Of all the frat boy-style responses to the UK supreme court’s recognition that women exist, there’s one that’s stuck with me the most: “JK Rowling is Andrew Tate for women.” It’s a line that’s been shared in various forms, often with a photo of Rowling celebrating For Women Scotland’s victory. As a response, it’s got everything.
There’s the callousness, comparing a woman who set up a rape crisis centre to a leading representative of the manosphere; the faux progressive posturing (as I wrote in my book Unkind, for a certain type of man, “‘not being the far right’ and ‘not being Andrew Tate’” function primarily as misogyny entitlement tokens); above all, there’s the back-slapping smugness.
Isn’t it funny, likening women’s fight for female-only spaces to men’s fight to abuse women with impunity? Hey, rape victims, you know your rapist? That’s you, that is.
In many ways, it’s beneath engaging with. If women had an Andrew Tate, it would not be JK Rowling. Then again, women cannot have an Andrew Tate because women are not a dominant group with a propensity to violence and a misplaced sense of grievance. Followers of Andrew Tate might view women that way, as do those currently sharing the “JK Rowling is Andrew Tate” meme. Unfortunately, this is not where the similarities between these groups end.
Since the explosion of misogyny that has followed the supreme court ruling, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between “ordinary” men’s rights activism — the kind where, if the activist sends you a death threat, your employer doesn’t respond with an announcement telling him “YOU ARE LOVED AND CHERISHED” — and the type to which trans activism has given rise. To be clear, I do not just mean the activism of men who claim to be women. I mean the activism of their male supporters — self-styled “cis” [aka red-blooded] men who have been increasingly radicalised into an “acceptable” form of profound woman-hating.
These men have been around for some time. Back in 2018, two of them uploaded a song to YouTube which featured the following lyrics:
It’s not hard to use the right words
When you’re talking to people […]
To use respectful language
It’s the least you can do […]
Terfs are trash
We won’t stand for trans exclusionary feminism […]
If you intentionally misgender anybody
You’re a sexist piece of trash
That deserves a brick to the teeth […]
Swerf talk terf talk
Gonna get that sidewalk
curb stomp
At the time I discussed this with feminist friends. Back then, we were still bending ourselves into pretzels to find that elusive middle way in “the trans debate”. Men like these, we proffered hopefully, were opportunists. They’d found a loophole, a way to give free rein to their hatred without being called out by fellow “progressives”. These men didn’t care about trans women — indeed, their “activism” had absolutely nothing to do with the actual sex and gender debate. They’d just noticed it was open season on “terfs” and decided to fill their boots. If anything, we insisted, innocent trans people who “just wanted to get on with their lives”™ were being exploited by these men, too.
So we said, but it never felt entirely convincing. It never really explained why this particular movement had created this particular loophole. Nor did it engage with the fact that much of what these men had latched onto — shut your mouth, watch your words — wasn’t random abuser rhetoric. It was a distillation of the standard trans activist line, one gaining increasing acceptance in the media and workplace training schemes: women in general, and feminists in particular, needed to show some goddam respect.
The “clash of rights” argument, which proposed that trans and feminist concerns — both equally valid! — “just so happened” to be in conflict now and then, was also starting to wear thin. Like all feminists, we’d been ordered to “listen to trans women”, but the more we did, the more it seemed their beliefs about women were totally in line with what MRAs believed. Eventually, we had to admit that the existence of the terf-bashing loophole wasn’t random. It was fundamentally related to the fact that trans activism was not a civil rights movement that happened to compete with feminism for a limited set of resources.
Trans activism is a men’s rights movement. Some of its biggest victims are trans-identified people — the gender non-conforming children, the unhappy teenage girls — but its leaders, those who hide behind these genuinely vulnerable people, are spokesmen for porn-age male supremacy. Their male “allies”, with their he/him bios and their pseudo-progressive posturing, follow their lead.
Trans activism has radicalised the kind of man who would not be seen dead looking up “standard” manosphere influencers yet is drawn to their ideas. He may already have a dehumanised image of women from the porn he watches, but knows that he is “meant” to see women as fully-fledged humans all the same. For years he might have kept his misogyny in check, then along came the trans woman, magic emissary from Planet Gender, to reassure him that no, all the worst things he secretly thinks about women, those frivolous, masochistic whores? They’re true and it’s great! In fact, it’s bigotry to think otherwise! Yes, old-style women — “those dinosaurs”, as Ricky Gervais so accurately put it — might object, but the new-style women, “good as gold”, have arrived to set them straight.
