But it means I do understand the power of J.K. Rowling’s childhood-shaping novels. And so I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn about the shrine on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire. Here, a tumble of painted rocks remembers Dobby the house elf, a squeaky-voiced magical creature from the Harry Potter series who was stabbed in a good-versus-evil battle before teleporting (stay with me) to the sand dunes to die. Fans found the spot after the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 in 2010; in the intervening years, mounds of pebbles and odd socks (long story) have been stacked along the shore around a simple wooden cross. 

We know that adult Harry Potter fans can be, well, fanatical. They tote tattoos or necklaces bearing the sign of the Deathly Hallows, hold Hogwarts-themed weddings, name their dogs Sirius Black. They are cringe but they are harmless. Unless you’re in the energy sector, that is. Simon Ludlam, director of a £430 million cabling project, knows exactly the damage they can do. He was recently inundated with “hundreds” of calls from Potterheads over a project he was leading, the Greenlink interconnector, which would thread underneath the dunes of Freshwater West — right through Dobby’s grave — all the way to County Wexford. Ludlam, who looks to be a normal and well-adjusted man in his sixties, very reasonably asked “who?” before being informed that the house elf’s resting place was a “very, very serious matter”. In the end, the fans won: a 504-megawatt interconnector between Britain and Ireland had been made to negotiate with the imagined remains of a house elf. 

It has become depressingly fashionable to distance oneself from the supposedly heinous views of Harry Potter’s creator. Rowling’s advocacy for women and children in the gender debate, at great personal cost to herself, has awakened all the fury and poisonous misogyny of those living in their own fantasy worlds. Hundreds of scribblers and social-media screamers have been keen, over the years, to highlight the “irony” of the offense emanating from one of the figures in British life most celebrated for promoting warm and fuzzy values. How can this woman going to bat for single-sex spaces on X be the same dreamweaver of our childhoods — the creator of a world in which the oppressed triumphed? The implication is of a national treasure turned witch — a fallen angel. And, for many, it’s personal: some of the biggest evangelists for the cult of gender were once the biggest fans of Harry Potter.

The pipeline here should be self-evident. Many of the most vocal apostles for “trans resistance” are part of an arrested cohort: their generation festers in fandoms, hoards Funko Pops, indulges in parasocial relationships with celebrities and fictional characters. They assimilate the moral frameworks of imagined worlds and bluntly apply them to complex grown-up politics. Gender evangelism being a distinctly dweeby movement is not incidental: it directly relates to the baked-in credulousness, magical thinking and outsiderdom which has come to define their generation. 

Nor is it incidental that these themes are the very foundations of the Harry Potter novels. The series’ inciting incident is the sacrifice of Lily Potter, Harry’s mother, to shield him with the simple “old magic” of love. For Rowling, noble is the acceptance of death in the face of persecution — Harry’s parents, many of his peers and ultimately the boy himself model this. The novels’ “wizarding wars” mirror our own, particularly the Second World War: the creed of Voldemort’s gang (the Death Eaters) is a cognate for white supremacy — a murderous preference for pure magical blood over the “mudblood” dilution of non-wizard muggles. Toleration, parity and sympathy for the weak: these are tenets not just of the Potterverse but of the Christian world, too. And just as the beneficiaries of Christianity in the modern, skeptical West have turned on the Church in the Tom Holland model of secularism, so too did Rowling raise a generation of readers to turn on her for criticizing the ultimate monopoly-holder of modern-day oppression: the transgender movement. The force — the creed, the author — which shaped our values also handed us the tools to dismantle them. Harry Potter’s Christian skeleton (intentional or otherwise) put the novel’s author on a familiar track: it seems inevitable now that she’d be ridiculed by those who were raised in the cozy, tolerant atmosphere which both Christianity and Rowling, in their own ways, ushered into being. 

The Potter novels also place enormous emphasis on the mendacity of institutions and the untrustworthiness of official language: the Ministry of Magic, the magical government, is a den of mealy-mouthed apparatchiks and becomes, after Voldemort’s return, a sort of butterbeer-swigging Vichy. Journalists like Rita Skeeter are incorrigible tabloidy liars; authority figures like headteacher Dolores Umbridge are corrupt sadists in league with forces of evil. Even public speech is boobytrapped in Rowling’s world: nobody dares name Voldemort, and speaking obvious truths — for example, about the fact of his resurrection — is met with utter contempt and castigation (a state of affairs Rowling has now come to experience herself). 

Of course, the laudable moral messaging of the Harry Potter novels does not map directly on to real-world political disputes. These books are about heroes and villains: the good, the redeemed and the bad. In real life things are much more messy: rights conflict, language cannot dissolve material trade-offs, and sincerity does not equate to truth. And so, Rowling’s fantasy-steeped children came of age with both an unusually vivid appetite for moral sorting and a drilled-in obsession with oppression and empathy. Frustrated by the complexity of our strange political world, they turned on their maker; transcending upwards into ever purer believers, they labeled their founder a heretic.

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So the debacle surrounding Dobby’s grave isn’t a silly-season news quirk. The moving of a real half-a-billion-pound infrastructure project around a fictional character encapsulates the entire story of Rowling’s place in public life. Hundreds of furious adult fans gave Dobby the house elf a real-world moral constituency and appointed themselves guardians of his final resting place. When that was threatened, they leapt up to do battle with an evil bureaucratic body which, like the ministry in Rowling’s novels, are maleficent killjoys picking on the plucky little guy. They were acting, in other words, like characters from Harry Potter — the tenacious schoolchildren fighting against the odds, the motley Good Ones plotting against dark forces in the tumbledown Weasley cottage. 

I understand why grown adults came out swinging on Dobby’s behalf; I also understand why other former Potter readers cling to an absurdly trenchant moral framework and deranged obsession with victimhood. What was meant to be a refuge — a fictional world with its impossible narrative logic — has hardened into reality for a generation of perennial superfans prepared to elbow children out the way to spend grown-up pocket money on chocolate frogs at theme parks. For the fact is that these are simply cracking stories, vivid worlds with plotlines that inspire a sense of justice even in small children. Because these plotlines were so wonderfully woven, a small number of vocal adults will do whatever they can to cleave to the Potterian schema — whether it’s calling up energy execs or turning on their founding mother for being a little too of reality. In the end, the lure of this fiction was too strong for a readership who cannot seem to put childish things away.

As far as I was concerned when I spoke those words, I was offering my own perspective as a woman — but also saying something that every woman on this planet has always known, and that feminists have repeated for decades. We really must be wary of men because the problem of sexual violence is overwhelmingly a male problem. In France, 99% of rapes are committed by men. Women know. 

According to the three LGBTQ+ organizations who brought criminal proceedings against me — Mousse, SOS Homophobie and ADHEOS, all of which receive funding by French taxpayers, by the way — my words amounted to incitement to transphobic hatred. On Wednesday, the judge delivered his verdict that, yes, I was guilty of committing a “public injury towards a person or a group because of their sex, their sexual orientation or their gender identity”. On top of paying €1,000 to the French state, I’m also liable for various other costs. All told, I’m obliged to pay €4,754. 

Of course, what matters here is not money but principle. Apparently it is now against the law for women to tell other women to be wary of the opposite sex. Naturally, my lawyers and I intend to appeal this Orwellian verdict, all the way to the highest court in France if necessary, since it marks a worrying shift in French freedom of expression — quite beyond the specifics of my own rather absurd trial. It seems to me basically unacceptable that a woman should be condemned for having expressed her misgivings about the safety of women and the reality of biological sex. This represents narrowing of permissible speech in France, the judicialization of ideological disagreement — and the growing influence of gender politics on a country that once prided itself on intellectual honesty. 

I uttered the fateful phrase in October 2023. In my work as a feminist writer and activist, I have long argued that allowing men to change their legal sex and be recognized as women has real implications in various areas, from medicine to law to parenting to sport — and that these merit discussion. I co-founded the feminist NGO Femelliste, and later co-authored a book investigating the excesses and consequences of modern gender ideology. 

When I was invited onto the France 2 show Quelle époque, hosted by the prominent TV journalist Léa Salamé, I hoped it would be a chance to have an open, honest and respectful discussion. I would be appearing alongside France’s first-ever transgender mayor, Marie Cau, then-head of the small northern village of Tilloy-Les-Marchiennes. 

In the event, the debate felt more like an ambush. I was accused of being part of the “far-Right sphere”, which could not be further from the truth. Then the contentious moment arrived when Salamé asked me what I, as a feminist, thought transgender demands might take away from women. I answered that these issues should not simply be opposed — “we must find common ground”. I then raised specific areas where conflicts arise, notably around sport and prison policy. 

In relation to prisons, I referred to documented cases in the United States and the United Kingdom, where male prisoners convicted of violence against women had self-identified as female and been transferred to women’s prisons — where they subsequently sexually assaulted female inmates. It was in this specific context that I said: “I am not saying that all trans people do this, far from it, but as women, we are obliged to be wary of people with penises.” 

Two months later, I received a complaint from Mousse, SOS Homophobie and ADHEOS. The associations cited several of my statements in the program, including one in which I said that, in my view, Marie Cau was a “transfeminine man”.  This was framed as a “transphobic insult”. More broadly, the document portrayed me as someone who contributed to a climate of hostility, even suggesting that my words could be linked to the suffering or suicide of trans-identifying individuals. 

So the initial complaint was not narrowly constructed. It was an attempt, rather, to build a case around a series of statements that, taken together, characterized me not just as someone who had said something controversial: but as someone engaged in a broader pattern of harmful speech. This strategy did not survive legal scrutiny. Before the trial began, my lawyers Richard Malka and Marine Viegas challenged the admissibility and legal qualification of several statements. A significant portion of the complaint was dismissed on procedural and technical grounds; what remained was not the full set of accusations, but that single sentence — “As women, we are obliged to be wary of people with penises”. 

Note that the sentence had become curiously detached from its preceding qualification: “I am not saying that all trans people do this, far from it, but…” Indeed, I was speaking about a concrete category of risk — in other words, doing the opposite of generalizing. This did not prevent the complaint from accusing me of “abusive generalization”. This was the first lesson of the case: once a statement has been ideologically re-coded, context ceases to matter. 

At the hearing, the court returned obsessively to two things: the phrase “people with penises”, and the verb se mefier de — which might be rendered as “to be cautious of”, “to be wary of” or “to watch out for”. The prosecutor argued that my words were doubly discriminatory: first, because they implied that all men are dangerous; and second, because they targeted trans women, recast as “women with penises”, as objects of suspicion. The prosecutor even requested that I be sentenced not only to a fine, but to a so-called “citizenship training course” — a faintly comic euphemism for ideological re-education.

The court’s questioning suggested that my phrase “to be wary of” had to be understood as a hostile generalization. It was treated not as the language of female self-protection, but as a form of exhortation. The word “obliged” made it worse, the prosecutor argued. It transformed caution into an injunction. 

Then there was the phrase “people with penises”. The judge suggested that it sounded like a punchline, a provocation. I explained that I was in fact using a term that is deemed by many progressives to be more inclusive than merely “men” (since as we now know, not all men have penises). Indeed, “people with penises” comes from the same discursive universe as “people with uteruses”, “people who menstruate”, “sex assigned at birth”, and so on. However, it seems that when linguistic logic is applied in the wrong direction, it suddenly becomes indecent. 

The judge then pressed me, several times, on whether I believed all men were dangerous — attempting to force me into either caricature or capitulation. Did I think literally all men were rapists? Really? Every single one? At one point, I was momentarily thrown off balance by this insistence. My lawyer Richard Malka intervened and reframed the point. Not all men are violent, obviously, but the overwhelming majority of rapists are men. That is the social fact women live with, and it is what underlies female caution. It was a necessary intervention as the hearing repeatedly tried to re-code rational female behaviors as forms of ideological extremism. 

But as I learned, this new moral grammar has rendered lived experience all but illegible. Like all women, I have learned from childhood to assess risk. Do not walk alone too late. Watch your drink. Be careful with men you don’t know. Trust your instincts. These are all things we learn as we navigate a social world structured by asymmetrical risk. In court, though, the female habit of caution was recast as criminal suspicion. For this, ordinary reality had to be denied. 

I chose Richard Malka to represent me for a particular reason. His name is not just associated with technical legal expertise — but with some of the most consequential free speech cases of the past two decades. He was the lawyer for newspaper Charlie Hebdo, before and after the terrorist attack on its offices. Malka defended the newspaper’s right to publish caricatures of religion even though they were offensive. That case was about whether a society accepts that certain expressions must remain lawful even when they provoke outrage or worse. Freedom of expression, Malka argued, does not exist only for consensual speech, nor for ideas that flatter prevailing moral sentiments. It exists precisely for what shocks, disturbs, contradicts.

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Malka later represented Mila, a 16-year-old girl subjected to an extraordinary wave of threats and harassment after she criticized Islam in a social media post. The girl had committed no crime, Malka argued, and yet she had effectively been purged from civil society. “I can’t get over the fact that she lives as a recluse,” he told the court. “Imagine her life, she can no longer walk peacefully, she can no longer do internships, all doors are closed to her.”  In this instance, it was those issuing the death threats who were on trial, but the case raised the same underlying question: does the right to free speech remain protected irrespective of the sensitivities of whoever may be offended by it? Or does the concept of harm expand if the identity group is sufficiently sensitive to offense?

In both cases, Malka defended a strict, almost classical understanding of free speech: the law does not exist to protect people from being offended, but to protect the conditions of open debate. It is increasingly rare to find people who defend this position, even in France, which is why I had contacted Malka years before my trial — when I had already begun to face professional consequences for stating that, in my view, being a woman refers to biological reality. For years I had been targeted by activists openly calling for violence against me, even for my death, all while promising legal defense funds for those willing to attack me. When the complaint was eventually filed, I knew who to call. 

In principle, French law still distinguishes between opinion and incitement. The offense at issue — provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence — traditionally requires something more than a harsh statement. It requires an actual call to hostility or exclusion. Marka’s colleague, Marine Viegas, made precisely this point: “I will not fall into the trap set by the civil parties,” she told the court. “For or against trans people? For or against gender identity? That is not what this case is about. The only question is whether, today, in a democratic society — ours — it is still permissible to debate this subject, the ideology it has produced, its excesses, and its taboos.” 

Viegas argued that my words did not target trans people as such, but a category of individuals defined by specific acts and circumstances — in other words men who exploit loose self-identification rules to enter women’s spaces and harm women. In French law, that distinction matters. It is not an offense to criticize people for their conduct. Viegas also pointed out what should have been obvious: there was no call to hatred in my words, no exhortation to attack, expel, discriminate against. At most, she said, it was “a measured recommendation”, rooted in documented facts and limited circumstances. As she concluded: “Forgive us for having dared to say that women should be cautious of rapists.” 

Viegas also made the peculiar inversion of victim and accusers central to the defense. She reminded the court that the associations prosecuting me claimed to act in the name of tolerance and protection, while aligning themselves, explicitly or implicitly, with people who had subjected me to sustained intimidation. She cited messages calling for me to be “burned alive”, “crushed”, or “destroyed”. Those same actors, she argued, had now come before a criminal court to demand the policing of a single phrase. When you “attack everything and everyone”, as she put it, you lose the ability to distinguish between hatred and disagreement. 

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That, indeed, is exactly what I believe this bizarre case illustrates. Asymmetry is now structural. Explicit threats can be minimized, contextualized, or ignored, provided they come from the “right” side of any given moral divide. But a statement grounded in observable reality becomes suspect, actionable, even prosecutable if it disrupts the dominant narrative. The legitimacy of the act becomes secondary to the identity of the speaker. Once that shift is complete, the law ceases to regulate behavior. Instead, it regulates who is allowed to speak and who must be silenced. 

Perhaps the most revealing move by the prosecution was the implication that I had dredged up some bizarre, malicious fantasy — that my worries about male offenders exploiting self-identification rules to enter women’s prisons was the lurid invention of a woman obsessed with discrediting trans people. But as my defense made absolutely clear, the prison issue was real and documented — and these people were not being criticized for being trans but for being violent criminals. 

That was my point, and it remains my point now. Not all trans-identified prisoners are dangerous. Perhaps the vast majority aren’t. But some are, and women should be able to discuss the consequences without being accused of hatred. 

What is particularly dismaying about all this is that France has long imagined itself as intellectually distinct from the Anglosphere — where these debates have been raging for a long time. The Republican tradition is, at least in theory, universalist. French citizens are treated as individuals, not as members of identity groups, and public debate can be abrasive, even confrontational, without automatically becoming a legal matter. This is now beginning to shift. What is being imported is not so much Anglo-American law, but Anglo-American ways of interpreting speech, in which disagreement is reframed as endangerment and criticism as a form of violence. 

In court, I was told that statements like mine could contribute to suicides among trans-identifying individuals. Such reasoning does not belong to traditional French legal culture. It belongs to a broader cultural shift, visible across parts of the Anglosphere, where the boundary between speech and harm has been progressively blurred in public discourse. 

This was also a central point in the defense. Marine Viegas insisted that my case was not a marginal provocation emerging from the “far Right”, but part of a wide and ongoing debate with implications for many sectors of French society. And yet the language used to police it is distinctly un-French. We have imported a distinctly alien cultural reflex. In her closing statement, Marine Viegas asked the question the court should have asked from the beginning: by what right should the French public be deprived of this debate? I believe it is the right question. 

In the end, my case is not about whether my sentence was elegant, diplomatic, or gentle. It is about whether women are still permitted to speak plainly about sex, risk, and bodily reality: when those realities conflict with the demands of gender ideology. If a woman can be prosecuted for saying something that basically all women know to be true, then free speech in France does not exist. It is being conditionally tolerated, and only so long as it does not disturb the reigning moral consensus. For that reason, if nothing else, we will appeal — for I cannot accept that women have no right to speak our truths.

The diatribe dragged wearily on: she’d never want a son — what the hell would she do with it? — and she couldn’t wait to be a “chic divorcée”, quite an ambition for a woman with only a single long-term boyfriend under her belt. Every man she met promised harm, risk and psychic poison; every guy in a bar or on Hinge was bound to ghost her, or cheat on her, or tell his friends she had fat thighs. Men only wanted big-titted bimbos; those women in turn were shallow patsies who lacked the rich inner lives of, say, herself. I reeled off our male mutual friends: “Is he evil?” I asked of the softly spoken journalist devoted to his fiancée whose worst known habit was being too generous with trays of shots. Her reply: “Not yet.”

This was not my first such evening, nor were this woman’s views especially radical in my milieus in New York or London. I was not surprised, then, by the depressing revelations in the New Statesman’s gripping cover story on “Angry Young Women” last week. The article drew on polling of 2,000 Britons between 18 and 30, finding that three times more women than men held a negative view of the opposite sex (21% versus 7%). They were more pessimistic about their futures, more likely to feel that the odds were stacked against them. Soi-disant feminists interviewed at university clubs would gloat that they “don’t care for” men, nor would they date, or be friends with, one they disagreed with politically. 

To older or less online readers, all this must seem shocking. The suspicion, the detachment, the hopelessness; it’s not how most men or women recall the ups and downs of dating. Yet the landscape has changed: these women were teens when the first volleys of #MeToo were sounding across social media; their early romantic experiences were mediated by dating apps; their partners’ sexual appetites were honed by the ubiquity of hardcore porn. To cope, the feminine cyberspace has warped into something dark and cynical. In incel culture, total romantic resignation is known as “the blackpill”: while the so-called manosphere preaches the inevitability of rejection based on looks or status, its incipient female version — the femosphere — slaps acolytes around the chops and warns them of the abject humiliation they’ll face should they be so weak as to fraternize with a sex both destined and determined to hurt them. This certainty unites the femosphere’s twin poles: the dejected women like my friend who’ve “given up”, and the “dark feminine” influencers who tell them instead to use male decrepitude to their advantage. For both camps, the bestiary of modern men is 1,000 synonyms for “dick” — fuckboi, softboi, finance bro, DJ, pervert, weirdo, fascist, too nice: the man mavens of TikTok tell us that if we must interact with one, we should do it only for personal gain. 

On TikTok — the crucible of Gen Z female culture — “dating experts” such as SheraSeven coach their followers first to accept the Badness of Men and then to profit from it. Seduction is not about romance but leverage; women must rinse men for all they’ve got; “if he’s not paying, he’s playing”. Women should never reveal their true feelings, only select “targets” who offer to buy them something within the first 15 minutes of interacting and, most importantly, remember that we are “single until we’re married”. All men cheat, Shera tells us; she dares deniers to “bet your life on it and see if you stay alive”. Dating is a race to the bottom and men languish on the ocean floor: gaming the system gives the canny among us a snorkel. If that’s how young women are being told to view prospective partners, is it any surprise that many want to withdraw from dating entirely?

Those who do are comforted by spreading their dejection to other women. The femosphere is foreclosing on the life-giving possibilities of love (300,000 BC – 2026 AD) so as to reinforce itself; dig beneath the headstone and you’ll find that villainous worm, female intrasexual competition, which gluts on universal despair. Misery loves company, and the quietly cutthroat dynamics familiar to anyone who went to an all-girls school are extrapolated into adulthood through gossip, mockery and eye-rolling when a member of the coven shows signs of hope. She’ll learn, the grumbling goes. At the end of the day, he’s still a man.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the philosophies of both “dark feminine” influencers and the despairing celibates who obsess over a vicious caricature of the opposite sex. In her radical cynicism (though not in her sexual aggression), Shera is the mirror image of Andrew Tate, another profiteer of gutter sex discourse. Both philosophies desecrate one of the finest human faculties — the romantic imagination. They limit boys and girls to callous, incurious, self-defeating futures devoid of hope or affection, sighing armies of Houellebecqinos. 

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But the biggest problem with the female blackpill is that it’s intellectually dishonest. The bitterness of incel ideology relies on gormless simplicity: feminism bad, women selfish, men wronged. Its logic dissolves on contact with real women. Satisfaction, beauty, romantic success — such blessings streak through populations like raspberry ripple, even among those men fated to have weak jaws. Life is not so unfair. Nor is it for young women, who are no more destined for loneliness or disconnection than incels are: the new cohort of blackpilled Zoomettes are only doomed by their delusion, by too much time spent rehearsing their own misery. For a generation so fixated on the sacred and unique nature of personhood, it should not be so easy to write off an entire sex; women were once denied key rights on that very basis, and so we should know better. As a category, men were once permitted or encouraged to be promiscuous, aggressive and extractive with women. Sometimes, in some countries and on some corners of the internet, they still are. This does not doom them all, and especially not today.

The false logic of Angry Young Women is fragile; the only way to sustain such perverse fantasies about the inherent Badness of Men is never to interact with one. Unfortunately just that is happening all over the world, as the sexes splinter into a perpetual school disco, sniggering and shuffling their feet as a way of avoiding romantic risk. Women who deign to go to the dark side — i.e. go on dates — venture there only with pegs on their noses. Here in New York they defensively uncouple sex and love; they boot boys out at 2am; they hold the lowest of expectations and their finger over the “block” button like the sword of Damocles. Hope invites snipes from friends, and breakups jubilant schadenfreude. Feminism is brazenly misinterpreted as hatred of and opposition to men, and wielded as a club to beat them with. 

The intoxicating appeal of the female blackpill is its vain simplicity: it’s not that I’m flawed, or insecure, or even less desirable than another — it is that the world was not built for me. It is incel cope in a bow, blackpill in pink varnish, and it is bullshit. Get some fresh air and you’ll see the world is not an unfriendly place — yes, even its men. By their nature, sex and love come with terrifying risk; many men are physically dangerous, or at the very least might hurt your feelings. But there is a vast difference between vigilance and resignation — and in that gap might be the best moments of your life.

So far, so cruise-ship entertainment — the sort of thing you could just about wince through after 10 complimentary daiquiris. But Patrice’s bimbo pisstake found a more conventional audience last week when Dublin Zoo decided to use him to front their Mother’s Day promotions, “Mams Go (Pants?) Free”. Festooned in green and yellow, Malahide Mammy gleams like an overshaken can of Sprite, presumably the perfect enticement for every actual woman who plans to celebrate another year of child-rearing by seeing a funhouse-mirror mockery of herself. Like every bizarre instance of drag acts being shoehorned into such institutions, the premise is deliciously spurious: the zoo wrote on its website that the event — part of its broader “All Things Irish” program for Saint Patrick’s Day — would be “vibrant”, filled with “warmth, humor, community and heritage” and a “strong sense of togetherness”. Nothing says solidarity like a honking set of foam breasts.

The backlash was swift and merciless. Even in the capital of the most self-congratulating, aggressively progressive country in the world, a drag act gasping his way through animal enclosures in a sordid simulacrum of motherhood went down like a can of cold setting spray. It was described as a “national disgrace”, showing Irish mothers “what Dublin Zoo thinks of you”; another bemoaned “how far we have fallen in stature to now be denigrated and codified as a mere pantomime dame”; yet another decried a “symptom of a sick Europe”.

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Whatever Dublin Zoo’s campaign was, it was not as cataclysmic as all that. At most it was a misguided scramble for sodden scraps of virtue from the 2010s, an embarrassing hangover from an era which rewarded public bodies for aligning themselves with the queer omnicause. After all, the gender-critical movement has spent years making the entirely convincing case that words do not equate to violence — that verbal accuracy and reality did not “erase”, “attack” or “endanger”.

The outrage at the zoo’s campaign is not surprising, nor unjustified — but its sense of crisis (the “sick Europe”, the “national disgrace”) feels overegged at a time when Butlerian bollocks has been so comprehensively punctured. The daydream of gender performance shoved down the gullets of students in the middle of the last decade is over; the nasty stereotypes it concealed — the breathless sex-object nonsense which clearly inspires the likes of James Patrice and Andrea Long Chu — are by now plainly obvious.

Much contemporary drag does away with its good-natured, witty founding fathers. Consider music-hall prototypes such as Dan Leno, known for playing the ultimate panto dame: the joke was an inflated cartoon of femininity, later also the subject of Dame Edna Everage and Lily Savage — not women themselves. These characters were brutal, snobbish, fussy, funny; the humor centered on the dimension of their egos and not the dimension of their bosoms. Acts like the Malahide Mammy replace insight and critique with pointless pornographic jibes, double entendres robbed of primary meaning and masochistic male role-plays of female sexuality — all that’s left is writhing, moaning voracity under a hideous wig. Like other favorite progressive pastimes (porn, prostitution), drag has become yet another sacrifice to the male libido. In so doing it flattens the original radicalism of drag — its capacity to mock stereotypes — by imposing them back on its subjects.

It’s a mechanism recognized by Ben Appel in his Atlantic piece about having been an “effeminate boy”. Where modern drag tends to collapse womanhood into vicious sexual caricature, well-meaning chin-strokers in activist circles, academia and the medical establishment collapse non-conformity into essential identity — you act like a girl, so you must be one. Instead of asking the more daring question — what does “like a girl” mean anyway? — genderism prefers neat taxonomies and interventionist “solutions”; androgyny is not a charm or incidental quirk but an opportunity, even a pathology, to correct as soon as possible. This must be why Mammygate struck such a nerve. No demographic is more clear-eyed than mothers about the pitfalls of gender theory, which is why Mumsnet became an intellectual vanguard in the protection of sex-based rights (to the horror of the polite media establishment).

The zoo itself has carefully sidestepped criticism, having a spokesman state that it was “disappointed that some commentary on social media has taken elements of the campaign out of context”. It would continue, it sniffed, to welcome “people from all backgrounds and communities every day” including, I presume, that embattled community of middling drag queens. The PR team, like the long-suffering wardens of the elephant enclosure, must have spent all day shit-shoveling. Shortly after, the zoo put up a mealy-mouthed post about International Women’s Day, thanking the women among its staff (none of them named, mind).

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By the next Mother’s Day, all this will have blown over — it will be some other institution’s turn to put its foot in it. Public bodies remain vulnerable to these cock-ups because they are hopelessly time-lagged, five years at minimum behind a culture sick of being expected to laugh along as another mammoth Marilyn flashes the congregation at Tumble Tots. Institutions — libraries, arts centers and other “third spaces” manned by frustrated middle-class libs — can’t seem to shake that cringe, focus-group-friendly fun which sees them blundering into the sorts of promotional crises that more canny corporate bodies manage to avoid. Long gone are the mastectomy scars inexplicably emblazoning a Costa coffee wagon; for-profit firms have a way of deserting sinking ships while the activist elite bubble to the sea bed.

It’s no mystery why: the sorts of overeducated grunts who land in directorial roles at beloved institutions develop a toxic benevolence born of resentment against the relative lushness of the private sector, and the “fascist” politicians who work against their interests. They blindly impose their radical views as righteous correctives to the world that has personally wronged them. In Ireland, a formerly ultra-conservative nation which only in recent decades has adopted progressive social policies, the urge to overcorrect seems even more pressing.

For the art form of drag itself, this state of affairs is pitiful; once desperately uncool institutions start paying you to gyrate in front of giraffes, you have to question your own radicalism. Drag was once an affront to bourgeois respectability; now it is considered, by some at least, the bourgeoisie’s favorite family-friendly entertainment. And that is my great objection to the Malahide Mammy and her league of gelatinous lookalikes; bereft of a sense of novelty or protest, the transgression she represents is simply tedious. Like her prosthetic breasts, the joke arrives before the queen; all her lines have been purred before. What she speaks to is not a culture in decline — on the virtues of genderism she lost the argument years ago — but cultural institutions still in hock to well-meaning but misdirected orthodoxies which insult the very people they’re meant to serve. How much longer must we suffer these humiliating episodes where public bodies self-flagellate for meaningless causes? What next, a tribute to NHS nurses starring up-and-coming drag superstar Florence Naughtygale? Enjoy, ladies — this one’s on us.

But then the culture wars hit. And now our literary awards are no longer about merely recognizing artistic merit; they have become battlegrounds for ideological conformity. Well, in England they have.

That’s one of the reasons I traveled to Paris for the Prix de Roman Fnac. John Boyne was about to receive it for his latest novel, Earth. He is only the sixth non-French writer to win it since it was inaugurated in 2002, and the only non-French nominee among this year’s 250 books. But though celebrated in France, Boyne is persona non grata in England after an ugly spat over his inclusion on the longlist for the LGBTQ+ Polari Prize.

It all kicked off after a transwoman judge resigned from the Polari’s first novel panel when she discovered that Boyne, a gender-critical gay man, was up for a prize. Cue the storming out of another two judges and 10 authors, and a petition signed by more than 800 writers and publishing-industry workers calling on the Polari organizers to remove Boyne’s book from its long list. Despite the bullying, though, he stood firm.

