The catalyst for the discourse was former Elle fashion editor Stacey Duguid, aged 52, a high-octane glamourpuss whose candid social media posts about her own precarious employment situation have gone viral. As she told The Times, in the past 18 months she has applied for “everything from a brand director on six figures to a part-time job taking photos in a warehouse”, all to no avail. She says she is now on universal credit, and has had to sell her jewelry on Vinted and put her Menorcan holiday home on the market.

As usual with articles aimed at the female market, there are a number of things going on here at once. Come for the inspirational taboo-busting and rejection of societal shame; stay for the schadenfreude; leave with vague anxiety that you too might soon be on the scrapheap. But in Duguid’s case, the reality is surely more complicated than recent coverage suggests. By her own account, this is not her first midlife crisis. Three years ago, she wrote an eye-wateringly frank book about the wild aftermath of a divorce. It included tales of drinking on the day job, drug-fueled one-night-stands with much younger men, and being told by otherworldly voices to make expensive clothing purchases on credit. She joked at the time that it should have been called Cocktails, Cock and Coke: A Middle-Aged Adventure. It is not inconceivable that prospective employers have read it too.

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But perhaps she has identified a more general phenomenon. Other stories have followed, of former high-flying ladybosses sending out hundreds of applications into the void, while burning through their savings and feeling humiliated. One theme is the impossibility of remaking oneself from scratch in middle age. Steph Walsh, 50, who once earned £120,000 as a chief of staff but now scrapes by making video animations and getting gifts from relatives, told the The Times: “I reject the narrative of midlife reinvention; there should be no need for it at all and women more than men have to absorb the consequences.” Duguid herself says that “we can’t just simplify things to a midlife image overhaul”.

This seems true, despite the fact that Duguid is, precisely, using the moment for an image overhaul. She has created a new organization, The Encore, to fight for women “overlooked by hiring processes that seem designed to screen us out, and silenced by a shame that was never ours to carry”. Meanwhile Walsh says she is now writing a book about redundancy and the “fallacy of midlife reinvention”, which also sounds like midlife reinvention to me. Both women appear to be following a well-worn path for corporates who encounter career adversity: reframe the moment as a learning opportunity for others, then make capital out of that.

Another example is journalist Eleanor Mills, a former editor at The Sunday Times before she was axed at 50. After a self-described period of panicking and weeping, she started an organization called Noon, aimed at demonstrating that “midlife is an age of opportunity”. “Long lives mean we will all have to get used to reinventing ourselves”, she says on the website. The organization runs meetups and retreats for distressed gentlewomen — more diplomatically referred to onsite as “queenagers” — hosted by the sort of LinkedIn denizen with big jewelry who says she is passionate about transformation, life balance, and finding joy in everyday moments. Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that the main option for the newly unemployed menopausal high earner is to recreate yourself as a life coach or therapist for other newly unemployed menopausal high earners. There is surely a limit to how long this scheme can go on.

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It’s also tempting to wonder whether there is a real problem to be addressed here. Unemployment and unexpected penury are blights on any life, at any age; but I’m skeptical there is a burning issue for (formerly) well-heeled middle-aged women in particular. The economic inactivity rate for women aged 50 to 64 is higher than that for men in the same age group, but economic inactivity is not unemployment: a large chunk of this, according to ONS figures, is women (and men, for that matter) who are deemed too ill or disabled to work. Another chunk is women “looking after home or family”. I have trouble believing this is a huge problem for boardroom types, tending as they do to pay others to do that kind of thing. Perhaps the corporate world is not well set up to accommodate hot flashes, brain fog, or mad dashes up the motorway to deal with health crises of aging parents; but still, I’m fairly sure provision is better than for the average supermarket or care home worker.

The main allegation of Duguid’s is that women like her are being winnowed out of the application pool by AI systems, before any human eyes have seen their scintillating CVs. But again, this is a problem that affects a much wider group of job seekers — perhaps even most these days. The real worry is the reliance of employers on a small set of AI systems, so that the same algorithms are relentlessly applied, removing the element of serendipitous chance that used to be ineliminable in hiring. Young people are also said to be struggling with the brutal impersonality of the machines. It seems very bad for a 20-something not to be able to get a foot in the door, thanks to the bots; much worse than to be pushed out of it in your fifties at 100K.

Indeed, though it perhaps seems cruel to kick struggling women when they are down, there is a whiff of selfishness about this discourse. When Duguid tells the interviewer of a “former executive for a high street brand” she knows who is now on universal credit, or of a “chemical engineer who is cleaning holiday lets for cash”, the unfortunate implication is that this is all shockingly beneath such highly credentialed people, though perfectly fine for the plebs. Mills writes on her website that when she lost her newspaper job, she felt “raw, naked … I’d worn a big velvet cloak of status for two decades, now it was gone”. Shame is a constant theme of the narratives we are offered. What seems to really sting is not the lack of income, but the lack of validation: if I am not impressing someone with my glamorous job, do I really exist at all?

