There seems to be quite some confusion about the purpose of an open letter or statement like the one made by GC Anti Far Right, so I wanted to lay out some thoughts on that.

First perhaps, it’s best to start with what the purpose is not. It’s not to convince people who are sympathetic to the talking points and beliefs of the populist and far right that they are wrong, or to shame them into saying they are wrong.[1] That’s not an end that can be achieved by means like this, and indeed, it’s not clear to me that such an end can be achieved at all, any more than that arguing with hardcore TRAs will convince them they are wrong. Providing it doesn’t lead to unlawful behaviour, I strongly believe that everyone is entitled to hold their own beliefs, just as everyone is entitled to criticise the beliefs of others. (It’s worth noting, given some of the insanity going on out there, that ‘incitement to violence’ has been a crime for a good while; it’s not just some new ‘woke’ thing made up by the government on the fly. And there is some added complications here because it’s pretty likely that some beliefs being expressed about Muslims right now aren’t WORIADS at all.)

When people criticise other people’s beliefs, they are not coercing them (unless they are actually coercing them as well). Free speech has to work both ways. It must protect both expression of a belief and the rejection of that belief. In the Forstater case, what ended up happening was the protection of both the belief in gender identity and the rejection of that belief. I thought that was right, even though I have spent many years campaigning against the political impacts of the belief in gender identity. I think I have every right to campaign against that when the political impacts negatively impact my rights, or when the silencing and bullying by TRAs prevented me from expressing my views. But in a democratic society grounded on free speech, believing in gender identity shouldn’t be unlawful even if we think it’s dangerous bullshit. As long as our right to say we think it is dangerous bullshit, and to campaign against the effects of that bullshit, is also protected. It’s not okay for people to try and stop us saying ‘we think humans are sexed and it matters’ by claiming we are harming them or committing genocide or making people suicidal just by saying it. It’s equally not okay to try and stop us saying ‘we would like to keep the fuck away from the far right’ by claiming we are shaming people or coercing them or bullying them just by saying it.

Just as in the gender war, the primary purpose of saying ‘we would like to keep the fuck away from the far right’ isn’t actually to do with the people whose views are being rejected. I didn’t go round saying ‘I think humans are sexed and it matters’ because I was trying to make people who believe in gender identity sad, anxious, angry, frightened, or ashamed. I said it because I think it is important and impacts the political interests of the people I am committed to defending, and doing the kind of political work I am committed to doing. And I have exactly the same reasons for saying ‘I want to keep the fuck away from the far right’. My belief is that I can’t defend the interests of women as a class unless I say it. I can’t edit a magazine, or run a school where women come to learn about feminist history and politics, and claim it’s about women’s class interests, unless those spaces are really for all women as a class. And ‘the interests of women as a class’ includes black and brown women, and what they have to say about their experiences of being female in a racially hierarchical society, and what solidarity and understanding they need from women who don’t share some aspects of their experiences. You cannot ‘defend women’s rights’ if you are in any way propagating discourses that end with racialised violence against certain communities of people. Those communities are half women. And many of those women are now fucking scared.

I’m not going to get into arguing the toss on Twitter regarding the many arguments or alleged arguments people are using to handwave, dismiss, or outright condemn those who wrote or signed the statement. Some of those gambits are addressed in the letter itself, which has not stopped many people knee-jerk repeating them in response. I wrote a reply yesterday on Twitter to a feminist woman I like and have always got on well with, regarding the concern that it is not possible to express legitimate concerns about Islam. There is a bunch to say about that, but here I’d just like to underline that several people who signed the statement are Muslims or ex-Muslims who have spent much of their adult political lives writing and campaigning against the patriarchal harms of Islam and the dangers of fundamentalist and political Islam. They are nonetheless perfectly able to spot anti-Muslim racism when they see it, and many of them, having supported the gender critical cause, would like some solidarity in return when their communities are under attack.

I’m also not also going to get into arguing about why everyone who signed that letter is not a socfem, head girl, handmaiden, member of the far left, living in an ivory tower etc., because anyone who looks at the signatures can see that is patently bollocks. (Indeed, many signatories can’t be ‘socfems’ or ‘handmaidens’ in principle because they are men, unless we have suddenly decided that some humans can change sex, and that being an antiracist miraculously turns men into women.) If anyone genuinely wants to understand why people are using the word ‘populist’, the fact that anyone who voices political criticism or dissent around the far or Christian right immediately gets told they are some version of ‘the elite’ who ‘hates the working class’ is pretty much the reason why. I am also going to note that it is somewhat inconsistent to dismiss the list of signatories because you don’t know who any of them are while at the same time leveraging a populist discourse about being the voices of ‘ordinary women’ standing up against the snooty out-of-touch elites. The fact that you don’t know who many of those people are is precisely because many of them are ‘ordinary’ women and men (whatever that actually means).

