On 16 March 2016, the philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper delivered a talk for Coventry Skeptics. The title was “Critically examining the doctrine of gender identity”. You can watch it
here. Reilly-Cooper also created a blog, “
Sex and Gender: A beginner’s guide” and wrote an article for Aeon on
the problem with viewing gender as a spectrum. If you want to get a feel for all the supposedly terrible things left-wing feminists were saying about trans people around a decade ago — things that apparently
merited this response — you could do worse than start with these.
The mid- to late 2010s were a weird time for left-wing feminists, many of whom had always voted for Labour. While some brave voices, such as
Julie Bindel, had long been telling us there was a problem with trans activism, it was at this point that left-wing gender critical activism gathered speed.
Woman’s Place UK was founded in 2017, by Judith Green, Ruth Serwotka and Kiri Tunks. When I interviewed her for my book
Hags, Tunks told me “we thought us being recognisable women of the left would make people stop and think.” Yet when Woman’s Place held
an unofficial fringe meeting at the 2019 Labour Party conference, attendees were threatened throughout, with protestors blocking access and kicking on windows. In the Labour leadership contest of 2020, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy
signed a pledge describing Woman’s Place as a “hate group”. There have been no apologies for any of this.
It really didn’t have to be this way. Years ago, gender self-ID was a Tory cause, with former Women and Equalities Minister Maria Miller insisting the only opposition came from women “
purporting to be feminists”. If that sounds confusing now, it is only because the male-dominated left’s enthusiasm for sex denialism eventually became — as many of us
warned it would — an open goal for the right. In the period leading up to this, though, you got the sense that many Tories saw “trans rights” as a low-cost way of looking progressive — a kind of super-charged version of gay rights, with none of the inconveniences that come with supporting single mothers, women fleeing violent relationships or those facing pensions inequality. They loved women, the Tories, so much so, anyone could be one.
Obviously things have changed since. To anyone who was not paying attention at the time (and fair enough —
as Jane Clare Jones wrote in 2018, “if you glance at it running from twenty paces, [trans activism] does look exactly like the gay rights movement”), it may be hard to understand why so many of us are so very angry about Labour’s current promises to solve the gender wars. Hey, at least they’re trying, aren’t they? Gotta have a bit of compromise! To some, it may seem churlish to dwell on the injustice of Starmer blaming feminists for
being “toxic” (that is, for saying the kind of things Tony Blair might say, only in their shrill, strident voices). Why can’t we just swallow our pride — that same “pride” that led us to keep researching, writing, speaking, campaigning, fundraising, year after year, ignored by politicians, without ever once stooping to the level of those hounding us — and let bygones be bygones? Let’s just be grateful the adults have entered the room and are going to sort it all out.
Only Labour can’t do this. Or at least, not without having to unpick years and years of legal obfuscation and organisational capture, while also acknowledging that a substantial amount of psychological damage and physical harm has already been caused to vulnerable people. This is not about getting two warring sides to see sense. It is an enormous legal and ideological mess, in which misogyny and porn addiction have played none too small a part. Still they refuse to see it. Instead Starmer now offers up the same lazy “gotchas” that trans activists have been serving up to feminists for the past ten years, all the while seeming profoundly irritated that he — a sensible, rational man — is having to deal with such trifles.
There was a time — and I find it darkly funny now — when I thought all this was preventable. As those of us who were sounding the alarm in the 2010s might recall, there was a period — say 2016 to 2019 — when a particular sequence of events kept recurring. You’d write a piece or make a speech or launch a campaign, and some nice progressive type would come across it and think “oh, that’s good! These women aren’t anything like the evil transphobes I’ve been told about. At last, a compassionate middle way, in which no one denies the salience of biological sex but gender non-conforming people aren’t harassed either!” Then this person would publicise their support for you and — in the early days at least — you’d think “hooray!” Then all hell would break loose.
Your progressive supporter would be inundated with messages from trans activists telling them that one of the worst things about gender-critical feminism was that it seemed sensible, empathetic and left-wing (as the
CUSU guide to spotting “TERF ideology” warns, “the language of TERF ideology is ever changing, always with the aim of sounding reasonable. If your approach to spotting and fighting TERFs is purely based on words and optics, then you’re vulnerable to being taken onboard by a new dogwhistle or talking point”). They’d be told we were not, in fact, an alternative to the evil TERFs; we were them, but it would take an extra-special initiate to spot this (as the grandma in Roald Dahl’s
The Witches says, “REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women”).
Your supporter would hold out for a day or two, perhaps. A few years in, many of us were debating in private how long a particular person would last. Sometimes the supporter would send you semi-apologetic private messages, usually along the lines of “I know you’re not one of the evil TERFs, but I’ve learned that your rhetoric is misused to harm trans people, so I don’t feel comfortable backing you”. Or it could be the more basic “I didn’t realise how complex this — I have a job and some trans friends, so I can’t risk getting into it” (thankfully, feminists don’t have jobs or friends). Then the person would either quietly delete their support or even offer up a low-level denunciation of you.
I’m sure there are people who did this who now have
no recollection of ever having been anything other than the purest supporter of trans activism. I even went through a phase of feeling guilty whenever someone I admired supported me, because I knew what was coming (“denounce me now!” I’d think. “Save yourself! You’re going to be doing it the day after tomorrow anyhow!”).