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“The irony is,” he tells me, sipping a mint tea in a café outside Gare du Nord station, “I would have felt like an idiot, stepping down. I just thought, ‘you can all have your tantrums and scream and shout. But it’s really nothing to do with me.’ I had never heard of the Polari prize ’til I got on the list.”

His crime? To describe himself as a Terf. There is no greater sin among the LGBTQ+ community than for a gay man to be gender critical. And though the prize describes itself as inclusive, it was unable to withstand such contradictions, and the awards were entirely shelved this year.

Boyne laughs when I point it out. “I thought, ‘let them kick me off the longlist and see what happens then. But I am not doing their dirty work’.” At first, he urged those new writers who had asked to be removed from the list to re-enter the award. “It was obvious to me they were either misguided or had been bullied or intimidated into withdrawing,” he says. Then, as the matter dragged on unresolved, he suggested that if these writers returned, he would ask judges not to consider his book for the shortlist.

It all represented a new low in literary politics, with personal ideology taking priority over literary merit — “pure vitriol” from “grown-ups who work in an industry which should be defined by freedom of thought and freedom of expression,” as Boyne puts it. In France, though, things are different.

Full of verve, ready for the awards ceremony, he is keen to address the madness of recent years. “When it comes to a literary award, it should really just be about the best book. Nothing else should matter. Not who’s the most famous, who has the most acceptable, popular views on stuff. It should be just about the writing.”

It’s never just about the writing, though, as Boyne discovered when his book My Brother’s Name Is Jessica was published. This was a novel told through the lens of the brother of a boy who believed he was a girl. “It’s where my troubles began,” he says.

“When I decided to write about a boy growing up wanting to be a girl, I decided to do it from his brother‘s point of view. He’s trying to understand it, and by the end of the book, he realizes that the person he’s always loved hasn’t changed in any way.”

But the abuse he got after Jessica was the worst he had ever received. “I was called a transphobic bigot for ‘misgendering’ Jessica!” he still seems baffled at the outrage. “What was I supposed to do? Call the book, ‘My Sister’s name is Jessica’? Which would mean absolutely nothing to people. The walls came crashing down on me after that. I was officially transphobic.”

From then on, Boyne was targeted whenever he spoke out in support of women, lesbians and gays, and, in particular, J.K. Rowling. She is an unspeakable in certain circles. And it was after he published an article in support of her earlier this year, proclaiming himself a Terf in the Irish Independent, that the gloves truly came off.

“What’s worse is that during the whole furor, not one person from Polari made contact with me,” he says. “Which is pretty disgusting and unprofessional to say the least.”

Things couldn’t be more different on the other side of the Channel. Boyne is greeted at his incredibly glamorous awards ceremony with rapturous applause from the literary crowd, not a cancellation. And he makes the most of the opportunity to contrast his experiences in the UK with France.

“We live in a time when culture is often denigrated,” he tells the room. “I learned this recently with a prize that I was nominated for in the UK, where the personal ideologies of the authors were considered much more important than the qualities of the books.” He then plays to the crowd: “It was a French writer, Voltaire, who pronounced this famous phrase, I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend your right to say it. Unfortunately,” he continues, “some today prefer: I disapprove of what you say, and I will not allow you to say it. But not here, not in France.”

Afterwards, as Boyne is besieged by cashmered crowd, I ask a few of those milling around whether they’ve heard about the transgender controversy. They either didn’t know what I was talking about, or couldn’t care less. “We are French, we believe in liberty, this nonsense has nothing to do with our values”, said one, with a gallic shrug. I asked another if Boyne’s views on the trans issue had influenced her view of his work. “I also don’t know whether he likes French cheese,” she replied, gnomically.

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Boyne is clearly relieved that these awards have been a sort of bookend to the cancellation. It shows that there is still hope for writers. “The Prix du Roman has reminded me of what’s most important: the books that I write, the support of readers around the world, and the friendship of those fellow novelists who believe in freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and the importance of literature.”

The worst thing about the whole episode, he says, was the tenor of the interventions by all those 800 people who signed the open letter against him. It’s impossible to be blasé about personal safety, he says. And it made him think very carefully about his response. “Forget about the gender issue for a moment, it comes down to whether or not you are capitulating to bullying,” he says. “I’ve seen some bullying in my time in the literary world, but I’ve never seen it quite like that.”

Boyne’s refusal to hide away, though, and the fact that he didn’t retire to lick his wounds following the onslaught against him has made a big difference. It has shown the British literary establishment in its very worst light. And, even under that spotlight, it has only doubled down.

Perfectly representing our cultural cringe, a trans activist tweeted about John a few days before the French award. “Appears you’re done getting awards. You’re an embarrassment to our country”, it read. Soon after he won the Fnac prize, Boyne retweeted it with a series of laughing emojis, adding, “That tweet aged well, dude. All of nine days.”

But it’s not only Boyne who’s laughing. France, too, is surely mocking our small-minded pretensions. As one of our great writers heads off to be courted by some of France’s finest literary critics, and as our literary world grows ever more timid, it’s hard not to feel a little embarrassed on Britain’s behalf.

In reality, Trogneux is Brigitte’s older brother. The pair grew up in Amiens, in the north of France, with four other siblings and a family confectionery business which, to this day, turns out two million macarons d’Amiens each year. Among other things, the city is known as the home of Jules Verne, father of science fiction. But as fantastical as Verne’s writerly imagination may have been, even he would have struggled to conceive of a scandal such as this.

Owens is not the first to have disliked Brigitte Macron. The first lady, as we all by now know, was a teacher at Emmanuel’s Jesuit school and 24 years his senior. The couple have always maintained that their relationship remained “within the bounds of the law” during this period; in 2007, they wed when Macron was 30 and Brigitte, having recently divorced the father of her existing three children, was 54. It is this sex configuration, rather than the inherent issue of the age gap, which is viewed with queasiness — after all, Donald and Melania Trump are also separated by 24 years. That Brigitte is the elder party, that the couple met when Emmanuel was a school pupil and that the couple are French — a country whose sexual reputation, to Britons at least, still has the whiff of adulterous libertinism — meant the Macrons would always be easy targets for prurient speculation.

Coupled with his reputation for soft-touch liberalism and unfashionable Europhilia, this new Napoleon was never destined to woo conservatives. A lovers’ tiff caught on camera in May, as Brigitte pushed Emmanuel’s face away when the couple disembarked a plane, turned social media’s unease into full-blown distrust. A conspiracy theory is born.

The origins of the Brigitte Macron “transvestigation” — a depressing internet coinage for when people’s appearances are scoured for evidence of transsexualism — began with two strange French ladies. Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey, respectively a “spiritual medium” and a self-described “independent investigative journalist”, posted a YouTube video speculating about Brigitte’s birth sex in December 2021. Rey’s suspicions followed the classic transvestigation route: she noticed that Brigitte’s body shape seemed unexpectedly masculine in photographs and invented an elaborate personal history from there. Within hours, the video had amassed half a million views. Last September, Roy and Rey were compelled to pay Brigitte and her brother €13,000 in damages. This month, the verdict was overturned — not because the court ruled that Brigitte was in fact Jean-Michel, but because the threshold of defamation was not met. This case is now in the highest appeals court in France; another, concerning alleged online harassment by 10 individuals, goes to trial in October. Separately, Owens faces her own lawsuit in Delaware.

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In the conspiracy world, Owens is a breath of fresh air; in a rogues’ gallery of gammons, she is a canny, outspoken young black woman. She became famous by hosting Q&As with university gender goblins, precisely and without compassion dismantling their luxury beliefs. In one such viral video, she responds to an appeal on behalf of the trans students who felt “victimized” by her views: “Life’s tough, get a helmet man. I’m too pregnant for this. Next question.”

But sex realism only had so much mileage, particularly as it returned to the mainstream. Now, the Brigitte conspiracy theory opens a convenient new frontier in Owens’s truth crusade, a perfect confluence of culture-war claims which have become important to her personal brand. First, liberals compulsively lie. Second, those same liberals are sexual deviants, weaponizing their grip over a sleeping public to further shadowy homosexual/paedophilic agendas. And third, the cult of transgenderism has compelled normal people to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes. The first and third of these claims are difficult to dispute in the sense that all politicians necessarily lie, and that part of 2020s politicking has until now involved avoiding obvious truths about biological sex. The transvestigation reflex has not been helped by the fact that those who to the general public appear obviously male, like the Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, have been defended in the name of kindness as put-upon non-conforming females. Gender suspicion is a consequence of institutional dishonesty, and Brigitte — verifiably a woman, though a slightly gangly one — is collateral damage.

As for Owens’s second crusade — uncovering the sexual deviancy of elites — revelations about the late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s activities and the successful circulation of the conspiracy theory QAnon have created a constituency of American truthers who want to believe in the existence of a global paedophile ring at any cost, and are continually emboldened by, among other things, the reticence of their own president. Of course, a simpler explanation for the flourishing of such theories is the platforming, via social media, of commentators who are verifiably stupid. So it is that Owens has been able to claim, in the past, that the Moon landings were fake, that Bill Gates is a “vaccine criminal” and that Emmanuel Macron’s presidency is the result of a CIA mind-control experiment.

Owens’s claims may be deranged, but they are no more so than the various conspiracy theories which have to some extent always been part of life at the French court. Then, as now, the political wife is central: a figure of both fascination and anxiety. The inference behind the Brigitte conspiracy is that Emmanuel is an effete liberal man under the thumb of his powerful wife. Lady Macbeth asked the spirits to “unsex me here” to wield power behind the throne; conspiracy logic does the unsexing for Macron’s first lady. Internet weirdos hunching over images of the First Lady in a swimming costume, desperate to locate a spectral todger, may seem exceptionally prurient and cruel — but as Hilary Mantel demonstrated in her celebrated essays for the LRB, royal bodies (an elision you must forgive with republican France) have always been subject to vengeful, woman-hating scrutiny — just look at the lascivious fixation on Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber.

Conspiracy theories prior to, and to some extent responsible for, the revolution were transmitted via the libelles, pornographic pamphlets comprising anonymous vitriol familiar to those on social media today. Mantel describes them as “a pantomime mix of scenes of copulation and conspiracy, endless unbuttoning and tupping and frotting and plotting”. They catalogued, with slobbering glee, the dauphine’s apparent vices: incest, orgies, Swedes. In the hands of pamphleteers, workaday political crimes like naivety and venality become chaotic scenes of promiscuity and buggery. In the rationale of the libelles, these speculative leaps are perfectly coherent. So it is that in the modern culture wars, “citizen journalists” like Rey are compelled to morph suspicion of power into pornographic, defamatory flights of fancy. After all, what better proof that leaders are “not like us” than exposing them as a caste of depraved sex pests?

In an absence of lettres de cachets — the bulletproof decrees beloved by his kingly forebears — Macron and his wife must navigate global legal systems in order to put down whisperings of the First Lady’s little lad. It seems undignified to even engage with such tattle, but I have no doubt that the dismantling of Owens’s brand will be satisfying to watch, and so I too will be bringing out le popcorn. But letting this debacle pass without reflection on the timbre of modern political commentary would be a mistake; a return to the fervor of 1780s pamphleteers might just be a portent of an impending period of political chaos. We should be wary of the desecration of public discourse, symbolized by the sordid Owens-Macron saga. The perpetrators of our modern conspiracy theories may be a league of mouth-breathers, but they have big, credulous audiences. The real problem is that such gossip muddies, rather than clarifies, the waters of legitimate protest, and disenfranchises believers by plunging them into alternate realities which make them sound like idiots. There are many sensible reasons to criticize Macron: his wife’s awkward gait and dodgy blow-dry is not one of them. All eyes on Delaware, then — the entire world will see Owens in court.

The New Zealand singer, also known as Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, first slouched on to the world stage with her acapella-style hit “Royals” as an actual teenager in 2013, when her door-slamming earnestness made sense. A tangle of wild hair and breathy vocals, she emerged as an understated prodigy at a time when high-gloss X Factor alumni crowded out the charts. She also masterfully captured the greatest fixation of Gen Z: themselves. In her hands, songs became mopey private reckonings; concerts were reverential affairs imbued with the cringe sincerity of a slam poetry night. Audiences of excited girls were shushed for singing along so that the teary archteenager could wail about being dumped. Shut it — I’m talking about my trauma!

Lorde’s great thesis is that being uncomfortable in her own skin makes her fundamentally interesting. It is unfortunate, then, that most of her fans are girls and young women — a demographic for whom being a bit self-conscious is basically the cost of admission. Now, however, the singer has gone nuclear in her battle to prove that she is not like other girls: maybe, she suggests, she isn’t a woman at all. Perhaps nobody should be surprised that after more than a decade of submersion in the entertainment industry and its attendant fantasies, Lorde has come out with revelations about her own gender trouble: the most popular song on her new album Virgin, saucily titled “Man of the Year”, hard-launches a non-binary era with the lyric “some days I’m a woman / some days I’m a man (oh-oh)”. Imagine Lorde’s dismay, then, when the boring old cis girlies of TikTok started clipping her song to use over videos showing horrible texts sent by ex-boyfriends, sarcastically declaring them “man of the year”. As much as she yearns to break free of the breakup ballad, her conventional fanbase drags her back.

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In some ways, Lorde is a good bellwether for Gen Z’s self-centered neuroticism. Adam Curtis’s new documentary series, Shifty, goes some way to describing how we got to this stage, when collective culture and the external world gave way to personal fantasy and self-expression. In one episode, a woman explains to a cut-glass Seventies reporter that her boxer dog is undergoing a sex change, and must now be considered a girl. The dog looks entirely nonplussed, oblivious to the delusions of his owner. Curtis splices the clip with others of societal discontent and political upheaval, heavily implying — but of course not saying outright — that gender identity is a feature of bourgeois individualism which has disconnected people from reality. Lorde’s confusion of the realities of womanhood with a fundamental mislabeling crisis enacts this process perfectly: instead of questing to the root causes of her stated problems, from bodily discomfort to the vagaries of love and sexual politics, by considering the macro issues like misogyny, medicine or the media, she has turned inwards and focused on herself. This technique, and the high-concept misery it inflects her music with, is what makes Lorde and her ilk so ineffectual — and so difficult to take seriously.

If Lorde is sometimes a bloke, she’s a bad one. The singer, it is rumored, split up her producer and his partner — and took him for herself. A few years ago she was also rumored to have had an affair with Lena Dunham’s boyfriend, Jack Antonoff, another producer. The naked facts of Lorde’s love life, the great theme of her work, reveal her to be nothing more or less than a melodramatic young woman, subject to the same bland human frailties as the rest of us.

Lorde’s obsession with beauty standards — and freeing herself from them — is all-encompassing. She recently left a comment under a post of Addison Rae frolicking about in her pants, saying: “It’s so yummy seeing someone so in their body.” Rae, who became famous by dancing on TikTok, is probably okay with how she looks — but no matter. The point of the compliment was really to signal Lorde’s own delicious complexity, her saintly self-alienation. She recently told Rolling Stone of her own far more interesting relationship with her body: “I went to the cupboard, and I got the tape out, and I did it to myself,” she said of putting duct tape over her boobs. “It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.” Enlightenment, after all, is how you look.

Pretentious androgyny has proven the refuge of the overpromoted teen star ever since Harry Styles popped on a frock for Vogue. Unfortunately, such an approach cannot salvage bad music. The former One Direction heartthrob may have cribbed his dresses from Bowie, but it has not saved him from churning out record after record of froth destined to be piped into the changing rooms at River Island. A similar problem confronts Lorde, whose new album is impossible to listen to without imagining a teenage girl angrily lip-syncing into a mirror, because that is, essentially, what it is. “I swim in waters that would drown so many other bitches” is the sort of lyric that could only ever sound good if you’re 13 and practicing applying eyeliner.

There is a hidden revelation in Virgin, though: Lorde is, it turns out, horridly conventional. She has a unique talent, but not the one she thinks: the talent for transforming real-world problems into yet more mirrors for her own inner jaggedness. The most honest thing about Lorde’s latest album, which pledges to bare all with a sleeve showing her own pelvic X-ray and artwork that includes a picture of her own vagina (brilliant), is the following lyric on “Hammer”: “I don’t have the answers.” In this, I heartily agree.

Many of my Gen Z comrades, however, have bought Lorde’s world view — that of her own navel — wholesale. One young woman playing about with duct tape and publicizing the granular details of her journey to self-discovery is not the end of the world; I’ll not hold this single New Zealander accountable for the mopey, limpid youth culture which raised her. But I will say this: sadgirl pop is indicative of a bigger problem, a global self-awareness deficit, of which our Lorde and savior is the sulking face. The message of this album is that the world is impenetrable and victimizing; the solution is to turn inwards and wage war on your own body, taping and drugging and titillating it until you can bear your own company. We may forgive 13-year-old girls for being broody, pouty and self-obsessed, but as grown-up women we have a responsibility to look beyond ourselves. If only someone would tell Lorde that.

BeLonG To is far from alone. Across Ireland, trans activist groups such as Trans Equality Network Ireland (TENI) and Rosa International have taken over a movement that used to serve lesbians and gay men. Since the Gender Recognition Act of 2015, a new orthodoxy has emerged. At Trinity College, Dublin, where the student union president is an infamous trans activist, students have driven campaigns to deplatform speakers, boycott events, and label gender-critical views as hate speech. Meanwhile, when it comes to women’s rights such as reproductive health and protection from male violence, Ireland continues to lag behind most of Europe.

Thankfully, an energetic new movement is forming. In Dublin, a group of mostly working-class twenty-somethings, including Annaïg Birdy, are taking a stand. Founded by three lesbians, two bisexual women and four gay men, Not All Gays (NAG) believe that today’s LGBT movement no longer speaks for them and that the government uses the movement to push through laws without scrutiny, like hate speech legislation, that would see people like them be criminally investigated. Their championing of sex-based rights, freedom of speech and ethical boundaries around surrogacy puts them at odds with the current activist dogma.

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I meet them on the eve of the holy month of Pride. Not that this is a typical Pride crowd — most NAG members have been excluded from LGBT charities, events at universities, and Pride. They’re hosting LGB Interrupted, Ireland’s first lesbian, gay and bisexual-led conference. Birdy tells me that NAG decided not to publicly advertise the event’s venue, fearing the usual angry protests if word got out that the Terfs were daring to gather. Sure enough, as I arrived, the organisers were frantically looking for a new sound system. Theirs had apparently been stolen overnight. “It has to be sabotage,” one organiser told me. “Maybe they” — NAG’s enemies — “realize how bad it looks picketing in public, but either way there’s plenty of people who didn’t want this event to go ahead.”

Seán Atkinson, the vice-president and co-founder of NAG, used to identify as non-binary and used they/them pronouns. But he began to question gender ideology after he saw lesbians “facing the cotton ceiling backlash”: that is, they were expected to date transwomen. Atkinson realized that “gay men were not under anywhere near the same pressure to date trans men”. Other members experienced similar awakenings. Monica, a researcher and project leader, was a liberal feminist in her teenage years before she saw the need for LGB to separate from the T. Kylie, a gay man, attended BeLonG To in the 2000s, but turned against gender ideology because of what women, especially lesbians, were dealing with.

While critical of the progressive movement, many NAG members still identify as on the Left. “I’m a femme lesbian — Left-of-center, atheist, pro-choice, anti-racist Terf,” Birdy tells me. But one of her best friends is a gender non-conforming gay man who is Catholic and economically conservative and “just as committed to protecting women and children” as Birdy herself. “We are proof,” she says, “that being same-sex attracted doesn’t come with a political party membership.”

What unites these members is not an ideology but reality. “Sex-based rights are not arbitrary or archaic issues, they are absolutely vital, particularly for women and girls,” says Birdy. “And the freedom to dissent from the gender narrative is now more important to defend than ever before.”

I find it fascinating that NAG are rejecting not just gender ideology but a number of other shibboleths. It’s very rare for young queer people to reject the libertarian “sex work is work” take on prostitution, or to critique commercial surrogacy. But NAG is a unique voice in a chorus of queer activists.

One of the issues the group is disturbed by is how lesbian and group youth are being sexually exploited in the name of liberation. There’s much talk at the conference of drug-fueled sex parties, resulting in what have become known as “chemsex” deaths. A recent report shows that use among gay men in Ireland is on the increase, and I heard from several at the conference that weekend-long chemsex-fueled parties are as common as clubbing.

“You will hear repeatedly, and this is the sad thing, almost all these gay men are going to parties where they’re using highly dissociative drugs, looking for brotherhood, connection, friendship, community,” said panelist Robbie Travers, a young gay Irish activist, “and young women are beginning to die in chemsex parties, which is a total shift.”

In recent years, sexually transmitted infections such as hepatitis, gonorrhea and HIV are on the rise among gay men. And yet, as Travers pointed out, to even mention safe sex or drug misuse is usually met with accusations of homophobia. “It’s gay culture!” is often the cry in response. All of this is being done in our name.

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A similarly contentious issue is surrogacy. Between 33-40% of those who use a surrogate are same-sex couples, with supporters describing gay male couples as “infertile”. Surrogacy in Ireland is unregulated, which means it is neither explicitly legal nor illegal. At LGB Interrupted, it was the subject of fierce criticism. One of the speakers was Olivia Maurel, who was born via surrogacy and is now the spokesperson for the Declaration of Casablanca, a global appeal to abolish surrogacy in all its forms. She calls surrogacy “a violation of human dignity, of women’s rights, and especially of children’s rights”.

“I was conceived through a contract that stated clearly that the woman who carried me, birthed me and bonded with me for nine months would not be my mother,” Maurel told the conference. “Adoption requires accountability,” she said. “Surrogacy requires only money.” Adoption and fostering rates are at an all-time low among lesbian and gay people, despite the fact that many of us campaigned for years in order to have the legal right to adopt and foster.

Since the Gay Liberation Front, founded in 1970, there have been significant improvements for gay people: the right to civil partnerships and marriage, to foster and adopt children in same-sex couples, and protection from discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. Even the church and other religious institutions have accepted that we exist. But since trans activism became the dominant force, things have gone backwards. Surrogacy is now replacing adoption and fostering for gay men, lesbians are seen as bigots unless we swear our allegiance to the trans flag, and despite the terrible legacy of the AIDS crisis, gay men are being cajoled back into risk-taking hedonism and disregard for safe sex. These issues are “not Left-wing or Right-wing concerns,” says Birdy. “They are human-rights issues that transcend party lines.”

Lesbian and gay sexual activity was only decriminalized in 1993. Already many of the positive changes of the past three decades have been rolled back thanks to the dominance of transgender ideology. But this new generation, exemplified by Not All Gays, brings new hope.

The show put six young men in competition for a $10,000 prize, which would be awarded to whoever won the affections of a 21-year-old Mexican model, Miriam Rivera. It was only at the end of the series that Miriam revealed to the unsuspecting contestants, and the one “lucky” winner, that “she” was in fact, in the modern idiom, a transwoman. The shell-shocked lover was then invited to either reject Miriam or collect his prize money: the latter of which, to twist the knife, required the happy couple to embark on what one assumes would have been an unusually frosty romantic Mediterranean boat trip together.

After weighing up his options, our lucky winner creatively chose secret option C: joining his fellow contestants in a multi-party lawsuit against the creators of the show, whom they accused of conspiracy to commit sexual assault, defamation, breach of contract and personal injury in the form of psychological and emotional damage. Which seems about right.

Of course, some will be quick to identify There’s Something about Miriam as a disturbing cultural artifact of the morally benighted age sometimes referred to as the recent past. The most aging thing about it, though, to my eye — admittedly only after watching the final “reveal” on YouTube a couple of times — is not that it is morally bankrupt trash. (That doesn’t really distinguish it from modern TV, after all.) Instead, it is how utterly pre-woke the sensibility underlying the show is. You cannot begin to properly grasp the central manipulation of the format, or how captivatingly unethical it is, without taking sex-realist assumptions for granted. Miriam was born a man; he, and the makers of the show, are pretending he is a woman; the hapless contestants are having their heterosexual dispositions systematically deceived by a series of deliberate tricks. The reaction of the young contestants when they find out is artlessly relatable, and equally unfamiliar to the current age: a mixture of undisguised astonishment, horror, and sniggering mutual-mockery as they attempt to collectivize the dawning embarrassment.

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Still, there is rather less than progressives might like to think to distinguish There’s Something about Miriam from I Kissed a Boy, the BBC’s present-day, Love-Island style (at least nominally) gay dating show, which has been criticized recently for including a trans man among its gay male contestants. Whereas Miriam involved the calculated deception of its unwitting contestants by the program makers, I Kissed a Boy is able instead to rely in 2025 on socially-engineered self-deception: both on the part of its contestants and one assumes some large portion of the viewing public, all of whom are prepared to engage the pretense that there is nothing odd about the fact that one of the “gay men” taking part isn’t actually a man.

To do the makers of I Kissed a Boy justice in criticizing their unwise choices, it is important to hold fixed just how bad the show would be anyway, without the odd intrusion of a trans contestant. Though it is possible that the sexual majority of mankind likewise feels demeaned by what unfolds on heterosexual dating shows, somehow in the gay case, the veiled insult feels more personal. All that the show’s contestants are depicted as knowing how to do is shriek, dress up, speculate inanely about their various sexual predilections, and shout things like “slay” whenever they spot the show’s host, Dannii Minogue, herself something of a loud counterexample to the theory that no sound travels through a vacuum.

Annoyingly, because of the creators’ earnest sense of the program’s social progressiveness, the show doesn’t fully cooperate with the viewer’s desire to dislike any of the contestants (a bit of a breach from the norm when it comes to reality TV, as I understand the genre). Instead, as if to insist that we find them sympathetic, we are offered a series of one-on-one, sometimes teary-eyed, teachable moments about the struggles of the contestants in their pursuit of true love, after which the camera carelessly cuts back to whatever lurid discussion of butt plugs or threesomes is taking place around the pool.

As one might expect, it is in the heavy-handed didactic mode that the trans-identified woman, Lars, is deployed to greatest effect. In one bizarre moment, she attempts to correct the alleged misconception that women are physiologically unable to “top” (i.e. genitally penetrate their partner). None of the fellow contestants presses her for details. Instead, they simply shout and cheer affirmingly, before moving on to more important things.

As everyone knows, the contrivances of the genre make the “reality” bit of reality TV something of a misnomer. If the fantasy of cross-sex identification can be sustained anywhere in life, you might have thought, it could surely be sustained here. Yet, in a way quite contrary to its presumably inclusion-driven agenda, I Kissed a Boy unwittingly presents viewers with a vivid demonstration of the shallow confusions of its own theory of sexual reality. Most noticeable of all is the superficial quality of the other contestants’ subscription to trans-inclusive political dogma. Though they mindlessly affirm the claim that Lars is a man, none of them seems disposed to act on that expressed belief: for the most part, Lars is not perceived as an object of attraction or even a potential source of intrasexual competition by the men. They pay lip service to the mantra, but little lip service of other kinds to the person. Two episodes in, the man Lars has been forcibly paired up with nervously exits the relationship, making impressively dubious use of “it’s not you, it’s me” style reasoning. Economists often talk of “revealed preferences” as a more reliable indicator of an agent’s state than self-reported desires; in this case, the contestants’ sexual choices subvert their collective claim to take their female co-contestant to be a man.

The capricious dynamic of the show parallels the broader reception trans-affirming politics has received among homosexual men, where the response has often been an unstable mixture of apathy and dogmatism. A good number of gay men seem to have mistakenly judged that what is principally on the line in the terf-wars is a general right to sexual libertinism and various permissive norms of sexual self-expression, the critique of trans rights being merely the thin end of a threatening political wedge. Many have been willing to join the debate with gusto on the basis of that inadequate understanding. That they themselves wouldn’t dream of actually having sex with a female, trans or otherwise, registers with them not as a possible source of tension in their beliefs, but a mere good use of the very general right to untrammeled sexual autonomy that they see as under contestation in the first place. It often doesn’t occur to these self-described allies of the trans movement that the view (implicit in much of what they say) that gay rights can only be bought at the price of a complete sexual free-for-all is a very pessimistic view of the justificatory standing of homosexual rights.

Of course many other people, including gay men, have noticed how regressive I Kissed a Boy is. Though it may be an excessively polemical gloss on the show, there is an uncomfortable degree of truth in the provocative claim here that the show places its contestants in a situation akin to that of conversion therapy: an environment in which they are invited to feel sexual attraction towards someone who is female. Though they wouldn’t put it in these terms, the makers of the show are in a very literal sense committed to the old bromide that some of its gay male contestants may just not have met the right woman yet. In response to such claims, the programme’s defenders have pointed out that all of I Kissed a Boy’s contestants appear to have consented to the set-up, woman and all — ignoring, in doing so, the awkward truth that those seeking conversion therapy often consent to the process too, a fact in spite of which many still see clear reason to proscribe it.

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By Kathleen Stock

What leads well-meaning BBC executives to insert a trans contestant into a gay male dating show, all the while presumably thinking they are doing something laudable? Perhaps they operate with a faulty, but oddly widespread, heuristic to the effect that gay men, in virtue of their androphilia, must in some obscure way be non-standard women. Another subliminal temptation on the part of self described progressives is often to simply chunk all non-standard sexual identities into a category that could be labelled “sexual miscellaneous”: no doubt because they view any internal differences among these people as less important than their shared deviation from the norm.

But whatever the more eccentric features of the programme makers’ mistakes, the more damning underlying error is their failure to understand one of their show’s central concerns: the romantic and sexual dispositions of the gay men on it. These sexual dispositions track biological features, not social ones. Sex, not gender identity.

Though there remain interesting evolutionary questions about the origins of homosexual desire in humans, there is little evidence to think it less stable or fundamentally different in kind to the standing sexual dispositions of, for example, heterosexuals. There is no reason to think a gay man might be successfully “turned” by a woman, whether she thinks of herself as a man or not. Despite what the creators of I Kissed a Boy seem to think, a gay man’s sexual disposition is a robust psychological fact about him.

Why is that simple and informative account of sexual orientation, arguably the default view, so widely rejected? One obstacle to its acceptance is that it can often appear to clash with people’s introspective reports about their own inner sexual lives, a subject about which they are often tacitly assumed to be infallible informants.

