In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, we learn how the first Mrs Rochester comes to be declared insane by her husband. At one point – before the part where he takes all her wealth, renames her Bertha and locks her up in an attic – he tries the “more sad than angry” tack. “I do not hate you,” he tells her, “I am most distressed about you, I am distraught.” Somewhat annoyingly, I can’t now think of this line without thinking of fox-bothering barrister Jolyon Maugham.
Maugham is also very sad — distraught, probably — about an inconvenient crazy woman who has more money than him. In this case, though, it’s JK Rowling. Rowling, Maugham recently opined, is “unwell”. This is because of her opinions on sex and gender. Before she got into all that, she was totally fine but now she’s not (and it’s not just Maugham who thinks that. Just ask fellow Rochester, Stephen Fry).
Personally, I don’t think Rowling is mad, but then what would I know? I’m another of those women about whom the odd acquaintance has expressed “sadness” because of what I’ve become. When we are not being called evil, women who express the “wrong” views on gender ideology are frequently called insane (or perhaps not insane — the kind of people who do this view “insane” as ableist – but “un-” words such as “unwell” or “unhinged” tend to do). As someone who would actually quite like to be considered reasonable, this bothers me. Has this issue driven me mad?
Gender identity ideology deliberately encourages women to question their own perceptions
That “the trans debate” has had an impact on the mental wellbeing of any woman who speaks out goes without saying. Death and rape threats, social isolation, fear of losing one’s job — all of these things exact a tremendous psychological toll. As Jenny Lindsay has documented in Hounded, and Karen Ingala Smith in Defending Women’s Spaces, even witnessing “nice”, non-abusive people lying about basic biology has a negative impact on trust in others. I think it is rational (if sad) to respond to unjust, irrational and/or aggressive behaviour by being less trusting and open than one was before. That women are then judged harshly for a rational response merely adds insult to injury. The accusations of madness, however, go even further than that.
Calling women crazy for speaking the truth is of course an age-old tactic. The trouble is, gender identity ideology deliberately encourages women to question their own perceptions at the most fundamental level (don’t trust your own eyes, other people know better than you!). It is a form of torture, at least if you are the kind of person who won’t do the ‘sensible’ thing and stop tugging at that thread. Reading Esme Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, I was struck by Wang’s description of maintaining awareness of what is “supposed to be true” despite suffering from delusions: “The idea of ‘believing’ something turns porous as I repeat the tenets of reality like a good girl”. Wang knows what to say in order to appear sane, even if she doesn’t feel it. Trans activism imposes a version of this genuine experience of madness on all women: deliberately reject what you perceive in order not to be called mad or bad.
One could argue that this has always been the dilemma faced by women who see through patriarchal untruths. With regard to the second wave there has also been the question of whether, in some cases, this pressure really did lead to insanity. “Feminists,” wrote Moira Donegan in a recent review of Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces, “have long understood themselves as truthtellers, as exposers of misogyny’s lie […] But Firestone’s fate seemed to raise the grim possibility that this vision could drive women insane”. Donegan plays this off against what Firestone saw as the “well-adjusted madness” of playing along with the myth of female inferiority. This distinction — between “ordinary madness” and the “well-adjusted madness” of compliance — is instructive. I think feminist who have convinced themselves that men can be women are out of touch with reality (Donegan is one such feminist). At the same time, they probably have a better sense of self-preservation than me.
To observers — to those who have not pulled at the thread, who do not wish to, or who have but will not speak out — it may well look mad to keep sticking one’s hand in the fire on this issue. Like many gender critical women, I have had to listen to numerous “I agree with you but wouldn’t say so out loud” confessions, and often — when I feel the implication isn’t “because I have stuff to lose, unlike you” — I fear it’s the equally insulting “because I’m not totally insane”. There are moments when I wonder if they are right. It’s not as if I don’t know that I could look “reasonable” and “nuanced” by feigning ignorance and pretending an entirely different “trans debate” is taking place (that is, one between Millie Tant in Viz and Hayley Cropper from Coronation Street).
Yet maintaining a grip on what is real matters to me. I think it matters to other women, too. It would have been crazy indeed for JK Rowling to experience so many years of such vicious, unjustified abuse and not draw any conclusions of her own from it. This is not a sign of being unwell. It’s a sign that in a debate that is so deliberately disorientating you can start to think that you are the problem, sanity might yet prevail.
