Local groups of gender critical feminists have sprung up throughout Scotland, from the Borders to the Highlands and Islands, and are making their mark both online and on the streets. Stickers, posters, postcards and suffragette ribbons all bear the same message for Nicola Sturgeon’s government: “Women Won’t Wheesht.”

As Covid restrictions ease and May’s local elections draw close, these women are ramping up their campaign to make the Scottish government think twice about its plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). Currently, if you want to legally change your gender in Scotland, medical evidence is required; you must have lived in your “acquired gender” for at least two years. The Scottish government’s proposed reforms would mean that no diagnosis or medical reports would be needed, and the period in which applicants must have lived in their acquired gender would be cut to three months.

In other words, self-identification of gender would be introduced. The SNP government is expected to reveal its draft legislation in the coming weeks. For Scotland’s gender-critical feminists, their fight has never been so urgent.

Many of these women describe themselves as “politically homeless”. Some are considering breaking the habit of a lifetime and not voting in May; others will spoil their ballots. Some are considering whether to vote for the new Alba party, which has pledged to protect and preserve the rights of women and girls. The Scottish Conservatives have also realised this is an issue on which they can appeal to female voters — several Conservative MSPs visited a demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament organised by For Women Scotland in September.

For my research published this week into what I term a Scottish “cooperative constellation” of gender-critical feminists, I spoke to a coalition of women that reaches across the independence/unionist divide and includes women from all sections of society and political tribes. Some began their feminist careers on Greenham Common. For younger members, this is their first step into the political public sphere.

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Putting aside what divides them, these women are united by concerns about the impact of the GRA reforms on women’s sex-based rights: the implications for women’s sport, refuges, prisons, and the myriad services achieved by feminist campaigners since the Seventies.

I carried out 18 in-depth interviews with politicians, researchers, journalists, bloggers, creative artists and grassroots campaigners — all of whom were promised anonymity. I asked all of them to disclose any abuse they had suffered due to their involvement in the constellation. After all, women’s livelihoods have been threatened because of their opinions on the GRA reform, and many involved in the debate are concerned for their personal safety.

What they had to say made for grim listening: they spoke to me of death and rape threats, demands that their employer sack them and attempts at “cancellation”. One interviewee described the response to an essay she posted online, in which she expressed her opinion that being a lesbian is the same as being same-sex attracted. “Almost minutes after it was published, I got a message saying, ‘I hope you get raped, or, better yet, killed. LOL’.” She also had another abuser post pictures of her home and her home address: “And this account was filled with things like, ‘Kill TERFs, TERFs don’t deserve rights. TERFs aren’t women’.” As another interviewee put it: “We seem to have become like the new witches, it’s like the new Salem”.

Of course, during lockdown the activities of this constellation of feminists were confined to social media. Women shared, debated and organised on Twitter, Facebook and sites like Mumsnet, where feminist forums offer a comparatively safe space for gender-critical discussion. Women could keep their anonymity but signal their stance by using the suffragette colours of purple, green and white. In recent months, David Lammy’s dismissal of gender critical women as “dinosaurs hoarding rights” has offered another eye-catching addition to Twitter handles and Mumsnet usernames: the T-Rex emoji.

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The term “cooperative constellation” comes from the literature surrounding a phenomenon of feminist cooperation that took place in the EU and Nordic countries in the Nineties and early Noughties. In order to achieve women’s rights, female politicians, researchers, activists, and policy advisors worked together across political divisions. The researchers provided the theory, while the activists and grassroots led demand for change, which policymakers and politicians could then use in their push for new legislation.

The cooperative constellation also, importantly, included — and continues to include — female members of the media. The women I interviewed for my project acknowledged how crucial it is to achieve mainstream press coverage of their concerns. In recent years, though, the growth of online commentary has meant that gender-critical voices are less reliant on  the mainstream media. The contemporary constellation in Scotland has expanded to include bloggers and writers with large online followings — including, of course, J.K. Rowling.

But that is not the only difference between today’s Scottish activists and those who came before. Unlike the cooperative feminists 20 years ago, these Scottish women are focused on slowing down policy change, asking policymakers to think more carefully about how proposed changes will impact the sex-based rights of women and girls. And, in comparison to other constellations — where the networks were often supported by national governments that desired an academic underpinning for their sex-equality ambitions — the Scottish feminists are acting as outsiders. Those members of the SNP, Scottish Greens and Scottish Labour — including Holyrood and Westminster politicians — who belong to the constellation are acting in direct contradiction of official party policy.

Although they come from all corners, the majority of the women I interviewed are largely positioned on the centre or Left of Scottish politics. They are women who have been used to supporting, and being supported by, institutions like the BBC, The Guardian and trade unions. Yet when they appealed to these organisations to discuss their concerns about GRA reform, not only did they find their worries dismissed, but they were also vilified and accused of transphobia. One interviewee who had raised her concerns on an email list for union activists was immediately expelled from the group. The heading of the email, sent to all members, was “Fucking transphobes, fuck off”.

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And as well as being rejected by their usual allies, the constellation has also been thoroughly snubbed by established women’s organisations in Scotland. Interviewees stated that they felt betrayed by organisations such as Engender or Rape Crisis, which do not represent their views. In fact, established women’s organisations were perceived to be in a feedback loop with the Scottish government, and to represent only a small section of Scottish women, with no interest in alternative points of view. It was frequently suggested that this was a necessary position, given their reliance on the government for funding. And so gender-critical feminists had felt compelled to start their own grassroots organisations, including For Women Scotland or Frontline Feminists Scotland.

