This morning I found myself getting much more annoyed about the Cass report and the treatment of feminists over trans issues than I've allowed myself to feel before (I don't think I'm alone in this). The trigger was something incredibly trivial. > I saw a news report which mentioned an author visiting a conference near me. It wasn't an author who'd been particularly horrible to me or anyone else. It was just someone who'd once tweeted, as one does, in that arse-covering way, that they were really sad about mean terfs >

In years to come, people who have knowingly supported misogyny and homophobia out of sheer cowardice will quietly adopt the views of left-wing feminists, but claim they couldn't support them earlier because the left-wing feminists were aligning themselves with fascists

https://twitter.com/SunnyMarmalaid/status/1661922773026082817

Feminists function as cannon fodder, holding the line you won't hold yourself because you want to be popular. Meanwhile you blame them for the open goal you've created and insist - again, through cowardice - on keeping it wide open.

Principles such as "female bodies matter", "male inner lives aren't more special and important than female ones" and "female perceptions of male power and threat aren't arbitrary and contingent on individual male approval" are not exclusive to any one "debate". > They are basic feminism. There are women who are giving these principles away wholesale without noticing they're doing it because they tell themselves it's just "the trans debate", but it's not. You give this stuff away, you give it to *all* male people. >

Women: <get hounded out of jobs, face death threats, deal with constant smears, require protection just to speak>
Man: "well, you got to speak, didn't you? Jeez, don't know what you're complaining about"
theguardian.com/education/2023… It's like an abusive partner telling you you're not being bullied or controlled because he can still "hear you whining".

Thanks, but I think people are capable of reading the words I've actually written without my supposedly hidden intentions being "revealed". I am so sick of "what she really means is ..."

https://twitter.com/mollyknefel/status/1667224878791946247

This is why women get told we just need to write or speak more reasonably or politely or compassionately. Because we do it already, only it gets presented as having a hidden, unreasonable meaning.

The gender-neutral language masks the fact that the first "people" refers to males, whose needs are pitched as universal (ability to feel like they belong). The second "people" refers to females, whose needs are pitched as trivial and mean (winning and losing).

https://twitter.com/WRNWales/status/1666789751519576064

Maybe female athletes want to feel like they belong rather than be edged out because the category isn't theirs any more. But that's just mean of them. Belonging is a human - male default - need. What would the non-males know about it?

Men shouting at women to shut up - blocking passageways, banging on windows, throwing eggs, waving banners threatening decapitation - is exactly what it looks like. It has been happening in plain sight for years, at universities, at feminist gattherings, at party conferences. The women who've talked about it have been vilified themselves on the basis that those on the right side of history wouldn't do this unless their targets were really evil and actually, it's quite prissy to care about a bit of shouting in the face of pure evil.

So many people see "nice" men abusing women and think not "perhaps these men aren't so nice", but "how terrible must these women be? And if these women are so terrible, maybe I should join in the abuse" Or "that proves these women are as bad as I thought and I am safe, because I'm not bad".

Wait, I have some thoughts about this! blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/produ…

https://twitter.com/DrVicFielding/status/1638686063672819712

One of the things I look at in Hags is how positions characterised as cohort-specific ("gen X women are bigots but their views will die out with them") can really be lifecycle-specific ("older women have specific reasons for thinking femaleness matters, so we call them bigots")

Because it's my publication day (and I'm obviously massively excited about this!) I thought I would list a few of the books that I found really valuable when writing Hags (also to stop me just going on about Hags all the time) > The first is Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born, which I'm always talking about, but it's just so insightful not just on intergenerational relationships, but disidentification (or not) from the female body > amazon.co.uk/Woman-Born-Mot…

Calling a male rapist by male pronouns means centring the perspective of the victim and recognising the politics of male sexual violence. It's not about being petty to someone you "don't like" A feminist analysis of rape is not some indulgence we should dispense with because it's all a bit old and Judith Butler finds it boring

"As thinkers we are unfortunately not yet think-y enough to distinguish between supporting gender non-conformity and drugging children who are gender non-conforming in order to claim they're the sex that 'matches' after all" nytletter.com This woolly, eyes-half-shut attempt at looking like you have a coherent, evidence-based argument is really depressing. Because you sense people know that they don't, that they're not really supporting non-conformity, and that they have to pretend really hard to deny it.

We're meant to think how a 16yo feels about gender and their body is completely unrelated to how traumatic puberty is and how many pornified, negative messages teenage girls receive, how much harassment they suddenly encounter, and how teenage boys behave

https://twitter.com/HolyroodDaily/status/1605240321063157760

How you feel about being female is obviously related to what you are told being female *is*. I don't think teenagers invent feeling deeply distressed, but in an incredibly sexist world, why would their understanding of what women are be infallible?

I think there are women who've absorbed the idea that female difference = female inferiority so much that it's only by denying difference and pretending people who aren't female are more disadvantaged that they can feel powerful. It's that "what if female people aren't discriminated against, but are just losers?" anxiety. So you hate feminists because they seem to draw attention to that "loser status" that you, through sheer force of will, are transcending.

One of the things I've found hardest about discussions on teenage girls and gender dysphoria is you get "well, how could you possibly understand?" So then you try to show that you do, not that anyone should be owed it. thecritic.co.uk/should-puberty… Then the response is "ha, *your* body hatred shows you were fucked up. It's completely different to the body hatred that shows you know exactly who you are". You're considered *less* worthy of having a view. Hey, maybe even something dodgy happened to make you like this!

I think there will be journalists who end up drawing the same conclusions on teenage girls and gender dysphoria as the women they vilified, and the way around this will be to claim the women who spoke out first made it harder for "nuanced" people to have a say. > It will be argued that the women who first said there was an issue contributed to the "polarisation of the debate" - even if these women were not saying *anything* different to those now posing as the nuanced voices of reason. >

Tfw describing class characteristics is "sinister and reductive", but calling women gestators (and denying they have any class connection with post-menopausal or infertile women) isn't It is so deeply misogynistic that people see dehumanisation in describing which sex class gets pregnant. As though that's the same as saying "women are baby machines" (as opposed to "inclusively" deciding women aren't baby machines - just those "gestators" are)

Trauma responses to male violence aren't conditional on how individual male people describe themselves. Telling students to report those who wish to have female-only spaces is truly shameful.

https://twitter.com/MForstater/status/1590626110470950912

University staff have no idea of the homes their students come from, the experiences they've had, yet it's been decided one form of distress is valid and another is a "phobia" that requires a process of rooting out and shaming.

I didn't grow up in a feminist household. I used to get told I was fat and ugly a lot, and internalised the idea that my appearance made me inappropriate and ridiculous (plus the fact that I "talked too much"). > A lot of "feminism" I encountered in the 90s pushed back on second wave feminism by portraying it as having wrongly vilified femininity - "it's okay to be pretty / wear pink / get your tits out", as if we just needed to be liberated to choose what we were pressured to do anyway >

Many of us who grew up around right-wing men see little difference in the attitudes of 'progressive' men who lecture us on language and submissive behaviour, with threats of violence for non-compliance and warnings that 'the other men' are worse. You do not have anything to teach us about 'the other men'. We know, but here you are, suggesting we're in with them because we've said no to you. You are the same.

I wrote about Jordan Gray being a dick, and why misogyny isn't "ironic" or "satirical" when women themselves remain the punchline thecritic.co.uk/A-dick-move/ There is a real misogyny loophole whereby people - usually women, terrified of looking "exclusionary" - tell themselves actual misogyny is just a performance of misogyny. But the latter would mock misogynists, not women themselves.