TW: Violent imagery

The last few weeks have been incredibly distressing.

When Joanne[1] Rowling released her essay there was a moment of collective, tearful hope. A woman with enough power had spoken our truth, with all the precise eloquence at her disposal, and, for one suspended second, I think we thought that they would have to hear.

It now seems evident, watching the boot come down, the steady stream of disavowal and dismissal and outright demonising denigration, that a woman’s words about her truth, no matter how eloquent or precise, cannot, still, be given any credit. Our pain, etched into our bodies, mimed over centuries, and finally wrested into speech, will never be taken as intended. As evidence of our humanity, and an explanation of how that humanity is harmed by what is done to us. We are still, only ever, an object and repository, a resource for the needs and wants of others whose humanity matters more. Our pain, like our speech, like our politics, could never be for or about ourselves, because it has never registered – and this moment is nothing but the concatenation of this denial – that we actually, in our own right, exist.

This argument is not, therefore, an appeal for empathy with the damage done to us by male power and projection, by the immemorial and immovable demand that we efface ourselves before the needs of more important others. We know our pain doesn’t count in your economy, that it only registers on your balance books as a sly deceptive weapon or a vicious wilful harm to the interests of the only kind of people given credit. That you’re so certain of the justness of your accounting, you never seem to notice, that this one obvious fact, gives the lie to the ‘validity’ of your catechism. If you really thought that they were women, their pain would be a nought to you as well.

The purpose of this exercise is for myself, and us all, I hope. The last few weeks have been more painful than I remember. After the torrent of cocks, and the exhortations to choke, and the parade of denunciations, and the trolling kids with porn, and the media spin complicity, and the ‘you’re weaponizing your trauma,’ all polished off with tech-bro corporate might coming down on us like a ten-ton digital brick, it was the implacable, imperious requisition of Allison Bailey’s words that finally broke me. Or rather, it was the attempt to justify that requisition by claiming that speaking the violent, often sexual, threats against us, was, in and of itself, an act of ‘severe’ discrimination against the people threatening us. On a quiet Wednesday afternoon, at my desk, something happened I haven’t felt for years. The back of my brain went metallic. I managed a few, incandescent tweets and then fell, quickly, into inarticulate rage. By Friday, on the phone, my ‘discourse’ consisted mostly of a series of guttural, groaning sounds. I stuck needles* in my body, and the vice receded long enough to write and speak a poem, before tightening again. Rage passed into anger passed into despair passed into heavy, body-crushing sadness. Eventually the tears pooled in the centre of my heart and the bottom of my back so strongly I could cry them out. And then I started to see, and needed to try and speak, what was happening.

What is happening is a violently enforced, three-tiered denial of our words, our right to name the reality of our experience, and the reality of the violence perpetrated against us, because of our sex. Two tiers of this denial have long been evident. Now, in this battle between our discourse and their silencing, because we have fought so fucking long and hard for our words, our speech is, finally, beginning to be heard by some, the third tier is becoming ever more obvious. It was this that tipped me off the edge and, for a couple of weeks, stole most my words. It looks, as my friend said last night when I explained it on the phone, like a near-perfect, circular, stitch up. It looks like this:

Tier One:

We know this one well. This is the stealing of our language enacted by the core of trans ideology. The redefinition of the word ‘woman’ as an amorphous meaningless gender class against our consent. The removal of all words that link the word ‘woman’ to the concept of ‘female.’ The imperious imposition of the essentialist bullshit label ‘cis’ (‘IT’S LATIN!’). The dehumanising conversion of female people into fragmented body parts and functions. The command to call conspicuously male people ‘women’ even when engaged in conspicuously male behaviour, like, say, downloading child pornography or getting out their cocks at work. This all amounts, we’ve said repeatedly, to the political erasure of sex. We have said, perhaps too abstractly, we object to ‘the erasure of the axis of our oppression.’ What we mean is this: We object to male entitlement – to our bodies, to our time, to our attention, to our care, to our service, and now, above all, to our existence and the words that name it. We need to name the reality of sex, for yes, medical reasons, and sporting reasons, and because women are oppressed by conversion into sexual-reproductive resource and your idealist gender-bullshit can’t explain patriarchy in the slightest. But we need to name it most of all, because – as you never seem to grasp – gender is the system of entitlement that runs along the lines of sex. And the system that enforces that entitlement by means of threat or force. We need to name sex because we need to speak the violence males commit against us. Because our ability to speak at all depends on it. Which brings us to….

