Political hypocrisy and women's legal and social rights:

I am sick of the lot of them

Good morning all. Last week I tweeted: ‘You may hate me for this (well, some of you at least), but I cannot BELIEVE that many of you on here are deciding who is good or bad for PM because of the trans issue ALONE. I mean, I KNOW it is an urgent issue, but so are a million other things right now!!’

Although some twitters understood what I meant, others didn’t, and the backlash began. I was accused, by one woman via her YouTube channel, that I was ‘centering men’ and that I clearly did not understand how much was at stake for women if the genderists won.

I assume she thought I meant that women’s rights per se were a fringe issue, and not one to concern ourselves with.

But I didn't. What I meant was this: there may well be some Tories that refuse to trot out the mantra “trans women are women”, and they may well pour scorn over the Stonewall approach that insists gender identity trumps biological sex and women’s sex-based rights. Those politicians clearly are refusing to cave to the orthodoxy, which may mean that they are brave, or it may just mean that because their party is in government, they can say the opposite to what many of the Labour Party idiots are saying. But here's the thing that I'm most concerned about - these politicians could also be deeply misogynistic, be anti-abortion, anti-lesbian, think women should be barefoot and pregnant, and not give a damn about our hard won rights. Just because they know what biological sex is doesn't make them a friend of women, it just makes them sensible enough to agree with scientific fact.

What I meant about all of the other ‘urgent things’ that we should be concerning ourselves, was not that we should push women and girls aside and focus instead on saving the planet, animal rights, and every other cause under the planet before we even concern ourselves with women’s liberation, I actually meant urgent issues directly affecting women and girls. For example, the de facto decriminalisation of rape; rising levels of domestic abuse and femicide; police perpetrated abuse; and the proliferation of porn and other forms of sexual exploitation.

I am getting really concerned that a number of women, none of whom were feminists before the ‘gender wars’, have focussed on trans, and nothing but the trans. Why does this matter, you might ask? Well for one thing, if we fight gender ideology without keeping a firm grip on the underlying principles of feminism and women's liberation, it becomes a single issue. If that happens, it means that we could end up giving our support to monstrosities such as Trump, as some (mainly) US based campaigners, did, because he is against trans rights. Trump is also against women's rights, the rights of asylum seekers and refugees, lesbian and gay rights, yadda, yadda. To me, it is morally and politically unconscionable that we would support right wing ideologues because they don't like trans people.

Feminists do not dislike individual trans people because they identify as trans. That is a prejudicial and bigoted view to take. We dislike gender ideology and the creeping capture of our institutions that favour gender over sex based legal rights.

Those accusing me of ‘centering men' seem to not realise that I have written an entire book in which I argue that feminism is the only political movement on the planet that centres women and girls. Yes I actually said that, repeatedly, throughout the book. Perhaps its title gives it away a little, Feminism for Women: the real route to liberation (2021).

The problem with the notion that we should support any politician that ‘knows what a woman is’ is that we have set the bar so low that even a world champion limbo dancer would be flummoxed. We do not need them to simply be ‘anti-woke’ because that possibly or even probably means they really don't like women at all, they just don’t like Stonewall either.

So, when I said that I couldn't believe some women (and men) were deciding who would be a suitable Prime Minister based on their views on the trans debate, I didn't mean that women’s rights is a niche topic, I meant that the ‘what is a woman?’ gotcha question being slung around doesn't actually give us much of a clue about their views on women's liberation. It doesn't tell me whether they support the existence of women's refuges or whether they think that funding them would be a waste of money. It tells me nothing about their views on lesbian asylum seekers from Uganda, or the lack of housing for women and their children escaping violent men. It's easy for politicians to trot out a mantra, whether it is “trans women are women” or “women can't have penises”. As a feminist, rather than someone with a narrow focus on the trans debate, I fight for the liberation of all women, from all forms of male violence and oppression.

Anyway, have a listen to this 5 minute interview with me on the issue from yesterday. I spoke to Rachel Johnson on LBC about political hypocrisy