So then, if the purpose of the statement is not to persuade or appeal or coerce or shame people, what is the point?

1. The first reason always for drawing a line between any political movement, however loose, and the far right, is that the far right routinely attaches itself to any movement that is generating traction and tries to co-opt it and turn it into a vehicle for disseminating its rhetoric and talking points. It is as little-known fact that the far right generally has a recruitment problem, and if you walk straight up to most people and say, ‘Would you like to become a Nazi?’ they generally say ‘No’. The far right often works, then, by attaching itself to a political movement with energy and turning that momentum towards its own political objectives. The letter was pointing to the fact that this has indeed already happened to some parts of the ‘GC movement’, broadly understood, and pointing to that was one reason it was felt that such a letter was necessary. This has also happened with respect to the influence of the Christian Right[2] (and there is a massive overlap, especially in the US, between the Christian and populist right). Trying to stop that happening was why some people wanted a line drawn much much earlier. That didn’t happen, and, as the letter suggests, things are now where they are. But there is still a purpose in drawing such a line at this point.

2. One of the most important reasons for that is that many people who think racism is extremely harmful – and those that are also committed to feminism as a project for women as a class – feel deeply ethically and politically uncomfortable and compromised when political causes they are involved in become associated with racist rhetoric. Some people who think racism is extremely harmful don’t feel compromised, and think they are responsible only to themselves and not to any collective of people involved in their cause. I find it difficult to comprehend this view, as I think politics is collective action, and I don’t think human beings are atoms who are completely distinct from the people they relate to, interact with, and work with (I discussed this in the last essay of Gender Critical Disputes). However, I accept that that is their view and that they genuinely feel like that, so they don’t feel a need to make it publicly clear. There are, however, many other people who don’t feel like that at all, and they really do need to make it publicly clear. You can say that that is just pointless ‘virtue-signalling’ which serves no purpose other than making them feel all good and virtuous about themselves, but that’s a fairly dismissive and sneering spin to put on ‘some people have a deep and genuine sense of their own ethical and political integrity and it matters a great deal to them’.

And it’s also not just about them feeling their integrity is intact. This is a practical matter. Because people who feel that being involved in a certain political cause is ethically or politically compromising are sooner or later just going to walk away from it. Lots of people have already done so. Many others have told me they no longer feel comfortable arguing the GC cause in their workplaces and friendship groups because they have nothing to say when people throw the racism in their face. They’re not prepared to handwave and dismiss those concerns, because they know they have some substance and they are profoundly bothered by that. And if a movement gets partially co-opted by far-right political forces and rhetoric, and loads of people who are really uncomfortable with that just withdraw, what ends up happening is snowballing radicalisation and widespread tipping of the movement towards the hard right. And then at some point or other, the decent people still involved do end up being the polite veneer for something that doesn’t actually correspond to the reasonable things they are saying about why trans ideology is a harm to women and gay people and gender non-conforming young people.

Simon Edge and Darren Johnson wrote the letter, and the impetus for it came originally from them. My involvement has been some legwork (keyboard work?) to help them with gathering the signatures. And what has come over repeatedly from many of the people who agreed to sign was relief and gratitude. The signatures flooded in for the first few hours after it went live. People saying how uncomfortable they had been seeing the things some people are saying, how damaging they think it is to the cause, and how it meant a lot to them to have a chance to make that clear, as well as thanks for the organisation. It is not insignificant that in a ‘movement’ fighting for a cause which means many people have good reason to be anonymous, over 400 people were prepared to put their real name – in most instances – on a public document like this. Many who were very supportive also chose not to sign because they aren’t out as GC, as well as other good work-related concerns or restrictions. And some chose not to sign because they know what kind of shit comes down on the head of anyone who says ‘I don’t like the far or Christian right’ anywhere near the GC movement and have good reasons for not wanting to deal with that right now. Which is itself indicative of the problem.

So, in summary, by all means say you don’t understand why other people feel like they need to do this. But people are different, and you not understanding why is not the same as them not needing to do it, and for genuine reasons that matter to them.