Tier Two:

In response to your demands, for our existence and its words, all we’ve said is ‘no.’ We haven’t threatened, or intimidated, or besieged, or tried to cancel. We’ve explained, millions of times, why we’re saying no, why we won’t let you take our words, because we need them. But the economy of entitlement that belies all your claims to gender non-conformity, will not respect our boundary. The boundaries here are literal, around our spaces, around the de-lineation of our words, but they are, above all, figurative. They arise from the expression of our own subjectivity. The naming of our needs and interests. They arise when we say ‘no,’ and ‘I don’t want,’ and ‘you can’t have.’ In an ethical economy it should be understood that the demand ‘I want to take’ never, between adults, has right of force over ‘I don’t want to give.’ You do not take from others what is not given freely, you don’t coerce them into giving things they do not want to give. Doing so is an act of narcissistic domination. It subordinates an-other’s needs and interests entirely to your own, and in so doing, annihilates their subjectivity. In its core, this is the logic, and the deep traumatic injury, of rape.

The narcissistic rage trans activists have unleashed on women, to try and force us to be silent and comply, is an exact exhibition of this logic. That so much of this coercive rage is sexualised, from the phallic pink and blue bats to the desire to choke us on their cocks, is far from accidental. That people have been so easily convinced that gender lives inside a tube of eyeliner, while the sexual economy of entitlement is enacted in plain sight, apparently invisible to many, is evidence of how far feminism has left to go. The women using argument and evidence to defend their ‘no’ are clearly monsters. A ‘swarm’ of uptight, cruel, castrating cunts who heartlessly refuse to meet a need so small it costs them nothing but their own existence. And everyone agrees. The litany of slurs and threats are warranted by the provocation of a ‘no.’ Just stop being such bitches. Just shut your fucking mouths and give us what we want you witches. Our desire or your existence. No contest cunts. ‘Be Kind.’

Image by Tatsuya Ishida @TatsuyaIshida9

Tier Three:

It is only inside this economy of entitlement that the indictment of ‘weaponising trauma’ makes sense. Trauma is our explanation of why we need our words and the boundaries that they draw. (Although, let’s be clear, people shouldn’t have to give reasons to justify their boundaries, and the fact we feel the need to reveal our trauma to do just that shows how fucked this situation is already.) The claim that our trauma is a weapon, is then, at base, a claim that our boundary is an act of aggression. And this claim, relies, in turn, on the belief that the needs of, and harm done to, those who seek to transgress that boundary far outweighs the needs of, and the harm done to, those who will be violated. (This is precisely how the acronym that became the slur exerts its vilifying power – what distinguishes, we might ask, ‘inclusion’ from ‘violation’ other than consent?) The people pressing, and supporting, this claim, will ground it by appeal to the specific, and extreme, vulnerability of trans people. And while that appeal is not without foundation, the willingness to uncritically accept, and endlessly disseminate, empirically sketchy and appropriative statistics – to accept then, in its fundament, the claim that the oppression of trans people neatly and completely overrides the oppression of women – is, in itself, a product of the economy of entitlement. The readiness of people, both male and female, to identify with and elevate the pain of males not being given what they say they need or want, over against the females who tell them ‘no,’ is the psychic substance that greases the wheels and gears of the whole patriarchal shitshow. And it is the psychic substance that serves to justify, exculpate, and explain away, any violence used to press male claims.

There is no logic, no quantity of need or pain, that justifies male people violating women’s boundaries, that isn’t rapey. What got to me about the response to Joanne Rowling’s words – and by extension, the words of all of us who would defend our boundary – is how audaciously and easily left-wing journalists and politicians lined up to collude with rape-logic, so immersed inside an economy of male entitlement and its narcissistic rage they likely have no fucking clue that that is what they’re doing. Women’s boundaries are not an act of aggression. Painting them as such is part of the economy of entitlement used to justify taking what has not been given freely, and to justify both the violence that is that taking, and the violence often used to enforce that taking. (This is the difference between rape and aggravated rape. Rape is violence, rape is sometimes violence enforced by violence. One of the key feminist fights was the effort to make clear that it was not the enforcing violence alone that constituted the violation). The indictment that we are ‘weaponising trauma’ is hence, both, a contestation and delegitimization of the boundary that we have re-drawn in response to the primary, trans activist requisition of our words and the spaces they inscribe (Tier 1), but is also then, a justification of any force or threat of force brought to bear to press the claim against that boundary (Tier 2). Here, the ‘weaponising trauma’ claim reveals itself as just another, subtler variation of the endless exculpations and woman-blaming bullshit used to justify the violences against us. ‘She had it coming.’ ‘She made me do it.’ ‘She was asking for it.’