As a result, they have found themselves vilified and abused. But they have organised, and are fighting back. For many there is a new sense of sisterhood and solidarity with women throughout the country. “It’s united people from all kinds of backgrounds and experience,” one interviewee told me. “That’s been one of the most rewarding things.”

With lockdown lifting, they are back out on the streets with their leaflets, ribbons, slates and dinosaurs. “It’s almost like a guerrilla network, getting out there instead of just sitting around talking”. Forget devolution — Nicola Sturgeon is about to discover there’s a new dividing line in Scottish politics.

Future historians may marvel how that meeting of human rights groups in Yogyakarta established gender identity as an innate human quality and decided that it must be protected in law. At the time, in 2006, political commentators at home were more concerned with the so-called Granita Pact, and whether Tony Blair would ever resign in Gordon Brown’s favour. But Yogyakarta triggered a chain of events that would eventually challenge the use of biological sex to divide humanity. While the definition of gender identity was vague — how can you define what is in essence a feeling in our heads? — the vision was grand.

Fast forward to 2015 and attention in the UK was turning towards our membership of the EU. However, it was the Council of Europe — the organisation that we are not leaving — that drove the agenda in Europe when it passed Resolution 2048 and called on all member states to enshrine gender identity in national law, and thereby displace biological sex. Without the democratic scrutiny that surrounded prime ministerial succession and Brexit, Resolution 2048 shook the very foundations of human society — what it means to be a man or a woman.

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The impact on society is profound. At this very moment, Scotland is considering a change to the law that would allow people to change their legal sex without producing evidence of a psychological need. While they are not protecting gender identity — that would require a change to the Equality Act, which is not a devolved matter — it will have much the same effect.

“The Scottish Government seem bent on pushing badly written and poorly defined legislative change,” the Scottish campaigning group forwomen.scot tells me, “without due consideration for the potentially massive implications for the social and legal position of women in Scotland.”

Legislative change that has been planned in the dark. According to recent guidance for activists uncovered by the legal website Roll on Friday, secrecy is crucial: “Avoid excessive press coverage and exposure,” it urged. If society had been aware of the implications, those campaigners may not have been given such a free run as they lobbied governments to adopt Resolution 2048.

The tactics were highly effective. Immediately after the 2015 UK election, the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee turned their attention to Transgender Equality. Following a consultation that provoked just 208 responses, the committee report recommended that the Government should introduce self-declaration of gender, and establish gender identity as a protected characteristic. In the ensuing Parliamentary debate the Yogyakarta principles were cited as some exotic sounding authority.

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Elsewhere in Europe, the tide kept advancing. As Malta and then Ireland both passed laws based on Resolution 2048, liberals and progressives were kept on board or — more likely — in the dark. Meanwhile, the occasional dissenter could be denounced as a hateful bigot and probably a Nazi.

Government consultations were announced at Westminster and separately in Scotland, where gender recognition is a devolved matter. Few people cared apart from transgender activists. Small groups of women did meet to share their concerns, but their gatherings provoked outrageous responses from supposed progressives.

Politics changed at Speakers’ Corner in London on 13 September 2017 when 26-year old Tara Wolf — a self-declared trans woman — assaulted 60-year old Maria Maclachlan before one of those meetings (Wolf was fined £150 by magistrates). A group of female trade unionists decided enough was enough, and two months later their new group, Woman’s Place UK, held its first meeting in Cambridge. They drew in big name speakers including Linda Bellos and Beatrix Campbell, and the tide began to turn. Within two years they filled the QE II Conference Centre in Westminster.

In an increasingly febrile environment, governments dithered. The consultations were delayed creating a political vacuum that exacerbated the situation: hope and good will were replaced by fear and anger; compromise was out, confrontation was in.

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Scotland consulted first. By 1 March 2018, 15,697 responses had been submitted — rather more than 208. Westminster began its consultation four months later. When it closed on 22 October that year, more than 100,000 responses filled the electronic postbag, according to unofficial reports. The official figure is still not known because over a year later the findings of the Westminster consultation remain unpublished. Priorities have moved on, and it seems unlikely that Boris Johnson’s government will want to devote any time to gender recognition legislation. If it weren’t for Scotland, that may have been the end of it.

Scotland continued to dither. They neither threw out gender recognition nor moved forwards with confidence. They drafted a bill but started consulting a second time, a process that is currently underway. It closes on 17 March this year. The outcome will be felt south of the border and beyond our shores as the world watches Scotland deal with the hurricane.

The political divisions are profound. On one side are the arguments that we trans people have a difficult time, and simplifying gender recognition makes our lives a little easier. But this is about more than trans individuals, it is about society.

Allowing male people to declare themselves female for reasons known only to themselves is open to abuse, and any law that relies on well-meaning people declaring that (abusive) men wouldn’t do that, would they? is questionable at best.

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Women’s spaces are not protected because all men present a hazard, but a few do. In the same way, we don’t lock our doors at night because all passers-by are a hazard. But in both cases, some people will abuse trust and women need to take precautions just like householders need to take precautions.

The inconvenient truth is that transwomen are male, and — as a group — we present the same hazard that men present. Women can no more differentiate nice trans from nasty trans than they can distinguish nice men from nasty men. Allowing us to declare ourselves to be trans and then immediately self-identify into women’s spaces makes the boundaries meaningless. It is a safeguarding nightmare.

This matters for Scotland. Gender recognition is a devolved matter and it is for Scotland to decide how to progress, but if they are wise they will consider what is happening across the world. In Canada, for example, where the transwoman Jessica Yaniv is making a mockery of a 2016 amendment to the British Columbia Human Rights Code that protects self-declared gender identity. Yaniv took action (later dismissed) against female beauticians for refusing to wax what would in more normal times have been considered to be male genitals.