So, this is how things were back then. I recount all this to make several things clear: first, left-wing feminists were not being “toxic” (or
“throwing bricks”, as Starmer suggested in 2020) but trying very hard to reach a solution, with little support, in the face of utterly unhinged opposition. When other left-wing people looked at what we were saying, without being primed to consider it ‘secretly’ evil, they tended to agree with it.
Second, there’s no real excuse for not knowing what we were arguing. The material is all out there, yet Starmer, for instance, still has absolutely no idea what feminists think gender is (you’d think this was important).
The third thing is that Labour — unlike left-wing parties in other countries — had the chance to address this issue from a left-wing perspective. Debates over sex and gender had not yet been shoehorned into some Tory vs Labour “culture war” (however much trans activists desperately wanted them to be). The situation in the UK was nothing like that in the US, in which it was quickly obligatory to see things only through the lens of trans-inclusive Democrats/transphobic Republicans. Labour had a golden opportunity to progress beyond the slogans. Feminists with a huge range of expertise were
doing all of the work that politicians and career feminists failed to. The party ignored us, thinking the issue would go away. It has not.
Every time a Labour politician has explained their position now, I have felt a rising sense of rage. Do they think we are stupid? Do they seriously think that if only we’d tried a little harder, we’d understand there’s nothing to worry about? Now we are told of course we can have woman-only spaces! Who’s ever said we can’t? And of course trans women are women, but only if they’ve got a certificate, which would therefore make them
eligible to go into these woman-only spaces (it seems it’s only the ones who can’t be arsed to change the name on their phone bill you have to worry about).
This truly is pathetic stuff. What is going on in a male person’s head does not define a woman or girl’s reality. The logical conclusion of Labour’s position is that female-only toilets, changing rooms, refuges, rape crisis centres, dating sites etc. may never be female-only again, and that women and girls just have to live with it on the basis that the male people who use them may or may not have endured some minor bureaucratic inconvenience in order to gain access (not that you’d be able to find out either way).
True, there is
some lip-service being paid to the idea of genuinely female-only spaces. There is, however, no explanation as to how this will be achieved without greater clarification of the law as it stands. Right now, for instance,
a Brighton rape survivor is campaigning to have one — just one — single-sex service. Yet Starmer denies there is a problem. Why does he continue to do this, when it is so obviously not the case?
My suspicion is that on some level, Starmer is starting to realise what feminists worked out many years ago. He cannot admit this — not now, when things have escalated so much — so he must treat us like we are idiots instead. He does not want to tug at the thread we tugged at all those years ago. He knows it will unravel everything. Trans activists will not accept any form of clarification because that would indicate that trans women are not women in every single sense of the word. And if you’re thinking “what about saying ‘you’re women, but you’re not biologically female’”, we tried that one already. It doesn’t work (ditto if you’re considering rebranding “the biologically female” something else — say,
little whinging fuckers — and then granting that group some specific rights. Trans women would simply start identifying as that, too).
Starmer,
just like Harriet Harman, cannot admit that what we know now is completely different to what was known during the
passing of the GRA in 2004 and
the Equality Act in 2010. Apart from the few prescient feminist voices out there, I doubt many people were anticipating that soon there would be claims that trans women could
menstruate and
breastfeed, or that lesbians would be
told by Stonewall to overcome their genital preferences, or that women in general would end up
being rebranded vagina owners, uterus havers, bleeders and the like. Likewise, little attention was paid to the tremendous influence of misogyny-soaked porn on the self-perception of trans-identified males. The trans woman for whom the GRA was written was Coronation Street’s Hayley Cropper, the post-operative trans woman who never once told Roy that “
sissy porn made me trans” or that she liked nothing better than being “
treated like a piece of meat”. Today, we know how male people behave when it is made easier for them to identify as women. It is not like Hayley Cropper.
If, years ago, more left-wing people had stuck with “the feminists have a point”, things would not have escalated in quite the way they have. Because things have gone so far, it is harder for Labour to admit some basic truths: that trans people are not a homogeneous group; that a camp little boy or traumatised teenage girl will have completely different reasons for identifying as trans compared to a middle-aged man; that some men simply enjoy having new ways to breach female boundaries; that there is a difference between a male person’s fetishisation of female oppression and a woman’s actual experience of being oppressed. “Trans women are women” was offered up as a fiction, a kindness, something to ease the pain of a tortured minority, but male people have shown they could not be trusted not to misuse it. Given what we’ve always known about men, it was never really necessary to test this out, but we did. Now we know for sure. Yet Starmer pretends the test was never run, and that the real-life evidence all around him simply doesn’t exist.
So many clever, thoughtful, knowledgeable women were spelling all this out years ago. Now Labour’s only hope is that women forget there was ever a time when we weren’t cis privileged bleeders who don’t deserve words, movements or spaces of our own. Sorry, Sir Keir. It’s not going to happen.
We remember everything. We will keep reminding you of everything. As books such as
The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht and Jenny Lindsay’s forthcoming
Hounded show, we will make sure everyone knows exactly how we came to this point. We might not have all the answers, but at least we did nothing to make the situation so much worse.
One day you might use all the work we’ve done. We owe you nothing, and you hate us for it, but we remain your best bet.
