In the first scene, Price is looking at magazine covers from her glamour model heyday in the late Nineties and early 2000s: Loaded, Maxim, Front. Back then, she went by the pseudonym Jordan, and doesn’t like what she sees. “Ugly. Absolute ugly,” she says. The only time she softens is when she picks up some photos of herself at five and seven. “Ah, she’s quite a pretty little girl. Gentle eyes. Innocent. No idea what was coming ahead of me.”

Her words are slurred and nasal, because her teeth — glaring white and fitted in Turkey, in exchange for an Instagram post — are too big for her mouth. (She’s said that she doesn’t recommend anybody have fake teeth: “I can’t eat a chocolate eclair now in case I pull one out.”) After innumerable tweakments, her face today looks alien, like a Bratz doll’s. She recently had surgery to remove scar tissue from migrated filler. Her breasts, of course, are enormous, absurd. They almost distract from how tiny the rest of her body is: take away the implants, and she would likely be underweight.

All of this, Price insists, is how she wants to be. Back when she was a Page 3 girl with unaugmented breasts, The Sun ran a poll asking its readers whether she should have a surgery. (Headline: “MY BOOBS ARE IN YOUR HANDS”.) 80% voted against. Price ignored them. She also ignored the fact that implants were banned from Page 3, meaning that getting them was potentially career-ending — especially the ostentatiously fake, “stuck-on” ones she wanted.

In one sense, Price made the right decision. Her new body coincided exactly with the needs of the booming lad-mag market. “My pictures,” she says in the series, “were pornographic without being pornographic.” The artificial extremity of her figure turned her softcore poses into obscenities, and the precocious innocence of her Bardot-ish face (the face she now considers ugly) layered on the perversity. Every title wanted her as a cover girl because, simply, she shifted copies. Something about her mix of innocence and artifice made her into a provocation: men want to pick her up and possess her.

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From when she was a teenager, she says in the documentary, she understood how to incite male attention, and she loved it. None of this sounds like it’s about sex for her: the pleasure was all in the power she had to make men look at her, without giving them what they wanted. She explains that liked to be looked at — and she knew her sexuality could guarantee that — but not to be touched. She traces this impulse back to an incident that occurred when she was seven years old, when a strange man molested her in the park near her home.

Maybe as traumatizing as the abuse was the invasive way the police treated her when they investigated, taking away her underwear. “There’s habitual abuse of men against me. Taking advantage of me from a young age for their own self-benefit,” Price says. (In her adult life, she’s revealed that she’s been raped twice, once by a celebrity and once during a carjacking in South Africa. Unsurprisingly, she has PTSD.) There seems to be a direct line between the powerless victimhood she experienced as a child, and the deforming insistence on absolute bodily autonomy that has shaped Price into what she is today.

In 2000, against the backdrop of Price’s vertiginous rise to fame and her cultural dominance, Michel Faber published the novel Under the Skin. It’s about an alien called Isserley who has been sent to Earth. In order to pass as human, her entire body has been surgically reconstituted, causing her constant pain: under daylight, she looks obviously freakish, but in the dark it’s enough (or anyway her gigantic bosom is enough) to captivate men. “The rest of her was a funny shape, though,” thinks one of the hitchhikers Isserley picks up. “Long skinny arms with big knobbly elbows — no wonder her top was long-sleeved. Knobbly wrists too, and big hands. Still, with tits like that…”

Isserley’s reconstruction means she can’t have sex (“The tangle of knotted flesh between her legs she didn’t touch or examine; it was a lost cause”), making her the epitome of the woman who can be lusted for but not possessed. That doesn’t matter, because she isn’t seducing these men for intercourse: she’s bait, luring humans so they can be processed for the meat market on her home planet. Whatever debased things these men think about her as they sit in her car, Isserley is the one abusing them, not the other way around. Her modified body grants her supreme power.

Whether Faber was directly inspired by Price or not, her image was predatory too. That perception was solidified by the fact that she had a relationship with Pop Idol contestant Gareth Gates when he was 17 and she was 24. His agent told him to deny they were together — Price, they said, was career death to a teen idol like him. She sold the kiss-and-tell story of taking his virginity while she was pregnant with her first baby, conceived with the footballer Dwight Yorke.