While the Scottish government may claim in their consultation (Para 3.20) that they do “not wish trans people to go through procedures which are demeaning, intrusive, distressing and stressful”, it’s a matter of debate whether being asked to provide medical evidence of a need to change your legal sex is demeaning. I don’t think it is, though like many trans people I have never felt the need to change the sex on my birth certificate in any case. We shouldn’t need to lie about the past in order to live in the present.

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But this matters for more than Scotland. Fourteen years after Yogyakarta the policy juggernaut has paused in the UK, but it has not gone away. The pressure from transgender activists is incessant.

While the Westminster Government may be less sympathetic to reform, how long would someone need to be resident in Scotland in order to qualify in Scotland? England and Wales would no doubt recognise Scottish paperwork — even ‘Gretna Green’ paperwork — as equivalent to our own, and come under pressure to mirror Scottish legislation. The juggernaut would spring back to life, putting three vulnerable groups at risk.

• Women, who lose control of their own boundaries. If any male person can declare themselves to be a female person, those boundaries become meaningless. While few men would call themselves women just to access women’s spaces, those that would are the reason those boundaries are needed.
• Children, who are told that they can choose their gender and — if they believe their body to be wrong — may end up railroaded into medical and surgical interventions. Children young enough to believe in the tooth fairy are not old enough to be put on a path that can lead to infertility, loss of sexual function, and medication for life.
• Trans people who risk losing the goodwill we rely on. Attempts to change the law to our advantage by policing the words — and even the thoughts — of others will not end well for us. If the Scottish Government doesn’t see the problem, others will and those people may find popular support and rebuild society in a way that is genuinely unkind to us.

Consultations are not referenda. They are opportunities for people to pass on their wisdom and experience to inform decisions made by policy makers.

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There is a debate, even among trans people. While Owl Fisher, for example, has spoken about a moral panic over transwomen using women-only services, Kristina Harrison empathised with women when she wrote: “Perhaps you can begin to understand the concerns of many women when it is increasingly being asserted in practice, if not fully in law, that simply identifying as a woman means being able to access women’s and girls’ private, formerly single-sex, spaces — toilets, rape-crisis centres and so on.”

Decisions need to take place in openness and transparency, and following widespread consultation. We can all have an opinion on something as fundamental as what it means to be a man or a woman. Is it determined by our sex, or is it a feeling in our heads? The consultation is open until 17 March, and it’s vital that we all have our say to ensure Scotland gets this right. If Scotland revises the law to allow anyone to change their legal sex, just because they want to, women, children and trans people all become hostages to fortune.

Meanwhile, 14 years after Yogyakarta, policymakers across the world will be watching Scotland weather the storm.

This article first appeared on 22 January, 2020

In perhaps the surest sign of their newfound primacy, they have been not just authorised, but encouraged to participate in the ongoing protest actions. To clarify: these journalists haven’t merely been given the green-light to attend the gatherings as sympathetic observers, or even to frame their coverage in a positive light. Rather, they have been offered explicit institutional support to actively participate as protesters. (Some of these authorisations have been made public, while others have not.)

This represents quite a revolution in the prevailing mindset of mainstream media culture. Though it has exploded recently, its origins can be traced to 2016, when the rise of Donald Trump caused much of the political and media class to abandon a whole slew of reporting “norms” which had previously guided their conduct. Angered and traumatised by Trump, they adopted a radically new set of principles that would have been completely unrecognisable across the profession just a few years earlier.

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Whereas in the past, journalists who challenged the establishment media’s hoary allegiance to outmoded notions of “objectivity” were in the beleaguered minority, today they are fully in the mainstream, and conventional ideas about “objectivity” are being jettisoned Left and Right. This trend is especially pronounced among the rising generation of journalists in their twenties and thirties, although older colleagues are also increasingly susceptible.

This is not altogether a bad thing: pure “objectivity” was never a viable standard in the first place, often leading to skewed editorial choices, misplaced reporting priorities, phony “false equivalence”, and poor writing. However, since 2016 there has clearly been a dramatic overcorrection: what’s also being jettisoned is any remaining fidelity to what one might call impartiality. The lack of impartiality among journalists today helps explain why the media ecosystem they inhabit has been so integral in spawning the successive waves of moral panic that have engulfed US politics and culture over the past four years.

Just because something is a moral panic doesn’t mean its proximate causes are wholly fictitious. Take several instances that have arisen since the election of Trump, all with different features, and affecting different sectors of society, but all part of the same hysterical trajectory: #MeToo, “Nazi” alarmism and Russiagate. Sexual harassment and violence obviously exist, and sometimes go unreported; there really were a small band of “alt-right” instigators who gathered online and in person, inspired at least in part by Trump’s political success; and it is true that “Russian bots” probably do exist on social media to some negligible degree.

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Even so, all three of these phenomena took on straightforward qualities of moral panic, namely: wildly exaggerated claims with little or no connection to the facts at hand, prophecies of terrifying apocalyptic threats, public shaming rituals, thinly-veiled political and interpersonal score-settling, relentless policing of private beliefs and attitudes, and an all-encompassing, irrational, accusatory frenzy.

Likewise, it’s certainly true that black Americans are often subject to overzealous law enforcement practices, and in some cases wrongfully killed by the police — with the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis being the latest egregious example. But the subsequent quest by hypermoralising journalists and activists to impose their will on media institutions, often by employing the tactics of what one might call “emotional terrorism”, has nothing to do with George Floyd. Rather, it has everything to do with their desire for power. It just so happens that invoking the rhetoric of racial and ideological grievance is an especially effective strategy for bludgeoning liberal-Left media institutions into submission.

