Was it REALLY so controversial?

My piece on trans ideology from 2004

In 2004 I wrote the piece below, headlined Gender Benders, Beware, published in the Guardian Weekend Magazine. I didn’t choose the headline, but the words were all mine. As some of you will be aware, the complaints came flooding in, condemning me for ‘transphobia’. Trans activists were, at that time, fairly active on message boards, with many trans women gathering on sites aimed at lesbians, such as Ginger Beer.

Following the publication of the piece, the trans activists began to wage a war of attrition against me, which built up steadily to the point at which in 2008, when I was nominated for a Journalist of the Year award by Stonewall, a crowd of 200 gathered outside the venue at which the awards were being presented, shouting ‘Bindel the bigot’ and ‘No prize for transphobia’.

The rest is history, and too long and detailed to go in to here but trans activists have never left me alone. Today, of course, they target hundreds of us, for heinous crimes such as ‘misgendering’ or demanding single sex spaces, but I thought it might be interesting to look back at that piece from 18 years ago to see if it had stood the test of time.

If I were to write that piece today, I would lose some of the childish language such as ‘a man in a dress’ but I still stand by every argument and point I made. I have been asked, many a time, if I regret writing it, and my answer is a genuine ‘no’. The line that caused the most controversy at the time was, as I was bemoaning the reliance on sexist stereotypes of male and female appearance all too often relied on by trans identified individuals:

‘Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease.’ I like that line. It does what it says on the tin.

Four years ago I was alerted to a Medium article by academic philosopher, Professor Kathleen Stock entitled, When Bindels Speak, and I read it open-mouthed. Here was a senior academic, who, as far as I was aware, not involved in feminist campaigning, writing about my 2004 piece and actually defending it and my right to say such things. I was delighted, and re-read it, having not looked at it for a very, very long time.

I found that I was agreeing with myself!

Have a read of it and let me know what you reckon. It seems incredible that it was a fairly major catalyst in my life, and yet I believed at the time, as I believe now, I was just spouting basic feminism.

What most of my critics and haters did not know in 2004 was the Guardian column was not the first piece I had written on trans ideology. The year before, the Telegraph Magazine published an in-depth investigation of mine on the diagnosis of transsexuality. Here is an abridged version, archived (the piece was never online, just in the print version).

Again, to me, it was just feminism.

But the problem has always been the misogynistic ‘allies’ and female man-pleasers, not, aside from some notable exceptions, trans people. Back in 2003/4, most trans people had no interest in trying to destroy women’s lives or cause us direct harm.

Here is the infamous Guardian column. It all seems so very long ago, and at the same time, yesterday. Thank you for reading.

Warmest wishes, Julie