But that incautious way of handling the evidence of psychological testimony is a serious error. Unlike sexual orientation itself, one thing that is often not robust (as many cognitive scientists and philosophers working today recognize) is an individual’s access to their own fleeting mental states, about which they can often be mistaken. However counter-intuitive it may seem, that includes reflective access to their own sexual desires and beliefs. Indeed, that people can often be painfully or comically confused about what they want, who they are attracted to, or what they really think of other people, is one of the basic leitmotifs of reality TV.

In spite of the obvious truth that people are capable of gross failures of self-understanding, what might be termed the “Cartesian myth” that each individual enjoys transparent access to his or her own mental life remains ubiquitous and seductive. It has certainly been of great rhetorical help to trans activists in recent debates over the nature of sex and gender, where it has invested individuals’ claims to self-knowledge of their innately sexed identities with an unearned epistemic authority. Because those reports are often so muddled, the Cartesian paradigm also has the further downstream effect of making the underlying nature of sex seem messy, “fluid”, and complicated. People’s psychological self-assessments are often a highly faulty source of data.

Less often noticed is that once the robust, simple account of sex has been obscured by so much Cartesian graffiti, the same quickly happens to sexuality. Because sexuality must ultimately be understood in terms of sex, it too must be fluid, complicated and messy. One terminally frustrating feature of the way this dialectic plays out is that many boomerish heterosexuals, perhaps flattered by the unfamiliar attribution of sexual adventurism, often collude in the confused thought that sexual dispositions are inherently unprincipled and mysterious. The rich, tumultuous and sometimes surprising character of one’s sexual experiences can help to lend credibility to that picture. But psychologically, the “messy” theory of sexuality gets things completely backwards: modeling shaky access to a relatively robust phenomenon as robust access to a relatively shaky one. It is the conclusions we draw about our own sexual natures that can be confused or inconsistent, not the underlying natures themselves.

Were a gay man to kid himself that he fancied a woman, the default explanations should be that it is just that: a flight of fancy. Even if the show’s contestants, bullied by the format of the show and strongly internalized social expectations, are able to work themselves into that regressive frame of mind, it would establish nothing of importance. For a TV show to nudge a bunch of men into misperceiving their own sexual desires is no great political accomplishment, nor a particularly clever psychological trick either, as There’s Something about Miriam testified to many years ago.

Though the creators of I Kissed a Boy think of themselves as moved by considerations of political kindness, kind motivations, a bit like sexual desires, are the sort of thing one can be mistaken about possessing. If There’s Something about Miriam now looks eccentric to modern eyes, I Kissed a Boy may to future eyes look significantly weirder: a remnant of an age in which large swathes of society engaged the complicated pretense that they had forgotten the differences between men and women. It is silly enough to claim that the differences between men and women are of no social, legal or political importance; to insist, further, that they are of no sexual importance is barely coherent.

But it stuck with me, because for a split-second something remarkable about social norms in my part of the British Isles felt very palpable: that in this country — at least, where I live — a woman can run for miles, alone, and know that the physical risk to her from male strangers is so low as to be negligible. And to a far greater extent than anyone seems to realize, we owe this extraordinary social achievement to an aspect of male socialization contemporary culture seems hell-bent on dismantling: male emotional repression.

Last week, everyone decided young men’s emotions needed another airing. The media class determined en masse that the TV drama Adolescence was actually a documentary, and that we need more internet censorship to stop boys’ feelings going wrong. Speaking at the Dimbleby lecture, the former England footballer Gareth Southgate popped up to lament the way young men are turning away from real-life mentors to “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers”, who teach boys that “strength means never showing emotion”. And, on cue, Victoria Derbyshire invited three young UK men onto Newsnight, where they discussed when they last cried. “Even Keir Starmer is worried.”

Two out of three could not remember; all agreed that there’s a general, culture-wide pressure on men to restrain their emotions. Implicitly, we’re to understand that this is A Bad Thing. And we might be forgiven for imagining that all these young men really need is Elsa’s message in Frozen: “Let It Go”. What could possibly go wrong? Watching that clip, though, I remembered the running club I encountered in the countryside a couple of summers ago. It struck me: are we sure we know which feelings men would express, and how they’d express them, if they felt truly empowered to Let It Go?

While there’s plenty of overlap between men and women, on several important axes the sexes are markedly different. These differences include physical strength, sexual aggression, propensity to violence, and normative approach to handling conflict. Violent aggression is much more common in men than women, and the difference between the sexes grows larger the more lethal the aggression. Men are also vastly more sexually aggressive than women: 98% of the individuals prosecuted in the UK for sex crime are men.

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The majority of victims of sex crime are women: one in four women reports having been subject to some form of sexual violence since the age of 16, while among men that falls to one in 18. 94% of survivors of rape or attempted rape are women, and within the UK’s legal definition of rape all rapists are, necessarily, male. Most murders of women are by men, and of female victims of homicide between 2009 and 2020 in the UK, most were killed by a man. In 87% of cases, the murderer was an intimate partner.

But this is not, or not only, a female victimhood story. The majority of victims of violent crime are men, and men murder each other far more frequently than they murder women. Between 2010 and 2024, 570 homicides were recorded in the UK, of which 156 were female and 414 were male: a male-on-male homicide rate nearly three times higher than for women.

Rather, it’s a story about male aggression. The asymmetry comes about because, as Louise Perry has pointed out, most men can murder most women with their bare hands, and the reverse is not true. For the sex difference in propensity to violence and sexual aggression is attended by a similarly marked sex difference in physical strength.

These days, for complex and mostly well-intentioned reasons, such differences tend to be downplayed. No one wants to be constrained by stereotype. This egalitarianism has been taken to some strange extremes, such as the tendency of fantasy-type movies to include fight scenes in which petite women trounce huge, hulking men. (Again in Frozen, at the end tiny Anna punches Hans over the side of the ship with a single blow.) Combined with shrinking families and changing social patterns, such pervasive movie falsehoods accumulate to mean it’s now possible for a woman, especially a middle-class one, to get all the way to adulthood before realizing how much stronger men are — let alone the subtler sex differences.

And where these differences are noticed, it’s often to get them wrong. One common stereotype across both sexes, for example, is that women are more emotional than men. Men tend to make this claim because they want to think being emotional is bad; women, conversely, because they think being emotional is good. But the claim itself has always seemed strange to me, because it fits so poorly with the evidence.

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By Sarah Ditum

As I’ve already noted, men commit the vast majority of violent and sexual crime. And these are offenses that tend, with the exception of the odd psychopath, to be perpetrated in a high pitch of emotion, whether anger, lust, or some other intense, irrational state. This isn’t to excuse violence, of course. But we might wonder whether it’s not so much that men are less emotional than women than that they experience a different and possibly more extreme spread of feelings.

This is not to assert that there are no quiet, gentle men who feel things deeply, or that there’s anything wrong with such a personality. Where people of either sex are unhappy, there’s often a complex mix of internalizing (that is, introspective or self-directed) behaviors, such as sadness or rumination, and externalizing responses, such as hyperactivity or aggression. And while there’s a great deal of overlap between the sexes, internalizing appears to be more common among women and externalizing more common among men.

The increase in public support for emotional expressiveness might well bring relief and reassurance, at least to those men who are more prone to internalizing. But what about those men — who are, remember, as a group far bigger and stronger than women — who feel intensely, but tend to externalize negative emotion? Which is to say: what about the men who have a propensity to respond to sadness or anger with violence or aggression? It strikes me that, among this group, a far more prosocial message overall than “Let It Go” might well be “Suck It Up”.

And this brings us to the real heart of the matter. If “Let It Go” is a risky message, at least for men who tend to externalize, “Suck It Up” is not much of an alternative — at least not on its own. It invites the question: “Why?” Why, that is, should men accept this demand for self-restraint? The question is especially mordant when both the aggression being restrained, and also the restraint itself, are denounced as “toxic masculinity”. You would need a truly inspiring reason to accept so bewildering an edict; and yet to my eye no such reason is currently on offer. (I don’t think being invited on Newsnight to talk about crying counts.)

In a culture that offers men no idealistic reason to suppress their baser instincts, then, those young men who don’t simply act out violently can perhaps be forgiven for adopting an individualistic one: honing their ability to control their own urges and feelings, then directing this capacity for self-mastery to purely selfish goals. This is the moral vacuum within which influencers such as Andrew Tate operate, teaching a value-free program of masculine self-control stripped of higher aims beyond individual wealth and sexual dominance.

But the core of the problem isn’t men being told to control their feelings. It’s the poverty of the ends to which that control is then ordered. Because even strength and aggression are not bad as such: both domestic public order and international freedom from conflict rest ultimately on a capacity for violence. But the kind of violence that upholds public order or defends a nation isn’t comparable to (say) that employed by the machete-wielding teenage gang members that crashed a birthday party in Essex over the weekend. On the contrary: the capacity of public-spirited individuals — almost always men — for controlled violence is what stands between us and that kind of chaos and fear. The willingness of a few good men to be prosocially violent in an emergency is the ultimate guarantor of the peace in which I can run alone.

Encouraging men to repress the extremes of their emotional range is not wrong or cruel. It’s civilizationally essential. But there has to be a why, or few will bother — and those that do will do so for purely selfish ends. And then, before long, you won’t have a civilization; just (at best) warring tribes, or (worse still) omnium bellum contra omnes.

Obviously things aren’t anywhere near that bad. If they were, I wouldn’t be betting only on advancing age to keep me safe on my runs. Perhaps instead of a Labrador I’d have a Rottweiler. Perhaps I’d have a running machine in my panic room. But if we don’t want things to get worse, we can’t go about encouraging men to “Let It Go”. With heartfelt apologies to the sensitive ones: overall, male emotional repression is good, actually. What’s missing isn’t more masculine emotionality. It’s honor, appreciation, and a more transcendent reason for sublimating aggression and sexuality than just being able to take selfies in a Lamborghini.

My accounts of questioning this individualistic ideology, and embracing marriage and motherhood have resonated with social conservatives. Most of these, it goes without saying, feel (as I do) that family life and women’s distinctive sexed realities should be better understood and valued in the public conversation. Some, though, take more hardline positions: that women should never work, for example, that we should always be submissive — or even that women’s right to vote should be repealed.

But surely any stance which risks lending momentum to such extreme arguments cannot be in women’s interests? I explored this question recently with the Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

Southern’s story might easily serve as a cautionary tale for how socially conservative talking-points can lead women into danger. For where I lost my twenties to commune life and niche sexualities, she left media at 22 to embrace a socially conservative template for women: the lifestyle often idealised by social media influencers as “tradwife”. Except it wasn’t all Fifties pinafores and cute cupcakes; it was a living hell. Nor, as she has learned, was she the only conservative woman in this position.

Comparing our experiences, though, two things emerge. Firstly, that this is not simply a matter of the Right being uniquely toxic for women — though, as Southern’s story reveals, there’s plenty of scope for toxicity. It’s rather that purist ideologies as such map at best uneasily onto the practical realities of life as a woman – and especially as a mother. And secondly, that the simplifying, polarising incentives baked into the contemporary internet are increasingly warping the ideologies of both Left and Right into such extreme forms, that any sincere effort to apply these in real life will almost inevitably be the stuff of nightmares.

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Southern was perhaps the most telegenic figure in the brash, young, and very online “alt-Right” movement which emerged in the 2010s, quickly gaining international notoriety for her views on mass immigration, Islam, racially-motivated farm murders in South Africa, and the supposed harms of liberal feminism — content that saw her accused by the radical Left-wing Southern Poverty Law Centre of racist dog-whistling, and even hovering “at the precipice of outright white nationalism”. Southern herself has always denied this but that hasn’t stopped her critics on the Left accusing her of “far-Right” agitation.

Then, abruptly, she disappeared in 2019, to embrace marriage and motherhood in her husband’s home country of Australia. She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticised by progressives as “dangerous and stupid”. Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves — this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods.

Southern has attracted vitriolic criticism from the Right, for speaking openly about how “tradlife” went wrong for her. She, however, sees speaking out not as betrayal of her own “side”, but as continuous with her earlier willingness to challenge progressive consensus on topics such as immigration. “I’m not worried about saying the things I’m saying right now, that are getting me so attacked online. Because I’ve dealt with this, with South Africa. I’ve dealt with this with mass immigration, I’ve dealt with this with my critiques of feminism. And every single one turned out: oh, maybe she was onto something.”

For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

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What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life — in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.

How, then, did Southern get from posting videos titled “Why I Am Not A Feminist” to defending women’s sex-specific interests within family life? This is, after all, not a million miles from what used to be called “feminism”. It’s a long and bitter story, in which Southern did her best to live a purist internet ideology to the letter — only to receive a grim object lesson in its shortcomings.

Born in 1995, Southern grew up in British Columbia in a middle-class, conservative, Christian home. Southern was, she recounts, part of the first generation to grow up predominantly online. She and her sister (now a DJ and Twitch streamer) spent their adolescence in the kind of internet hinterlands where wild ideas flourish, free of grounding in material reality or practical experience.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years — to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too. So, when marriage beckoned, at 22, she tells me wryly: “I thought I’d won the lottery”. They were married within four months: arguably the equivalent, for the Right, of my Left-wing embrace of communes, anti-capitalist demos and niche sexual subcultures. She was quickly pregnant.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind. But he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree: “Whenever I wouldn’t do something, he would say: I’m going to divorce you.” So, feeling she had no other option, she assented.

He also insisted she should publicly quit work. His work required a high level of government security clearance; she was a Right-wing provocateur who had faced deplatforming, state investigations, and was even banned from entering the UK. In their early, giddy romance this had felt manageable. But “when we moved back to Australia, he really wanted to get back into his old work”. And Southern was a “hardcore liability”, so the pressure was on: “It was like: Lauren, you gotta hire lawyers. You’ve got to disavow everything. You’ve got to never talk publicly again.”

So, in 2019, she announced that she was leaving media and activism altogether. As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”. With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

Instead, between the lockdown claustrophobia and her husband’s behaviour, she began to revise her initial willingness to leave public life. In part, she told me, she hoped it would win back his love. “He was so much kinder, sweeter and more pursuant of me when I was this ‘boss babe’ travelling the world working. It seemed like becoming a mother made him lose respect for me. It was shocking to me, again, because the traditional view preached the opposite — that men love you more when you stop working and become a wife and mother.” In her experience, though, this was “very much not the case”. So, a year after retiring to embrace traditionalist domestic life on the Right-wing model, she posted her comeback video, and began making sporadic media appearances.

Never mind the pop-antifeminist ideal of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife that Southern had once promoted — the freedoms (won by early feminists) for women to work and have interests outside the home turned out to be a lifeline. Those already inclined to dislike Southern’s politics might feel a certain vindictive satisfaction at this collision of ideology with reality. But arguably, in having taken so long to see the potential downsides of her own antifeminism, Southern simply shared the same blind spots as much of the mainstream Left and Right.

It is surely true that conservative advocacy for complementary sex roles sometimes ignores questions about women’s physical vulnerability, and the scope this affords for domestic abuse. Conversely, today many self-identified liberal feminists have also forgotten that the earliest women’s movement was grounded in the sex-specific material vulnerabilities Southern experienced first-hand. The magazine pop-feminism that I internalised in Nineties Britain seemed less concerned with such gritty realities than more nebulous goods such as “empowerment”, representation, and smashing stereotypes. By the time Southern made her first viral video denouncing feminism, this was still more pronounced — and joined by the even more disembodied ideology of gender identity. When the physical vulnerability inherent in becoming a mother gets downplayed across the political spectrum, for different reasons, perhaps it’s no wonder Southern only gradually came to grasp the practical value of some first-wave feminist victories.

But even though she was no longer a “deadweight” financially, her job failed to appease her husband. “He kept demanding I contribute more financially, but then would chew me out whenever I would work.” It didn’t seem to matter what she did: “He would just give me impossible tasks all day. Tasks that I simply could not finish. It felt like he would almost send me on errands with the intent of having me fail.”

All of this was, Southern tells me, difficult to square with her religious beliefs. She would pray by his bed when he was angry with her, hoping that if she gave him grace one more time he’d realise the depth of her love and be kinder. And if this didn’t work, she was encouraged to persist by the way online life had conditioned these beliefs into “listicle” form. But as she discovered, distilling religious traditionalism into viral bullet points does not provide an adequate framework for navigating the complexities of a real-world marriage. She thought, she told me, that “as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I’m always submissive, and say yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.” And if it’s not fantastic? The listicle version of traditionalism would just say she should make more effort.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.

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It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support. And when their relationships go wrong, as they often do, the very online “trad” gender ideology has no remedy. “If there’s a problem due to the fact that he’s crazy, violent, or hateful,” Ellen says, “that’s just how it’s supposed to be. So there’s nothing really done to fix it.”

Southern is careful to emphasise that she knows many traditionalists in happy, loving, complementary marriages. But, she says, it’s a fallen world, and her community includes many women whose husbands seem to have been drawn to listicle-style gender ideology precisely because of the power it offers over women. “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

In the end, it wasn’t Southern who broke the spell, but her husband. Around the time her son was toddling, two family deaths prompted her to arrange a visit home to Canada. Her husband threatened to divorce her if she went, and Southern tells me she had to sign an affidavit promising to return. Finally he relented — only to text after she landed in Canada, declaring that because she’d chosen to travel, the marriage was over.

She moved in with her parents, then into the kind of affordable accommodation available to those on the breadline, in Canada’s brutally expensive housing market: a cheap cabin surrounded by woodland and trailers. Even then she still hoped her marriage could be saved: “I still wanted to make it work. I was texting my husband and calling him, begging to get back together. But he just said ‘No. I don’t even want shared custody.’” The cabin, she said, had an ant infestation; everyone used her washing machine because it was the only one. But, she says, it was unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.

Still, it was a confusing time for her. “My brain was breaking between two worlds,” she says, “because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.” I was at a similar age when I fell away from the radical Left, and the sense of disorientation she describes is familiar. But where I was free to grapple in private with my cognitive dissonance, Southern had built an international profile promoting this worldview. “I had been banned from countries over this ideology,” she says. “I had destroyed my reputation internationally for this. How am I going let go of this?”

And yet, every manosphere talking point had turned out not to match her experience. It wasn’t true that only women mess up relationships. Being submissive didn’t fix everything. Yes, women mostly initiate divorce — but as she discovered, this can happen because a man wishes to avoid incurring child support liabilities. When she described her redpill-conditioned expectations of divorce to her lawyer, the woman laughed at how mistaken she was.

More than anything, though, what shattered the listicle mindset was simply realising how much nicer life could be, when you live the life that’s in front of you rather than trying to follow rigid precepts. Despite not being “the Right-wing ideal of aristocracy and everyone going to Mass”, she realised she was infinitely happier there in that woodland, among her working-class neighbours, than she ever had been in her marriage. “Every single thing I was experiencing in my real realm, not online realm, was the complete opposite of what I was being told.”

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When she first announced her marriage, she says, she’d been lauded by friends and fans; then, when she announced the separation she was inundated with messages lamenting how her life was ruined. But in both cases the exact opposite was true: “Post-divorce, after becoming a single mother, my mental health started to improve. I started to repair all these really important friendships. And I’m living a much happier, much healthier life than I was before….Some of the most miserable people I’ve met – in fact, absolutely the most miserable people I’ve met – have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic.” The happiest people she knows, on the other hand, “are just living in reality”.

In Southern’s view, the increasingly visible gulf between Right-wing gender ideology and “living in reality” has an analogue in the memes and talking-points of the broader e-Right — a phenomenon that, once again, is mirrored on the other side of the aisle. Here, viral and overly simplistic ideas replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is. For example, she describes the “Repeal the 19th” meme, which calls for ending women’s right to vote, as “the Right-wing version of Defund the Police”.

Southern thinks the internet’s baked-in incentives encourage this drift toward ever more caricatured viral politics. For example, she tells me that where earlier generations of “red-pill” content merely focused on exploiting women sexually, it “has become just teaching men to hate women” – simply because this is a simpler, cheaper, and more viral message and therefore easier to sell.

Someone less online than Southern might reply: yes, but surely the error was disappearing into online ideological rabbit holes in the first place, and confusing memes for life principles. This is true; but so much of social life now happens online, including for children, that Southern is far from the only individual to have reached adulthood with a set of templates for life gleaned more from memes than real-world adult guidance. Nor is this a problem for just one side of the political aisle.

Against an online world with entropic, culture-dissolving effects at this scale, then, what hope is there for any of us? A pessimist might say the future looks bleak for interpersonal relationships, indeed for our public life tout court. But I think Southern’s story offers cause for optimism. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, our current crop of internet-generated political derangements will turn out to be a temporary symptom, driven by generations who grew up without the internet and hence without much psychological defence against its many pathologies. By contrast, the first generation to grow up online is now approaching middle age. A great many besides Lauren Southern have road-tested ideologies they developed in virtual space and are finding them inadequate to the real world’s complexities.

I doubt online “gender” arguments will abate any time soon. The tussle between men and women is a culture war as old as humanity itself: men and women always need to find a way to live together, which means negotiating those ways our material interests and physical capacities align or exist in tension. With the wider world in flux, it’s hardly surprising to find ourselves here again; the challenge is finding solutions that are grounded in reality rather than abstract, purist ideologies.

But the internet’s first generation of natives may be the ones who bring us back down to earth. Even the erstwhile queen bee of the extremely online radical Right is now a convert to “living in reality”. So perhaps there’s hope that the rest of us — and our politics — will also find our way back there, in the end.

***

This article was first published on 6 May, 2024

Looking back, there are a number of reasons why my identity transitioned so abruptly to that of a tomboy. The wildness of the guys was different from that of the girls: the risks they took were ones of daring and skill. The girls took risks with emotion and intimacy (being sexually intimate was an emotional risk). For another, the manly virtues were powerful: courage and valour and strength. I admired them, and I coveted them. I wanted to test myself, to prove my worth. More than anything I wanted others to see these qualities within me and to respect me for them. Femininity was disenchanting, with little to offer. While I was out on the mountain trails with the guys, testing and challenging my strength, the girls would be lazing on a lake dock, reading magazines, painting nails. Girliness was boring.

But there was another force at work, deeper and less comfortable to name. Being boyish was an escape from the anxiety of being a woman. It is one thing to jump off a 40-foot bridge into swirling water, quite another entirely to grapple with the pressures of being a young woman. I resented male sexual attention. It was exhausting, that constant awareness of male hunger. I wanted to be free from that background buzzing.

Instead, I was privy to their locker room talk. They would often tease each other about whom they had bedded the night before and laugh about the way the girl would wake up hoping for more commitment, more connection, more promises of care. Though I see only now that the guys were also afraid of the risks involved in love. Their mockery often concealed a lurking fear and resentment of their own need for female affection, a threat to their independence and autonomy. But I had a secret terror of becoming one of these girls, of being treated casually, of feeling unvalued. There are differences in how young women and young men respond to the risks of intimacy. As a woman, I was afraid that I might become callous and disillusioned, or wounded and hurt. The promises of the sexual revolution that offered freedoms and pleasures without guilt held little appeal for me. It wasn’t guilt I wanted to avoid, it was the self-protective cynicism that disappointments often lead to. I wanted to avoid the sexual marketplace altogether. Shedding my femininity was the easiest way to do this.

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But it wasn’t just because of the influence of men that I became a tomboy. Women, too, in ways that are subtle, judge other women, especially pretty ones, with preconceived notions that I was keen to avoid. Young pretty women are sometimes seen as superficial, as dumb, as less serious than a type of woman who covers up her attractiveness by appearing to not care about her looks. Young women often earn social points with other women for having a type of look that loudly says, “I’m not vain, and not pandering to socially constructed expectations of beauty.” Baggy clothes become a sign of ethical enlightenment. Not wearing make-up a signal that one has inner beauty. That this style is itself carefully cultivated, an exercise of moral vanity, often seems to be lost on young woman. Cutting off my hair as a young woman was taking this aesthetic one step further. It was a decisive striking out against the femininity of my teenage years and a clear signal to those around me that I was not to be confined by gender expectations. (It was the late Nineties. I shudder to think of what I may have been tempted to cut off were I to be in my late-teens now.)

At any rate, it worked. Immediately I was taken more seriously by my professors, by my friends, by guys and by girls. I was seen as tough and as independent. And the more I was seen as tough and independent, the more I became tough and independent. We tend to become the person we pretend to be.

There were three aspects to the change in my appearance that seem to be absent from today’s discourse on young women and gender, all of them related. The first was that I had a deep and genuine affection for men and for masculinity. I had no interest in correcting their “toxic” attitudes and humour. I had no desire to domestic their behaviours. I adored their swagger. I loved their courage. I delighted in their jokes, their irreverence, their ridicule. The second is that virginity was a concept that had not yet been entirely corrupted by the accusation that “The Patriarchy” employed it as a weapon to keep women controlled and confined. And the last was that though I wanted to push against convention, this push was aimed at enlarging what it meant to be a woman rather than what it meant to be merely “gendered”.

I am often surprised, and troubled, now by how quickly a young woman will abandon being a woman because she isn’t at home in the stereotypical idea of femaleness. That rather than redefine the female stereotype, she jettisons her female gender. What makes her dislike it so much, I wonder? The added irony is that when she becomes a “he” or “they”, as we often see today, he/they does so without any genuine affection for masculinity. That is, rather than challenge the feminine stereotypes she clearly doesn’t fit, he/they becomes a boy who isn’t, often, at all masculine. He/they appropriates the concept of maleness into herself (himself, themself), making it safe rather than wild and scary and foreign and fun.

I am sympathetic to the young women I see today who seem to want to escape the burden of being a woman by becoming some form of nonbinary. It may feel like it offers freedom from the confines of a girlish stereotype, frees one from social expectations, and, importantly, from sexual pressures. Identifying in ways that cut against the norms of gender is often seen as a kind of power move, a way to position oneself so that others take one seriously as an individual. It answers to our desire for uniqueness and self-expression. But as it does so, it often forms a young woman into a new stereotypical type, while cementing the idea that femaleness is merely girly, an idea that feminism once worked hard to break.

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I remained a virgin into my early twenties. This allowed me to not only slowly grow into my skin as a woman, but also gave me the independence from gender I was so keen to embrace. But once we label virginity as a form of male dominance, a remnant of a more repressive sexual era, one in which men controlled women’s sexual experiences in an effort to eliminate their own anxieties around female sexuality, it makes it much harder for a young woman to remain a virgin while being an oppression-fighting ethical person. (And why would men be so keen on keeping women virgins, exactly, we might ask? Isn’t it possible that men might be the primary beneficiaries of sexually available women?), In an effort to express their sexual freedom – a moral imperative – young women may feel internal pressure to have sex in order to be unrestricted from traditional sexual mores.

Being a tomboy freed me from the anxieties of sexual relations. I was able to indulge in my deep affection for males without the demands of being on the sexual marketplace. And I won respect and admiration from others I desired by succeeding in masculine pursuits. I was able to do this because, not in spite of the fact, that I remained solidly and joyfully a female. I was granted respect from the guys I spent the summer months with not because I was seen as their equal and certainly not because I demanded that they respect my “inner-truth”, but because I was a girl doing the same things they were — and sometimes even doing them pretty well. That I was a girl doing tough-guy things made me even more admirable. I didn’t have to persuade anyone to respect me by ideologically brow-beating them.

I am now a grown woman with teenage daughters of my own. I grew out of my tomboy phase but the toughness and the confidence I developed have stayed. Though often deemed as toxic, this strength helped me to deal with a painful intimate relationship when it eventually occurred. (The poetic irony of the human condition is that we often run headlong into the thing we are keenest to avoid.) The risks of the sexual marketplace are very real, and the power of a man to manipulate and wound a woman something that recent feminism has been right to emphasise. But this should not be at the expense of colouring over women’s affection for men with resentment towards them. It is this affection for manliness that I want to instill in my daughters, an affection that grows into their own identities. It is important to man-up in life, even if you’re a girl.

It looked like a man punching a woman because, according to the International Boxing Association, Khelif is not a woman. In 2023, Khelif was disqualified from the World Boxing Championships along with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting  — “a result of their failure to meet the eligibility criteria for participating in the women’s competition”. This decision was based, not on testosterone levels, but on “a separate and recognised test, whereby the specifics remain confidential”.

A Russian-language statement (the IBA is Russian-led) put it more bluntly: “Based on the results of DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women. Based on the results of the tests, it was proven that they have XY chromosomes.” Lin did not appeal, while Khelif initiated an appeal and then withdrew it, meaning that in both cases, the judgement became legally binding.

But not binding on the Olympics, which withdrew recognition from the IBA earlier this year over multiple concerns over governance. That means the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is free to apply its own rules on sex categories in sport. IOC spokesperson Mark Adams warned against starting a “witch hunt… These are regular athletes who have competed for many years in boxing; they are entirely eligible and they are women on their passports.”

Which would be a totally acceptable way to classify sex, if the fight was between passports, rather than two bone-and-sinew bodies. Khelif is apparently not female, in a category designed for female athletes. And while the IOC has been keen to emphasise that this controversy is wholly unrelated to the contentious matter of trans women in sport, that is an impossible separation to maintain. The question of how sex should be defined — by chromosomes, by hormone levels or by legal marker on a passport — is the heart of the argument over inclusion.

What happened in the ring in Paris is a riposte to all the absurd claims that sex is immaterial to athletic performance. Witness, for example, the writers Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis, who argued in a 2012 New York Times op-ed for “letting go of the idea that the ultimate goal of a fair policy is to protect the ‘purity’ of women’s competitions”. If inclusion is the objective, “then sex-segregated competition is just one of many possible options, and in many cases it might not be the best one”.

And anyway, doesn’t the enforcement of sex categories simply re-instil bad old stereotypes about female weakness and vulnerability? That, at least, is what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) believes. “Excluding women who are trans hurts all women,” says the organisation’s self-identified factsheet on sports. “It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being ‘too masculine’ or ‘too good’ at their sport to be a ‘real’ woman.” History professor Johanna Mellis even suggested in The Guardian that women’s sports categories might have been invented by men “to limit our athletic success and opportunities by reinforcing sexist notions of cisgender girls and women as the ‘weaker, slower sex’”.

From there, it’s a short distance to travel to the often-repeated claim that, as an article in LGBTQ+ magazine Them put it, sex differences should be viewed “much like the way we view Michael Phelps’s abnormal wingspan”. Athletes are, by definition, physical exceptions. A male person who has been legally recognised as female is simply another example of biological variation, and — claimed sports correspondent Jonathan Liew (now of The Guardian, but then writing in The Independent) — perhaps one to be celebrated: he claimed that, “in a way, it would be inspiring” if trans women came to dominate women’s sport.