3. Lastly, the strategic reasons. I know a lot of people out there think that everyone who believes trans ideology is a member of some cultural Marxist far-left cult and everything they believe about everything is crap that can just be dismissed. Those of us who came to this fight from the left and also from the centre don’t tend to believe that thinking some people are oppressed is a load of bollocks, or that liberal laws and social mores about not discriminating against people are just totalitarian ‘woke’ rubbish. We’re not generic right-wing culture warriors who think this whole thing went wrong when women and racialised people and homosexuals said, ‘We’d like you to treat us a complete human persons please.’ We think things went wrong when that discourse got distorted with a load of bullshit about ‘identity’. And we’re pretty damn sure that you are not going to win over the people who have been sucked into this distortion if the only other option you are giving them looks increasingly like ‘fuck those people, they’re degenerate primitive barbarians’. That’s going to look like bigotry to them because that’s what is it. And not everyone who thinks so is a lefty puritan who regards anyone disagreeing with them as a bigot. There is totally such a thing as, in old-skool parlance, ‘political correctness gone mad’. There are also a lot of people running around shouting ‘woke’ at pretty much everything[3] who are just really pissed off that other people, and our laws, don’t think it’s okay to say and do flagrantly sexist, racist and homophobic shit anymore.

It has been said that the fight against trans ideology can be won by just ‘going around the left’. I always thought this was nonsense, because I don’t think this battle can be won until we persuade a significant number of those people most inclined to believe it that it’s bullshit with some extremely harmful consequences. I think it is all the more nonsensical now that we have a Labour government with a huge majority. You are not going to be able to convince people inclined to believe trans ideology because they bought the trans activist distortions about who was actually oppressing who, or who is vulnerable, or who is monstering and demonising who, if lots of people associated with your political cause are running around saying shit that sounds hateful because it basically is. The ‘we were called bigots for saying sex matters and therefore nothing is bigotry’ gambit doesn’t wash when a whole load of other people who are very familiar with left identitarians misusing charges of bigotry to control the expression of factual beliefs are also horrified by some of the things they are hearing from the GC side. ‘Mammals are sexed’ and ‘Muslims are medieval barbarians’ aren’t the same kind of claim. And only one of them can reasonably be construed as racist.

When you are trying to win over the people inclined to believe trans ideology, there is a very real and potentially extremely damaging political cost to having your political cause associated with some of this rhetoric. And it is not remotely plausible to keep going ‘we can’t be far right because people called us the far right when we weren’t’ when you are stanning for Tommy Robinson (or Carl Benjamin, and at this point frankly, Douglas Murray). That’s not going to wash with most people, and rightly so. The fact that people saying this kind of stuff are getting loads of likes and RTs on Twitter is not an accurate representation of reality. Because after years of Twitter being tilted in the favour of TRAs, Twitter is now heavily tilted in the favour of the populist right. Most people, and this is true of both Labour supporters and Tories, think Elmo Musk is a dangerous lunatic. The only people who don’t are those who support Reform. None of this is surprising, and it’s one of the reasons why a load of people screaming about this statement on Twitter and calling people names for having written or signed it no longer bothers me personally. That was always going to happen. It’s a demonstration of the landscape we are working in and the problem we are pointing at.

I do, however, still care a great deal about the gender critical cause as it was originally formulated. Women are oppressed on the basis of sex. Sex matters to the material political interests of women and gay people. Gender is a mechanism by which women are oppressed and it is harmful to define us by that in law. Women need spaces away from men. And medicalising gender non-conforming children on the basis of insufficient medical evidence, in the service of an ideology disconnected from material reality, is a really fucking bad idea. What I didn’t sign up for, among other things, is ‘they’re all degenerates and perverts who should have no rights at all’, ‘drag queens are a fundamental threat to family values’,  ‘gay marriage was a slippery slope to TWAW’, ‘Muslims are dangerous barbarians so deport them all’ and ‘we want laws against cross-dressing’. And there are quite a lot of people knocking around who didn’t sign up for that either.

People who signed up for the original formulation of the UK GC project, and are not at all comfortable with right-wing culture war formulations of all this – or the Covid conspiracy, or the climate change denial, or the threat to democracy, or the whole removing-women’s-reproductive-right-Project 2025-techbro-Gilead-train – now find themselves in a difficult position. It’s difficult morally and ethically, and for some of them it’s potentially difficult with respect to carrying on doing their work. It is very possible that some people’s work will start being seriously harmed by this, and one of the major reasons for wanting to create a public statement is to give their work some protection should this stuff really start to blow up in people’s faces. This matters to me personally, mostly because of the hundreds and hundreds of women who did thousands of hours of unpaid work on this when we were so far on the backfoot and so deep in the wilderness that it all felt like a Hail Mary pass. For myself, active involvement in all of this is pretty much done. I’ve made my contribution, and it no longer feels politically, ethically, intellectually, or indeed, spiritually, a good idea to sink my energy into it. Women are still oppressed, the world is basically going to hell in a handcart along multiple axes, and there is no shortage of fuckery to be worried about and think about. But the task the gender critical project set out with isn’t finished by a long way, and it matters to me and to many other people, still actively involved or not, that the important work yet to be done can carry on as effectively as possible. It matters to me that if, or rather when, people we are trying to persuade gesture at some of the nonsense going around, those still fighting to stop sex being overwritten in law have something to point to that allows them to convincingly say ‘yeah, a lot of us are not okay with that.’

