Twenty years a target of the trans cabal

Since January 2004, transactivists have waged a war of attrition against me, with an aim to shut me up and make me contrite. Mostly, they failed

This is a longer version of an article published in Unherd, on the 31st January 2024. You can read it here: https://unherd.com/2024/01/twenty-years-a-terf/

Twenty years ago, the slur of ‘terf’ had not been invented, and the concept of gender ideology was confined to university lectures on Judith Butler. Radical feminists were fighting for the rights of women, and everyone knew they didn’t have penises. But then, something changed.

The 31st January was the 20th anniversary of something I have no desire to celebrate but feel I must acknowledge. Back in January 2004, the year I left academia to become a full-time journalist, I wrote a column for Guardian Weekend Magazine on the issue of transsexuality. It was entitled “Gender Benders, Beware”. It wasn’t the first time I had written about the issue. But this piece in particular lit the touchpaper for a fire that is still burning today even today, as the NHS is castigated for not knowing what a woman is.

I wrote it on the suggestion of the editor, Katharine Viner. She wanted, she said, something about the trans issue. I mainly wrote about male violence, and sometimes lesbian politics. I had no direction from her, except the deadline. So I wrote about how a bastardised version of ‘human rights’ was being used against women - misogyny being one of my favourite subjects – with what was happening to Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR) as an example.

In August 1995, two of VRR’s employees had asked Kimberly Nixon (a trans-identified male) to leave its counsellor training as they thought it might not be appropriate for a man to be counselling abused women. Nixon immediately filed a human rights complaint and began suing VRR. The legal battle was long and arduous. In 2002, Nixon won $7,500, the highest amount ever awarded by the tribunal, for injury to “her dignity”. But when I wrote my piece, that decision had just been overturned.

My piece praised VRR, while considering how gender roles were being subverted at women’s cost. It went to press on January 31, 2004. Here’s a taster:

“…having not experienced life as a ‘woman’ until middle age, Nixon assumed ‘she’ would be suitable to counsel women who have chosen to access a service that offers support to women who have suffered similar experiences, not from a man in a dress! The Rape Relief sisters, who do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman, successfully challenged the ruling and, for now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.”

It was like a bomb going off. The letters page exploded. Two hundred-odd complaints landed and in his weekly column, the readers’ editor felt bound to apologise on my behalf, claiming my words had: “…abused an already abused minority that the Guardian might have been expected to protect”.

This was my Rubicon. The gay press, which had never been fond of me, pretty much declared war, I became a figure of hate for trans activists and things took a nasty turn. The Guardian was and is the only newspaper that employed a readers’ editor to whom complaints can be made about anything that appears in the publication. The organised lobby of trans activists availed themselves of the opportunity to make a huge scene about my piece, claiming everything from it being an incitement to violence, to how no LGBT person would read the paper again unless I was fired.

Penis News coverage - well, one of the 998 articles about it

I was shocked at the tsunami of complaints, but It’s not as though I hadn’t been through similar when I put the blame on men for rape in print, although nothing as extreme.

Viner defended me to the hilt and continued to commission me. But this was the beginning of a war of attrition being waged against me by trans activists: I received death and rape threats, and was confronted by a baying mob of protesters wherever I appeared to do a public presentation.

If I thought things were bad, I drew some comfort for being shortlisted, in 2008, for the Stonewall Journalist of the Year Award. Back then, I was still the only out lesbian journalist in mainstream media and I was writing about issues that were vitally important to lesbians and, indeed, women. Alas, what should have been a moment to celebrate my achievements for the under-represented became a prime opportunity for trans activists to target me. One Stonewall insider told me they were getting up to 20 calls a day demanding my removal from the shortlist. And as I arrived at the ceremony, I was greeted by a 200-strong picket made up of trans people and allies, all screaming “Bindel the bigot!”, “transphobe!” and hurling other such terms of endearment. It felt surreal, and I could not quite believe how, for the protesters, my decades of work on behalf of women, including lesbians, had been disappeared. I knew then that this was it - they would never stop.

And no, I didn’t take home the prize — it went to Miriam Stoppard, the Daily Mirror’s (heterosexual) Agony Aunt who had offered decent advice to a reader whose son had come out as gay in one of her columns.

The judges had been instructed that I was not allowed win, even though I was the firm favourite, because it could have “ruined Stonewall” because they would be seen to be rewarding a transphobe. And it seems the date of this ‘victory’ has now gone down in trans history as the dawn of the modern-day trans rights movement, according to a number of Blogs written by those involved in the protests.

Some bonkers geezer protesting outside the Stonewall Awards, 2008

With that, I became an unspeakable. Invitations to prestigious events, such as the Sydney Writer’s Festival, were withdrawn. I was shortlisted for awards, only to be un-shortlisted when the organisers found themselves under pressure. And in 2009, I became the first individual, alongside six fascist organisations, to be no-platformed by the NUS (National Union of Students). As my name became dirt, the trans stars rose. How did we get here? For many, the trans rights movement was simply a continuation of the campaign for lesbian and gay rights. Many of the legal battles, such as civil partnerships for same-sex couples, had been won, and the growing number of LGBTQ organisations began to look for a new cause.

By 2011, the media had begun platforming transwomen. Juliet Jacques was charting their “transgender journey” in the Guardian, and Channel 4 screened the reality series, My Transsexual Summer. In 2012, Trans Media Watch (TMW) a tiny charity with massive power gave evidence to the Leveson Enquiry, claiming that coverage in the mainstream media was almost always prejudicial, with some news stories ‘outing’ trans people that had not chosen to do so themselves. TMW began flexing its muscles with the big news outlets, offering ‘training’ and ‘advice’. Suddenly, the trans issue was everywhere. Activists were pushing to do away with the requirement for a rubber stamp from medical professionals in order to be allowed to access cross sex hormones and surgery, and the murmurings of “self-identification” as a way forward were getting louder. At the same time, the T was increasingly attached to the LGB acronym.