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So far, chromosomes notwithstanding, Khelif has not dominated women’s boxing. XY chromosomes notwithstanding, Khelif lost in the quarter-final of the Tokyo Olympics to Kellie Harrington of Ireland, who went on to take the gold: BBC 5 Live boxing analyst Steve Bunce pointed out that Khelif is “not a devastating puncher” and has ever only achieved five stoppages. The implication, perhaps, is that Carini could have fought on, and maybe even beaten Khelif if she’d been good enough. Maybe so.

But genetically male athletes do not only become a problem in women’s sport when they’re successful. Every XY athlete “included” means an XX athlete pushed out. In combat or collision sports, they also imperil the female athletes they compete against. According to the organisation Women in Sport, male athletes have (on average) 40-50% greater upper limb strength and 12kg more skeletal muscle mass when compared to age-matched female athletes at any given body weight.

A technically accomplished woman might win a fight against a man, but the risk of injury she takes in the process is immense. So Casini had every right to weigh her own safety. After the bout, she said: “It could have been the match of a lifetime, but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment.” Boxing is inherently dangerous — but there is a very different level of exposure in agreeing to be punched by another woman, and agreeing to be punched by a man.

This is the difference that proponents of eliminating sex categories in sport cannot acknowledge. Some, like Liew, may tacitly accept it while being fundamentally unconcerned about what that would mean in practice for women in sport — perhaps because they consider women’s sport to be fundamentally unserious. (“Sometimes we forget that there are bigger things than sport,” wrote Liew in his Independent piece, which is not an observation he ever appears to have made about men’s sport.)

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But for others, particularly for women, and perhaps most particularly for women who are not actively involved in physical pursuits, there is a kind of hope in this denialism. They would like to believe that women’s physical disadvantage compared to men really is a purely, or at least largely, social phenomenon. They recognise women’s inferior status, and they understand that this is tied to the body; but they believe that the body is the cause of the inferiority, and so the body becomes politically inconvenient. They choose instead a tactful fiction of physiological equality — if not in the here and now, then in the inclusive Jerusalem to come.

The female body can, certainly, do more than the male authorities who run sports have historically liked to believe: there is a long and weird tradition of claiming that exercise will cause a woman’s uterus to fall out. Given fair access to training and competition (something which is still very far from assured), women do become faster, stronger, more aggressive. I know this from personal experience. I started powerlifting in my late thirties, and in my forties can pull weights I once thought cartoonishly huge. But I also know that the same weights pulled by a man would be much less impressive, which is why comparing myself to men tells me nothing at all about my progression.

Mixed-sex sports simply lead to exceptional women being forced out by mediocre men: brute strength besting accomplishment. The Olympics’ failure to protect women’s sport is a tragedy for female athletes, but it also makes a travesty of the competition overall. What should be a celebration of excellence becomes, through the IOC’s contempt for fairness and safety in women’s sport, the elevation of the mediocre. After decades of obfuscation and inanity over gender and sport, the truth of it all became clear in an entirely unnecessary meeting: between an apparently male fist and a female face.

This phenomenon is particularly marked in feminism, made worse by those Utopian-minded thinkers who see the cherry-picking of facts or even untruths as a way to establish their own preferred values. Perversely, while many turn a blind eye to the appalling treatment of women in some contemporaneous cultures, historically distant women who sought to make a dent in the male-centred legal and cultural edifices of their own times are often condemned as morally imperfect, overly entitled Karens who didn’t pay enough attention to colonialism or classism as they made their arguments. Equally, what passes for feminist history in the popular imagination is lazily retrofitted to justify present cultural obsessions.

The really important stuff, it is sometimes suggested, began with a weighty-sounding aphorism by Simone de Beauvoir; then immediately passed through a regrettable stage of racism and self-absorption from middle-class white women towards other minority groups, before various African-American thinkers intervened to set them straight. Taking on some polemical energy from radical feminists in the Sixties and Seventies while carefully detaching from their awkward anti-pornography and anti-prostitution political objectives, feminism finally landed with some relief in the sunlit uplands of Judith Butler’s world, where it has stayed ever since.

Here the human sex categories got all sticky with gender fluidity and began to melt in the heat, to be replaced by a more pleasingly non-binary configuration: always-lipstick, never-lipstick, and sometimes-lipstick. “Consent” became a magical substance, changing objectively awful behaviours into things that are actually fun and liberatory for women, and we all could live happily ever after — or we would have done, had the dark triad of the Pope, Vladimir Putin, and pesky gender-critical women on Rainy Fascist Terf Island not banded together to mess it all up.

Into this yawning intellectual chasm comes a new book by Susanna Rustin, Sexed: A History of British Feminism. In the introduction, Rustin — a social affairs leader writer for the Guardian — sets out her stall: to explain why defences of sex-realism and sex-based rights have been so “pronounced” in the UK, relative to other Anglophone countries, by placing them within a tradition of British feminism reaching back to the 18th century.

Though with some qualms about the branding, Rustin is herself sympathetic to the sex-realist, gender-critical cause. This fact alone would make Sexed a symbolically important book, irrespective of its quality: to find a writer apparently at the heart of the modern Establishment Left, yet who unambiguously rejects transactivist talking points and insists on the political importance of sex, is a rare thing indeed. Luckily though, the book is also impressive in its scope and erudition. The narrative zips along faster than the King’s horse heading for Emily Davison, and elegantly compresses a lot of detailed information about important figures, trends and themes into a relatively small space.

I read Rustin’s book with Roy’s injunction against taking the past as another branch of the present firmly in mind, and yet the book’s content made it hard not to draw parallels with the contemporary moment — and presumably, that is part of its point. Indeed, at times, I wondered what the second (or third, or fourth) wave of feminism had actually been for, exactly, since every possible position in feminist logical space seems to have already been occupied before 1940. From the 18th century onwards, as Rustin tells it, there was robust discussion among British women about whether minds as well as bodies had a sex; whether biological sex difference should be politically prioritised or ignored in advancing women’s interests; whether being in the domestic sphere was limiting or valuable for women; whether there was too much of a focus in feminism upon the preferences of child-free types, or conversely, upon those of mothers; and whether advancing women’s rights was in tension with wider class-based or race-based interests.

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Almost as soon as Darwinism appeared on the scene, George Eliot noticed, well in advance of 20th-century feminist critics, that some aspects of its framing were latently sexist. Later Virginia Woolf — whose statue in Bloomsbury now comes with a QR code warning viewers of her objectionable opinions — would observe that sexist arguments generally were often accompanied by claims about the naturalisation of certain traits. And in 1932, nearly 60 years before Butler, Woolf’s biographer Winifred Holtby suggested we should replace talk of sex altogether with talk of “gender” since, as Rustin paraphrases her, “the former was too weighted down with the kinds of biological connotations that dragged women down”.

The many fascinating women who each get to shine for a few pages under Rustin’s scrutiny seem up to date in other ways too. In 1854, educationalist Barbara Bodichon records her love of wild swimming, writing that she had partaken with a friend in a lake “in the most utterly crazy Dianalike way with no Actaeon save a mountain mutton or two who came and stared and thought we were literally two very odd fishes’”. In the early 20th century, MP Eleanor Rathbone was, like many today, worried about “a legal fiction” — albeit one which gave husbands enhanced parental rights rather than potentially bestowing an official sex change upon them. And back when BBC Women’s Hour first started on the radio in 1946, it seems that it had men on — plus ça change. Meanwhile, in a cautionary tale for present members of Just Stop Oil, we are told that Mary Richardson — the suffragette who, in 1914, attacked Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery with a meat cleaver — “went on to hold a senior role in the British Union of Fascists”.

With the exception of Richardson perhaps, the toughness, cleverness, and collaborative pragmatism of British women fighting on behalf of other women throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, in deeply belittling and often abusive contexts, comes across as truly impressive — whether or not they called themselves “feminists” or agreed on background political frameworks (they often didn’t, on both counts). And in fact, although Rustin does not sanction such a heretical thought, by the time I arrived at her section on the Sixties and Seventies, things seemed to me to be going downhill.

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Suddenly everyone was consciousness-raising like mad — treating the new craze imported from the US as if groups of women had never discussed their circumstances and feelings together before — and becoming subtly beholden to a more volatile sensibility in the process. Despite the undoubted political and legal gains of this period, there was a growing shift of emphasis that looks ominous in retrospect: a move towards internal feelings and “subjectivity”, and a fixation with how women were being culturally represented at the expense of other pressing concerns.

Not everybody liked it: Barbara Castle harrumphed that women in the Seventies “should find a cause bigger than themselves”. And although Rustin doesn’t really mention it, there was another unwelcome development during that period, also following the US: feminists tearing chunks out of one other, based on hierarchical perceptions of privilege plus whatever other personal resentments were bubbling under. In 1976, the American version of this was memorably documented in a piece by Jo Freeman in Ms. magazine, on feminist “trashing”.

At one point in her narrative, Rustin describes how, in the Seventies, “a series of meetings in Brighton was headed ‘How Do We Oppress Each Other?’ and aimed to explore the barriers between women in groupings such as mother/non-mother, lesbian/heterosexual, working class/middle class, young/old, black/white, intellectual/non-intellectual and quiet/vocal.” She seems to think this was a welcome development; to me it sounds quite unlikely to improve group morale or political efficiency. It’s difficult to imagine the lively, eccentric characters from earlier periods of British activism putting up with such elaborate requests for guilt-ridden self-flagellation, and they seem all the more refreshing for that fact.

Here in 2024, circular firing squads within what passes for feminism are now legion; and British gender-criticals are habitually hectored, insulted, screamed at, and worse, for the ways in which “cis women” are supposed to have power over that other, more testosterone-pumped kind of woman. In the approach to the election, various Labour politicians including Keir Starmer have exposed their own historical amnesia about how exactly things got this bad, insinuating that the threats and aggression have flowed equally from each side, and ignoring the fact that senior members of the party have played an instrumental role in getting us here.

But the last chapters of Rustin’s book, bringing British feminism into the recent present, tell a different story. We hear of one party member being physically shoved out of a room at party conference in which she had been peacefully handing out leaflets against self-ID; of the Labour conference fringe meeting in Brighton where fellow conference-goers blocked the entrance, threw water over participants, and kicked the windows throughout (I was there); and of a pledge signed by nearly all candidates for the Labour leadership and deputy leadership, describing gender-critical groups Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance as “hate groups”.

If anything, Rustin substantially underplays the extent to which the party has betrayed the thousands of gender-critical women that once were members or voted for them: leaving out, say, Starmer’s betrayal of his own MP Rosie Duffield, or his refusal to meet with veteran feminist author and campaigner Joan Smith to discuss single sex space. Olivier Roy may be right that we often erroneously treat historical figures as modern ones; still, sometimes even the most modern of figures seem like very convincing throwbacks.

My accounts of questioning this individualistic ideology, and embracing marriage and motherhood have resonated with social conservatives. Most of these, it goes without saying, feel (as I do) that family life and women’s distinctive sexed realities should be better understood and valued in the public conversation. Some, though, take more hardline positions: that women should never work, for example, that we should always be submissive – or even that women’s right to vote should be repealed.

But surely any stance which risks lending momentum to such extreme arguments cannot be in women’s interests? I explored this question recently with the Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

Southern’s story might easily serve as a cautionary tale for how socially conservative talking-points can lead women into danger. For where I lost my twenties to commune life and niche sexualities, she left media at 22 to embrace a socially conservative template for women: the lifestyle often idealised by social media influencers as “tradwife”. Except it wasn’t all Fifties pinafores and cute cupcakes; it was a living hell. Nor, as she has learned, was she the only conservative woman in this position.

Comparing our experiences, though, two things emerge. Firstly, that this is not simply a matter of the Right being uniquely toxic for women — though, as Southern’s story reveals, there’s plenty of scope for toxicity. It’s rather that purist ideologies as such map at best uneasily onto the practical realities of life as a woman – and especially as a mother. And secondly, that the simplifying, polarising incentives baked into the contemporary internet are increasingly warping the ideologies of both Left and Right into such extreme forms, that any sincere effort to apply these in real life will almost inevitably be the stuff of nightmares.

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Southern was perhaps the most telegenic figure in the brash, young, and very online “alt-Right” movement which emerged in the 2010s, quickly gaining international notoriety for her views on mass immigration, Islam, racially-motivated farm murders in South Africa, and the supposed harms of liberal feminism — content that saw her accused by the radical Left-wing Southern Poverty Law Centre of racist dog-whistling, and even hovering “at the precipice of outright white nationalism”. Southern herself has always denied this but that hasn’t stopped her critics on the Left accusing her of “far Right” agitation.

Then, abruptly, she disappeared in 2019, to embrace marriage and motherhood in her husband’s home country of Australia. She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticised by progressives as “dangerous and stupid”. Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves — this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods.

Southern has attracted vitriolic criticism from the Right, for speaking openly about how “tradlife” went wrong for her. She, however, sees speaking out not as betrayal of her own “side”, but as continuous with her earlier willingness to challenge progressive consensus on topics such as immigration. “I’m not worried about saying the things I’m saying right now, that are getting me so attacked online. Because I’ve dealt with this, with South Africa. I’ve dealt with this with mass immigration, I’ve dealt with this with my critiques of feminism. And every single one turned out: oh, maybe she was onto something.”

For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

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What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life – in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.

How, then, did Southern get from posting videos titled “Why I Am Not A Feminist” to defending women’s sex-specific interests within family life? This is, after all, not a million miles from what used to be called “feminism”. It’s a long and bitter story, in which Southern did her best to live a purist internet ideology to the letter – only to receive a grim object lesson in its shortcomings.

Born in 1995, Southern grew up in British Columbia in a middle-class, conservative, Christian home. Southern was, she recounts, part of the first generation to grow up predominantly online. She and her sister (now a DJ and Twitch streamer) spent their adolescence in the kind of internet hinterlands where wild ideas flourish, free of grounding in material reality or practical experience.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years – to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too. So, when marriage beckoned, at 22, she tells me wryly: “I thought I’d won the lottery”. They were married within four months: arguably the equivalent, for the Right, of my Left-wing embrace of communes, anti-capitalist demos and niche sexual subcultures. She was quickly pregnant.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind. But he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree: “Whenever I wouldn’t do something, he would say: I’m going to divorce you.” So, feeling she had no other option, she assented.

He also insisted she should publicly quit work. His work required a high level of government security clearance; she was a Right-wing provocateur who had faced deplatforming, state investigations, and was even banned from entering the UK. In their early, giddy romance this had felt manageable. But “when we moved back to Australia, he really wanted to get back into his old work”. And Southern was a “hardcore liability”, so the pressure was on: “It was like: Lauren, you gotta hire lawyers. You’ve got to disavow everything. You’ve got to never talk publicly again.”

So, in 2019, she announced that she was leaving media and activism altogether. As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”.  With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

Instead, between the lockdown claustrophobia and her husband’s behaviour, she began to revise her initial willingness to leave public life. In part, she told me, she hoped it would win back his love. “He was so much kinder, sweeter and more pursuant of me when I was this ‘boss babe’ travelling the world working. It seemed like becoming a mother made him lose respect for me. It was shocking to me, again, because the traditional view preached the opposite — that men love you more when you stop working and become a wife and mother.” In her experience, though, this was “very much not the case”. So, a year after retiring to embrace traditionalist domestic life on the Right-wing model, she posted her comeback video, and began making sporadic media appearances.

Never mind the pop-antifeminist ideal of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife that Southern had once promoted — the freedoms (won by early feminists) for women to work and have interests outside the home turned out to be a lifeline. Those already inclined to dislike Southern’s politics might feel a certain vindictive satisfaction at this collision of ideology with reality. But arguably, in having taken so long to see the potential downsides of her own antifeminism, Southern simply shared the same blind spots as much of the mainstream Left and Right.

It is surely true that conservative advocacy for complementary sex roles sometimes ignores questions about women’s physical vulnerability, and the scope this affords for domestic abuse. Conversely, today many self-identified liberal feminists have also forgotten that the earliest women’s movement was grounded in the sex-specific material vulnerabilities Southern experienced first-hand. The magazine pop-feminism that I internalised in Nineties Britain seemed less concerned with such gritty realities than more nebulous goods such as “empowerment”, representation, and smashing stereotypes. By the time Southern made her first viral video denouncing feminism, this was still more pronounced — and joined by the even more disembodied ideology of gender identity. When the physical vulnerability inherent in becoming a mother gets downplayed across the political spectrum, for different reasons, perhaps it’s no wonder Southern only gradually came to grasp the practical value of some first-wave feminist victories.

But even though she was no longer a “deadweight” financially, her job failed to appease her husband. “He kept demanding I contribute more financially, but then would chew me out whenever I would work.” It didn’t seem to matter what she did: “He would just give me impossible tasks all day. Tasks that I simply could not finish. It felt like he would almost send me on errands with the intent of having me fail.”

All of this was, Southern tells me, difficult to square with her religious beliefs. She would pray by his bed when he was angry with her, hoping that if she gave him grace one more time he’d realise the depth of her love and be kinder. And if this didn’t work, she was encouraged to persist by the way online life had conditioned these beliefs into “listicle” form. But as she discovered, distilling religious traditionalism into viral bullet points does not provide an adequate framework for navigating the complexities of a real-world marriage. She thought, she told me, that “as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I’m always submissive, and say yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.” And if it’s not fantastic? The listicle version of traditionalism would just say she should make more effort.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.

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It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support. And when their relationships go wrong, as they often do, the very online “trad” gender ideology has no remedy. “If there’s a problem due to the fact that he’s crazy, violent, or hateful,” Ellen says, “that’s just how it’s supposed to be. So there’s nothing really done to fix it.”

Southern is careful to emphasise that she knows many traditionalists in happy, loving, complementary marriages. But, she says, it’s a fallen world, and her community includes many women whose husbands seem to have been drawn to listicle-style gender ideology precisely because of the power it offers over women. “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

In the end, it wasn’t Southern who broke the spell, but her husband. Around the time her son was toddling, two family deaths prompted her to arrange a visit home to Canada. Her husband threatened to divorce her if she went, and Southern tells me she had to sign an affidavit promising to return. Finally he relented — only to text after she landed in Canada, declaring that because she’d chosen to travel, the marriage was over.

She moved in with her parents, then into the kind of affordable accommodation available to those on the breadline, in Canada’s brutally expensive housing market: a cheap cabin surrounded by woodland and trailers. Even then she still hoped her marriage could be saved: “I still wanted to make it work. I was texting my husband and calling him, begging to get back together. But he just said ‘No. I don’t even want shared custody.’” The cabin, she said, had an ant infestation; everyone used her washing machine because it was the only one. But, she says, it was unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.

Still, it was a confusing time for her. “My brain was breaking between two worlds,” she says, “because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.” I was at a similar age when I fell away from the radical Left, and the sense of disorientation she describes is familiar. But where I was free to grapple in private with my cognitive dissonance, Southern had built an international profile promoting this worldview. “I had been banned from countries over this ideology,” she says. “I had destroyed my reputation internationally for this. How am I going let go of this?”

And yet, every manosphere talking point had turned out not to match her experience. It wasn’t true that only women mess up relationships. Being submissive didn’t fix everything. Yes, women mostly initiate divorce — but as she discovered, this can happen because a man wishes to avoid incurring child support liabilities. When she described her redpill-conditioned expectations of divorce to her lawyer, the woman laughed at how mistaken she was.

More than anything, though, what shattered the listicle mindset was simply realising how much nicer life could be, when you live the life that’s in front of you rather than trying to follow rigid precepts. Despite not being “the Right-wing ideal of aristocracy and everyone going to Mass”, she realised she was infinitely happier there in that woodland, among her working-class neighbours, than she ever had been in her marriage. “Every single thing I was experiencing in my real realm, not online realm, was the complete opposite of what I was being told.”

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When she first announced her marriage, she says, she’d been lauded by friends and fans; then, when she announced the separation she was inundated with messages lamenting how her life was ruined. But in both cases the exact opposite was true: “Post-divorce, after becoming a single mother, my mental health started to improve. I started to repair all these really important friendships. And I’m living a much happier, much healthier life than I was before….Some of the most miserable people I’ve met – in fact, absolutely the most miserable people I’ve met – have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic.” The happiest people she knows, on the other hand, “are just living in reality”.

In Southern’s view, the increasingly visible gulf between Right-wing gender ideology and “living in reality” has an analogue in the memes and talking-points of the broader e-Right — a phenomenon that, once again, is mirrored on the other side of the aisle. Here, viral and overly simplistic ideas replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is. For example, she describes the “Repeal the 19th” meme, which calls for ending women’s right to vote, as “the Right-wing version of Defund the Police”.

Southern thinks the internet’s baked-in incentives encourage this drift toward ever more caricatured viral politics. For example, she tells me that where earlier generations of “red-pill” content merely focused on exploiting women sexually, it “has become just teaching men to hate women” – simply because this is a simpler, cheaper, and more viral message and therefore easier to sell.

Someone less online than Southern might reply: yes, but surely the error was disappearing into online ideological rabbit holes in the first place, and confusing memes for life principles. This is true; but so much of social life now happens online, including for children, that Southern is far from the only individual to have reached adulthood with a set of templates for life gleaned more from memes than real-world adult guidance. Nor is this a problem for just one side of the political aisle.

Against an online world with entropic, culture-dissolving effects at this scale, then, what hope is there for any of us? A pessimist might say the future looks bleak for interpersonal relationships, indeed for our public life tout court. But I think Southern’s story offers cause for optimism. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, our current crop of internet-generated political derangements will turn out to be a temporary symptom, driven by generations who grew up without the internet and hence without much psychological defence against its many pathologies. By contrast, the first generation to grow up online is now approaching middle age. A great many besides Lauren Southern have road-tested ideologies they developed in virtual space and are finding them inadequate to the real world’s complexities.

I doubt online “gender” arguments will abate any time soon. The tussle between men and women is a culture war as old as humanity itself: men and women always need to find a way to live together, which means negotiating those ways our material interests and physical capacities align or exist in tension. With the wider world in flux, it’s hardly surprising to find ourselves here again; the challenge is finding solutions that are grounded in reality rather than abstract, purist ideologies.

But the internet’s first generation of natives may be the ones who bring us back down to earth. Even the erstwhile queen bee of the extremely online radical Right is now a convert to “living in reality”. So perhaps there’s hope that the rest of us — and our politics — will also find our way back there, in the end.

Many view the co-existence of these two economic characteristics as, if not a paradox, a cause for concern. Indeed, a number of observers, from Left-leaning policy wonks like Larry Summers and Richard Reeves to Right-leaning US senators such as Josh Hawley, appear terrified of its implications. In March, for instance, as the Nasdaq soared to new records, the rate of prime-age labour force participation fell for men, despite rising for the population as a whole. So, what’s driving this, and how is it remaking the relations between the sexes at a time of escalating gender conflict?

Here, my friends could spare the social-policy establishment some man hours: they are a microcosm of a cause-and-effect relationship that ties together two trends. Among the surest ways to cause people to work less is to make them wealthier. When you have wealth — accumulated money and assets — you can afford to rely less on income from paychecks. “A larger bribe,” as one Harvard professor puts it, “will be required to convince a wealthier person to enter the labour market.” And a defining characteristic of the US economy in the 21st century has been an explosion in household wealth. In 1999, on average, the American household had $661,000 (in 2023 prices). By 2023, this had exploded to an average of $1.15 million. By historical standards, this is a mammoth gain: in the four decades before 1999, the increase in average household wealth was just $358,000.

Much of this wealth, it turns out, has accrued to men. “Although the gender income gap has narrowed,” according to a 2022 publication by Harvard’s Angela Lee, “the gender wealth gap has widened from the mid-Nineties to the mid-2010s.” The numbers are stark. “Women’s median wealth as a percentage of men’s median wealth dropped from 90% in the mid-Nineties,” Lee reports, “to 60% in the mid-2010s.” Why was this? The straightforward answer is that men were probably bigger asset-holders to begin with, and have historically tended to earn more money from their jobs and to work longer hours than women. Financial markets also reward bigger risks with bigger rate of return and, on average, men have tended to make riskier investments.

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Other sources of wealth data tell the same story as Lee’s study. According to the US Census Bureau, the average man aged 25-54 who’s left the labour force now reports 21% more in income from investments than one with a job. The surprise, then, would be if America’s men were not choosing to work less.

So deeply has this trend become entrenched that it appears in one of the oldest and easiest to measure vectors of privilege: height. A population’s average height is a barometer of its economic status: it is economics’ equivalent to psychology’s “the body keeps the score”. The skeletons of the mummified elite in ancient Egypt are, on average, 3.6 inches longer than those of its commoners. The aristocrats of late-18th century Germany were 5.2 inches taller, on average, than its peasants. Data from the 20th century confirm this isn’t down to genetics. When South Korea grew rich while North Korea fell into the abyss, despite sharing a genetic pool, men in the south became three inches taller.

In terms of average height, America’s non-working men were once the commoners to its working pharaohs. For all intents and purposes, they are now eye-to-eye. In 2017, America’s prime-age men out of the labour force were 0.1 inches taller, on average, than those with jobs. This was the first time since the relevant CDC data begin in 1976 that they could look down on the working men. Back then, America’s prime-age men with jobs were 0.7 inches taller. That difference trended up until 1985, peaking at 0.9 inches before dropping back towards the convergence that prevails today.

Such biological analysis might suggest a wholesale economic revolution for American men. But, despite all the fretting about the number of drop-outs and a crisis of masculinity, this isn’t a society-wide issue. It is barely in the double-digits: the percentage of prime-age men who have left America’s labour force now sits at only 11%, up from 5% in October 1975. And this is because this isn’t a story about the male population, but about a sub-population of men: a class we might call the petit-aristocracy.

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Like the aristocrats of the pre-industrial world, this group’s economic existence relies on assets. In this case, they were produced during the 21st century’s wealth explosion. And this species of aristocrat is petit not in height, but in consumption. Many maintain relatively modest lifestyles to be able to live without a steady paycheck. Some will work jobs for brief spells, however, if necessary. Their ephemeral imprint in the jobs numbers has even led to “in-and-out” becoming a term of America’s labour economics jargon as well as its fast food.

Though currently small, like America’s gross wealth and the number of people who own part of it, this petit-aristocracy is set to grow. Neither the dot-com bubble nor even a financial crisis changed the upward trend in the US wealth-to-income ratio that started around 1999. Because modern assets are not finite like land, today’s petit-aristocracy can grow its ranks in a way that land-based aristocracies couldn’t. Nor is the decision to drop out of the labour force purely a function of wealth. The allure of leisure relative to work matters, too. And if past is prologue, improvements in leisure technologies, such as video games, will increase leisure’s allure in ways that appeal particularly to men.

Where does this leave America’s women? Thanks to the liberating effects of household technology and changing gender norms, a “quiet revolution” has taken place, to the point where women now almost outnumber men in the workplace. And their readiness to work is what has facilitated men’s exit (without women, the gross national product would have collapsed). But they do not enjoy the same benefits of this position that men did in the 20th century. Women lack the financial power over men, now wealthy, that men once had over women, when gender norms locked women out of the labour market. And as they take over the job market that men are vacating, they’re not finding that jobs pave a path to happiness. “Female well-being appears to be compromised (or male well-being enhanced),” according to one representative study, “by high female involvement in gainful employment”.

The effect of this is to tee-up a clash of biblical proportions between men, women and norms about work. In Genesis, as humanity’s original punishment, God effectively hands the labour market over to Adam, and condemns Eve to live in the household. At least some men and women have long wanted to escape each of these settings. Now, each finally can. But will humanity’s technological and financial escape leave anybody, men or women, happier than they were in the divine prison? It’s unclear.

As Oscar Wilde said, there are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting what you want. The challenge is that the social norms about the importance of work that increasingly satisfy men or women increasingly dissatisfy the other. Men out of the force would benefit from norms that facilitate their finding of purpose, identity, and flourishing, without jobs. The ancient Greeks, who viewed the enablement of leisure as the purpose of work, offer examples. And the obsession of manosphere activists with the Stoics, who lived before Christianity dominated the Western mind, is revealing in this regard. Women, meanwhile, would benefit from the social veneration of paid jobs associated with Weber’s Protestant Ethic. After all, abandoning the Protestant Ethic now, once women have finally entered the labour force, would be devaluing a social currency as soon as women start to acquire it.

This is the economic backdrop that today’s gender wars are playing out against. Men, despite growing wealthier, feel increasingly alienated by a society that still views a job as an admission ticket to polite society. Women, despite breaking ground in the labour market, sense that their gains have failed to turn into the lives of empowerment that they expected them to. What comes next is unclear — but it will certainly open a new chapter in the social history of Adam and Eve’s descendants.

According to the late political theorist Charles W. Mills, Kant’s oeuvre contains the resources to establish a variety of “Black radical Kantianism”. Numerous others have presented him as a proto-feminist, with a recent monograph by US-based philosopher Helga Varden claiming that “despite his austere and even anti-sex, cisist, sexist, and heterosexist reputation, Kant’s writings … yield fertile philosophical ground on which we can explore … abortion, sexual orientation, sexual or gendered identity”.  All of this is quite unexpected for a 18th-century Prussian bachelor of Lutheran upbringing, of the opinion that sex should occur only within Christian marriage, black people were natural slaves, and women unfit to have a vote.

Also surprising, at least initially, is the fascination Kant’s systematic philosophy still exerts over many in academia, despite the famed dullness of his prose. In an unusually striking phrase, he once wrote of “the miserly provision of a step-motherly nature” — and indeed, step-motherly nature doesn’t seem to have been liberally doling out the bantz the day young Immanuel was born. According to one biographer, he was “extremely stern with himself from his early youth”: determined to be economically independent, “because he saw in it a condition for the self-sufficiency of his mind and character”. Throughout his life, he never left his home city of Königsberg; later on, his neighbours there would set their watches by his exactly timed daily constitutional walks.

Valiant attempts of hagiographers to make him seem like a fascinating demimondaine only reinforce the impression of squareness. “He was a very social type who often went to parties and sometimes drank too much,” protested one fellow German author to the Guardian 20 years ago, a little too insistently.  “At times Kant could not find the street where he lived because he was so inebriated.” There were also “amorous interests” in at least two women, it was reported, though no evidence the relationships were consummated.

If not his innate charisma or worldliness then, what explains the lingering attraction of Kant’s elaborate philosophical system to today’s thinkers? For many, it is surely the ingenuity with which he dealt with a number of disquieting sceptical challenges that emerged during the Enlightenment. Over the course of several mature works, Kant built an intricate cathedral of interlocking justifications, providing support for certain traditional assumptions that new scientific discoveries and encroaching atheism would otherwise seem to leave dangling in mid-air.