For me personally, given how the last two years of my life went down, this also has felt like unfinished business. This statement does the work it needed to do for those people who strongly believe it was necessary. I don’t think its value or necessity is a function of Twitter likes, or how many TRAs or populist GCs say stupid shit about it. Along with many of us at this stage of the rodeo, I am entirely unmoved by accusations of elitism, snobbery, headgirlery, handmaidenry, meangirlness, wordiness, jealousy, comfortable armchairs, sipping lattes, eating sourdough, using WhatsApp, working for the WEF agenda, hating the working class, being okay with women being raped, looking down my nose at ordinary women, overcomplicating things that are totally simple for my own nefarious ends, being controlled opposition, keeping pet troons, committing tax fraud, being a paedophile apologist, fucking an AGP, or whatever insane, often misogynist, ad hominem nonsense people want to throw around in place of an argument. To all the women who have only just stuck their head above the parapet (and anyone who has recently got it in the neck for doing heinous things like, I dunno, explaining how UK equality law works): solidarity, it can be a deeply grim experience. When it was happening to me, I got pretty distressed by people saying ‘just block them’ because it was invariably a way of handwaving the fact that people are blatantly being mob-bullied and it is distorting the political discourse. (Just as it distorted the political discourse when TRAs did it.) But at the same time, seriously, just block them. Nobody is obliged to try and engage reasonably with people who are basically only interested in calling them names. Especially when the people calling you names are trying to bully you into compliance by claiming you are coercing them simply by expressing an opinion and chanting about ‘free speech’ and how everyone but them is a totalitarian.

I have no idea what will happen now with regard to the fight against trans ideology, and how this will all play out. That is in thousands of people’s hands now, relatively few of them coming from the feminist ground that first informed much of the original UK gender critical project, and a lot with motives and political objectives I am extremely sceptical about. In some ways, that is simply a consequence of how successfully the issue has been pushed into the mainstream. Although it is also a consequence of the fact that, at the time that was happening, there was a massive explosion of populism all round, and as the statement suggests, the populist and far right have seized on the open goal handed to them by left identitiarians. I can’t take responsibility for all of that, or for what happens next, but given how all this went down, helping Simon and Darren to get this letter together felt like it was my job. Like many of the people who signed it, what I now feel is overwhelming relief. What could be done to protect that cause, as I understand it, has been done. You may strongly disagree with that assessment, but it is what I and many others believe, and protecting all that work and its success matters a lot to me. While some people clearly want everyone to pretend the issue isn’t there[4] because the TRAs will disingenuously exploit it (obvs), what the statement actually demonstrates is that when we originally set out on this journey, and TRAs argued that thinking sex matters makes you fash-adjacent, they were, indeed, talking absolute shite.

With all of that I finally feel a sense of being able to let this go and move on to what’s next. And what’s next right now is going out in the garden, knocking some things down, and then rebuilding them.

And I don’t have to do anything else now.

Relevant Reading

Julia Long, ‘A Meaningful Transition?’ May 2020

Kellie-Jay Keen, Transcript of ‘Language Is Everything,’ October 2022

Kellie-Jay Keen, Transcript of ‘A Breeder, a Domesticated Zombie and a Dog Sh*t Walked Into a Bar,’ June 2022

Woman’s Place UK, ‘Woman’s Place and Kellie-Jay Keen,’ June 2022

Jane Clare Jones, ‘Purity Spirals, Political Alliances, and Movement Building,’ June 2022

Jayne Egerton, ‘Women and the Religious Right,’ July 2022

Kathleen Stock, ‘On Guilt-By-Association,’ July 2022

Jeni Harvey, ‘Feminism and the Far Right. Let Women Speak,’ September 2022

Helen Joyce, Joyce Activated Issue 21, and Joyce Activated Issue 22, September 2022

