’t know I had options. I thought sex was something that was done to you and that part of life as a woman was to make males feel included, because they’re the priority,” she says.

That day in her rape support group — her last day, it turned out — she realised none of this was true: she could say no. “This isn’t about money for me — I don’t care about the money. I just want a change of policy and for there to be female-only services, without taking away the mixed-sex services. Since I launched my case I’ve heard from so many women who say they stopped going to their groups for the same reason, but they didn’t want to say anything, and I thought about doing that — just going away and staying quiet. But I couldn’t do that anymore. It’s enough.”

The fact that the unraveling is taking place is one of the few points on which the Right and Left can agree. Both sides take for granted the collapse of the traditional “gender binary” and its replacement by a novel and fluid suite of gender identities. The disagreement is over whether this represents freedom and progress or coercion and decadence.

Many on the Left argue that a teacher should be allowed to counsel children on their sexual identity and introduce them to academic gender theories. They argue that socialising young children to embrace concepts such as gender fluidity and “birthing person” is essential to the student’s civic education and personal development. Their opponents reject these efforts as a political intrusion into the domain of moral and sexual education that should belong to parents.

But the political and cultural debates, which focus on ideology and government policy, ignore the crucial role that technological and economic revolutions are playing in replacing the male-female dyad with a new virtual multiplicity of gender expressions.

In the first decade of the new millennium, amid the talk of terrorism, war, clash of civilisations, and global financial meltdown, there was an accompanying cultural preoccupation with hipsters. For at least a decade, this seemingly trivial youth subculture dedicated to vintage t-shirts, anti-consumerist “indie” consumerism, trucker hats, and a self-referential style, seemed to be a leading concern of America’s chattering class.

“What was the Hipster?” asked N+1, the premier journal of New York’s young intellectual scene in a 2011 symposium and subsequent book that provided a formal historiography for the subculture which, by then, appeared to be in decline.

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In a more thorough analysis than most commentary from the time, N+1’s Mark Greif argued that hipsterism was not merely a set of fashions and aesthetic choices, but the product of an interaction between larger cultural and economic forces. In America’s urban cultural capitals in the early 2000s, Grief wrote: “The indie bohemians (denigrated as slackers) encountered the flannel-clad proto-businessmen and dot-com paper millionaires (denigrated as yuppies), and something unanticipated came of this friction.”

The emblematic hipster trousers, haircuts and bands that were popping up in Williamsburg, Silver Lake and Shoreditch represented a cultural evolution. The old skin suited to a factory-production-based economy and its attendant white-collar professions was being shed, and a new one adapted to the post-industrial knowledge economy was growing. Hipsterism was the cultural manifestation of a stratifying information society in which the caste of the professional class came to express its status through an ornate language of tastes and luxury beliefs.

“The postindustrial economy is indifferent to brawn,” wrote the journalist Hannah Rosin in her 2012 book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. “A service and information economy rewards precisely the opposite qualities,” Rosin continues. “Social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominantly the province of men. In fact, they seem to come more easily to women.”

The new economy thus laid a new material foundation for gender relations.

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From the beginning, the hipster sensibility contained a reaction against the success of the women’s movement. Norman Mailer, author of the 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” and forefather of the modern middle-class hipster genre, was openly hostile to the women’s movement, which he criticised at length in books and public debates for being humourless, sexless, and refusing to grapple with the biological differences between the sexes.

A half century after Mailer’s essay, latter-day hipsters preserved the boyish, performative elements of his reaction against feminism but divorced it from any political content. Instead of Mailer’s philosophical critique, they popularised an amateur pornography aesthetic in photography and music videos and ushered in a campy revival of macho fashions such as mustaches, woodsman beards, and trucker hats. Certainly in America, anyway.

These anti-feminist fashions were, however, only one aspect of a sensibility that was less a platform for modeling a specific masculine ideal than a stage on which conflicting impulses and concerns about gender norms could be acted out and then obsessively analysed. “At the same time that hipsters were dressing like Seventies-model Stanley Kowalskis,” wrote Greif, “they were consuming culture that was considerably more anxious about machismo, heterosexuality, and maturity.” Other hipster looks such as skinny jeans also played against traditional ideas of masculinity.

Hipster artists could be criticised as closet sexists who hid their chauvinistic attitudes in layers of irony. Or they could be written off as dandys, too twee to make anything truly moving or lasting. In either case, hipster was not only a way of describing and critiquing a type of youth fashion, it was pointed to something different in contemporary manhood.

Meanwhile, the rise of hipsters coincided with and accelerated the mainstreaming of postmodern themes in popular discourse. The professional classes, already prone to self-examination, could not help but notice around the turn of the millennium that amid the digital boom, their lives were becoming more curated and self-conscious, increasingly mediated through data and simulations, and suffused with ironic detachment.

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There followed what you might call an irony panic. Every few months a new think piece appeared in a glossy magazine declaring the death of irony or heralding its rebirth. The suspicion of irony and relentless inspection of authenticity focused mostly on male artists, like the musician Beck, the writer Dave Eggers, and the filmmaker Wes Anderson.

It was possible to notice all this at the time without taking any of it seriously. “It’s easy to let this hypothesizing go too far, and you get into trouble when you try to charge hipsters with representing the ‘ethos of our age,’” warns a 2012 essay in The Atlantic. Hipsters were “just kids making their way from young adulthood to the rest of their lives”. Much of the hipster commentary was absurdly overinflated — wasn’t it ridiculous to make so much out of something so frivolous? But the young American intellectuals who saw it as their duty to analyse and interpret and, eventually, treat the culture, really did spend years concerned in all and high seriousness, with hipsters. And part of what drove that persistent fascination, I would suggest, is that the figure of the hipster spoke to fundamental changes in men and women and the relations between them.

There was something unreconciled, if not schizophrenic, in the hipster outlook, which both venerated personal authenticity and assumed unlimited freedom for individuals to construct new identities through their tastes and consumer choices. But in its own ridiculous way, the hipster phenomenon anticipated the burgeoning gender experimentations that would shape the social-media-driven youth subcultures of the 2010s, which, in turn, fed into the current political wars over gender and sex education. The strange political evolution of the past decade has seen the same anxieties about gender and authenticity once present in the ironic and whimsical poses of hipsters harden into articles of the most humourless, irony-resistant political dogmas.

Through a process of cultural evolution that was driven by networked social technologies, the same hipster’s subcultural gender performances of the 2000s were succeeded in the 2010s by a creed of speculative gender absolutism. Rather than demanding to know whether an individual’s self-expression was ironic or authentic, as had previously been the norm, the new style of gender activism presupposed that subjective statements concerning gender not just true but ontologically valid.

In the subcultural firmament that emerged on digital platforms such as Tumblr and spread rapidly through Twitter, the post-structuralism of gender theorists such as Judith Butler which had once been the province of academics and activists, was treated as ground-level truth. Involuted treatises presenting gender as a social construction with no innate characteristics flourished online and yielded an expanding array of virtual identities. The effect of these changes is neatly encapsulated in the ever expanding list of pronouns, such as the one in a curriculum recently adopted by a school district in Illinois, where teachers instruct first graders that they can choose from options that include “she”, “he”, “tree”, “ze”, and “zir”, among other choices.

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Whereas the characteristic attitude in the adult world toward earlier youth subcultures, including hipsters, tended to be a mix of condescension and alarmism, this was reversed over the past decade as the online forums for gender experimentation fed into and were fed by the growing power of social justice activists.

In a progression that is still scarcely believable, post-structuralist theories that were first transmitted from academic theorists and activists to young people exploring their capacity for self-invention, were then adopted as mantras by the most powerful political figures in the United States.

It’s not simply that a phrase such as “birthing person”, used in President Biden’s 2022 budget proposal to refer to pregnant women, would have been unrecognisable to earlier generations. Beyond the change in language, the ideologically sterilised concept of maleness and femaleness it represents is a deliberate step away from biological and theological understandings of what it means to be human, and into a realm of totalling political authority.

