Kathleen Stock identifies in Stella Creasy a tendency that all too often emerges in the writing of leftist feminist women writing on Unherd.
All too often a subject is examined from a sectarian angle. The sect can be “women like me” which is one of the approaches Kathleen identifies Stella as frequently taking or slightly more broadly “ women in general”. In contrast the great social reformers of the past campaigned on matters that were never going to affect them. William Wilberforce was not and never had been a slave. Similarly David Steel was not gay when he sought to decriminalise homosexuality. The question never was how does this affect me or even people like me but is it right that we treat people unlike me so badly.
It might be said that Stella’s support for trans rights is a support for people not like her but she does so by conflating sex and gender so that the trans women is regarded as someone like her.
It is one of the things Kathleen Stock does not indulge in. Her writing is more universal in slant and all the better for it.

Cost of living crisis, war in Ukraine, … . But Stella Creasy thinks this is amongst the top challenges facing the country. If indeed this whole thing isn’t an entirely man-made (or woman-made or whatever one is supposed to call it now) “problem”.
It’s almost as if she only knows how to do gesture politics.
Keep digging Stella. I don’t want another Labour government either.

“one of the things that happens to trans women is that they are oppressed because the patriarchy goes: ‘Oh well you’re a woman…'”
Not sure I can speak on behalf of all the patriarchy, but I really don’t think we do.

Lovely article and thanks for the introduction to the hat. I feel that the vigorous attempts for acceptance by the trans community are more masculine than feminine but I guess that’s another incongruous layer to the impossible hat

So… if people believe the fiction that males can literally become women, how do they deal with the situation when a violent man becomes a violent woman? This goes against all the other tropes of ‘Believe Her’, All Women are Angels, etc.
Fiction may well be charmingly incoherent to assert a truth, but it’s no way to run a country.

Aren’t people like Creasey and her views on transexual men just the flat earthers of our time?

Feminism is dead.

But to assert the fundamental truth which is our fundamental reality is not and cannot be ‘oppressive’ or ‘discriminatory’.
If I believe, in my heart of hearts, that I live in YOUR house, and proceed — quite earnestly — to enter ‘my’ home at 2:00 AM, my subsequent arrest and incarceration would not be ‘oppression’. It would not be discrimination. It would be justice. And it would be justice because, in reality, I was trespassing upon property not my own. Despite the sincerity of my delusional belief, that delusion gives me no right to enter your home.
So, too, with Bovary’s Hat.
Yes, Flaubert’s description of that hat is ornately incoherent…but beneath the endless verbal ornamentation (mirroring, perhaps, the ornamentation there upon the hat) there is, still, the hat, which functions exactly as it was created & intended to function. The hat does not change and is not transitioning to anything other than what it is. It does not pretend to be a shoe.
The Progressive Feminist who asserts that women are born with penises, does not describe a superficial ornamentation attached to a creature otherwise female. The ‘hat’ she describes is still a hat, still the man who will remain a man no matter what a surgeon does or does not do to that ‘ornate ornamentation’. Neither is that so-called ‘ornamentation’ incoherent. It is and he is exactly what he was created and intended to be. Nothing less; nothing more.

I don’t think it is unreasonable of people to start to campaign on issues when they personally come to experience problems themselves in their own lives, as this article argues that Stella Creasy does. The problem comes when some voices are louder than others in society and people with different experiences aren’t listened to.
In terms of feminism, the changes to our technologies over the past decade have made young women’s voices much louder in the media than older women’s voices. As women age, they begin to notice that their experiences of their treatment in society change. Too many older women’s experiences are currently ignored by a younger generation of women who haven’t yet experienced what happens to a woman as she ages. And not listening to the voices of experience can end up causing harm for women, as might happen in Spain from some recent laws that have just been brought in.
The Spanish government has just brought in laws allowing women to have time off every month for period pains. In theory these laws are there to help women, however they have largely been brought in through the campaigns of young women from parties on the left who are in their 30s and have never worked in small businesses or even in large public sector organisations. These women argue at other times that they are trying to help women locked in abusive relationships. What they have failed to notice is that for a woman to be able to escape an abusive relationship, she needs economic security – something a job can provide. A small business is now less likely to employ a woman under 45 because there is always a chance she will take advantage of this new law, giving her the right to three days off a month for painful periods. Even though the State will cover the financial aspects of this leave, there are other factors involved in taking time off – a manager would need to cover someone’s job role, for example, which can be difficult to do for a small business. By assuming that they know best, young women in the Spanish government have, effectively, brought in laws that will actually harm women.
Stella Creasy is right, I think, to speak out on issues that she believes in. However, it is narcissistic for any individual to believe their views are the whole story. That is why society needs to return to understanding that democracy isn’t just about people voting every five or so years; it is essential that in between elections people are debating with each other, including with people with very different life experiences to their own, so that when people get to the ballot box, they have deeply thought about the issues that the people they are voting for will be deciding on on their behalf.

Brilliant a mature argument that politicians fail to match.

On the contrary, sex and gender are exactly the same thing, and that is why transwomen are men.

Sex and gender are not two different things.