I was one of the "be kind" brigade. But I was at Reading Uni. TRA's treatment of Rosa Freedman peaked me. She's a human right lawyer standing up for female refugees. They pissed on her door, said she should be r*ped #YoungGCWomenUnite https://t.co/7BVIzDyy5H
This is absurd as saying that we cannot consent to being born, growing older and dying. These things happen regardless of whether we want them or we ‘consent’ to them. Puberty is an essential part of everyone’s development.
I don’t frame it as rights lost “because of trans people.” That is your framing.
The issue is rights and protections weakened by policies that replace sex with gender identity.
Women have a right to name themselves as a sex class. Women have a right to female-only spaces where privacy, dignity, trauma, or safety matter. Women and girls have a right to fair female sport. Lesbians have a right to define their orientation as same-sex attraction. People have a right to speak truthfully about sex without being threatened, punished, or smeared as hateful.
Those rights do not have to be completely destroyed before women are allowed to object to them being redefined, narrowed, or made unenforceable.
Trans people can have ordinary civil rights without everyone else being required to pretend sex is irrelevant.
“Why do you care?” is not an argument. It is an attempt to shame and scold people out of discussing policies that affect language, law, sport, prisons, safeguarding, medicine, schools, and women’s rights.
If it shouldn't matter to me then it shouldn't matter to anyone, so what are you doing here? Women are allowed to care about the definition of women. Lesbians are allowed to care about sex-based boundaries. Parents are allowed to care about safeguarding and medical ethics. Women and girls are allowed to have boundaries, to have those boundaries respected by men and boys and to be concerned when their reasonable concerns are ignored and shot down by some random woke scold with "Why do you care?"
Calling that “obsession” is just a way to avoid answering the actual arguments or engaging ingood faith.
And if this is supposedly no big deal, then it should be no big deal to say sex is real, women are female, and gender identity does not override everyone else’s rights, language, or boundaries. If it's no big deal for women to be redefined, then it's no big deal to not do that shit, too. It really should be no big deal to say sex is real and the infalsifiable gender identity of a tiny monority does not override everyone else’s rights or boundaries.
Speculating about my psychology instead of answering the argument is just name calling and bad faith concern. Women are allowed to care about laws, language, safeguarding, sport, prisons, medicine, and sex-based rights.
"Why do you care?" is yet another deflection, ad hominem, and attempt to suppress the argument rather than addressing the concerns in good faith. Thank you for demonstrating my point about common rhetorical tactics of trans activists in this exemplary example.
The Core Differences
The central conflict is this:
Gender-critical feminism treats sex as material reality and gender as a social hierarchy to be dismantled.
Gender-identity ideology treats internal identity as primary and asks law, language, institutions, and sometimes other people’s boundaries to reorganize around that identity.
Gender-critical feminists argue that a just society can protect trans-identified people from cruelty and discrimination without erasing sex, redefining women, weakening safeguarding, or compelling everyone else to pretend that sex is irrelevant.
The Core Similarities
Despite the conflict, both sides often begin from several shared moral concerns.
Both generally agree that people should not be punished, abused, or excluded from ordinary life because they are gender-nonconforming, trans-identified, homosexual, bisexual, masculine, feminine, or otherwise noncompliant with sex stereotypes.
Both generally oppose rigid sex stereotypes. Neither side, at its best, wants boys and girls forced into narrow roles of masculinity and femininity.
Both generally recognize that trans-identified people can face cruelty, harassment, family rejection, employment discrimination, social isolation, and violence, and that such treatment is wrong.
Both generally agree that people should be free to dress, speak, behave, and present themselves in ways that do not conform to traditional expectations of their sex.
Both generally claim to be defending dignity, autonomy, and safety.
The disagreement is not over whether people deserve humane treatment. They do.
The disagreement is over whether subjective gender identity should override objective sex in society, culture, language, governance, law, safeguarding, medicine, sport, data, and female-only spaces.
The Core Contradiction
Gender Critical sex realist treats sex as a material fact and gender stereotypes as irrelevant to whether someone is male or female. A masculine woman is still female. A feminine man is still male. Personality, clothing, behaviour, interests, body modification, and inner feelings do not determine sex.