For instance: answering to David Hume’s worry that humans could neither directly observe nor otherwise prove the existence of fundamental natural laws such as the connection between cause and effect, Kant got rid of the underpinning assumption that the human mind and the natural world were wholly separate. Instead, in a reversal he likened to Copernicus’s revelation that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way round, he wove an understanding of such laws into the fabric of sensory experience, so that allegedly it now made no sense to seriously doubt them.

Faced with the creeping fear that there could be no free will in Newton’s mechanistic universe, Kant then leaned upon his own picture of the physical world as a realm of partly mind-constructed appearances, and placed the free, unmoved-yet-moving self safely in a separate realm beyond it. To the increasingly urgent complaint that without God as a foundation, traditional Christian precepts must surely lose their authority, he responded by instead putting free will and autonomous human reason at the heart of objective moral decision-making, conveniently preserving many austerely Protestant-looking practical conclusions as he did so.

In all of this Kant gave the cognitive faculties a crucial role, painting the mind not just as a discoverer but also as a partial inventor of our universe and its fundamental rules — a suggestion flattering to susceptible brainboxes in universities, secretly pining for a superhero role in life befitting of their intellectual talents. And despite the often flatfooted and prosaic presentation, there is also a thrilling intimation of spookiness to the metaphysical picture Kant ultimately offers readers: on the one hand, the world of knowable appearances, and on the other, a supernatural realm of things-in-themselves, whose existence humans cannot apprehend directly but only infer.

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But perhaps the aspect of Kant’s thought most attractive to today’s professional academic is that — like many of them — he is an intellectual conservative of sorts. Though he rearranges the metaphysical furniture, sometimes fairly radically, he usually leaves his fellow citizens sitting almost exactly where they were beforehand. The structure of the universe is still predictable; humans continue to have free will; it is still the case that one shouldn’t kill, break promises, or lie. Effectively, Kant often starts with conclusions he wants to preserve and then works backwards.

To some extent, this is also the strategy of some of his modern interpreters, beginning with a particular set of now-fashionable political conclusions, then casting about in Kant’s writing for the resources to prop them up (usually, by making extensive use of his emphasis upon the importance of freedom and self-governance). Though in his ethics Kant railed against using another person instrumentally as a “mere means” to your own personal ends, in practice commentators don’t seem to pay much attention to that bit, as they haul him off down the gender clinic or to the BLM march. Superficially, it may look sexily avant-garde to employ the ideas of a thinker as buttoned-up as Kant, in order to underpin arguments for the rights of people to have polyamorous orgies or to cut body parts off at will. In reality, though, these anachronistic uses of his thought would never have escaped the seminar room and made it out into the wider world alive, had society not already rendered it perfectly permissible or even profitable to pursue such endpoints.

Of course, there are also differences between Kant and the new crop of academic apologists for contemporary mores. Perhaps the most obvious is that, over the last 300 years, hundreds and thousands of people from many walks of elite life have read and responded to Kant’s works; a trend helped along by the assumption, popular until relatively recently, that a grasp of the central figures in Western philosophy was a requirement upon any decent education. But these days, almost nobody who isn’t already studying or researching philosophy reads academics like Mills and Varden. So who or what are they doing it for, exactly? It would be madly grandiose to think that, in the 21st century, anyone has ever been converted to black radical politics or pansexual people’s rights by reading opaque monographs from academic presses priced at £25 a pop.

A more charitable take, perhaps, is that both Kant and those modern thinkers loosely inspired by him are each using reason to perform a kind of sense check upon certain key presuppositions of their time. They start off with some folk-conclusions that are believed by many, though with no clear idea of why; next, they ask themselves whether there are convincing rational arguments available that might support those conclusions, and so lend them extra weight. In other words: can philosophers, with all their specialist technical skills in argument construction, produce a solid-enough rational scaffolding for some of the important-looking things that people already think?

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But if this is the strategy, it is a risky one. The more byzantine the layers of argument offered for the truth of a particular set of presuppositions, the more keenly the suspicion grows that it might have been just as easy — or certainly, no more difficult — to offer neat and ingenious arguments that seemed to show exactly the opposite. Kant’s sprawling system, with its host of interwoven technical assumptions ranging across metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and politics, already invites this worry; by the time commentators start to lean upon that system in order to justify social-justice mantras about abortion or cis privilege, the edifice looks in danger of collapsing.

Or perhaps these present-day commentators assume that the only way to redeem Kant from his intermittent episodes of racism and sexism — to cleanse him of those everyday 18th-century sins — is to demonstrate that, despite appearances, his philosophical system has the potential to generate a progressive position on those very matters about which he was so reactionary. For some academics, this may well be the best explanation: attempting an absolution of sorts for their hero.

Either way, it’s hard not to conclude that in thinking about Kant’s legacy, we are better off going back to the extremely rich source material directly, and trying to see it in its proper historical context — for better or worse. There is no need to mess around with any quasi-religious new adaptions. It is a strange irony that, in the 300 years since Kant was born, those working in universities only seem to have got more puritanical.

Instead, time and again in Cass’s report she is forced back into the conceit that the most pressing problem for contemporary gender medicine is the lack of good evidence for such interventions either way. It is as if a modern-day medic had been tasked with reviewing the efficacy of trepanning, and then ordered to defend her findings in front of fanatical fifth-century devotees. “It’s not that drilling a hole in a child’s skull to release demons is necessarily harmful, you understand — indeed, it may be the best outcome in some cases. The main issue is the lack of long-term follow up.”

Alongside Cass’s cumulatively devastating account of reckless decision-making, poor evidential standards, and patchy record-keeping at Gids and elsewhere, a whole section of the report gently attempts to educate its readership about “the components of evidence-based medicine” — complete with basic explainers about randomised controlled trials, blinding processes, and the possibility of bias. She might as well be addressing an archaic people who have just emerged blinking from a time capsule, still convinced that disease is God’s punishment for insufficient acts of propitiation.

In a sense, though, this is indeed very like one group to whom the report is addressed: those clinicians, parents and patients immersed in bubbles of identity affirmation, and cognitively isolated from any reasoning or evidence that would confound their worldview. Perhaps unusually for a medical review, it is clear from Cass’s overtly respectful tone and at times still-euphemistic language that her aim is not just to inform these readers but also to deprogram them.

The very first sentence of her report begins with a weary disavowal of Stonewall-endorsed paranoias (“This Review is not about… undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves, or rolling back on people’s rights to healthcare”). Somewhat nonsensically, references to “birth-registered females” are scattered throughout the text, as if the author were somehow only concerned with those with birth certificates — presumably an attempt to build bridges with child-like souls still convinced sex is something coercively assigned to neonates at random. Generally, there is a sense of gingerly addressing a group of emotionally labile people who are not quite ready to face the whole truth.

And no wonder: nearly every indicator of cult membership is present among so-called affirmative clinicians and their hapless patients. Among the most telling signs are a fervent belief in a transcendent new way of life; induction into a mystical world of occult symbols, flags and lanyards; the love-bombing of new recruits with affirmative language and talk of “queer joy”; and the replacement of traditional support systems (one Pride post on the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust  website  — a hospital involved in creating the new youth gender services to replace Gids  — talks about “the fight for LGBT rights” as something “to be won against your family or your neighbours or whoever is directly around you”).

Relatedly, there is a lot of what cult specialists call “hate-bonding” — that is, framing critical voices as evil enemies to be automatically discredited, a process which neatly shuts down intellectual curiosity while solidifying group cohesion at one fell swoop. A recent example of such attitudes was the intensely hostile protest last month at a clinician-organised conference critical of child transition, purportedly led by an NHS doctor. When considered alongside other obvious signs of religious commitment — the mantras and incantations, sacred texts, citations of high priests, annual holy weeks, and so on — it is not hard to conclude that, for many in the medical profession, transactivism is based on faith not reason. Consider, for instance, the astonishing levels of religiosity in this 2023 publication from the NHS Confederation, at one point encouraging “allies” to “recognise the privilege afforded to them as a cisgender person and uses this to uplift the voices of trans and non-binary colleagues”.

Cults are not unusual, as human phenomena go; the unusual point is that one came to control parts of the NHS. As Cass relates, again euphemistically, “for this group of young people expertise has been concentrated in a small group of people, which has served to gatekeep the knowledge”. Suitably translated, so that “expertise” means “power” and “gatekeep the knowledge” means “deflect real scrutiny”, she is effectively pointing to the fact that much damage can be done in an institution by only a few zealots, as long as they are the ones presumed in charge of things by others.

There is no better evidence of this than the fact, also highlighted in the report, that according to current NHS guidelines, a newly socially transitioned young person can be given a different NHS number in alignment with their preferred identity. As well as affecting the provision of sex-appropriate screening and other kinds of differentiated care, this change alone has made it very difficult to track long-term outcomes of gender treatment. When first mooted, it would not have been hard to anticipate problems; but such petty worries obviously paled in comparison to the thrill of achieving metamorphosis-by-bureaucracy.

Another clue to the level of ideological capture emerges when Cass describes a proposed data linkage study, originally envisaged as culling information about 9,000 patients from “Gids, hospital wards, outpatient clinics, emergency departments and adult gender dysphoria clinics”, and so providing “a population-level evidence base of the different pathways people take and the outcomes”. In the end, the much-needed study didn’t happen because clinicians in existing gender services nearly all refused to cooperate. (An inquiry into adult clinics has since been announced.)

Reasons for refusal included that the Cass Review would be politically biased; and that “[t]aking part in a study of this kind could bring into question the integrity of clinic staff and the relationships they have with patients”. It is hard to imagine such a self-serving affront to patient safeguarding being considered acceptable in any other healthcare context. Another reason offered, also with an apparently straight face, was that “the study outcomes focus on adverse health events, for which the clinics do not feel primarily responsible”. Once you have fixed the problems with a young person’s soul, apparently what happens to their body afterwards is not your concern.

One could be forgiven for thinking that medical culture should easily be able to condemn bizarre physical interventions performed upon children in the name of religion, without having to undertake a four-year clinical review first. Indeed, lawmakers have previously criminalised practices such as FGM without requiring any such tests. But one instructive thing we can learn from the wreckage of gender medicine is that, with the right kind of institutional and rhetorical scaffolding, doctors can become unsure about what their goals are supposed to be. It’s no good telling them to first do no harm, when they can’t work out how to reliably detect it.

A superficial reason for this confusion is that the harms taken to fall squarely under the medical profession’s remit include negative psychological impacts as well as physical ones. And indeed, this looks like the right result: we can all think of obvious cases where mental suffering causes real damage to a person, and going to see a doctor is an appropriate response. But the downside is that, in a culture very picky about physical looks, or in the grip of some other body-related derangement, a person’s perceptions of her own healthy body can cause her severely negative psychological impact too; and then what is the clinician supposed to focus upon first? Cass herself talks about the rise among teenage girls in “Body Dysmorphic Disorder”, an obsessive preoccupation “with body image and with compulsive revisiting or avoidance of thoughts to manage distress”.

At least in theory, the doctor then has a choice: changing the mind to be better able to cope with the body, or changing the patient’s healthy body to relieve the mind. Cosmetic surgery opts for the latter strategy. Though described as “not routinely provided”, the NHS will sometimes fund implants for uneven breasts, reduction for large ones, or ear-pinning, as long as these things are causing “significant distress”. This, then, is a case where psychological feelings are taken to justify an assault, quite literally, upon physically healthy flesh.

Transactivists tend to ramp up this strategy, often baselessly suggesting that early physical interventions to change children’s bodies will avoid devastating psychological consequences and perhaps even suicide later on. Inflated figures have been disseminated by mainstream sources for years about the prevalence of suicide attempts in trans-identified young people, and weaponised in order to motivate medical “affirmation”. Dr Christine Mimnagh, clinical lead at the Merseyside adult gender service CMAGIC and a member of an influential Clinical Reference Group at NHS England for gender dysphoria services, was recently caught on camera telling listeners at Dorset Healthcare University NHS Foundation Trust that if child services “worked as they should” we would induce “menopause” in some nine-year-old girls before menarche.

But a deeper reason for medical confusion about what counts as harm these days is widespread acknowledgement that judgements of harm are often or even always value-laden — that is, that they implicitly depend on background assumptions about what sort of life is worthwhile. People can put up with all sorts of physical discomfort, on their own behalf or that of their children, when the cause is placed in a moral or religious framework making it look better than the alternative. Some Christian Scientists will avoid all medical treatment for sick children, failing to shield them from great pain in the process; some Roman Catholics will put their mortally ill children through invasive medical procedures to keep them alive a bit longer. More mundanely, many parents vaccinate their children, circumcise baby boys, or pierce girls’ ears — not because they are sadists (of course), but because they believe that benefits outweigh somewhat painful costs.

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Acknowledging that judgements about physical harm are not always straightforward, and often depend upon background values, can make the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and radical surgery disappear into an ethically confusing fog; and especially when the doctor herself has no strong intuitions about the prioritisation of bodily integrity over mental wellness to call upon. Certainly, there are other adults who swear that such physically damaging treatments — for what else can we call them? — have made their lives better overall in terms of other goals: mental health, or aesthetics, or self-expression.

But there are obvious differences when it comes to children and young adults — differences that apply well beyond the age of majority, to at least one’s mid-twenties. One is that so-called affirming procedures are far more physically debilitating, for longer, than things like ear-piercing, tattoos, or even most kinds of cosmetic surgery. Another is that each of them negatively affects what a recently published journal article has argued is a child’s “right to an open future”: roughly, important freedoms or capacities that can only be exercised as autonomous adults (such as biological parenthood or a fulfilling sex life), and whose value is unlikely to be recognised by an individual until later in life. When Cass writes that “the central aim” of treatment “is to help young people to thrive and achieve their life goals”, she does not of course mean the life goals they have now, but the ones they may well have afterwards.

The liberal ideal that each adult individual should be free to pursue her own conception of a good life, as long as it doesn’t impede others from doing the same, takes a bashing these days from both Right and Left. But one thing the ideal can do — at least when properly understood, and robustly applied — is protect our children from fanatics with mad glints in their eye, wishing to imprint their religious ideals, quite literally, upon children’s healthy developing bodies. In her report, Cass encourages a much wider range of people with relevant specialties to get involved with the care of trans-identified youth, moving forward; by which she presumably means, clinicians whose personal value systems won’t have such perilous physical consequences for their young charges. We can only hope that right-minded people answer her call.

Opened in 1989, and closed following a litany of scandals last year, GIDS — the UK’s only specialist service designed to help children questioning their gender and/or identifying as transgender — drew on just one, since widely critiqued, study to underpin its practice. This, despite the fact that it has treated roughly 2,000 young people with hormone blockers and in some cases cross-sex hormones.

“The Dutch Protocol” describes a three-step treatment pathway for children with gender-related distress or incongruence. It starts at the brink of puberty with puberty blockers to prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, is followed by cross-sex hormones that help to feminise or masculinise appearance, and then concludes with genital and/or breast surgeries in adulthood. The Dutch reported that, after puberty suppression alone, their cohort of 70 young people experienced a reduction in behavioural and emotional problems, decreased symptoms of depression and a significant improvement in functioning. Despite choosing to make medical treatments available to younger children from 2014 anyway, GIDS were not able to replicate the Dutch findings — a fact they didn’t share with the world until 2021.

Given the increasing polarity among professionals on the matter, Dr Hilary Cass, a former President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, was employed by the NHS to conduct a review of the published evidence on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in children and young people with gender dysphoria. In March 2021, she concluded that they had not been able to find evidence “strong enough to form the basis of a policy position”. It was clear then, at least to those paying attention, that the evidence needed to justify the existing clinical practice in Gids did not exist. And yet, it wasn’t until last month that the NHS announced it would no longer be offering puberty blockers to young people in England and Wales.

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Today, as Cass finally publishes the results of her wide-ranging review, the reason seems obvious: her 388-page report concludes that, for most young people, up to the age of 25, “a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress”. Commenting further on the lack of evidence, she states that not only is there no way for a clinician to accurately determine who will continue to identify as trans for life and who won’t, but that the fundamental rationale for using puberty blockers in the first place “remains unclear”. She speaks of the need to balance medical innovation with the potential “creep of unproven approaches into clinical practice” and calls for the use of “standard evidence-based” interventions instead.

Cass also makes it clear that the factors influencing gender-related distress might be as much social as psychological or biological, with a particular focus on the new cohort of adolescent girls who now make up the majority of gender clinic patients. Instead, she suggests, we need to draw on bio-psycho-social thinking to ensure that future child patients receive the safe and effective care they deserve.

The motivation behind this isn’t hard to glean. The sociological “broken windows” theory hypothesises that, once something becomes damaged just a little, it sends a message that the thing is no longer of value at all, and leads to further vandalism. At heart, the Cass Report is an attempt to prevent this from happening: it punctuates a process that, left unchallenged, might have led to further extraordinary practices creeping into other areas of psychology or medicine.

For those of us working in the field of gender, the influence of social media on adolescent mental health, in multiple and complex ways, has been undeniable. What gets less attention is the impact on us, the adults and professionals. After all, we are just as vulnerable to social influence, including misinformation. One of the factors that has led to the increased demand for medical interventions from gender-distressed young people are the ideas, widely shared on social media platforms as facts, that the medical pathway is not only safe but effective, even life-saving, for all.

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Despite the absence of face validity or the long-term data needed for such certainty, some have claimed that regret rates for the surgeries many Gids patients received during early adulthood are lower than for knee surgeries. Yet, as the Cass Report highlights, some of the “facts” shared online are not certainties but myths. Sadly, for example, some young people do later experience profound regret — a reality that Cass acknowledges in her recommendation that “NHS England should ensure there is provision for people considering detransition”.

Yet rather than accept Cass’s rational, evidenced conclusions, a number of professionals and institutions will no doubt continue to argue with certainty that access to medical interventions is both a necessity and a human right. They already call for their colleagues to join them in becoming “practitioner-activists”. Others openly describe their motivation to pursue the medical approach Cass wishes to end as being “based on how passionate we are about the work”. Passion can be a good thing, of course, when aligned to evidence and fact. But when passion becomes untethered to these, or worse tethered to misinformation, it risks transporting us into a troublesome arena. Such an approach has already led to serious lapses in best practice and governance, particularly in relation to the use of puberty blockers for children. The question now is: will such extraordinary practices be able to continue post-Cass?

This is where a sense of concern starts to creep in. For while NHS England has refocused on the need for evidence-based interventions in recent years, some practitioners have already made clear their resistance to this. Last year, we heard that the endocrinologist responsible for prescribing to Gids patients had questioned whether the Cass Review was necessary in the first place. Leaders in the field of clinical psychology have also challenged the need for the review, and splits in the UK’s two psychology associations have been apparent for a while now, with one publicly criticising Cass. Remarkably, as today’s report discloses, the NHS’s adult gender clinics have also set themselves up in opposition to evidence and research, by refusing to participate in the Cass Review’s centrepiece longitudinal research study — an attempt, albeit retrospective, to follow into adulthood the 10,000 young people who’ve been through GIDS’s doors.

In an attempt to explain away such behaviour, some have sympathetically described GIDS as a “justice project”. Yet, in her interim report, published in February 2022, Cass made clear that the implications of GIDS’s approach were far more serious than this: its clinical approach, she wrote, had “not been subjected to some of the usual control measures that are typically applied when new or innovative treatments are introduced”. Just over two years later, she ends her final report by remarking that, while GIDS clinicians were “passionate and wholly committed to their care, [they] had developed a fundamentally different philosophy and approach compared to other paediatric and mental health services”. This deviation from best practice was, in other words, an injustice, and resulted in one group of children receiving less robust standards of care than others.

To mitigate this, Cass invites a return to the ordinary, and an embrace of the scientific method. And this requires sensitivity: after all, understanding why gender-distressed and non-conforming people might have been reluctant to trust ordinary science, medicine and psychology/psychiatry should also be part of the post-mortem to come. Medical approaches and institutions haven’t always been a safe place for them. Sadly, this is not the first time that gender non-conforming people have been considered so different as to require extraordinary treatment. Perhaps Cass’s recommendation to offer regular treatments to our distressed, but still ordinary, children and young people is where the true justice will begin.

Though she has published prolifically on adjacent topics, it’s been a while since Butler spent a whole book dedicated to her own thoughts on gender. A few things have changed in the interim, including her pronouns (she is now a “they”, though generously prepared to tolerate the former designation) and her sentence lengths, which — at least for the time being — no longer stretch epically to cover whole pages at a time. Still, despite the apparently mass-market ambitions of the new publication, some familiar habits remain.

Not for her the pedestrian business of going through critics’ arguments, providing non-partisan evidence, and patiently exposing internal contradictions and gaps in an understated but cumulatively devastating manner. In the book’s lengthy introduction, she tells us that “of course” she could “provide good arguments as to why looking at gender this way is wrong, which would be useful for educators and policymakers”; indeed, “as an educator” herself, it is “tempting to try and expose and puncture this inflammatory caricature of gender through an intellectual exercise”. Tempted as she might be, however, it turns out that she’s not going to bother with that stuff much. Instead, she wants to give the people what nobody was really asking for: a deconstruction of the “syntactical elements” of the “anti-gender movement”, understood as a “phantasmic scene” according to the “theoretical formulation of Jean Laplanche”.

Translated into ordinary English, Butler is going to put the anti-gender people on the shrink’s couch. She seems unruffled by the fact that, in prosecuting her case, she can’t define “gender” clearly — her most definite pronouncement is that it is “a felt sense of the body, in its surfaces and depths, a lived sense of being a body in the world in this way”. But never mind the pesky details: if you are anti-gender (whatever that amounts to, exactly), then you are very probably a patriarchal racist Christian nationalist nutjob, and also secretly gay. She is probing your unconscious, remember, and understands you better than you do yourself.

Or perhaps — and this is about as charitable as it gets — you are simply a naïve and credulous fool, for whom getting in a moral panic about gay marriage and LGBTQ+ library books acts as a psychic substitute for reasonable fears about climate change and neoliberalism. As such, you are being played by the reactionary rhetoric of various deplorables, including Orbán, Trump, Bolsonaro, various Popes, and er… J.K. Rowling, Holly Lawford-Smith, and Kathleen Stock. (A whole chapter incomprehensibly passes on the heading “More Sex Please, We’re British”, and goes instead for “TERFs and British matters of sex”.)

Though at times the author feigns charitable curiosity about some of her argumentative targets, the attitude never lasts. A sentence about gender-critical feminists that starts with “To be fair” ends up, a mere clause or two later, talking about their supposed affinities with “fascist politics”. There isn’t a single objection lodged against opponents that does not come freighted with the implication of moral taint and/or stupidity. Of course, painting one’s intellectual enemies as cartoon characters is a known tactic of modern transactivism; still, it is shocking to see it done so crudely by someone who retains a high reputation in many quarters.

It is also striking how hackneyed some of the thought is. Butler’s writing in her heyday at least displayed a bit of panache and originality, assuming you could parse it successfully. In contrast, here she comes over as in thrall to established activist tropes, and with all the depth of a TikTok video in places. She even cites Pink News as a source of data. Indeed, if you have spent much time hanging around the so-called “queer community” in the last decade, you will have read many of the talking points in this book already.

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Whereas she used to insist, admirably, on fluidity and impermanence in the expression of gender identity, now she exhorts “affirmation” and recognition of “the reality of trans lives”. The chapter on British so-called TERFs is a compendium of smears culled from online teenagers about their gender-critical mums: they are not real feminists; they are effectively racists focusing on a white ideal of womanhood, on the side of “colonialism and empire”; they spread “baseless fears” about vulnerable transwomen; and so on.

Her evidence is carefully cherry-picked and often from partisan sources. There is no real attempt to take seriously the mounting evidence from hospitals and whistle-blowers of medical malpractice against children and teens in the name of “affirmation”; the rising numbers of assaults against women and girls as a result of self-ID; the demoralisation of displaced women athletes; or the physical and psychological pain of detransitioners. (On the latter, she claims that “the regret rates for people of all ages is very small”, based on a single 2021 study that has been heavily criticised since.) Also familiar from arguments with anime avatars on Twitter, we find fatuous whatabouttery: you say you are interested in stopping violence against female prisoners, but why don’t you care about male prison guards raping them? (Er… we do?) As usual, the message seems to be that these things aren’t really happening; and even if they were, they wouldn’t really matter.

Equally though, Butler declares that I personally am bringing “toxicity” and “cruelty to the table” in insisting that a male who declares he is a woman is still not a woman. “Imagine if you were Jewish and someone tells you that you are not. Imagine if you are lesbian and someone laughs in your face and says you are confused since you are really heterosexual”. As a Jewish friend laughingly observed when I first told her about this, there are Jews who spend their whole lives insisting that certain other pretenders are not really Jewish. And, as I ruefully know from personal experience, something similar goes for lesbians too. But in Butler’s histrionic calculations, failing to affirm someone else’s identity claims is apparently more traumatic than anything a surgeon could do to a confused, unhappy trans-identified teenager, or a trans-identified rapist to an already traumatised female prisoner.

She also objects that critics have misconstrued the nature of social construction in previous writing about her work; and that she can and does, in fact, hold that biological sex is “real” (at least, sort of), even if it is also “mutable”. I’ve done my time in the academic salt mines trying to make sense of the contradictions in Butler’s writing so I’ll leave it to others to adjudicate who is right. Instead, I prefer to turn to a more interesting question, made perfectly legitimate by the precedent she herself sets. In producing such a terrible book, what is going on for Butler psychoanalytically? What is she really scared of?

Given their known volatility, one plausible answer is transactivists; a fear also indicated by the author’s submissive observation that her own previously published views on gender have proved “questionable in several ways, especially in light of trans and materialist criticisms”. After all, if what passes for acceptable methodology in your own academic discipline includes shaming others in print for unquantifiable harms to a much-mythologised community, sooner or later a grandee like Butler is bound to fall victim to the practice herself. The more venerable you get, the more likely it is that young pretenders will come for your throne, and they have some scary tools at their disposal. If I were her, I would be frightened too.

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But there is also, I suspect, a deeper fear at work here, and an unconscious desire to sublimate guilt. (See how annoying this is, Professor Butler?) The level of projection in this book — by which I mean, attribution of unrecognised features of one’s own behaviour to others, in the Freudian and Jungian sense — is off the scale. Butler sees authoritarian cancellers and enemies of critical thought everywhere, though apparently not so much among those closest to home.

She tells us that in the anti-gender movement, there is a hatred of rational discussion. To say gender is an ideology is, in itself, “an ideological move par excellence”. Whereas gender studies — gender studies, for gods’ sake — is a “diverse field, marked by internal debate”, by contrast its enemies refuse to “read the texts they oppose — or to learn how best to read them” and they “do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence”. It is impossible to convince members of the anti-gender movement “with good arguments because of the fear that the reading will introduce confusion into the reader’s mind or bring her into direct contact with the devil”. To anyone who has ever been no-platformed as a result of transactivist complaints, been put through a disciplinary or worse because of gender-critical views, or even just laboured through one of Butler’s previous sentences, this aspect of the book should come with a health warning.

Still, there is something correct in Butler’s observation that critics of transactivism are getting increasingly intolerant and illiberal. The dominant emotion she attributes to them is fear, but a more accurate description would be fury. It is obvious that many across the world have become angered by the grandiose, narcissistic overreach of academics like her: thinkers indifferent to the real-world havoc wrought by their barmy ideas and impenetrable speech codes, and who pillory all objectors as badly intentioned or deeply confused, no matter what the background reasoning. Butler is right to fear increasing threats towards LGBT people and women across the globe but fails to notice her own significant responsibility in the aetiology of the problem. Speaking personally, I’m not remotely afraid of gender, understood blandly as sexual and bodily expression; but I am very afraid of what Judith Butler has done with it.

Of course, this didn’t actually happen, because people don’t talk like that in real life. Many do, however, engage in this way on social media, typically towards total strangers. This week I’ve been trending on X (or Twitter, as I stubbornly still call it) following a mass pile-on instigated by several gender-critical activists. This particular bombardment resulted in my decision to temporarily deactivate my Twitter account, to the glee of my critics and transactivists alike.

Having since been contacted by friends within the gender-critical movement, I have learned that many of them are exasperated by the “intolerant elements” within their community who seek to destroy anyone who does not conform to every single aspect of their worldview, even if it means that the cause is fatally undermined. They describe a “civil war” being waged by a small but intimidating minority who maintain that any slight point of disagreement is a form of heresy, that language has the capacity to shape reality, and that those found guilty of wrongspeak ought to be publicly shamed and alienated. Remind you of anyone?

This civil war within the gender-critical movement is, of course, a boon to the high priests of gender identity, those authoritarians who have been conducting a frighteningly effective campaign to reorganise society around the metaphysical belief that “gender” should take priority over sex when it comes to spaces, sports and human rights. Given that the stakes are so high, not least for women, children, and gay people, it might be worth considering what this in-fighting is all about and how it might be avoided in the future. In order to do this, I should first explain the background to this week’s furore.

I host a weekly show on GB News called Free Speech Nation, which explores all aspects of the culture wars and has a particular emphasis on the ongoing attacks on women’s rights in the name of “progress”. Even before last Sunday’s show had aired, I was contacted by regular viewers who had taken issue with me for inviting the trans writer and teacher Debbie Hayton to appear for an interview. As an admitted autogynephile — a heterosexual man who presents as a woman out of an erotic attraction to himself — Hayton is something of a hate figure for many in the movement. By conducting this interview, I was deemed guilty of “enabling” and “promoting perversion”, in spite of Hayton’s gender-critical beliefs.

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Further context is required here. The day before my show, a profile appeared in The Times in which the interviewer, Janice Turner, referred to Hayton with female pronouns. Turner clarified her reasoning in a tweet: “The issue of pronouns is becoming absolutist on BOTH sides. Stonewall demands even bearded rapists be called “she”, GC ultras refuse to call any trans woman “she”. I reject both positions. I never call male sex offenders she/her. But I will be courteous to those who respect women.”

For many, the issue of pronouns has become a red line in the gender wars, and Turner’s efforts at compromise are seen not only as wrongheaded, but traitorous. It is widely held that trans-identifying individuals must never be described as anything other than their true biological sex, and cries of “hold the line” are often heard. Not only are the likes of Turner demonised for attempting to find a middle ground, but they are also told that they have been “groomed” by the men who are insisting that other people’s language must be modified in deference to their sense of self.