If this is right, the worry is unsurprising. For decades, university-educated women have been encouraged to think that breaking the glass ceiling is more validating and meaningful than washing the kitchen floor; and also to think that the kind of part-time job that allows you to prioritize family and domesticity is embarrassing and meaningless. Of course the idea is absurd; there are very few things done for large amounts of money that make life meaningful. Still, assuming that you are very attached to being the sort of woman who changes her work handbag every season, it is bound to come as a shock to find you are an expendable drone like the rest.

Duguid says she is now “botoxing” her CV, taking out any references to age and experience that might meet the disapproval of the machines. I would probably do this too, were I frustrated enough (though admittedly, I probably wouldn’t give newspaper interviews citing my age and work history at the same time). But there is something very queasy about it. For the truth is that, once you have reached a certain level of seniority in a career, you can’t reinvent yourself as a fresh-faced ingenue, even metaphorically speaking. You are far too well-defined in your character, skills, and preferences; too inflexible in your personality. Employers are not wrong to be wary of formerly senior applicants for entry-level jobs, for they are unlikely to be a good fit. And in any case, we oldies need to leave those jobs to the young people.

In years to come, as AI conquers various sectors and competition for fewer desirable opportunities increases, we can look forward to the grim possibility of PR battles between various interest groups, each telling highly emotive tales about who is struggling most. We should probably remember that some will have an advantage over others here. Free-falling from the climbing frame can certainly be terrifying — but a fat media contacts book and a holiday home in Menorca can help cushion the fall.

When Stanley Kubrick needed a truly disturbing haunting for the bathroom of room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), he latched onto one of the most effective and elemental terrors imaginable: an old woman. More specifically, a nubile young woman who rises from a bathtub to seduce main character Jack Torrance, and then reveals her true form as a sore-ridden, saggy-breasted crone, cackling at her own deceit. 

It’s a scene that I suspect plays differently depending on the viewer’s sex. For a man, the horror comes from identifying with Jack. He, too, is aroused by the youth and beauty of the ghost’s first form; he, too, is appalled when he realises he has been tricked into lusting for old, degraded flesh. For a woman watching, the horror isn’t about what you want. It’s about what you are — or what you will become. You will age into monstrosity, and your only power will be the power to disgust. Every female body contains the terrible fact of its own future.

Coralie Fargeat’s new satirical body-horror The Substance contains a lot of visual nods to The Shining: corridors with sinister geometric carpet, blood pouring down walls, a bathroom decorated in an upsettingly lurid shade of red. But the most important nod of all is this: it’s a movie about the horror of female ageing, in which the ultimate nightmare is a woman’s body made grotesque by time. This time, though, it’s not a male filmmaker seeing this horror from the outside. It’s a female filmmaker seeing it from the inside. 

The film’s concept is a bit complicated and pretty clever. Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore) is an Oscar-winning actress turned fabulously successful aerobics instructor (shades of Jane Fonda), just hitting her 50th birthday — which is the point at which “it stops”, as her repellent producer (Dennis Quaid) tells her. “People always ask for something new.” She loses her show. She loses her celebrity. She loses her purpose. 

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Enter the substance — a mysterious black-market medicine that promises to create the best version of you. When Elisabeth injects it, she gives birth to a whole second self through a gory vaginal split in her back. The new her (played by Margaret Qualley) is young, luscious and beautiful, and takes the name Sue. The only snag is that, while Elisabeth and Sue have separate bodies, their existence is shared: one of them can live for seven days while the other lies insensate. Disturb that balance, and you pay a price.

Of course, the characters (character?) can’t simply follow the rules. As Sue steps into Elisabeth’s old life and job, it becomes unbearable to sacrifice herself so the older body can live. “Just one more day,” she whispers to Elisabeth’s prone body, as she draws another dose of serum from the spine. The cost is borne by Elisabeth, who becomes more decrepit with every liberty Sue takes. Unable to coexist, they end up in a battle to survive that neither ultimately will win. Sue will end up savagely kicking a wizened, hunchbacked Elisabeth to death. 

There are more gruesome parts of the film, but for me, this moment of obliterating overkill directed at the despised figure of female age was the most horrible. Sue, of course, is ensuring her own hideous death by murdering Elisabeth. But in that moment, she cares less about her own life than she does about destroying the saggy, sunken portent of her own future. Elisabeth’s body represents everything she fears becoming, and everything that she will be, because Sue is Elisabeth and Elisabeth is Sue. 

The writer Victoria Smith dissects this particular form of ageist misogyny in her book Hags. “From the moment we are born female,” she writes, “we are conditioned to feel ashamed, not just of our appearance, our biology and our desires, but also of other women and our connection to them.” One way to manage this entrenched internalised misogyny, argues Smith, is through “hag hate”, which “provides a means to pacify that fear and shame by directing it onto the older woman.” The enthusiastic way in which some younger women embraced terms of abuse for middle-aged women like “Karen” and “terf”? That’s hag hate. The young woman understands, correctly, that to age as a woman is to become hated; her futile defence is to hate harder than anyone else.

But the self-destruction begins with Elisabeth’s choice to take the substance rather than accept her own decline into maturity. In an interview about the film, Demi Moore has said, astutely, that “it’s not about what’s being done to us [us here being women] — it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s the violence we have against ourselves.” And having worked to Hollywood’s punishing physical standards since she was a teenager, Moore knows a few things about this violence.