Trans activists and genderists claim to reject sex stereotypes, but actively reintroduce and endorse them by treating a person’s relationship to masculinity, femininity, social recognition as male or female, body discomfort, or “inner sense of gender” as evidence that a person is "trans" and that they belong to the opposite sex category.
This is why gender-critical feminists argue their position is less sexist: no stereotype can make a man a woman or a woman a man, and no rejection of stereotypes can make a woman less female or a man less male.
The gender-critical position is that gender stereotypes tell us nothing about a person's sex or identity.
The gender-identity position is: stereotypes are not supposed to define sex, but somehow a tiny minority's internal relationship to those same gender stereotypes must become the basis for redefining sexed language for the overwhelming majority.
Thwse are common misrepresentations of the GC/TERF position:
Misrepresentation: “GC feminists think women must be feminine.”
Actual GC Position: GC feminism rejects femininity as a requirement of womanhood. A woman is female whether or not she conforms to feminine stereotypes.
Misrepresentation: “GC feminists hate trans people.”
Actual GC Position: The position is about defending sex-based language, law, safeguarding, and feminism, not trans people. Disagreement with gender-identity doctrine is not hatred of individuals.
Misrepresentation: “GC feminists want to police bathrooms by appearance.”
Actual GC Position: The sex-based rights of women protect gender-nonconforming women from harrassment. Female-only means female-only, not performatively-feminine only.
Misrepresentation: “GC feminists erase intersex people.”
Actual GC Position: GC feminists argue that DSDs are real medical variations within sex development, not proof that sex is imaginary or self-definable.
Misrepresentation: “GC feminists reduce women to reproduction.”
Actual GC Position: No. The claim is not that women exist to reproduce. The claim is that women are oppressed because of the material reality of female embodiment versus the material reality of male embodiement, and the sexist assumptions and stereotypes constructed around the material reality of human sexual dimorphism.
Misrepresentation: “GC feminists deny trans people exist.”
Actual GC Position: GC feminists deny that gender identity changes sex. A person can identify as transgender or gender nonconforming without requiring sex categories be rewritten around their gender identity because sex and gender are different. When people equate gender identity and sex, they are being gender essentialist and sexist.
Misrepresentation: “GC feminists are conservative.”
Actual GC Position: Not necessarily. The position is rooted in materialist feminism, free speech, safeguarding, bodily autonomy, and opposition to sex stereotypes.
Materialism and free expression are not “right-wing.” They are historically central to left-wing politics:
- materialism analyzes power and social constructionism through real, material conditions rather than ideology or mysticism, and
- free expression is necessary to counter fascism and populism ecause dissenting movements cannot challenge power without the right to name reality, argue openly, and criticize institutions.
Gender-critical feminism is not a conservative backlash against progress. It is a continuation of left-wing principles: material analysis, opposition to stereotyping, defence of women’s sex-based rights, freedom of conscience, and resistance to institutional propaganda and language controls.
That does not mean every GC person is left-wing, or that the left has always been consistent on free speech.
But materialism, anti-essentialism, free inquiry, and dissent against institutional orthodoxy are all historically compatible with the left, and arguably foundational to the left.
4. Female oppression is sex-based
Women are oppressed as a sex class. Patriarchy is not aimed at an inner identity called “womanhood.” Women are not discriminated against on the basis of their pronouns or fashion. Discrimination against wome and girls is organized around female embodiment: reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, female socialization, physical vulnerability, economic dependency, sexual exploitation, and male violence.
This is why sex matters in feminism. If the word “woman” is detached from female human beings, feminism loses the ability to name the class of people historically and materially subordinated under a male supremacist system.
5. Single-sex spaces and services are sometimes necessary
Gender-critical feminists do not argue that every space must be segregated by sex. They argue that sex matters in specific contexts where privacy, dignity, safeguarding, trauma, bodily vulnerability, or fairness are at stake.
Examples include prisons, rape crisis services, domestic violence shelters, changing rooms, intimate care, hospital wards, and female sports.
The argument is not that every male person is dangerous. The argument is that male-pattern violence, male physical advantage, and the privacy needs of female people are real enough that female-only provisions must remain lawful, meaningful, and enforceable.
A right to single-sex provision is not a right to harass anyone. It is not a femininity test. Masculine women, butch lesbians, and gender-nonconforming female people belong in female spaces. The category is sex, not appearance.
