The Gender Debate: From the Gaslighting Era to the Culture War Era

My speech to WPUK on 9 November 2023.

The speech below was delivered to the event organized by A Woman’s Place to discuss the coverage of gender in the British media in the last two decades. I spoke after Julie Bindel, who recounted what it was like to cover the subject in the 2000s, and I was followed by Susanna Rustin, Susan Dalgety and Sonia Sodha.

WPUK’s background is in the trade unionist movement, so I wanted to talk about the danger of a sensitive topic being co-opted by extremists. On the night, I skipped over some sections for time, so this is the Extended Cut.

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Photo by Rubén Bagüés on Unsplash

My entry into this debate begins where Julie left off. It was January 2013, and I was editing the website of the New Statesman, a left-leaning British magazine. I had hit upon the idea of running “theme weeks” on the website, to explore important political issues in depth, and in the round. And so I commissioned one called Trans Issues Week. “For anyone interested in equality, it should be obvious that trans people are subject to harassment simply for the way they express their gender identity,” I wrote in the introduction. “If they do not “pass” in the street, they can be subject to everything from cruel comments and sideways glances to assault or rape – just for standing out. The kind of dehumanising language which most people would find outdated and offensive if used against women, or a racial group, is routinely used when talking about trans people.”

That post now feels like a time capsule. Most of it, I stand by — it is hard to be visibly transgender, or gender non-conforming, and I have never wanted to make anyone’s life harder. Now, though, I wouldn’t use the words “gender identity,” and that is because of what happened next. 

A few months ago, someone suggested to me that the reason I had so much grief for my writing on this issue is that I arrived to it early. I quibbled at the time, but I think that’s right. I think it’s true of Julie too. In his book The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk talks about the “short march through the institutions” by a particular kind of identity-based ideology — and nowhere is that more obvious than in trans activism. When I started writing about trans issues, I thought I was supporting a movement for human dignity—trans women wanted to be treated like women, to use female names and female pronouns to soothe their gender dysphoria. Of course they weren’t female, and some protections in law were written specifically for biological females, so those wouldn’t be included.

But I quickly discovered that wasn’t the case: that some people found any discussion of vaginas and ovaries in relation to womanhood appalling, yet many of those same people had no problem identifying who was a woman when it came to singling out writers for abuse, threats and bullying. I feel as though I have lived through an arc: I started writing about gender because no one was paying attention to what was happening. No one would put a rapist in a female jail, we were told. There was no conflict between women’s rights and trans rights. Puberty blockers were a life-saving intervention administered only after a careful clinical process. 

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That was the gaslighting era. We are now in the culture war era. As a political journalist, I regularly attend events where hardline social conservatives — who want to restrict access to abortion and divorce — use preferred pronouns as a punchline. In the early days—by which I mean all of a decade ago — the challenge of reporting this subject was making the case that it mattered at all. Now, particularly as a writer for an American publication, my biggest difficulty is separating my own criticisms of the excesses of trans activism from a wider conservative backlash that sees gender non-conformity as degenerate and disgusting, and would strip legal protections and access to healthcare away from trans people entirely. That informs how I write and talk now.

Back in the mid-2010s, what made so many liberals resistant to hearing the feminist critique of gender was the assumption that trans activism was merely the continuation of the gay rights movement. I certainly did, and I know why: It’s hard to remember now, but the 90s and 00s were cruel to trans people in the same way they were cruel to women: in the film Ace Ventura, the big twist is that the police detective Lois Einhorn is, to use the film’s language, “a man.” Remembering that he kissed her, Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura then mimes his disgust for several minutes—vomiting into the toilet, using a plunger on his face, squeezing a whole tube of toothpaste into his mouth. Another way to see how casually cruel people used to be about “trannys” is to find a man ranting at feminists on Twitter to “be kind” … and then search his tweets from about, say, 2012.

What shifted my view further was an open letter—that plague upon the earth—circulated by the lobby group Trans Media Watch in September 2013. A representative for the group asked me to sign it, and promote it in the New Statesman. You can tell how long ago this was by the fact that “trans” in the letter is followed by an asterisk—something we were told at the time was vitally important in …. recognizing something, but which was dropped five minutes later. It was the first intimation that this movement was the child of Judith Butler, obsessed with using jargon to carve out an enlightened “us” and a despicable “them”. 