Inevitably, as a young woman Moore was told that she wasn’t thin enough (“before I ever even had children”, said Moore, in a phrase which ever so slightly and heartbreakingly suggests she might have accepted some justice in it after having children). She doesn’t, however, see those comments in themselves as the most harmful thing inflicted on her: “those were humiliating experiences, but the true violence was what I was doing to myself, the way in which I tortured myself, did extreme crazy exercise, weighed and measured my food because I was putting all of my value of who I was into how my body was, how it looked, and giving other people’s opinion more power than myself.”

Yet all the while Moore felt inescapably inadequate, her body was the peak of commodifiable perfection as far as the film industry was concerned. In Indecent Proposal (1993) she played a woman so gorgeous that a man would offer a million dollars to sleep with her. For going topless in Striptease (1996) — and for appearing to be fully nude on the poster, which may have been more important for the film’s commercial prospects — she was paid an unprecedented $12.5 million. 

It would have been sensational for any woman to appear naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. But it was Moore who did it, in a 1991 shoot by Annie Leibovitz that drew both feminist praise and moral majority ire. It was talked about by everyone for most of that summer. Moore might never have received much critical recognition for her performances, but her body has always been significant in itself. It stands for the ideal.

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Which is why it is shocking to see her naked in the early scenes of The Substance. Her breasts are a little less perky than the last time you probably saw them, her butt a little less perfectly round. In the mercilessly full-screen close ups on her face, you can see that her skin’s plumpness is fading, its texture not so refined. She looks undeniably like an older woman. She does not, however, look her age — which is 61. She doesn’t even look her character’s age of 50. She could pass easily for 40-something. 

And that is partly the point. “Part of what was interesting is that Elisabeth is being rejected, and it’s not that I look that bad,” Moore has said. But it also points to a different kind of horror taking place off-screen. Moore has denied ever having plastic surgery, despite extensive speculation that she had undergone procedures including breast implants, fat transfer and eyelid reduction. Regardless, her body speaks of relentless discipline in diet and exercise: slim, toned and exquisitely proportioned, even if some parts of her are very slightly drooping. 

Keeping the hag inside you at bay requires constant vigilance. While Moore looks 40-ish, stars who are actually in their 40s have begun to look nearer to 20. This month, Dazed declared the advent of the “Undetectable Era” of beauty — the beauty itself is detectable, but the means used to achieve it are not. “We strive for dramatic results,” explained one surgeon. “The undetectable part is that it’s done so well, so beautifully, that to the natural observer it just looks like a person who’s maintained some youth.”

This, of course, is the dream that drives Elisabeth to the substance: to be younger, more beautiful, more perfect. That possibility — of youth stretched into decades — is not dystopian anymore, or at least not dystopian if you have access to the money and expertise that Hollywood success can offer. You can look as poreless and full-lipped at 30 as you were when you were a pre-teen. A beauty that looks born, not made, is there for the purchasing.

No procedure, though, can bargain away time forever. The portrait in the attic (or in the case of The Substance, the unconscious 50-year-old body in the closet) is still there, awaiting revelation. The hag is in her bathtub, waiting to be found. The horror of female ageing is that you can’t kill the crone inside yourself. She is you, and the alternative to reconciliation with her is mutually assured destruction. The only way to live, in the end, is to accept your mortality.

The #MeToo era was, among other things, a peak moment for what I have called photogenic feminism: a feminism focused on the plight of the young, gorgeous and ceaselessly hassled. While any women’s rights movement needs to concern itself with assaults in the lingerie-modelling audition room, a movement solely interested in stories that just happen to titillate broader audiences can feel limited at best — and at worst, counterproductive. What about all the unsexy issues affecting women: motherhood, menopause, mid-life crises?

Behold, a new book about ladies who have reached the top of the hill and kept going. Hags is Victoria Smith’s alternative to what she calls “non-confrontational, smooth-skinned, pre-menopausal feminism”. It is an alternative, too, to the witchy feminism peddled by writers such as Sharon Blackie, who last year released the similarly-named Hagitude. Where Blackie speaks of “energies” and “journeys”, Smith is decidedly unromantic. Getting older does not automatically bring women into a cosy sisterhood, she argues, but rather highlights disparities when it comes to wealth or care work. She’s not interested in harnessing mysticism, or recycling “you go, girl” platitudes, or supporting the (unconvincing) argument that older women don’t care what people think about them.

Instead, she comes out in defence of Mumsnet, and, more generally, of women who’ve aged out of peak hotness continuing to exist in society. Smith’s hag feminism is about speaking up even when no one is looking at you. It’s about using the wisdom that comes from years of life on this planet as a woman, rather than demurely agreeing to fade into the background. It’s a break from photogenic feminism, with its intense interest in the experiences of the most visible women. But it is also different from the woo-woo world of witchy feminism, with its coven-chic and its inspirational t-shirts.