6. Sexual orientation is sex-based
Gender-critical feminists argue that homosexuality is same-sex attraction, not same-gender-identity attraction.
Lesbians are female people attracted to female people. Gay men are male people attracted to male people. Bisexual people are attracted to both sexes.
No one is entitled to another person’s attraction, validation, language, or sexual boundaries. Recognizing sex-based attraction is not hatred. It is basic respect for sexual orientation and consent.
7. Trans people have rights, but not the right to override sex-based rights
Gender-critical feminism does not require cruelty toward trans-identified people. It does not require denying housing, employment, medical care, ordinary public participation, or protection from violence.
The disagreement is narrower and more specific: gender identity should not override sex where sex is materially relevant.
The core objection is to compelled belief, compelled language, sex-category replacement, and policies that remove female-only boundaries without honest democratic debate.
8. DSDs do not erase the sex binary
People with differences of sex development deserve dignity, privacy, and accurate medical care. They should not be used as rhetorical loopholes.
DSDs are variations or disorders of sex development. They may complicate classification in rare individual cases, but they do not create a third reproductive sex or make male and female meaningless.
Ambiguity at the margins does not destroy the categories. It presupposes the categories exist in the first place.
The Gender-Critical or "TERF" Position is a materialist analysis of sex, gender, and women’s rights. It is not a theory of hatred toward trans-identified people. It is a claim about the importance of sex as a real, human, and materially significant category in law, language, medicine, safeguarding, sport, and feminism.
Trans activists often misrepresent the views of GC feminists, sex realists and TERFs becaue honesty would cause them to lose the argument.
The following is an attempt to represent my position as a gender critical, sex realist and radical feminist precisely so it is easier to see when that view is being intentionally misrepresented and/or understood by bad faith representatives of trans activism.
I know my own position better than anyone. Bad faith is presuming to tell me what my own position is in order to discredit me. That's worse than a strawman, and the main tactic of gender essentialist activism.
Here is my actual position: the only position I need to defend:
1. Sex is real and materially significant
Sex in human beings is not an identity, a feeling, a role, or a personality type. It is a reproductive and developmental category: male and female are the two human sex classes that are the means of human reproduction. Male is the sex class organized around the development of small, mobile gametes and female is the sex class organized around the development of large, immobile gametes.
This does not mean every person is fertile, typical, or currently capable of reproduction. Infertility, menopause, hysterectomy, castration, DSDs, injury, age, or illness do not erase sex. Sex is not a human performance and there is no standard for sex beyond teproductive role. Sex is a human condition and an innate, immutable attribute of the human body.
Gender-critical feminists reject the idea that sex is “assigned at birth” in the sense of being invented, guessed, or arbitrarily imposed by authority. In ordinary cases, sex is observed and recorded. Even in rare, extraordinary cases with ambiguous secondary sex characteristics, with modern instrumentation, the primary atrribute of sex is observable at the definitive level beyond the crude level of external genitalia at the cellular level.
2. Women are female human beings
In this framework, “woman” means an adult human female. “Girl” means a juvenile human female.
This definition does not depend on femininity, beauty, clothing, sexual behaviour, reproductive capacity, compliance, heterosexuality, or conformity to stereotypes. A woman can be masculine, feminine, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, celibate, infertile, disabled, old, young, gender-nonconforming, or medically atypical. She remains a woman because she is female.
The position is therefore not that women must look, act, dress, think, or feel a certain way. It is the opposite: women should be free from the sex-based stereotypes traditionally imposed on female people.
3. Gender is not sex
Radical feminism distinguishes sex from gender.
Sex refers to the embodied, biological male/female distinction.
Gender refers to the social roles, stereotypes, expectations, behaviours, and hierarchies imposed on people because of sex.
Gender-critical feminism does not seek to preserve gender roles. It seeks to abolish their coercive power.
A feminine male does not become female. A masculine female does not become male. No one should have to change sex category, medically alter their body, or adopt a new identity to be allowed to reject sexist expectations.
Continued...
Being a woman is a biological reality for us.
Being a man who insists he is a woman is an authoritarian demand to submit to male domination from him, and any society who indulges him.
