Disputes and Kumbaya

Photo by Ruan Richard Rodrigues on Unsplash

I don’t know if anyone really needs my two penneth on this, but I’m going to offer it. Recently, the Radical Notion magazine put out a pamphlet called “Gender Critical Disputes” which outlined the position of some feminists in ongoing disagreements.

I’m a member of the editorial team at the Radical Notion, and a feminist, but before publication I read the pamphlet and asked for my name to be removed from it. I think it’s important for every woman to speak for herself on these kinds of knotty issues and my position on it is not the same position as the one the Radical Notion took. 

As I write that sentence I already feel the need to line up my disclaimers. No I don’t want us to ally with the far right (do many of the women in this actually want to do that?? Are we sure they do?) and no, I don’t think women who want to talk about a shift they see in these discussions are ivory tower dwellers, either. 

Our online space feels increasingly polarised which gives the illusion that our views are neatly divided into clear sets, but for a lot of women much of this is messy. They value reading other women’s analysis but they also value the space Posie has created for women to speak. They don’t have any desire to ally with those who will destruct women’s rights in other ways but they do want a broad church to fight back against an out of control ideology. They may be very interested in discussions about strategy, but they don’t want to be expected to dislike any other woman in order to have those conversations.

Every woman who has spoken to me privately about all of this is tired of the rather sharp rounds of back and forth because it is getting us nowhere. Except into further misery. 

We are standing in a movement full of heretical women. A movement full of women, of all ages and from all walks of life, who have in common a willingness to step forward to say crucial things that vast swathes of society and the establishment suddenly deemed completely unsayable.

So perhaps it is not entirely surprising that our disputes, when they came, would be impressive and a little relentless.

Actual footage of an uncredited English person hearing any one of us speak for the first time

We seem to be at a point where many are concluding that there are serious, and unavoidable, fault lines between groups of women and that we therefore should more officially divide ourselves up. Things feel rather Us vs.Them. The different perspectives on language, and on tactics etc, are crucial but none of the women even in the most firmly divided groups can be reduced to a cipher in this way. It’s easy, and daft, to believe that a woman must think exactly like the women nearest to her just because she likes them. Or works with them.

The hundreds of women who attended the rally in Glasgow aren’t thought clones any more than the lefty feminists are. Often the two overlap. In this way, dividing us clearly, is impossible.

(I know for my part that I want to stand with women I don’t agree with on everything just as dearly as I want to stand with women I agree with on most things.)

And I think, maybe, most of all, women might be tired of being treated like they’re stupid, wrongheaded, or malicious, for taking whatever position they do in these disputes. As though they haven’t woken up everyday, for a long, long time, to fight trans ideology and each simply tried to stand where they think it is most effective for them to do so. 

So what I think about all the nuances, and various disagreements, is largely irrelevant to what I think most of all; what we are arguing about is far less important than how we navigate the fact that we are arguing.

I don’t think anyone can say anything to get you all to join hands and sing kumbaya, and I don’t think it should be attempted. After all, when it comes to brilliant women, and interesting ideas, and determined actions we have an embarrassment of riches so we don’t all have to sing from the same hymn sheet.

We have women writing letters, braving the trans activists (and the cold at this time of year) to speak in public, analysing law, fighting court cases, writing essays, doing safeguarding work, holding the line on language, trying to protect women in prisons, researching, stickering, speaking, peaking, working diligently behind the scenes and in the media, and generally trying to unpick every terrible stitch of trans ideology. 

We have women, too, who offer support and camaraderie and do the fundamental work of keeping other women going.

It’s all crucial and women are doing it, everyday.

If we want to talk about direction of travel in our movement, the most notable direction of travel is that more and more people are waking up to the problems we have been shouting about for years and a lot of why they are doing so is because of women’s painstaking work to get this discussion into the mainstream. 

The sadder direction of travel is that, as we are expanding and seeing that shift, we seem to be listening to each other less and making less space for each other. A lot of women have been on the receiving end of the Twitter equivalent of a lot of pushing and shoving, and have been very upset by it. Because of course they would be when this movement matters to each of us so much.

Our diversity of thought and our previous good faith were strengths we can’t afford to lose. It led to intricate and important discussions that kept the movement alive and making progress. Now, we risk destroying women’s work, and their morale, instead of creating more of both with the way these conflicts are playing out. We also risk women feeling unable or unwilling to speak up, as some already are. Not to mention what it might be like for women new to the fight to turn up to all this.

I realise we must each set our own boundaries, and that we must each be free to align, and not align, with whichever women we like.

Finding women who share our core values is a particular joy, and it does make this work easier and more rewarding. 

A wise woman once told me, though, that we’ve got to have a bit of Game Theory in life. You will not value every player on the board, but each player is in turn valued by someone else and may be needed for the winning move. 

I don’t know if all the starker predictions of irrevocable splits are true. Or if we have really lost the glorious Terven magic that animated the Twitter space for so long. 

But I do know most of us are still here, and still fighting for women in prisons and refuges, for children, for all single sex spaces, for transwidows, for our right to speak truthfully about biological sex in society, for lesbians and gay men to get to define their own sexuality, and against an ideology that is bringing so much harm. 

If you are a woman in this fight, thank goodness you are here. Every woman is needed. Even if the only thing we ever have in common is seeing how much of what is happening is wrong and wanting to stop it.

That seems like it might just be enough shared ground to help us protect women's rights. I really hope so.