Six months later, she was sacked. “I’m now on the barred list alongside Wayne Couzens and multiple rapist David Carrick,” she tells me.

Her crimes, though, were of a rather different order: remarks deemed sexist and transphobic. Colleagues alleged that she repeatedly referred to men in derogatory terms, regularly stating “I hate men”, “fucking men”, and on one occasion, “all men are rapists”. She also faced complaints for comments about transgender people. The allegations were upheld, and the career of a detective who spent 24 years investigating violence against women and children was summarily terminated.

Critics will characterize Fletcher’s remarks as straightforward misandry, and she herself accepts that some of what she said might be seen as offensive and inappropriate. Her defense, though, is not that the remarks were acceptable, but that they were made in the context of investigating repeated male violence against women, and that they have been judged by a disciplinary standard not consistently applied elsewhere.

The vast majority of male perpetrators of domestic violence and stalking are never arrested — let alone convicted. Just as shockingly, the Government’s early-release scheme will apply to those few who were jailed; soon, these dangerous men will be let loose to continue their war of attrition against their victims. In the meantime, a police officer who put heart and soul into protecting victims of the most heinous crimes has been sacked for hurting the feelings of male colleagues.

Why, then, was Fletcher deemed to be such a significant disciplinary problem?

Partly, this was because she was an outlier in the force — a woman of low rank who nevertheless spoke out against self-ID and what she saw as dangerous practices within the police (including the controversial ruling on strip searches for transgender individuals). She was chair of Northumbria Police SEEN, an independent body set up by women in the force in order to challenge sex discrimination and uphold the rights and protections that relate to sex, as set out in the Equality Act 2010. Her forthright approach to these matters, she believes, set her at odds with the DEI squad.

“From the beginning of this process,” she tells me, “it has felt like they wanted rid of me. And mainly because I do not hold the views of the force about gender ideology. I have been very clear that I believe self-ID is a disaster, and that gender ideology in general is anti-women.”

Context is everything, though, and Fletcher’s determination to speak out was all taking place as the entire police force embraced Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (EDI) policies and training. As Dominic Adler stated in his investigation for UnHerd: “Fantasies of inclusion are colliding with the brick wall of reality”. Indeed, Northumbria Police, in particular, has been criticized for taking its trans rights ethos too far, being seen to take a side in a highly politicized, deeply contested social issue, while internally admonishing those who refuse to toe the accepted line.

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Fletcher’s first “crime” was to express her views about how prevalent woman-hating is across society following Sarah Everard’s murder in November 2021. Some male colleagues, we subsequently learned, became “upset and offended” when she said that the only way to stop night-time rape is to put a nine-o’clock curfew on all men.

“I am upset that Sarah Everard was raped and murdered by a police officer,” she tells me in response. “It happened because of misogyny, and that’s the problem that they should be looking at, not me talking about it.” It’s worth recalling that police did suggest a curfew at the time — just one for women.

The next time she ran into trouble was in March 2023, when she complained about online training materials that had been issued as part of the EDI force strategy. One was a TED talk by Sophie Cook, a trans activist and TV newsreader. “He was talking about how he transitioned and how when he was feeling suicidal, he went and bought some make-up, and everything was better after that.”

Fletcher sent emails complaining about the Sophie Cook material. In the emails, she stated that it was offensive and misogynistic for men to claim they know what it’s like to be a woman. She explained in her complaint that she feared the force would “sleepwalk into self-ID, which would be a disaster”. Of particular concern to her was trans-identified men arrested for rape being recorded as female. “How would this work,” she points out, “with our research policy, and our crime recording?” It would completely skew the data about male violence if these were deemed to be female crimes.

Fletcher also complained about a presentation on “The power of pronouns”, delivered by a trans man and another member of the DEI team. Attendees were warned that refusal to use preferred pronouns would cause harm. Again, these were sent by email. And each time, Fletcher says she received an acknowledgment promising to review her complaints and come back to her. “But they never did, they just reported me to Professional Standards.”

When she was finally told by her sergeant that there had been complaints made against her, which would be investigated, she said out loud, “God, this is ridiculous. I’m getting done by the fucking rainbow unit!”

One complainant in the case who was in the room when she made that comment is PC Kevin Thompson, who is gay, and a passionate ally of trans people. In his statement for the tribunal he claimed that: “As a man working in that environment, I felt quite intimidated by her radical views.” It is probably noteworthy that, at the time, he insisted he wasn’t offended, and, indeed, continued to say as much until the gross misconduct disciplinary was being constructed. At that point Thompson, along with various others who had not felt moved to complain when offense was caused, suddenly decided to go on the record.

Given that the police service is now recognized as one of the most institutionally misogynistic institutions in the land, it is ironic that a woman with previous exemplary service has been sacked for making off-the-cuff remarks about male violence and women’s rights. As Fletcher puts it: “Without doubt, these trumped-up allegations came about because the entire force has been captured by gender ideology,” says Fletcher. “They went on a massive fishing expedition to gather as much dirt on me as possible so they could get rid of the big-mouthed feminist.”

The issue, then, is not whether Fletcher’s remarks and complaints were appropriate, but whether they justified dismissal when allegations of far more serious misconduct by male officers have often been dealt with less severely. Of the almost 1,000 officers facing formal internal proceedings for police perpetrated abuse, over half had their cases addressed in standard misconduct meetings — rather than gross misconduct tribunals — and so were protected from dismissal. Indeed, Northumbria police seems to be a textbook study of misogyny in the force. We learned, in 2024, that 64 Northumbria Police officers had been accused of sexual or domestic abuse in the previous four years. And, back in 2015, the chief constable, after also being accused of “rudeness”, claimed that she was treated differently because she was a woman.

It was the same story with Fletcher. “I was sacked because I challenged their unlawful conduct and their discriminatory conduct,” she claims. And she goes on to describe how not one colleague reported her at the time. They were all spoken to later on by a senior officer who was collecting “dirt”, mindful of the fact that Fletcher was repeatedly raising the fact that Northumbria Police has a huge problem with women.

If Fletcher sees her case as a witch-hunt, her fight is not over. She is preparing for an employment tribunal against Northumbria Police on the grounds of belief discrimination, and she will rely on the Forstater ruling, which held that gender-critical views deserve legal protection.

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement for any women considering joining the force. As Fletcher puts it in characteristically robust fashion: “I feel like I’ve been in an abusive relationship with my employer for about the last five years.” What woman would willingly sign up for that?

Back in January 2004, the year I left academia to become a full-time journalist, I wrote a column for Guardian Weekend Magazine on the issue of transsexuality. It was entitled “Gender Benders, Beware”. It wasn’t the first time I had written about the issue. But this piece in particular lit the touchpaper for a fire that is still burning even today.

I wrote it on the suggestion of the magazine’s editor, Katharine Viner. She wanted, she said, something about the trans issue. At that point, I mainly wrote about male violence, and sometimes lesbian politics. I had no other direction from her, except the deadline. So I wrote about how a bastardised version of “human rights” was being used against women, with Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR) as an example.

In August 1995, two of VRR’s employees had asked Kimberly Nixon, a trans-identified male, to leave its counsellor training as they thought it might not be appropriate for a man to be treating abused women. Nixon immediately filed a human rights complaint and began suing VRR. The legal battle was long and arduous. In 2002, Nixon won $7,500, the highest amount ever awarded by the tribunal, for injury to “her dignity”. But when I wrote my piece, that decision had just been overturned.

Here’s a taster: “…having not experienced life as a ‘woman’ until middle age, Nixon assumed ‘she’ would be suitable to counsel women who have chosen to access a service that offers support to women who have suffered similar experiences, not from a man in a dress! The Rape Relief sisters, who do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman, successfully challenged the ruling and, for now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.”

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It was like a bomb going off. The letters page exploded. Two-hundred-odd complaints landed and, in his weekly column, the readers’ editor felt bound to apologise on behalf of the newspaper, claiming my words had: “…abused an already abused minority that The Guardian might have been expected to protect”.

This was my Rubicon. The gay press, which had never been fond of me, pretty much declared war and I became a figure of hate for transactivists. The Guardian was and is the only newspaper that employed a dedicated “readers’ editor” to whom complaints can be made about anything that appears in the publication. The organised lobby of transactivists availed themselves of the opportunity to make a huge scene about my piece, claiming that it was an incitement to violence and warning that no LGBT person would read the paper again unless I was fired.

Viner defended me to the hilt and continued to commission me. But these were just the starting salvos in a war of attrition waged by the transactivists: I received death and rape threats, and would be met by a baying mob of protesters wherever I appeared to do a public presentation.

If I thought things were bad, I drew some comfort in being shortlisted for the 2008 Stonewall Journalist of the Year Award. Back then, I was still the only out lesbian journalist in mainstream media and I was writing about issues that were vitally important to lesbians and, indeed, women. Alas, what should have been a moment to actually celebrate my achievements for the under-represented became an opportunity for transactivists to target me. One Stonewall insider told me they were getting up to 20 calls a day demanding my removal from the shortlist. And as I arrived at the ceremony, I was greeted by a 200-strong picket made up of trans people and allies, all screaming “Bindel the bigot!”, “transphobe!” and other such terms of endearment. This, it later transpired, was the largest ever transactivist demo in the UK: effectively, the dawn of the modern trans rights movement.

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And no, even though I was the firm favourite, I didn’t take home the prize — it went to Miriam Stoppard, the Daily Mirror’s Agony Aunt who had offered decent advice to a reader whose son had come out as gay in one of her columns. A win by me, I was told by one insider, could have “ruined Stonewall”.

Instead, the mob tried to ruin me. Invitations to prestigious events were withdrawn. I was shortlisted for awards, only to be un-shortlisted when the organisers found themselves under pressure. And in 2009, I became the first individual, alongside six fascist organisations, to be no-platformed by the National Union of Students. And as my name became dirt, the influence of transactivists grew.

By 2011, the media had begun platforming transwomen. Juliet Jacques was charting their “transgender journey” in The Guardian, and Channel 4 screened the reality series, My Transsexual Summer. In 2012, Trans Media Watch (TMW) a tiny charity with massive power gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, claiming that coverage in the mainstream media was almost always prejudicial. TMW began flexing its muscles with the big news outlets, offering “training” and “advice”. And, suddenly, the trans issue was everywhere. Activists were pushing to do away with the requirement for a rubber stamp from medical professionals in order to be allowed to access cross sex hormones and surgery, and the murmurings of “self-identification” as a way forward were getting louder. At the same time, the T was increasingly attached to the LGB acronym.

So, it was a surprise when, in February 2014, the acting Stonewall CEO, Ruth Hunt, emailed asking if I’d like to meet her for a drink. I was by now a loud critic of the organisation, considering it assimilationist and conformist, as well as focused far too much on gay men. Almost immediately, the conversation turned to the trans issue. Hunt told me there was “no way” Stonewall was going to add the T to the LGB if she was offered the permanent post, and that she would go no further than help set up and support a separate organisation for trans people.

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Well, what happened next? When, that summer, Hunt was revealed as the new CEO of Stonewall, she met with transactivists to discuss how the organisation could become more trans inclusive and apologised for my nomination in 2008.

Then, in 2015, I was invited to debate the question: “Does modern feminism have a problem with free speech?” by the University of Manchester Free Speech and Secular Society. My opponent was Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-Right agitator and misogynist who opposed abortion rights and blamed women for rape. Following the predictable trans activist pile-on, the Women’s Officer decided I should be publicly disinvited because my presence could “incite hatred towards and exclusion of our trans students”, and my views were “dangerous for trans people and…for feminist and liberation movements in general”. A feminist activist was being silenced while a self-proclaimed misogynist was welcome. Yiannopoulos was eventually disinvited after feminists kicked up a fuss. People were beginning to finally twig that trans activism was a front for woman-hatred, otherwise, why treat the actual transphobic bigot as far less of a threat than the left-wing feminist campaigning to end male violence?

It was a lonely time, despite a handful of other feminists speaking out and organising against transgender ideology. But the growing grip of gender ideology was a force to be reckoned with. And they had made me a pariah. When, for instance, I was invited in 2016 to speak to the Salford Working Class Movement Library about growing up as a working-class lesbian in north-east England, hundreds of mainly middle-class students petitioned the library to de-platform me, claiming I was a bigot. They even went after the library’s funders, who were told I was “transphobic”, “biphobic”, “Islamophobic”, “hateful,” and “anti-sex work”. I was also a Terf (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) — a nasty term coined by self-described “trans ally” Viv Smythe, bemoaning what she considered to be “anti-trans” coverage in the British press.

Undaunted, the library volunteers stood their ground, and the event went ahead in February 2017. It was standing room only. I hadn’t intended to mention trans ideology (strangely enough, it wasn’t much of an issue on my run-down council estate in the Seventies). But, once I was in that room, having been escorted by security guards past yet another baying mob, I cracked and spent 15 minutes talking about the rising transactivist hatred towards women, especially lesbians. And then we moved on to my lesbian awakening.

It has been a torrid two decades. I have been physically threatened and attacked on several occasions. Obscenities and threats are hurled at me. The irony escapes these activists — generally trans-identifying males — that I am a feminist who campaigns to prevent violence against women.

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I’m lucky, though, that unlike some women, such as my friends Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix and Maya Forstater, I had no job to be hounded out of. I work as a freelancer. And despite being slowly frozen out of writing for The Guardian over the past decade, I have always had plenty of work. But these past 20 years have not been easy.