We are all biologically human, and either male or female.
Our human experience, which involves such things as human intellect, perceptions, and feelings, make our understanding of being human more complex than canine existence is for a dog, for example.
Our human experience is, however, most informed by our sex.
Female humans experience our humanity in a way that no male human ever can.
Our human existence as women is different to a man's human existence, because our human biology as females is entirely different in a complicated and unique way that can never be replicated by men.
Neither by experience, nor chemical or surgical intervention.
Women exist in human biology entirely separate from and complimentary to how men exist in human biology.
Because of our human female biology we have different needs, and a progressive liberal society should account for those needs in ways that foster our social and political amenity and allow us to more easily enjoy the freedoms and opportunities that society provides.
Societies that do not account for human female biology are not liberal. They are not progressive. And they are undesirable societies for both women and men to live in.
No truly liberal and progressive man who has had all the benefits of living in a liberal democratic society wants to live in a country that disregards the unique needs of their biological human compliment.
Women.
No man can be a 'Biological Woman', a 'Trans Woman', or a 'Gender Identity Woman'. It is impossible. Because their fundamental existence as a biological human is male.
Our collective human intellect is failing us on this most basic reality of being human.
I believe people “peak” about trans ideology in stages - and we have to let them.
Because some of what people eventually discover is genuinely frightening and difficult to process. Push too hard too early, and instead of becoming more open to the evidence, many will simply shut down or turn away from it completely.
That aside, I spent the best part of a decade in digital marketing. Which is how I know - first hand - that most of us need to hear something more than a dozen times - and often in many different ways - before the message has any chance of landing.
And that we can't assume everyone is at the same 'stage' we are.
STAGE 0: “Live and let live.”
You support gay rights and assume this is mostly about kindness and acceptance.
You may feel uncomfortable about men in women’s spaces - but it hasn’t affected you personally, so you don’t think too deeply about it.
And because it’s all grouped together under LGBTQIA+, you’ve never really separated sex (LGB) and gender identity (TQIA+).
STAGE 1: Something unsettles you.
Maybe it’s a nurse being forced to share a changing room with a man who says he's a woman at work. A parent challenging a school because girls are expected to undress in front of a male pupil. Boys being allowed to join a girls’ only organisation.
At the same time, you start noticing language changing.
NHS leaflets that say “pregnant people” or “cervix havers”.
Women’s initiatives that include men.
Men in women’s sport.
Children being medically transitioned.
You still feel sympathetic - especially towards young people struggling with gender identity - but something feels ‘off’.
But you still think there must be a sensible solution.
Third spaces. Clear boundaries. Some kind of ‘compromise’ maybe?
But when you cautiously voice even mild concerns - or see someone else doing so - you realise these views are often treated as unacceptable.
STAGE 2: The penny drops.
You realise this isn’t simply about being kind to people who are different. People are being expected to publicly deny biological reality - socially, politically and professionally.
You notice people in positions of power saying ridiculous things - like ‘women can have penises’ or men can 'grow cervixes.' And that challenging such ridiculous statements costs people jobs, reputations and friendships.
You notice some gay people are pushing back hard - and why.
Because if sex is no longer real or meaningful, then neither is same-sex attraction.
So this doesn’t just affect women’s rights, but gay people too - whose hard-won rights also depend on sex being real.
You learn about women like Maya Forstater, Kellie-Jay Keen and Sall Grover - women who have been publicly attacked, vilified and, in Kellie-Jay Keen’s case, physically assaulted, for what feel like entirely reasonable positions about sex and women’s boundaries.
You learn what a “TERF” is - and how it’s used as a slur against women who defend their sex-based rights.
You see pictures of masked protesters holding up signs calling for women to be hanged and r*ped. Videos of activists calling for them to be urinated and defecated on. Simply for defending their lawful right to single sex changing rooms, toilets and other intimate spaces.
You notice journalists, politicians and institutions seemingly afraid to state basic biological facts. Male offenders - who have committed the most serious crimes - being described as women in the press.
You start to feel the chill.
Not just around women’s rights - but around free speech itself.
And start asking yourself:
If people can be pressured into denying biological reality - into literally agreeing that the man standing in front of them is actually a woman - what else can they be pressured into staying silent about?