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In the documentary, both she and Gates talk about their time together with tenderness and respect: he doesn’t seem scarred by his fling with an older woman, but it’s clear from the way he talks about the coverage that her scorched-earth strategy hurt him personally. Meanwhile, it gave her profile a boost. The more outrageous Price could be, the more the press ate her up. She was a Noughties succubus: a female demon who could be portrayed as seducing men to their destruction.

And in the same way that Isserley’s unnatural cleavage distracts men from everything that should be disturbing about the rest of her, Price’s ever-expanding chest seemed to distract from the fact that there was something not quite right about her. Only occasionally did anyone seem to notice that she might not be OK. Nothing to Hide includes striking archive footage of the comedian Frank Skinner interviewing her in 2001, after she revealed her pregnancy, and — with kindness that belied his new lad image — telling her that she seemed vulnerable.

She was: a year before she had attempted suicide following a break-up. But there was no room for weakness in her public image. When her baby, Harvey, was born, she commodified him as she’d commodified herself, selling photos of them together. In the documentary, she explains her thinking. The level of press interest in her meant that someone was going to make money from pictures of them, so why shouldn’t she be the person to profit?

Similarly, the documentary explains how she cut a deal with a favored paparazzi. She would tip him off so he always got the killer shot of her falling out of a nightclub (now even more disgraceful since she was a new mom), and he allegedly kicked back a share of his fee to her. Price was exploiting the system that sought to exploit her. Later, she would use reality TV to monetize every aspect of her life, including her marriages and her children.

It was clever, and it seemed to give her the thing she’d always wanted: attention and control combined. But her power was illusory. Price was being publicly broken down for mass consumption, and drawing some profit from that process could not stop it from harming her. As the series follows her career, her disintegration escalates — physically (Price has dealt with multiple complications from surgery), emotionally (her private life, lived in public, is painfully chaotic) and financially (she has been declared bankrupt twice).

Price wanted to be desired, and when men desired her, she was hated for it. The tabloids cheerfully had their cake and ate it, first running the salacious details of the Gates affair from Price’s account, and then using his denials to paint her as a liar. In the documentary, there’s footage of her being booed at an awards show when she makes a jibe about the situation. Her actions were calculated to provoke, but the backlash to her provocations still wounded her — especially when it touched on her capacity as a mother. Maybe the nadir of Price-hating came in 2010, when the comedian Frankie Boyle made a joke in his Channel 4 series Tramadol Nights about Price being raped by her son, who was eight at the time.

Price’s fortunes fell with the old-media structures. The lad mags are gone, the tabloids weakened. But her approach to fame was prescient. Total self-commodification is now the rule of social media. The porn stars Bonnie Blue and Lily Philips have followed Price’s path of seeking maximum outrage (for example, through their viral gangbang stunts) in exchange for maximum attention. Blue even, horrifyingly, found a way to market her pregnancy, by arranging a “baby shower” where she invited men to urinate on her belly.

Blue and Philips make the same arguments as Price: their bodies, their choice, and they choose to extract maximum profit from themselves. But as Price shows, when you make yourself hard, you make yourself brittle too. Perhaps her successors will be spared the damage that Price has gone through. Perhaps they will be better at protecting themselves, even while they are selling themselves off piece by piece. Perhaps they are able to inoculate themselves against the hatred they inspire in others, in a way that Price was never able to — there is an argument that having access to social media, rather than needing to rely on an often-hostile press, gives this generation of self-exploiters an unprecedented level of control.

I think this is a false hope. However rapacious the media was before the arrival of the mass internet, social-media audiences are even more hungry for drama and liberal with their viciousness. The incentives to flog yourself are as strong as they ever were, and now there are no intervening editorial layers between you and your audience to act as a moderating force. The impulse to extremity goes unchecked, and competition for attention pushes everyone to go further. After all, you could hardly say that social media has been good for Price: just think about her teeth.

