Listening to the brilliant Empire podcast hosted by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple, one of the stories that struck me most was that of Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, and in particular her political journey from having witnessed the ravages set upon early 20th century Amritsar by the British empire to becoming a central figure in the British suffragette movement.
Anand tells the story of Singh marching on Parliament Square with 400 of her fellow suffragettes on November 1910 - a day that would become known as Black Friday. Leading the charge with a small group of 12 women that included Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, they reached the parliament railings first, only to find themselves immediately trapped up against them by link armed police who kettled them in, forcing them to watch as later arrivals were brutally attacked by a much larger force that had been drafted into Westminster especially. Pankhurst could apparently be heard screaming, “JUST ARREST THEM!” as women were repeatedly thrown to the ground, hit, kicked, their clothes ripped and torn from their bodies. Singh - by all accounts tiny - eventually managed to squeeze out through a policeman’s legs and bravely face off an officer who was attacking an already injured woman.
But perhaps the most shocking detail from Black Friday is that of the involvement of the general public: crowds of ordinary, baying men into which police threw the suffragettes so that they could be further beaten and sexually assaulted for the crime of believing that female people ought to have the right to vote. The media, in the aftermath, were largely unsympathetic, blaming suffragettes for having first incited the violence, implying they got their just deserts.
What we can now look back on and understand as male violence deliberately meted out against women specifically because they were women who refused to bow down to societal dictates that denied them an equal say in the democratic process, was at the time seen as a justifiable response towards a group of “bad” women who had only brought it on themselves.
At the trans pride march held in Trafalgar Square on July 8th this year, former prisoner Sarah Jane Baker (previously known as Alan) who has served a total of 30 years for the kidnap and torture of a male family member, as well as the attempted murder of a fellow prisoner, took to the platform. To rousing cheers Baker exhorted the crowd to:
“If you see a terf, punch ‘em in the fucking face!”
When considering the law alongside any propensity we may have to learn from history, one might have thought that open threats of violence against women would receive universal condemnation. Certainly, many politicians and their parties have made a point of stating their commitment to tackling male violence against women and girls as an urgent priority. As part of a new strategy to address male violence, London mayor Sadiq Khan recently pledged that:
“…violence against women and girls often starts with words, and we all have a responsibility to challenge the behaviour that can lead to violence and women feeling unsafe.”
In light of this, Khan’s response to Baker’s incitement, which began with a reaffirmation of his proud support for the march and unquestioning allyship with the LGBTQI+ community (which had never in fact been called into question) before ending with a short add on about violence never being acceptable, seemed weak.
Weak at the least because it wasn’t just “violence” that Baker was threatening, but specifically violence against women. A violence justified and given social sanction by the new political and ideological cause of our time – the claim that sex as defined by biology is now immaterial and that humans can become either sex or none based on some indefinable inner essence. A cause that serves to muddy and ultimately disappear any materialist, feminist analysis of the sexed power structures by which male people have historically oppressed female people, it has proven extremely popular. Certainly, many men previously hostile to feminism have apparently discovered a newfound passion for “gender” politics now that it has conveniently singled out a group of women they are not only allowed to express misogynistic contempt for, but transformed that contempt into something cool and cutting edge. This is trendy misogyny; different to the bad kind.
Whether witches, suffragettes or terfs: there is always a reason as to why we – she – deserves it. Male violence is not random or isolated, but rather has a purpose, and whether directed at an individual or a particular group, that remains much the same: a tool of social control by which men assert their power, maintain their sense of superiority, and keep women in line. The threat of both physical and sexual violence is used to this end as all women, whether victims or not, become constrained by the fear of what could potentially happen to them if they were to step outside the bounds. If, for example, they were to walk alone freely at night; reject a drunk and overfamiliar stranger at the bar; demand the vote; or state freely their belief that male people are not female people just because they say so. Any and all of the above have, at some point, resulted in a punch in the fucking face.
As part of this pattern we can see that Baker’s threats on July 8th served as warning to every woman watching – yes, even to those cheering along. For every woman in attendance and every woman viewing the clip open mouthed over the internet, it served as that ultimate attempt at patriarchal control: one meant to ensure our understanding that any step outside the bounds could easily be met with violence and the sound of cheering crowds. Not one single woman hearing that crowd erupt at a man calling for disobedient women to be “punched in the fucking face” could count herself exempt. Baker meant me, and he meant you too.
The point is that the threats made by Baker are in no way special or different; his is not a unique, more justifiable kind of male violence. It is the very same violence underpinned by the very same motivations and justified by the very same notions that have always existed to justify men’s violence against women. You cannot wrap a pastel coloured ribbon around it all and claim it transformed into something opposite, just as you cannot upend an entire axis of oppression, positioning women’s belief in a sexed reality as an unacceptable act of aggression, and men’s literal violence as a reasonable response to it on the basis that they are now the vulnerable, historically oppressed party. Indeed one might argue that in that moment, Baker became the pure, archetypal embodiment of toxic masculinity. So what if he was wearing a dress?
By the same token neither are “terfs” in any way special or different; ours is not a unique kind of womanhood, nor a unique set of politics. We are just… women. Ones who won’t pretend not to believe in the social and political significance of sex as it remains a protected characteristic under the law. This is not a particularly earth shattering belief, nor an immoral or uncommon one, and frankly if you intend to punch every single one of us who holds it in the fucking face you will be needing an awful lot of fists at the ready.
The truth is we are – or once were - all just women. Witches, suffragettes, terfs: all of us just women marked out as somehow deserving of mistreatment and violence due to our perceived refusal to be quiet and knuckle under. The past is littered with groups of “bad” women who were seen to have got what was coming to them and the garden variety misogynists who cheered it on. When we hear male transactivists now openly advocate serious violence against us and politicians and public figures fail to unequivocally condemn, or even to acknowledge it, it may be shocking, but it isn’t new.
It's all just a little bit of history repeating.