This tactic, of suggesting that an opposing view is the result of a delusion, is common to all ideological movements. Marxist theorists have often dismissed unbelievers as suffering from “false consciousness”. Similarly, many transactivists insist that those of us who believe that sex is immutable have been “radicalised online”. Yet this is also the identical approach of those gender-critical campaigners who deny the individual agency of their comrades and claim they are the victims of “grooming”. I suppose it is easier to explain away disagreement as the product of some collective fantasy rather than accept that not everyone thinks the same way as you.

The inevitable firestorm following Turner’s piece provided the backdrop to my own interview with Hayton on Sunday night. Initial feedback was cordial and productive: many feminists were pleased that I had listened to their concerns and asked questions about the use of toilets, single-sex spaces, and a schools guidance policy that Hayton had co-authored for the teachers’ union NASUWT in 2017. There were also many critical comments, which I welcomed and took seriously.

The first signs of trouble occurred when one of my critics began repeatedly railing against “the gays” in her posts. She complained that I had used the pronoun “her” in relation to Debbie in one of the introductory pieces to camera (as it happens, this was simply because the producer had written it that way in the autocue). I explained that I use pronouns to denote biological sex, and certainly when it comes to reporting on the news, because I do not believe in gender identity. But I also said that when it comes to personal friends who identify as the opposite sex, I have occasionally adopted their preferred pronouns and names. I have done this to avoid needless distress, not to signal that I share their belief-system. It would be like bowing my head for a prayer at a friend’s family meal, even if I didn’t believe in their particular god.

I respect and understand criticisms of this approach. Women are facing the erosion of their spaces and rights, and this is being actuated by gender-identity ideology and the compelled use of pronouns. I have written previously about the need to resist this pressure to conform to pronoun declaration, and I am particularly vexed by the tendency of journalists to describe rapists, paedophiles and other male criminals as “she” or to use nonsensical phrases such as “her penis”.

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Therefore, I answered many of my critics by agreeing that my view may be flawed, and that I was open to persuasion regarding their “slippery slope” argument. It was only when multiple anonymous accounts starting branding me a liar, a grifter and a hater of women, and outright telling me to “fuck off” that I realised this was beginning to turn nasty.

One of my traducers claimed that I lacked credibility and integrity because I adhere to “a deranged homophobic, sexist ideology”, even though I have consistently and outspokenly opposed it over many years. This struck me as an absurd overreaction, the kind of “you’re either with us or against us” purity demand that one has come to expect in these tribalistic times.

From there, matters escalated at a dizzying rate. I was repeatedly accused of being a misogynist, something which I find odd, given that over the past few years I have covered the rising threats to women’s rights on my show with a tenacity that has been notably absent in other media outlets. Every week I have invited women to appear, including Helen Joyce, Maya Forstater, Jo Phoenix, Julie Bindel, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, Milli Hill, Kellie-Jay Keen, Dr Jane Clare Jones, Jo Bartosch, Mara Yamauchi, Holly Lawford-Smith, Sarah Phillimore, Kate Coleman, Rosie Kay, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Sharron Davies. If my critics are correct, and I am indeed a rabid misogynist, surely I at least deserve some credit for going to such elaborate lengths to disguise it?

Many of my detractors took the view that my homosexuality was the issue. One self-declared feminist confessed to being “a raging homophobe” and wrote: “I don’t like gay men anymore. I think most of them are miso[gynist] pieces of shhh [sic] that mock women and platform AGPs”. Another was more direct: “The gays are definitely to blame as well. First off, sticking a penis inside a man’s asshole is unhealthy. If you can’t admit this then you are part of the problem.” Another went with “I hate men in general”, and then clarified her misandry in an oddly specific way: “Gay MEN. Straight MEN. White MEN. Black MEN. All MEN. I don’t discriminate. I view you all with equal amounts of derision”. Then there was an especially malicious attack from law scholar Dr Alessandra Asteriti, who called me a liar and resorted to the defamatory claim that my objective was to “harm women and children”.

Despite the onslaught, I should emphasise that this kind of sociopathic behaviour is far from typical in the gender-critical movement. Yes, there exists a small contingent who despise gay men and seek to bully and harass anyone who takes a different view. But this is most definitely not the norm, and the overwhelming majority of women I have encountered in this fight have been generous, compassionate and incredibly courageous in the face of threats and wholly unfounded accusations of “hate” and “transphobia”. It is only thanks to their hard work that we have seen a recent sea-change in public understanding of the dangers of this ideology.

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Naturally, at the time, I found it difficult to distinguish between legitimate criticisms and outright abuse. And once I started becoming defensive, it of course made matters worse. It’s always worth bearing in mind that, in the eye of a Twitter storm, one does not see individuals, but rather an army determined to see you crushed. At that point, nuance becomes impossible.

And while I am fully aware that most of those participating in the pile-on would have been appalled by the excesses of the few, that isn’t much consolation. This had all begun with one woman griping about “the gays” and ended hours later with complete strangers on my timeline discussing why gay men are so vile, invariably misogynistic, and have a tendency towards paedophilia (the most repugnant and common prejudice of them all). By the time someone posted an audio recording of one of my detractors saying that she would enjoy murdering gay men, I was out.

And of course, transactivists noticed the abuse I was receiving and were quick to weaponise the situation. One of them emailed me directly: “I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’ but… ha.” Many have since boasted on social media that the attacks were karma for my stupidity in associating with this brood of reactionaries. They have shared screenshots of the worst tweets and taken this as confirmation of what they have been alleging all along: that the gender-critical movement is a front for far-Right homophobes.

My experiences this week have certainly alerted me to a dark element within gender-critical circles, one that has become a source of considerable concern for many women in the fight. I have retreated from Twitter and instead launched a Substack, in the hope that I may continue these conversations with those who are able to remain civil even while robustly disagreeing. I now understand that serious discussions about this issue are simply not possible on Twitter, and my mental health has to come first.

For all that, gender-critical feminism remains an essential force in protecting our rights in these maddening times. The genuinely bigoted elements of the movement may be aberrations, but they are increasingly being perceived as the norm. If this cannot be rectified, it will prove a disaster not just for women and gay people, but for truth and sanity itself.

The Scottish savings meters evoke a 20th-century practice known colloquially in Ireland as “the manage”, where working-class women budgeted for their families by separating cash into envelopes and jars earmarked for special purposes — one for Christmas, one for electricity bills, another for new shoes. In poorer households, while men brought home most of the money, managing that money and making it meet the demands of a household was women’s work. It was often an impossible task, somehow making two plus two add up to seven.

This is the kind of social practice that fascinates the Princeton economic sociologist, Viviana Zelizer. Her work focuses on the points where the business of money meets the not so business-like subjects of intimacy, community and the sacred; money when it mixes with sex, with parenting, and with romantic love. She is particularly insightful on the difficulties of negotiating the transfer of domestic money from a husband to his wife.

Women’s money in the 20th century was distinct from everyday cash, which implied a level of patriarchal freedom. Instead, ordinary cash was transformed into tokens with strings attached: “pocket money”, “pin money” and “dole”. But defining the terms of that transition was always difficult. Should women’s money be a payment, an entitlement, or a gift? Framing it as something she was due, Zelizer writes, conferred a dangerous level of entitlement. And yet a payment implies something a little too close to a working transaction: demanding a wage undermined the assumption that some kinds of work — such as childcare or homemaking — were natural to women. If you were paid, it was no longer a “labour of love”. In fact, as feminists involved in the “Wages for Housework” campaign in the Seventies pointed out, getting paid for housework might be the first step in refusing to do that work entirely. The notion of this money as a gift, however, implied layers of subordination and precarity, being subject to some man’s whims and inclinations. There was no such thing as a perfect transaction.

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While working-class women struggled to make ends meet, women in upper and middle-class households rarely handled cash at all. Instead, Zelizer writes, they “relied almost entirely on ‘invisible’ dollars”, and had to resort to “asking and cajoling and begging” for addi­tional cash. If this failed, there were always other “underground” tactics, from “home pocket-picking” to “padding bills” — which usually involved asking a dressmaker to send a bill for an inflated sum and pocketing the excess.

This image of the angel in the house “begging” or scouring her husband’s pockets for loose change while he shaved in the morning is jarring. And Zelizer realised that there were more important questions to ask than just whether or not a woman had money. The middle-class women that Zelizer studied were, by all classical economic measurements, comfortable and well-off. Their husbands provided for their every material need. And yet, they had no money of their own and, as a consequence, no real freedom.

I remember having an awkward conversation about household budgets with my own mother, who was married in 1966, three weeks after her 20th birthday. “Your father decided that £5 a week would do it,” she said. “That was to pay for my food Monday to Friday.” And what about clothes? “Well, sometimes he was paid in postal orders and he would give them over to me to cash in. Those were for clothes and children’s toys, days out, treats, that kind of thing.” The conversation hitches and stalls, as it often does with money and family. It feels intrusive. It feels too on-the-nose. By asking about money, I’m asking her to sketch out the power dynamics in her early marriage. But what if you just wanted something? I hedge. “Your Dad was always very generous,” she doesn’t quite answer. “He always bought me things to make life easier for me.” She recites the Sixties housewife’s ultimate wish list: “I had a dishwasher before any of my friends, a hostess trolley, a microwave, a tumble dryer… Wait! — I nearly forgot the fur coat.”

The weight of our conversation would not be lost on Zelizer. Before she came along, much of the sociology of money, from Karl Marx to Georg Simmel, took the view that money reduced every human exchange to a transaction and every “thing” it touched to its price. In their eyes, money was cold, hard and calculating. Zelizer, by contrast, shows in her book, The Social Meaning of Money (2017) that money is a deeply social technology. She points to all the ways in which things that aren’t meant to be for sale are routinely exchanged: engagement rings for brides-to-be, complex treat economies for courting couples, settlements in the event of the accidental death of a child. She also shows how money can be used, not just to buy things, but to express morality, norms and social values. There’s a reason, for instance, that the poor are offered alms or food stamps rather than cash, which has long been seen as a dangerous form of relief.

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We might believe that there is a vast gulf between the legitimate transactions that underscore romantic rituals — the treats, meals out, and jewellery — and the illegitimate ones, such as paying a stranger cash for sex. But Zelizer argues that it all depends on how the meaning of money is transformed through a transaction. By attaching values to money, we can make dirty money clean and clean money dirty. We can communicate power, obligation and vulnerability. For women in the 20th century, money communicated ideas about their place in the home. Unlike cash, the “invisible dollars” of pin money and housewives’ allowances not only made the work women did in the home invisible; they also hid a range of financial constraints and chokepoints — even financial abuse, where one partner takes control of bank accounts and forces the other to account for how every penny has been spent.

In 2024, it’s tempting to think we are worlds apart from Zelizer’s accounts of gender-based financial dependence. But women still earn 85p for every pound earned by men. This tends to make women more reliant on their male partners if they choose to enter into traditional romantic partnerships or have children. And contrary to the tropes of gold-digging ex-wives cleaning up in the divorce courts, women are far more likely to lose out in the aftermath of a marital breakdown, with men typically holding 2.5 times the wealth of their female partners and women’s household income falling by 41% following a divorce.

Furthermore, women continue on average to give up more of their time and income to look after children than their male partners. In the United States, the number of women describing themselves as stay-at-home mothers gradually decreased in the latter half of the 20th century, falling from 49% in 1960 to 23% in 1999. But by 2012, the number had risen once more to 29%, with women citing childcare costs and income stagnation as the motivating factor for returning to the home. The same is true in the United Kingdom, where, for the first time in decades, the number of women not returning to work after having children is on the rise. This leads us to question whether, in heteronormative relationships, women can ever fully escape their economic dependency on wage-earning men. For many women, the financial problems identified by Zelizer have never truly disappeared.

The decision has apparently caused outrage in some of the show’s seven million viewers, who are complaining that the event has succumbed to “le wokisme”. The timing of the decision seemed to some particularly suspicious, arriving only a fortnight after the programme’s production company was ordered to pay two former competitors compensation for showing hidden camera images of their unclothed breasts — almost as if those in charge wished subliminally to convey to viewers that, in terms of bosom-related content at least, there was now quite literally nothing to see here. Whether or not this was a real factor in the decision, it’s certainly true that Gilles’s look has been claimed as a win for “diversity”, which is probably quite irritating for the two Afro-Caribbean women she beat to first place.

Gilles’s victory follows earlier relaxations of traditional Miss France etiquette, each of them controversial in their own right. First came a change in the eligibility rules in 2019, allowing biological males to enter if they were legally female. Then last year, apparently even more radically for stalwarts, the event was opened up for the first time to females who had given birth, got married, were over the age of 24, and who had tattoos or body piercings. In what she claimed was a historic milestone at the time, a mother of a toddler won the regional heat Miss Alpes-du-Sud in March, causing another delegate to declare that this was “going to cause a stir, because there have already been young married women or young women a little older than 24, but a mum is a really big leap”.

Arguably though, with the exception of the edict about tattoos and piercings, these rule changes were not particularly threatening to the status quo. In practice, for a while it seemed as if they would make no difference to the sempiternal formula for a Miss France winner: voluminous hair, big teeth, an hourglass figure, and eyes sufficiently wide apart that you look ever-so-slightly like a startled faun. Indeed, up until this week, it seemed that whether you were virginal, married, a mother of 12, or indeed biologically male, in reality you could only get somewhere in the pageant by fitting this exact physical template. But then came Gilles and the old certainties collapsed. In French beauty competitions, it turns out that cosmetic changes are the most revolutionary.

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Interviewed after her win, Gilles said she had deliberately chosen an “androgynous, more masculine look with short hair” in order to “talk about the body shaming we have to put up with every day. We all have our imperfections.” At first glance, that short hair on a woman could count as “masculine” and a flat chest as “imperfect” might seem a sign only of how ridiculously tightly the French conception of femininity is always gathered. But then you remember that this is also the country that gave us the concept of a gamine, and the iconic image of Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) — in other words, hardly a culture unappreciative of female tomboyishness. Indeed, France also gave us the concept of the jolie laide, and has presented for our delectation such fabulously elegant examples as Simone Signoret, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Camille Cottin. In short, though no one could pretend the visual norms operative on French womanhood are particularly relaxed, it would still be an exaggeration to suggest that every woman there is expected to look like an old-fashioned Fifties beauty queen.

On second thoughts, then, it seems that this controversy is less a dispute about whether general beauty standards for women should be more “diverse”, and more like an argument between Crufts’ judges about whether a spaniel’s ears should be well-feathered or not — which is to say, a highly technical discussion, and not of much relevance to the rest of us. Essentially, people are fighting about the appropriate aesthetic standards for beauty queens — a specialised genre all of its own — and not about standards for women generally. What looks perfectly normal and even wildly attractive in any other woman might still make a beauty queen look fearsomely “masculine” and so allegedly imperfect to contest aficionados. These things are always somewhat relative.

And yet, one might wonder why, as in the case of Miss France but also others, so many of the beauty industry’s attempts to display the values of  diversity and inclusion end up seeming half-baked and easily mockable. In a nutshell, it’s because, being a visually-oriented business, true diversity and inclusion for the beauty industry would mean achieving this in the visual realm — and that is the one thing that those in charge cannot possibly let happen. Even the most ostentatious attempts of magazine editors to represent diverse skin tones and body shapes still betray cripplingly tight aesthetic restrictions. Thankfully, models can now differ in colour — and occasionally in size and physical ability too — but whatever the precise variables, they still all share the characteristic of looking perfectly proportionate. This elephant in the room explains the rising sense of hysteria that can emerge in ordinary mortals whenever a Vogue magazine editor starts to lecture readers about expanding “limited versions of womanhood”.

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Of course, there are also those who insist society should reconstruct beauty norms much more radically in the name of genuine inclusion, so that — to put it frankly — even objectively ugly people start to count as literally beautiful. Arguably, this political project has been given a whole new burst of energy since transactivists started claiming literal womanhood for transwomen. Followers of this particular religion observe some implications of their foundational belief very strictly: if transwomen are women, they can be mothers, daughters, and lesbians too, or so it is continuously insisted. Other implications look less welcome though: for instance, that if transwomen are women then — at least in their natural and unadorned state — they are among the most unprepossessing women on the planet. Hence alongside the radical expansion of womanhood, standards of beauty suddenly have to be radically expanded too. Only yesterday, a commentator in The Independent was calling failed Labour candidate Eddie Izzard “a beautiful person, inside and out”, which surely stretches credibility in at least one direction.

But in this, as in so much else, would-be social reformers can easily lose touch with the limits of reality. Perhaps they are mistakenly thinking of the plasticity of sexual attraction, which, in contrast to perceptions of beauty, is clearly genuinely diverse and inclusive — for how else could we explain the rich panoply of fetishes and paraphilias, and the fact that there are men out there who actually think their horse or their car is giving them bedroom eyes? In contrast, perceptions of who the beautiful people are seem fairly stable across cultures — which is exactly what you would expect, given the hypothesis that being beautiful is a loose indicator of reproductive fitness.

That’s why pretending that Eddie Izzard is a beautiful woman is just about as stupid as pretending that Eve Gilles is not — in both cases, our eyes can tell the difference. Cutting the influence of beauty down to size in a society cannot be done by acting as if we get to make up the rules as we go along. And why should we even want to? Gazing at a truly beautiful face is a source of huge pleasure, and always will be. The beauty industry has many hideously immoral, exploitative, and frankly ridiculous aspects, but centring beautiful people is not in itself one of them.

For those too young to have witnessed the great metrosexual panic of the late Nineties and early 2000s, it’s hard to explain just how worked up we all were by the realisation that there were men out there who conditioned their hair and moisturised their faces and wore clothes that actually fit, and yet who were somehow — and here, the mind boggled — not gay. In 2003, “metrosexual” was Word of the Year; in June, it was subject to a writeup in the New York Times Style, under the winking headline, “Metrosexuals Come Out”. By December, it was showing up in everything from celebrity profiles to book reviews to think pieces pondering whether the metrosexual was definitionally metropolitan, or whether men in the suburbs could get in on this new brand of masculinity too. Threaded through it all was a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop: the metrosexuals were into women, or so they said, but they obviously weren’t straight in the same sense as the cowboys, lumberjacks and plumbers of the world.

Like many Style-section pieces, the struggle to define the boundaries of metrosexuality was ultimately more about marketing than identity: “Along with terms like ‘PoMosexual,’ ‘just gay enough’ and ‘flaming heterosexuals,’ the word metrosexual is now gaining currency among American marketers who are fumbling for a term to describe this new type of feminized man,” wrote the New York Times. Then, as now, we weren’t quite sure how men should be; the metrosexual was an early hint that one possible answer was: more like women.

Today, metrosexuals are recognisable as an early prototype of affinity-based identities, the kind that describe how you present yourself instead of what you do (see: the straight-married women in their thirties who have never slept with a woman but self-identify as “queer“). Although some metrosexuals of the early 2000s dabbled in gender nonconformity — with painted nails and skirts and such — in a way that might now be referred to as “queerbaiting”, metrosexuality wasn’t ever really about who these men wanted to have sex with. It was about masculinity, and what that was supposed to look like, and particularly about how this new breed of man would be received by women.

As for this, feelings were mixed. For some women, perhaps the kind who perk up at the phrase “couples spa trip”, a metrosexual boyfriend represented the best of both worlds; for others, these men invited comparisons that tended to make us feel, if not unfeminine, then at least like slobs. In my early twenties, at the peak of the Metrosexual Discourse, I won a trip for two to a ranch in Texas after entering an essay contest in which entrants were asked to describe why their metrosexual boyfriends needed lessons in manliness. I gamely joked about how my boyfriend’s predilection for pink shirts and casual use of the phrase “mani-pedi” were becoming relationship dealbreakers, but looking back, what strikes me is that this was less about masculinity than a bad match. The poor guy didn’t need manliness lessons; he just needed a different girlfriend, ideally one who shared his interest in nail care.

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But the is-he-or-isn’t-he jokes among women also masked a quiet sense of desperation. Most straight men had come to approach matters of grooming and culture with an aggressive indifference: an approach that flew in the face of historical norms. It wasn’t just that the metrosexual had an obvious precursor in the fashionable dandy of yore; being mannered and being marriageable had always gone hand in hand. Jane Austen’s eligible bachelors dressed for an occasion, and even the hyper-masculine James Bond was fussy about the cut of his tuxedo. But sometime in the mid-20th century, those associations began to shift, perhaps fuelled by a Sixties protest culture that recast civilised norms — things like haircuts and suits — as tools of oppression. The masculine ideal morphed from Cary Grant in North by Northwest to something far scruffier, unshaven and untucked.

And once caring about your appearance became square, it was only a matter of time before it also became (homo)sexually suspect, culminating in the Nineties nadir wherein every sitcom couple included a schlubby man paired with an impossibly hot wife. Straight men asserted their straightness via a sort of peacocking in reverse: whoever wore the worst outfit was probably the most heterosexual. Not even the sexiest man alive could make these terrible clothes look good.

One can detect a confluence of factors at play here, including the downstream effects of tech replacing finance as the nexus of male power and influence. Suddenly, the biggest boss in the room wasn’t a Wall Street VP in a three-piece suit, but a gawky geek who had never been interested in clothes nor looked especially good in them. For these guys, disentangling basic male fashion and grooming standards from male sex appeal may have functioned as a sort of revenge — not just against the preppy bullies and jocks of high school, but against the oppressive notion that appearances should matter at all. At the same time, the increased visibility of gay men in elite cultural spaces — art, fashion, food — combined with the casual homophobia of the era to create a visceral sense that culture itself was “gay”, a word that became synonymous with “uncool”.

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And so the heterosexual man of the moment was identifiable not only by his Seinfeldian pairing of ill-fitting jeans and chunky white basketball shoes, but by an adolescent distaste for anything more highbrow than a Die Hard movie. These guys didn’t dance, didn’t cook, and definitely didn’t care about art or films or music. If metrosexuality was about straight men who didn’t mind seeming a little bit swishy, it was arguably an overdue response to straightness having become synonymous with having the sartorial and cultural tastes of a five-year-old. At a moment when raunch culture was on its last legs but the soft boy had not yet made his debut, metrosexuals were like a gateway drug to a new, more mature, sensitivity-trained brand of masculinity.

And once men started to care what they looked like, a massive vibe shift ensued: more stylish clothing, for instance, meant slimmer silhouettes, which meant more time at the gym, which meant that metrosexuals were targets for not just fashion and grooming but fitness and nutrition products as well. We think of them as a sociological phenomenon, but as the New York Times pointed out: they were a marketing demographic first. You can practically see the dollar signs flashing in the eyes of a marketing executive quoted in the original writeup on this emerging category of man: ”The guy who drinks Grey Goose is willing to pay extra,” he said. ”He does it in all things in his life. He doesn’t buy green beans, he buys haricots verts.”

First you make a person believe that spending $40 on shampoo isn’t vain or frivolous; then, you convince him that actually, the shampoo is a form of self-care. This is the logic that has long persuaded women to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year on skincare, makeup and beauty treatments; but it’s also a logic that persuades men to adopt the same neuroses women have long struggled with around fashion, aging, and physical fitness.

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And persuaded they are: men are now seeking out tweakments in record numbers, and suffering from body dysmorphia at greater rates than ever before. TikTok “looksmaxxers” trade tips on proper skincare; Twitter accounts scold men for sartorial crimes like improperly matching a formal tie with a rugged sport coat. Caring about how you look has been fully recoded from a niche, suspicious twist on traditional masculinity to an obligation, as it has always been for women. The sexual suspicion surrounding men being effeminately preoccupied with their faces has disappeared. Indeed, a key tenet of looksmaxxing is that the young men who do it make themselves more attractive to women — and why not, when there’s no perceived paradox between wanting to be desired by women and wanting to behave more like them?

The past 10 years have not only encouraged men to adopt the same neuroses as women about what other people think of their skin and hair and bodies, but to constitutionally reorient themselves toward the feminine. Consider how often are men instructed that they need to be more feelings-oriented, less assertive, more empathic, less status-seeking — or how male sexuality, or even just sexual interest, is increasingly understood as inherently predatory and dangerous. Consider the 2018 American Psychological Association press release which declared that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful”, and all but announced the profession’s intent to wage war on manhood, one 50-minute therapy session at a time. Consider the summer blockbuster Barbie, in which the previously effeminate Ken’s newfound masculinity is presented as both a profoundly malevolent force and an absurd punchline.

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Replacing old-school masculinity with metrosexuality may be the least objectionable way in which our concept of ideal manhood keeps tipping incrementally toward the feminine. Certainly, as a straight woman, I’m in no hurry to return to a time when men proved their heterosexual bona fides by competing to see who could dress (and sometimes smell) the most like literal garbage. But if boys and men are in crisis, as we are repeatedly and reliably assured they are, I’m also not persuaded that recalibrating the entire world toward a more feminine baseline is the best way to avoid that outcome.

The arc of the metrosexual holds lessons here: we have seen the backlash to a world in which being a man becomes synonymous with being a boor, but we have also seen what happens when that backlash curdles into a sense that masculinity and boorishness cannot be disentangled, and hence should both be rejected wholesale. In a culture that can’t conceive of healthy masculinity — a culture that instructs men that the best way to be is more like a woman — some men will conform. But others, finding nothing they can emulate and nothing to aspire to, will revolt — and it will be ugly.

It was playful and bold to write a novel as though it were a biography, and to call a fiction a life, and to invent that life around a woman the author was in love with, and to stretch her over 350 years, like a body freed from the problems of gravity. In Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf did away with the usual co-ordinates of biography and set off through time as though it were an element, not a dimension.

The story is simple: Orlando is a young nobleman, aged 16, in the reign of Elizabeth I. After a series of adventures and disappointments in love and life and poetry, he takes an appointment as the British ambassador in Constantinople. Aged 30, he wakes up one morning from a week-long dead sleep to find that he is now a woman. Orlando returns to England and discovers that it changes as centuries pass but he, or rather she, continues as before. Woolf wrote the book at top speed, scarcely pausing, as Orlando scarcely pauses as he races through 350 years.

On 11 October 1928 — the last day in the novel — Orlando has reached the age of 36: “The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.” This is a poke at Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the great and erudite editor of the DNB. The Victorians loved dates and facts, especially dates and facts in order — theirs was the age of classification, of taxonomy, of the museum, the geographical society, the butterfly net. The pinned wings or the shot and stuffed head are symbols of Victorian England. The Dictionary of National Biography, where the great and the good could be safely pinned and stuffed, was, to Woolf, part of the monstrous edifice of the 19th century that 20th-century creativity needed to overthrow.

As Orlando enters the 19th century she notices, to her dismay, “widow’s weeds and bridal veils… crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and mathematical instruments”. In one of the funniest passages in the novel, Orlando suffers a kind of self-generated electric shock treatment as her left hand takes to convulsing spontaneously. She realises that it is because she is not wearing a wedding ring. She rushes out and finds a husband, and the symptom subsides — the censorious somatic symptom of an age where every woman must be classified as virgin, wife or widow.

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And everyone as male or female. Woolf was born in 1882. She grew up as a Victorian. Gender roles were strictly observed in society and at her London home in Hyde Park Gate. Her brother Thoby went to Cambridge; Virginia and her sister Vanessa were educated at home. The social doctrine they were raised on was that of “separate spheres” — woman in the home, man in the world — and it was still going strong when Woolf published Orlando, in the year that all female British citizens over 21 finally got the vote.

But Woolf believed that the creative mind is androgynous. She was an expert in Elizabethan literature. She loved both the scope and the certainty of the Renaissance mind. Shakespeare, writing his sonnets to boys and women with equal passion, understanding the manliness of a soldier, the intensity of a nun, seemed to her to be a sign of what we all might be — bigger, wider, freed from convention and hypocrisy. Woolf met Vita Sackville-West in 1922. Sackville-West was an English aristocrat brought up at Knole House in Kent. As a woman, she could not inherit the ancestral home. Woolf, who had fallen in love with Sackville-West’s past as much as her person, found that the family portraits, ancient relics and priceless objects that filled Knole filled her imagination.

But Orlando is more than a fantasy or a historical novel; it is highly political. Orlando is a savage satire on sexism. When Orlando becomes a woman, his stately home and all her affairs are put in Chancery, because a woman cannot be a duke, and a woman cannot be an ambassador to the Turks, and a woman cannot inherit one of the finest houses in England. But a woman can cross-dress. Once Orlando becomes Lady Orlando, he must make his skirmishes across gender by dressing up. This she does frequently, in order to meet with life outside drawing-rooms and carriages. Sackville-West often dressed as a man and had affairs with other women in her disguise as “Julian”. She had an affair with Virginia Woolf as herself, and although both women were married the passion between them was real — this is clear from their letters. On Woolf’s side it was deeper while it lasted, because Woolf was deeper, and Sackville-West was an unrepentant flirt.

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But whatever happened between them affected Woolf’s imagination as well as her heart. Orlando, written as a romp, a love letter, a gay book in every sense of the word, turned out to be the engine of an exploding freedom in her style. Writing Orlando did Woolf good. Begun as a gift to Sackville-West, it became a gift to herself. It is the most joyful of her books. Woolf’s mind was always first-rate, but when she came to write her next book, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she carried across the full-heartedness of Orlando. A Room of One’s Own is a masterpiece because it is more than a polemic; when she writes about women, about men, about the interplay of the mind, about creativity — above all, about writing — all her thoughts are steeped in feeling. The tract is much more than an argument; it is a passion for life as it could be lived.

Sackville-West, who was not a great writer or a deep thinker, and certainly not a faithful lover, released something in Woolf — something that had been pressing at the bars since Mrs Dalloway (1925). The quality of mind that Woolf (following Coleridge) called “androgyny” is really an adventure of the spirit (think Emily Dickinson). Sackville-West, for all her evening suits and ancestors, did not possess that quality of mind or that adventure of spirit, but she did have a full sexuality and a body to match. It is as though Sackville-West became Woolf’s blood supply for a while. Woolf was never a physical person; with Vita she found herself to be a woman — rather in the way that Orlando does. Sackville-West, all body, allowed Woolf to live in her own body.

It is an entertaining thought to remember that Orlando, all sex-change, cross-dressing and transgressive desire, appeared in the same year as Radclyffe Hall’s sapphic romance The Well of Loneliness. The two novels are different solar systems. The Well is gloomy, beaten, defensive, where women who love women have only suffering and misunderstanding in their lonely lives. The theme is as depressing as the writing, which is terrible. Orlando is a joyful and passionate declaration of love as life, regardless of gender. The Well was banned and declared obscene. Orlando became a bestseller. Woolf’s wit, her writing, her audacity, smuggled across the borders of propriety the most outrageous contraband. Many of the photographs included in the first edition of Orlando were of Sackville-West. I am still not sure how Woolf got away with all this, but she did. The exhilaration of the writing has a lot to do with it.