What hurts most is being labelled a bigot, homophobe and fascist. After all, I have chosen to spend all my life, since coming out as a lesbian at 15, campaigning to end bigotry. And I like to think I still do. Last September, I was back in Vancouver, meeting the brilliant women I wrote about all those years ago, many of whom are now close friends. They are still under attack by transactivists, and have had cuts to their funding, and even a rat nailed to the door of their centre by blue-fringed misogynists. But they, like me, persist.

For Maria, the chance to work for one of Oxfam’s global outreach programmes, helping to end violence against women in the workplace, was a dream come true. And for a few years, it was — right up until the moment a fellow co-worker asked on an internal messageboard if Oxfam shops should ban the sale of J.K. Rowling’s books.

Three years ago, the Harry Potter author found herself accused of transphobia for having supported women who have “concerns around single-sex spaces”. During a discussion on Oxfam’s intranet, Maria had come to the defence of Britain’s most popular living author, asking for evidence of Rowling’s supposed transphobia. It was a decision that prompted a gruelling internal investigation, one in which Maria struggled to clear her name, led to her having a nervous breakdown and leaving both her job and the country.

Oxfam eventually offered a grovelling apology for the “procedural mistakes” that caused Maria such upset, but she is still struggling to make sense of it all. Speaking for the first time about the episode, she reveals: “My life has been torn apart. It drove me to a breakdown, I lost my confidence and, worst of all, I began to doubt myself.”

What Maria endured is part of a wider woke culture in the charitable sector, where female employees are silenced and treated like bigots for believing that sex-based rights matter. Certainly, Maria is so convinced that her career remains in danger — that any woman accused of transphobia will be blacklisted by much of the charitable sector, even when they have been exonerated — that she has agreed to speak to UnHerd under a pseudonym. “This will hang over me for the rest of my life,” she says. For decades, Oxfam — which was formed in 1942 to send food supplies to starving mothers and children in Nazi-occupied Greece — was one of the UK’s most respected charities, providing international aid to end hardship around the globe. But in recent years, its reputation has been tarnished. In 2018, evidence emerged that senior staff had paid survivors of the 2010 Haiti earthquake for sex, and that the use of prostitutes during the relief effort was covered up by the charity, allegations that Oxfam denies.

It was Maria’s concern for vulnerable women that first drew her to work for Oxfam: “I have experienced rape and domestic violence in the past, so I wanted to help others in the same situation.” Born in Spain, where she had worked as a pre-school teacher and volunteered at a sexual assault centre, she moved to the UK in 2017.

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“I loved my job,” says Maria, “being able to see how Oxfam’s work improves the lives of other women and children.” Three years after joining the charity, she was promoted to a co-ordinating role within the women’s rights team, whose remit was to ensure that female equality was reflected in Oxfam’s work.

She realised almost immediately how impossible that aim would be, given the growing dominance of a pro-trans mindset within Oxfam. Along with many other charities and institutions, it had capitulated to gender-based ideals, ones that asserts that “trans women are women” and that the categories of male and female are on a spectrum, rather than biological realities. On the advice of Stonewall — the discredited charity whose workplace diversity scheme sought to “recognise and celebrate the efforts of leading employers to advance LGBT inclusion” — Oxfam advised its employees to state their pronouns in meetings and on correspondence. “It was regularly using Stonewall materials to advise staff on LGBTQ+ inclusion in the workplace, with a heavy emphasis on transgender ideology above all else.”

Maria says that she initially toed the party line on the matter, staying silent when trans issues were discussed. “But then I began to see how women’s rights were attacked, particularly because it was obvious that single-sex spaces, such as rape crisis centres, were labelled as ‘anti-trans’.”

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Oxfam staff were invited to join company-wide online groups related to their interests, and Maria joined the LGBTQ+ group. In September 2020, a charity shop manager asked the group: “What is your opinion on selling J.K. Rowling books?” The employee, who is a transwoman, worried that the writer’s latest thriller, Troubled Blood, written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, might be “highly transphobic”. She wondered whether it might be covered by Oxfam’s “unsuitable for sale” policy.

Several staff engaged with the forum thread, widening the debate to include Rowling’s suitability as an Oxfam-stocked author, and added their concerns about her supposed transphobia, until Maria asked the question: “Can you explain why she is transphobic or why the book is transphobic?” When her query went unanswered, Maria went on to express concerns about banning books by “one of the most important woman writers in the UK”, before adding: “Actually, we are selling books from paedophiles and rapists. We are selling religious books. Stopping selling something we don’t like is called censorship and is the opposite of freedom of speech.”

The manager then left the conversation, and Maria thought that was the end of the matter. “She had said she was uncomfortable with the conversation and did not want to discuss it any further.” But following the exchange, Maria discovered she had been labelled in private chats as a transphobic bigot by other members of the LGBTQ+ group. Another manager sent her private messages, suggesting that Maria could lose her job after posting her comments. “They felt threatening to me,” says Maria. “She said my views were ‘incredible’, and that she would be reporting me. There is absolutely no way I am anti-trans. I am merely pro-women’s rights.”

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In the next few days, members of the LGBTQ+ group encouraged colleagues to complain about the discussion, stating that “transphobia is not tolerated here”. “They did not name me, but it was obvious who they were referring to,” says Maria. Next, a petition signed by 70 staff members was sent to all staff via the intranet, calling for Oxfam’s leadership to “take a stand” and “communicate a zero-tolerance approach to transphobia”.

Senior management replied to the petition authors, saying: “No one in our organisation should be subjected to hate speech, discrimination or other forms of harm” and “It is of great concern that members of the wider LGBTQIA+ community have felt intimidated by workplace conversations.” Oxfam’s CEO got involved, and gave a “no-debate” steer, adding: “We value the experience of our trans and non-binary colleagues, friends and partners and we do not expect their experience to be debated in our workplace.”

Three days later, Maria was invited to a meeting with her line manager and a member of Human Resources and told that she was under investigation because of her “transphobic comments”. Maria says: “They should have told me what the actual topic of the meeting was, and I could have brought a union representative with me. I apologised for upsetting anyone and tried to outline the rationale for my views and beliefs, but they refused to accept it.” Signed off sick with anxiety and depression, Maria felt alone and scared of losing her job, particularly in the middle of a pandemic. “All my family and relatives were in Spain and the borders were closed.”

Six weeks later, two days before Christmas, Maria learned that she’d been found guilty of misconduct and was issued with a final warning. Oxfam told Maria that her comments online “breached the requirement of the Code of Conduct to treat all persons with respect and dignity”, and reminded her that “transgender people are protected from discrimination under the Equality Act 2010”. The letter did not give a definition of transphobia or say how her posts were transphobic. Refusing to accept that finding, Maria appealed. “As a woman I have always had to fight for everything,” she says. “I knew that if they beat me then they were trampling on all of us.”

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Three months later, Maria was informed she had lost her appeal. The letter informing her of this decision also offered, for the first time, a definition of transphobia (not for want of asking): “Oxfam refers to Stonewall definitions to support our understanding, which states transphobia is the ‘fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans’.” Feeling she was left with no choice but to resign, Maria took Oxfam to an employment tribunal. “I became determined that this should not happen to another woman,” she says.

Maria claimed constructive dismissal and belief discrimination. In July last year, during judicial mediation, both parties agreed to settle, with Oxfam issuing a public apology for its handling of the process. “We believe that each member of our community has a right to their own religious or philosophical beliefs, including the belief that ‘sex is immutable’ and ‘sex is important’. We acknowledge that in dealing with your case and during the disciplinary process we made mistakes. We acknowledged that it was not appropriate to give you a final written warning, and we would like to offer our sincere apologies for the upset that this has caused you.”

Earlier this year, Oxfam updated its language guide, which is an internal document advising staff how to speak about its work. The document includes the instruction that, rather than using the phrases “biological male” and “biological female”, “AMAB and AFAB” (assigned male/female at birth), should be used instead; and when talking about “expectant mothers”, use the phrase “people who become pregnant”.

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“I hope every single woman, especially those stronger and richer than me, fight every time this happens within the charity sector,” Maria says. “Oxfam is supposed to be protecting women and girls in the most vulnerable situations all over the world, and this ideology will ruin it.”

In response, an Oxfam spokesperson said: “We are sorry for the procedural mistakes we made in the handling of this case and we have apologised to the individual concerned. We fully support both an individual’s right to hold religious and philosophical beliefs and a person’s right to have their identity respected, regardless of their gender identity and expression, sex, or sexuality. We believe LGBTQIA+ rights are human rights.”

Now back in Spain, Maria has just finished an internship at a refugee camp in Greece, with the aim of a career in humanitarian work. “I lost so many friends,” she tells me. “I lost my job. My mental health suffered. Enforcing the views of the trans lobby, at all costs, seems more important to Oxfam than meeting their actual charitable aims.”

She says she often thinks of the author who changed the course of her life — and believes the way Rowling has been vilified for simply supporting and defending the rights of women who have suffered domestic abuse and rape is proof that misogyny has no limits. “No matter how much money or power you have achieved, if you are a woman, you will always be a target,” says Maria. “I fought my case so that all women know they can fight, and win, against this crazed ideology.”

I have known Kathleen since 2018, when I discovered her research on gender identity and women’s sex-based rights. We have remained close since then, and I have looked on with horror at the abhorrent treatment she has been forced to endure in recent months.

Watch the full 50 minute interview on UnHerdTV below, or listen to the podcast version here:

When I interviewed Kathleen for UnHerd this morning, she detailed the true extent of the aggressive campaign of targeted harassment she’s been forced to endure. Kathleen might be a mild-mannered, liberal academic, but she is not one to shy away from a fight. Her decision to leave Sussex after 18 years teaching there was no easy decision.

“I went to work as normal, and saw stickers all over my building about the ‘transphobic shit that comes out of Kathleen Stock’s mouth’,” Kathleen says. “That was obviously distressing but the next day it escalated.” As she walked to campus from the train station, she was confronted with a number of posters calling for her to be sacked: “Fire Kathleen Stock”, “Kathleen Stock’s A Transphobe”, “We’re Not Paying Our Fees For Transphobia With Kathleen Stock”.

“They were setting off flares… And they later took a picture of a man in a balaclava, all in black, looking just like Antifa. The imagery was obviously intimidating: holding a massive banner saying ‘Stock out’, while setting off pink and blue flares because those are the colours on the transgender flag.

“I ran back to the station, got the train home, tried to teach a class on Zoom, burst into tears and my dear students said I must be having a tough day and they let me off,” says Kathleen. “It was the beginning of the end of the campaign to intimidate me out of my job.”

The campaign to push Stock out of Sussex began after she self-published a number blog posts critical of extreme transgender ideology. Kathleen was concerned that the majority of academics, including philosophers such as herself, were reluctant to criticise campaigns to introduce self-identification for transgender people. After all, she thought, why should we just ignore material categories such as sex?

But to implement self-identification without question is to ignore a key safeguarding problem. As Kathleen puts it, “Self  ID policies trade on a fantasy that suddenly putting on a dress or saying ‘I’m a woman’ will change your basic nature. But, in fact, what was there before will be there after. Humans are humans, and if you make it the case that you can self identify into a better situation than you were in — i.e. a woman’s prison as opposed to a male prison, which are usually less intense, aggressive places — then some people will do it, whether they’re trans or not.” And as both Kathleen and I keep saying, this isn’t about every trans person. It’s a safeguarding policy.

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“These academics were not attending to the obvious consequences for women,” she says. “Yet on the other hand, there were plenty of academics who were cheerleading self-ID, ostentatiously moralising about it, and talking about Terfs and transphobia.”

Kathleen continues: “Gender identity theory is egregiously false. It is terrible, pseudo philosophy and would fail a first-year essay. As a philosopher who cares about logic and truth at a basic level, I couldn’t believe that all these academics were just waving it through.”

One aspect in particular that baffled her was the claim that a person’s belief about their psychological identity, whether they are male or female, is more important than their material sex at birth — not least due to the impact such categories have on medicine, sport, science, education and more.

“I’m a lesbian and a feminist,” states Kathleen. “I assumed that academic feminists were covering women and girls’ rights and I didn’t need to get involved. I started to see that they were not only not covering it, but they were also actively undermining women’s rights in the name of feminism, and there were all these knock-on consequences for lesbians. On all those levels, it annoyed the fuck out of me.”

Although Kathleen is understandably upset by the conduct of the small number of abusive students, she is adamant that many of them are taking a cue from the influential adults around them. “I don’t think they’ve actually read what I think. There’s a lot of enabling, or inciting, of individuals in this story,” she says.

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“Many of these academics contribute to an environment in which some pretty terrible things are happening to, for instance, children in gender identity clinics. I can see why they had a vested interest in shutting me down.”

She stresses: “I absolutely believe that trans people should be protected in law, so I’m never going to waiver from that. I just disagree about the laws that should be used.”

Like a number of other women in the public eye who have been deemed to be transphobic, Kathleen is tired of being “lumped in with holocaust deniers” as the personification of all evil.

“I’m not even a free speech absolutist,” she says. “This is preposterous framing and entirely set up by our enemies to mean that we can’t win. All we’re doing is insisting on basic obvious facts of biology and their social significance. Nearly 99% of the planet agrees with us. The most I can get out of people is a tentative ‘Well, we absolutely support Kathleen Stock’s right to say what she thinks’ but they won’t say ‘And yeah, of course we agree with her because it’s bloody obvious’.”