Progress marches on and hipsters, once so determined to stay on the cutting edge, now seem positively rooted and organic compared with the era of online trolls and Tumblr identity fundamentalists who replaced them and in turn seeded a new sense of reality. Can anyone imagine a George W. Bush era Supreme Court nominee answering, “I’m not a biologist” when asked whether they can provide a definition for the word “woman”. That is exactly what happened when the question was posed to Biden nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has now been confirmed as America’s newest Supreme Court Justice. It was a trick question of course, but the fact that such a question can be a trick is telling. Countless media commentaries appeared in American publications assuring readers that Jackson is on the side of “the science” showing that defining a woman is righteously complicated.

Parents in Florida and elsewhere are under no obligation to investigate the gendered dimensions of techno-capitalism before deciding whether they are comfortable with their children being taught from handbooks that are designed to sever the connection between sex and biology. Yet, if they are curious about the deeper currents at work and why it is impossible — even if conservatives were to take control over every cultural institution tomorrow — to revert to traditional gender roles that have been wiped away by economic revolutions that most conservatives once embraced, they may find that, against all odds, the hipster offers an illuminating historical example.

But Harvey is not a woman. He is a male serial killer.

The New York Times, formerly a paper of record, but more recently a censorious mouthpiece, referred to Marcelin its report as, “An 83-year-old Brooklyn woman”. In fact, almost all media reports of his latest crime – murdering and dismembering a woman he met two years ago online – refer to Marcelin as “she” and “her”.

Marcelin already has two convictions for killing women, and has served much of the past five decades in jail. He was released in 2019, but earlier this month, he was taken into custody again, after the severed remains of Susan Leydon were discovered at his home and local area. The “defrauding the government” on the charge sheet referred to his attempts to cover up his crime.

Marcelin began his long career of violence with an assault charge in 1957. In 1963, he was arrested and charged with attempted rape, but the case was dropped when the victim didn’t show up to court. As violent men do, he escalated, and murderered Jaqueline Bonds on 18 April 1963. He shot her in the head in front of witnesses in Harlem. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years to life.

While in prison, Marcelin served repeated stints in solitary confinement, about which he submitted numerous complaints that this amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment”. All were dismissed. Then, in 1984, having served only 13 years of his sentence, he was released on lifetime parole.

The following year, 1985, he fatally stabbed Anna Laura Serrera Miranda and dumped her body in a bag on a roadway near Central Park. Despite this being the second woman he had killed, he plea bargained down from murder to first degree manslaughter and was sentenced to just six to 12 years.

Every two years, Marcelin unsuccessfully applied for parole. At one hearing, he blamed his crimes on “youth and poor judgement and stupidity”, and was rebuked by a parole officer, who told him he was a “grown ass man”. Marcelin complained about this comment, but it went nowhere.

Following his 1997 parole hearing, Marcelin submitted a complaint to the court that he had been denied a fair hearing because all three members of the parole board were women. He felt that the nature of his crimes would lead women to be biased against him, telling the court, “I have problems with women.” But his complaint was rejected by a three-judge panel as speculative and baseless.

In 2001, according to the court filing, a guard “observed the prisoner [Marcelin] engaged in an act of oral intercourse with another inmate”. He had to face a hearing about it, but no penalty was applied. Eventually, in 2019, the parole board made the decision to release him.

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On 27 February this year, Susan Leyden was seen entering Marcelin’s apartment, carrying a multi coloured bag. On 3 March, a woman’s torso was discovered in a garbage bag in a shopping cart on a busy street in East New York, Brooklyn during the early morning hours. Five days later, a leg was discovered in Cypress Hill only blocks away from where the torso was discovered. The next day, detectives questioned Marcelin following reports that he had been seen leaving the apartment with the same bag. A search of Marcelin’s home turned up a human head, and electric saws he had bought from a nearby Home Depot. Then a severed leg was found, four blocks away, poking out of a tire, cut from the knee down and still wearing a sock. Astonishingly, Marcelin was caught on CCTV in a 99-cent store in Brooklyn, in his wheelchair, with Leydon’s severed leg, wrapped in a garbage bag.

Nora[1. Not her real name], an experienced lawyer and feminist campaigner based in Brooklyn, is furious.  “It outrages me that this perpetrator murdered one woman, was released on parole, then brutally murdered a second woman within months and was later paroled again. How would that be possible in a world that valued women’s lives?” She tells me that even with serial murders of women, some victims are seen as expendable.

At the time of his arrest, Marcelin was living at Stonewall House, New York City’s first LGBT-welcoming senior housing. No one seems to know when Marcelin began identifying as a woman, but there is no evidence that he had undergone treatment of any kind, and it would appear that he was presenting as male until very close to the discovery of Leydon’s remains.

“He needs to be incarcerated,” Nora says. “But at the same time, we need to protect incarcerated women. How would I feel if a woman I cared about were put in a cell with this defendant? I’m worried about women being confined with this person. We have to be able to talk about those concerns.”

I also spoke to Oren Yaniv, Director of Communication at Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office about Marcelin’s case. At first, Yaniv used male pronouns to refer to Marcelin, then within a couple of minutes he suddenly switched to “she”.

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“I don’t know what her driver’s license says,” he told me, when I asked if Marcelin had legally transitioned. “Usually in the US these days it is based on a person’s preference, so right now she identifies as a woman, and we are respecting that.” So does that mean Marcelin will be held in female correctional facilities? “To the best of my knowledge, yes,” he replied.

But what about the risk he may pose to the women incarcerated with a male serial killer? Wasn’t this of concern to the DA?“I’m sure that they are taking precautions now,” Yaniv said, “this individual has spent… years in prison already, where to my knowledge they did not kill anybody, I don’t think there are too many chainsaws in prison but… she won’t be the only accused murderer that’s being held in Riker and they have policies and precautions to, you know, minimise the violence of it.”

He also confirmed at trial, “we respect the person’s gender identity… She identifies as a woman, and we refer [to] her as a woman.” Marcelin will be referred to in court as she/her. The DA’s office and the correctional facilities will “respect” Marceline’s gender identity, make the bold assumption that his transition is genuine, call him she/her in court, and put him in prison with women.

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Susan Leyden, Marcelin’s latest victim, was a devoted single mother. At her funeral, her daughter Nicole said, “Mom had a heart of gold. She was so much fun to be around. Our relationship was more like sisters at times. Perhaps because it was just the two of us, I never wanted to leave her side.”

I feel for Leyden’s daughter, and her family, and the families of the other victims. They will have to listen to the court referring to a male serial killer as “she” and “her”. They will have to live with the fact that the second and third murders were entirely foreseeable and preventable if the authorities had only acted. And all the women who will be incarcerated with this man, and who are already vulnerable will know that they have been put seriously at risk.

Marcelin epitomises the worst example of unbridled male violence, and to pretend he is the same sex as those whose lives he destroyed is nothing short of an abomination.

It’s hard to deny that the practice of self-identification is increasingly open to abuse — in the UK, as well as in America. Only last week Baroness Nicholson broke the story of the rape of a woman in a female ward by a male-bodied transwoman, who had been allowed in the ward thanks to the acceptance by the NHS of self-identification.

Gender identity ideology often comes packaged in warm and fuzzy clichés. “Trans women are women”; “What impact does it have on your life anyway?”; “Can’t you just be kind?” But for how much longer can we ignore the grave consequences for women when predatory men take advantage of the new rules of this ideology.

Last week, she posted a poem online declaring that if only she’d been Vladimir Putin’s mum, he would have been “so loved, held in the arms of joyous light” that instead of “calling Mother Russia” and rolling the tanks toward Kiev, he’d have phoned Mother AnnaLynne. And she would have saved him from this terrible deed, “with the love only a mother can give”.

Something of the same faith in a mother’s power to create the world you want for your child, out of raw love and determination, suffuses Marlo Mack’s How To Be A Girl. A memoir of raising her transgender daughter, referred to in the book as “M”, it captures convincingly the fierce determination mothers have to lay down their lives for their children’s wellbeing.

