I guess it shouldn't be that surprising that people who devised a political project based on reality denial seem to think that reality denial is the best response to a court judgement reasserting reality. Stephen Whittle, 2001: 'being a man or a woman is contained in someone's gender identity'

Stephen Whittle, 2007: The GRA rewrites the meaning of sex and gender in law and gender now determines sex

Stonewall and various TRAs and orgs: 2010-2025: The GRA redefines the meaning of sex in the EA2010, and the protected charactersitic of gender reassignment means that you cannot exclude trans people from single sex spaces of their gender.

The Supreme Court, 2025: Sex in the EA2010 means biological sex and single sex spaces are organised on the basis of biological sex.

Whittle, Coppola, Stonewall, TRAs: That is not the law, that is not what the law says, that is an extreme interpretation of the law, organisations do not have to follow that, wait for the statutory code because it will say that that isn't the law, the lawyers saying that is the lay are all liars, everyone who says that should be sacked!!!

So, a bunch of feminist academics have written an open letter condemning the Supreme Court judgement, and the EHRC's interim guidance.

None of this is particularly surprising, given what we know about how captured academic gender studies is by trans ideology, and the particular interpretation of feminism that supports it.

There is a lot that can be said about this letter, not least that academics should be fucking embrassed to be repeating nonsense about genital checks in toilets, but I'd like to focus on a few paragraphs that make claims about what feminism is and what feminism isn't, because they underline how academic third wave feminism produced a hard orthodoxy that has very successfully attempted to deligitimise/reread/erase second wave feminism, and present itself as the one true feminist way ⬇️

docs.google.com/document/u/0/d… So, this is pretty much a bingo card of all the third wave classics.

1. It isn't feminist to define women by their biology.

As we have argued ad inifinitum, this claim depends on a slippage in the meaning of 'defined by' between 'to define the meaning of the category' and 'defined/limited by.'

When second wave feminism argued that women's opportunities and possibilities should not be defined/limited by their sex, they did not mean that the category of woman was not a biological category.

This only happens in third wave feminism, and with the collapse of the sex/gender distinction, most significantly as the result of Butler's intervention.

2. It isn't feminist to think biology determines our destiny

True. But thinking women are female doesn't imply anything about what you think women should 'do, wear, or be' *unless* you have already collapsed the sex/gender distinction, and think that biology is *in and of itself* necessarily determinist.

Which is fucking nonsense.

The claim that it is 'essentialist and patriarchal' to think that women are female, and that thinking women are female implies anything about women's necessary behaviour, only follows if you yourself are working with a fundamentally biologically determinist assumption about the relationship between biology and social norms.

Second wave feminism does not have that assumption. That was the point of the sex/gender distinction.

3. It is only by collapsing the sex/gender distinction that it could be possible to think something as fucking stupid as 'the law defining women as female' = 'enforcing the idea that all women need to conform to a singular, racialised and ableist model of femininity.'

Defining women as female is *precisely not* defining women by femininity.

The whole fucking point of the second wave feminist distinction between sex and gender is that 'being female' =/= 'femininity.'

It is gender ideologues, by asserting that women are a gender class, who *are* defining women by femininity, which is one of the main reasons why we have resisted this redefintion.

Definining women as female is the definition we have defended, precisely *because* it is the defintion *that does not import gendered ideas of femininity into the defintion.* This is the reason we have maintained that is is the only non-sexist defintion.

So the new campaign recently launched to link the gender critical movement with anti-immigration politics has been picked up by the press, as was very likely, because it plays right into the hands of the TRAs.

The campaign was launched with the claim: "We’ve won the battle against trans ideology. Now, it’s essential that the gender critical community speaks up about the dangers of mass immigration for women."

I have some thoughts 🧵:

metro.co.uk/2025/04/23/ter… First off, Metro should not be using the word TERF. It is well established that this term is a slur associated with violent threats against women, and efforts to bully them into complying with their erasure in law. Anyone claiming to be writing in the interests of social justice is immediately rendered a hypocrite by using this term.

So, seeing as portions of the media and political class are still going with the 'this is the result of a bunch of bigots persecuting a tiny minority' narrative, I thought it worth doing a potted history of how we got here, and why it was necessary to get the SC to clarify the meaning of sex in the EA2010. n 2015, Maria Miller was appointed as the Chair of the newly established Women and Equalities Select Committee (WESC).

The first thing WESC did was undertake an Inquiry into Transgender Equality.

The Inquiry's report was published at the end of 2015.
publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cm…

To all the journalists who would not touch this issue because they thought it was too toxic, and left grassroots feminist women to do all the heavy lifting to undo a process of political sex erasure being carried out against us by our institutions.

Maybe you could have opened your mouths a bit fucking earlier? I understand that you are worried this might end up having a maximalist effect.