And this insistence on keeping silent has had a toxic impact on the transgender debate, allowing small groups of extremely vocal and aggressive activists to fill that gap. For example, Kathleen firmly believes that Stonewall is in large part responsible for the current witch hunt mentality. As someone who has experienced the ensuing vitriol first-hand, it is hard not to agree. During the past few years, its business model has prioritised promoting a very narrow conception of what they would call trans rights.

“I would say these rights don’t benefit trans people,” says Kathleen. “But they were already embedded in all these national institutions, government departments, the CPS, the EHRC, almost all of our universities, schools and local authorities. And being in one of their schemes means these institutions get a constant stream of instructions such as: ‘We would really appreciate it if you would put out a tweet lobbying for this project’. Our national institutions have almost unwittingly been instruments to be used by extremists.”

Those extremists are swift to accuse Kathleen of “weaponising her trauma” if she ever dares talk about how the attacks have affected her personally. Which they have, obviously. She insists on talking about it, though, because it’s not just affecting high-profile characters like us two. “It’s what’s happening now in every institution, not just universities, to women who feel like they’re choking,” she explains. “They cannot get their words out — or if they do, then they’re put through complaints systems, they’re socially ostracised, they are told by their bosses, ‘we’re watching your Twitter feed.’ There’s just this feeling of surveillance that is unacceptable. So that’s why we have to talk about the human cost.”

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What was the final straw for Kathleen? She tells me it was when the Sussex branch of the University and College Union (UCU) put out a statement in support of “our trans and non-binary students” and against “institutional transphobia”.

“At that point I was just hanging on. I was teaching from home. I saw the posters. I was advised to stay at home for my own protection. The police were coming round. I’m getting security stuff delivered to my house, trying to think about the future. I thought I’d  have to stay off campus for the rest of the term but at least I can teach on Zoom. I hoped they would support me.”

And then her UCU branch issued its damning statement. “It was a pompous peroration about ‘standing with our trans and non binary students against institutional transphobia’” Kathleen explains. “And all they could possibly mean by that is that I was there”.

“There’s nobody else who speaks out like I do. Plus, every second communication that comes out of the university is about trans and non-binary spaces in the library and trans or non-binary support groups and LGBT issues. There’s a staff network; there’s a Centre for Sexual Dissidence; there’s a Centre for Gender Studies.

“It’s literally saturated with positive messaging. It’s in Brighton, one of the most queer-friendly places in the world. So all they could mean by institutional transphobia is: ‘We haven’t shut that bitch up yet’. It came through on my email and it just felt like a punch in the gut.

“But this is a union! They are supposed to protect employees from their bosses and to offer solidarity with anyone who is an employee — especially in a university where they are being targeted for their academic research and their philosophical beliefs, which are also protected in law under the equality act.”

And, Kathleen tells me, this intolerance trickles all the way down from the top of UCU. As far back as 2019, for instance, Jo Grady, UCU’s general secretary, boasted of her decision to instal ‘Terf Blocker software’ on Twitter, which automatically blocks any account that has been deemed transphobic.

“Grady is not unusual in academia,” says Kathleen. “She has these relatively extreme views but they’ve become the norm and it’s all so moralised. These people are a small number of hardcore totalitarians.”

I ask Kathleen if there’s anything we can do. How can we enable students to critically examine controversial topics without being scared to speak out?

“What we can do is demand that universities reduce the influence of lobbying groups like Stonewall, and insist that senior management do not make politically loaded pronouncements in controversial areas of public dispute.”

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She explains that having transgender flags on campuses, holding quasi-religious ceremonies such as Trans Day of Remembrance and so on are not neutral gestures, despite how they are presented. These are political gestures and managers should not be participating in them.

Despite all the abuse she’s received, Kathleen believes there is better news on the horizon. She has seen a tsunami of support from Government ministers, students, feminists and, of course, right-minded liberals who are now less afraid to speak out, having been inspired by Kathleen and others who have put their heads above the parapet.

“We’re obviously having some success because I see more and more people speaking out. I think as the public becomes better educated about the basic issues and our particular position, which is the opposite of how it has been represented.

“One thing that’s happened recently is that the Guardian and the BBC are no longer presenting our views as anti-trans or transphobic. And at least some of the people working there seem aware that there’s actually a proper intellectual dispute here. Beforehand, I honestly think Guardian readers hardly knew about any of the implications of self-identification. They just were being protected from that information, because it wasn’t serving the newspaper’s business model very well.”

What will Kathleen do next? “I’m not going to stop,” she tells me with defiance. “In leaving Sussex, I’ve become even more able to speak out and now I’ve got a bigger platform.”

What she does with that platform is yet to be seen. But I suspect it won’t be long until we find out.

Jess De Wahls is an embroiderer, and the RA used to stock a range of her iron-on patches in floral designs, all ready to turn your favourite jeans into a work of art. For De Wahls, this was not a particularly big deal. The RA’s order was small, and as someone who sees herself outside the mainstream art world (“I don’t give a fuck about art institutions — I’m a trained hairdresser,” she says), winning the Academy’s approval held limited cachet.

For the RA, though, it seemed to be a success: it had just reordered her patches when the trouble started. And the trouble started because of a small number of people for whom it was unconscionable that De Wahls should have anything at all. De Wahls, they claimed, was a transphobe, and simply by having her work in its shop, the RA was condoning hatred of trans people. The RA contacted De Wahls, informed her it had received complaints then apparently panicked, and pulled the stock.

And what had De Wahls actually done to make herself untouchable? In 2019, she published a long, considered essay laying out her thoughts on gender identity. “My hope is that this will help you, the reader, the viewer, to understand my conclusions about this subject,” she wrote. “And I will tell you them candidly so no mistake can be made in misunderstanding or misrepresenting me.” As anyone who has ever ventured an opinion on gender could tell you, this was always a vain hope given the torrents of bad faith that run through this subject.

So it didn’t matter how precise De Wahls was when she wrote: “I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex (or in whatever way they please for that matter).” It didn’t matter that she described her own close and supportive relationship with her father, who lives a gloriously gender-nonconforming life in heels and lipstick. It didn’t matter that De Wahls, who was a child in pre-unification East Germany, drew parallels between the chilling propriety of gender-identity dogma and the constant self-censorship demanded by life under the stasi.

What mattered was that she had said no, and no amount of thoughtfulness or articulacy can make female refusal inoffensive. “I can not accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such,” De Wahls stated, and in doing so she asserted both an internal and an external boundary: a boundary that said she would not automatically treat male people as though they were female, and a boundary that said she would not think of male people as though they were female.

Perhaps not all the horror this elicited was genuine. Some, surely, came from fellow artists who were glad of a way to hobble a competitor in a fierce market. But the taboo she broke was so profound, the RA found it inarguable once it was brought to its attention. “The RA is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion and does not knowingly support artists who act in conflict with these values,” it said in a statement. Although you can still buy a book about child-rape enthusiast Gauguin and prolific mistress-abuser Picasso.

Or maybe “equality, diversity and inclusion” simply aren’t on offer for a Tahitian teenager who ends up at the wrong end of an artist’s syphilitic penis. There’s an argument which used to be made (and thankfully isn’t so much anymore) than an artist’s special role in society sets him (always a him, in this argument) beyond the norms of bourgeois decency: if it cost Picasso “the blood of those who loved him” (in the words of his granddaughter Marina) to produce that tasteful cubist nude so you can hang a print of it in your living room, then so be it.

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That, clearly, is an abhorrent position. More convincing is the argument that art itself should be permitted to shock. It’s a tradition that the RA has made itself home to. Back in 1997, it offered the Sensation exhibition. This was where you could see Marcus Harvey’s “Myra” — a portrait of the murderer Hindley, compiled from children’s handprints. It also included one of Marc Quinn’s “Self” sculptures, which recreated the artist’s own head using ten pints of frozen blood, and the Chapman brothers supplied child mannequins with phalluses attached to the face or anuses for mouths.

All of this is much more disturbing than De Wahls’ beautifully detailed flowers. There was genuine outrage, not just a few huffy messages: protesters vandalised the Hindley portrait. But the RA stood by it. When challenged about the distress caused to the families of Hindley’s victims, the then-chief of exhibitions said the portrait “raises interesting questions… about the exploitation of children in our society”.  A quarter of a century later, it seems the RA would now be more likely to take the side of those throwing eggs at Harvey’s work than to defend artististic expression.

But then, De Wahls is a woman, and historically the RA has always found decency a useful weapon for excluding women: it deemed women too delicate to take part in life drawing classes except as models, and so denied them a complete artistic education, which in turn justified keeping them out of any significant role in running the Academy. (As artist-activists the Guerilla Girls demanded in 1989: do women have to be naked to get into a gallery?) Not until 2011 did any woman achieve the rank of Professor in the RA, and it took another five years before Sonia Boyce became the first black female Academician.

In the past it was offensive for a woman to see a human body; now it’s offensive for her to name it. Decorum has always had a handy way of falling more heavily on women. The genius of gender identity doctrine has been to reinvent etiquette as politics. To assert the inarguable fact that humans are born with a sex and have that sex for life — regardless of how they dress, act or feel about themselves — is the most scandalous thing De Wahls could have done in 2021.

No one is really offended because they believe her statement to be untrue. Everybody knows, functionally, that sex is real and significant: even the most assertive of gender identity ideologues finds that genitals do not exist on an unknowable spectrum when they’re actually in bed, and they can all somehow figure out which kind of person should be called a bigot and denied an income. They are offended because a woman is not supposed to say the things De Wahls did. A woman today is not even supposed to acknowledge that she’s a woman, unless it’s to prostrate herself with guilt for her supposed “cis privilege”.

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Some privilege, to have your reputation trashed and your work deemed toxic on the strength of eight complaints. De Wahls — who could surely bring a compelling libel case here — has so far only said that she wants an apology from the RA. And while the RA has refused to defend or even discuss its decision making, public opinion seems to have swung behind De Wahls, who says she has been inundated with supportive messages and direct orders through her website.

But for every woman able to stare down her bullies with the resilience of De Wahls, there are dozens for whom the ostracism and the financial penalties are too much to bear. Gender identity doctrine is a kind of sexism that, by making sex unnamable, places itself cleverly beyond criticism. It’s the same old misogyny, refined and perfected, conveniently emerging just as feminism succeeded in making direct sex discrimination untenable. The Royal Academicians of the past, with their frantic contortions to resist the “female invasion”, would surely have nothing but admiration for this new way to keep women down.

“Deep down, I want to be a Cambodian police woman,” responded Cleese, apparently facetiously (although how anyone could be sure he was facetious when we’re all supposed to be the expert on our own identity is beyond me), at which point numerous people started saying he was transphobic and lots of news sites started writing stories about how people were saying he was transphobic.

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None of this is interesting, exactly. What’s interesting is the tone of wounded possessiveness that animated the reaction to Cleese. Not John Cleese, of all people! seemed to be the widespread implication, as though he had previously given everyone to believe that he was team “trans women are women and burn anyone who says otherwise”.

Presumably anyone experiencing this as a particular injury would be a fan of Cleese, but not enough of a fan that they’d seen his most famous work. Anyone who’s watched half an episode of Monty Python knows that it’s full of the kind of cross-dressing lols that would raise a stern eyebrow in a doctrinaire student union today. Python drag is funny, which is precisely why it cannot stand: it relies on the audience recognising a man in a dress as a man in a dress, rather than taking the dress as ultimate evidence the person wearing it is a woman.

And anyone who’s watched more than half an episode of Monty Python has probably seen Life of Brian, which means they’ve seen the “Loretta” scene, in which Eric Idle’s character Stan announces: “From now on, I want you all to call me Loretta. It’s my right as a man.” Cleese’s role here is to be the voice of incredulity: “I’m not oppressing you Stan, you haven’t got a womb!” Perhaps the Pythons were simply engaging in absurdity with no knowledge of the existence of trans people when they were making Brian in 1978; but given that the highly publicised Corbett v Corbett case involving April Ashley (a trans woman) took place in 1969, and Jan Morris published her transition memoir Conundrum in 1974, perhaps not.

This doesn’t make Cleese guilty of historical transphobia any more than supporting Rowling makes him guilty of it now, but it does put him at odds with the kind of respectful solemnity around gender identity that his disappointed admirers were expecting him to show. And this is really because they weren’t thinking of Cleese in terms of his actual work, but instead constructing the kind of figure they want him to be based on his place in the culture. Comedians are supposed to be liberals, whatever liberal means.

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If there’s an “us” and a “them”, Cleese’s anarchic, authority-tweaking kind of comedy is supposed to belong to the “us” rather than the censorious, rule-enforcing “them”. If his opinions are experienced as betrayals, it’s because there’s an assumption that humour takes a position regarding power (and then, subsidiary to that, an assumption that the trans cause is the cause of the powerless against the powerful, even when it involves telling a victim of domestic violence to choke on a girldick, but we will gloss over that for now).

Cleese came up, pre-Python, as part of the 1960s satire boom that included Private Eye and David Frost. It’s a movement that has irrevocable associations with the rise of the counterculture and the demise of deference (the 1966 “I know my place” sketch from The Frost Report, which featured Cleese along with Ronnies Barker and Corbett, couldn’t have been a more explicit jab at the complacencies of the British class system). But a refusal to take the establishment seriously doesn’t necessarily imply anything at all about your own politics.