Now, I became a journalist because I’m not a joiner-in. I wanted to run a website where issues were debated. So I wasn’t going to sign myself, or my organization, up to a single interpretation of the truth. I didn’t sign that letter. I didn’t join in with the insane pile-on that followed Caitlin Moran’s How to Be A Woman, where she was accused of being racist, ableist, transphobic—you name it. Instead, I defended her good intentions and her clear desire to reach a mass audience in accessible prose. 

Those two actions put me out of step with the school of feminism then sweeping through Tumblr and Twitter, obsessed with status and purity and disassociating itself with the icky Second Wave. It also put me out of step with a shift in progressive politics that became obvious in the mid-2010s, after Britain and the U.S. had passed gay marriage legislation, following a long legislative slog, where gay rights campaigners worked across party lines, and eventually convinced Conservatives to back a conservative institution being extended to same-sex relationships. Matt Yglesias summed up the new orthodoxy like this: “that there is a set of identity-linked issues that are beyond the scope of normal political give and take.” In Britain, this was packaged as the idea that refusing to say that trans women were women was the same as questioning their “right to exist.” Or it can be summed up even more briskly, as Stonewall did: NO DEBATE.

During the gaslighting era, leftwing journalists too often unthinkingly accepted what they were told by charities and activists—after all, weren’t they all on the same side? New style guides were offered, dictating what could and couldn’t be said—no to “single sex spaces”, no to “deadnaming,” yes to “sex assigned at birth”. Sex change surgery became gender reassignment surgery became gender confirmation surgery. A teenager having an elective double mastectomy was softened into someone being affirmed through top surgery. “Male bodied” was taboo, because who was to say that a penis was a male sexual organ? This language was deeply political and it often served to obfuscate. If I tell you that a trans activist attacked a TERF at Speakers Corner, I’m denying you the extremely relevant information that a twentysomething male physically assaulted a woman in her 60s. Talking about the spike in teenage referrals to gender clinics over the 2010s also requires the context that this spike was almost entirely driven by natal females — girls — the same group most prone to social contagion. Talking about rape requires the acknowledgement that 98% of sexual violence is committed by males, according to the ONS. The trans activist movement of the 2010s was so hostile to journalists because it wanted to make so many things unsayable. The things I have just said are, even now, hard to say in many liberal media outlets, because they would be deemed “anti trans”. 

Photo by Norbu GYACHUNG on Unsplash

At the same time that some charities and lobby groups insisted that civil rights issues were exempt from normal scrutiny, discussion and compromise, those same charities and lobby groups were pushing for vast, sweeping changes to law. And this is what really prompted my entry into the Trans Debate. In 2015, the expenses cheat Maria Miller decided to give her political career a new act by using a Women and Equalities select committee report to recommend self-ID. She did this even though representatives from the prison service suggested that sex offenders might exploit such provisions. 

Maria Miller’s committee did not invite any gender-critical groups to testify—which is more understandable when you realize how few such groups existed in 2015. The domestic violence charity Nia, of which I was once chair, was a lonely example standing up for single-sex provision: Women’s Aid told the inquiry it aimed to accommodate trans women wherever possible, in a tone implying this was no big deal and that no one reasonable could object. More gaslighting. 

Back then, trans groups had a large and well-funded infrastructure thanks to Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence and other groups; women’s organizations were largely caught napping. The gender critical movement owes a huge debt to women like Julie, who raised the alarm early, as well as campaigners like Nicola Williams, Stephanie Davies-Arai and Karen Ingala Smith of Nia, who all cared more about informing policy than getting the credit. As a journalist, I won’t take dictation from activists —but I am extremely grateful when I encounter experts who really know their stuff. 

After the Miller inquiry reported, I wrote articles to oppose self-identification, and to call out this blinkered and biased approach to policy-making. Then I got all the backlash that you would expect those positions to attract—and so I wrote about that, too. It seemed so obviously misogynist to me that I was surprised other people couldn’t see it, or could pretend not to see it. 