But seriously, who produced this situation?? How did we get here??? Why was it not sorted out in a timely manner??? Why did the government just repeatedly drop the ball???

The answer is because they were scared of the trans activists.

Let's be honest here.

And our institutions abnegation of duty is responsible for enabling the conditions of a wider backlash. And I include the media in that.

I think the populist right's response to 'Adolescence' has been incredibly revealing.

The show dedicates several hours to trying to understand a young boy's murderous behaviour, and despite his crimes, treats him as fully human, and worthy of understanding and in many instances, compassion and care.

If feminists wanted to make a criticism of the show, it would be that, as the female detective points out, the female victim ends up dropping out of sight, and all the attention is focused on the boy who killed her.

But to the populist right, this complex, and in many ways, empathetic exploration of the boy's behaviour is 'demonisation.'

What is the basis for claiming that the boy is being 'demonised'?

spectator.co.uk/article/adoles… I think it's important to think that through, because it highlights something very important in the discourse about male violence being used by the populist right.

1. The first rule of that discourse is that male violence must not be attributed to anything to do with 'masculinity.' I think the phrase 'toxic masculinity' has been unhelpful, because a lot of people hear it as 'masculinity is toxic' rather than what is meant, which is 'there are certain aspects of masculinity that produce harmful effects.'

But I also think the fact that people hear it like that has a lot to do with the fact that there are a lot of people who will point blank refuse to engage in any conversation about the harmful effects of aspects of patriarchal masculinity, and will always respond to that in an incredibly defensive way, and by decrying the way men are being 'demonised.' Even when the treatment is actually very humanising and compassionate.

In the video linked in the Spectator article, Young bats away the problem of online influencers like Tate by claiming 'only 25% of young boys like Tate.' Tate is peddling in the very worst kind of misogynist violent domination and dehumanisation of women and girls. If a quarter of boys are being influenced by that *that is a HUGE problem.* It's not okay that only a quarter of young men think women are subhuman sex servants that should be slapped around to keep them in line Toby.

And it is extremely revealing that you are far more concerned about the apparent 'demonisation' of men for consuming this content, than you are on the harmful nature of this content, and the effect it might have on women and girls.

Indeed, gender is a core second wave feminist concept. As a core second wave feminist concept it refers to the social mechanisms through which people are socialised into their respective sex roles, the hierarchical valuation of those sex roles, the mechanisms of othering and devaluation of women, and beyond that, the entire hierarchical set of social values and oppositions which upholds this system.

It *does not refer* to people’s inner or innate identity. And it does not displace or overwrite sex in any way. Gender in second wave feminist operates with a distinction between sex and gender, and the understanding is that gender role socialisation is applied to particular individuals *on the basis of sex* in order to maintain and propagate sex based oppression.

That is not the same concept as is being used either by third wave Butlerian feminism, or by the dominant gender studies paradigm that was created by the fusion of third wave academic feminism and trans ideology.

And the reason we are fighting a battle that has come to be called ‘the gender war’ is because we fundamentally don’t agree here about what gender is. Although, as Jo is doing an exemplary job of demonstrating, we have spent the last ten something years trying to get a coherent definition of what the dominant gender studies paradigm actually thinks gender is, and we’re still not much the wiser. I was teaching this last night in my class on third wave feminism.

One of the issues here is that feminism appropriated the word ‘gender’ from sexology in the early seventies to apply to a concept/set of thoughts that has existed in feminism at least since Wollstonecraft’s ‘Vindication.’ That is, that our society has a hierarchical sex based role system and that the ‘inferiority’ of women is socially produced.

It turns out that taking the word from sexology might not have been so felicitous. Because in sexology it comes along with a load of individualising, psychologising, and patriarchal assumptions. And that is the meaning of gender that ended up resurfacing in the concept of ‘gender identity.’ Which, to underline, *did not emerge through feminism.* That concept goes from sexology into trans ideology, and then is absorbed into the dominant gender studies paradigm when it is formed from the fusion of third wave feminism and trans ideology.

Okay. So I’m only going to do this once here.

This is in response to the below tweet requesting evidence, in response to my previous tweet about whether people really do want us to provide receipts, which was a response to the anonymous GC Letter, which is an exercise in handwaving and deflection produced in response to the GC Anti Far Right letter.

This account is claiming she has no idea what we are referring to and asking to be directed to some evidence. So I checked her TL. We have many of these such encounters these days. People saying ‘we can’t make legitimate criticisms of Islam’ or ‘it’s just about two tier policing’ and then checking their TL and then going ‘Oh fuck, okay, right you are 🤯’

Turns out this tweet is a pretty good example. The practice being depicted in the video is indeed barbaric. And it’s okay to say that. However, the text places that observation in a much wider frame. The use of ‘most of these apes’ (FFS), the reference to ‘live like we are in the 1AD,’ combined with ‘who follow the Quran,’ ‘third world,’ ‘immigration’ and ‘barbaric’ produces this:

‘We should not let Muslims immigrate to this country because they are backwards uncivilised primitive animal-like barbarians.’