Maybe we think of comedy — and satire particularly — as inherently liberal because it’s bound up with the liberal cause of free speech. Life of Brian was picketed and preached against on release because of its blasphemy: in some places, it was banned (a screening in Torquay needed a special dispensation in 2008), and the Pythons were set at odds with authority figures of Christian conservatism such as Mary Whitehouse.

Or maybe it’s a product of the “punching up” theory of comedy, which holds that jokes should always take aim at the powerful. In a 2013 essay, the stand-up Stewart Lee argued that Right-wing comedy was practically impossible: “You can’t be a Right-wing clown without some character caveat, some vulnerability, some obvious flaw. You’re on the right. You’ve already won.”

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There’s a truth in this, in that what’s funny often draws on the kind of exaggerated rhetoric that outrage can licence. Think of Cleese, this time as Basil Fawlty, finally losing his temper in a limb-flailing fury at some presumptuous customer: it’s funny because, as awful as Fawlty is, there’s an acknowledged justice to his rages.

But there’s a long way from there to the idea that comedy must therefore be an agent of change, and even further to the idea that the changes it advocates must be liberal ones. Private Eye was the home of campaigning Left-wing journalist Paul Foot, and also of Christopher Booker, who saw out his later career denying climate change and defending big tobacco at the Telegraph.

Comedy’s natural state, often, is conservatism — at least in sitcom, which resets each episode to a default condition (peak-era Simpsons is the perfect sitcom, because cartoon characters don’t change in any of the inconvenient ways that human actors do). And just because satire laughs at authority doesn’t mean it’s out for revolt: the riotous days of carnival, thought the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, allowed a populace to turn the world upside down for a limited time, so they could go back to the established order afterwards. Satire can do the same.

It’s nice to think that what’s funny aligns with your political beliefs, but it’s also naïve, and anyone who imagines that they get to tell John Cleese what to think forgets that he’s been through this once before with Mary Whitehouse, and won. She didn’t end up as an enemy of comedy because she was a Right-winger fronting up to Left-wingers, but because she was someone who took her faith so seriously that it was anguish for her to see others take it lightly. The people riled by Cleese’s tweeting might think they’re her opposite, but in their horror that someone might be cleaving to an apostate position, they’re really her inheritors.

Distraction has always been a triggering word for me. In a good way. My PhD supervisor told me I was “a woman of too many distractions”. This was because I was venturing into journalism, frustrated by the dead language of academia. She also asked me whether having a grant made any difference. It turns out that my distractions were paying the rent, as they have been ever since.

Even though I’d been writing for them for decades, editors consistently try to steer me towards “lifestyle” subjects for my column. One even suggests that I shouldn’t touch politics at all. And yet I won the Orwell Prize for political journalism the year before. This was for articles on Brexit and war remembrance, among other things.

Maybe they were steering me away from certain subjects because they thought they were dealing with some mad old bint, or maybe they were scared and had been indoctrinated into the cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies. At its best, the paper deserves to see itself as a beacon of the Left, but lately it has been hard to define what the Left consists of beyond smug affirmation. During the Corbyn years the paper had a difficult job to do: support Labour but to be honest about Corbyn and his cronies’ monstrous failings.

Of course, not every editor is nervous; but the anxiety around certain issues remains tangible. It has often been this way and none of this is new to me. Bad columns don’t come from bad opinions, they come from a lack of conviction. Readers know that instinctively, so to steer writers away from what they want to write about is a strange thing for an editor to do.

But, then, journalism has been in a strange place lately, unsure of itself and what it should be doing and giving itself away for free. A case of low self-esteem one might say, but not in my paper which makes journalists redundant even as it pays moderators to delete comments calling me a cunt under one of my columns about Scottish independence. Have I got issues? More than enough to go round.

My relationship with the paper has always been slightly odd, I guess.

So, I finally get to write a piece on trans issues. And 338 “colleagues” write a letter of complaint to the editor, alluding to that column.

Strung out to cry

Now, six months on, I have resigned. And I am still trying to work out why I have been treated so appallingly.

My hurt is obviously minuscule compared to so much of what has happened in the world. It’s a flesh wound and I shouldn’t make a fuss. But, do I look like a doormat with Welcome written on it?

There were no such upset letters organised regarding the various hot Tory takes about difficult subjects that we sometimes publish. Seumas Milne even reprinted a sermon by Osama Bin Laden. What about that? Not a word. So what did I do that was so terrible? I stepped outside the orthodoxy.

Perhaps I need to put my denunciation into a larger context. At the end of the year one reflects, right?

When I was first at the paper, in the 1990s, there were no women on the Comment pages. My column featured in the “Women’s pages”, which was seen as Features. The editor at the time, Peter Preston, took me out for an awkward lunch after I won Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards and said: “It must be nice to be a lady columnist. You can write about painting your toenails.”

I had been meaning to raise the idea of an actual pay rise, but I had no idea how to do it. I don’t understand middle-class people and money (not that Preston was middle class but certainly his environment was totally bourgeois). So when he asked if there was anything he could do to make me happier, I just blurted out: “Give me more money.”

Preston’s power lay in silence. He had, after all, spent time in an iron lung. His ability to not speak was quite something, and I admired his refusal to make others comfortable. In one way. But I may as well have just farted loudly. I had made some awful faux pas: asking to be paid the same as men who were not as good as me. That was the end of the meal.

The thing is, I had found out I was being paid less than half what my male counterparts were earning. So I got an agent. She wore very short skirts and had a way of rattling her BMW keys that seemed to unnerve men. The one and only time Preston ever called me was to frantically beg — no uncomfortable silences — that he would never have to see her again. Result.

Another part of not knowing my place was that I also asked to be moved from the Women’s pages to the Comment pages. They offered a Monday slot which would mean I had to work on Sundays. As the only woman in the section, and single parent to boot, I asked them if they had ever heard of equal opportunities. Again I was not only unclubbable but unspeakable. No movement was possible. Madly, I suggested that Hugo Young be moved. I didn’t even realise he was Jesus in the hierarchy, floating above us all.

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The truth was, and remains that I never fitted in at the Guardian. The personal becomes political at the moment you never feel clean enough. I was always somehow inappropriate. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas said, dirt is “matter out of place”. Matter out of place. I know this feeling. I would describe it as an essential part of my political formation, this knowledge that I could scrub myself raw and it would never be enough.

Back then, I was in the office a bit, but was never given my own desk and grew bored hearing conversations about cricket and having various guys yell the names of Oxbridge colleges that I hadn’t been to at me. Telling them that I had been to a polytechnic was information some of them basically couldn’t compute.

The only people who were nice to me were Will Hutton and Richard Gott, who I was very fond of, although it turned out he had taken “red gold” from the KGB and he had to resign. A shame really, but not unfamiliar to me as I had worked at Marxism Today, which it turns out had similar “funding issues”. Let’s not go there now. I liked Richard because he would tell me fabulous stories about finding Che Guevara’s body one day and the next talk about a great Spanish fashion designer. The politics guys were dull, living on Planet Westminster. Plus ça change.

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Leaving home

Fickle power-crazed harpie that I was, though, I got poached. I love that word. Off I went to The Independent, enticed by Andrew Marr’s exciting vision of having no news on the front page. Also there was no question that I wouldn’t be on the Comment page. It was great working there, I loved it, though it was all to go tits up.

The relevance of this? This was my original sin. No one leaves The Guardian. I had left the cult.

It was to get worse, as when I left the Independent, I went to The Mail on Sunday. The Indy was collapsing and The Mail on Sunday offered me a bit more money and many more readers. I thought it would be interesting to talk to the people who would decide the future of the country and I was bored with preaching to the converted.

Plus, there was the challenge of doing a tabloid column. This is much harder than long rambling pieces: The Times’s Matthew Parris told me so, bless him. The great and the good told me again that I was making a terrible mistake and I would lose my voice. This was another denunciation of sorts. Once again I was in the headmistress’ office chewing gum and telling my teachers I didn’t need them. I left school at 16 because rules did not interest me. Reading did.

This new idea, though, of talking to floating voters appealed. Politically. The very idea! And yet they were the ones deciding who was in power. They are now the ones the Left still despises while needing to win over. The Left could not and still cannot represent those whose “false consciousness” stops them from seeing the true and rightful path.

I cannot say how much I despise this way of thinking, having grown up in a Tory-voting working-class household. Don’t ask me to hate those I love in the name of socialism.

Mind you, clearly at one point I did think just like this. I wanted them all executed and joined the Workers Revolutionary Party in this hope.

Then I grew up. Not much, it must be said.

Now I was at The Mail on Sunday I was no longer pure. The dark side had claimed me. This was utter bollocks but it’s the way so much of the Left thinks, in binary terms. Electoral politics, which could be about persuasion, instead becomes a series of war games.

The Marxist philosopher Eric Hobsbawm, of all people, thought it a good idea for me to talk to “Middle England”. Middle England is a fantasy in my book. An imagined community. Still, my contract said I could write what I liked and that was honored. Anyway, I presumed it was a temporary job, like all jobs in journalism. I didn’t even start hackery till I was 30. I had a life before that. Thank god.

I lasted for several years at the Mail on Sunday, although I hankered to write longer pieces, which I did elsewhere. The lesson I learned was that I could get through to the paper’s readers on almost every social issue except immigration, where I could make no headway. This was to become key to so much of what has followed since. Facts are not feelings.

As I live in North London, when I moved to the Mail on Sunday, most people I knew who had read me regularly in the Guardian or the Indy thought I had just died. Actually I had gone from a readership of 300,000 to two million. Some of us didn’t need the arrival of social media to know about bubbles. Some of us couldn’t see a bubble without wanting to burst it. It’s a class thing.

At one point I was writing columns for both the Mail on Sunday and the Guardian (somehow, neither audience noticed) and eventually a new editor arrived at the former and wanted changes. That was fair enough, so I recommitted to the Guardian.

Back to the nest

Back among the righteous. Now, in the North London playground, other parents would talk to me — I became a “Guardian Writer” again. Resurrected somehow, absolved, I was more and more aware of the conservatism that was rising, politically and culturally.

We were being enveloped in beigeness. Especially women. When I had taken my older children to school in the late 1980s and 1990s, we had all just dropped them off and hurried to work. By 2010, mothers hung around the playground: “Lattes or pilates?” They didn’t have jobs, and made cushions. They had husbands, dogs and camper vans. Violin lessons were a thing and no one seemed to notice that the school had been ethnically cleansed. This was the work of property prices. They thought David Cameron seemed nice. This is, it’s true, a class issue, and something that’s particularly noticeable in my corner of North London. But there was definitely a wider move in modern conservatism to push women back into the home.

The electoral coalition that had brought Labour to power was collapsing. I didn’t find this out from Planet Westminster — for all my sins, I met and lunched Cameron — but from the playground. He will be prime minister I told the pol guys at the Mail. They put this down revoltingly to me fancying him. How could a woman know such things otherwise?

During my time at the Mail on Sunday there was no politician to whom we did not have access. They knew they needed that paper’s support. I have dined with every Right-wing bogeyman and every Labour bore you can imagine.

Going back to The Guardian brought another challenge. What should I be doing? I would describe my approach as: lobbing in some Molotov cocktails, some cultural analysis and some jokes. Not to buy into groupthink and in the end . . . entertainment. People should want to read what you write. I know this is verboten: actual pleasure. I chose not to go into the office. I still did not belong, having strayed from the true and rightful path.

Some debates had remained the same, some had changed. The Labour Party seemed to be imploding. Again. So I returned to my real passion: cultural politics and good old-fashioned feminism.

Seeing Red

In 2012, I contributed to an anthology of essays edited by the great poet and journalist Cathy Galvin. The theme was red. My piece was about the need for female anger and it was called “Seeing Red”. Feminism had become way too polite and we were going backwards. Fast.

The essay was about how and why women should be angry. I quoted the Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee: “Anger is like water; the shape it takes comes from the container you put it in.” Let it flow, I said. How little I knew.

The book came and went and the following year 2013 my essay was reprinted in the New Statesman. It contained this line: “We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.”

That was wrong — in that it was of its time. Now it’s a different body shape: the Kardashian ribless tits and ass. But hey, let’s roll with the times.

Suddenly I was inundated with tweets about the murder rate of Brazilian transsexuals which is appallingly high. Many of them are forced into sex work (I prefer the term prostitution but the new feminism likes to pretend all jobs are equal when they clearly are not. “Phoebe got four A-stars but hopes to become a sex worker” is not something you hear often.) But it’s true I had carelessly used a certain phrase to talk about the then fashionable shape for women; slim hips and big breasts. Indeed, transsexual models did appear on catwalks.

While I was trying to emphasise the impossibility of the ideals for women, maybe I had been thoughtless. I hadn’t actually killed anyone. Yet the backlash that hit me, online and offline, was like nothing else. And you have to understand I have been threatened in the past by the fascist group Combat 18 for my columns — on multiculturalism, immigration, being pro-choice and in favour of gay rights…  My crimes, back then, were “nigger-loving”, “paki-loving”, and “whore”. Sometimes they called me a “Jew”. I had panic buttons installed in my house. I would get phone calls at home with threats saying they knew I had kids so they wouldn’t kill me, just disable me. As ever I just got on with it. What else can you do?

But this time around, after the Red piece, the abuse was from the Left. It was a taste of what would happen in Labour a few years later with anti-Semitism.