It is here too that the contours of Tier 3 emerge. It consists of the effort to justify and/or dismiss both the violence that is the violation of our boundaries (Tier 1), and, in particular, the violence used to press the claim against, or enforce the violation of, our boundaries (Tier 2). This thought has always, in fact, been around. It often inheres in the classic patriarchal reversal underpinned by the economy of entitlement. That is, because female people having boundaries is an act of intolerable exclusion (and by extension then ‘oppression,’ or, in its current usage, ‘anything that stops me getting what I want’), then any violence used to press the claim against the boundary is, actually, just self-defence. It also turned up in another form just last night on Twitter, the wilfully circular ‘the boundaries of bigots do not need to be respected,’ which fails, of course, to recognise that ‘bigot’ in trans activist discourse means nothing but ‘a woman whose boundaries stop me getting what I want,’ viz, in fact, ‘women’s boundaries are bigotry.’ Such is the power of the economy of entitlement that someone can seriously type ‘I do not need to respect the boundaries of someone whose boundaries stop me getting what I want’ and think that it will fly.

Of course, the defenders of the faith won’t accept a word of this. And to return to where we started, at Tier 1, they won’t accept it because its blasphemy against the catechistic sanctity of the Trinity (‘Trans women are women, Trans men are men, Non-binary is valid, Amen’), and its disavowal of the structuring of power along the lines of sex. (Remember, always, anyone who can actually defend their faith need not be so dogged with ex-communicating heretics). Indeed, everything I have said here, because it relies on the sexual economy of entitlement, would be deemed to be hateful – although, as I’ve underlined, the transparent operation of that economy in this whole affair belies the truth of its own dogma. It is here that the denigration and dismissal of Jo Rowling’s testimony, slips into the almost non sequitur of Owen Jones’ reply. Jones’ response here depends, entirely, on ostensibly reversing the balance of power between males and females, by denying that Jo Rowling speaks as a female, and as a member of a class oppressed as female (this is the work of so much Tumblrised intersectional discourse about ‘cis’ women, ‘rich’ women, ‘white’ women, ‘cishet’ women), and denying that the vulnerability of trans people as trans, does not magically negate the fact that the ones dictating that our boundaries are bigotry and can be rightfully overridden are still male. The epithets ‘abusive,’ ‘silencing,’ ‘aggressive’ and ‘violent,’ when applied by females, to the behaviour of males trying to coerce their boundaries, is not the sneaky gambit of a ‘powerful’ majority jealously hording their piles of privilege. It is how female people name, explain, and process the violence they experience because they’re female, in a society governed by a sexual economy of entitlement.

Because OJ catechistically believes that trans-ness negates maleness, he can, effectively make a claim which, without such catechistic cover, is something no self-respecting progressive would ever say, because its incel-MRA-speak. That is, that women should not name male violence, and that in doing so, they are demonising and discriminating against males. This is, as Owen is fond of reminding us, a trope picked up from the gay rights movement, and leveraged in a way that was, in truth, wrong. It is true that the association of gay men with paedophilia as an excuse to refuse them rights was reprehensible (and just to underline, the general analogy with gay rights fails because gay rights did not involve violating the boundaries of another oppressed class). It is not true, however, that no gay men are paedophiles, and that suspecting a gay man of being a paedophile is a priori an act of bigotry, if you have reason for your suspicion beyond them being gay. (Just as it’s not de facto homophobia to think there might be a safeguarding issue if a gay man dresses in fetish gear and wanks in the toilet of the national children’s charity and then puts it on the internet). Jones’ claim in that case, effectively, was that gayness negates maleness (which it does not), and similarly here, that trans-ness should provide a negating shield of perfect immunity around males who identify as women, or non-binary, or maverique, or whatever, from any indictment of conspicuous male-pattern violence. (Cue Family Guy cartoon). A society that took the sexual abuse of women and children remotely seriously would understand, off the bat, that creating a sub-class of males who are a priori immune from being suspected or indicted of male-pattern violence is a safeguarding risk the size of a fucking planet.