STAGE 3: You can’t unsee it
You realise that men demanding access to women’s spaces aren’t poor, misunderstood people who simply want acceptance.
They are vulnerable.
But they need mental health support - not affirmation.
You learn that some may have a recognised condition called autogynephilia - where a man is sexually aroused by the idea of himself as a woman.
And realise - often with horror - that many public institutions have embedded harmful ideology in the name of compassion and inclusion. Without properly questioning it.
Allowing some men to bring their ‘kinks’ to work, education, social and other aspects of public life. In some cases, into settings that include children.
You still have compassion. And recognise that many vulnerable children - and their parents - have been swept up in something adults should have questioned much sooner. But know you can’t look the other way.
Because you now understand why so many ordinary people stayed silent - not because they agreed, but because they were afraid.
At this stage, some people speak publicly. Many speak up earlier.
Others support quietly behind the scenes.
But very few return to Stage 0 - and nor should they.
Yes, the people who call themselves 'trans' exist and they deserve exactly the same rights as everyone else, which, fortunately, they already have in the UK. It would rightly be considered discrimination if a person was refused employment, housing or the vote because they identified as trans.
'Trans women are women' is a thought-terminating cliché. Men are not women. That doesn't mean they're not allowed to present themselves however they like, call themselves whatever they like and believe whatever they like about themselves. It means they haven't changed sex.
If we replace the objective, observable characteristic of sex with the unfalsifiable concept of gender identify, women and girls lose, among other things, their right to fair and safe sport and women-only spaces, including changing rooms, prison cells and rape crisis services.
Women and girls are provably more vulnerable to forms of abuse including sexual assault, harassment and voyeurism in mixed-sex spaces. There is no evidence that trans-identified men don't have exactly the same rates of criminal offending as all other men.
Trans people exist. I have no desire for them not to exist; indeed, I wish them safety, happiness and health. However, 'existence' does not, and should not, mean the violation of other people's right to privacy, dignity and freedom of speech, or the reconfiguration of society to indulge a fallacy.
The International Olympic Committee announces new Policy on the Protection of the Female (Women’s) Category in Olympic Sport.
Read: https://t.co/QcU5IVxyTi
"Anyone who imagines that the construction of such a cavity between a man’s legs makes him a woman would appear to equate womanhood with the presence of an accommodating hole into which another man may ejaculate. On that measure, a blow-up doll is a woman. I am not quite sure how to do justice in words to how insulting and morally repugnant I find this proposition."
And it will forever be appalling to me that a bunch of celebrities with influence over young people used their platforms to amplify unevidenced claims for the benefit of transitioning minors while smearing those urging caution as bigots.
Landmark victory: West Africa’s highest court has ruled that female genital mutilation (FGM) is a form of torture,and ordered Sierra Leone to ban it. This is a historic step forward for the rights of women and girls.
It should be banned worldwide it is mutilation of the female genitalia, there is absolutely no reason on earth for it to be done.
When a man claims he's a "woman" because he likes makeup and high heels,
and a woman claims she's a "man" because she likes football and flannel shirts –
that's not "breaking rigid boxes". That's the exact opposite.
It's surrendering to social stereotypes in the most distilled, conformist way possible.
It's not smashing gender stereotypes – it's embracing them.
There's nothing brave about telling kids "you were born in the wrong body".
There's nothing groundbreaking about believing your clothes define your essence.
Clothing can be a fantastic way to express yourself – I'm all for people celebrating their authentic selves.
But here they're lying to themselves, and I doubt they even buy their own lie (while forcing the entire world to play along).
This kind of thinking isn't special or refreshing – it's deeply stereotypical.
It sees sex as performance rather than reality.
It doesn't truly see the person. It doesn't accept them as they are.
The opposite – it demands they change.
@mark_slapinski The issue here is whether or not the scope of women's rights, boundaries and safeguards should be rendered subject to what a man claims about himself.
You are basically saying 'yes, they should be subject to what a man claims about himself, so long as it's only a few men.' 🙄
Today we are quoted in @ObserverUK as @Martha_Gill calls for a ban on surrogacy.
After the backlash against Meghan Trainor, more people are waking up to the realities of the baby trade. End it now @DHSCgovuk
https://t.co/GiaFTsxCut