When the big row over anti-Semitism happened, it was strangely no surprise; it had all just finally risen to the surface. I had spent enough time on the far-Left to know how the righteous thought. And it’s not so different from the far-Right. In the name of rights for Palestinians, this most elemental racism was once more permissible. A giant conspiracy theory that places itself on the moral high ground was not discouraged by the Labour leadership. It disgusts me.

Yet the abuse I got over the trans issue was different, and worse than anything that had come before. Social media was beginning to flex its muscles. It was a mindfuck. Twitter was full of people telling me how they were going to rape me, decapitate me, ejaculate inside my head, burn me. This was all somehow to do with the Brazilian transsexual remark. The police came round but they didn’t really get Twitter. They said things like: “Don’t email them back, love”. The worst threats were from people who knew where I lived and said that they would give my then 11-year-old a good fisting.

The sewer was opening, a torrent of women-hatred was pouring out, no one seemed to be able to control it. (Was this helping trans people? Was it coming from them? Mostly I think not.) I made the mistake of losing my temper and insulted my antagonists back. I would not be lectured on feminism or womanhood.

There was a new word. TERF. It posed as an acronym — trans exclusionary radical feminist — but it was used as a slur. On this row went. The label “transphobe” may as well have been tattooed on my forehead. My own history and activism was irrelevant: my years with Act Up, campaigning around Section 28, my lifelong commitment to campaigning for abortion. Nada!

I watched woman after woman denounced as a TERF. Attempted suicides of young trans people were the fault of women like me. The murder of trans people by men was somehow refracted onto feminists. Masculinity is never the problem, you see. Masculinity sets the rules. Women are always the other, the outsiders. Yet suicidal ideation is a growing issue for all young people — I studied counselling and psychotherapy for two years at this time — and suicide rates for young women are rising, too.

The Right Side of History

Why did I speak up? I have no hatred or fear of trans folk. As a feminist, I would argue that gender is socially constructed, and it can be reconstructed.

Under the professions of radicalism and the vitriol and stupidity, though, I was witnessing a new conservatism, the revenge of gender stereotypes. Pink and blue. Girl toys and boy toys. The female role models, such as Sam Cameron and Kate Middleton, were mute. Nostalgia was everywhere dressed up as irony.

During the Aids crisis, I was involved in queer politics, where difference was argued over endlessly. But we were on the same side against a straight world that hated homosexuality and women who wanted equality. Then that world fragmented. The queer alliance was fragile and the theories began to be more important than the practice. When academia moves in, activism moves out.

At the same time, women were getting ahead in the workplace by imitating men and pretending that children didn’t interfere with their wage slavery, now defined as “having it all”. Some act to pull off. I tried and failed. I had three children and worked the entire time. In my entire life, I have had eight weeks’ maternity leave.

Gender roles were becoming more fixed even as gay rights campaigners won the “victory” of gay marriage. I agreed with David Cameron that this was a basically conservative move and it cost nothing, and made people feel somehow that they were a bit modern. Gay rights and feminist campaigners were no longer the natural allies they had once been.

Looking back, I see that by the late Eighties and early Nineties, I had already picked up on something that perturbed me. A denial of female biology, of our ability to name and define our experience. Some of this came from certain strands of postmodern theory where objective reality gives way only to multiple subjectivities. A kind of gender tourism became possible. Everyone could be everything. A new kind of feminism came into being, one in which flesh and blood women and our desires became somehow a bit dull. Feminism without women. Grow a child inside you and push it out of your body and tell me this is a construct. (NB: no one has to have children.)

I believe quite simply bodies exist. I have been there when babies are born. And been there when people die. I know what happens when bodies no longer work…what shall we call my view? Materialism?

As trans ideology came into being, to question this was to question trans people’s “right to exist” — how is that even possible? They obviously exist! — when really we were questioning the ways in which we think about gender and oppression and how complex this all is.

It remains so. Yet somehow morality had entered the debate. To be good — ie, modern — one didn’t interrogate the new trans orthodoxy. Sex was no longer binary, but a spectrum, and people didn’t need to change their bodies to claim a new identity. All this was none of your business, and had no effect on your life.

I disagreed. By 2018, the atmosphere was poisonous. A fellow columnist at The Guardian replied to a message I sent about being civil at the Christmas do with: “You’ve prompted the most sickening transphobia, for which you have never apologised, you called islamophobia a myth and you publicly abuse leftwingers.” This person went on to say that I felt insecure “because a new generation of younger leftists have caught the public mood”. I didn’t even understand the accusation of Islamophobia. More broadly, I understood that the possibility of a left-wing government was exciting, but unlike half the paper, I didn’t believe that Corbyn had actually won in 2017. I also didn’t like the macho, bullying culture around him propped up by writers at my place of work.

I complained to my editor about this person at the time but was told that as neither of us were on staff, nothing official could be done. Really?

So there we have it. Here comes the “new generation”: the new Left, same as the old Left. Full of misogyny, utter pricks and those with the emotional intelligence of whelks. Misogyny in the name of socialism. Again.

Ladies who Lurch

Around this time I was in Armenia covering a story on foetal sex selection. Women were aborting female fetuses as they wanted boys. The UN population fund was doing fantastic work there, knowing that as fertility rates drop, sex selection becomes ever more prevalent. This world was a long, long way from those people who think sex is just a matter of personal choice. Foetal scans at 12 weeks mean generations of girls go “missing”. In rural Armenia I visited class rooms of 27 little boys and 5 girls, while at home I was told sex is simply “assigned at birth”.

Other women were now starting to be disturbed by the idea of transwomen with working male genitalia in womens spaces. The idea of the predatory trans person is not one I am particularly invested in, really. We are talking about a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of the population. I am not that bothered about toilets or changing rooms. My youth was spent in gay clubs and with wonderful trans people who looked after me in New Orleans. Refuges, though? Prisons? Surely that can be sorted out and it has to be.

No, what I most didn’t and don’t like is the erasing of female bodies and female voices and female experience and our ability to name it.

What I care about fundamentally is the right of women to meet in single sex spaces and assert themselves as a class, a sex class — one that is oppressed by a patriarchal system. By men, even sometimes the good ones. As for the bad ones, they are the ones who rape and kill trans folk, too.

Feminism has to be able to talk about bodies. Many of the advances women have made in my lifetime — reproductive rights, more choice over how we give birth, discussions of menstruation and menopause — depend on biology, the biology we were now told was irrelevant.

When I walked past the Woman’s Place meeting in Brighton at the Labour Party conference last year, people were banging on the windows. More TERF-hunters. It hardly affected me, I was in a blur of distress about anti-Semitism, and a friend of mine who was dying. Her lung and bone cancer was missed and she had been told to do more yoga. Bodies fail us all in the end.

What sort of people would stop other people meeting, though? What good did it do the cause of trans people, some of whom were present at the event? Why can feminists not organise?

The moral climate had shifted from “trans rights are something we need to discuss and we must support trans people in all the ways we can” to a denial that such rights may at certain points compete with women’s rights. Friends were under threat, no-platformed in schools and universities if they questioned what had become a fixed set of beliefs.

Women who said that they were subject to threats of violence were told they had to suck it up. Any discussion of trans rights had now mutated into a denial of the existence of trans people and therefore actual violence.

Debate became murder

So while I and many others were receiving vile threats, we were somehow also responsible for the awful violence that is meted out to trans people. Social media blurred the conversation: very few trans people are murdered in Britain (around one a year) but the American stats are worse, so these are the ones used. In Britain at least two women a week are killed — estimated at 3.5 during lockdown — but women are never a marginalised group. We have it all!

In the States, trans healthcare is not free, either. So when American feminists tell us we are “behind” on trans rights, it rankles somewhat. Get your own house in order. We live in a country where abortion is free and legal and where health care for trans people, though not perfect, is free; and we have maternity leave. Neither country is perfect.

Various people who had not been there for the fight around Section 28 told us this was a re-run of that era, with trans folk being described as paedophiles and predators in the place of gay men. (As ever, lesbians were somehow invisible. Except the ones who wanted to transition.) This is revisionism. No one was being asked to give up anything for Section 28 to be dropped.

Gay people have chosen how they were to be referred to. In the trans debate, however, women were not consulted about their terms of reference. They are “Cis”. And “Cis” women are higher up the privilege ladder than trans women. We had become the oppressors — a subset of men.

Then came the rise of “non-binary”. Phew! Finally! By any definition of non-binary, this is what I am. The knowledge that since I was a tiny child my inner and outer selves did not match in any way. Knowingly, I upped the signifiers of femininity to be able to use the power of my mind. This was what I got in trouble with Germaine Greer for: hair, heels, tits. To me, just my drag. Presumably it is the same for everyone.

The Bad Column

Which brings us to March 2020. Eventually, I was allowed by a great editor to write about how gender critical women wanted to assert their basic rights. A professor of working-class history at Oxford, Selina Todd, was disinvited from an event. I noted, referring to this incident, that it is women again, never men, who were losing jobs, incomes and public platforms if they spoke up. Many of them were emailing me: not on one side or another, but generally worried. I wrote that I believed biological sex to be real and that it’s not transphobic to understand basic science. To my mind the column was fairly mild.

It was published. The next thing I know there are loads of people on social media thanking me for saying what needed to be said. And then another lot: the “die in a ditch terf” lot, amazingly telling me to die in a ditch. Again.

Seven years of this sort of abuse now, and no one from the Guardian had ever spoken to me about it. I just carried on. Do they care? Why should they? They should care, if they truly want more “diversity” in journalism, but that’s a lie which liberals tell themselves. How can you bring on working-class writers if you damn them for not knowing the codes upon which the media runs? If you won’t tolerate the heresies of outsiders? If — gasp — they haven’t been to Oxbridge?

In the new orthodoxy, where do I fit in? What is my place in the tickbox set of Left beliefs? I was Brexity, though I voted Remain. I want independence for Scotland and a united Ireland. I want England to be England. I don’t believe in the monarchy or the UK. I think biological sex is real… I have never hidden any of these views.

My experience is that I have been censored more by the Left than the Right and it gives me no pleasure to say that. Laziness of thought is my big fear, this unthinking adherence to some simplistic orthodoxy. There are values and there is experience and there are people. Complicated fuckers, all of us. The Guardian. Labour-supporting except for its Lib Dem blip in 2010. Endlessly “good”. Yeah; right.

I was discussed at “conference”, the newspaper morning meeting open to all: editorial, digital, advertising, everyone. (It looks like equality, but some people sit on the floor and others get seats, let’s put it that way.) I never go in to the office, or attend conference, but it was reported that a trans woman developer, who had already resigned some weeks earlier, resigned again that morning, because my words, my column, had made her feel unsafe. According to the news story: “the column was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back,’ the trans employee said, following a series of pieces that pitted trans people against women and against women’s rights.”

Apparently, my fellow columnist Hadley Freeman defended me and I am grateful for that. It appeared to be an extremely upsetting incident for all concerned. I am sorry that it happened. No one will believe that, but I am.

The Letter

Then came the letter to the editor, expressing dismay about the Guardian being a publication “hostile to trans rights and trans employees”, since three trans people had apparently resigned in the last year. This was news to me. Although I wasn’t named in the letter, it was very clearly a response to my column. Three hundred and thirty-eight people signed it.

Not one of them had the decency to pick up the phone to me. Should The Guardian be a welcoming place for trans people to work in? Yes of course it bloody well should. Should it be a place where we discuss complicated issues? Again yes.

The letter made it clear to me that it wasn’t just social media activists who wanted me out of the paper. My fellow staff were gunning for me: time to hand over my job to the young Corbyn crew who spend their lives slagging off the mainstream media but cannot wait to be part of it. Could they write a good sentence? Say something from the heart? Does that matter? Apparently not, they simply think the right things.

The letter was then leaked to Buzzfeed and then the names were made public. I was devastated to find people who I like and had worked with had done this. In 30 years of journalism I have often disagreed with people and had stand-up rows with them but no one has ever done something so underhand as to try and get someone fired because of one column.

I listed the names of my denouncers on Twitter. I read one of them saying I doxxed them, not the case as the names were already in the public domain. I wrote a distraught and emotional letter to the people who I knew, asking how could they do this? What kind of victory had they achieved?

I felt fucking awful. Well, how would you feel if 338 colleagues basically bullied you? But off I went to Amsterdam to do a mushroom retreat because life goes on.

Mistakenly, I thought my editors would stand up for me because that was my experience at other papers; or they might issue a public statement. They didn’t. There was some internal email, and I hear it was discussed at the Scott Trust, which governs the paper. What this means I genuinely have no idea. Nor do I understand what editorial independence means any more. Do they? Not in my book.

This to me was utter cowardice. Shouldn’t you stand by your writers? But on this issue the Guardian has run scared. I suspect this is partly because of Guardian US sensitivities and, partly because the paper receives sponsorship from the Open Society foundation, which promotes trans rights.

This also might explain some of the utter gender gobbledegook we run about how HRT has taught someone to cry and all categories are porous. Whatever.

As a feminist, I have limited interest in all this, in the holes in which other people do or do not wish to put their bits. Sorry it’s rather dull. I am with Foucault in that I don’t believe sexuality is the essential soul or truth of an individual. My concern with this issue is only to do with the rights of women and the welfare of children.

So much of the discussion is about trans women, but the unhappiness of teenage girls must concern us. We have known since 2017 — earlier in fact — that there has been a huge uptick in female teenagers wanting to transition. Presenting to the Tavistock with self harm, eating disorders or suicidal ideation, these girls may end up on puberty-blocking hormones and then go on to have surgery. And for some of them that indeed may be the right thing to do. For others though, it clearly isn’t and to question that is not anything phobic, it is to care.