Smith offers up a thorough survey, backed up by evidence, of the ways women past a certain age become villains. They are “Karens”, demanding to speak with the manager, and sporting the wrong haircut. They are “Terfs”, speaking of female biology rather than gender identity, and, quite possibly, sporting the wrong haircut. Smith writes: “Once upon a time getting a bad haircut might just have meant having to purchase a fetching hat; now a woman might find herself having to record and distribute a public statement claiming a rare mismatch between politics and frumpy appearance.” Throughout the book, Smith is very, very funny. But she’s making a serious point, all the same, about the way that women past a certain age are not merely ignored, but treated as all-purpose antagonists, their flawed faces signs of outdated politics. Not bad guys, but bad gals with the occasional unplucked chin hair.

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Bear in mind that Smith isn’t writing about old women. The middle-aged are her focus, not the elderly. But for women, old can start young. I remember being madame’d in Paris at 27 and knowing that this marked the end of something. Stephanie Cole was hired at 48 to play a firebrand pensioner — in Nineties sitcom Waiting for God — while Graham Crowden, the actor who played her love interest, was 19 years her senior, and therefore the same age as the character he was playing. I am not, to be clear, offended that an actor was cast as a character whose biography doesn’t match their own, but rather am struck by how readily the viewer accepts Cole as an old lady. It seems that 49 and 79 are, in a woman, the same deal: all part of an undifferentiated life stage called “past it”.

I say “are” but should really have used the past tense. One of Smith’s most interesting points is that nowadays our ability to look young into old age means that looking — and even feeling — one’s actual age reads as a choice. Where once it was only celebrities like Barbra Streisand who were commended for things like choosing to “keep” her nose, today — with hormone replacement therapy and anti-wrinkle injections — any 49-year-old women can choose to look like a 29-year-old. People who are middle-aged these days, unlike in previous eras, don’t look it unless they nobly eschew cosmetic measures — or cannot afford them. As Smith writes: “When Sex and the City was rebooted for the 2020s as And Just Like That… much was made of the fact that the now middle-aged characters were older than those in the first season of Eighties sitcom The Golden Girls yet looked much younger.” A trip to the hair salon and a good 10 hours a week at the gym and you, too, could be a “glammie”. This makes looking young forever seem both plausible and — due to such dull factors as time and finances — frustratingly out-of-reach.

Add to this the handwringing over whether a good feminist should love her hard-won wrinkles, or, conversely, do what she can to mitigate visible signs of ageing, so as to stay viable in the sexist and ageist workforce. It can feel as though it went from being anti-feminist to wear lipstick, to being a feminist imperative to look as you did 20 years prior. This new order has been sold to older women as empowerment. Visibly ageing is no longer seen as going the natural (or frugal, or low-maintenance) route; it is seen as conforming to negative, outdated stereotypes about what an older woman looks like. As Smith writes: “it is easier to justify lookism — and the attendant moral judgments — if you can convince yourself that looking like a middle-aged woman is a genuine choice.”

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The crux of the problem for Smith is that she’s pleading with an unyielding audience: younger women who’ve internalised society’s ageist misogyny, and who have convinced themselves that older women are those other ladies, and not themselves in a few years’ time. “Hawking a non-ageist feminism is like hawking life insurance to people who’ve been promised eternal life.” Smith presents herself as a recovering Cool Girl, a woman who reviled older women in her own youth, only to realise how wrong she’d been. This is partly an age-old, gender-neutral question of young people deeming their elders dorky and out-of-touch, but is also a specific issue in feminism, where younger women view older ones as avatars of a retrograde past that they are, or want to be, well rid of. It’s not clear to me that any cohort of young women will ever feel differently, but it’s also unclear that Smith anticipates that outcome. Given how much of a young woman’s power often derives from her youth, it seems unlikely that a cross-generational solidarity is imminent.

There are others to whom Hags might not get through. It is not going to reach, for instance, an audience of people who think that, actually, it’s men these days who have it worse, that it’s boys who are really suffering. And that’s fine, lots of people can be right about different things that seem to contradict one another but maybe do not. Which gets us to that other thing. You know the one. The real audience Hags stands to alienate will be those who have correctly assessed which team Smith is on when it comes to the only feminist issue anyone seems to care about these days: trans stuff. She’s with J.K. Rowling and not Owen Jones.

Most of Hags isn’t even about gender identity, but all books about women and girls are obliged to take a side these days. I find this unfortunate. Surely both sides agree that the vast majority of violence against women comes from male-identified men, and not from men claiming womanhood to sneak into women’s spaces? Surely they agree, too, that the vast majority of violence against trans women comes from men, and not from middle-aged ladies who roll their eyes at the expression, “people who menstruate”? Wouldn’t it be simpler, more accurate, and better for women if feminism reminded itself frequently of these facts?

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But the “Terf” label is as much about age as actual ideology, and “Terfdom” can serve as a pretext to label older women generally irrelevant yet potentially dangerous to listen to. Smith is onto something when she mentions the refrain, which I’ve also seen circulating, about how trans women look more like women than “Terfs” do. This is meant as a pro-trans rallying cry, equating beauty with goodness, and implying that gender-critical feminists are all sitting around wishing they looked like Barbie dolls, as though their non-resemblance to them were not intentional. What it winds up doing is defining true womanhood, cis or trans, as, to use Smith’s phrase, “femininity-fertility-fuckability”.