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It is hard not to fall in love with this book. The writing has a lovely physicality to it. Woolf is always an exquisite detailer but in Orlando the writing is earthed differently. There is something unprotected, even as it is fully conscious. There is a smell of soil, a wave of bilge, the turf is spongy, the rooks hoarse. The unprotected feel of the writing is about speed and energy. Some of that energy is sexual:

“Flinging herself on the ground, she felt the bones of the tree running out like ribs from a spine this way and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the world. She liked to attach herself to something hard.”

When Woolf thought about writing she concluded that poets proceed by leaving everything out. The novelist proceeds by piling everything in. How could she both pile in and leave out? Orlando is more cluttered than any of her other novels. At the same time, because she is Virginia Woolf, this pell-mell fling of a book is anti-clutter, anti-collecting, and we find as we read that all these collectables are playthings and chimeras. She vanishes them away in an instant. Centuries pass, the rules of time are ignored, physical boundaries do not matter, even the shabby poet Nick Greene, who insulted Orlando as a young man, is met with again as a fashionable London critic of the Victorian age.

Woolf’s sense of this tremendous freedom of existence clusters in a moment near the end of the novel. The Lady Orlando is by the Serpentine watching the toy boats. She has lunched with Nick Greene. She has ordered books from a bookseller — a great novelty for one born in the age of ink-stained manuscripts. She stands at the water’s edge:

“It’s something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous… ecstasy…”

And we are back with the boy Orlando racing through the rooms of his ancestral home, late for the great queen, sinking upon his knees under a hand “attached to an old body that smelt like a cupboard in which furs are kept in camphor”.

We live in a speeded-up world where is it difficult to find 40 minutes, let alone nearly 400 years. Yet, as Woolf observes, time is there for us if we know how to take it. Reading is one way of taking time. Reading takes time, but time is not lost that way, it is repurposed. We find time. Orlando refuses all constraints — historical, fantastical, metaphysical, sociological. Ageing is irrelevant. Gender is irrelevant. That last is especially interesting now, as the politics of non-binary identification are challenging categories of what is male, what is female, and whether or not biology should be destiny. Orlando grapples with sexism for sure — but makes it clear that while society regards Orlando very differently after her unexpected sex-change, Orlando themselves does not take that view. Immediately after the transformation, the newly formed Orlando gazes into the mirror “without any signs of discomposure” and calmly goes off for a bath, while Woolf addresses us directly:

“We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same.”

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Different sex. Same person. Orlando is not the first piece of fiction about sex change. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an equally playful and serious treatise on the mutability of the human form. The Arabian Nights is stuffed with gender-switches and cross-dressing. Shakespeare’s comedies often pivot round a gender-disguise, and as no women were allowed on the Elizabethan stage, and female parts were played by boys, every romance is also a bromance. It’s likely that Woolf’s title is taken from As You Like It, where Rosalind, disguised as the shepherd Ganymede, teaches the man she loves — Orlando — how to love in return.

Still, Orlando is the first trans-novel. Except that Woolf was refusing all labels here. She called it a “biography”, knowing it was a novel. She started the postmodern fashion for mixing up fact and fiction, history and invention. We are used to all that now. Woolf was our pioneer. “Did you feel a sort of a tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday last at five minutes to one?” Virginia wrote to Vita on 20 March 1928. She sent her a copy on publication day, 11 October 1928. Their love affair was nearly over by then. Our love affair with Orlando, the boy who’s a girl who’s a girl who’s a boy, goes on and on.

***

This extract is taken from an introduction to the Everyman Classics Library edition of Orlando by Virginia Woolf. 

For a long time, the runner Caster Semenya made for a terrific and compelling true-life underdog. In a world that was increasingly cognisant of the oppressive interplay of race, gender and class, here was a woman, black and gender non-conforming — a 2009 New Yorker article described her as “breathtakingly butch” — battling against a racist, sexist system that wanted to keep her down. Her trajectory from an impoverished running club in rural South Africa to the winner’s podium at the Olympics was Hollywood movie material, and the repeated indignities she suffered at the hands of officials and fellow competitors who questioned her right to be there were an outrage: Semenya was dogged by rumours that she was a man in disguise, and was routinely required to prove her sex by submitting to humiliating inspections of her genitals. It all seemed like the work of a snivelling patriarchy conspiring to take down an exceptional woman.

But the truth was more complicated: Semenya is a woman — by her own definition, and in virtually every social context that matters — but she is also not exactly female. Testing eventually revealed her to be intersex, possessing an XY chromosomal makeup and a pair of internal, undescended testes, which among other advantages meant she could produce performance-enhancing testosterone at levels that an ordinary female could not.

Athletic governing bodies struggled to come up with a policy that would allow someone like Semenya to continue competing: when she declined to remove her internal testes, they required her to take drugs to suppress her testosterone production. The solution satisfied no one, including Semenya, who found hormone therapy intolerable. In an essay adapted from her new memoir, The Race to Be Myself, she writes: “If I had internal testicles or whatever they were saying I had, they were mine. I was healthy, I loved my body, and it had made me a champion. Why must I go and mutilate it to conform to someone else’s rules?”

In one sense, it is only fair that someone who moves through the world as a woman be allowed to compete alongside women. “I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now what the medical findings are,” Semenya writes. “I was born a girl and raised as a girl.” But socialisation is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to defining womanhood in sports; science matters, too. And the concept of protected classes in sport also stems from a desire to be fair. Women, disabled people, the very old or very young: all of them compete on playing fields that only admit people who share certain characteristics, which is to say, certain limitations. The boundaries around these fields have always been human-drawn and hence imperfect, but they are also necessary; the alternative, as the International Paralympic Committee notes, is “one-sided and predictable competition, in which the least impaired athlete always wins”.

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Semenya, in her book, puts scare quotes around the words “protected class” as if to mock the idea that it could apply to women, but the argument doesn’t land — not least because her presence in women’s sports has more often than not given rise to exactly the sort of one-sided, predictable outcome the IPC works to avoid. Semenya mops the floor with her competitors, and the women who have raced against her have noted that it doesn’t feel like a fair fight. And while nobody likes to think that half the planet can be reasonably classified as impaired compared with the other half — that womanhood itself is something akin to disability — the truth is: the acceptance that women are weaker is the essential foundation of women’s sports. Men jump higher, run faster, kick and punch harder. And if women’s sport is a ghetto of sorts, it is a necessary one, not just for fairness or safety’s sake but for the sake of sport. Nobody wants a one-sided and predictable competition; we want drama and excitement. This is why we play sport, and why we watch other people doing it. We love to see them fight; we love a win against the odds.

There’s something viscerally distasteful about the inverse: somebody with too much strength clobbering someone who has too little. An able-bodied athlete dunking on a guy in a wheelchair; a grown man winning a sprint against a bunch of 8-year-olds. A ringer parachuted into an amateur competition. We watch in pursuit of the kind of fairness that makes for a good game.

This doesn’t mean that the line where an attribute becomes an unfair advantage is always easy to discern. Years ago, the Olympics governing body became embroiled in a debate over whether Oscar Pistorius’s bionic legs gave him an unfair advantage, leading to months of rigorous study that culminated in the following remarkable conclusion, published in The Journal of Applied Physiology: Pistorius, the scientists agreed, was “physiologically similar but mechanically dissimilar” to an athlete with normal human legs. (Pistorius was allowed to run.) But to the general public, fairness in sport is like obscenity as famously defined by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: we know it when we see it.

This is what makes Semenya’s case so complicated. The notion of her being some sort of cheater is flawed. When she balked at suppressing her hormone levels, it wasn’t because she wanted to win; it was because it felt like lying: “I wasn’t going to take on an identity that did not fit my soul because some doctors had taken my blood and images of my organs. I was not a hermaphrodite or anything other than a woman.”

In her memoir, Semenya is largely describing events from over a decade ago. But the book has been published into a world where a related, ongoing battle is raging, over the place of trans women in sports. These issues are not identical, of course: Semenya never imagined she was anything other than biologically female, while trans women are seeking admission to a category they know full well they were not born into. But both have been plagued by allegations that they’re trying to game the system, that they’re cheaters. Often, trans women are presented as just a bunch of grasping, avaricious men who’ve found the easiest possible pathway to a gold medal. When ESPN aired a special about trans swimmer Lia Thomas, her former competitor Riley Gaines slammed both the network and the athlete as complicit in the destruction of women’s sports: “Lia Thomas is not a brave, courageous woman who earned a national title. He is an arrogant, cheat who stole a national title from a hardworking, deserving woman.”

This knee-jerk demonisation has always seemed wrong to me — morally, but also logically. The humiliation, the opprobrium, the physical and mental burden of transitioning: all seem like a wildly disproportionate price to pay for the sake of a college swimming championship. Instead, what has always struck me about Thomas’s case is that elite swimming is one of the few arenas where the women celebrated are broad shouldered, long limbed, and tall. Perhaps swimming represents, to her, a chance to feel not just like a winner, but like she belongs.

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This is the tragedy: that what is fair at the macro level is not fair, as in compassionate, to an individual person. Lia Thomas cannot fairly compete in the sporting category known as “women”, and arguably neither can Semenya, whose memoir presents this as an obscene attempt to deny her identity. No doubt it felt that way to her: to alter her body to compete with women would have amounted, in her mind, to a tacit admission that she wasn’t one.

And as long as women’s sports are seen as having the power to validate or invalidate one’s innate sense of self — for as long as we see the regulatory bodies as not just deciding who can compete as a woman, but who is one — this issue will remain intractable. The best hope is a future where the category of “woman” in sports is treated in much the same way as the IPC treats the category of “disabled”: “If an athlete is not eligible to compete in a sport, this does not question the presence of a genuine impairment,” the committee website assures readers. “It is a sport ruling.”

The truth, unfortunate but inevitable, is this: the most carefully drawn lines, the ones that need to not just include but protect, will always leave someone on the outside.

It was supposed to be a haven for young people experiencing gender-related distress. Instead, following a string of complaints by whistle-blowers, an “inadequate” rating by the Care Quality Commission, a high-profile judicial review and, finally, a damning independent review, it was deemed unsafe.

In its place, two new regional hubs were set to open, with several more centres to follow. For Gids’s long-standing critics, concerned about the distress its tumult was having on children, this came as a huge relief.

The story, however, does not end here.

Kathleen Stock has spent the past month speaking to a range of clinicians, NHS professionals and parents of dysphoric children — to find out whether Gids’s new service will be an improvement.

The portrait she paints is stark: her findings suggest that the NHS gender services are yet to become a clinically safe space for children and teens, with senior figures still pushing an activist ideology. Only last week, NHS bosses internally announced that they are significantly delaying the launch of one of the hubs. And as she reveals in the below investigation, it is unlikely to be the final twist in Gids’s new chapter…

Read on to learn about:

What happened to Gids?
The ideology in the new hubs
A new Wild West for patients

***

In 2014, the head of the NHS Gender Identity Development Service, Dr Polly Carmichael, appeared on a BBC children’s television programme billed as the story of “an extraordinary boy… born with a girl’s body”. Soothingly addressing the tomboyish young protagonist sitting across from her, Carmichael was filmed saying that a “puberty blocker” — or to give it its proper name, a gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogue — “pauses the body and stops it from carrying on to grow up into a man or a woman”.

She continued: “The idea of the blocker is that if we can take away that worry about your body doing something that you don’t want it to, then it gives you and us more time and space to be really thinking about what’s going to be best for you now, but also in the future.” As she spoke, a cartoonish pause button symbol was projected onto the child sitting opposite her, whose moving image was then frozen to a still, to reinforce the point.

Back in 2014, Carmichael’s service — known as Gids, and based at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London, with a satellite clinic in Leeds — was still riding relatively high in public opinion. The clinical psychologist was often in the media, describing the challenges of treating a highly mysterious new being — the “transgender child” — to fascinated and relatively uncritical audiences. Indeed, the children’s television programme in question, My Life: I Am Leo, went on to win a Bafta.

But times change. These days — thanks to a string of whistleblowers, a high-profile judicial review involving a former patient, a rating of “inadequate” by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), and a cumulatively devastating book by investigative journalist Hannah Barnes — the name of Carmichael’s service is now synonymous with mismanagement and medical scandal. The closure of Gids was announced by NHS England in July last year, and an independent review is now well under way, also known as “the Cass Review” after its chair, the distinguished paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass.

Following Cass’s interim recommendations, published in February last year, two new regional services are being formed to treat “gender incongruence and gender-related distress” in children under 17, with several more centres planned for launch afterwards. Slated to open next month, the “Southern hub” involves teams from Great Ormond Street Hospital, the Evelina Children’s Hospital, and the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. The “Northern hub” partners Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust with the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital.

Many long-standing critics of Gids have been reassured by these developments, and by the principled and cautious approach apparently taken by Cass so far. It seems she aims to examine trans-identification in children and adolescents systemically, applying what is known about wider paediatric health rather than sacralising her patients as exotic anomalies. One parent of a Gids patient, seeking anonymity for the sake of protecting the privacy of his child, as so many parents of trans-identified children do, told me with enthusiasm: “Gender has been exceptionalised as a clinical speciality, but Cass wants to weave it back into paediatric practice.”

But the story does not end there. Over the past month, I have spoken to a range of clinicians, other NHS professionals, and parents of dysphoric young people to understand how Cass’s guidance is being enacted on the ground. I have discovered that there are deep ideological tensions and conflicts within the very institutions — clinics, hospitals, trusts, commissioning boards, adjacent adult services — whose responsibility it is to implement Cass’s new vision. Moreover, it seems NHS systems are still influenced by activist thinking; in particular, by the idea that a sex-incongruent gender identity is something to be “affirmed”, either as a matter of social justice or as personal liberation.

Considered together, my findings suggest that the NHS gender services are yet to become a clinically safe space for children and teens. Last week, NHS bosses suddenly internally announced that they are significantly delaying the launch of the Southern hub — after months of preparing training materials for clinicians recruited into the new service, and only a few days before the materials were due to be used for the first time. In line with I Am Leo’s original metaphor, it seems that senior managers too are pressing the pause button, in order to have more time and space to think. In the meantime, thousands of distressed children and their worried parents wait anxiously for a resolution.

***

What happened to Gids?

Despite the common belief that Gids closed following the announcement last year, it is still open, providing what it describes as “continuity of care” for around 1,000 existing young patients, including some on puberty blockers. (Cass recommended that in this interim period, any referrals to endocrine services by Gids staff should be reviewed by a multidisciplinary external panel).

It is unclear to outsiders exactly how patient care is now being managed at Gids, but what does seem true is that attempts have been made to improve existing processes since at least 2021. Published in February, an open letter from Gids staff concerned about Cass’s plans for the new services reveals that, after the CQC rating of “inadequate”, something called the “Gids Transformation Programme” was developed — separately from the Cass review, according to them — in order to make “wide-reaching changes to the running of the service”. The letter claims that external consultants were paid over £1.5 million to advise on the Transformation Programme, with some changes yet to be implemented.

At the heart of the controversy about the original service was its increasingly positive attitude to “gender affirmation”: roughly, the idea that a clinician should “believe” a girl who declares she is a boy (or vice versa), and so accede to her way of describing herself in clinical encounters. Though advocates deny it, critics insist that this practice precludes genuinely critical exploration of what may well be a passing phase. Without the capacity to gently challenge such a child in a therapeutic setting, an outcome involving lifelong medication is thought to become much more likely.

Even under the most scrupulous of arrangements, treating psychological distress in a physically healthy child or teen by administering experimental, powerful hormone-blockers carries risk. At Gids, that risk was increased severalfold by the organisational chaos of the service. During Keira Bell’s judicial review in 2020, High Court judges expressed surprise that clinicians did not seem to know how many young people had been referred there for blockers since 2011, nor of what age distribution. Only in 2022 — when Gids clinicians got round to publishing an analysis of outcomes for medicalised patients for the first time — was it announced that 1,151 children had been referred to the endocrine clinics in London and Leeds for puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones between 2008-21. According to Barnes, what proportion of them received puberty blockers still remains unknown.

There were other failures too, made clear in the course of Keira Bell’s judicial review and appeal, and in Barnes’s book. They include a startling absence of curiosity about certain recurring characteristics of patients — for instance, why so many of them were female, same-sex-attracted, and/or autistic. And there was also the close working relationship with the transactivist lobby groups Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence; inadequate preliminary assessments, both in quantity and quality; and a shocking lack of post-discharge follow ups.

In the past year or so, this impression of institutional disarray has been reinforced by Cass. In her interim report, she criticised management for having no standardised approach to patient assessment; no routine contact between psychologist and endocrinologist; no consistent safeguarding processes; poor record-keeping; and too-infrequent monitoring of medicated patients. She also seemed critical of affirmative approaches, noting with apparent disapproval: “From the point of entry to Gids there appears to be predominantly an affirmative, non-exploratory approach, often driven by child and parent expectations.”

In June, guided by Cass’s analysis, the NHS published an “Interim specialist service specification for children and young people with gender incongruence”, laying out the broad features of a new clinical pathway for this cohort — including standardised, genuinely exploratory assessment by multidisciplinary teams. Separate service specifications for puberty blockers and hormones are to follow. Cass has also insisted that, in future, puberty blockers should be administered in the NHS only as part of a properly managed clinical trial.

Despite the many criticisms of her management career to date, Carmichael remains in post as director of Gids. One of the main whistleblowers at the Tavistock, former staff governor Dr David Bell, told me: “Gids was found in the judicial review to be profoundly deficient in terms of clinical governance and record keeping. It is thus extraordinary that Polly Carmichael has been allowed to remain in position as director.” He described this as “a shocking message to parents and families who have been so damaged by this level of neglect”.

It is hard to find out which other clinicians still work at Gids, but many are assumed to be affirmative in their approach. In a second open letter from late last year — written from an affirmative perspective, in order to criticise the relatively positive response from the Association of Clinical Psychologists to the Cass Review — 13 signatories named their current workplace as Gids, including Carmichael herself.

One of the Gids-affiliated signatories was non-binary author and therapist Dr Jos Twist. Twist has edited an anthology, Non-Binary Lives: An Anthology of Intersecting Identities, which includes “stories of… how it feels to be non-binary and neurodiverse, the challenges of being a non-binary pregnant person, what it means to be non-binary within the Quaker community, the joy of reaching gender euphoria”. Another Gids signatory was clinical psychologist Dr Lorna Hobbs, who told The Guardian in January that, “for me, affirmative is starting from a stance that says gender diversity isn’t a disorder but has existed across cultures through history. It is saying ‘I believe you’ when you tell me about your experience.” Along with Twist, two other signatories who also claim to work at Gids — Dr Claudia Zitz and Dr Josh Goulding-Talbot — are now also listed as working at GenderPlus, a recently registered private provider with ambitions to prescribe hormones to teens (more on this below).

Such evidence suggests that the remaining patient cohort at Gids are not receiving the sort of care of which Hilary Cass would thoroughly approve. However, when it comes to the new services being built at the moment, it is not entirely clear that things will be much better…

***

The ideology in the new hubs:

Certainly, the presence of Professor Gary Butler in the new Southern hub does not instil great confidence that things have changed. For much of the service’s history, Butler was the endocrinology lead for Gids. In 2017, apparently with all the zeal of a true believer, he told The Daily Mail that, under his supervision, his clinic at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust “routinely” prescribed puberty blockers to children with “life-long” gender dysphoria: “When the team feels the young person is genuinely transgender they welcome [the use of] puberty-blocking drugs right from the early stages.”

Butler has also co-authored articles with Carmichael and others at the clinic. In one from 2018, he observes that “around 35% of referred young people [to the clinic] present with moderate to severe autistic traits” — apparently untroubled by the thought that he might be contributing to the premature sterilisation of autistic youth. For it is now recognised that, when combined with cross-sex hormones later, giving blockers to dysphoric young patients early on in puberty can inhibit the development of adult sexual function permanently — a fact occasionally openly mentioned by clinicians supportive of medical intervention but most of the time glossed over.

Yet Butler has now been recruited onto the team based at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) charged with developing training materials for clinicians in the new hubs. (Insiders I have spoken to believe that Polly Carmichael was initially on the recruitment panel, though the BBC reported that the decision to have her there was later “reversed”.)

Butler advertised his new role at a conference for gender medics in April, during a speech in which he also accused Cass of “nepotism” and said that the hospitals he was working with had no relevant experience with gender incongruence. He said he had “fought back” to “continue to be able to provide endocrine services for trans young people”. He has since rowed back on his comments and expressed support for Cass. But for David Bell, Butler’s presence in the new service still rings alarm bells: “Butler was responsible for being part of a service penetrated by trans ideology and neglecting the safeguarding of children; he is part of the Gids debacle and shouldn’t be involved in the new service.”

And Butler is not the only Gids clinician involved in the new hubs. I’m told that Dr Lorna Hobbs — the Gids psychologist who extolled the virtues of “believing” a trans-identified child to The Guardian in January — has advertised online that she is involved in the new service. Hobbs often reposts material from trans activist lobby groups on her public LinkedIn profile, and declares, on the website of a private therapy provider she also works for, that she applies a “social justice and equalities framework” to all the work she does.

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One person working in the Southern hub told me that some clinicians recruited into the service “only believe in an innate notion of identity rather than one developing over time”. They added that involving such different voices on a single team was causing dysfunction. “The official position is that diversity of opinion in a team is a good thing, in order to mirror the fact that people don’t all agree in real life. But it doesn’t work. You can’t say yes and no at the same time.”

In the Northern hub, meanwhile, there is also a risk of repeating old mistakes. Buried within the July 2023 meeting minutes of the Alder Hey Board of Directors is the news that Leeds Children’s Hospital has now entered into the Northern hub partnership “as the existing providers of endocrinology services for children and young people under the care of the current Gender Identity Development Service”. In other words, endocrinology appointments for patients in the new service will apparently be managed by the very same hospital department involved with Gids Leeds, the satellite clinic of the Tavistock. On the current website for the hospital team, staff all list their pronouns.

Why were affirmative clinicians who were already tarnished by an association with Gids recruited into the new hubs, even after Cass’s recommendations? According to NHS sources close to both hubs, the most common explanation is cock-up rather than conspiracy. Managers at the relevant trusts don’t know much about the area, I was told, and when recruiting and setting up new structures, were likely to be impressed by a lot of mentions of “gender” on a CV. From this uninformed perspective, having already worked at the main NHS gender identity service for children presumably looks like an unimpeachable background.

Whatever the explanation, what does seem clear is that transactivist lobby groups and networks are strongly vocal in all of the trusts involved in the new hubs. Across the NHS, activist clinicians and support staff are pushing the idea that gender identity affirmation is a minority rights issue, and a way of furthering Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) goals. With “inclusive” policies about pronouns, changing rooms, and hospital wards already in place in a trust, the job of any clinician who wishes to resist affirmative narratives for dysphoric young people becomes that much harder. For fellow staff naively unaware of the potential clinical repercussions, it can easily seem that “respecting identities” is a simple matter of courtesy.

So, for instance, GOSH’s existing “Privacy and Dignity policy” instructs clinicians that “Trans and gender variant young people should be addressed and accommodated according to their self-defined gender or presentation e.g. the way they dress, and the name and pronouns that they currently use”. Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust’s trans policy says: “Asking and correctly using someone’s pronouns is one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their gender identity.” In other words — wider hospital policy in both trusts instructs clinicians and support staff to “affirm” any non-standard gender identity automatically, wherever it is encountered. It is unclear how such policies could possibly be maintained in the sort of genuinely exploratory clinical setting Cass apparently envisages.

Over at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, meanwhile, all job adverts have Stonewall Diversity Champion branding. Freedom of Information requests also reveal that Mermaids provided EDI training to Childhood and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) staff at the Maudsley Hospital last year. (The training this year was cancelled after adverse press attention.) Moreover, the hospital also has a vocal LGBTQ+ Staff Network, which seems to have some influence with management. I’ve been shown a copy of an email written by their leadership team in September this year, warning members of a visit to the Women’s Staff Network from Lynn Alderson, a lesbian feminist speaker with gender-critical and sex-realist views. After complaining that the speaker’s views were “divisive and hurtful, and in contradiction of our network’s gender identity statement”, the authors continue: “We have been assured that strict protocols have been put in place to prevent the speaker stating her views on gender, and that she will be ejected from the meeting if she does so.”

South London and Maudsley Trust also participates in the NHS Rainbow Badge scheme, described as “an assessment and accreditation model for NHS Trusts” and a “partnership between the LGBT Foundation, Stonewall, LGBT Consortium, Brighton & Hove LGBT Switchboard and GLADD”. (The Rainbow Badge scheme was actually founded by a medic working at the Evelina Children’s Hospital — the third hospital involved in the Southern hub partnership.) In a recent assessment, the Trust was given a Bronze Award, with particular commendation for its trans policies and for having “awareness posters across the site that reference microaggressions relating to homophobia, biphobia and transphobia” — though it was also marked down for a maternity policy that “uses gendered language throughout”.

A similarly ideological picture emerges in the North. Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust — which includes the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, one of the two children’s hospitals in the hub — also advertises its membership of the NHS Rainbow Badge Scheme, and in the recent past has used another scheme from the explicitly transactivist charity LGBT Foundation for training. The other one, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital Trust, is a member of the “Navajo Charter Mark” scheme — the North West’s equivalent of the Stonewall scheme, founded in 2010 to assess organisations in terms of “LGBTIQA+ friendliness” with a remit that includes “practices and policies” and “training”. Alder Hey was reportedly accredited by Navajo this month.

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The content of Navajo training for organisations is unavailable to outsiders, but a 2019 Navajo newsletter perhaps gives us a sense of the organisation’s sympathies. It carries posts about banner-making workshops for Trans Pride, and regurgitates the persistent falsehood that “Almost half the trans kids of school age in the UK have attempted suicide”.

When it comes to implementing the recommendations of Cass, then, it is not inconceivable that local LGBT+ networks and transactivist groups within hospitals and trusts will put up resistance, whether active or passive. In April 2023, a NHS-sponsored analysis of responses to the public consultation on Cass’s interim service specification was published. Of the 411 clinicians who responded, 49% of them (the largest group) fell into “Group A”, described as “largely opposed to the proposals outlined in the interim service specification”, for reasons that included the perceived “transphobia” of some clinicians and the equation of “mental health treatments” for trans-identified youth with “conversion therapy”. Though obviously there was self-selection bias here, nonetheless the findings suggest there is a problem.

This sense is reinforced by the contents of a series of FOI requests made earlier this year to every NHS Trust in England and Wales that provides CAMHS, asking: “What if any training in gender, gender identity and equality your Clinical staff and practitioners have received in the last 4 years?” Some trusts replied that they paid explicitly trans activist organisations such as Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence to give them training; but even where trusts used less obviously partisan sources, it was clear from responses that the majority of them are employing a minority rights and inequality lens to look at gender identity, and not a psychological one.

And there is also evidence of at least partial capture in other powerful NHS bodies. NHS England was placed 68th in the Stonewall Top 100 Employers this year — an intensely fought competition with hundreds of entrants, in which a high placing indicates close policy compliance with Stonewall’s transactivist goals. The Care Quality Commission, in charge of regulation, proudly advertises on its website that it is a Stonewall Diversity Champion — as does the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), Health Education England, and the NHS Confederation.

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Elsewhere, the British Medical Association has come out in favour of affirmation, and published a response to Cass that criticises the new service specification for failing “to recognise the highly individual nature of children and young people’s experiences or their own developing autonomy in relation to exploring their identity”. The Chair of the Sexualities Section at the British Psychological Society, Dr Rob Agnew, frequently writes or endorses transactivist content on his public LinkedIn profile, including one post claiming that “[k]ids receive cis gender ‘grooming’ from the moment they are born” and that “[s]upposedly ‘experimental’ blockers are fully approved by the medical establishment and readily prescribed to cis kids for a variety of reasons”.

But this is not so. Some analyses suggest that blockers can negatively affect the bone density levels of young patients, and perhaps their renal and cognitive functions too. ​​A 2020 Nice evidence review — later acknowledged by Agnew after pushback — has concluded that the quality of evidence for the positive impact of blockers on “gender dysphoria, mental health and quality of life” is of “very low certainty”. There is also increasing doubt about whether blockers are beneficial or even just neutral for mental health.

Indeed, one NHS research trial manager I talked to expressed strong scepticism that a properly described clinical trial for puberty blockers — as mandated by Cass — could ever meet statutory regulations for what is known as “Good Clinical Practice”. She told me: “The Tavistock’s original application for their Early Intervention Study wasn’t regulated as a Clinical Trial of an Investigative Medical Product (CTIMP) but this one would have to be.” She added: “Children get classed as a vulnerable group. They need to have very special protections, and the rationale is just not there. The possible impacts [of blockers] on a child are so high that the moment that this was recognised, the study would be shut down. If you had a healthy child, and you recognised that medication could confirm sterility issues, or fertility issues, or bone density issues, the trial would be stopped at that point.” It would be “completely insane” to run such a trial, she concluded.

Meanwhile, even within the National Programme Board for Gender Services, the body ultimately in charge of service specifications for both adults and children with gender dysphoria, there are worrying signs for those seeking a clinical approach that situates dysphoria in the realm of paediatrics and psychology.

The Chair of the Board is Dr James Palmer, Medical Director for Specialised Services, a consultant neurosurgeon who has overseen all gender services in England and Wales in the past decade, both for children and adults. In 2018, he told a conference that the NHS needed to design “a healthcare service that will allow somewhere around 1-3% of the population at some point in their lives to have a discussion about their gender”. Talking about the drop in average age of Gids patients, he added: “It’s got to be a good thing that there are people out there that want to explore their gender. The fact that it’s in the younger age group has got to be a good thing. For a young adult, to be able to come forward, to seek that expertise, earlier [rather] than much much later in life, that’s got to be a good thing.” The lack of curiosity about why so many younger people were suddenly arriving in his services is marked. And in fact, there is evidence that early social and medical transition for a child experiencing gender dysphoria — carried out, of course, by adults — tends to solidify a sex-incongruent gender identity in the child that otherwise might well have passed.

