On 16th April, the trans comedian Jordan Gray shared the following message on social media: “If I die of transphobia, just drop my body on the steps of parliament”. This followed the UK supreme court’s ruling that the definition of “woman” for the purposes of the Equality Act was to be restricted to those of us who are actually female.
Thanks to the ruling, achieved by the tireless work of grassroots organisation For Women Scotland, some of the UK’s most vulnerable women — rape survivors, those in refuges, female prisoners — have seen their entitlement to privacy and safety upheld. The ruling also means that all women can expect the bare bloody minimum — our own changing rooms, sports categories, sexual orientations, political movements, shortlists — in a world still largely framed around meeting the needs of men.
It is brilliant news, if long overdue. Female people — the sex that owns the least wealth, commits the least violence, performs the most unpaid labour, gestates all the new humans — matter enough to be legally recognised. It’s surprising, then, to see reactions such as Gray’s. Our rights are so upsetting — so scary, so devastating — that they might actually kill him!
I’m reminded of the passage in A Room of One’s Own where Virginia Woolf describes the impact on men of women ceasing to serve as looking-glasses “reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size”:
The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug field deprived of his cocaine.
A century later, and women are rejecting similarly male-centric, regressive definitions of femaleness, such as trans writer Andrea Long Chu’s “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another”. Oh no! Take that away, and Jordan Gray might literally expire! Or perhaps not. Perhaps women existing in their own right isn’t a plot to hurt trans women. Perhaps not everything revolves around male feelings, all the time.
To be fair to Gray, his has been a common response to the supreme court ruling. There has been widespread dismay from individuals and institutions who, for the past decade, have pandered to trans activist demands while ignoring the concerns of feminists, lesbians and indeed anyone with an ounce of compassion for women and girls who want spaces and resources of their own. The actor’s union Equity quickly put out a statement claiming that “while the victors pop champagne bottles outside the court, our trans members’ safety and dignity at work is now at yet greater risk”. How dare these women celebrate having the most basic, minimal rights affirmed when there are male people who might want to use their toilets! Can’t they at least look ashamed?
Former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn responded by declaring himself “really saddened by the level of vitriol and hatred being directed toward the trans community”. “We are losing our common humanity,” he tweeted. “How hard is it to treat people with kindness and respect? Trans people are human beings – and they deserve to live in dignity.” The likes of UCU’s Jo Grady and Owen Jones have treated the ruling as hateful and regressive, calling for more kindness and compassion towards its supposed victims.
It is a measure of how much damage trans activism and gender ideology have done to women’s rights that a mere restatement that women exist as a definable group — a group that deserves resources, and the right to organise independently — has provoked such a response. There is a word for people who find a female “no” intolerable, and it is not “marginalised” or “victimised”. I find it grotesque that there is a call to shower even more pity and attention on people who hold such deeply entitled, misogynistic views that the prospect of having a noun — just one noun! — that remains exclusive to female humans is enough to prompt a week-long tantrum.
Even those who like to consider themselves “somewhere in the middle” on the trans debate have been guilty of this misplaced sympathising. In a piece for the Guardian, Gaby Hinsliff worries that “some gender-critical feminists who have endured years of death threats, ostracisation and attempts to get them fired […] are clearly in no mood to be magnanimous”, whereas “for trans people and those who love them, this is a frightening and uncertain time”. It’s an interesting play-off. Gender-critical feminists might have experienced years of the worst, most terrifying abuse but the main issue isn’t their lasting trauma. It’s that it might have made them less “magnanimous” towards those who perpetrated it, who are too busy being “frightened” by women having basic rights to give a second thought to how the women they harmed might be coping.
It takes a lack of empathy for women for any adult men to claim to be one in the first place
What all of this highlights for me is the utter absence of empathy, compassion and kindness on one side of “the trans debate” — and it is not the side of gender-critical feminists. This lack of empathy goes to the very heart of the sex and gender debate, and to the mess created by politicians who could not be bothered to consider the feelings of anyone other than trans-identified males.
It takes a lack of empathy for women for any adult men to claim to be one in the first place. It may not be deliberate. I am prepared to accept that while some — the Andrea Long Chus, the Dylan Mulvaneys, the Grace Laverys — are clearly trolling women, others are simply too bound up in their own distress to consider how insulting it is to women and girls to reduce them to an idea in their heads. Along with most women, I am not incapable of feeling empathy for these men. Nevertheless, theirs are not the only emotions that count. Other people matter. As Woolf put it, “women feel just as men feel”.
Like many feminists, while I find the concept of gender identity fundamentally sexist, rooted in regressive and often pornified stereotypes, I have never had any particular desire to tell men who believe themselves to be women that in actual fact, they are not. It’s not just that this would be needlessly hurtful; it’s also that their beliefs aren’t remotely interesting. Scratch the surface and it’s bog-standard fantasising about how women lack complex emotional lives, or enjoy being hurt, or really get off on getting dressed up. It’s not some great challenge to “the gender binary”; it’s conservative and it’s boring.
What interests me and others — what has always interested feminists — are the diverse, complex lives of women and girls. The trouble with trans ideology is that an absence of empathy for female people is so deeply ingrained — so essential to the maintenance of the passive femininity myth — that any assertion of female needs, desires and boundaries is instantly translated into an attack on trans women. It is as though female humans, those eternal looking-glasses, only operate on two emotional settings: the desire to serve males by saying “yes”, or to hurt them by saying “no”.
This is why every time women have suggested that we are a class of humans in our own right, we’ve been accused of wilfully denying trans women’s “right to exist”. It’s why the supreme court ruling has been swiftly reinterpreted, not as something about and for women, but as cruelly targeting males, just for the sheer hell of it. It cannot be that women are doing something on behalf of other women, with male desire on the periphery; to those in thrall to gender ideology, such a thing does not compute.
I have found it obscene to see the handwringing over women drinking champagne following the ruling, with the implication that these are heartless bitches who wanted to be “triumphalist”. Do you want to know what triumphalism looks like? It’s Jordan Gray on Channel Four, getting his dick out to play the piano while singing “I’m a perfect woman – my tits will never shrink”. As an actual woman, who has experienced both flashing and years of deep distress related to my own changing body, this really pissed me off. Still, I managed not to put out a request that my misogyny-murdered corpse be deposited outside the Channel Four studios.
And one of the reasons why feminists don’t tend to do this is that ours is not a politics of pure grievance. It’s about examining what women and girls actually need, and trying to make it happen. For Women Scotland were not campaigning against trans rights; they were campaigning for lesbians, for female prisoners, for sex assault victims, for all women who want support and recognition in law. That is what empathy looks like — looking outwards, thinking about the needs of others.
That trans activists and their allies have interpreted the ruling so badly shows just how poor their own empathising skills have become. I am sure they would feel happier if they could start to consider what other emotional settings women have, beyond those that revolve around meeting or not meeting male desires.
We are people with our own inner lives, and once you learn to think of us as such, you might see that our needs have nothing to do with attacking you. You will feel safer, but first of all, you need to learn to be kind.