Kellie-Jay Keen, Transcript of ‘Right Wing Women Are Women,’ September 2022

DJ Lippy, ‘Feminism and the Far Left. Let Women Speak,’ September 2022

Heather Brunskell-Evans, ‘Policing Adult Human Females,’ October 2022

Julie Bindel, ‘Racists did NOT expose the ‘grooming gang’ scandals. They capitalised on cultural relativism,’ December 2022

The Radical Notion, ‘Gender Critical Disputes,’ February 2023

Maya Forstater, ‘On Gender-critical Disputes,’ February 2023

Julian Vigo, ‘Anatomy of the Near Murder of Kellie-Jay Keen,’ April 2023

Aja The Empress, ‘The Troubles of a Saturday Stroll,’ June 2024

Jane Clare Jones, ‘Tommy Robinson, Far Right Populism, and Gender Criticism,’ July 2024

Jayne Egerton, ‘The Resurgence of the Far Right,’ July 2024

Southall Black Sisters, ‘Statement on the Far-Right Riots Following the Southport Attack,’ August 2024

Jo Phoenix, ‘Talking about Asian grooming gangs: Some history and a few realities,’ August 2024

GC Anti Far Right, ‘Statement on the Gender Critical Movement and the Far Right,’ August 2024

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[1] There is a really weird thing going on with the conflation between ‘being racist’ and ‘being called racist’. People seem to think the principal purpose is to shame and feel superior to other people saying things that are perceived as racist, rather than not liking racism and believing it causes people harm, particularly at the precise moment that people are trying to attack mosques and set fire to buildings with asylum seekers inside them. There seems to be a widely held belief that people are only bothered about ‘being called a racist’ and not bothered about ‘actually not being racist’. I think that tells us quite a lot about the lens through which some people are looking at this and I am totally getting why black feminists have been banging their head against a wall for the last 50 years now. The left identitarians completely overplayed their hand here. No, using a motif from a Greek vase that might look a bit like a swastika if you look at it from a funny angle is not evidence of latent white supremacy, and subjecting people to public struggle sessions in which they are not allowed to speak in their defence for making a decorative border to a poster is abusive. But srsly people: when women of colour, or feminist women in general, are trying to point out why framing things in certain ways, or hanging around with Tommy Robinson, might be a problem with regards to actually making space in the women’s movement for all women, and the only response is all about how other people are just trying to make you feel bad, I really completely get how ‘White Women Tears’ and ‘#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen’ became a thing.

[2] One of the reasons I have some scepticism around the ‘legitimate criticisms of Islam’ claim, which often shades into ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric, is that, as far as I can see, the biggest actual threat to so-called Western values from religious fundamentalism is presently coming from the Christian Right. The people who are decrying the threat of Islam to the West are also often the people decrying anyone pointing out the threat of Christian fundamentalism to the values of democracy, equality and pluralism, as well as women’s and racialised minorities’ fundamental rights. To return to the question of racism, this ends up looking very much like ‘white man fundamentalism good/brown man fundamentalism bad’. The feminist position is ‘all forms of fundamentalism bad’ and ‘while we’re here can you all stop trying to make us cape for one form of your bullshit patriarchal ethnonationalism against another’.

[3] Including eminently sensible things like researching how much money that went into major institutions, or important historical buildings, came from the proceeds of slavery.

[4] At this point I always get the mental image of genteel ladies serving tea in bone china cups in the middle of a large marquee while people try to shove some nazis behind a nearby aspidistra.

Final Addendum. There is a great deal of disingenous handwaving and deflection going on on Twitter following the anonymous GC letter about how nobody could possibly know what the letter writers or signatories are referring to. As I discuss if you follow this thread, there are strategic reasons for not providing all the reciepts, both in terms of giving ammunition to the TRAs – which is not, as explained above, the purpose of this letter – and because, from bitter experience, I know that the GC populist side will immediately seize on the provision of receipts and spin it as ‘doxing,’ ‘bullying,’ ‘putting targets on women’s backs,’ ‘almost getting women killed,’ or some such evidence of being vile and despicable. I provided one example in this thread of what we are talking about, and it was, as predicated, immediately respun as intolerable aggression. Do not get distracted by the handwaving. The people who can see the problem and are not okay with it can see it clearly, and a vast number of the people pretending they can’t see the problem have some motive for that pretence (which is why I used an example from the TL of the person handwaving and demanding evidence in that thread.) The statement stands as it is. No argument or evidence given will ever be deemed satisfactory. And all that is happening here is the effort to produce a lot of smoke (and mirrors) and (hand)wave it around to try and obscure what has been said and why.