Women

A bonus post this week for subscribers.

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I don’t know how to write about what happened at the Supreme Court on Wednesday because I am not sure how we got here.

I know the roadmap of course, intimately. Miserably, this year marks a bitter anniversary; it’s a decade since Parliament’s Women’s and Equalities Committee launched an inquiry into ‘Transgender Equality’. They made a simple recommendation: the government should speed-up plans to update the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, making it easier for trans people to attain legal recognition of their gender. It was a proposal designed to make a “dehumanising” bureaucratic process less so. Little did the equalities committee know, reform efforts were about to collide with a growing movement of disaffected, mostly cisgender, women, who found new zeal and purpose in campaigning to block progression.

I don’t know how to write about the women who stood popping champagne on the steps of the Supreme Court on Wednesday, because they occupy a world where, at least from my vantage point, everything is upside down and opposite. People drive on the right. Books are consumed back to front. The toilet water swirls in reverse. Polly Toynbee is a must-read. And in Upside Down world, the gaggle spraying each other with France’s finest sparkling outside the Supreme Court are the tenacious protectors of women’s rights, rather than radicalised obsessives who have fought tooth and nail to strip a specific group of women of certain protections — and their dignity.

Susan Smith and Marion Calder, of pressure group For Women Scotland.

These women terrify me because our perception of the world is as polarised as it gets. Sometimes I attempt a taxonomy of their ranks: former radical lesbian activist turned high profile lawyer; neglected housewife; abuse victim; rich broadcaster/author/arts professional who has never quite felt at home in her gender (who does!) and is turning the unease viciously outward. There’s many more of course. All women chafing at the confines of their assigned gender. All women transferring their gripes onto an external boogeywoman because they’ve lost faith in changing the system that makes aspects of being a woman so grinding.

Other factors have contributed to this movement emerging at this moment in time (notwithstanding the rightwing cycle we are in, internet-fuelled radicalisation etc): the bottom falling out of socialist feminism in the 1980s and 1990s, slashed funding for women’s spaces, particularly violence support services, campaigns for equity stalling and petering out and so on.

All of this created a landscape of scarcity and hopelessness and lots of women decided unconsciously, for different but connected reasons, that they were sick of feeling helpless and hopeless on an individual or collective level, or both. They wanted to feel powerful again, or maybe even for the first time. And so they created a foe out of trans women, an enemy they could take on and maybe win against. That’s what I think, anyway.

What I also think: theirs is a wide coalition but underpinning it all is a simple animus — a terror and hatred of the male sex¹. In their eyes, being born male is akin to original sin; you are corrupted from the get go. You exist to harm women. When this group speak about ‘immutable sex’, they are really saying what is ‘immutable’ to people born with an XY chromosome pairing is a desire to inflict pain and violence on women. bell hooks actually wrote about this vein of paranoia years ago, in The Will to Change.