Why, as feminists, can we not talk about this epidemic of young women who cannot bear their bodies and the thought of what is happening to them: breasts, periods, unwanted sexual attention, the works? Why can you not be a young butch lesbian these days?

In an ideal world, feelings of masculinity or femininity could be achieved without surgery or hormones that may cause infertility. We are far from such a world and I respect the decisions of adults who go through this long, difficult process in often impossible circumstances. Brave, brave people.

My argument to my newspaper, though, has always been if we don’t have this discussion then the Right will, and indeed that has been the case. The Spectator and the Times have covered stories we haven’t, and I have had to write what I wanted to in the Telegraph. Investigative journalism means going into no-go areas. Why can’t we? The liberal Left looks not virtuous but naïve.

Less sexy subjects such as the appalling low rate for rape convictions, the Covid pandemic causing women to lose jobs and be forced back into the home, the complete lack of childcare… all of these things fall by the wayside when the main discussions of feminism appear to be by men telling us men can just say they’re women and if we say otherwise we deserve all the rape threats we get.

There is no actual interrogation of gender and I say this as someone who has written about and studied this subject for decades. There is a simply a belief system.

The Witches They Cannot Burn

For such thoughts, I have been denounced, alongside bigger and better people such as JK Rowling. The words “compassion” and “kindness” are often used by trans activists. Can we all just not be kinder? Well, yes … I never have and never would be unkind to someone because of their gender identity. I reserve the right not to kowtow to certain blokes, though. What I would like is some kindness towards women, some empathy towards our fears and our concerns, but I don’t see much of that. What have you done for us lately?

Since my denouncement, I have received nothing but support from all sorts of people in private, including many at the paper who are now afraid for their jobs. I didn’t stop writing, I carried on. “Don’t mention the war, Suzanne.” It felt quite schizophrenic, the split between the groundswell of women who are thinking along the same lines as me and the lack of support from the institution I work for.

The censorship continues and I cannot abide it. Every day another woman loses her job and a witch-burning occurs on Twitter. My fear is not about trans people but an ideology that means the erasure of women — not just the word, but of our ability to name and describe our experience. We are now cervix-havers, birthing parents, people who menstruate. On Amnesty’s latest posters to support the women’s strike in Poland, the literal translation from Polish for the thousands of women who were protesting the awful tightening of abortion laws was: “I stand with people in Poland”. Which people? Women forced to give birth on a plastic sheet to a dead baby with foetal defects? Say it.

Nor do I buy the idea that all of this is a purely generational issue. In part it is, sure, but it can at times be an issue of unfettered misogyny and a failure to understand that many women’s rights are fairly recent and always contested.

The Left — well, I guess I mean the Labour Party with its mad insistence on conformity — just stopped listening. As the Corbyn project collapsed, the cultural battle around trans issues became a proxy war of insane proportions. The Labour leadership contenders were ordered to sign a pledge which called Woman’s Place a “hate group”. With the exception of Keir Starmer, they did. “Transphobe” was now a slur to throw at anyone who didn’t keep the faith. You lose the electorate so what happens. Do you reflect?

No, apparently armed with misread Gramsci and a smidgeon of Chomsky you decide you will redefine common sense without persuading people to your side. Calling everyone unconvinced by your politics racist homophobes as an electoral strategy never sat well with me. Call me precious. The utter failure of the People’s Vote told us that, surely? The haute Remain position consisted mostly of telling Leave voters they were idiots.

Likewise, alienating women who are lifelong Labour supporters, because of their refusal to sign away what they feel to be their hard-won rights, is a performative gesture that I am unconvinced provides any actual “wins” for anyone.

Yet this one tiny issue has somehow come to dominate every debate now on feminism. It’s boring. Something has got terribly skewed here. Something has been lost and I am lost in it.

There is obviously bigger and more important stuff to deal with than the issue of the liberation of women. There always is. My hurt at being ejected from cults I never belonged in anyway is not self-pity. That dissolves the moment I have the freedom to speak my truth.

The things I want to talk about — the deep unhappiness of women, the suffocating girdle of masculinity, the ever growing and bleak inequalities, the falling fertility rates which will mean girls don’t get to be born, rape as a war crime, FGM — these things are hard enough to do anyway. To understand that women’s bodies are used and abused however we might feel about them is not a comfortable place to be. Our relationship with our bodies is not straightforward. I am sure it’s the same for many men.

Now that I have personally transitioned — my uterus no longer works, my estrogen has dropped — I have even less fucks to give than I did before. You can denounce me as much as you like but you cannot deny my life’s work of living somehow inside this female body. You cannot tell me it’s not real. It’s as real as it gets.

This, then, is a story about a woman journalist who “made it”, who never thought it would be easy.

This is a story about a feminist who started to see things going backwards and wanted to tell the world. This is not a story about trans people at all. Really it isn’t. It’s a story about not belonging. Not knowing my place.

Sure I understand the clichéd trajectory that as one grows older, one moves from Left to Right. Actually, I would say in my case this is not so: class politics becomes ever more pertinent to me, not less. In these fearful reactionary times, I will not be fearful and I will not be reactionary, but I will centre women and children and the possibility of freedom, as I always have, at the heart of my work.

The consequences of this have been tough in a tough year. The support both within and without the paper for which I write has been huge and I am grateful for it. I remain flame-retardant.

All this is then just a little story about being given a warning to shut up. And refusing to. I have had a lifetime of such warnings. Class will out. This is just something I wanted to tell you about a woman saying no. And the ways we say no.

That’s all it is. That’s the rub.

That’s all it takes sometimes.

Listen to Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

I was 18 when the infamous Section 28 became law in May 1988, prohibiting the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities. I don’t know where all this promotion was taking place but it wasn’t at my Cleethorpes comprehensive, which had covered sex education in one baffling, strictly science-only lesson. Homosexuality wasn’t mentioned, let alone advertised.

In 1989, Stonewall was founded and, thanks in large part to its careful, determined work, British society began to change for the better. Life became gradually easier and happier for lesbians, bisexuals and gay men. It was a slow process.

Fast-forward to 2006. I am 35, the artistic director of Queer Up North International Festival, and I have commissioned an educational theatre production addressing the issue of homophobic bullying in secondary schools. Stonewall is co-producing the project and I have been spending hours on the phone to teachers up and down the country, trying to persuade them to let Queer Up North and Stonewall into their schools.

Suggested reading

Trans people don't lack rights

By Debbie Hayton

The calumny that LGBT people are a risk to children is alive and well, and I don’t want what I write here to give succour to those who perpetuate it. But here’s the thing: the Stonewall of today is not the Stonewall I so admired a decade ago. If I were on the phone to those teachers today, I’d advise them not to have Stonewall in their schools.

The government also appears to have spotted that something is wrong. It has issued guidance prohibiting schools from working with external organisations that “reinforce damaging stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender based on their personality and interests or the clothes they prefer to wear”. The government doesn’t say which organisations it has in mind, but several established LGBT organisations — including Stonewall — produce materials that would appear to fall foul of the new rules. 

The original Stonewall proceeded from a premise which gradually found support across the political spectrum: that the experience of same-sex desire is morally neutral and therefore not a just basis for discrimination. Stonewall’s campaigns to equalise the age of consent, overturn the ban on gays and lesbians in the military, and secure civil partnerships and equal marriage, all gathered social and political support on this basis.

But since beginning to campaign on trans issues in 2015, Stonewall has faced more complex, specialised questions than in its first 26 years, during which it campaigned solely on matters relating to sexual orientation.

Suggested reading

Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

The foundational proposition of modern trans politics is that sex — boundaried, binary, and stubbornly unchangeable — should be replaced with the more malleable concept of ‘gender identity’ — the belief that we all have an innate, irreducible (and unverifiable) sense of our gender, unrelated to biological sex.

The marginalisation of sex in trans activism sits uneasily with the centrality of sex to lesbian and gay activism. I’m a gay man which means I experience sexual desire for male bodies — not for people who ‘identify as’ men (who could be male or female). But the solidarity between LGB and T people has tended to mean more to us than any underlying conceptual frictions; Queer Up North had this solidarity at its heart and trans artists and performers were central to the work we did. 

But when Stonewall decided to campaign on trans issues as well as sexual orientation issues, these conceptual frictions had to be resolved into a coherent policy platform. Stonewall’s response to these complexities was to adopt wholly the precepts of trans politics; the de-emphasis of sex and the promotion of innate gender identity. This has led to some contorted positions with damaging real-world effects.

For example, it has led Stonewall to reconfigure homosexual desire. This is not immediately apparent from Stonewall’s glossary, which, for example, describes a lesbian as a woman who is attracted to other women. But the glossary doesn’t offer a definition of ‘woman’ because Stonewall is keen to dodge the implications of its replacement of biological sex with self-reported gender identity — namely that a woman is a person of either sex who ‘identifies’ as a woman.

It follows inexorably that lesbians must now accept that — to use the phrase beloved of trans activists and their woke allies — “some women have penises”. You don’t have to know much about lesbianism to appreciate that the absence of penis is fundamental to the concept. When a group of lesbians protested at London’s Pride parade in 2018, Stonewall showed them no sympathy. This issue is causing distress and anger for many people, including young women just finding their feet in the lesbian community.

Suggested reading

Stop searching for the 'gay gene'

By Julie Bindel

Its new policy platform has also led Stonewall to look both ways on the issue of gender stereotypes. On the one hand, Stonewall produces excellent materials encouraging young people to explore their lives beyond the boundaries of gendered expectations. On the other, its promotion of gender identity reinforces those same gender stereotypes; a biological male who reports having the gender identity ‘woman’ cannot explain the claim without gender stereotypes. This is not a problem within the specific domain of trans politics, but Stonewall now claims that everyone has a gender identity, and therefore everyone identifies, in some way, with gender stereotypes. While Stonewall continues to make this claim it will continue to be on the wrong side of the government’s new schools guidance.

Having adopted such radical, far-reaching new policies, rather than seek to persuade wider society of their value, Stonewall has sought to silence opposition and enforce submission by labelling heretics — such as women who want to retain the sex-based rights secured by the 2010 Equality Act, and lesbians who reject the concept of the ‘female penis’ — as ‘transphobic’, placing them on the same moral level as racists.

A substantial, and increasing, number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people have had enough of Stonewall’s dogmatism. The founding in 2019 of the LGB Alliance, a grassroots, lesbian-led lobbying group which rejects gender identity, is responding to the demand for alternative thinking.

Stonewall’s brand is powerful — but brands are illusory, and Stonewall’s masks the socially divisive and damaging effects of its current policies. Politicians, schools, NGOs and major corporations routinely subcontract their judgment on LGBT issues to Stonewall, persuaded that whatever Stonewall says is ‘best practice’ must be right. But they should learn to be more cautious, because the new Stonewall is a vastly different organisation from the one which gradually earned their trust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in 2012, as the Lib Dems were really starting to suffer for their role in the Coalition government, some commentators  and some Conservatives started to speculate that growing unpopularity could force the smaller party out of government.

Others, perhaps more familiar with the Lib Dems, saw more resilience in the party. One of the more colourful bits of analysis noted this extreme resilience, comparing the party’s ability to survive political damage to the apocryphal cockroaches that will supposedly survive even a nuclear winter.

Most people would be mildly unhappy at being called cockroaches, but the Lib Dems wore it as a badge of pride — literally.  The party press office had yellow cockroach badges run up for that year’s party conference. The joke stuck, and at the 2013 party conference, Tim Farron, then the party president, cheerily called his party “cockroaches and nutters” from the podium.  Party members loved it.

Fast forward to 2020, and winter has well and truly arrived for the Lib Dems. This weekend, they will meet, virtually, at an online party conference that will attract little attention — and not just because of the huge events taking place elsewhere in British national life right now.

The story of the Lib Dems in 2020 can be told in two numbers. The first is 2 – that’s the percentage of voters in Wales who backed the Lib Dems in a recent poll.  Dismal, but hardly inconsistent with the party’s general standing. The Politico Poll of Polls currently puts the Lib Dems on 6%, far behind the Tories on 41% and Keir Starmer’s Labour on 39%.

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A year ago, that same tracker put the Lib Dems on 20%, snapping at Labour’s heels on 24%, and even Jo Swinson’s general election failure in 2019 saw the Lib Dems take 11.5% of the vote last December.

The other number that explains the state of the party today  is 998. That’s the number of words in the official party definition of transphobia that the Federal Board of the Liberal Democrats (more about party structure in a minute) recently adopted as the party’s official position on what constitutes discrimination against trans people, and people who suport them. (“Transphobia, whether through words or action, may be targeted at people who are, or who are perceived to be, trans or trans allies…”)

Really, the various Lib Dem sub-groups and working parties who laboured over this epic could have saved themselves a lot of time, because those 998 words can be expressed in just three: everything is transphobic. Still, the words do merit some attention here, because that statement says rather a lot about the Lib Dems today. How on earth does a party that can count JS Mill among its forebears end up seeking the outlaw the use of the phrase “biological man”?

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the Lib Dems are tanking in the polls because they are staunch supporters of trans rights, or that the British public is deserting them as a result. I’m suggesting that the Lib Dems are tanking because they’ve become fixated on things that are of no urgent interest to the majority of that public. British voters, by and large, are neither pro- nor- anti-trans: they’re just more interested in stuff like the pandemic, the NHS and the fate of the economy.