But is love really enough to protect a child from pain? This is a complicated question. It’s not so long ago that Western mothers were encouraged to leave babies to cry, to “exercise their lungs”; in other cultures mothers willingly subject their daughters to painful FGM. Mothers in every age have faced death or worse to protect their children to their utmost power; but what we seek to protect our children from varies enormously.

Mack describes how, age four, ‘M’ said to her: “Something went wrong in your tummy” that “made me come out as a boy”. She describes M sobbing: “Put me back, so I can come out again as a girl.” How to respond? We allow or fend off suffering for our children according to a wider moral framework. And reading How To Be A Girl, it’s clear that Mack and I both love our children, but differ significantly in that framework.

In contrast to my British pessimism, she inhabits a Democrat-voting Seattle milieu, whose culture draws on a West Coast American tradition that prioritises individualism and empathy. In the influential words of 20th-century Californian psychotherapist Carl Rogers, this view argues that within each of us exists an “actualising tendency” that draws us organically toward becoming our true selves. For Rogers, all we need to “actualise” is “unconditional positive regard”.

Within the Hollywood-individualist worldview, adult violence, cruelty and aggression are caused by a lack of love and acceptance: the deficit McCord believes now drives Russian aggression in Ukraine. “If I was your mother,” says McCord in her address to Vladimir Putin, “I’d have died to make you warm.”

If I believed, like Rogers or McCord, that adult wrongdoing is driven by lack of love and acceptance, I expect I, too, would go to great lengths to provide my child with an adequate supply of “positive regard”. I expect, in other words, that I’d do much as she does: accept her child’s right to self-define. This leap of faith and validation made, she describes the relief she and her ex-husband both experience: “Before, everything was tense and contested, everything was a fight. Afterward, we were at peace.”

I expect I’d move mountains, as she does, to see that this extends beyond just the family and all the way out into the world. She even starts a playgroup for trans children, calling it the “Be-Your-True-Self Play Group”. How To Be A Girl shows the degree to which a mother’s love can reshape reality itself. And it also shows the power such commitment has, in an age where many are desperately in search of something to believe in.

For if we’ve always put together competing stories from the same facts, today’s culture is perhaps unique in the tools it offers us to project our worldview digitally into the wider world. But while you might think seeing so many different perspectives would enable greater empathy, in fact the reverse seems to be happening: evermore antagonistic filter bubbles have emerged, tranforming into communities of belief: a process Katherine Dee calls “fandomification”.

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How To Be A Girl recounts, in microcosm, the formation of just such a “fandom” or community of belief. Having decided to reorder reality around her child’s own sense of self, Mack is then committed to projecting this sovereign right to self-define out into the wider world. She recounts the emotional rollercoaster of telling family, then the neighbours; finding a school where her child can “be a girl”. And increasingly, these choices — all rooted in a clearly sincere commitment to holding her child “in the arms of joyous light” — come to shape and define Mack’s own life and activities, drawing her deeper into the trans-rights community of belief via the community she builds both in real life and online.

First she joins a support group for parents of “trans kids”. She starts blogging, and receives heartfelt positive feedback (as well as death threats) from strangers. She joins a local Trans Pride march, attends conferences, receives media inquiries. She starts a podcast with her child.

The story opens with her divorce and her child “coming out” as transgender; both lives are rebuilt over the course of the book, around M’s transness. But the only question she receives about the all-encompassing nature of this project is from a man she is dating, who asks her: “You’re so into this transgender thing… It’s your daughter who’s transgender, right?”

Instead of hearing this as a question about her embrace of the trans-rights fandom, though, Mack interprets this as him asking if she is in fact transgender. She dismisses this as absurd and offensive and dumps him. There’s no question of making space within the world she’s constructing for the possibility that it has an outside.

But it does have an outside. I, for example, do not believe all the evil in the world can be cured by maternal love, or indeed that humans can change sex. How To Be A Girl meant, for me, stepping out of the gender-critical filter bubble into the world as it appears to a woman who has staked not just her own identity and social world but literally her child’s body on believing gender identity is real. Doing so was like visiting the Upside Down.

Mack and I share numerous reference points on the topic of transgender rights, but are familiar with radically opposing interpretations of them. She takes at face value the (debunked among gender-critical feminists) statistic about the high risk of suicide among trans children, for example, while treating as debunked the study, widely cited in gender-critical circles, about the high percentage of trans children who desist if left alone.

Elsewhere she curates stories in a way that’s a photographic negative of the one I’m accustomed to. She notes, for example, that the pioneer of “watchful waiting” in gender-identity treatment, Kenneth Zucker, was “fired” from the clinic he ran, and the clinic itself “shut down pending an investigation of its practices”. Move the picture, though, and the optical illusion changes. Zucker was eventually paid $586,000 in damages after it was ruled that he was wrongfully dismissed; the question is whether that gets reported.

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Similarly, in her discussion of America’s “bathroom bill” court cases, she states that there “wasn’t any evidence” that “men posing as transgender women were infiltrating changing rooms”. But step into the other fandom, and you’ll soon hear about the evidence.

In the online battles over which facts to curate, it’s easy to forget that what’s at stake is real people, with real lives, and — as is clearly the case with Marlo Mack — real love for a real child. But this doesn’t make the escalating contest between incompatible fandoms less intense. Quite the opposite. For if there’s a common theme to the bitterest online disputes, it’s they’re rooted in questions that, somewhere at least, someone is willing to stake living bodies on.

It’s perhaps telling that Mack’s story ends with M aged 13. Transition has, up to that point, only resisted social norms; the reader is spared the far more gruelling and invasive fight against biological ones. But the blocker is inserted, and the book ends with M “excited to be growing up”. And speaking of M’s participation in a long-term study on trans kids, Mack rejoices that “Our kids would be part of a historic cohort”.

Move the picture, though, and the image changes: another way of saying this might be “conducting medical experiments on children without a control group”. Regardless, Mack is willing to stake her child’s body on her convictions — and in a post-Christian culture desperately searching for meanings, it’s no wonder competing online communities of belief take shape around such certainty. And this in turn forces us to confront the fact that disputes with real stakes in real bodies aren’t like arguments over fictional fandoms. Some battles between filter bubbles really are zero-sum.

You can read books that say reality should be re-ordered to accommodate children like M, and others that say humans can’t change sex. If it doesn’t affect you, you can murmur about the “marketplace of ideas”. But which fandom sets the rules for life in the material world is a political question, and on matters that affect the wider legal or cultural framework, there is nowhere neutral to stand.

Mack is willing to swim against the tide of biology, transform an entire legal system, hammer other people’s use of language into new shapes, for the sake of her child. And as she recounts the role her struggle plays in her own identity, as well as M’s, it’s increasingly clear that succeeding is an existential matter for both of them. This is emotive enough when what’s at stake is children’s wellbeing. But when it’s the life and death of an entire nation, everything intensifies again: the appeal of joining one or another fandom, the impossibility of neutrality, and the incapacity to think long-term about wider material consequences.

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As we sidle along the edge of nuclear precipice, in the world’s first very online viral war, it’s increasingly clear how easy it is to slide from mutually antagonistic online bubbles powered by love and good intentions, to a world where people call for actual real-world Armageddon on the basis of internet-powered belief. If I have any hope at all of averting catastrophe, it lies in perhaps the most powerful force there is, a force I still have in common with Marlo Mack, despite our radically competing worldviews: we love our children.

As How To Be A Girl amply illustrates, this can be turned to many uses. Loving parents determined to reorder reality around their adored child may drive radical changes across the social, legal and political fabric while ignoring serious knock-on effects elsewhere. But the love we have for our children is also the beginning of life in common.

Anyone raising children needs a community. Most mothers, when they become mothers, set about building one. We can only hope that this need we still have for one another is enough to keep our fraying public life from total conflagration — or, if the worst comes to the worst, to rebuild it from the ashes.

With nine books and several prizes to her name — her debut collection, The Language of Cat, was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal — Rooney’s career has been marked by success. But now it is over, following what she describes as “two and a half years of intensive bullying for doing nothing more than telling the truth”: namely, that there’s something deeply concerning about the prevailing orthodoxy around gender identity.