For a while, the Stonewall tactics worked. Theresa May went to the Pink News awards, and the Tory party backed self-ID. Jeremy Corbyn cleared up any confusion we might have had by declaring that his pronouns were he/him. 

In the gaslighting era, gender-critical feminists were completely shut out of the conversation on the left, while the right hadn’t yet seen the electoral potential of saying things like “women don’t have penises.” It felt very lonely.  You were simultaneously a genital-obsessed wignut intent on genocide… and someone writing about trivialities rather than serious, manly politics. And that word TERF: we all knew it meant bitch, cunt, hag, crone, witch, harpy… and it did exactly the work those words have done throughout history, to isolate dangerous women with their dangerous opinions.  

For a while, it felt as though the New Statesman was the one of only places for feminists to voice their misgivings, which they did despite the personal and professional risks. We ran a pseudonymous piece by an academic headlined: “Are you now or have you ever been a TERF?” We ran Rachel Hewitt’s incredible essay on how single-sex spaces helped her heal after being raped. We ran Glosswitch and Sarah Ditum, and Suzanne Moore—and we ran the other side of the debate too, when a few brave trans activists dared to disobey their own side and make arguments rather than loftily refusing to engage. And make no mistake, it was hard to being a dissident trans activist—when Gia Milinovich put together a Sceptics event on gender featuring two trans panellists, they got an incredible amount of grief from their small, close-knit communities. The incentives in LGBT spaces all pointed towards “no platform” and “no debate”. Both the extreme right and extreme left chose to play to their base — they both chose culture war over compromise. 

Gradually, though, the kind of journalists I respect—people who read the evidence, talk to sources, think things through … rather than taking their opinions readymade off a shelf marked “left” or “right”—became involved. Janice Turner wrote about the issue in the Times. James Kirkup developed an incredible knowledge of the policy implications of self ID and wrote about it in the Spectator. Caroline Criado Perez wrote about her refusal to call herself ‘cis,’ another of those words we were once assured would be ubiquitous within a decade.  Julie continued to write about women, bloody but unbowed. Becca Reilly-Cooper explored the philosophical arguments for the idea of gender as a spectrum, in an essay I still hear cited today. A Woman’s Place found those who had been personally affected by the campaign of silencing and invited them to speak—demonstrating to sceptical journalists that there was a real story here. 

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

For me, this has been some of the most meaningful journalism I have done in my career. I try not to count my losses from speaking out, but I do count the gains: I have met some of the most principled, brave people I know as a result of this work. Who was listening to the voices of women in prison? Who was listening to the whistleblowers of the Tavistock? Who was listening to the women fired from jobs, removed from boards, denied promotions, ostracised by their peers—all for making arguments which are now accepted by the leader of the Labour Party? 

Today, the picture has transformed utterly—with organisations like Sex Matters, For Women Scotland, and MurrayBlackburnMackenzie developing the kind of legal expertise that ensures a real policy debate is now possible, and lawyers like Anya Palmer taking the fight to the courts. That’s incredible.

But I want to end on a warning. I came to this subject because of my background in writing about feminism. Where the issue once had far too little light shone on it, today it is a nuclear missile for reactionaries to deploy against the left. This the cultura war era, and we are now in the thick of it. Many conservatives have entered the discussion because of a sincere concern about women’s rights, and that’s wonderful too — this isn’t about partisanship or purity spirals. But we have to acknowledge that the “trans debate” has also attracted narcissists and grifters, monomaniacs and extremists, and commentators who don’t give a shit about women but know that there are clicks and applause in dunking on irritating students and queer theory academics. It has attracted people who throw around words like “groomer”. People who are genuinely transphobic. People who hate butch women and femme men. People like Hungary’s illiberal leader Viktor Orban, whose government no longer allows citizens to change their names to fit their sense of their own gender, or the Polish right, who promised to create “LGBT ideology free zones”. 

And you bet your life I am going to write about that. Journalists can work productively with activists—by representing them fairly, by giving airtime to important debates, by pushing back on misrepresentation. But journalists have to stand apart from activists. Not doing so was what got us into this mess in the first place.