In 2015 Jon Ronson published So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. I bought the audio version for my commute to work and found it strangely comforting. Listening to all the ways in which individuals had been hounded for committing crimes against social justice, I’d draw comparisons with what was happening to many feminists I knew. “Only unlike Max Mosley or Justine Sacco, we haven’t even done anything wrong,” I’d think. “Imagine when people like Ronson find out about us!”
Back then, I’d been classed as a “terf” for over a year, having written a piece very tentatively critiquing the concept of cis-ness (I would not be so tentative now). It was a strange, disorienting period — Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time magazine announcing “The Transgender Tipping Point”, Stonewall had just declared their intention to campaign on trans issues, and most people thought of trans activism as a ramped-up version of gay rights campaigning. In the UK, the Tories were in favour of gender self-ID, Maria Miller being years ahead of Nicola Sturgeon in insisting that anyone who disagreed just wasn’t a proper feminist.
You’d have to have been within certain specific circles — in my case, the feminist blogosphere, in which we were suddenly ordered not to write about abortion rights or pregnancy as women’s issues — to suspect something else was happening. You’d also have to have dared to question such orders to come up against the true level of woman-hatred fuelling this supposed civil rights movement.
For a couple of years, whenever I tried to talk to “outsiders” about what was really going on, the problem was not that they disagreed with me. It was that they thought I was making it up. I’d be told that no one, apart from a handful of totally mad people, thought that biological sex wasn’t real or that children were born in the wrong body. No one thought that male rapists should be in women’s prisons or that male bodies belonged in female sports! No one thought a person should be able to switch genders at random, simply on their say-so! Where had I got such crazy ideas?
Trans activist demands were so obviously insane that most people’s natural response was to think you were inventing them in order to make trans people look bad (so no wonder trans people hated terfs!). While this reaction was both frustrating and isolating, it offered a degree of reassurance. All the people you’d believed were on your side in their opposition to sexism and homophobia were still on your side — they just hadn’t yet accepted that this iteration of bigotry was real. Once they did, they’d be right there with you.
“Decent, smart people recognize who the villain is when a misogynist attacks a feminist writer,” wrote Ronson. “Hurry up, decent, smart people,” I’d think. “Time to give us feminists a bit of a hand!” Only it never happened. We waited, as it became more and more obvious that no, we hadn’t made anything up. Yet all of these supposed deep thinkers – all of these speakers of truth to power, these brave challengers of online bullies, these people who had already made it clear that they would have found it all insane if only it was real – sat back and said nothing, or even threw their lot in with the mob. The switch from “this would never happen (and thinking it could makes you a bigot)” to “this is happening and it’s great (because only bigots worry about it happening)” was remarkable. Remarkable, and profoundly damaging in ways that go far beyond ‘the trans issue’ itself.
I know that right now, when a “smart” person such as Malcolm Gladwell finally admits that feminists were right — about some things, at least — that we are supposed to be grateful. Better late than never! If people like him are shamed for changing their minds, surely fewer will be motivated to follow his example? I can see the logic of this, yet I cannot fully buy into it.
I had no idea how many self-styled “good” people will support bad things on the basis that other, less important people can take all the hits
It’s not just that it’s far too late. It’s that Gladwell has not changed his mind at all. He — the same, I would suggest, as many a “sceptical” male comic, “curious” journalist or writer of “feminist” dystopian fiction — always knew that trans activist claims were nonsense. Indeed, the claims are so internally incoherent — sex is pure guesswork but some kids will die if they go through the “wrong” puberty — that I don’t think trans activists believe them, either. The damage done by trans activism is not just direct, in terms of harms to gender non-conforming children, same-sex attracted adults and women seeking female-only spaces. It has also changed the way many of us see those we thought of as, if not allies, then essentially principled people.
Until this issue arose, I had no idea how many self-styled “good” people will support bad things on the basis that other, less important people can take all the hits. Maybe I was incredibly naïve, but I thought of my political opponents as people who believed different things to me, not people who believed the exact same things but considered themselves much more special and exempt from responsibility than their fellow believers.
Gladwell now admits that when he participated in a 2022 discussion on male people participating in women’s sports, “I heard that and thought, ‘This is nuts,’ and yet I didn’t say anything”. He claims to have been “cowed”. I get that. Everyone has something to fear in a world where you can be torn to pieces for simply saying sex matters. But this world only came into being because people who agreed with feminists spent years refusing to say so. We were scared, too, and we would have had far less to be afraid of had we had some support.
Like many a terf, I have had years of people mistakenly believing that they can “support” me by telling me in private that they agree with me, even if in public they say the opposite. This is not support. While I can empathise with being afraid, all too often the reasons given for “not being able” to speak up rest on the assumption that those of us who do are blessed with some form of inferiority which mitigates the costs. Unlike people who have reputations to protect, friends they don’t wish to offend, concerns about playing into the hands of the far-right, women like me are apparently unimportant, insensitive and politically reckless. It’s only right that we should serve as cannon fodder in the gender wars, clearing the way for the “good” people to breeze in later.
As recent books such as Hounded, TERF Island and The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht have made clear, the impact of the ‘gender wars’ on those who spoke out has been profound. Even if tomorrow every single person were to say “yes, you were right”, it won’t restore the loss of trust. Because we know that you knew we were right all along. You just didn’t think we mattered enough to say so. Instead of telling us how scared you were, why not think about what this has felt like for us?