Meanwhile, on the Clinical Reference Group for Adult Gender Dysphoria Services, described as providing “independent expert advice to the National Programme Board for Gender Dysphoria Services on the various aspects of the Board’s work”, two out of five of the members are openly affirmatory of children. Dr Laura Charlton, a clinical psychologist, works at Gids Leeds and was the first author of the open letter signed by Carmichael last year, defending affirmation. At one point, the letter complains of the use of “male” and “female” for trans-identified children because it “undermines the lived experiences of the people being referenced”.

The second affirming clinician on the board, Dr Christine Mimnagh, is clinical lead at the Merseyside adult gender service CMAGIC, and also a GP and private practitioner. In an interview last year, worth quoting at length, Mimnagh said about trans-identified children: “The first thing you get taught in safeguarding for children is, if a child comes up to you and says, you know… ‘I don’t like the way they touch me’, or whatever, what you do is go ‘OK, yeah, tell me more, I’m listening’… what you don’t do, is say, ‘Oh no they didn’t, that’s Mr Jones the gamesmaster, he would never do that!’ There’s a difference between affirmation and dismissal and with everyone whose trans, affirmation is kind of the name of the game; you can’t deny people’s reality just because their reality is different from yours.”

In other words: just as we should believe a child who says she or he is being sexually abused, we should also believe a female child who says she is a boy.

***

A new Wild West:

It appears, then, that despite the apparent good sense of Cass’s interventions so far, contemporary gender medicine in England and Wales remains somewhat chaotic. Within relevant services and wider NHS institutions, there are clinicians with directly clashing views about what sex-incongruent gender identity is, what it means, and what clinical decisions should be made as a result. And it seems that the cracks are starting to show.

I have seen evidence that, only last week, clinicians in the Southern hub — getting ready to launch in a month’s time, and to trial the new training materials with clinicians that very week — received a wholly unexpected internal announcement: the November launch had been postponed. Rising clinical, legal, and communication costs were cited, as was the insufficient time for senior clinicians to sign off the training materials in line with the proposed delivery schedule. I’m told that a manager of the team in charge of producing training materials resigned. Though teams within the Southern hub continue to be employed, their work is now paused, with no revised schedule yet in place.

What will this delay mean? With Gids closed to new referrals and the hubs not yet established, waiting lists will inevitably grow longer by the day. Now taken out of Gids’s hands and managed separately by a NHS Commissioning Support Unit, as of July 2023 7,902 children and young people were on the national waiting list. It is widely acknowledged that any child who is 16 is unlikely to be seen by a children’s service before she turns 17 (the cut-off point for care under childhood and adolescent services).

In desperation, some parents with enough means are turning to private providers to buy puberty blockers and hormones for their child. GenderGP is the most well-known of these, notorious for its close links with Mermaids — even to the extent of employing former CEO Susie Green for a few months this year — and for its historical run-ins with the General Medical Council.

But there are others who also see waiting lists as a business opportunity. The “Yorkshire Gender Endocrinology Services clinic” offers blockers on its website, though it’s unclear whether its clinicians would dispense these to under-17s. And last month, a new private clinic — GenderPlus — arrived on the scene, overseen by former Gids clinician Dr Aidan Kelly, with stated ambitions to start prescribing hormones to teens in the next couple of months. Several other former and current Gids clinicians are involved in this venture, most notably Paul Carruthers — lead nurse at the NHS Gids clinic still based at Leeds Children Hospital, and described as the person who will be “leading the hormone clinic” at GenderPlus.

For some parents, this is an attractive option. One told me: “I know there are parents who want to do it by the book and feel that GenderGP is not doing it properly. They want to go to a Harley Street clinic, get a diagnosis, and feel reassured by having a clinician registered with the NHS.”

Yet while GenderPlus is presented by Kelly as a new project, focused on hormones not blockers, it seems he might already have experience in prescribing blockers to children under the auspices of another of his businesses, Kelly Psychology. As an anonymous comment on the TransgenderUK Reddit put it a year or so ago: “There is another provider to GenderGP but it’s probably more expensive. I use Kelly Psychology and have a private endocrinologist who prescribes puberty blockers to my 13-year-old child. The process is the same as Gids but private.” (Kelly Psychology did not respond to a request for comment.)

Whatever the truth here, it is clear that Kelly is aiming GenderPlus at the parents of dysphoric children and adolescents, and that he anticipates big business. The company already lists 17 staff members on its website, including a research manager.

Given the acknowledged lack of a solid evidence base, to prescribe such poorly-understood drugs privately could be seen to be incautious. Cass’s new interim service specification is very explicit, with added red lettering for extra emphasis: “Children, young people and their families are strongly discouraged from sourcing puberty suppressing or gender affirming hormones from unregulated sources or from on-line providers that are not regulated by UK regulatory bodies.” Though GenderPlus has told The Times it is seeking registration with the Care Quality Commission regulator, its website currently says that it has “clarified” with the CQC that its service “does not fall under their remit and as such is not eligible for CQC registration. If in the future we do provide services which will require CQC registration then we will seek registration.”

Another major worry for many parents of children currently on the national children’s waiting list is the increasing proximity to adult services as their child gets older. In August this year, letters were sent directly to all 17-year-olds on the list, encouraging them to opt for referral onto the adult list instead. They were told that the original date on which they were placed on the children’s list could be transferred to the adult one, so that they could be seen more quickly. The letters were signed by James Palmer.

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Since adult services tend to be uncritically affirmative, the letters have profoundly alarmed some parents desperately holding out for a non-medicalised resolution to their child’s dysphoria. In practice, it seems that a 17-year-old might self-refer to an adult clinic and be put on hormones on the day of her second appointment, without any psychological intervention; indeed, one clinic proudly advertises the possibility of prescription at this speed.

What makes this possible is the existing NHS adult service specification, written in 2019. It is a document that governs standards of care in all adult services, and is a world away from Cass’s careful formulations. Gender dysphoria, it states, is “not, in itself, a mental health condition” — making it somewhat obscure why the NHS should pay for treatment. Equally, “psychological interventions will not be offered routinely or considered mandatory”; and “the majority of individuals will have two core assessment consultations” (and no more). Individuals can also self-refer to a clinic without any intermediate referral from a GP. For breast removal, a patient will need the sign-off of one clinician within the service. For genital surgery, she will need two.

There are eight NHS gender clinics for adults in England and Wales, plus four new “pilot” services, brought in more recently to bring down adult waiting lists in local areas (one of these was mentioned earlier: C-Magic in Liverpool, run by Dr Christine Mimnagh — the clinician who made an equation between believing a child’s disclosure about sexual abuse, and affirming a child’s incongruent gender identity). The new pilot services tend to be embedded within sexual health services, are run by predominantly LGBTQ+ clinicians, and appear to be even more affirming than the already fairly ideological norm.

For instance, the website of Indigo, the pilot service in Manchester, says: “We know that trans and non-binary people are the experts of their own experience… Our services are trans and non-binary-led, with trans and non-binary people guiding and feeding into them at all levels.” An NHS commissioning document for the pilots says that Indigo is “testing the role of Care Navigators, a non-clinical role typically staffed by individuals with lived experience, to support patients before their first appointment with the specialist team”. Somewhat unusually for a primary care provider, Indigo also has a “Leave this site quickly” button on its website, taking browsers to Google if necessary.

I talked to Anna, the mother of a trans-identified daughter currently on the Gids waiting list who is nearly 17 and is seeking medical transition. Her daughter formerly identified as a lesbian. Over lockdown, she began to identify as a boy, having discovered transactivist websites. The teenager, who also has ADHD, is now living with an affirming father who supports her transition.

Anna told me: “I’m frightened that without any evidence of benefits, and with a high rate of neuroconditions and traits — bearing in mind that girls will be more undiagnosed than boys — without consideration for all of that, and with only one pathway in the adult services, our kids have no hope. I don’t want to say mutilated but that’s what is happening. There is so much regret, I don’t want our kids to have regret. They are only on one path, without any mental health considerations. I don’t understand how they can do it.” Along with another mother in a similar position, she is now seeking permission to pursue a judicial review against the NHS, “for providing unsafe treatment advice for young people from 17 years old and vulnerable adults”.

For David Bell, what is happening to dysphoric 17-year-olds is the “biggest area of concern”. He told me that, in light of their incomplete cognitive and emotional development, there is plenty of precedent already for 17-25 year olds to be treated separately from adults in mental health services; pointing me to guidelines from the Royal College of Psychiatrists and elsewhere in the NHS that have established this. He described the failure of adult gender services to recognise this as the “trans-exceptionalism” already familiar from elsewhere in the NHS. Indeed, with what another former Tavistock clinician described to me as a “beautiful irony”, the Tavistock and Portman Trust itself has an adolescent and young adult service in general mental health that covers 14-25 year olds — just not in Gids.

Cass’s interim service specification states that, when a child is moved to an adult service, “a co-ordinated transfer to appropriate local adult services will be needed where complex presentations continue”. It seems that, at the moment, such a rational arrangement is some distance away. In effect — thanks to the collapse of the old service and to delays within the new ones — a void has opened up in the systems supposed to care for gender dysphoric young people. And until it is filled, a cohort of highly distressed children and their desperate parents will continue to pay the price.

***

A spokesperson for the NHS Children’s and Young People’s Gender Service (London) said:

 “The NHS Children’s and Young People’s Gender Service for London — a partnership between Evelina London Children’s Hospital (part of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust), Great Ormond Street Hospital and the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust — is working towards full mobilisation of the new service by the beginning of April 2024

“The set-up of this completely new service is complex. In advance of full mobilisation, we will be working with colleagues on the safe handover of current patients. We are also focused on recruitment, training and ensuring good data collection which supports the developing research, and progress made in these areas will determine how quickly it will be possible to start seeing new patients off the waiting list.”

On Saturday, Dauwalter won the women’s Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, a 106-mile race around Mont Blanc involving a total of 32,700ft of climb plus accompanying brutal descents.  In the past 10 years this astonishing athlete has won 20 ultra marathons, the shortest of which was 100km and the longest 240 miles. In the past 10 weeks alone, she has won three races of 100 miles each, with little time for recovery in between. The UTMB was her latest; she completed it in under 24 hours. In an interview the day afterwards, she pronounced her legs “completely destroyed”, and I believe her.

During her youth, Dauwalter honed her tolerance to suffering by competing in cross-country skiing in Alaska, putting duct-tape on her face to avoid getting frostbite. In races these days, past a certain point of exertion she tends to vomit every couple of miles. According to one extended profile of the runner, if she’s competing for more than 24 hours, now and again she will permit herself a one-minute power nap at the side of the trail. She often hallucinates: for instance, that bears are hugging in a circle in front of her, or that flying eels are attacking her. Hallucinations have now become part of her brand: she has a merchandise line that makes graphics out of them and puts them on T-shirts.

During one long race, she refused to change her running gait despite a huge blister migrating from her little toe to the top of her foot. In another, she developed temporary blindness but still ran on. Tripping on a tree root, and unable to see the blood leaking from her face after the fall, she dismissed it as “just sweat”. As her husband said in a documentary about her: “Something that Courtney has learnt and has got really good at, is that when you think your body is telling you to stop, maybe you don’t need to stop”.

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Of course, sometimes when your body is telling you to stop, it’s a good idea to listen. My own version of this is to take a breather halfway up a local hill to enjoy the view. Dauwalter’s version is to attempt a 486-mile course record across the Rockies, stopping only for acute bronchitis at mile number 309. It’s not that she doesn’t feel pain at all. It’s rather that she mentally approaches it in a very deliberate way, originally learnt from her high school skiing coach.

To cope, she visualises in great detail a “pain cave”: a dark underground space full of tunnels, whose outer edges she pictures herself chiselling away at with every agonising step. In classically puritan vein, she tells herself at the beginning at every race that she is about to step into the cave and that “we’re going to get better from visiting it”. Early on in her career, she used to picture herself shying away from the cave’s mouth; or else sitting on a chair near the entrance, just “surviving it”. Nowadays, pain and the mental chiselling it prompts are conceived of as industrious and productive: “Each time I’ve raced, and hurt a little more, and dug a little deeper, I’m actually making a bigger cave with different tunnels.” She imagines herself in a hard-hat “going to town, trying to make it a dust pile while I am in there”.

The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius might have urged us not to struggle against pain but to accept it as neither good nor bad. This runner-philosopher goes one better, advising us to give pain a meaning, then love it. Reading about Dauwalter this week — and having just finished my own bout of bronchitis — I decided to try out her technique by going for a run.

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After about three minutes of heaving myself up the road, I mentally donned a high-vis vest and headlamp and tentatively entered my cave. Staring blankly about me, I ineffectively chiselled a bit here and there, but soon got distracted by the dragging pain in my legs and hammering in my chest. As my discomfort increased, I made some more desultory marks on the walls — for some reason, these looked a bit like the scratches made by the victims of serial killers — and then put down my tools and lit an imaginary fag. I don’t think I have the right work ethic for this job. Personally, I see nothing wrong with a pain cave on the snug side.

Womanhood and pain is a naturally occurring combination. The pains of childbirth for most, menstrual pain for nearly all, and fluctuating hormones which increase the intensity of already painful conditions are the female lot without access to medication. Women report pain more frequently than men and are more susceptible to chronic pain conditions, for complex reasons that are probably both biological and social. Some studies even suggest that female pain intensity is higher too. Women also apparently buy the most over-the-counter analgesics — though it remains unclear whether some of these are purchased for their husbands.

There are also sexed differences in dealing with pain. One overview suggests that while men distract themselves with other tasks and use “problem-focused tactics”, women tend to try “positive self-statements and emotion-focused techniques”. Indeed, I can attest to this, having once done a hypnobirthing course, full of 30 and 40-something expectant mothers trying very hard to convince themselves they weren’t going to have a caesarean at the end of it. Here, too, there was a geological visualisation — except this time it was called the “cove of confidence”, and you were supposed to retreat into its soothing depths whenever you needed a break from the agony of what the instructor euphemistically renamed as “surges”. (Without wanting to discourage any pregnant readers, let’s just say that, at the very least, the cove of confidence empowers you to scream all the louder for an epidural during the surges).

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Women are also apparently more prone to what psychologists “pain catastrophising” — worrying and ruminating excessively, mentally magnifying threats and anticipating the worst, feeling helpless, and so on — which in turn exacerbates pain intensity and general distress. This degree of anxiety starts seeming more rational when supplemented with the knowledge that, when women go to the doctor, their pain apparently tends to be underestimated relative to identical behavioural manifestations by men (yet another data point unanticipated by Wittgenstein).

Indeed, there’s a danger that simply stating in public that women experience more pain than men partly due to biological factors — as I am doing here — might encourage a dismissive attitude towards women’s pain by health care providers. That is, this knowledge might induce hearers to confuse what is the case naturally, with what ought to be the case, producing a knock-on social penalty as well. Yet if the modern-day medical attitude to “natural” pain is that it should be medicated away — and clearly it is — then there’s no fair reason to extend this attitude to one sex but not the other.

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But maybe we don’t always have to opt for anaesthesia. With pain an inevitability in life, and particularly for women, it makes sense that some people make it part of an identity. Choose pain deliberately before it chooses you! Contrary to appearances, this is not always the same as masochism. Masochism, whether sexual or emotional, involves unconsciously leaning into passivity, helplessness, victimisation, and the familiarity of suffering. This seems to me the precise opposite of what someone like Dauwalter is doing. She is emphatically winning at life, not stagnating in the comforts of defeat. She has no coach, follows no set training regime but just runs how she feels on the day, and rewards herself afterwards with nachos and beer. According to one journalist: “Sometimes around 3 a.m., she is so amped, in awe of the mountains surrounding her, that she’ll squeal: “This is awesome!” Even controlling for being an American (or, at least, not being British), this still sounds pretty far from the masochistic mindset.

Indeed, one common explanation sometimes offered for masochism positions it as a negative response to a highly competitive environment — you revel in feelings of pain, failure, and inferiority as an inadequate psychic proxy for power and control. Dauwalter, in contrast, seems obviously in touch with her inner competitive beast, and approaches every race with explicitly positive goals in mind. Pain is conceptualised as a necessary means to the ends of beating rivals, smashing course records and personal bests, and — of course — winning that coveted first place in the “World’s Most Voluminous Pain Cave” competition. “My goal with every race is to make it hurt and get everything out of myself that I can,” she says.

Hardly any of us can be as positive as this about what is essentially an unpleasant experience, and in some cases overwhelmingly so. Pain hurts, sometimes terribly. The clue is in the concept. Still, in a world where so many of us seem to be keen to escape pain in all its forms, whether physical or emotional, Dauwalter serves as a fascinating exemplar of how it is possible to go the other way, and rush towards it, grinning ecstatically.

In the interests of “balance”, an opposing view was deemed necessary. The counter-argument, published last week, was made by Jacqueline Rose, a professor at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. According to Dawkins, her response does not make any “coherent sense”, which he suggests may be a badge of honour among postmodernists.

I am a long-time admirer of Rose. Her insights on psychoanalysis have suffused my own writing and I loved her book Mothers, which, as it happens, I reviewed in the New Statesman. I described her as “one of our very best cultural critics”.

Yet even I was surprised at how poor her recent article was. I understand that, unless you are Zizek, you have to sign up to a lot of nonsense if you are to survive on the international academic circuit. Unlike Dawkins, though, I am weirdly steeped in postmodern theory. In the Eighties, I got an interview with Baudrillard and tried to sell it to The Guardian, but they had never heard of him.

From early on, I could see how much of this fashionable theory — rooted in a rejection of “grand narratives” about the truth — does not accommodate feminist politics. When I was teaching American students about postmodernism and Judith Butler, it became even more apparent that much of her argument was a response to Marxism; that postmodernism was born of the failure of revolutionary politics.

But there were good bits. And the Rose article reminds me strongly of something I wrote in 1988: “If the whole question of power cannot be tackled, it is because these new hysterics with their male bodies and optional female subjectivities cannot speak of a desiring subject who is actually a flesh and blood woman.” I was talking here about male theorists, rather than trans people. But I return to it in an attempt to understand how, in a call for “generosity”, Rose has written a piece that is so completely dismissive of women, our concerns, rights, bodies and fears.

She begins by claiming that a “central goal of feminism is to repudiate the idea of womanhood”. Is it? What is womanhood if there is no such thing as a woman? Does she mean “femininity”?

On the threat of sexual violence, she suggests that it is “the category of women as much as the safety of women that needs protection”. That category, she thinks, should include women who were once men. Let’s take this idea for a walk, shall we? Out of the academy and to Iran and Afghanistan, to places where women die in menstrual huts or undergo FGM, where women-only spaces are compelled. She complains that “the idea of female” is “some kind of primordial condition… as if it were the bedrock of all the limitations to follow”. She’s actually right here: this is the unfortunate reality in many parts of the world.

Of course, she uses the de Beauvoir quote — “One is not a woman, one becomes one” — but, predictably, chooses to ignore the rest of it: “No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine.” The second part of the quotation is key. The construction of gender is social and there is a difference between being female (sex) and femininity (gender) which is learnt.

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Rose’s preference for referring to “females” as opposed to women, she says, is because Andrea Long Chu argues that “female” was developed in the 19th century as a way of referring to black slaves. As a result, it is “historically naive and racially blind” to assume it is a “neutral biological category”. Woah!

“Female” was in common usage long before the 19th century and I think Rose does Long Chu down here. Long Chu is a controversial, often witty, trans author who starts her book Females with: “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” For Long Chu, a female identity is one of self-negation and fuckable porn-addled passivity, which is precisely why she transitioned. If the answer to “What is a woman?” is this person, then the majority of the population — women — are tragic failures. Perhaps we are, but at least I know that male babies are not born “with spermatozoa”, as Rose asserts.

Rose goes on to argue that the act of transitioning challenges a binary which “reinforces the most regressive of gender stereotypes”. For her, it is an “imaginative leap”. Others might call it a fiction and listen to the accounts of detransitioners who can never experience parenthood or sexual pleasure. Others might say they are being sold a fantasy, that the sexed body has limitations whatever the imagination says, and that cynical drug companies and surgeons are cashing in on this.

Still, Rose insists there is no bedrock on which “sexual differentiation can securely ground itself”. Perhaps she has not read Dawkins or perhaps she knows more about biology than him. I couldn’t possibly say, but she goes into the familiar refrain that because some women don’t have a uterus, biology cannot be the gatekeeper of what she would call “femaleness”. This is true, but every one of us, however sexually interesting we may be, was born from someone who did have a uterus. There is no way of escaping this.

Transwomen, she says, have “a feeling that biology and a core, lived, sexual identity have been woefully misaligned”. What, pray, is “a core, lived sexual identity”? Is it a soul? Is it an orientation? Is it changeable? The issue with this Butlerian perception of gender is that, if it is nothing but performative, why is anyone compelled to repeat the performance repeatedly and permanently?

The dissonance between who you feel yourself to be and a sexed body is dysphoria, and I don’t know a single feminist who is not sympathetic to those who suffer from it. It’s just that, on the whole, we’re more worried about distressed, often gay, teenagers doing it.

The goal of transition is to simulate femininity, not femaleness because it cannot be done. The liberatory aspect of this, which Rose refers to as “discarding the straitjacket of masculinity”, is actually done by many men without them claiming to be women. But Rose doesn’t address the attendant power grab of women’s spaces and language. Instead, up comes Stuart Hall and his important work concerning moral panics in the Seventies, with a focus on “muggers” and young black men.

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Trans people, she is right to say, have become political footballs when we should be thinking about other things. Yet no other “civil rights” movement has had the dominant group identify into the oppressed group and then tried to take away their rights. Rose doesn’t dirty herself with such issues.

“‘Reality’ for feminism”, she argues, is something that has to be negotiated, and to dictate on this matter is patriarchal. Rose, you have to understand, is coming from a place where discourse always trumps objective reality. Postmodern theory depends on us seeing ourselves as formed only in and through language. Meaning is never settled; it is always contested. This is a fine and interesting philosophical argument, but as a politics it stinks. Postmodernism is patriarchy in drag.

What is a woman? “In the end,” we’re told, “it is a matter of generosity and freedom.” Well yes, that will go down well with the Taliban. Where is the generosity towards women who have lost jobs and reputations because of this “debate”? Where is the freedom for women to define themselves? If oppression is not rooted in biology, where does it come from exactly?

One is not born a woman but becomes one. And then one becomes an angry woman — not because we are gatekeeping an essentialist position, but because we cannot individually identify our way out of trouble. Feminism is a collective struggle or it is merely cosmetic.

What is a woman? I suspect Rose knows. She just also knows which side her bread is buttered on: the side that holds the power in academia, publishing and literary circles. They have stopped dreaming big and kid themselves they are radical in their safe spaces. Yet most women don’t get to choose our safe spaces: we are too mean and unsophisticated. Thankfully, unlike Rose, some of us remain unkind, unpersuaded, unbound.

Gids had been established in 1989, to help distressed teenagers navigate their feelings of gender dysphoria, but changes in leadership along the way led to a dramatic shift in its clinical approach. In recent years children routinely found themselves on a medical conveyor belt before the psychological effects of early adverse experiences were fully explored. Much has been written about the blanket application of an “affirmation-only” approach to a complex caseload, which too often put children on a single pathway to life-long medicalisation. By 2020, Gids had prescribed puberty blockers to more than a thousand children. 

In most academic discourse, a “no-debate” approach, such as the one described at Gids, will be stifling and unproductive — but in medicine, it will inevitably result in harm. All clinical practice should be centred around the careful consideration of competing possibilities. It is unsurprising that children were harmed at Gids when a single-minded certainty usurped clinical curiosity.

One year on, Gids remains open, although it no longer accepts new referrals. The plan is to replace the moribund service with regional hubs offering the holistic care required by young people struggling with their gender identity. The promised new services are still taking shape, but before they have even opened their doors to the ever-accumulating backlog of referrals — last rumoured to be upwards of 8,000 young people — concerns have been raised about history repeating itself. Some of the senior clinicians from Gids have seamlessly transferred into new leadership positions, despite appearing to have learned little from its terminal failings.

In April 2023, Prof Gary Butler, the lead endocrinologist at Gids and a clinician appointed to a leadership role in its replacement service, questioned any need to rethink the model. He told a conference audience that Gids was already working in “exactly” the way that Dr Hilary Cass had called for in her thorough review of services for children and young people with gender incongruence. It is difficult to see how anyone could reconcile the service described in Time to Think — BBC Newsnight reporter Hannah Barnes’s careful and balanced account of the failings reported by multiple Gids clinicians — with the holistic approach recommended by the Cass Review.

Its recommendations tear down the exceptionalism that allowed things to go so wrong at Gids; evidence-based practice will be the bedrock of the new service, just as it is in every other NHS clinic.  Those working within the new services will be contractually committed to follow Dr Cass’s recommendations, which place a new emphasis on integrated models of care and evidence-based treatments, recommendations that should be as uncontroversial as motherhood and apple pie.

But, then, motherhood and apple pie aren’t quite as uncontroversial as they used to be. And an evidence-based practice may not be quite the unifying foundation if the clinicians involved cannot agree on the evidence base.

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Doctors have failed detransitioners

By Sallie Baxendale

Earlier this month, a group of 21 eminent clinicians working across nine countries in the field of gender distress wrote an excoriating open letter in response to a bold claim from Stephen Hammes, president of the Endocrine Society. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Hammes had stated that more than 2,000 studies had provided a clear picture that gender-affirming care improved the well-being of gender diverse people and reduced the risk of suicide; if that were true, it would be very reassuring and closer to certainty than we often get in many medical specialities. The authors of the response, who included Dr Anna Hutchinson and Dr Anastassis Spiliadis, two of the original whistleblowers at Gids, noted that this claim had been contradicted by every single systematic review of the evidence, not least one published by the Endocrine Society itself. They noted that recommendations for clinical practice should be aligned with the best available evidence, rather than a position that exaggerated the benefits and minimised the risks.

Not all evidence is equal. There are hierarchies of evidence in science, often represented as a pyramid. The lowest level is “expert consensus”, which is barely evidence at all. Who decides who is an expert? The process of reaching a consensus can result in a compromise where lots of people agree collectively what nobody actually believes individually. Consensus may have nothing to do with empirical truth. Expert medical consensus can be very wide of the mark, sometimes disastrously so: in the early 1900s, it was expert medical consensus that smoking cured asthma and other lung diseases. It is well within living memory that the expert consensus for treating back pain was bed rest and plenty of it. We now know this is likely to increase pain and prolong recovery.

The history of medicine is littered with these examples, and there are treatments we are recommending now with the full blessing of expert consensus that will eventually prove to be ineffectual at best, fatal at worst. But perhaps the biggest problem with consensus, particularly in the area of gender medicine is the chilling effect it has on debate. As Michael Crichton, the physician and author of Jurassic Park, said: “The claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.”

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Why the Tavistock had to fall

By Kathleen Stock

Fortunately, most branches of medicine now rely on more rigorous forms of evidence to inform their practice. Further up the “evidence pyramid” are case reports and studies that compare the outcomes in patient groups before and after treatment, with and without control groups. Close to the top of the evidence pyramid are the results from randomised controlled trials. All of these kinds of research can provide valuable information (some more than others) but no study is perfect and no study design can control for all of the biases that might have influenced the results. So sitting right at the top of the evidence pyramid are the meta-analyses and systematic reviews. These studies systematically evaluate the quality and quantity of all of the relevant evidence that has been published in peer-reviewed journals. These independent reviews summarise what we really know and how confident we can be in that knowledge. Bodies such as the National Institute for Health & Care Excellence (Nice) produce the gold standard in clinical practice guidelines based on these kinds of independent meta-analyses.

In 2020, Nice examined the evidence for puberty blockers. They concluded that “the results of the studies that reported impact on […] outcomes of gender dysphoria and mental health (depression, anger and anxiety), and […] body image and psychosocial impact (global and psychosocial functioning), in children and adolescents with gender dysphoria were of very low certainty”. In other words, there is no good quality evidence supporting the use of these drugs on these outcomes.

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You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

It seems likely in the heated debates that surround gender medicine that many people are confusing “expert consensus” — the evidence right at the bottom of the pyramid — for the gold standard in clinical practice guidelines, which are based on evidence and right at the top.

This conflation appears to have been responsible for the mutual bafflement in the heated exchange between Republican Dan Crenshaw and Dr Meredithe McNamara earlier this month, in a debate in the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce on gender-affirming care. While Dr McNamara insisted trans healthcare was based on “standards of care”, the senator countered with the stark lack of evidence from any systematic reviews. Both appeared exasperated with the failure of the other to grasp the importance of their incontrovertible evidence. Just as not all evidence is equal, neither are all clinical guidelines or standards of care. They can be developed from evidence at the top of the pyramid (as in Nice guidelines), but more often come from the bottom and simply represent expert consensus with all its inherent flaws and biases. The stamp of approval from a learned society does not trump the rigours of a Nice review.

Since no high-quality evidence for the benefits of puberty blockers has been found in systematic reviews, it is unsurprising that even the doctors who work in this field have described themselves as building the plane while flying it. With mounting concerns for the possible harms associated with medical pathway of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones (including reduced bone density, disruptions to neurodevelopment, impaired sexual function and infertility) — not to mention the growing numbers of detransitioners for whom this was never an appropriate treatment pathway, one might extend their aviation metaphor as an attempt to build a plane while flying it while someone else throws out all the parachutes and sets an engine on fire.

Who would put any children on that plane? Or volunteer to pilot it?

The only rational response in such a situation would be to ground the plane immediately. The interim recommendations of the Cass Review combined with the upcoming closure of Gids effectively do this, but the pressures on a new service to immediately take to the metaphorical skies again will be significant.

However, there is another way. Practice guidelines based on expert consensus cannot be mistaken for those based on systematic reviews. Where the systematic reviews indicate little evidence for benefit and potential for significant harm, the service should proceed with the caution that would be applied in any other branch of medicine.

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What if you regret transitioning?

By Julie Bindel

Cass has emphasised that just as there are many pathways into gender dysphoria for young people, so there could be many ways out. For some, that may still be a medical pathway, with its unevidenced outcomes and multiple inherent risks. The new teams will be tasked with explaining these uncertainties in uncompromising detail to ensure the truly informed consent of those who wish to embark on this experimental approach. Fortunately, the new service model means that other treatment pathways will now also be available.

Bringing gender distress firmly back into the fold of mainstream mental health services for children and adolescents means that these vulnerable children can finally begin to benefit from the therapeutic input and safeguards they have been denied for far too long. It can’t begin soon enough.