With the concept of “journalism” having been expanded beyond recognition to include all forms of “content-producing” activity on the internet, the sentiments of younger “journalists” have fused almost totally with the sentiments of pop cultural and corporate activists in the same peer group. Among this cohort, there is widespread adherence to the principle expounded by the actor Rachel Zegler — who while herself not technically in “media,” might as well be, given her online content-production style: “RACISM ISN’T A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION PLEASE STOP SAYING THAT,” she recently proclaimed. (Needless to say, there are certainly “differences of opinion” around the definition of “racism”.)

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Zegler’s attitude was distilled more crisply into a media context by E. Alex Jung, a senior writer at New York magazine, who declared: “The entire journalistic frame of ‘objectivity’ and political neutrality is structured around white supremacy.” Adhering to this mindset allows these journalists, and increasingly their employers, to deny that engaging in outright public protest activity is “political”, thus giving them licence to do essentially whatever they please without it being seen as an ethical breach.

As the panic rages, one media institution after another has capitulated to the demands of the more aggressive of these activists/journalists, who tend to be younger and inordinately effusive on social media. Indeed, a life suffused by social media — which incentivises elaborate public expressions of personal identity — is all they’ve ever known. (Many also seem to have gone stir-crazy from the still-ongoing lockdowns in the cities they tend to populate — such as New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.)

We are now left with an ascendant class of media activists who earnestly espouse the view, for example, that newspaper op-eds constitute literal “violence” — putting them and their loved ones in “danger”. Even avowedly progressive media outlets are currently being accused of “institutional racism” — as though the editors are plantation owners and prison wardens, as opposed to extremely sensitive, accommodating (and, frankly, paranoid) Left-liberals.

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If one delves into the background of this rising class of journalists, one frequently finds a CV replete with elite credentials and prestige. An instructive example is the Intercept journalist Akela Lacy, who attended the Baldwin School, one of the most prestigious private schools in the Philadelphia area, followed by an undergraduate tenure at the College of William and Mary, one of the most renowned higher education institutions in the entire country. But even with this impressive elite preparation, Lacy was reduced to sheer emotional exhaustion earlier this month after a disagreement with a colleague. “I’m so fucking tired,” she proclaimed in a dramatic Twitter tirade.

The reason Lacy was so very “tired” was because fellow Intercept staff member Lee Fang, one of the most accomplished journalists in online Left-wing media, had the audacity to interview some non-white people in communities afflicted by the recent riots, who offered observations that did not align with the prevailing liberal-Left activist media consensus on the subject. For this, Lacy condemned Fang as a “racist”.

Apart from their shared institutional affiliation, Lacy in practice has little to do with Fang; they work on opposite sides of the country. Yet a colleague propounding viewpoints and reportage that she finds disagreeable is apparently sufficient to affect her on such a visceral level that it would prompt a sensational online outburst. Compounding the pathetic nature of the incident, it was Fang who was ultimately coerced into apologising to Lacy, with his job hanging in the balance. And his Intercept colleagues, petrified of drawing “racism” accusations themselves, refused to come to his public defence.

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Having travelled to several of the cities that were afflicted with riots, I can confirm that black Americans on the sidewalk or stoop commonly express roughly the same sentiments as those who were interviewed by Fang — opposition to rioting and qualified concerns about the logic of the protests. That Lacy emerged as the victor in the confrontation shows just how warped the dynamics of US media culture have become. The power of those who use such tactics is being is being entrenched, and they are displacing those who exhibit even the most mild scepticism of their identity-centric activist worldview. In all likelihood, there is no turning back.

The new class of emotionally unstable journalists will dictate the culture and direction of the institutions for which they work. Self-censorship will accelerate, as those who fear for their job security will simply opt to say nothing rather than incur the risk of deviating ever-so-slightly from this new ideological consensus.

Whether you like it or not (I, for one, do not) those who occupy prominent media positions comprise a significant portion of the taste-making class of the US. Their influence on culture and politics is substantial. Hence, this isn’t just a “media story” — it’s a story about the epistemological rupture in the US polity that was provoked by the events of 2016, and ever since has grown more extreme. In isolation, these moral panics and collective mental breakdowns can be difficult to make sense of. But when you see them through the prism of America’s current status as a rapidly declining hegemonic power, it all becomes much more intelligible.

This is not to say that there aren’t many on the Left who consider themselves to be feminists and are happy with the party’s direction of the previous half-decade. It’s even true that in that time, Labour politicians have achieved a few feminist victories (although largely these have been accomplished by Stella Creasy in relation to abortion law, and without significant support from the front bench). But the kind of feminism permissible on the Left has been a narrow kind, with little room for discussion about its aims and underpinnings.

While Labour continued to offer its record in Government as proof that it was the natural home of women’s rights — the party of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), the Equality Act (2010) and all-women shortlists — it was simultaneously going to war on its own record by endorsing gender self-identification, which would render all those measures incoherent. And anyone who expressed doubts about gender identity as a solid basis for legislation would find out very fast that they had placed themselves firmly outside acceptable thought on the Left, despite the fact that self-identity was driven by the Conservative MP Maria Miller.

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Obviously, plenty of people on the Left still held these unacceptable thoughts. When Dawn Butler, then the shadow minister for women and equalities, uttered the absurdity that “a child is born without sex”, she was hardly voicing majority opinion on the Left. When Suzanne Moore wrote a Guardian column against the harassment and no-platforming of the historian Selina Todd for her gender-critical views, many outside the immediate blast zone of the issue were surprised that this could even be up for debate: of course women should be able to speak, especially when it comes to matters directly affecting their rights.