Photogenic feminism wavers between insisting that it’s empowering to devote your resources to looking like a pin-up, and decrying the objectification faced by those with hourglass physiques. Hag feminism, meanwhile, is not, as one might suspect, about the right to be seen as young and gorgeous when one is very likely neither of these things. (If you’re expecting Hags to be about the importance of putting ordinary-looking 50-year-old women on the cover of Vogue, you’ve got the wrong book.) It simply skips that focus in favour of the right to be respected and understood as having an inner life regardless of whether the typical man wants to sleep with you, or whether the typical woman hates herself for not resembling you physically.

Old-lady feminism, then, has plenty to offer young women. It might even benefit them at least as much as their seniors. It is, after all, young women who tend to experience the most severe angst regarding their appearances. This is easy to forget once you reach the Botox pros and cons life stage yourself, when it can feel as if virtually anyone younger than you is gorgeous and has nothing to complain about physically. But if anything, it’s the young women posting hot gym videos of themselves on TikTok — the same generation of women forming strong opinions about their “buccal fat” — who might stand to benefit the most from a feminism whose focus shifted towards women’s self-actualisation and away from an exhausting analysis of what men see when they look at us. What hags lack in collagen, they — we? — more than make up for in their ability to just get on with it.

That was Rebecca Long-Bailey’s answer when Laura Kuenssberg asked her about transgender issues — specifically the legal recognition of gender on the basis of self-identification.

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But does the principle of letting people be who they want to be apply to gender alone?

What about other personal characteristics that are defined in law, such as age? Should people be able to decide what age they want to be and have that legally recognised?

*

You may remember a Dutchman by the name of Emile Ratelband. In 2018 he launched a legal action to change his official age from 69 to 49. “We live in a time when you can change your name and change your gender. Why can’t I decide my own age?”, he argued.

The Dutch courts, however, disagreed. While Mr Ratelband was “at liberty to feel 20 years younger than his real age and to act accordingly”, the right to change legal documents was judged to be “undesirable”.

Case closed, then?

Not according to Joona Räsänen, a bioethicist at the University of Oslo. In a thought-provoking piece for Aeon, he makes the argument for the right to change one’s legal age. It applies specifically to other people seeking to lower their age, though “in principle”, he is “not opposed to younger people increasing their age”.

So under what circumstances might this right apply? Räsänen sets out three conditions:

“First, the person is at risk of being discriminated against because of age. Second, the person’s body and mind are in better shape than would be expected based on the person’s chronological age (that is, the person is biologically younger than he is chronologically). Third, the person does not feel that his legal age is befitting.”

Ageism certainly exists. People can be discriminated against because they’re considered too old or too young — their actual capabilities discounted in favour of a mere number.

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But isn’t a better solution to outlaw such discrimination? A lot of progress has already been made. For instance, in the UK it’s now illegal to force employees to retire just because they’ve reached a certain age. The employer has to prove that the employee is incapable of doing their job. So, in that context there’s no need for people to pretend they’re 55 when in reality they’re 65.

Ah, but when it comes to age what is reality? Räsänen draws a distinction between chronological and biological age. It’s true that people age at different rates. People of exactly the same age can differ radically in terms of appearance, physical fitness, mental acuity or other measures of youthfulness. Aren’t these qualities more meaningful than the number of birthdays you’ve had? Why shouldn’t you have your biological age recognised as your legal age if that is what you wish?

The key problem is that, as Räsänen admits, “little consensus exists on how it should be determined”. Who would do the determining? The state? A private consultant? Or would it be self-assessed? There’d be no consistency across the population.

Biological age isn’t even consistent within an individual. Somebody might be a physical wreck, but sharp-as-a-tack mentally. A middle-aged, sun-worshipping fitness fanatic might have a face full wrinkles, but stronger muscles than most people half their age. The gardener Monty Don, who is 65 this year, recently observed that his “shot” knees were 85, while “aerobically” the rest of his body was 45.

*

So, performance-wise, different parts of our selves age at different rates — not that a precise figure could be put on any of it. Chronological age remains the only precise, consistent and objective measure of age that we have. But, of course, the third of Joona Räsänen’s conditions — i.e. that “that the person does not feel that his legal age is befitting” isn’t meant to be objective, it is by definition subjective.

Which is why I doubt that all three of his conditions would endure, if used as a basis for reform. In a post-modern society, subjectivity trumps everything else. Before long, self-ID would come to dominate any alternative to the chronological reckoning of age.

Would that matter? After all, in many circumstances people can lie about their age anyway — or refuse to divulge it. Furthermore, if we’re outlawing ageism, then age really would be just a number.

Except that not all age-based discrimination is bad. In fact, a great deal is necessary or, at least, not unfair. For instance, government has to set an age at which someone qualifies for the state old age pension. We can argue over precisely what age that should be, but a line has to be drawn somewhere otherwise everyone would qualify and the system go bankrupt. In deciding who is legally of pensionable age , the only fair and equal way of doing it is years elapsed since birth. Any system of self-ID would be gamed to the point of absurdity.

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Or what about the age at which older drivers must reapply for their licenses (and declare any relevant medical conditions)? In the UK this is 70, which further re-applications required every three years after that. It’s a somewhat arbitrary line to draw and one which applies to all individuals regardless of variations in capability. And yet it makes sense and affects everyone equally on the basis of the same objective measure of age. Self-ID would drive a coach-and-horses through all of that.