And that isn’t just ‘expressing reasonable concerns about Islam.’ That is anti-Muslim racism. So, I have an essay I wrote yesterday and I’m just faffing around with it and getting it ready.

In response to all this handwaving I started getting the receipts together and sorting them into piles.

‘Historic GC anti-Muslim rhetoric’

‘Recent GC Anti-Muslim rhetoric 1 and 2.’

‘Attendance at Tommy Robinson marches and handwaving and defending it.’

‘Personal abuse and lies aimed at anyone who calls it out.’

‘Rhetoric handwaving the racist nature of the riots, claiming it is just legitimate class war, claiming anyone who objects is some mad totalitarian wokeist, more nonsense about two-tier policing, more nonsense about how the far right doesn’t exist, re-posting videos repeating the far right framing of the grooming gang scandal at the precise moment people are trying to set fire to buildings with asylum seekers in them in Rotherham while making cracks about ‘inflammatory’ rhetoric. Yes the rhetoric is at this very moment literally inflammatory. Okay.’

It all tells a pretty compelling story.

I’m not going to post them. I am not going to post them for strategic reasons I consider more important than answering to a great deal of wilful deflection and handwaving.

Anyone who honestly wants to see what people are concerned about merely needs to open their eyes and look.

Extract from ‘Feminism Is Not Identity Politics: Transactivism, Gender Critical Populism, and the Culture War.’

The Radical Notion Issue 8/Gender Critical Disputes, February 2023.

“What is happening now in the gender-critical community is the steady replacement of arguments based on material sex-class analysis with a politics of ‘woman-identity.’ Materialist feminists used to laugh when TRAs accused us of ‘gatekeeping womanhood,’ as if we gave a shit about such a nebulous gendery thing, or as if being female was somehow the same as being a country with borders under human control. I hear a lot more talk of ‘defending womanhood’ these days, or even, in one alarming (and alarmist) formulation that turned up in my mentions, the urgency of ensuring the “survival of the biological female race.” People seem to have forgotten that the original gender-critical point was that men who wear women’s clothes, or use women’s names, or even take she/her pronouns, are not, thereby, made female, because being female is a material fact distinct from all the social trappings of ‘woman-identity.’ Women, we said repeatedly, are not an idea one can simply identify with. Women are no more or less than adult female people. And being female is not a thing that can be attacked, and not a thing that needs to be defended. It simply is. What needs to be defended is the recognition of female people, or women, as a class in law, the organization of public services and public policy on the basis of sex, and the right of women to organize and speak politically as a sex class. That is defending women’s material class interests, not defending womanhood.” “Right now, however, gender-critical discourse is increasingly focused on the protection of ‘woman-identity’ from the onslaught of an invading other. And it is no accident that with this shift comes tribalism, ‘us vs. them’ thinking, mistrust of nuance and complexity, increasing dehumanization of ‘the enemy,’ and just in the last few days, a direct—haha joking!— incitement to violence.(24) In this new ‘either you’re with us or against us’ landscape, internal critique can no longer be tolerated and anyone who raises questions about the direction of travel will be increasingly positioned as a traitor, in league with ‘the enemy,’ or, as materialist and radical feminist women have recently been called, ‘TRA-lites.’ And you know what, many of us do share some beliefs with the TRAs—or at least, with what TRAs claim to believe about othering people, provid- ing they’re not non-compliant middle-aged women who re- mind you of your mum. We believe that dehumanizing other groups of people is wrong and goes bad places, that it’s not consistent with a feminist politics of anti-domination,(25) and that mechanisms of tribal othering have a lot to do with right- wing nationalisms, with white and male supremacy,(26) and indeed, with fascistic violence. As I argued in ‘Why Feminists Are Not Nazis,’ the reason for the spuriousness of transactivist claims about the inherent connection between gender-critical feminism and the kind of ‘us vs. them’ tribalism that tends to shade towards fascism, was that gender-critical feminism was materialist class politics, not sovereign identitarianism. At the point at which it starts to become primarily a matter of tribal identity, some of the TRAs’ anxieties become substantially less batshit-sounding (although going from nought to genocide in two tweets will never sound not-batshit). And lo, right on cue, up turn the men with big guns and big hats, Tommy Robinson’s crew, Patriotic Alternative, theocratic fascists, assorted MAGA-cum-QAnon loons, and some Proud Boys. Like seriously, I’m sorry, I am trying my hardest to be calm and moderate here, but WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.(27)”

So, it appears it is time to get this old favourite out.