While JK Rowling might be too famous to cancel, those with heterodox views in the foothills of literary fame have two choices: keep quiet or leave. It’s a lesson not only Rooney has been forced to learn: only last year, Gillian Philip, who used to write animal fantasy novels under the name Erin Hunter, was suddenly dropped by her publishers after voicing her support for Rowling’s views on the importance of women-only spaces. She retrained as a lorry driver, noting that “the haulage industry is far more supportive and inclusive — and a lot less misogynistic — than the world of children’s writing”.

Rooney’s path to creative writing is a story in itself. Following a “toxic relationship” and nervous breakdown that led to her being hospitalised, poetry became her “main tool for recovery”. At 49, she won a CLiPPA (a national award for children’s poetry) for her first collection. After years of working as a teacher, she describes being “catapulted into a second career as a children’s writer”; her books were endorsed by everyone from Carol Ann Duffy to David Walliams.

But things began to change when Rooney felt compelled to investigate why so many autistic teenagers were identifying as the opposite sex. “I was once a gender non-conforming autistic child,” she tells me. “I know how it is to be uncomfortable in your own skin, to hate what society tells you it is to be female. It felt strange to realise that my growing reservations around the simplistic idea that children can be ‘born in the wrong body’ would be seen as being bigoted and hateful. I had always been progressive, even ‘woke’.”

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Rooney, undeterred by the hostility she knew might follow, started to gently question whether our understanding of gender identity has become warped — only to find herself unfriended and blocked by a number of children’s authors. Many, she explains, did “get in touch privately and admitted to being too scared to speak out — others said they had been warned off from engaging with the topic”.

But Rooney was determined not to be intimidated. So rather than back down, she decided to write a book to “counter the explosion in titles which told children they might be trapped in the wrong body if they don’t conform to stereotypes”. Through 2018 she worked on what was to become My Body is Me! with the illustrator Jessica Ahlberg. Published a year later by Transgender Trend, a well-established group of parents and professionals “who are concerned about the current trend to diagnose children as transgender”, it challenges sexist stereotypes and promotes a positive self-image.

“It’s a proudly inclusive book,” she says. “We talked in depth about the celebratory message we wanted to get across: we aimed to show a diverse range of personalities, body types and family set-ups.”

Of course, Rooney suspected she would face a backlash — but nothing could prepare her for what happened next. Ahlberg, whose parents Janet and Allan Ahlberg wrote and illustrated a number of best-selling children’s books including The Jolly Postman and Peepo, was for the most part ignored. Rooney, however, continues to be monstered and hounded more than two years later.

She explains that “a core of around a dozen authors, librarians, book bloggers and illustrators” — some of whom have allegedly been encouraged by “committee members in the Society of Authors (SoA)” — have repeatedly “smeared” her online in “an attempt to drum her out of publishing”. She recalls: “Fellow authors discussed my ‘hateful world view’, my ‘transphobia’, my bigoted, exclusionary nature and even my autism.”

Take Clara Vulliamy, creator of the Dotty Detective series and daughter of the acclaimed children’s author Shirley Hughes, described Rooney as representing “an extreme ideology that explicitly targets children”. Vulliamy even went so far as to compare Rooney to Tommy Robinson.

“In her post,” Rooney explains, “Vulliamy tagged an agency that employed me to do school visits, warning them about my views and saying ‘ideologically driven school visits could see us all in deep water’. I don’t think she’d even read My Body is Me and thankfully I had a good reputation at the schools I worked in, so kept that work. Ultimately, all I did was speak out on issues around education, literature, child development, safeguarding and more specifically, the female, autistic perspective. I did so because I care.”

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By Julie Bindel

There is, however, only so much vitriol a person can endure. And soon Rooney started to struggle with bouts of debilitating anxiety. “It was exhausting. The thought of socialising with people in publishing made me feel physically sick. Poetry was not only my livelihood; it was how I stayed sane. But after the abuse from others in my profession I began to associate it with trauma.”

Then, towards the end of last year, Rooney received an urgent call from her agent to inform her that the publisher of her children’s books was unhappy with her outspoken questioning of gender identity. “I was told that my stance could be considered offensive and that people had been complaining. Two independent bookshops had refused to stock my latest picture book, The Problem with Problems, even though it was entirely unrelated to gender ideology.

“I was told I needed to stop tweeting about the risks to children from gender identity ideology and to remove posts on social media. But I was never offensive, I just told the truth as I see it.” When she refused to be silenced, Rooney was told that her Twitter account would not be copied into any online publicity “in case it sent traffic my way where people might learn of my ‘offensive’ views.”

Soon the campaign to vilify Rooney ratcheted up. Save the Children were bullied by activists into taking down from social media a charity video of Gillian Anderson reading The Problem with Problems. Waterstones was targeted after it posted a video of Tom Hardy reading the same book, though didn’t back down.

But the harassment against gender-critical authors hasn’t stopped. Last week, author Jay Hulme, who identifies as transgender, posted a tweet accusing an unnamed author who “hates that I’m trans and write for kids” of preventing the publication of one of his books. Hulme was supported by Vulliamy, who added: “People within children’s publishing, you KNOW who Jay is talking about.” Rooney wasn’t named, but is confident she was the subject of these posts.

I contacted several of those making accusations against the “unnamed author”. The only person who responded was Hulme, who told me: “I didn’t name the author for a reason — because I don’t believe in pile ons or digital attacks, and so I cannot and will not confirm any names or comment further. Had I wished to expand, I would have done already.”

The SoA also appeared to close ranks. Rather than responding to my enquiry, a press officer directed me to a link to a statement from August which outlined the SoA’s stance on inclusivity. Remarkably, their policy states that SoA will ensure “individuals are supported and able to speak out”.

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No doubt Rooney would beg to differ. The repeated smears, sly insinuations and cowardice of the professional bodies have all taken their toll, not least on how her work is received. “People often talk of cancel culture. But there is a more insidious technique at play — one that’s harder to prove but palpable to the receiver; that of ‘Ghosting Culture’. It’s when your book is left off reading lists; when it doesn’t get reviewed; when you are not invited on a panel to discuss it. It’s where organisations you’ve worked with and even long-time friends suddenly avoid sharing publicity about it.”

And yet despite everything — the abuse, the betrayal, the attempts to silence her — Rooney says she has no regrets. She has one more book due in 2022, The Fears you Fear, but it will be her last.

“I can’t work in an industry that purports to care for children yet polices and punishes those who raise safeguarding concerns,” she says. “Regardless of what anyone believes, we should always be free to talk about what’s in the best interests of children.”

However, given her venomous treatment, and that of her fellow authors, it seems unlikely she will be the last victim of the publishing purges. Her story, of overcoming barriers and reaching success in middle-age, is surely impressive; it ought to serve as an inspiration to aspiring writers. But thanks to the stunted vision of those who hold sway in children’s writing, the moral of Rooney’s tale is entirely different: “publish and be damned”.

But it’s not just individual mothers and daughters who do this. It is also reproduced in the women’s movement. In American Electra, the feminist writer Susan Faludi argues that it is a central feature: matricide is a core dynamic in feminism from the Twenties onward.

“The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr”, wrote Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born (1976). Faludi quotes Betty Friedan, perhaps the quintessential rejecter of bourgeois domesticity as a desirable role for women, who said: “I didn’t want to be like my mother”.

And this dynamic, Faludi argues, has translated into “a persistent barrenness” within feminism: that is, a rejection not just of individual mothers but of the movement’s ability to create a heritage over time. Instead, each generation rejects the one that went before, endlessly reproducing this second-wave feminist scorn for endlessly victimised, unfree, martyred and unsatisfied mothers – both literal and also political. It’s a push-me-pull-you dynamic that both rejects whatever came before in the women’s movement, while also longing for an ongoing, motherly warmth and acceptance.