The same would be true at the other end of the age spectrum. If young people could self-ID on age then we would have 13-year-olds taking their driving tests. What could possibly go wrong? Of course, it’s undoubtedly the case that some 16-year-olds would make safer drivers than some 18-year-olds. But that doesn’t mean that the driving age of 17 is ‘unfair’. It’s perfectly fair because it collectively applies the same requirement to everybody equally and does so for the common good. The loss of opportunity suffered by the potentially safe-driving 16-year-old is rightly judged a price worth paying for that common good. Self-ID on age, however, would place the boot on the other foot, empowering individuals at the expense of society.

In an era in which individualism and relativism are intellectually dominant, it’s worth pausing to consider just how much of everyday life still depends on restricting individual freedom of action and doing so on the basis of a shared understanding of reality.

*

Is our shared understanding of age under any serious threat? After all, Emile Ratelband’s legal challenge didn’t get very far — not even in a notably liberal country like the Netherlands. However, fringe ideas can become mainstream in the space of a generation or two.

Alongside Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry, Rebecca Long-Bailey is a candidate in the current Labour leadership contest. Now compare that field with the candidates in the 1976 contest — James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Dennis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn and Anthony Crosland. Can you imagine any of those gentlemen supporting the idea of self-ID on gender? I doubt the concept would have even occurred to them — and that includes Jenkins, author of the permissive society. A lot can change in a few decades.

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However, viewed from a different angle, Long-Bailey’s position is consistent with the 19th century philosophy of utilitarian liberals like John Stuart Mill.

In furthering the liberty of the individual, Mill not only believed in limiting the power of the state, but also the power of society. This is how he puts in his most famous work, On Liberty:

“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

When the contemporary Left — which combines Mill’s liberalism with over-confidence in the state — says “we have to let people be who they want to be”, I want to ask who do they mean by “we” and what do they mean by “have to”? Are we to be forced to speak and act as if something is real when we know very well that it isn’t?

*

Terry Pratchett once said that “inside every old person there’s a young person wondering what happened”. As a middle-aged person, I find that feels truer every day.

And yet the actual truth about the date of my birth remains the same. No one should be compelled to deny it just because of how I feel (especially as feelings are hardly the most constant thing in the world).

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to go down the street in a pair of spray-on jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt if I want to (don’t worry, I don’t). It isn’t the job of state to protect me from public embarrassment. But, equally, the state has no business forcing society to play along with my delusions. I have no right to falsify my birth certificate. Or to claim a young person’s railcard. Or to claim that I’m 25 on a dating app.

The fact is that I can’t be whoever I want to be. Reality is real and I am what I am.

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What Sajid Javid should say at Davos, but won’t

By Peter Franklin

“Will you let them drink and smoke, too?”

This is usually the first response I get when I propose enfranchising all citizens under the age of 18. The answer is, obviously, no. We have laws that prevent young people from drinking and smoking because these things are harmful. Voting, by contrast, is not harmful; drawing an X on a ballot paper is substantially less dangerous than inhaling toxic smoke into your lungs.

Before you start freaking out, let’s be clear: this wouldn’t mean the sudden election of a government that promised free ponies and paintball instead of the NHS. At the last count, 17% of the population were under the age of 18, and I am not proposing that only children should vote — simply that they deserve to have a voice in shaping our shared future.

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Why men should be banned

By James Kirkup

Still, there are two significant arguments for continuing to deny children the vote. Firstly, that they are too young to understand politics, or the consequences of their decisions; secondly, that they are vulnerable to outside influence, and will just vote the way their parents do — or against their parents to spite them.

The first is a reasonable concern. But we have already set, as a nation, an age threshold at which we expect children to understand the law sufficiently to be able to abide by it. It’s the age of 10: the age of criminal responsibility in England. From 10, a child is required to follow the law, and if they do not, they can be punished by the state.

How can we argue that a 10-year-old has the judgement required to understand the law and the consequences of breaking it — and then argue that a 10-year-old doesn’t have the judgement required to understand democracy or the consequences of voting? If you have to follow the law, you should have a role in making it.

And until you reach that age of 10, your parents should be able to cast your vote as your proxy. Clearly, a small baby would struggle to exercise their vote directly, given their basic inability to control a pencil. But a parent with a second vote, to cast in their child’s name, could be expected to consider that child’s interests, and talk to them about their choices and ideas from an early age.

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Let's junk our electoral system

By Tim Bale

Of course, this brings us to the argument of undue influence. Whether the parent is directly casting their child’s vote or not, we can expect the family environment to shape a child’s choices. But then, you could say the same thing about any one of us. None of our votes really make sense, from first principles. We all have stories and experiences that shape our political identities — and the votes we cast from election to election. If some children vote the way their parents do, that makes them no different from millions of adults. If some children vote to spite their parents, the same is true of some adults.

If some children vote without really understanding the facts; if some spoil their ballot paper with a drawing of a penis; if some vote for the candidate whose surname starts with A simply because they’re at the top of the list; if some vote for the party with the prettiest logo: they are simply following in the footsteps of generations of voters before them.

