Antifeminism. But Make It Progressive.
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling
22/04/2025, 19:36
It is the aftermath of the Supreme Court Ruling. The Tuesday after the Easter weekend. There have not been many quiet moments in which to reflect since last Wednesday, life has been a wall of noise.
Over the weekend there were protests, which people are entitled to attend. I thought, go crazy - it’s a free country and we still have our ruling for all that. But the sheer ferocity of the backlash has taken me by surprise, though perhaps it shouldn’t have.
It was exactly 8 years ago, in April 2017, that I published my first ever article in the Huffington Post on the issue of gender ideology and its impacts on women. At that time gender criticism was almost entirely socially unacceptable, certainly in the circles I moved in, and I knew no other gender critical feminists at all. Having been much involved with the radically left environmentalist and social justice movements of the 1990’s, it had been a surreal and discomfiting experience to be presented with what was supposed to be the shiny new vanguard of civil rights and equality, only to see something nonsensical and, I thought… sexist. And so, I tried. I turned this new thing upside down. I gave it a shake. I looked at it every which way in order to find some way to believing. But no matter the angle I just could not make myself. Because it was not true. Trans women were not women.
I had not prepared for any great response to my piece; wasn’t sure if it would be read at all. Yet for two days my phone could barely cope with the onslaught of notifications. It panicked me. I turned them off. One long term friendship came to a swift and dramatic end, and I worried I had somehow detonated by life. But I discovered too an underground swell of women, connecting, organising, resisting. I continued to write furiously: male people were not female people, and to pretend that they were cost too much.
Precisely a year later, in April 2018, I spoke at one of the first meetings set up to discuss the issue. A group of women active in the trade unions: feminists, socialists, women on the left, had set up the campaign group Woman’s Place UK to ensure women’s voices would be heard in consultation on proposals to change the Gender Recognition Act. We were due to convene at the Mercure hotel in Cardiff, who then cancelled without warning at the eleventh hour due to harassment and threats made by transactivists. Amid unsettling rumours these activists were trying to locate us we scrambled to find a new venue, eventually holding our meeting in a local primary school.
Just a few weeks later I was set to chair a meeting organised by Venice Allen at the Jam Jar in Bristol. I had arrived early but to access the venue, women had first to run a gauntlet of hostile protestors who had gathered outside to block the entrance with banners and were occupying the stairs leading up to the meeting room. The police had not yet arrived and having managed somehow to get past the entrance, I found myself at once trapped on the stairwell, masked protestors both in front and behind me. For a brief time, I was frightened. Protesters shouted abuse and slogans; I could go neither forward nor back. One man used his chest and arms to prevent me going up the stairs. My nose was at the level of his chest. He was so close I could smell him.
In the June I attended the London radical bookfair held at Goldsmiths university with approximately 300 copies of a pamphlet I had written entitled: Sex, Gender and Women’s Rights. The pamphlet set out to explain the difference between sex and gender from a feminist perspective, as well as the current laws around gender recognition, what the proposals for reform to those laws were, and how these could potentially impact the rights of women and girls. By now I knew enough to ask the people accompanying me not to put my pamphlet out on display until I had had a chance to go to the toilet, as after people had seen me distribute it, it would no longer be safe to go alone. The full story of that day can be found here, but in summary what followed was a sustained attack on women’s speech and intellectual freedom in which my pamphlet was ripped up, set on fire in front of me, and I was subject to torrents of verbal abuse, sexual harassment, and close physical intimidation by men who can only be described as entirely gender conforming. Again, I was lucky not to have been hurt.
Soon after that I spoke at another Woman’s Place UK meeting in Hastings. This one was subject to a bomb threat.
I could go on. But these are just a handful of my experiences of what it has meant to be a gender critical feminist over the last decade, set against a backdrop of endless, endless death threats, rape threats, and disgusting, violent pornographic images sent to me online. I recount them here for the historical record, and to say too that I have been far luckier than some.
So I should not have been surprised by this weekend’s protests and the more general fury brought forth by the highest court in the land having finally said what trans activists had tried so hard to make unsayable: that their demands were not rights at all, had no basis in law or fact, and that actual rights and protections for women and lesbians were being undermined by them. In response the same people who might well decry undemocratic attacks made on the independent judiciaries of France, Hungary and the US took to the streets to declare their own Supreme Court biased and bigoted. Worse though, were the violent expressions of hatred directed at women. Placards depicted us hung from gallows with the slogan: ‘the only good TERF is a dead one’. Others exhorted us to ‘suck trans dick’. ‘Why not try a DIY lobotomy’, asked one, next to an image of someone stabbing themselves in the eye. Another covered in fake bullet holes said ominously: ‘I will make you listen’. A smiling, long haired man held up a sign advocating a return to witch burning, and threats to piss and shit on women abounded on signs and in speeches. In a final symbolic display of contempt for women and feminists transactivists urinated over the statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett, the only statue of a woman in parliament square.