Nonetheless, it was Moore, not Butler, who was subject to bitter criticism from the Left. Saying you don’t believe in sex had become a safer Left-wing position than saying you do believe in women’s civil liberties. It doesn’t matter how solid your commitment to redistribution is, how fervent your anti-racism, how deep-rooted your ties to LGBT liberation, how committed you are to the trade union movement, how adamantly you support public services. A narrative was established that any criticism of trans activism could only come from the Right, with journalism in the paranoid style drawing feverish connections between British socialists and American evangelicals.

The perverse consequence of this is that many feminists have ended up closer to the Right than they ever imagined. Certainly I would not have predicted that a nice social democrat girl like me would end up writing defences of women’s toilets for the Spectator, or condemning rape threats against JK Rowling in the Telegraph — or rather, if you’d told me a decade ago that I couldn’t write these things for a Left-wing outlet, I would have been very shocked indeed. (Then again, I’d have been surprised to learn there would ever be an occasion to write them.)

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But politics has shifted drastically during my adulthood. Old boundaries and expectations do not apply. The best description I’ve read of this shift has come in a New York Times column by Ross Douthat (and the me of a decade ago would also have been surprised to find myself aligned with Douthat given that I’m a pro-choice feminist and he’s a firm opponent of abortion, but here we are).

Progressive movements, he argues, are no longer beholden to conventional liberal principles. Instead, they “contain within themselves both reformist and revolutionary tendencies, and progressives regularly move back and forth between the two”. This is, he points out, what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology” – successor, because it is primed to succeed liberalism, although it so far lacks an internal coherence of its own.

So a feminist might ask how self-identification would work in the prison system where vulnerable women need to be protected from predatory male offenders, and the successor ideology response would be that we should abolish the prison-industrial complex, at which point segregation would cease to be an issue. Or, if the issue is how to include trans women in refuges, the successor ideology could answer that the real aim should be ending all male violence rather than just ameliorating its effects — a laudable goal, but a remote one.

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It’s a shift to utopianism that evades all responsibility for material conditions in the present, while justifying the removal of rights now as a trade-off against the glorious kingdom to come. Why do you need free speech to talk about sex when you have the post-gender future to look forward to? (Means of reaching the post-gender future remaining very much TBC.) For feminism, which has to be about directly improving women’s lives and prospects if it’s to be about anything at all, this is all deeply unsatisfying. If the Right is able to offer at least a common ground of norms, why not work there?

In any case, the idea that feminism inherently belongs to the Left is — if not false, at least a bit flaky. The suffragists and suffragettes covered a whole range of political opinion with outliers on Left and Right, united by their belief that they should be able to express those opinions at the ballot box. The second wave was galvanised by a split between the women’s movement and the anti-war Left.

Keir Starmer’s Labour has clearly signalled its intent to move beyond inchoate radicalism and get back to policy on women’s issues, and this is very positive, but feminism can no more be taken for granted by the Left than the “red wall” could. And if women stop shaping their demands to fit a political movement that has clearly signalled its complacency towards them, and start working in the interests of their sex regardless of affiliation, feminism could emerge from this bleak era with a force it hasn’t had since the last century.

Future historians may marvel how that meeting of human rights groups in Yogyakarta established gender identity as an innate human quality and decided that it must be protected in law. At the time, in 2006, political commentators at home were more concerned with the so-called Granita Pact, and whether Tony Blair would ever resign in Gordon Brown’s favour. But Yogyakarta triggered a chain of events that would eventually challenge the use of biological sex to divide humanity. While the definition of gender identity was vague — how can you define what is in essence a feeling in our heads? — the vision was grand.

Fast forwards to 2015 and attention in the UK was turning towards our membership of the EU. However, it was the Council of Europe — the organisation that we are not leaving — that drove the agenda in Europe when it passed Resolution 2048 and called on all member states to enshrine gender identity in national law, and thereby displace biological sex. Without the democratic scrutiny that surrounded prime ministerial succession and Brexit, Resolution 2048 shook the very foundations of human society — what it means to be a man or a woman.

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

By Debbie Hayton

The impact on society is profound. At this very moment, Scotland is considering a change to the law that would allow people to change their legal sex without producing evidence of a psychological need. While they are not protecting gender identity — that would require a change to the Equality Act, which is not a devolved matter — it will have much the same effect.

“The Scottish Government seem bent on pushing badly written and poorly defined legislative change,” the Scottish campaigning group forwomen.scot tells me, “without due consideration for the potentially massive implications for the social and legal position of women in Scotland.”

Legislative change that has been planned in the dark. According to recent guidance for activists uncovered by the legal website Roll on Friday, secrecy is crucial: “Avoid excessive press coverage and exposure,” it urged. If society had been aware of the implications, those campaigners may not have been given such a free run as they lobbied governments to adopt Resolution 2048.

The tactics were highly effective. Immediately after the 2015 UK election, the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee turned their attention to Transgender Equality. Following a consultation that provoked just 208 responses, the committee report recommended that the Government should introduce self-declaration of gender, and establish gender identity as a protected characteristic. In the ensuing Parliamentary debate the Yogyakarta principles were cited as some exotic sounding authority.

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Why don't trans activists practise what they preach?

By Meghan Murphy

Elsewhere in Europe, the tide kept advancing. As Malta and then Ireland both passed laws based on Resolution 2048, liberals and progressives were kept on board or — more likely — in the dark. Meanwhile, the occasional dissenter could be denounced as a hateful bigot and probably a Nazi.