There is no test of wisdom or thoughtfulness for over-18s. A distant relation of mine voted Leave in the referendum convinced that Turkey had already joined the EU. She was wrong. But she still had the right to vote: the right to be wrong, and the right to be heard anyway. We shouldn’t use age as a proxy for seriousness: we should enfranchise every citizen, wise or foolish, young or old. The right to vote should be inalienable.

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How I learned the Tories weren't evil

By Polly Mackenzie

Now, there is a toxic movement, in particular on the Remain side of the Brexit debate, to celebrate the idea that Leave voters — and social conservatives more broadly — are dying off. That’s evolved in some places to proposals to strip the vote of the over-70s, arguing that they don’t have a stake in the future, in the way young people do. These arguments are repugnant. Every citizen has a right to their vote, no matter their age.

But we do have a problem when the electoral system is inherently biased towards the 83% of the population who are over 18. By granting the vote to all children — exercised by proxy until they reach 10 — we would simply rebalance the system to recognise that all citizens are equal.

A Twitter spat last week between myself and Ash Sarkar – a 26-year-old ‘super-woke’ commentator – put this gulf in sharp relief. Sarkar, who had five minutes of fame when she shouted at Piers Morgan on live TV, “I am literally a communist, you idiot”, had tweeted about the proposed changes to the GRA, claiming that the introduction of “self-identification” would not have any effect whatsoever on the rights of others.

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The Left has forgotten what feminism looks like

By Julie Bindel

I replied: “Unless you are a female in prison of course, one of the most disenfranchised groups on the planet”. It was a reference to the hideous case of Karen White, the transgender sex offender who was placed in a female prison and went on to sexually assault two female inmates.

Sarkar’s response, befitting of the new wave feminists who have learned their politics via social media, was to tweet an image of a Twitter search that had yielded no results. “What a surprise”, she tweeted, “These anti-trans bigots don’t actually care about women in prison, unless it serves their agenda to exclude trans people from public life.”

What a surprise.

These anti-trans bigots don’t actually care about women in prison, unless it serves their agenda to exclude trans people from public life. pic.twitter.com/LkCDPEXD5Y

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) October 19, 2018

Sarkar, a senior editor at media platform Novaramedia, did not even attempt a Google search, or a quick glance at my Wikipedia page to double check whether or not I actually might indeed ‘care’ about incarcerated women. If she had, she would have learned that I am the founder of Justice for Women – a campaign I began in 1990, two years before Sarkar was born – and have helped countless abused women get out of prison. These young keyboard warriors who do their so-called ‘activism’ online might want to recognise the material change, and numerous benefits, that us older feminists fought for and won.

The ageism of some of these new feminists is outrageous. Take Paris Lees, who has taken aim at feminists over the age of 30. Lees, who is transgender, has written that feminists who dare to criticise extreme transgender ideology are: “A bunch of boring, middle-class, middle-aged people arguing about who is ‘right’”. In an interview for i-D magazine, Lees describes us feminists who do not believe men can become women as “miserable has-beens or never-weres.”

Further reading

Gender preference has no place on a birth certificate

By Meghan Murhpy

I have lost count of the number of times I have been referred to as a ‘dinosaur’ for arguing that men can’t become women or that the sex trade is not empowering. I have seen countless examples of similar ageist and misogynistic abuse of older women such as feminist icon, Germain Greer. As one privileged Cambridge student wrote, Greer is “just an old, white woman”.

When a group of lesbian campaigners protested the transgender takeover at London Pride this year, the gay press and the organisers went into overdrive, accusing the women of bigotry and hate speech. Weeks later, at Manchester Pride, there were loud cheers when the gay male MC announced that the protesters should have been dragged off by their “saggy tits”.

It is unbelievably offensive and hypocritical of women who call themselves ‘feminist’ to accuse older women of being ‘past it’ – from witch-burning to Hollywood casting, isn’t this slur something that feminists have long been united in fighting against? How do they do not see that this is blatant misogyny? Perhaps because it is extreme identity politics, not the liberation of all women, that these super-woke digital agitators are fighting for.

None of these things are supported to any significant degree by the populace, nor have there been any genuinely grassroots public campaigns in their favour. Instead they remain largely minority causes – enjoying the patronage of the political class, who dress them up as ‘progressive’ and ‘reasonable’, while leaving millions of people to scratch their heads and wonder at the sheer perversity of it all.

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Liberal smugness will destroy the Left

By Giles Fraser

The notion that schoolchildren are mature enough to be entrusted with selecting Her Majesty’s government must surely fall into this category. The Votes at 16 campaign has to rank as one of the most cynical and opportunistic of our times. Crusades for the extension of the franchise have historically been waged by the masses and resisted by the elites.

Votes at 16 is the inverse of this: it holds little appeal in the court of public opinion, but is instead being foisted on us by those in power who have been rocked by the recent political convulsions and want to find a way of stopping any repeat. So their cunning plan is to swell the ranks of the electorate with hordes of new voters who they assume (probably accurately) share their philosophy and will reward them at the ballot box.