Nowhere is this battle over the nature (or, perhaps, the possibility) of a feminist legacy more evident than in contemporary arguments around trans identity. Shon Faye’s new book on “transgender liberation”, The Transgender Issue, argues this inheritance with energy and clarity. Meanwhile, in what it leaves half-said or unsaid, it also demonstrates it.

In general terms, the book delivers what you’d expect, given gushing blurbs written by Judith Butler, Ash Sarkar and Owen Jones: a bog-standard “intersectional” treatise. It abounds in the expected namechecks of standard “marginalised” groups, gestures in familiar ways at the evils of “capitalism” and evinces standard woke opinions on prostitution, prisons and immigration.

The Transgender Issue: an argument for justice is written with an op-ed journalist’s persuasive energy, in a style that (for anyone familiar with the so-called “Terf wars”) at times egregiously begs often hotly-contested questions. For example, proposed legislation that would replace biological sex in law with self-identified “gender identity”, a change with far-reaching conceptual and political implications, is breezily characterised as “a more humane process for gender recognition”.

But Faye writes well. Anyone seeking a primer on “trans-inclusive” and “gender critical” arguments could do worse than read this book alongside Helen Joyce’s Trans. The book’s interest lies in its ambivalent relation to an older generation of feminism.

Faye draws on second-wave writers and radical feminist history, to argue that far from representing a repudiation of the second-wave legacy, trans-activism is its inheritrix. To this end, The Transgender Issue quotes Andrea Dworkin’s approving 1974 description, in Woman Hating, of how new research and fertility technology “challenges the notion that there are two discrete biological sexes” and “threatens to transform the traditional biology of sex difference into the radical biology of sex similarity”. Elsewhere, Faye correctly points out that disagreements over the place of trans women in feminist groups go all the way back to the Seventies.

And, indeed, this matriarchal lineage is difficult to dispute, when it was this generation of feminists who first argued that “sex” and “gender” are separable. Andrea Dworkin stated in Woman Hating that “man” and “woman” are […] cultural constructs […] reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming”. What Dworkin outlines here is, today, settled opinion among pronouns-in-bio online leftists.

Against what Dworkin called the “totalitarian” idea of “man” and “woman”, other second-wave radical feminists imagined all of us liberated from the givens of biology. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), for example, dreamed of a future in which women had been wholly liberated from reproduction by a mix of extra-uterine gestation and collectivised childcare.

From this perspective, if we admit of any relationship whatsoever between biology and wider social norms or structures, women are at risk of being subordinated again: relegated once more to (as Rich puts it) “the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr”. And if there’s no relationship between biology and identity, why shouldn’t a trans woman be — as Faye argues — also “female”?

Like the secondwavers, Faye rejects the “conservative” idea that women are “vessels for reproduction”. The Transgender Issue situates trans liberation as a logical extension of feminist call for bodily autonomy and particularly for safe and legal abortion. In Faye’s view, both abortion and gender medicine are forms of resistance to “[c]onservative ideological positions about gender roles and the degree to which an individual is entitled to autonomy over their body”.

Faye’s argument for “transfeminism” as a daughter of the second wave, then, has merit. It continues this matrilineal dynamic in one further way: by embracing the “matricidal” dynamic described by Susan Faludi.

Mothers have only the most tenuous presence in The Transgender Issue. Only two get more than passing, warm mention: Faye’s own mother (in the dedication), and the supportive mother of a transgender-identified child.

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Mothers as a political group are (in Faye’s characteristically tendentious style) airbrushed out. Reflecting on why British feminism in particular is resistant to the inclusion of trans women, Faye blames this on all manner of things, from a hostile press, to (somehow) the British Empire, while leaving out perhaps the most central rallying-point for “gender critical” activism: Mumsnet, or as it’s sometimes dubbed by those infuriated by its members’ stubborn wrongthink, “Prosecco 4chan”.

Mumsnet’s feminism pages have played a central role in gender critical activism politics for over a decade, a fact not unconnected to Mumsnetters’ (usually) shared experience of maternity. It is, after all, more difficult to take seriously the idea that “woman” is an identity, when you’ve experienced pregnancy, childbirth and the shift in outlook and social role that comes with motherhood. But for Faye, the possibility that mothers might have experiences in common, and views of their own, doesn’t merit airtime.

In The Transgender Issue, mothers appear as bit-part players. Some are kind blunderers who don’t understand their children’s identity needs; others are violently transphobic. Inasmuch we appear as a class at all in connection with the female reproductive role, we’re either gender-diverse “people with uteruses” (ie not mothers), or else women in need of abortion services so they can avoid becoming mothers.

Again, in keeping with second-wave feminism, Faye is keen to sever any connection between women and gestation. In one footnote, the notion that pregnancy is a women’s issue is dismissed as “conservative and regressive”. With that, a key locus of specifically female political interest is reframed as a set of fertility services, that can and should be detached from “woman” as a concept, and whose “postcode lottery” availability represents yet another injustice to the trans community.

Shon Faye’s “transgender liberation”, then, sits in intimately ambivalent mother/daughter relationship with the feminism that birthed it. It embraces the conceptual legacy of second-wave feminism; then, in accordance with that heritage, also rejects motherhood and maternity. And, at the same time rejecting its own second-wave heritage, which (we gather) wasn’t nearly radical enough but instead merely accepted a set of minor improvements to the conditions for bourgeois women under capitalism.

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Nor is it enough, in Faye’s view, to replicate such marginal gains for well-off, white, transgender people. Such activism (which the book exemplifies in Stonewall’s corporate “diversity” activism) affords at best superficial improvements without addressing The System that claims the right to determine who is or isn’t “acceptably trans under capitalism”.

For Faye, the real prize is smashing this underlying system, which the book identifies with “patriarchy”. Achieving this seems to mean abolition of all boundaries or limits, a vision that includes ending “rigid” ideas of biological sex, dissolving hierarchical relations such as “the state’s monopoly on legal force through policing, prisons and migrant detention centres” and ending any political structure — such as national borders — that imposes harsh divisions of any kind.

To replace this “patriarchal” regime, Faye envisages one of pure nurture. This order, we gather, would be unstintingly welcoming to the vulnerable, impoverished, addicted or mentally unwell. It would be endlessly adaptive to individuals’ specific, contextual, identity-driven needs. And it would be boundlessly giving with medical, housing and therapeutic resources – up to and including laser hair removal and gamete-freezing, resources certainly not universally available to other groups on the NHS.

It ought, Faye declares, “to be the state’s obligation to support trans people, not the other way around”. Even as it rhetorically sidesteps literal mothers, then, true liberation, is a political regime that sets out liberate women from the need to be mothers, by itself embodying the once-archetypal maternal qualities of empathy, nurture and support.

Faye characterises as “frankly unhinged” Germaine Greer’s argument in The Whole Woman that transgender women are engaged in a form of symbolic matricide. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say Greer didn’t go far enough. That is, it’s not just transfeminism that’s engaged in symbolic matricide, it’s pretty much all of it, from the second wave onwards.

Other strands have, of course, emerged over many decades of sometimes rancorous feminist debate. But Shon Faye makes a convincing case for transgender activism as the matricidal inheritrix of a profoundly matricidal strand in that debate.

And perhaps the regime of therapeutic totalitarianism The Transgender Issue proposes, to replace our current social order, is the true inheritance of this matricidal liberation. For since the likes of Dworkin and Firestone were writing, those women who didn’t want to be like their martyred mothers have increasingly swapped caring for toddlers favour of entry into public and working life.

In tandem, the care of even very young children has since been increasingly outsourced to institutional providers. Many of these young people are now adults: generations for whom, increasingly commonly, the earliest infant experiences of nurture are fused with a more impersonal, institutional authority.

Perhaps it’s natural that such adults would dream of a political regime on the same template of nurturing authoritarianism. And perhaps, too, Shon Faye’s vision of a politics so motherly no one need ever want, compete or quarrel again is the true contemporary legacy of the second wave’s mummy issues.