Government consultations were announced at Westminster and separately in Scotland, where gender recognition is a devolved matter. Few people cared apart from transgender activists. Small groups of women did meet to share their concerns, but their gatherings provoked outrageous responses from supposed progressives.

Politics changed at Speakers’ Corner in London on 13 September 2017 when 26-year old Tara Wolf — a self-declared trans woman — assaulted 60-year old Maria Maclachlan before one of those meetings (Wolf was fined £150 by magistrates). A group of female trade unionists decided enough was enough, and two months later their new group, Woman’s Place UK, held its first meeting in Cambridge. They drew in big name speakers including Linda Bellos and Beatrix Campbell, and the tide began to turn. Within two years they filled the QE II Conference Centre in Westminster.

In an increasingly febrile environment, governments dithered. The consultations were delayed creating a political vacuum that exacerbated the situation: hope and good will were replaced by fear and anger; compromise was out, confrontation was in.

suggested reading

Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Scotland consulted first. By 1 March 2018, 15,697 responses had been submitted — rather more than 208. Westminster began its consultation four months later. When it closed on 22 October that year, more than 100,000 responses filled the electronic postbag, according to unofficial reports. The official figure is still not known because over a year later the findings of the Westminster consultation remain unpublished. Priorities have moved on, and it seems unlikely that Boris Johnson’s government will want to devote any time to gender recognition legislation. If it weren’t for Scotland, that may have been the end of it.

Scotland continued to dither. They neither threw out gender recognition nor moved forwards with confidence. They drafted a bill but started consulting a second time, a process that is currently underway. It closes on 17 March this year. The outcome will be felt south of the border and beyond our shores as the world watches Scotland deal with the hurricane.

The political divisions are profound. On one side are the arguments that we trans people have a difficult time, and simplifying gender recognition makes our lives a little easier. But this is about more than trans individuals, it is about society.

Allowing male people to declare themselves female for reasons known only to themselves is open to abuse, and any law that relies on well-meaning people declaring that (abusive) men wouldn’t do that, would they? is questionable at best.

suggested reading

Don't give in to the bullying trans activists

By Graham Linehan

Women’s spaces are not protected because all men present a hazard, but a few do. In the same way, we don’t lock our doors at night because all passers-by are a hazard. But in both cases, some people will abuse trust and women need to take precautions just like householders need to take precautions.

The inconvenient truth is that transwomen are male, and — as a group — we present the same hazard that men present. Women can no more differentiate nice trans from nasty trans than they can distinguish nice men from nasty men. Allowing us to declare ourselves to be trans and then immediately self-identify into women’s spaces makes the boundaries meaningless. It is a safeguarding nightmare.

This matters for Scotland. Gender recognition is a devolved matter and it is for Scotland to decide how to progress, but if they are wise they will consider what is happening across the world. In Canada, for example, where the transwoman Jessica Yaniv is making a mockery of a 2016 amendment to the British Columbia Human Rights Code that protects self-declared gender identity. Yaniv took action (later dismissed) against female beauticians for refusing to wax what would in more normal times have been considered to be male genitals.

While the Scottish government may claim in their consultation (Para 3.20) that they do “not wish trans people to go through procedures which are demeaning, intrusive, distressing and stressful”, it’s a matter of debate whether being asked to provide medical evidence of a need to change your legal sex is demeaning. I don’t think it is, though like many trans people I have never felt the need to change the sex on my birth certificate in any case. We shouldn’t need to lie about the past in order to live in the present.

suggested reading

The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

But this matters for more than Scotland. Fourteen years after Yogyakarta the policy juggernaut has paused in the UK, but it has not gone away. The pressure from transgender activists is incessant.

While the Westminster Government may be less sympathetic to reform, how long would someone need to be resident in Scotland in order to qualify in Scotland? England and Wales would no doubt recognise Scottish paperwork — even ‘Gretna Green’ paperwork — as equivalent to our own, and come under pressure to mirror Scottish legislation. The juggernaut would spring back to life, putting three vulnerable groups at risk.

• Women, who lose control of their own boundaries. If any male person can declare themselves to be a female person, those boundaries become meaningless. While few men would call themselves women just to access women’s spaces, those that would are the reason those boundaries are needed.
• Children, who are told that they can choose their gender and — if they believe their body to be wrong — may end up railroaded into medical and surgical interventions. Children young enough to believe in the tooth fairy are not old enough to be put on a path that can lead to infertility, loss of sexual function, and medication for life.
• Trans people who risk losing the goodwill we rely on. Attempts to change the law to our advantage by policing the words — and even the thoughts — of others will not end well for us. If the Scottish Government doesn’t see the problem, others will and those people may find popular support and rebuild society in a way that is genuinely unkind to us.

Consultations are not referenda. They are opportunities for people to pass on their wisdom and experience to inform decisions made by policy makers.

suggested reading

Of course biological sex exists

By Tom Chivers

There is a debate, even among trans people. While Owl Fisher, for example, has spoken about a moral panic over transwomen using women-only services, Kristina Harrison empathised with women when she wrote: “Perhaps you can begin to understand the concerns of many women when it is increasingly being asserted in practice, if not fully in law, that simply identifying as a woman means being able to access women’s and girls’ private, formerly single-sex, spaces — toilets, rape-crisis centres and so on.”

Decisions need to take place in openness and transparency, and following widespread consultation. We can all have an opinion on something as fundamental as what it means to be a man or a woman. Is it determined by our sex, or is it a feeling in our heads? The consultation is open until 17 March, and it’s vital that we all have our say to ensure Scotland gets this right. If Scotland revises the law to allow anyone to change their legal sex, just because they want to, women, children and trans people all become hostages to fortune.