More worryingly , trans activists were making their presence felt across powerful charities. It was a surprise when, in February 2014 the acting Stonewall CEO Ruth Hunt emailed asking if I’d like to meet her for a drink. I was by now a loud critic of the organisation, considering it assimilationist and conformist, as well as focused far too much on gay men. Almost immediately, the conversation turned to the trans issue. Hunt told me there was “no way” Stonewall was going to add the T to the LGB if she was offered the permanent post, and that she would go no further than help set up and support a separate organisation for trans people.

When, that summer, it was announced that Hunt was the new CEO of Stonewall. Hunt met with trans activists to discuss Stonewall becoming trans inclusive and promptly apologised for my nomination in 2008.

As Hunt was lauded by the trans lobby, I was de-platformed. Every time I was invited to speak, the haters would do their best to get me cancelled — even though the discussions were about my feminist campaigns to end rape and domestic violence. Their activism usually worked. I’d accept an invitation, whether from a university or another public body, the event would be advertised, and then, following a campaign of bullying and harassment, the organisers would pull out and publicly announce that I had been cancelled.

In 2015 I was invited to debate the question: “Does modern feminism have a problem with free speech?” by the University of Manchester Free Speech and Secular Society. My opponent was Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right agitator who opposed abortion rights and blamed women for rape. Following the predictable trans activist pile-on, the Women's Officer decided I should be publicly disinvited because my presence could “incite hatred towards and exclusion of our trans students”, and my views were “dangerous for trans people and…for feminist and liberation movements in general”. A left-wing feminist activist was being silenced while a self-proclaimed misogynist was welcome. Yiannopoulos was eventually disinvited after feminists kicked up a fuss. People were beginning to finally twigg that trans activism was a front for woman-hatred, otherwise, why treat the actual transphobic bigot as far less of a threat than me?

It was a lonely time, despite some individual feminists speaking out and organising against transgender ideology. But the proliferation of gender ideology peddled by the Guardian and universities was a force to be reckoned with. And they had made me a pariah. So, when I was invited in 2016 to speak to the Salford Working Class Movement Library about growing up as a working-class lesbian in north-east England. Hundreds of mainly middle-class students petitioned the library to de-platform me, claiming I was a bigot. They even went after the library’s funding and funders, who were told I was “transphobic”, “biphobic”, “Islamophobic”, “hateful,” and “anti-sex work”. I was also a Terf, (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) coined by self-described ‘trans ally’ Viv Smythe in series of blogposts from 2008, in which she bemoaned what she considered to be ‘anti-trans’ coverage in the British press.

The library volunteers stood their ground, and the event went ahead in February 2017. It was standing room only. I hadn’t intended to mention trans ideology (strangely enough, it wasn’t much of an issue on my run-down council estate in the 1970s). But, once I was in that room, having been escorted by security guards past yet another baying mob, I cracked and spent 15 minutes talking about the rising transactivist hatred towards women, especially lesbians. And then we moved on to my lesbian awakening.

Such was the tenor of the debate and the violent anger that drove the transactivists, I have been physically threatened and attacked on several occasions. Obscenities and threats are thrown at me, I have been injured in scuffles and have had to be defended from punches and body blows. The irony escapes these activists - generally trans-identifying males - that I am a feminist who campaigns to prevent violence against women.

In September 2017, Woman's Place UK (WPUK) was founded by a group of socialist feminists in response to Tory Minister for Women, Maria Miller deciding to recommend self-ID as a key reform to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act.

Everything changed as groups of women began to organise politically; resistance to gender ideology was now driving feminist activism.

I’m lucky, unlike some women, such as my friends Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix and Maya Forstater, I had no job to be hounded out of. I work as a freelancer. And despite being slowly frozen out of writing for the Guardian over the past decade, I have always had plenty of work. But these past 20 years have been hard at times.

For me, the worst thing of all is being labelled a bigot, homophobe and fascist. Since coming out as a lesbian aged 15, and soon after joining the campaigns for lesbian, gay and women’s liberation, I have chosen to spend all my adult life campaigning to end bigotry. Hearing high-profile liberal luvvies saying things like, “I abhor Julie Bindel’s transphobia but I defend her right to free speech” makes me furious. I have fought for the rights of marginalised and oppressed communities for decades. And I don’t regret a thing. I have had a lifetime of being unpopular, hated even, for speaking out against male violence and refusing to compromise on that. But I have met so many brilliant women along the way. There have been triumphs, such as Stonewall being cross examined and exposed as extreme trans activists during the case brought by black lesbian barrister, Allison Bailey; the capitulation of Nottingham City Council following a legal challenge I won against them for banning me from speaking at a public library, and numerous other legal victories such as the recent one by Professor Jo Phoenix against the Open University.

But there is still much to do. A number of institutions remain captured by Stonewall, including the Crown Prosecution Service, and children are still being allowed to ‘socially transition’ in school without parental consent. And women like me are still being labelled as bigots for doing nothing more than stand up for our sex-based rights.

Last September I was back in Vancouver, meeting the brilliant women I wrote about all those years ago, many of whom are now close friends. They are still under attack by trans activists, and have had cuts to their funding, and even a rat nailed to the door of their centre by blue-fringed misogynists. But they, like me, persist.