I knew I could make my life easier if I just reverted to being the good girl and shut up. This made and makes no sense to me, not because I think that trans women are terrible people, but because women’s sex-based rights exist for a reason.įor the first time in my 20-plus years of being a liberal journalist, I felt completely isolated. Debates about gender rights are also debates about women’s rights, because activists are asking, essentially, for the abolition of women’s sex-based rights. Many transgender people have said how much they have hated being the subjects of political and online debate over the past five or so years, and who can blame them? Yet this issue is not just about them. As a result, many on the Left would prefer that this debate about gender, with older feminists on one side and gender ideologues on the other, was not happening at all, because it doesn’t fit into the good versus bad dichotomy with which the Left frames the world. You can - and many do - dismiss these angry women as irrelevant middle-aged mums, or just a bunch of Karens, but they do not fit into the “Right-wing bigot” pigeonhole, however much gender ideologues try to squash them in. My friendship group consists mainly of thirty-something to fifty-something progressive women, all, like me, lifelong Labour, or Liberal Democrat, or Green voters, all teachers, or civil servants, or writers, or lawyers. Yet I know a lot of non-Right-wing, non-bigots who are extremely angry at how things have shifted. Activists like to claim that the only people who have a problem with this are “Right-wing bigots”, because it keeps things simple to suggest that this is a good (gender ideology) versus bad (Right-wing bigots) issue.
Today, gender ideology - the belief that who a person feels they are is more important than the material reality of their body - is firmly in the ascendent.
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