Meanwhile, 14 years after Yogyakarta, policymakers across the world will be watching Scotland weather the storm.

Which means that at any other time, the fact that she has built an election platform on the twin planks of making it impossible to measure sex inequality and eliminating women-only spaces, would get her rightfully trashed as a hypocrite.

But we don’t live in any other time. We live in 2019, when the actual “sex” part of sexism makes the most fastidious of progressive speakers squeamish, and talking about women’s rights is seen as dreadfully passé. We’re not supposed to think that oppression occurs on the basis of bodies any more. Instead, it’s framed as question of feelings: everyone has a gender identity, we’re told, and injustice occurs when people aren’t treated in accordance with the identity they claim to have.

Suggested reading

The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

It’s a supremely liberal logic, because it’s wholly individualistic. The problem is no longer to free women from male violence and exploitation, it’s a matter of personal liberty. As Swinson said during her interview with Andrew Marr, she supports gender self-identity so that “everybody can be themselves and be free to live their lives”. Under this reasoning, it would be a deep cruelty to turn a transwoman away from a women’s refuge because it would be a denial of the transwoman’s deeply held sense of self.

But what about the women who need the refuge? There are services for male victims that a transwoman could access. Female victims, who need female-only refuges as a sanctuary from male violence, don’t have that option. They aren’t trying to access women’s services to validate their identities: they’re trying to access women’s services because they’ve been terrified and traumatised by men.

This obvious truth — that women and transwomen both need refuges from male violence, and that there must be separate institutions for everyone to have the security they deserve — is an unspeakable act of transphobia in the eyes of anyone who has accepted the rule of gender identity. Women who have already suffered violence from males who identified as trans to access supposedly female spaces (such as the victims of the rapist Karen White, who sexually assaulted fellow inmates after being moved to a women’s prison) are merely regrettable collateral.

Suggested reading

Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Single-sex refuges, changing rooms, sports, prisons and toilets were established for women’s protection. When women are forced to share them with males — however those males identify — women are not “free to live their lives”, because they can’t be free from male violence. And there is no test we can apply to reliably identify men who will abuse a system of gender self-identity. Despite the Lib Dem MP Layla Moran’s claim that “I see someone in their soul and as a person. I do not really care whether they have a male body”, soul reading is not yet an objective test.

One of the Lib Dems’ other commitments is to “improve diversity in public appointments by setting ambitious targets”. Ambitious targets sound great, but they’re meaningless without any mechanism for achieving them, all the more so if there’s no way to measure them. Replacing sex with self-identified gender (rather than recording both sex and trans status) immediately renders any sex-disaggregated data farcical. It only takes a handful of male executives ticking the “woman” box in wage-gap reporting for the underpayment of hundreds of junior women to be obliterated.

Actually, Swinson has personal experience of the strange distortions of gender identity applied to sex inequality. Writing in Equal Power about her time working at Viking FM in the 2000s and how male-dominated radio is, she says: “In fact the gender balance was slightly better than we knew at the time, as our anchor breakfast presenter was Stephanie Hirst, at the time known as Simon.” She does not appear to be joking.

Suggested reading

All the world's a stage for the trans ultras

By Stephen Pollard

Hirst was, by all external warrants, a man; was hired as a man; was treated by colleagues as a man. Subsequently coming out as a transwoman is personally brave, but it doesn’t retroactively alter the maleness of Viking FM in the previous decade, any more than Swinson would stop being the Lib Dem’s first female leader if she were to declare herself non-binary.

The party’s festishisation of “freedom to” means that it’s offering freedom in name only, which is no kind of freedom for women who need protections for their sex rather than permission for their self-expression. Judged by her feminist credentials, Jo Swinson is a disaster.

On Twitter, McKinnon celebrated, announcing: “First transgender woman world champion…ever.” Jennifer Wagner-Assali, the woman who came in third, wasn’t so pleased. She tweeted: “It’s definitely NOT fair.”

Wagner-Assali later apologised for “not properly congratulating” McKinnon and for “fanning the flames”.

I apologize, @rachelvmckinnon , for not properly congratulating you on race day. I hope you accept it a few days late. Congratulations and enjoy your off-season. Thanks, everyone, for reading. –Jennifer

— Jennifer Assali (@jkwagnermd) October 18, 2018

But let’s not pretend she doesn’t have a point. Men and women’s bodies are different. Men are, quite simply, bigger. They have larger organs, bigger bones, and a higher ratio of muscle mass; they have bigger lungs, bigger hearts, and higher oxygen carrying capacity than women. They are generally stronger and faster than women.

Men and women are biologically different in many ways beyond this, but for the purposes of discussing what is “fair” and what is not, in sport, these points are obvious to most. The truth is, there is no possible way to change an adult male, physiologically, into a female.

Despite being a self-declared expert on “the ethics, law, and science of trans athletics”, McKinnon ignores this. Instead, he cites his “human right” to compete, accusing his detractors of having an “irrational fear of transwomen”. As he writes:

“I’m a professor. I teach courses on ethics, including sports ethics, and I’m teaching a course on sport and gender, focusing on the question: Is it fair for trans women to compete in women’s sport? My work answers that question clearly. Yes, it is fair.”

He qualifies this by simply saying that his ID now says he is female. The whole episode pretty much sums up the problem with gender identity ideology and legislation: when males are allowed to change their legal sex on official documents, women get shafted.

The transgender movement has yet to demonstrate what the difference is between a “transwoman” and a male. In fact, it has yet to define what it means to be transgender in any coherent way. But it isn’t even being asked to – all it is being asked for is the correct ID.