It is this – the ‘you’re demonising us as predators’ stitch-up gambit – that leads directly to the moment where Allison’s Bailey’s description of the contents of terfisaslur is summarily requisitioned as an act of ‘severe’ discrimination against trans people as a whole. (This is MRA logic again, where ‘NotAllMen’ becomes ‘NotAllTransWomen’ and of course, yes, but a not negligible some). There is no way a decent person of progressive persuasion can look at the contents of terfisaslur, or the memes of gun-toting anime characters emblazoned with ‘Shut The Fuck Up TERF,’ or the gratuitous phallic threats aimed at Jo Rowling, and conclude that these are not ‘abusive,’ ‘silencing,’ ‘aggressive’ and ‘violent.’ It is an epic gaslighting piss-take to tell us to choke on cocks, threaten us with rape, make T-shirts soaked with our fake blood, emblazon signs with death threats, erect guillotines with our names on, draw sketches of our hanging bodies, and openly, gleefully, fantasise about the many other ways you want to kill us, and then turn around and say by describing this violence as what it is, we are invalidating and demonising you with prejudicial malice.

The fact that much of this violence is enacted by males who are trans, does not transubstantiate it into ‘not violence’ and it doesn’t mean that people coercing female people’s boundaries with the kind of baseball-bat wielding rapey bullshit always used to coerce female boundaries are somehow, alchemically, ‘not doing male-pattern violence.’ And your catechism-that-we-don’t-believe is no defence, not a get-out clause, not some kind of whizz-bang-magic immunising shield that will stop us naming what we see right before of our eyes. We’ve often noted, sometimes caustically, sometimes ruefully, that if people wanted to convince us that they were women, and not a threat, telling us to choke on cocks and hammering down the door with bats was probably not the way to go. We will keep our words, the boundaries that they draw, and the naming of the violence they allow, because the survival of our subjectivities and the possibility of our healing depends on it. And though we may be silenced sometimes, by your animation of our trauma, and your refusal of our power to name, all you will achieve, with your catechistic dictates, in the end, is demonstrating why we wouldn’t let you take our words from the beginning.

We say again:

No means no.

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[1] I hope she’s okay with this, but I’d like to ditch the JK. The occlusion of her sex is a symptom of – not a remedy for – male power.

* It has been pointed out to me for people who don’t know me, the needles in question are acupuncture ones, not the ones attached to hypodermic syringes. This shit is hardwork, but I’m not doing heroin, well, yet. (We can thank Lorelei’s boyfriend for the need for this clarification 😂).

This letter is a guest post by @hatpinwoman, written in response to the House of Common’s Briefing Paper ‘Gender Recognition and the Rights of Transgender People,’ published yesterday, July 16 2020.

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To whom it may concern at the House of Commons,

I am writing to you in response to the recently published commons briefing paper entitled “Gender Recognition And The Rights of Transgender People”. It contains both crucial factual errors and statements the veracity of which have not been ascertained.

In order of appearance in the document the points that are contentious are:

i) The documents states that the term transsexual is a “predominantly historical term”. A significant minority within the transgender community continue to call themselves and consider themselves to be transsexual as they have always done. The discarding of the term seems to be extremely premature.

As an especially vulnerable group of people who have a medical diagnosis and follow a path of full or near full transition, their needs and requirements may be considered to be potentially very different to a much larger group who do not have full (or even sometimes any) medical interventions.

ii) The idea that the term acquired gender should be replaced with the term affirmed gender is surely ideological rather than a matter of the law. It is in line with the language used in current models of care which suggest affirmation rather than the more traditional watchful waiting is the correct medical response to patients presenting with dysphoria and a desire for transition.

The replacing of the watchful waiting approach is contentious among some clinicians in the field, and potentially opens the medical profession up to a situation where many patients will be harmed because gender dysphoria is not synonymous with a need to transition. There are, in fact, many reasons why a person might experience dysphoria and many outcomes for such patients. Transition being of benefit to some of them but not all.

The language of “affirmed gender” is a less robust term for the law to use when “affirmed” is so much more wishy-washy than acquired, and it also seems to endorse one specific way of responding to patients with dysphoria. This is surely beyond the remit of Parliament.

iii) The statement from a quote by Transgender Equality that “each of us is assigned a sex at birth” is completely untrue. Our sex is observed and recorded. It is not a random designation, nor is it a rough guess. For the vast majority of people sex is entirely unambiguous. This holds true in Transgender people who are not substantially more likely to have DSDs than the rest of the population. (DSDs are differences, or disorders, of sexual development. Colloquially people may use the term intersex).