People aren’t even that interested in Brexit: the most recent Ipsos Issues Tracker showed barely a third of voters mentioned it as a top priority. Whatever the outcome of the Brexit process, voters have mostly moved on, and Keir Starmer has proved it. The Remain-voting leader of Remain-backing party has recently been urging Boris Johnson to get on with Brexit — with barely a murmur of protest from his party.

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By James Kirkup

Brexit, of course, was the adrenaline shot that restarted the Lib Dems’ failing heart in the years after coalition. Under Vince Cable and then Swinson, the party took increasingly stark positions against the policy chosen by more than 17 million voters in 2016. That drew in a new wave of members, the sort of people who spend time on #FBPE Twitter inveighing against extremist elements in British politics and not seeing the irony.

The new Lib Dems were delighted when Swinson promised to “cancel Brexit”, but the old cockroaches weren’t so sure. British history might have been rather different if Swinson had listened to Lib Dems like Norman Lamb, then the MP for North Norfolk, who warned that the “cancel Brexit” stance would help to polarise politics and “open the door” to Boris Johnson to win big.

But the Lib Dems didn’t listen, and actually rushed to open that door: it should not be forgotten that the 2019 election only happened because Swinson believed it was in her party’s best interest to allow Johnson to go the country.

Today, Brexit is not done but, endorsed in a referendum and a general election, it is a settled fact of British politics. That has left the Lib Dems, once again, searching for a purpose. That brings us back to transphobia, and the identity politics that seem to be all the party has to offer.

Log on to the Lib Dem website today the first thing you’ll see is a crowd of earnest young people holding rainbow flags and #LoveisLove placards. It’s the site of a Pride rally, not a political party.

Again, to be clear, this isn’t an argument that the Lib Dems should take a different position on gay rights, trans rights or any other part of that rainbow-flag agenda. For a party targeting younger, degree-educated urban voters, there’s a certain sense in that positioning, especially when Starmer is so carefully trying to avoid Tory attempts to draw him into a culture war where he can be painted as the head of a “woke liberal” party.

Nor is that different position really an option for Ed Davey, the Lib Dems’ sober new leader and a cockroach who first worked for the party in the early 1990s. One of the things that makes the Lib Dems different is their insistence on internal democracy and rules. The party machinery is a network of committees and boards, all with real internal power. If a small group can control an official “Specified Associated Organisation” such as LGBT+ Lib Dems, they can and do help set party policy and priorities.  Weaning the Lib Dems off identity politics probably isn’t an option for Davey.

A better approach would be to put the rainbow flags in perspective: make them part of the Lib Dem offer — but not all of it. Once, not too long ago, the Lib Dems were the most effective think-tank in British politics, an outfit relentlessly churning out policy ideas that were perfectly sensible but just a little too far ahead of their time for bigger parties to embrace.

Yet Davey has taken the leadership of a party that has little to say about the bread-and-butter issues of politics and government that still motivate the typical voter. The party did develop some sound policies last year — insulating low-income homes; a £10,000 training allowance for all adults — but these were inevitably drowned out by noise about Brexit.

The irony of Lib Dem irrelevance on policy today is so sharp you could shave with it.

If it were to be revealed that Dominic Cummings was a card-carrying Lib Dem who used to sit on the Federal Policy Committee in the early 2000s, no one familiar with the party in those days would be remotely surprised. Industrial Strategy, regional policy, unpicking pension tax perks for high-earners and obscure local government reform: these are all things Lib Dems spent years talking about, to no avail. Anyone looking for the policies that flesh out the Johnson-Cummings promise of “leveling up” could do worse than look at the unread policy papers that Cable and others used to churn out.

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Likewise on the green economy.  It has been reported recently that the PM has become fascinated with the role that hydrogen could play in a new low-carbon economy.

If only he’d attended a few Lib Dem conferences in the cockroach days, when Lib Dems enjoyed nothing more than a day dreaming about the carbon-free economy of 2030. When I chaired a fringe meeting on energy policy at last year’s Lib Dem conference, everyone enjoyed it when a very detailed row broke out between audience members about the precise size of hydrogen molecules; Davey, a panelist, cheerily joined in. This is a party that takes the detail of policy seriously.

What happens to the Lib Dems next will depend in part on who is left in the party. The FBPE crowd were largely not “proper” Lib Dem cockroaches; many of them were happy to have a membership card and a direct debit, but not for them pounding the pavements delivering Focus leaflets or going to conference for Glee Club. There are still some very serious Lib Dems in local government, however, and I suspect many of the old cockroaches are still there, even if some younger types with blue hair and pronouns now make more noise.

Will that be a solid enough foundation on which Davey can start to rebuild? And if so, what will he construct?  What is the role for the Liberal Democrats in a political system that is starting to look at least partially post-liberal? A fair bit depends on what Starmer does, but all the signs are that he’s listening to his very clever policy chief Claire Ainsley and trying to reconnect Labour with the values of the voters it lost to Johnson last year: Rule Britannia, VE Day and even Get Brexit Done.

Some Lib Dems may think that leaves a gap in the market for a truly progressive party: more rainbow flags and BLM slogans, and rejecting voters who believe the “wrong” things. In other words, offering sort of politics that Americans call “liberal left”.

As an outsider who runs a centrist think-tank, I’d suggest the Lib Dem aim should be something else: to make the case for a rather older idea of liberalism, one where personal freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand and people are trusted to make their own choices within a clear set of rules.

The two big parties are quietly agreeing a broad consensus that the size and power of the state should grow: assuming Johnson leads his party into the next election, don’t be surprised to see him battling Starmer over who can promise to do the most, spend the most, in the Red Wall and elsewhere. After all, money is cheap and the huge challenge of the pandemic demands a new paradigm, right?

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The Tories are facing a new revolt on the Right

By Matt Hancock

Economically, we have already entered the new world: the Conservative Party is waging political war on allies and institutions in order to obtain the power to use state spending to support companies favoured by ministers and their super-bright advisers. Likewise the rules and instructions rolled out in response to Covid-19, some of which constitute a remarkable extension of state power in daily life.

Who speaks for the dissenters, for those who’d like some more checks and balances on the people in charge? Who will make the case for rules on the role of the state in markets and in people’s lives? I am no liberterian but the absence of a clear liberal voice in British politics unnerves me sometimes. And as someone who still thinks Mill’s On Liberty is probably the most important book I’ve ever read, it saddens me to see “liberal” attached to causes and ideas that are keener to smother dissenting opinions than protect them.

Is there yet a role for a liberal Lib Dem party? Do the Lib Dems want to be that party? Here, Davey might want to pay attention to the detail of some recent YouGov polling on those Covid interventions, which asked people if they would follow ministerial encouragement to shop their fellow citizens to the police for meeting in groups of more than six.

No fewer than 43% of Conservative voters would report strangers to the police, and 29% would make a similar call about neighbours; 15% of Tories would even call the cops on family members. Lib Dems, meanwhile, were the voter-group least likely to snitch: only 26% would call the police on strangers, 21% about neighbours, and 7% on family.

https://twitter.com/cagyarrow/status/1306920845911224321?s=20

Britain may be heading down the road of post-liberal politics and a bigger state, but liberalism is neither dead nor doomed to irrelevance. Lib Dem cockroaches need to decide if they want to keep scuttling on.

The consultation itself came and went a year later in 2018 amid fervent campaigns by transgender activists eager to allow legal gender changes on demand, and women’s groups concerned that their boundaries would be rendered meaningless as a result. If men can identify as women — for whatever reason they might choose — how can they be kept out? It is naïve to rely on the argument that “men wouldn’t do that, would they?” Spaces such as changing rooms are most often cited, but also at risk are prisons, hospital wards, reserved places on committees and boards, scholarships and, indeed, every sex-based protection.

For the past two years, the hot potato never went cold — on the contrary, it ignited a social media inferno. The furore surrounding JK Rowling — condemned as a transphobe for reclaiming the word woman to describe her sex — is remarkable only because she is a public figure.

The plans leaked to The Sunday Times, and splashed across yesterday’s front page, sparked uproar. Many transgender rights campaigners were horrified. These were not the plans they were looking for. Nancy Kelly, CEO of Stonewall UK described them as “another blow to our community during a difficult time”, citing the huge amount of abuse they believe trans people suffer in their daily lives.

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Britain is not a transphobic country

By Debbie Hayton

As a trans person, I take issue with that statement. I very rarely suffer hostility in the UK — there seems to be no a causal link between gender recognition legislation and social attitudes at large. When I am out and about, people couldn’t appear to care less that I am trans, if they even notice, and few would know anything about the rather obscure law under debate.

The plans were not even unexpected. On 22 April, Liz Truss — the minister for Women and Equalities — set out her priorities for the Government Equalities Office. As she closed her statement, she remarked,

“We’ve been doing a lot of work internally, making sure we’re in a position to respond to that consultation and launch what we propose to do on the future of the Gender Recognition Act. We will be in a position to do that by the summer, and there are three very important principles that I will be putting place.

First of all, the protection of single-sex spaces, which is extremely important.

Secondly making sure that transgender adults are free to live their lives as they wish without fear of persecution, whilst maintaining the proper checks and balances in the system.

Finally, which is not a direct issue concerning the Gender Recognition Act, but is relevant, making sure that the under-18s are protected from decisions that they could make, that are irreversible in the future. I believe strongly that adults should have the freedom to lead their lives as they see fit, but I think it’s very important that while people are still developing their decision-making capabilities that we protect them from making those irreversible decisions.”

The Sunday Times report suggests that the Government plans to adopt these priorities, and move them forward through guidance rather than fresh legislation.

First, there seems to be no appetite to change the mechanism for legal gender recognition. Anyone wishing to change their legal gender will still need to produce two medical reports to support their application. But a proposed crackdown on “quack” doctors would close the loophole by which disreputable medics could write what the patient wanted them to write. Otherwise gender recognition would still be on demand, albeit on payment of an extra fee for sympathetic medical reports.

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Second, women’s “safe spaces” will be safeguarded. Existing legislation — the Equality Act 2010 — was cited, so no change there either. What has been lacking is clear and unambiguous guidance over when women can maintain spaces and services according to their sex. Hitherto, there has been rather too much assumption and too little clarity. The current jargon — “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim” — is easier said than applied. In July 2018, the Equality and Human Rights Commission set out to clarify the interplay between different pieces of legislation, but acknowledged that it was a complex area of law, and highlighted the need for further conversation.

The specific mention of toilets has been the lightning rod for concerns. It will never be workable to rigidly police who uses which toilet, but clearer guidelines are needed to empower women to challenge people who they think should not be in the women’s. Though rather than argue over who can have access and who should be excluded, let’s be truly progressive and campaign for additional unisex facilities for anyone who does not want to share communal facilities with their own sex. Good practice there is good practice for all, and not just those who might identify as non-binary. Long before I transitioned, I found them a godsend when out with my young daughter.

Third — almost as an afterthought — came a proposed ban on gay conversion therapy, mentioning “some church groups”.

Where does this leave transgender people? Some of my fellow transgender campaigners are in no doubt. Helen Belcher, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Chippenham in 2017 and 2019 urged us all to write to our MPs:

“Start writing today, and don’t stop until they drop this awful, discriminatory position”

while the journalist Paris Lees suggested that

 “trans people are scared and upset about our rights being rolled back.”

But I think differently. The problems we face as trans people are not based on a lack of rights, but a lack of confidence. Proceeding, as we have been, on assumption rather than statute, trans people have been taking and women have been yielding. That cannot go on indefinitely. Tensions have been rising — witness the toxicity of social media — and emotions are running ever higher.

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

By Debbie Hayton

We desperately need clarity, and these proposals are only a start. While self-identification of gender is off the table at Westminster, it remains a policy objective in Scotland. Dr Kath Murray of the policy collective MurrayBlackburnMackenzie tells me:

“The draft Scottish Bill would also allow people living elsewhere in the UK but born in Scotland to apply for a GRC under Scottish law, which means that change here has a potential impact outside Scotland.”

But across society organisations and institutions have already been captured. In an apparent rush to get ahead of the law, Marks and Spencer allow shoppers to use whichever changing rooms they wish, while Girlguiding UK allow male children to share tents and showers with female children. In business, Pips Bunce — a cross-dressing “gender fluid” man — won a place on the FT list of Top 100 Women in Business. While we should defend Bunce’s right of gender expression, it’s not progressive to displace a woman from a scheme to promote women. This all needs to stop. It is an affront to women and children.

It was notable that Truss referred to children in her statement, citing the dangers of inappropriate choices being offered. The Sunday Times did not elaborate on the proposed ban on gay conversion therapy. However, clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) — England’s only NHS gender clinic for children — have previously expressed concerns that “some openly homophobic parents sought transition for their children because they were gay”. If dogmatic churches might try to “pray away the gay”, this surely is an abhorrent attempt to “trans away the gay”.

In the short term, the future looks uncertain for trans people. Until the Government publishes its plans — reportedly at the end of July — speculation will be rife. But this is a debate we need to enter. Belcher is right: we should write to our MPs. But not to complain; we need to engage constructively with other groups, and campaign for long-term solutions that accommodate us in society without compromising the rights of women and children. Then we really will be able to live our best lives with confidence and security.