Dear men on the left,

Women wanting to protect their rights are not 'spiteful,' this is not evil nasty 'weaponisation,' and if the clarification of the meaning of our protected charactersitic in law is an attack on other people, then that might tell you something about what those other people's political project means for us, don't you think? jeniharveymindthegap.substack.com/p/dear-men-on-…

So apparently me, @lnmackenzie1, @LucyHunterB, @kathmurray1, @wpuk and @selina_todd are involved in some nefarious Bond villain style biopolitical plot of purification and population control by wanting to… *checks notes*… make sure there is accurate sex data recorded in order to ensure good resource allocation for women and to monitor and challenge our oppression.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117… Rainbow Pens of Doom incoming… when it is a bit less of a binfire all up in here…

There is a realy important part of the ERCC judgement that is worth underlining.

Trans activists have routinely tried to claim that it is somehow illegal to have the biological sex of trans people disclosed under any circumstances.

As GC women have repeatedly pointed out, that would make the funtioning of some single sex spaces impossible. And the case of a service user wanting to know whether a support worker is male or female is a perfect illustration of where the rubber meets the road here. ERCC tried to invoke the Article 8 legal right to privacy in order to suggest it would be unlawful in some way to have revealed AB's birth sex to a service user.

Trans activists have also appealed to the GRA to try and make a similar claim, and have sometimes even suggested that this right follows from the protected charactersitic of gender reassignment.

Because we’re not liberal feminists.

That has a great deal to do with explaining our positions on pretty much everything.

It’s kind of incredible that this is still opaque.

https://twitter.com/dmquillenr/status/1788928185985368322

It’s also pretty incredible that we’re in a situation where the liberal feminists are generally taken for the ‘far left’ and the radical, socialist and materialist feminists are taken for the ‘far right.’

I think I might need to get the pens out and scribble on Andrea Chu Long.... Okay dokes...

'ANDREA CHU LONG ON THE MORAL CASE FOR THE UNIVERSAL BIRTHRIGHT TO FREEDOM OF SEX BECAUSE WE WANT AND WE SAY WE WANT'

This is in a lot of ways a recapitulation of the famous Edinburgh Action for Trans Health Manifesto (which always gave me the vibes of being ranted up by large angry toddlers on speed waving plastic water pistols' )tumblr.com/edinburghath/1…

Our arguments aren't grounded simply in a liberal notion of autonomy.

They're grounded in an an analysis of harm, control, power and exploitation.

https://twitter.com/benappel/status/1731544945243075042

Liberal notions of autonomy don't give us a substantive enough analysis of harm, they don't take account of power structures and their investment in controlling and exploiting women's reproductive or sexual capacities.

So, the great sword wielding king of concepts has dropped his blistering analysis of my critique:

1. You is a crazy bitch. 2. You got Marxist cooties.

So, about James Lindsay - and also Pluckrose and Lindsay - and why its not a great surprise that he's turned out to be a misogynist anti-feminist asswipe.

Lindsay's analysis consists, basically, in nothing more than the claim that what is wrong with 'wokeism' is that it is an analysis of oppression. That's why he's running around all the time shouting about 'Marxism' and 'cultural Marxism' and 'race Marxism' and wotnot.

As far as he is concerned, the witch-hunting cancel culture phenomenon we have been dealing with over the last decade is a direct result of the idea that some groups of people oppress other groups of people.

That is, James Lindsay is against all analysis of structural oppression.

The resentment that men feel about desiring women is the key to misogyny and a great deal of male violence.

Desiring women makes men vulnerable. Because women are people. And women get to say yes or no. Depending on their own desires.

And men are not supposed to be vulnerable. Stop showing pictures of the roses.

Roses are not sweet or romantic when they are delivered as a sign of murderous entitlement.

Am listening to Naomi Klein's Doppelganger. It's a truly excellent analysis of the growth of the populist conspiratorial right and the rocket fuel given to it by the pandemic and covid conspiracy theories. One thing she's very good on is the way Steve Bannon has strategised the platform of issues on the basis of balls that have been dropped by liberals/progressives. There are kernels of truth in everything that turns up in what she calls 'the mirror world.'

JFC I am so furious right now about how TRA and related bullshit has completely fucked up the basic norms of political discourse. 1. You are allowed to say whatever you want - bar incitement to violence - even if it upsets or offends people.

2. If people are upset or offended, they are allowed to say they are upset or offended.

3. It would be even better if they explained why they are upset or offended.

So, I'm going to give it my best shot to exit this conversation now. As usual, when this topic comes up, the conversation devolves through analogies to locked cars and whether one should look twice when crossing the road, through claims about swamps of alligators, and into a conversation about why feminists are ridiculous and stupid for not accepting that the staggering rates of male sexual violence in this society are just some immovable rock like datum put there by evolution.