Earlier this year, I took part in a radio discussion about feminism, kindness and women’s work. I’d thought it was going quite well, then towards the end it took a slightly odd turn. One of the participants mentioned Donald Trump’s executive order to keep males out of female sports. This, she claimed, was an example of “cisgender” girls being misrepresented as in need of protection, when actually they didn’t need it. They were fine.
A lot of thoughts ran through my head on hearing this. First, why was she mentioning it at all? I wondered whether, since we both had books to promote and mine did indeed mention female sports, it was an attempt to make it clear that even if I sounded like I agreed with her, she wasn’t at all like me. Second, should I respond? If so, how? Wouldn’t that derail the whole conversation — one which thus far had been centring a bread-and-butter feminist issue — into a superficial rehash of the “toxic” trans debate?
I knew that any answer I gave that represented what I actually believed — that any claims on the part of Trump to “protect girls” were wholly disingenuous, but that this didn’t mean girls were never vulnerable on account of their sex and that furthermore, assertions to the contrary played into hands of the right — would be far less snappy than a quick “girls do/don’t need protecting”. I also knew from experience that highlighting the difference between Trumpian and feminist versions of “why sex matters” is rarely received in good faith by those who’ve already decided to denounce you. It’s viewed, not as an explanation of the enormous difference between the two positions, but as a kind of half-arsed retraction. Oh, so now you’ve realised that your support for female-only spaces means you’ve got in bed with the far right and now you’re trying to back out of it! Good luck there!
So I decided to let the issue go, on the basis that I wasn’t actively agreeing and anyone who read my book would know exactly what I thought. Still, it has bothered me since. It wasn’t just the sports question, but the whole idea that girls just didn’t need protecting. I found it such a startling statement. Not “girls need protecting but this has been weaponised by bad actors”, but “girls are fine”. As though not just the language but the whole concept of female vulnerability needed to be chucked into a bin marked “far-right dogwhistle”. In the end, it felt like another way of casting female complaints as ugly, dirty, messy — inherently tainted by bad politics and hence shameful.
That men of ill intent use the idea of “protecting [their] women and girls” to promote harmful, racist policies and justify violence is not a new observation. In 2014, UKIP used the image of a phallic black escalator going up the white cliffs of Dover to illustrate its message of “No border. No control”. As the feminist Jane Clare Jones wrote at the time, it was “revealing”:
Of the way in which the penetration of the sovereign body of countries, and the bodies of women are so thoroughly enmeshed in our thinking. […] It reminds us whatever palatable spin UKIP tries to give its policies, underneath is the same old patriarchal-racist obsession with the purity of the people, and its associated concern with the purity of the women whose job it is to produce those people.
In the decade since then, there have been increasing attempts to conflate this mode of thinking with gender critical feminism. Believing female people are, as Jenny Lindsay expresses it in Hounded, “materially definable as a class of people” has been recast as cruelly policing the boundaries of womanhood (whatever that is). Meanwhile, thinking women and girls have particular vulnerabilities and might want particular protections is reduced to an obsession with purity. Books such as Who’s Afraid of Gender? cast left-wing, anti-racist feminists — including women such as Jones — as “like Trump, Orban, Meloni, the Vatican, and all others on the Right who refuse self-determination as the basis for sex reassignment”, as if all reasons for objecting to gender self-identification must come from exactly the same place.
It is beyond frustrating that feminists who are invested both in protecting girls and protesting against right-wing misogyny are constantly compelled to refute these kinds of allegations. It’s not just that, as mentioned above, it’s often taken as an admission that actually, they’re all true — that there’s no way to want to protect girls without being in bed with the right. One thing my own experiences with the “gender wars” have made me consider more and more are all the other ways in which a “progressive” posture can be used to discount or trivialise male violence and sideline female victims (for instance, in discussions of porn or male mental health). I have lost trust in people with whom I once thought I was fighting the same battles and now it can feel as though I am being asked to say “but sure, the other side are still the real misogynists”. I bristle at the degree of scrutiny to which gender critical feminists are subjected compared to people whose “if black women are women, then so are male people” racism goes unchecked. At the same time, right now, if protecting girls matters, it has to be wrestled from the hands of those who might be willing to say the words but only for their own ends.
The left’s embrace of gender identity ideology might have created an open goal for the right but it did not manifest the latter’s tendency to use “protecting girls” as a cover for promoting their own racist version of patriarchy. That is far more long-standing. This is the context in which the letter signed by over 100 women’s rights organisations protesting the racist weaponisation of violence against women and girls needs to be read. It is absurd to imagine that, in a porn-soaked culture, in which rape is virtually decriminalised, protesting outside migrant hostels should be anyone’s first priority in keeping women and girls safe. As the authors of the letter note, “two out of five of those arrested for […] disorder themselves had police histories of domestic abuse”. This is not defending the humanity of women and girls (many of whom are terrorised by these protests); it is realising the idea that they are indeed territories to be fought over.
There ought to be enough of us who can say “protect girls” and actually mean it
There is a part of me that still feels anxiety when I see the letter’s stress on how much male violence takes place in the home, and not because that hasn’t been my experience, too. It’s because I’ve seen that fact used so often in recent years to suggest women and girls don’t need any protections whatsoever outside the home. Nonetheless, I don’t believe that to be what is meant here. There are times when the trans activist left has mirrored the misogynist right in constantly locating abusive men over there, somewhere else, never amongst us. Some are doing this right now, using racist protests to stick the boot in when it comes to women who want female-only public spaces. This doesn’t mean we have to choose between two forms of dismissal.
It dismays me that for some, the very idea “protecting girls” is regarded with such distaste. Nonetheless, it’s also true that for others, “protecting girls” is seized on as an opportunity to bully and demonise others (girls amongst them). I often wish I had tried to say something along these lines when I had the chance. Why let those who discard the whole concept of protection believe they are right? There ought to be enough of us who can say “protect girls” and actually mean it.