Transgender ideologues tell us that everybody has a gender identity — an innate and immutable feeling of maleness and femaleness — that determines whether we are women or men, or perhaps something else. If that conflicts with the sex “assigned” to you at birth, then come join us under the transgender umbrella. We will even give you a flag to make sure you feel special.

But what if gender identity is bunkum? To the true faithful who dutifully chant “transwomen are women”, even asking the question is tantamount to blasphemy.

The term “gender identity” was coined by Robert Stoller in 1964. He described it as “a congenital, perhaps inherited biological force”. But evidence is lacking. As Alex Byrne, Professor of Philosophy at MIT, has observed: “If there is some kind of ‘gender identity’ that is universal in humans, and which causes dysphoria when mismatched with sex, it remains elusive.”

Rather like the “luminiferous ether” of the 19th century, a hypothetical substance used to explain the transmission of light, gender identity was invented rather than discovered. But when Einstein showed that ether was unnecessary to explain its existence, that idea was abandoned. Presumably, then, if transsexualism can be explained without a mysterious biological force, gender identity can join it in the history books.

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Since the whole debate rests on the distinction between men and women, it makes sense to consider the differences between them. In humans, adult males tend to be taller, while females tend to have wider hips. But the crucial difference — which defines male and female in any species — is the production, or potential for production, of one of two gametes: ova in females and sperm in males.

Having fathered three children in the usual way, there can be no doubt which gametes I produced. I am male, and hence I am a man.

So why am I also transsexual? What could have caused psychological distress so severe that I felt I had no choice but to transition? At the time — nine years ago — the urge to change not only my social presentation but also my body was irresistible. But can this be explained by differences in psychology, rather than a mysterious force?

Male and female psychologies are not the same. The most obvious difference is sexual orientation. According to the Office of National Statistics, 93.4% of men are attracted to women, while 93.9% of women are attracted to men. But to attract partners, men and women also signal sexually in grooming, dress and presentation, and they tend to do it differently. No doubt some of this will be socially conditioned, but that cannot explain our observations of other species. Peacocks not only possess distinctive plumage, they show it off.

In her book, Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, Carole Hooven — currently the Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard — builds a persuasive case that testosterone in utero affects the psychology as well as the physiology of the developing embryo. She tells me, however, that unlike other species, “what particular [sexual] signals we use are heavily dependent on culture”.

Like sexual orientation, sexual signalling applies differently to the two sexes. But it is also overt and pervasive, extending far beyond clothes and makeup. Even the words man and woman evoke their sexual signals. When we hear “a real man”, we don’t picture an authentic producer of small gametes; we think of a man with sexually attractive, testosterone-driven male qualities: strong and tough, and probably not wearing a dress.

And so sexual signalling is more than mere gender expression. While gender is a poorly defined term and rooted in culture, sex is the reason our species is here. Sexual attraction involves two vectors: sexual orientation is the sex we are attracted to, and sexual signalling is how we make ourselves attractive. Neither can be disconnected from sex and the biological impetus to reproduce.

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Just as people with an atypical sexual orientation can be labelled as gay, those driven to atypical sexual signalling can be labelled as trans. So isn’t sexual signalling just gender identity by another name? Yes and no.

Yes, it is an innate quality that is hard-wired into us: it is not something that we can choose, and it can lead to transsexualism if we are driven to signal in the way typical of the other sex rather than our own. But no, sexual signalling does not supplant biological sex. When transgender activists chant “transwomen are women”, they are in effect demanding that gender identity replaces biological sex when we demarcate men and women. The deleterious impact of that approach on female people — “birthing bodies”, according to one female health charity — is profound.

Sexual signalling is also an observable reality, and it is a starting point to understand why some people are trans. There may be multiple different reasons, but I will focus on the group I know most about: heterosexual males who transitioned in midlife.

Not only can our maleness not be wished away — we are members of the sex that produces sperm, after all — I would claim that the reason why this group wants to wear dresses and makeup, grow out our hair and develop breasts is linked inextricably to our maleness. To quote another transsexual, Anne A Lawrence, we are “men trapped in men’s bodies”. That was the title of Lawrence’s book that contained a series of narratives written by autogynephilic male-to female transsexuals.

Autogynephilia was a term introduced in 1989 by the American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard. Blanchard told me that autogynephilia denotes “a natal male’s tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman.” He added, “in the Western Hemisphere and English-speaking Commonwealth countries, the overwhelming majority of adult natal males presenting with gender dysphoria are of the autogynephilic type.”

It’s not difficult to conceive why autogynephilia can lead to severe psychological distress in heterosexual men attracted to their own bodies. Because their sexual and romantic interest is directed inwards — a target location error according to Blanchard  — they respond by sexually signalling to themselves. But while their interest is in females (they are heterosexual), their bodies are male. Clothing may help to create an illusion of femaleness but, for some, medical transition may seem to be the only way to square the circle.

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This scientific approach to just one form of male-to-female transsexualism is a world away from a metaphysical claim that “transwomen are women”. But the concept of gender identity has been comforting and politically useful for autogynephilic transsexuals in a society that stigmatises unusual male sexuality. Unsurprisingly, Blanchard’s theory provokes a very strong reaction in some.

It should not, however, be ignored: gender identity has caused significant collateral damage to children and adolescents, women’s rights, biomedical science and Western political life. Moreover,  it is as unnecessary as the ether. Transsexuals — and other gender non-conforming people — do not need to invent an innate gender identity to understand ourselves.

We just have a need to communicate ourselves — sexually signal — as other human beings do, just in a way more typical of the opposite sex. There may be a host of reasons why that happens, of which autogynephilia is just one, but gender identity explains nothing. Worse, it hinders exploration into the conditions that make us the people we are.

But even as I rippled through the deep, marvelling at flashing schools of fish, there was a trade-off: constant self-control. Don’t breathe out through your nose. Don’t sneeze. Never, ever panic. For a short while it’s possible to pretend that you have the freedom of such an alien world, but in truth you’re only ever a tourist, granted safe passage thanks to technology, training and self-discipline.

Something about this sense of crossing an uncrossable threshold surely also powers our obsession with mermaids. And it is an obsession: mermaids are everywhere. Monique Roffey’s novel The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story recently won the Costa Book Prize, while “mermaiding” — swimming in the sea wearing a “mermaid tail” — has gained a cult following in Australia. And you only need to browse the girls’ clothing selection in a high-street shop to find countless cartoon girls with fish-tails, sequinned and sparkly, smiling at you from t-shirts, dresses, wellies, duvet sets, pencil cases and the like.

As a parent of a four-year-old, I’m more familiar than I’d like with mermaid content, and Disney is a rich source. Sofia the First: A Mermaid Tale is a favourite with my daughter, who is entranced by the moment when Sofia is magically transformed into a mermaid and dives underwater. There, she swims in circles exclaiming: “This is incredible!”. And it is. The rest of the story is almost an afterthought, with the whole narrative punch condensed into that moment of metamorphosis, and the dive into a new and mysterious realm.

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If mermaids offer an enchanting dream of transformation, perhaps it’s no surprise that the transgender movement enthuses about the special place mermaids have in their iconography. Activist Janet Mock links this to Ariel, heroine of the 1989 Disney film The Little Mermaid, who chafes at her underwater life and longs to visit the world beyond.

Ariel falls in love with a human, Prince Eric, and persuades the sea-witch Ursula to give her human legs, in exchange for her voice. Of course, being Disney, it all ends happily: Ariel gets her transformation at the end and marries the prince. It’s an elegant, arresting fantasy of pursuing and realising a seemingly impossible vision, and encapsulates perfectly the Disney motto: “Where Dreams Come True”.

Today, it’s increasingly accepted that we should support each individual in pursuit of their dreams — even to the extent, as in Ariel’s case, of accommodating those who radically alter their bodies to align with inner identity. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that in the 31 years since The Little Mermaid was released, the association between mermaids and those who pursue an identity at the cost of physical transformation has only deepened. Six years after the film’s release, a charity was founded with the aim of supporting transgender youth — and given the name Mermaids. Meanwhile, Starbucks (whose logo is a mermaid) ran a 2019 campaign in partnership with Mermaids, celebrating the moment a young transgender person hears their preferred name spoken by a Starbucks barista and, for the first time, identity supersedes body.

