If you're a woman but you don't feel like a woman 'on the inside', you've resisted the pressure to internalise patriarchal gender norms. If you're a man but you don't feel like a man 'on the inside', you've resisted the pressure to internalise patriarchal gender norms.

It was revelatory, while working at Mumsnet, to witness first hand, in parliament, the extent to which so many politicians wrap a mediocre intellect inside an absolute, bouncing, head-girl or boy self-confidence. You think you know this already - but you don't… [thread 🧵] Or at least, not the full extent of it. You would be astonished at the paucity of ability, experience and insight in many of those who have a meaningful hand in making our laws, and at the casual, will-they-won’t-they process by which they may - or may not ! - engage with
2/-

These Durham girls are 19-20. One of mine is 19. They are *children* in almost every way. What the fuck is wrong with this woman, seriously. Her cool girl shit overrides her desire to protect children like hers?

https://twitter.com/zoesqwilliams/status/1459458834284617734

This is not your posh girl Belle de Jour fantasy @zoesqwilliams . This isn't something on the side for a bouncing jolly-hockeysticks girl with a healthy appetite for sex. This OVERWHELMINGLY impacts working-class/previously abused/addicted/indebted/indentured girls and women 1/

Some young women seem genuinely unable to understand the argument against 'sex work is work' - they just don't have the same jolt of horror and empathy at the thought of a woman's vagina or anus being rented as a receptacle for his semen by a man. 1/.. Perhaps they don't recognise the scenario as a totalising act of objectification because they no longer recognise objectification at all. Two decades of porn saturation has been so fully internalised that it's engendered a kind of habitual auto-objectification. 2/..

It's not by chance that identity ideology constructs middle-aged women as the enemy, is it? It's all *about* mothers - rage at the mother, repudiation of the mother, mother-hate. Gender theory is a post-truth fantasy of self-generation, of giving birth to one's own Self. Unbodied/post-bodied - technology-born, all evidence of the blood and guts of birth erased;

By ‘building back in a more feminine way’, does Boris Johnson means more equitably, or more .. waftily? What he actually said was 'in a more gender neutral and feminine way'. So, let's build back in a boiler suit or crinoline way.

If, as the Irish government proposes, it becomes illegal to say out loud that the man who raped you with his penis is the man who raped you with his penis - regardless of what he's wearing or what he tells you about his 'gender' - we are all utterly fucked. All of us.
/Thread/ Please, don't soothe yourself with the idea that this is an extreme scenario or straw man. It's happening already. It's the institutionalised psychological abuse of women, and it's leading to the institutionalised sexual abuse of women, in prison and elsewhere. It will only grow.

Christ, this insistence that feminism act as unpaid carer to all other activist movements - and sacrifices, without complaint, its own interests in doing so - is precisely why feminism exists. No other movement is required to consider - let alone centre - the concerns or experiences of any other group; can you fucking imagine?

One reason many younger women don't understand gender critical feminism is that women often only come up against the biological basis of our oppression when we have children. Before that point - if you're middle class - it's easy to believe that battle is won. Not the only reason - of course not. But I think it explains why *so many* younger feminists buy into the idea that women’s oppression springs from their gender/socialised role- rather than from the simple fact that they belong to the sex class that has vagina/can give birth.