We know this because the medical profession has done some research that involves karyotyping patients. Some have found a higher incidence of conditions like Klinefelters syndrome (in which sex would not be ambiguous), others have found no statistically significant difference between incidence of DSDs in trans and non trans people. The consensus thus far is that because the results were consistent enough with the rest of the population it is of limited or even no use in evaluation, diagnosis and treatment.

In outlier cases where it might be of value the largest study I can find on this, to date, states that “patients with DSDs will typically have other clinical or hormonal signs that would point to a DSD diagnosis” (Inoubli et al)

“Assigned sex at birth” is language specifically taken from a small number within the minority of those who have DSDs and it is used in the rare cases where sex does have to be assigned. It seems wrong to take useful language away from a small group of people and generalise it, in a way that makes no sense, to the rest of the population.

iv) The statement , also from transgender equality, that “Trans identity can be “non-binary” in character, located at a (fixed or variable) point along a continuum between male and female; or “non-gendered”, i.e. involving identification as neither” also raises questions about where these fixed or variable points are, how they are measured and what it means to identity as less or more male or female given that the body is clearly one or the other. It seems that Sex and Gender are conflated here which is wrong.

v) the statement “gender dysphoria is not related to sexual orientation” is a highly disputable assertion given that the vast majority of children and young people who develop dysphoria in childhood will not grow up to be trans, but to be gay, lesbian or bisexual.

Additionally current concerns raised by some clinicians at the children’s gender service, GIDS, that gay and lesbian adolescents are being inadvertently transitioned suggest that sexuality is a fundamental consideration when dealing with dysphoria.

Further, clinicians such as Kenneth Zucker, a world renowned expert, notes that “sexual orientation is associated with meaningful differences among GD adolescents and adults”

vi) The statement was made in the report that “Gender Dysphoria is not in itself a mental health condition”. This is concerning.

Gender Dysphoria still appears in DSM-5 which is the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The American Psychiatric Association, who are responsible for publishing the DSM, also state that:

“It is important to note that gender nonconformity is not in itself a mental disorder. The critical element of gender dysphoria is the presence of clinically significant distress associated with the condition.”

The assertion that gender dysphoria is not a mental health condition stands to undermine mental health resources for patients, push them towards the singular treatment of transition which is not always appropriate and even potentially fail to offer them treatment at all.

vii) The assertion that puberty blockers are a “physically reversible intervention” is still in contention given that we do not know the long term effects. How can one assert something is reversible if we do not know the full consequences of a treatment yet? All we can state is that puberty resumes in patients. This does not make it fully reversible unless we can ascertain that their bones, brains, pituitary gland functioning and cognitive abilities are unaffected.

viii) The section about the safeguarding of children (and young people) undergoing treatment for gender dysphoria fails to mention ongoing concerns raised by the staff of GIDS about the standard of care these children are receiving. These concerns have been detailed, for example, in The Times and by the BBC. It is not helpful for MPs to be unaware of this issue.

ix) Where it talks of conversion therapies the report says

“The NHS does “not deliver, promote or refer individuals to any form of conversion therapy.” Conversion therapy is an umbrella term used in relation to:

 …a therapeutic approach, or any model or individual viewpoint that demonstrates an assumption that any gender identity is inherently preferable to any other, and which attempts to bring about a change of gender identity, or seeks to suppress an individual’s expression of gender identity on that basis.”

 This is misleading in its glossing over of things. Conversion therapy is indeed a harmful and heinous practice. Traditionally used to attempt to convert homosexual people to being heterosexual, it was, and is, barbarous.

How this relates to gender identity is unclear. A watchful waiting approach that addresses other issues the patient is experiencing and attempts to ameloriate those is not conversion therapy. It is simply treatment.

Affirmation in a sense is the absence of treatment because it presupposes an outcome: that a patient is trans. The idea that an innate gender identity is responsible for the symptoms in all cases, rather than the symptoms being potentially a product of a variety of things is objectively incorrect.

Any patient who is not trans and is only given affirmation is at risk of medical mistreatment. A growing number of detransitioners are now coming forward to tell their stories which suggests this is precisely what is already happening.

x) When discussing the protected characteristic of Gender Reassignment in the Equality Act, the report states the following about how gender reassignment is defined.

“A notable feature of this definition is that, unlike previous equality legislation, there is no need to be undergoing a medical process of transition. That is because the phrase “proposing to undergo” has a broad meaning.