To use an analogy that is perhaps inappropriate, but I can’t think of another, now feels like having finally walked out on an abusive relationship, in other words the most dangerous time. Men have been thwarted; told no by a bunch of largely middle-aged women, the kind they deem past it, irrelevant, good only for domestic duties. The kind that are supposed to be invisible, that remind them of their nay saying mothers. And they are apoplectic.
Those lamenting the ruling seem barely able to empathise with women at all. Under de facto self ID, snuck in unlawfully by the back door, women have been subject to sexual assaults by male prisoners in UK jails. They have been locked up, terrified, with male prisoners, some of whom are known to have previously abused women and children. Women in US jails have been raped. We have lost access to women only refuge and support when we have been abused, beaten, or made homeless. Women have been forced to play contact sports against men, endangering their safety. A myriad resources supposed to be reserved for women in an effort to tackle the sexism still pervasive in our society: electoral shortlists, book prizes, scholarships and sponsorships have been lost, and we have been persecuted in our workplaces and social circles - some women losing their entire livelihoods - simply for pointing out that this is unjust. Under de facto self ID many women have felt unsafe and lots of us had begun to change our behaviour in limiting ways as a result.
That all of this can happen while most say either nothing or indeed cheer it on tells us everything we need to know about the continued status of women in society. What the male protestors holding signs telling us that ‘Feminism can do better’ are in fact telling us is that they still expect their interests to take precedence over women’s, still expect that women will cater uncomplainingly to their demands, still think that women who do not comply should be singled out for punishment. The misogyny run rampant through this movement is a feature, not a bug.
On the Politics Joe podcast, Ava Santina, Conor Clark and Charlie Craggs sat down to discuss the ruling. Amid multiple references made to evolution - of society having presumably evolved past such retrograde notions of there existing male and female people and with that any clear pattern of one group oppressing the other - Craggs could not see the problem: “I don’t even like girls so why am I being treated like a sexual predator?” Then for good measure: “especially not girls with ugly terf haircuts.” Betraying at once a total inability to empathise with women’s socialised fear of male violence along with a failure to understand that we cannot tell just by looking who may or may not be a danger, Craggs went on to punctuate the point by employing the exact same joke used by Carl Benjamin in relation to Jess Phillips: you’re so ugly I wouldn’t even rape you anyway. Santina, far from being horrified, can be seen collapsing into mirth, her hand over her mouth. Never mind Ava, at least all the boys like you.
The million ways in which people betray their belief that women are unimportant in relation to men find expression all over my social media timeline. Men in particular rage, whine, and attempt to manipulate. They hector and lecture me, presuming to know more about politics, feminism, the law and women’s rights than I ever could. They are being very reasonable: why can’t I just be kind? Why can’t I just relinquish all of my rights and boundaries when they have made it so very clear they want me to and if I don’t, they will be sad? They simply cannot see themselves for the mansplainers, boundary pushers, and misogynists that they are.
I have told them why. Hundreds, if not thousands of times. In every detailed, careful, painstaking way that I can I have explained how and why female people both exist in reality and are entitled to their own rights in law. And I am tired. Tired and down to one word: no. No, I won’t give up my rights and boundaries. Neither will I tie myself up in knots any longer explaining all the ways in which it is possible to respect everyone’s dignity and safety with third spaces, more unisex provision where appropriate, and some mixed sex services alongside single sex ones. Because while those things are possible and I very much do believe in a society in which trans people are respected and everyone’s needs are met, I know it is a waste of time.
Because the only right answer for some people is that women hand over the lot. All the rights, resources, services, and political movements we created from the ground up in order to advocate for our own interests - god even the very words we use to describe ourselves - should now be open to anyone who wants in. Open to those who wish to subvert, upend, and deconstruct them in service of an anti-woman agenda.
I do not believe it a coincidence that this movement has gained so much power at a time when misogyny as a whole has been rising exponentially. Across the political spectrum frightened men living in the aftermath of a financial crash, a global pandemic, and environmental collapse are looking to regain a sense of control. Women find themselves caught in a pincer move between misogynists on the right and left, who threaten either to shunt us back into the kitchen with attacks on our reproductive rights and freedoms, or to deny that we have any specific rights at all. They fight each other for ideological supremacy through culture wars fought mostly online. But when it spills out onto the streets and into the real lives of women it is ugly.
Our brothers on the left would do well to remember their history; that feminist waves emerge from their failures. When in 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton found that she and other women were denied a place equal with men in the abolitionist movement, her response was to organise the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls that would lead to the demand for women’s suffrage. In the 1960’s the refusal of the New Left and civil rights movements to offer women positions of leadership gave rise to the unstoppable Women’s Liberation Movement that won us the rights we are now fighting to retain. In every instance women who believed in social justice took a good look around and realised that the male compatriots they thought were on their side were not. This time it is no different.
Another excellent piece Jeni!