Bonus newsletter: on absolutism

Bad at being dictated to

This is a bonus essay from Tox Report, so no listened/watched/read and no gimme more section. Usual service resumes on Tuesday.

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In March 2014, I published the first piece that got me called a terf. I was late to the party: Julie Bindel, who I spoke to for the article, had received ten years of vitriol by then for a column she wrote about Vancouver Rape Relief, a women-only service that was being sued by a trans woman who wished to be employed as a counsellor.

I think it’s characteristic of where I came into this debate that the piece I wrote wasn’t directly about gender identity. It was about freedom of speech and the mission creep of “no platform”, which was being used to silence a radical feminist who spoke about violence against women. It seemed to me then, and seems to me even more strongly now, prima facie sexism — misogyny rebranded as a liberal cause.

There are things which date the column. There’s no mention of “gender identity” or “gender criticism” — neither of those concepts had been fully established yet, and I would become one of the writers who helped to mainstream them. In the copy, I am clearly antsy about being seen as defending Julie’s original column in its entirety, which I call “facetious”. It wasn’t facetious, it was funny and correct, and something I should have said in the piece is that, to Julie’s attackers, her most unforgivable crime is being hilarious. Sorry, Julie.

(The other thing dating my column is that I also wrote about the no-platforming of the commentator Alan Johnson, who was shouted down by students calling him a “fucking Zionist” while he attempted to make a case against boycotting Israel. That was by far the least controversial part of my piece. It would not be so now.)

But I was cautious because this was terrain I was only beginning to explore, and it had already proved bruising. In the process of writing the piece, I’d approached some of Julie’s critics for comment. In true no-platform style, they’d not only refused to explain why Julie should be deemed an untouchable — they’d also headed to Twitter to publicly denounce me as a terf for even asking.

I’d anticipated this, but it was still not exactly fun (even if it was, and remains, extremely funny that one of the people doing this was a member of “Feminists Against Censorship”). Ten years later, I feel philosophical about the price of being labelled a terf: I have a decent career doing work I enjoy and a happy personal life. Through my engagement with the issue, I’ve made enduring friendships with people I am proud to know (hello, Julie).

I think my views across this period have been fairly constant. Sex must take precedence over gender identity. When someone transitions or presents in a gender-nonconforming way, they should be protected from discrimination, but that is no argument for eroding women’s rights. Children with gender dysphoria need time and support, not sterilising hormones. Most importantly to me, given where I came in: everyone must have both freedom of conscience and freedom of speech around gender identity, as around any other issue.

Many years ago now, a friend who was also writing critically about trans politics said (I paraphrase): when this all blows over, not only will everyone pretend they always agreed with us, they’ll say it’s our fault no one was listening sooner because we made the argument the wrong way. She was right. I just don’t think she, or I, anticipated which faction would be saying it.

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The pushback I received between 2013 and around 2020 tended to come from trans rights activists and look like this: by refusing to “validate trans identities”, I was endangering trans lives. When I chose not to use preferred pronouns, or defended other people’s choices not to use preferred pronouns, I was enabling anti-trans violence.

If I “deadnamed” someone (that is, alluded to their pre-transition name), I was dehumanising them. It was not enough to say trans women could (in a limited and legalistic sense) be considered women. I had to say they were female. If I criticised the rhetoric or actions of the trans movement, I was guilty of “tone policing” and speaking from a position of privilege.

The pushback I tend to get now comes from gender critical activists, and looks more like this: by acknowledging trans people as a group with certain needs and afflictions, I am endangering women’s rights. When I choose to use someone’s preferred pronouns, or defend someone else’s decision to do so, I am enabling misogyny.

If I fail to use someone’s pre-transition name, I am colluding in a fetish. It is not enough to say that trans women are male. I have to say that they are men. If I criticise the rhetoric or actions of the gender-critical movement, I am guilty of “tone policing” and speaking from a position of privilege.

I find this deeply tedious, especially given it comes overwhelmingly from people who don’t appear to have been involved in the debate about gender as long as I have. The GC anger over Janice Turner’s interview with trans woman Debbie Hayton felt like a watershed to me. Most of the people who were appalled that Janice used the “wrong” pronouns or disgusted that the Times had “platformed an AGP” (Debbie is clear and honest about experiencing autogynephilia) were simply not in the game when Janice began writing about gender. Yet here they all were, absolutely convinced that Janice was betraying “the cause” by using language they didn’t approve of. (And, even more sinisterly, convinced that Debbie’s wife Stephanie is a downtrodden victim. She isn’t.)

Posie Parker/Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who has appointed herself the arbiter of “holding the line” and is backed up by a phalanx of worshipful supporters, was posting in 2013 about how “weird” she found “prejudice shown by some rad fems against trans women”. People change their minds (maybe she’ll change her mind one day about having appeared on this guy’s podcast). Still, I wonder why I’m supposed to accept absolutism from someone who would fail her own purity test.

Many (not all) of those pushing the most hardline gender critical positions are also posting anonymously. This, too, is tedious. I’m aware that publicly critiquing aspects of gender identity ideology can have high costs for people in some sectors — after all, I lost friends and work after my own “coming out”. It was unpleasant. I understand why people would rather not pay that price.

However: the environment today is not what it once was. In the late 2010s, both major political parties in the UK were committed to self-ID, and anyone saying on social media that they didn’t believe in gender identity was inviting a public shaming. In 2024, neither party is advocating self-ID, and social media will warmly reward you for gender-critical posts. There’s still hostility (especially for those working in academia or the public sector) and many people have personal reasons for concealing their identity, but you cannot claim to be braver than me while risking nothing of your own.

There’s something poisonous about adopting a persona online. The person you are on the internet exists in a realm of pure ideology

I think there’s something poisonous about adopting a persona online, and anonymity can exaggerate that. The person you are on the internet can be more perfect, more austere than any flesh and blood because it has no commitments and makes no compromises. It exists in a realm of pure ideology. That was true for trans activists when they were in the ascendancy, and it’s true for gender critical activists now.¹

When the dust has settled, the messiness of people will persist. There will still be trans people who need legal protections (and those protections cannot be based on an untruth about human sex). There will still be detransitioners who deserve kindness as they learn to live with their changed bodies. There will still be people who believe in gender identity, and they remain entitled to their faith (just not entitled to impose it on other people).

I bridled at being told what to think and say when it came from one faction, and I bridle at it now. The taboos on “deadnaming” and “misgendering” were gross impositions, but the gender critical attempt to establish its own equal and opposite set of unsayable statements is also a gross imposition. Not every name change is nefarious. Pronouns are not magic, in either direction: the English language is flexible, and there’s a long history of playful she-ing and he-ing without making any counterfactual claims about sex. (Do people not know about Julian and Sandy anymore? Truly, these are philistine times.)

There’s less cause for me to write about gender identity now. For a long time, there were only a few people willing to take the subject on, and if I didn’t tackle something, the risk was that it might not be tackled at all. That’s not true anymore: it’s an established news beat, and I feel freed up to do what I always wanted to do, which is write about issues affecting women using language that’s clear and intuitive to me, rather than language imposed by an external doctrine. I got labelled a terf in the first place because I’m bad at being dictated to, and I’m still bad at that, whoever is doing the dictating.

1. If you find yourself tempted to defend Rishi Sunak for taking cheap PMQs shots about gender while the mother of murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey sat in the chamber, I’d suggest that now is a good moment to get reacquainted with your humanity. There’s a time and a place for that kind of thing, although given that the Tories have been in power for the entire period of gender identity’s march through the institutions, for Sunak the time is probably “never” and the place “nowhere”.