So an athlete who competed as a male last year is allowed to compete alongside women today, and any man who declares himself a woman has the right to enter women’s changing rooms, transition houses and washrooms. Those who dispute or question this are called “cruel”, “hateful”, and “bigoted”, and told to live and let live.

Suggested Listening

Test article

By Julie Bindel and Trevor Phillips

In Canada, something similar has happened. A biological man who self-identifies as a woman been calling beauty salons demanding a “Brazilian bikini wax”. When he was refused treatment – waxing male genitalia requires a different technique and supplies, besides the female beauticians might not feel entirely comfortable carrying out the procedure  – he claimed discrimination on account of the fact that he is a “transwoman”. He filed 16 complaints on this basis at the BC Human Rights Tribunal, citing discrimination on the basis of “gender identity”. But what of the rights of the woman asked to wax a man’s scrotum?

And then you have the blatantly abusive cases. Such as that of Karen White (previously Stephen Terence Wood), who was moved to a women’s prison despite numerous rape charges, and, who within days of arriving, attacked four women. In May, nine women filed a lawsuit against Naomi’s House, a shelter for homeless women, and its parent company, the Poverello House, after a man identifying as female was allowed to stay at the shelter, and sexually harassed numerous residents.

The consequences of self-identification can range from the unjust to the criminal. And in all cases it’s the women who are forced to put aside their comfort and safety to accommodate this choice. But when challenged, trans activists like McKinnon reply: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Let’s be kind to each other.”

Being kind is all fine and good, but when it comes to dramatic policy and legislative changes that have harmful effects on women, we need rational, evidence-based arguments, not appeals to people’s emotions. Unfortunately, though, this is complicated by the fact that there is a troubling trend among young college-age “social justice activists” that expects people to fall in line through emotional manipulation, with no attempt at a convincing argument.

Suggested reading

The media could make a serious difference to trans lives – why won't it?

By Owl Fisher

I’ve seen this first hand. Last month, I gave a talk in Kitchener, Ontario about the impact of trans activism on women’s rights. What was most interesting (and revealing) to me were the questions and comments from trans activists. One young woman asked, “How do you think your non-inclusive perception of woman and your non-inclusive language actually affects transgender people… [Do] you think you’re hurting their feelings?” In other words, rather than address any of the arguments I’d made in my talk, respond to any of the questions I’d asked or to any of the concerns I’d brought up, she wanted to talk about people’s “feelings”.

When I asked her to define the word “woman,” she replied, “I don’t want to be put on the spot.” When I asked why the word “woman” shouldn’t exclude men, she didn’t respond, and repeated, “I’m wondering how you think your words are affecting people’s feelings.”

I said, “Your words are affecting people’s lives.” Afterwards, the young woman tweeted, “I want to cry because I was just asking this question in attempt to understand if this woman possesses basic empathy… Deeply saddened by the blatant hate at this event yesterday.”

Far from uncommon, this is a go-to strategy on the parts of trans activists. When asked to explain their claims that “transwomen are women”, that individuals can change their sex, or, simply, what a “transwoman” or a “woman” is, they will refuse to respond, and instead accuse the questioner of being “mean,” “hurtful,” “hateful” or “bigoted”.

It’s a successful tactic, since most people do not wish to be considered “bad” or “hateful”. But when it comes to debating ideas and public policy, it makes no sense to avoid critical thinking or evidence, lest we upset those lobbying for the changes or ideology. Imagine if we were asked not to debate war or capitalism or climate change, lest it hurt the feelings of warmongers and capitalists and climate change deniers?

But beyond that, since when did being “nice” entail lying? Or rejecting critical thought? Is it “nice” to accept dogma one believes is harmful or irrational? If someone told you the earth was flat, would you agree in order to avoid hurting their feelings?

Suggested reading

Why the transbullies are a threat to us all

By Julie Bindel

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind, sees this trend as having originated on college campuses, where students have “medicalized” their aversion to certain ideas, books, words, and speakers. Rather than simply protest, as they would have in the past, students are claiming that these ideas, books, words, and speakers are actually harmful, traumatising, or even “literal violence”. And rather than debate these difficult ideas, they no-platform speakers and entirely avoid having to examine what, exactly, they say or believe is troubling about the ideas or words in question.

This isn’t an attitude that will save us from bad policies or harmful political ideologies. In fact, it is already preventing us from forming good ideas and legislation with regard to trans issues. Nor is it good philosophical practice to accept dogma unquestioningly. Besides, how “nice” is it to demand the public go along with your preferred beliefs, lest they be blacklisted, bullied, fired, threatened, or labelled as “bigoted”?

I’ve been threatened with violence online countless times, simply for asking questions about transgender ideology and gender identity legislation. Recently, Twitter locked my account because I tweeted the phrase, “men aren’t women”. This doesn’t strike me as particularly “nice” or open-minded behaviour. Yet somehow I am the one accused of “hate”.

Hi everyone! I've been locked out of Twitter since Monday morning. They demanded I remove the viral tweet complaining about having been locked out last week for saying that men aren't women. The tweet was at like 20,000 likes so I guess they didn't like that.

— Meghan Murphy (@MeghanEMurphy) November 21, 2018

Twitter’s response, after I appealed the suspension, was that I had engaged in “hateful conduct”, thereby breaking “Twitter Rules”. The company declined to elaborate on how saying “men aren’t women” is “hateful” or where, specifically, in Twitter’s Terms of Service, it states users are not permitted to differentiate between men and women.

You may successfully shut people up using these tactics, just as people are silenced and made fearful of rocking the boat under dictatorships. But if this is the preferred way forward, let’s not carry on the charade of describing trans activism as a progressive movement towards acceptance. It smacks, instead, of tyranny.