But just as scuba divers gain the enthralling freedom of the deep only via technology and absolute self-control, a delve into the deeper iconography of mermaids suggests that crossing a threshold as un-crossable as that between air and water isn’t as straightforward matter of making Dreams Come True. As T.S. Eliot hinted in 1911, the dream of oneness with the ocean always comes with a price, or else comes to an end:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The modern mermaids of pre-teen iconography are both ultra-glam and sexless, sporting revealing, shimmery shell bikinis and jewelled hair — even as the iconography swims smoothly past the question of what’s going on below the waist. As transgender icon Amiyah Scott puts it to Janet Mock: “With mermaids, the bottom is kind of like an unknown and I like that.” It’s not really done to speculate about how mermaids make more mermaids.

For a culture that simultaneously offers pre-teen girls Playboy-branded merch and rages about paedophilia, this style of mermaid perfectly combines an alluring, hyper-feminine aesthetic with a convenient evasion of the sexual dynamic that hyper-femininity is meant to evoke in adults. But the deep history of mermaids — and their element, the ocean itself — tackles those far darker and more turbulent feminine sexual associations in a way that’s far less sanitised.

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Once you’re out on the open sea of unbounded female desire, the mermaids of legend aren’t pretty and sexless at all. They’re alluring, slippery and apt to steal your loved ones. In one Cornish folk tale, chorister Matthew Trewalla followed a mysterious woman out of the Sunday service in the mining town of Zennor, straight to the ocean where he vanished.

As the story goes, Trewalla was never seen again — until spotted by a ship’s captain some years later. He had transformed to a merman, swimming alongside his mermaid wife and mer-children. Zennor’s mermaid tempts Trewalla to turn his back not just on friends and family but on land itself. She’s far closer to the temptress of seafaring lore, who sings to passing ships and causes them to run aground.

In Old Norse mythology, sea-maidens are more menacing still: the nine daughters of Aegir the sea-god and Rán, goddess of the drowned, are waves on the ocean. Each of these nine sea-maidens has a different aspect — such as the frothing one, the billowing one, the welling one — “through which one can see heaven”. The seafaring Vikings who told these stories were intimately familiar with, and healthily afraid of, an ocean seen as both feminine and deeply dangerous.

This hostile undercurrent to the association between women and the sea comes out even today. There’s no shortage of not very polite modern euphemisms for women’s genitalia referencing seafood, for example, while in drag culture someone is said to be ‘fishy’ if they pass as a woman.

So is crossing to the other side desirable or detestable? And what’s the price of a visit? In the movie of The Little Mermaid, there is no price: Ariel’s father Neptune uses his magical trident to transform his daughter permanently into a human, whereupon she leaves permanently for the land and marries her prince. There’s no sense in the movie that this is anything other than an unambiguously happy ending. But while older mermaid tales evoke that same longing to cross the boundary, either seaward or landward, they usually carry a far greater sense of loss or danger than this “Dreams Come True” retelling.

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The hauntingly sad Hans Christian Andersen story that inspired Disney couldn’t be further from wish-fulfilment. As in the film, the mermaid falls in love with a prince she rescues from a storm. But in exchange for giving her legs, the sea-witch doesn’t just steal her voice but cuts out her tongue. Even as the magic grants her a pair legs, walking on them is agony. And though the prince is fond of the transformed mermaid, he loves someone else. There’s no happy ending: the mermaid knows his marriage will break her heart, but though her sisters beg her to break the spell by murdering the prince, the mermaid loves him too much to save herself in this way. Instead, she throws herself into the water and dissolves into foam.

From the Disney perspective, this is all a bit grim. After all, we can all be whatever we want if only we believe. Can’t we? Far from offering a happy tale of dreams that come true, though, Andersen’s story reads like a bleak cautionary tale about struggling against your own natural limits.

Disney animations have a way of crowding out earlier and more ambiguous fairy tales, and it’s a safe bet the founders of Mermaids hadn’t read Andersen’s story when they named their organisation. In their search for a positive depiction of youth gender transition, it seems unlikely they had in mind constant physical pain, the loss of one’s authentic voice and a lifetime of being passed over as a sexual partner.

So even as the ancient history of mermaids has mixed feelings about the beauty and peril of femininity, the modern mermaid reboot is just as ambivalent about what’s real and what’s artificial — and just how far artifice can help us realise our desires. Perhaps it’s fitting that even as we’ve filled our real-life oceans with plastic, we should make such a concerted effort to give the archetypal oceanic feminine a plastic-toy  — or plastic-surgery — makeover.

But despite this embrace of the mermaid as a poster-girl for a consumer approach to identity, the mermaid as symbol isn’t so easily sanitised, or persuaded of her own happy ending. Some mermaids decide they don’t like the land after all, even if they’re no longer quite at home in the sea either. Some find new voices, and use them.

For despite all the toys, t-shirts and upbeat Disney stories, darker, older currents still roll beneath the safe and sparkly modern mermaid. These currents invite us to wonder: maybe some dreams bring no relief, even when they come true. Maybe some kinds of restlessness can’t be cured, only navigated.

Social media praise for the article seemed to suggest she had. “Rigorous critique and affirmative feminism,” said one tweet. “Magisterial,” said another. “Thoughtful, reflective, theoretically and historically rich,” said another. “If you’re confused about trans people and trans rights, I can’t recommend this interview with Judith Butler enough,” said Owen Jones.

I think Prof Butler deserves our attention. I don’t share the reflex sniggering at the opacity of some of her prose — sometimes complex ideas need a complex expression — and in this interview she was for the most part perfectly clear and conversational. But “magisterial”? “Theoretically and historically rich?” Not on the strength of this interview. What she had to offer was intellectually threadbare. Rather than bringing some analytical clarity, she did no more than cloak crude rhetorical strategies in academic grandiloquence.

By way of a disclaimer, I don’t say this because I’m a member of some terf-cult, and I don’t mean it as a motivated intervention in the trans wars. It seems to me that this is an area that admits of good faith disagreement, that there’s a noticeable lack of that in the public discourse, and that — even from so revered a figure as Judith Butler — we should call that lack out when we see it.

The interview began with her being asked about “how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics”. She responded:

“I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.”

This preoccupation with what’s mainstream and what’s marginal is just eccentric — especially coming from a theorist who has spent a lot of time, quite rightly, considering the stifling effects of normativity. Leaving aside the uninterrogated and question-begging use of loaded terms such as “transphobia” and “trans rights”, the arguments at issue should stand or fall on their merits, not on their relation to the mainstream. Liberation movements of the type Prof Butler might approve have, after all, been founded on “marginal” positions. To appeal to the mainstream is to fall into the fallacy called “argumentum ad populum”, and it’s something philosophers usually try not to do.

She’s then asked about JK Rowling’s stated concern that Self-ID could “throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman’, potentially putting women at risk of violence”:

“If we look closely at the example that you characterise as ‘mainstream’ we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.”

Prof Butler might legitimately argue that these concerns are theoretical and/or exaggerated, as many advocates for self-ID do. One writer I respect recently tweeted: “Honestly the best ‘argument’ I have in this is nothing to do with theoretical stances on the definition of gender (which we’re never going to all agree on anyway), it’s: ‘Ireland brought in gender self-ID in 2015 and the things you are afraid of have not happened’”.

But instead there are two things going on here rhetorically, neither of which redound to Prof Butler’s credit. She is pathologising or gaslighting those on the other side of the argument (using “fantasy” or its cognates four times in a paragraph). And she is straw-manning their position.

A fairer representation of the case would have been to say: “The feminist who holds such a view presumes […] that someone with a penis could identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside.”

This would be a good-faith representation of the gender-critical position on single-sex spaces. But it would require the hard work of arguing against it on material evidence, rather than dismissing it as hysteria or fantasy.