The logic — as laid out very clearly in Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, one of modern-day trans activism’s “foundational” texts — is this: women are indeed decorative objects, existing to service men’s sexual demands, and what’s more, they love it really. Old-style feminists have claimed otherwise because their “cis privilege” makes them unaware of how much they enjoy non-personhood. Like a fish unaware of water, the cis woman is unaware of her innate “femininity” — her pre-disposition to being a porn object — whereas the trans woman must valiantly struggle to access it, which makes her far more authoritative. “When I look into trans women’s eyes,” writes Serano, “I see a profound appreciation for how fucking empowering it can be to be female, an appreciation that seems lost on many cissexual women who sadly take their female identities and anatomies for granted, or who perpetually seek to cast themselves as victims rather than instigators.” There you go, “progressive” men. If a “cis woman” tells you she doesn’t like being defined as a fuckable non-person, just remind yourself it’s the privilege talking.
I imagine most of these men have not read Whipping Girl (whereas most “terfs”, in an effort to be good trans allies, have). This is the principle, though, and it is everywhere. Paris Lees waxes lyrical on the joys of catcalls:
I love random men smiling “Hello beautiful!” like my mere presence just made their day. I like being called “princess” and ignoring them as I giggle inside. I like being eye-fucked on the escalator and wondering if I’ve just made him spring a boner. That eye-fuck, by the way, is an age-old mating signal. I live for it.
The hardest thing about being a woman, says Caitlin Jenner, is “figuring out what to wear”, while Grace Lavery fantasises over being “fetishised […] as a slutty girl is”. Andrea Long Chu sniggers that Gigi Gorgeous, a trans influencer, “is a TERF’s worst nightmare: a shameless cosmetic miracle, assembled by a team of plastic surgeons, endocrinologists, agents, and marketers — a walking, talking advertisement”:
Gorgeous has sanded her personality down to the bare essentials. She laughs at what is funny, she cries at what is sad, and she is miraculously free of serious opinions. She has become, in the most technical sense of this phrase, a dumb blonde.
Trans activism … has made monsters of those who might otherwise have merely been casual sexists
Note that this is not “a feminist’s worst nightmare”, but “a TERF’s”. Trans activism has relegated actual feminism, with its claim that women are full human beings, to the status of TERFdom while claiming the word ‘feminism’ for itself. By doing so, it has told every embittered, basement-dwelling leftist misogynist that his belief that women are not fully human is entirely justified. That if women didn’t secretly enjoy their abject status, they’d cut off their breasts and identify out of it. This is radicalisation. It has made monsters of those who might otherwise have merely been casual sexists.
It is in this context that we should see the current backlash against the supreme court definition of “woman” — not just in practical terms (who uses which toilet?), but ideological ones (are women people at all?). Trans activism’s MRA army have been particularly incensed at the prospect of defining women in relation to their biology, and have sought to claim that this is biological essentialism. Of course, their rage is not at the thought of female humans — who will exist, no matter what you call us — being reduced to walking wombs (after all, they’re quite happy to call us “uterus havers” or “gestators”). Their rage is at the word “woman” being associated with non-pornified, ageing, flesh-and-blood female bodies — bodies with hair, wrinkles and odours, bodies housing diverse, creative, non-bimbo brains — rather than with plastic-breasted, wide-eyed fantasies. It is not for nothing that “protect the dolls” has become the go-to slogan for “supporting trans women”. Protect the fantasy of dehumanised womanhood from the threat of those saggy-breasted boner-killers, the adult human females!
It will be pointed out that many women have cheered this on. There are many reasons for this (I don’t think one should underestimate the draw of flight from the female body in a deeply sexist society, but to be fair, neither do I think one should underestimate how unprincipled and/or stupid certain women can be). The existence of female cheerleaders has never been seen to invalidate the core misogynist principles of the old-style manosphere, so I don’t see why it should do so here. The fact remains that what we are dealing with are manosphere beliefs.
The supreme court judgement was not about whether women are biologically female or a joyous, inclusive mix of identities. At its most basic level, it was about whether women are human or a porn stereotype. Humanity won. A significant number of men are so angry about this they’re threatening to rape and kill us.
This is what radicalisation looks like and women are not safe. We are condemned by incels and trans activists alike for existing as humans rather than objects, and politicians, in thrall to fictional rather than actual extremism, still say nothing. The longer they do so, the more things will escalate (as Jeni Harvey has written, this is “the most dangerous time”).
The pandering has to stop. It really is time for the world to wake up.