As a transgender person, I am tempted to agree. When I transitioned eight years ago the goal was to assimilate back into society, and with the minimum of fuss. Occasional stories did reach the press but, while there was passing interest, they were never high up the news agenda.

While the increased visibility cannot be denied, some people are now claiming that transphobia is taking over the nation. In an astonishing opinion piece for the New York Times earlier this week, Juliet Jacques announced that Transphobia is Everywhere in Britain.

Collins Dictionary defines transphobia as “a fear or hatred of transgender people”, so — if Jacques is correct — this is serious. Are there really hordes of people who are either fleeing from me in terror or on a warpath to my door?

I don’t think so. Certainly it is not my experience, nor is it the experience of my transgender friends. I earn a living as a teacher and go about my life much as I always did. Many things can keep me awake at night, but transphobia is not one of them.

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While vociferous transgender activists repeat endlessly their demand for “trans rights now”, it’s much less clear what rights we lack. The 2010 Equality Act established gender reassignment as a protected characteristic to defend us against harassment and discrimination. Meanwhile, transphobia is recognised as an aggravating factor in hate crime legislation. We can readily change sex markers on passports, driving licences and other documents. Even the sex recorded on our birth certificates can be amended — or falsified depending on your point of view — if we can demonstrate evidence of need. What more do we want?

Yes, transgender healthcare is buckling under the strain following unprecedented increased demand, and we suffer appalling delays for specialist medical treatment. Scope also remains to further develop additional “third spaces” for trans people, and anyone else who doesn’t want to share with their own sex. However, my fellow citizens do not appear to fear me or hate me because I am transgender.

Some perspective is needed here. Only 12 years ago, a transgender friend was dismissed from her job as an assistant headteacher because she proposed to transition. Her school told her that should she come to work in female attire, she would be escorted straight off the premises. Such outrageous transphobia is no longer permissible or acceptable. Society has been transformed.

So what is this transphobia that Jacques is complaining about? She is not alone; seeking out transphobia in order to moan about it seems to be a key part of transgender activism.

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By Meghan Murphy

On Monday evening, I was at an epicentre of this so-called transphobic hate: a rally hosted by the Labour Women’s Declaration in support of Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance. Those two organisations were recently singled out by the egregious Labour Campaign for Trans Rights (LCTR) as trans-exclusionist hate groups. Strong words — and a total misrepresentation of reality.

I not only attended that rally — held in a North Kensington social club — I spoke from the platform. Alongside me were those who the LCTR would no doubt condemn as premier league transphobes.

Kiri Tunks, a founder of Woman’s Place UK, reiterated her astonishment at the controversy Woman’s Place has generated. Their campaign to uphold women’s sex-based rights, as enshrined in UK Law, and defend women’s right to be heard, has been twisted out of all recognition in the minds of their opponents. From the LGB Alliance, Bev Jackson described the worst attack on lesbian rights in her lifetime. As sex and gender have been conflated and confused, 40% of people on some lesbian dating sites now have male bodies. She was clear: sex is biology; gender is stereotypes. As a scientist I agree wholeheartedly.

The barrister and former firefighter Lucy Masoud and UnHerd’s Paul Embery called out those leading Labour Party politicians who had signed the LCTR pledges. Masoud described it as “a descent into political lunacy”, but it is an entrenched position in the party. Lachlan Stuart — former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn — explained how doors were closed to him in 2018 when he voiced his concerns about the qualifying criteria for all-women shortlists.

Julie Bindel then let rip. The old-style sexism she had grown up with in the 1970s was preferable to this insidious misogyny dressed up as progress. Transgender ideology, she declared, was men’s rights activism. By now my erasure should have been complete but instead I listened intently as Professor Selina Todd — no platformed recently at Oxford University for alleged transphobery — told the packed hall that not signing the LCTR pledges and silence was not good enough, and if the Labour Party disappeared down a rabbit hole of misogyny then the Labour movement will go forwards without them.

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By Julie Bindel

If this was the transphobia that Jacques had in mind, trans people need not be concerned. Trans people in the hall were welcomed warmly and treated with dignity and respect. Trans rights are human rights and they were safe in that meeting.

Unfortunately, the sense of solidarity was not replicated outside the building. Throughout the evening a noisy and intimidating group of protesters repeated their catechism ad nauseum, trans women are real women (spoiler: we are not, we are a different sex) and trans men are real men. But after shrieking about terfs on their turf, they exposed their vacuous ideology and political naivety when they ignited smoke bombs outside the building, just two hundred metres from the shocking sight of Grenfell Tower. As smoke entered the room, the tension and fear was palpable. Memories are still raw in this neighbourhood: it most certainly was not their turf.

When I engaged with the demonstrators after the meeting I was met with fear and animosity. There certainly is transphobia in society — we must not be naïve about that — but it wasn’t found in that meeting, it was outside in the darkness. Maybe the frenzied concern that Britain is being consumed by transphobia is a projection of their inner fears?

The view from the New York Times that “Transphobia is everywhere in Britain” is not just nonsense. It deflects us from the work that we should be focusing on. Trans rights are not secure: we suffer appalling delays for specialist NHS treatment, and we would be foolish to think that bigotry and discrimination were behind us. But we are stronger when we find common cause with other groups that face similar opposition, namely women and LGB people; and from a platform inside a North Kensington social club we made that clear.

Liberals took the side of sex in the 20th century’s culture wars, and rightly so for the most part — pushing for the destigmatisation of extramarital sex and divorce, the acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships, freedom of access to contraception and abortion. (The dalliance with paedophile advocacy has, it’s fair to say, worn less well.)

Where these causes succeeded, it was on the back of strong arguments about privacy, consent and women’s rights. Most of those arguments are basically forgotten now, replaced with the catch-all principle of “tolerance”.

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There’s a favourite theory among liberals that conservatism is a kind of pathology, driven by higher susceptibility to disgust. The more anxious someone feels about the literal contamination of a dirty toilet or a sore-covered face, the more anxious they’re likely to feel about metaphorical contaminants such as immigration or same-sex relationships.

What’s interesting about this theory is less the degree to which it’s true (a bit, possibly), and more the degree to which liberals want it to be true: it becomes a point of pride to be impervious to revulsion, to refuse to cast judgement.

When it comes to sex, the moral language of the Left casts critique as a kind of individual disorder – hence the drift from “isms” to “phobias”. And while the concept of homophobia contains the important truth that opposition to same-sex relationships is entangled with an irrational abhorrence of “unnatural” attachments, the extension of “phobia” formations to other contexts is incredibly misleading.

The word “whorephobia” implies that both criticism of prostitution as an industry and the abuse of women in prostitution spring from the same mentally unwholesome root; as though the feminists who point out that commercial sex is a violation of women were working in concert with the men doing the violating.

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It’s an implication that is obviously absurd, once it can be unmoored from the presumption that negative reactions to anything involving sex must inevitably spring from an ickiness about moral dirt. But the dread of the ickiness is where we start from, and dread of the ickiness is as far as we are permitted to get. To be a liberal, as the slogan goes, is to tolerate anything except intolerance. So to the concept of “kinkphobia”: what, apart from revulsion, could inspire any of us to criticise what someone else wants to do in bed? Nothing at all, so long as we refuse to accept that personal conduct can have social consequences.

It is very difficult, for example, to simultaneously sustain the positions that it’s wrong for men to choke women for sexual kicks, and that “breathplay” is something that can be practised safely so long as you follow one of the sex guides that promotes it. (It is also very difficult to sustain “being alive” when someone is compressing your airways.) Throw in an accusation of “kinkphobia”, though, and the hideous prospect of being taken for a puritan scares off criticism like a gargoyle warding off evil spirits at the church door.

“Transphobia” functions in just the same way. In that word, the belief that sex exists (and is unaffected by how someone dresses, acts or claims to identify) is lumped in with the attitude that violence or discrimination is a reasonable response to someone not dressing, acting or identifying themselves in the way usually expected of their sex. Again: absurd. But totally consistent with the belief that only an irrational fear of contamination can explain any resistance to another party’s desires. You must tolerate, or be defined as the victim of a sickness.

More from this author

Jo Swinson's feminist credentials are a joke

By Sarah Ditum

Sickness is a kind of corruption, an invasion of the self by something that shouldn’t be there. And this is the strangest thing about the fervent liberal rejection of puritanism: it is a kind of perverse purity test. The more you purge yourself of these “phobias”, the purer you are. This helps to explain why it’s women, not men, who are especially required to avow their freedom from phobia; why it was the female Labour leadership candidates, not the male one, who signed up to the pledges of the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights which committed them to expel “transphobic” members, meaning anyone who did not recite the correct doctrine on gender identity.

Even in a politics where Ash Sarkar boasts that she “fucks like a champion” and Owen Jones celebrates a woman in a “will suck dick for socialism” T-shirt, women are required to be intellectual virgins. To keep their thoughts unsullied by anything that might make them ideological damaged goods, while men are permitted to play the field.

But as some of us have learned from experience: while being able to suppress your gag reflex and swallow anything can be impressive, it isn’t necessarily a virtue. Tolerance isn’t much of a value when it’s women being required to do all the tolerating.

But don’t panic! I am here to tell you that you can make it to the other side. It’s been a little over a year since I decided to enter into the heated debate around currently fashionable gender ideology and the same activists who smeared the former tennis player Martina Navratilova and the singer Marc Almond as transphobic have thrown everything they could at me too. And yet I have not changed my position one iota from what it was when I began.

I can summarise my position thus: women exist. They are not just an idea or a feeling. They have the right to assembly, the right to organise, the right to demand private and safe spaces free of men and the right to assert these rights without being tormented online by the first generations who didn’t go outside to play. 

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Why don't trans activists practise what they preach?

By Meghan Murphy

This is what I was able to hang onto in the worst moments: gender ideology is so incoherent that almost everything is now transphobic, including the National Health Service, dictionaries, the Venus symbol on Always sanitary products, The Vagina Monologues and Lou Reed. If they can take a transwoman to court on a charge of transphobia, if they can bully a transwoman, Debbie Hayton, for refusing to adhere to current orthodoxy, they can certainly give you a hard time for whatever transphobic thing it is you’re doing at the moment. 

So here are some things to bear in mind while enjoying your turn in the stocks.

First of all, remember that the Equality Act states that you must not be discriminated against on the basis of your sex, not your gender. The singer Sam Smith may ask you to use ‘they’ and ‘them’ when speaking of him, but you are under no legal obligation to do so. 

No two people seem to be able to agree on what the word ‘gender’ means, but many, myself included, feel it is the name for the stereotypes associated with either of the sex roles, male and female. Someone feeling an affinity with sex-role stereotypes is not the same as literally being that sex, and many brave transwomen are being forced to confront their dysphoria daily by fighting publicly against this concept, a concept that they feel is cruelly misleading fellow sufferers.

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The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

You will be told there is NO DEBATE. Just talk around anyone who lays that one on you. There is quite clearly a debate needed on the subject of how these ideas impact women’s rights, sports, dignity and safety.

Even Hillary Clinton, perhaps speaking with the freedom that comes after a failed presidential run, said: “I do think there is a legitimate concern about women’s lived experience and the importance of recognising that.” Direct your correspondent to the first point on the SNP’s Women’s Pledge, which states that women have “the right to discuss policies which affect them … without being abused or silenced”.  No reasonable person could object to this principle, and their attitude to your asserting it will tell you how seriously to take their concerns. 

Many of those writing to you will think they are behaving honourably, even as they direct the most appalling abuse at you. Don’t be intimidated. Be polite if you can, and remember that there are bad-faith actors working the controls and ensuring the temperature of the conversation is kept extremely high. Accusations of bigotry are the first stop on this journey, not the last, so get used to them. 

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All the world's a stage for the trans ultras

By Stephen Pollard

Don’t be fooled into thinking your principles are somehow outdated. Women are just as vulnerable to male power and coercion as they were during #MeToo or, indeed, a hundred years ago. Pretending that men have suddenly decided to reform overnight — worse yet, designing policies around that pretence — could result in dreadful things, as when “Karen White”, a male sex offender, successfully identified himself into a position where he was able to sexually assault several female prisoners.

You will see some very frightening and upsetting stats about trans people and suicide, and how you are contributing to those statistics by your continued association with the writer/academic/doctor who has somehow transgressed some arbitrary rules. These statistics have very flimsy underpinnings. The “fact” that 48% of transgender teenagers have attempted suicide is based on a study involving just 27 young people, 13 of whom self-reported having attempted suicide in the past. Of course, any suicide attempt is a tragedy, but these are not the figures of a meaningful and robust study.

Suggested reading

Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

You will be accused of causing violence against transwomen. Murder rates will be quoted. This is deceitful hyperbole. Trans people are one of the safest demographics in the UK. The statistics quoted usually relate to poor transwomen of colour in the USA / South America, many of them driven by poverty into drugs and dangerous sex work. In a like-for-like comparison with statistics on the prospects of poor female sex workers of colour in the same geographic regions, this argument falls apart. Ask your correspondent, finally, if they have any suggestions for actually addressing how poverty and male violence impacts all sex workers, and remind them politely that male violence should never, ever be blamed on women.

There’s more, there’s so much more, and every case is unique. I can’t pretend it’s enjoyable, what you’re about to go through, but at least you will be remembered as one of first who didn’t capitulate to bullies and stood your ground, knowing you will make it easier for the next victim.

Let your principles be your compass, and you will always do the right thing.

But get some Valium.