When challenged on the idea that “terf” might be understood as a slur, she responds with a high-handed run of rhetorical questions, or what sometimes gets called epiplexis.

“I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women’s spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists?”

Here is something close to the etymological fallacy. As Prof Butler will surely know, given her famously subtle engagement with the eddies and currents of power in discourse, you can’t reliably nail the connotations of a term by appeal to its literal meaning. Here is an argument not much more grown-up than the person who tells you that you misuse antisemitism because “Arabs are semites too, actually”, or rejoice in having noticed that the Nazis claimed to be socialists, or who might think that because something is derived from the Latin word for black it’s no more than a neutral descriptor.

If Prof Butler is interested in attending to what we now like to call “lived experience”, she might attend to the lived experience of those who — being on the receiving end of it — very much consider “terf” to be a slur. To say words to the effect of “well, they’re trying to exclude trans women from their toilets so why not call them exclusionary? If the cap fits, wear it” will not do. If she wonders what they’d prefer to be called, why not ask them? Most, as I understand it, are happy with the term “gender-critical feminists”.

When encouraged to comment on the online trolling that the novelist JK Rowling has faced in response to her public remarks on the issue, Prof Butler responded:

“I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling’s view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.”

This seems to me to be nothing more sophisticated than garden-variety whataboutery. It’s practically a snowclone of the formulation Jeremy Corbyn used to use when asked to make a full-throated condemnation of antisemitism: namely that he condemns all kinds of racism. Immediately Prof Butler pivots from the question asked to bring up the street harassment of trans people in Poland or Romania. This is an irrelevant false equivalence. Telling JK Rowling to choke on a dick doesn’t stop trans people being harassed in Romania; and finding the former objectionable doesn’t green light the latter.

Gaslighting ad-hominems, wilful obtuseness, straw-manning, deflection and whataboutery: this is quite the catalogue of intellectual shabbiness coming from a philosopher of Prof Butler’s standing. If the supposed grown-ups in the room are debating like this, no wonder the discussion is in such a state.

“I think we are living in anti-intellectual times,” Butler remarks later in the interview. You said it, sister.

Today, “gender identity” is used, often unthinkingly, to refer to an inner sense of being male, female or neither that every person supposedly has. “Transgenderism”, meanwhile, is used to refer to a person whose “gender identity” (begging the question) puts him or her at odds with the sexed body that he or she was supposedly “assigned”. Replete with impenetrable jargon, this transgender theory is poorly understood and highly contentious, both inside and outside of the medical profession.

As Helen Joyce explains in her meticulously researched essay for Quillette, theories about “gender identity” can be traced back to “two lines of thinking that originated in America in the 1950s and [were] fused into a single, dominant narrative half a century later”. First, Robert Stoller, an American psychoanalyst, coined the phrase “gender identity.” As well as transsexualism, Stoller wrote enthusiastically about “consensual sadomasochism”, pornography, perversion (which he didn’t believe in), and men achieving an erection during “the height [of] the female experience”, or transvestitism.

Stoller’s ideas about gender identity were further popularised by John Money, a psychologist who proposed a new taxonomy called “fuckology”, a term which proved less catchy than gender identity. Having helped set up the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University, Money then conducted a famous experiment on twin boys, which he left to other people to reveal as a disaster.

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A boy in a dress is just a boy in a dress

By Debbie Hayton

In this experimental study, Money advised the parents of twin boys, Bruce and Brian Reimer, to raise Bruce as a girl (called Brenda) after his penis had been damaged by a botched circumcision procedure in infancy. This brought Money international acclaim. However, when researchers tracked the Reimers down, decades later, it turned out that “Brenda” had been miserable under Money’s treatment and had reverted to a male identity in adolescence. After a lifetime of suffering from depression, both twins killed themselves. Before their deaths, the brothers maintained that Money had ruined their childhood; the supporting evidence for which has been well-documented by journalist John Colapinto in his investigative book, As Nature Made Him.

Paul McHugh MD, the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who was also active in debunking the false memory craze, told me: “Since the 1970s, I have listened to many people such as John Money explaining this concept [gender identity] but most of them are working on a definition, not of something clear and coherent, but an idea that will permit them to do what they want with patients.”

McHugh is not the only person with doubts. Ray Blanchard, a sexologist, and much-cited expert on transsexualism, told me that gender identity is a redundant term when applied to those of us who are not uncomfortable with our natal sex:

“It’s only at very unusual moments that a normal man or woman has a conscious awareness of ‘I’m a woman’ or ‘I’m a man,’ and this is often a highly emotional situation. . . The concept of cross-gender identity is really not a normal gender identity which has found itself lodged in the wrong body. Cross-gender identity is a constant preoccupation with, and unhappiness about, the individual’s gender. So, I guess you could say I believe in cross-gender identity, but I don’t much believe in gender identity.”

Of course, the Reimer tragedy could have been an opportunity to dispassionately examine the concept of “gender identity”. But psychologists, journalists and academics have overwhelmingly gone in the other direction, retroactively redefining “gender identity” rather than learning lessons from its ugly past.

When reminded of the Reimer tragedy, transgender activists suggest that the problem was that Bruce Reimer was really “cisgender” (newspeak for a person at ease with his natal sex; or a “normal man or woman”, per Blanchard). But such people are overlooking the more obvious fact that Bruce Reimer was a boy who was told repeatedly from his authority figures that he was a girl, as well as the more credible argument that misinforming a child about his basic biology can be psychologically damaging.

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Of course biological sex exists

By Tom Chivers

In his essay Science as Falsification, the philosopher Karl Popper suggested some criteria for the scientific character or status of a theory, and how we might tell science apart from pseudo-science. He warned of grand theories offering “explanatory” solutions to complex (and sometimes unrelated) issues, writing:

“Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status.”

The distress and desire to change one’s sex is a highly complex mental disorder, the root causes of which vary widely from person to person. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) defined this condition as “gender identity disorder”. Then, in 2013, under further pressure from activists, as “gender dysphoria”. The latter is how the condition is listed in the most current edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

But responding to activist pressure, the World Health Organization has recently indicated that they no longer consider “gender identity disorder” to be a “mental health condition”. This is quite a conundrum. If such feelings aren’t a problem, then why do trans people need chemical and surgical treatments at all? And if sex-change treatments are purely cosmetic, then why should British taxpayers (or American insurance providers) pay for them?

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There are no good answers to these questions, no way out of the gnarled web of contradiction. Presumably, this is why curiosity on the subject is not encouraged. Instead, transgenderism, the new theory of “gender identity”, has become a catch-all: an ideologically fashionable belief system, promising salvation to believers and damnation for heretics.

Those who don’t believe in the new idea of gender identity have become like atheists living in a theocratic society. Imagine, for instance, if an atheist wanted to have a debate with a Christian about the existence of God. But that, as a condition of the debate, the Christian demanded that the atheist not blaspheme, as well as refer to him throughout as a “child of God”. Further, imagine if those facilitating the debate expected the atheist to acquiesce to this demand or else be considered malicious or ignorant. This is precisely what is happening with the transgender debate every time a non-believer feels obligated to use words such as “transgender”, “gender identity”, or pronouns that do not match the sex of his or her opponent.

Of course, the balance between truth and tact, empirical reality and empathy, can be challenging. What pronouns should I use that respect the other’s self-presentation without betraying my argument? How far should I go in adopting the newspeak? Interpersonal conversations are one thing. But political debates are quite another. In what other debate do we allow our opponents to dictate our language?

Of course, often it’s best to politely get on with people, especially with people who are vulnerable and struggling, as many individuals with gender issues are. But when those in positions of power insist that you say something you don’t believe, participate in something you don’t support, or apostatise science and common sense, it’s only right to object.

Ask yourself which of the following you find to be more convincing. That everybody was born “in” a body, then “assigned” a sex by some careless God or whimsical doctor. Or that everybody is a body: immutably sexed (which is, to some extent, disguisable). One of these positions is settled science: self-evident and, until recently, uncontroversial. The other is an oversimplification of a mental disorder, at best. And at worst, a superstition.