 The point at which a person is deemed to be “proposing to undergo” was explained by the Solicitor General in 2009 during the Equality Bill’s consideration in committee:

 “proposing” suggests a more definite decision point, at which the person’s protected characteristic would immediately come into being. There are a lot of ways in which that can be manifested— for instance, by making their intention known. Even if they do not take a single further step, they will be protected straight away.

 Alternatively, a person might start to dress, or behave, like someone who is changing their gender or is living in an identity of the opposite sex. That, too, would mean that they were protected.”

I cannot speak to the accuracy of this interpretation but I do wonder at it. We have already seen cases, such as Karen White and Katie Dolatowski, where individuals have been predatory and look to be using transitioning as a cover for this.

We also know, for example, from prior research that there is a “small but concerning minority” of people who will try to transition to gain access to children because they are paedophiles. (Gender Reassignment: 5 years of referrals in Oxfordshire).

The interpretation of gender reassignment as a protected characteristic as explained by the solicitor general does not incidentally or accidentally give these people the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. It seems explicitly to allow them such. A person who dresses or behaves “like someone who is changing their gender” is not someone who, in fact, is necessarily changing their gender.

xi) When discussing single sex exemptions that allow for provision of single sex services and spaces for women the report asserts

“Under the genuine occupational requirement provisions, an employer may impose a “requirement not to be a transsexual person”. The Act’s Explanatory Notes provide the following example:

 A counsellor working with victims of rape might have to be a woman and not a transsexual person, even if she has a Gender Recognition Certificate, in order to avoid causing them further distress.

 As with the Explanatory Notes’ description of the services exception (see above), legal commentators argue this example inadequately describes the duties on employers:

 There are very real concerns that such guidance is too categorical and fails to emphasize the lengths an employer …would need to go to in order to demonstrate proportionality as an adequate defence to discrimination.”

This seems to set the bar one is required to meet to offer women single sex services impossibly high. It is not enough, apparently, for common sense and humanity to women to prevail and to consequently allow them to have single sex provisions.

Instead it must be such a hoop for an employer to jump through that one wonders if they would risk doing so.

Yet, many women very much require sex based rights both because being a member of the female sex remains a distinct physical and social experience, and because the group of people most likely to be violent towards them are male.

The fact that it is even in dispute that women might automatically expect their rape service providers will be female (or as per the previous example cited that their female counselling groups will be female only) is astonishing.

No one, except the most churlish among us, would begrudge trans people specific and exclusive resources and particularly when they are at their most vulnerable. One has to wonder why it is the case that women must be expected to forego a similar level of compassion and accommodation. It is unlikely when the bar for justification of these needs is set so high that service providers will feel comfortable insisting on providing female only provisions.

Given that this is already notably the case, the interpretation of the single sex exemptions must be more concrete, more intuitive and more decent towards the female sex.

xii) With regards to the spousal veto, the women and equalities committee has, to its credit, apparently spoken to the trans community about their thoughts on this. What it doesn’t appear to have done is also spoken to the (mainly) women who will be affected by the removal of the spousal veto. This is an oversight when the veto is something that both parties have a vested interest in.

xiii) The statement made that “Some argue that biological sex differences are immutable” is somewhat confounding. This seems to imply that there is some kind of reasonable argument that they are mutable, but biological sex cannot be changed and this is surely the foundational point of understanding for this whole debate. Trans people really cannot exist within the law, or transition in any meaningful way, if biological sex is not a concrete thing. Nor can women expect single sex exemptions to have any meaning at all.

xiv) The section entitled “the self identification debate” has a good attempt at covering the issue of the ongoing disagreements between groups, but really wouldn’t inform someone outside of the debate of the tenor of behaviour women have been on the receiving end of.

I personally speak anonymously on this issue because I was threatened with violence, told I would be executed with a guillotine, socially ostracised, and my friends were told they must disown me, for raising issues on this subject. In a manner no more offensive than the one I am writing with here. I have been relatively lucky in terms of the kind of campaign of terror I have received.

The level of rape threats, death threats, letters to employers, attempts at public denigration and shaming, and the misogynistic hostility women have faced while trying to talk about changes in law that concern them, too, has been unacceptable in a democracy. It is not only trolls and internet ruffians who have engaged in this behaviour, either.

Calling women “terfs” and intimidating, maligning and dismissing them on that basis has been horrifyingly widespread. So has the constant impugning of their character to assume that their motivations must necessarily be hateful.

Thank you for your time in reading my response,

Yours sincerely,

Lorelei