The rationale (such as it is) for handing votes to 16-year-olds doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It is argued that their lives are affected by the decisions of politicians, and thus they should be permitted to have their say. But aren’t all children’s lives similarly affected? On what basis, then, might we justifiably resist subsequent campaigns for the voting age to be lowered even further?

We prohibit 16-year-olds from doing all sorts of things in some or all parts of these islands: sitting on juries; working full-time; owning land or property; driving; marrying; buying knives, alcohol, cigarettes and fireworks; standing for council or parliament. And we do it because we know the truth: they are not mature enough to handle the responsibility, and there would be risks to wider society in allowing them to do these things.

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Labour’s conspiracy of silence on immigration

By Paul Embery

Supporters of the cause argue that working 16-year-olds can pay income tax and, in the words of the America revolutionaries, there should be ‘no taxation without representation’. It’s a fair point. So make them exempt. Don’t infantilise the political process for the benefit of securing a few extra pounds in the government coffers.

Or they will pray in aid the handful of countries, including the likes of Nicaragua and Ecuador, where 16-year-olds have been granted suffrage – ignoring the fact that the vast majority, including 26 of our 27 EU partners and all of the Anglosphere, have not introduced such a measure.

Needless to say, Labour, my own party, has embraced Votes at 16 with enthusiasm. Two things motivate its support for the campaign. First, the general perception, so prevalent throughout today’s middle-class, student-centred party, of the older voter as some kind of embarrassing vulgar relative, part of the brigade of conservative bigots for whom the antidote is the liberal, progressive youngster. And second, the belief that most 16- and 17-year olds are Left-wing Remain types who would have voted the ‘right’ way in the EU referendum and the 2017 general election. Votes at 16 is quite simply a short-cut to winning political and electoral advantage.

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The pension campaigners who took on the system - and won

By Liam Halligan

I want Labour to win the next election. But I’d like us to achieve it through the hard graft of developing a programme that is attractive enough to persuade the grown-ups in the country to vote for it – not through some shameless vote grab.

In this age of ever-proliferating ‘hate’ legislation, where virtually every supposed vulnerable or marginalised group is afforded special protection against offence, the exception, it seems, are older people.

They are the new scapegoats. These ‘racists’ and ‘gammons’, with their neat bungalows and well-trimmed lawns and old-fashioned views, all destined to die soon enough so that the views of more enlightened younger folk become the majority (because, of course, the views of young people never shift as they progress through life). No matter that they have sustained the nation over many years through their hard work and their taxes, by raising the next generation, and, in some cases, through their military service. No, these inward-looking reactionaries stole the futures of our young and deserve everything they get.

It is without question one of the most pernicious examples of the targeted demonisation of an entire group of people we have seen in this country in a long time.

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Inheritance tax is a tax on laziness

By Polly Mackenzie

The phenomenon isn’t unique to Britain, though. Across the pond, there are grumblings about the rise of the ‘gerontocracy’, with liberal commentators bemoaning the gradually increasing average age of congressional representatives (I don’t know if they’ve worked out that life expectancy itself has gradually increased too).

They will pepper their complaints with talk of ‘mental deterioration’ and ‘dementia’, and speak of ‘those who aren’t long for this Earth’. These are often the same people who rail fiercely against all other ‘isms’ and will have supported laws designed to eradicate ageism from the workplace and wider society. Yet they think nothing of displaying deep ageist prejudice to older politicians and fellow citizens who don’t happen to share their world-view. It all adds up to the same sinister agenda: to delegitimise a point of view on account of the demographic of those voicing it, as part of a broader effort to delegitimise that demographic itself.

You don’t, for example, have to be a Trump fan (spoiler: I’m not) to recognise that he should be challenged for what he says and does, rather than for the era in which he was born or for some alleged psychological impairment. The same rule should apply to the likes of Jeremy Corbyn (69 years of age) and Bernie Sanders (77), by the way.

The data from both Britain and the US show that older voters are more likely than their younger counterparts to turn out at election time. The fact that nature’s onward march means they might not ultimately personally benefit from some of the things for which they argue and vote doesn’t put them off; they head to the polls in their droves. They are, as some will see it, exercising their civic duty on behalf of future generations, rather than for personal gain. In this, their actions stand in the traditions of our Victorian forebears and strike me as being worthy of high praise, not contempt.

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The left-wing zealots are threatening our freedom

By Paul Embery

Sure, some older people are dumb and unpleasant. But as a demographic they are often imbued with the wisdom that can only come with, well, age. Moreover, they are, in the way they think and vote, less susceptible to the kind of group-think and herd-like mentality that afflicts so many millennials. In these days of echo chambers and ‘safe spaces’, we should value them.

Think back to your 16-year-old self. I was barely qualified to use a razor, let alone choose a government. Though that didn’t stop me, like everyone else in my class at school, thinking I knew everything.

The liberal class’s fetishisation of ‘yoof’ doesn’t just risk debasing the entire electoral process; it also exposes their own rank hypocrisy. These people who dismiss the masses as low-information dupes easily hoodwinked by adverts on the sides of buses, who have done everything they can to subvert the outcome of a democratic referendum, suddenly want us to believe their plan to extend the franchise to kids is born from a genuine desire to give ‘power to the people’.

They must think we were born yesterday.