For a while, it looked like Price truly had found a way to turn her objectification into a successful cottage industry: her degradation was the means of production, and she seized it with alacrity. Price was the perfect creature for the sexual culture of the Noughties: an effigy of femininity, who existed to be hated. Price has been made to pay and pay for wanting to be wanted.

This, again presented by students in the year above, was a car crash. We splintered off into seminar rooms to be quizzed on what we thought a “healthy relationship” was, what constituted sexual assault and what was acceptable to try on in the shaded corners of nightclubs. Half the people there were probably virgins — but no matter. It wasn’t about what you believed, or what you wanted to do, but about how you intended to come across to a room of peers you’d see every day until you graduated. Because of this, there was no honesty. No belief was challenged, nothing new was learned. The real questions that the boys wanted to ask were buried by red faces and the clearing of throats; who’d want to look like a freak in front of the girls? The workshop ended, we all filed out, and over the next three years the same disasters played out, as they always do. The women were no safer. Why? Because the men who ended up assaulting them — boys in that room, partners, men in clubs, total strangers — knew it was wrong and did it anyway.

Of course, workshops delivered to 18-year-olds slam the stable doors long after the horse has bolted. But that doesn’t matter: the role of such schemes is to give educational institutions some insurance against claims that they never acted to protect girls. They make everyone in charge feel good, asses well and truly covered. All this goes some way to explaining the Government’s £20 million plan, announced last week, to tackle “the root causes of abuse” by requiring secondary schools to teach pupils “about healthy and respectful relationships”, and giving teachers extra training around sexual consent. As part of the initiative, “behavior change programs” will be prescribed for high-risk children to tackle their prejudice against women and girls. Labour’s pitch notes that 40% of relationships between teenagers are abusive — and that the same proportion of young men “hold a positive view of Andrew Tate”. As at my university, the premise holds that women and girls are endangered because of a lack of education, not because of men and boys’ sexual entitlement. If only potential perpetrators knew better, they would make the right choices. Instead of laying out the consequences of violating another person, or even handing young people the resources to report and be believed, the focus was then and will continue to be now the gentle coaxing of boys to do the right thing, as if they didn’t already know what that thing was.

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In response to Labour’s anti-misogyny brainwave, Kemi Badenoch, finally finding her feet as a hard-headed Tory leader, called the program a “big mess” and rather bitchily implied that it was a handwringing response just because “some people in Labour” had watched Adolescence, the Netflix hit about a schoolboy incel murderer. And indeed, the anti-misogyny workshops — the portion of the strategy which made headlines last week — do reek of well-meaning but hapless Boomerism. They are the product of a mentality which holds boys as a homogenous block of well-meaning working-class lads being led astray by a nasty bald man online; a fatherly hand on the shoulder, or a flow chart handed out by a favorite biology teacher, will set them right in no time. The reality is a demographic hotchpotch with a diverse array of sexist influences, from white Manosphere bogeymen to ultraconservative Islam to grimly objectifying rap — there’s something for everyone! The idea that a workshop held in school hours can grapple with this atomized picture of internet subcultures, ancient prejudices and imported value systems is as stretched and naive as the teachers who will no doubt be lumbered with delivering it.

Besides, the most radicalizing material — that which lights a rocket under schoolboy misogyny — is viewed in secret. While Labour should be commended for introducing both age restrictions on pornography and limits on depictions of acts like choking, the Government mustn’t relax about what continues to drive violence against women and girls. Once home, the Schoolboy Sanitation subject of Jess Phillips’s fantasy will easily circumvent porn sites’ ID-verification laws and access an infinite supply of violent and degrading gooner sludge that teaches him to sexualize and despise girls in his class. The PSHE stooge’s kindly lesson on what pubic hair looks like will be forgotten after a single second of oiled and gyrating AI-generated flesh hits his retinas that evening. Porn and pornification saturates even mainstream social media: the only real way to limit children’s exposure is to boot them off sites like Instagram and TikTok entirely, with rigidly enforced age limits — 16 would be a good place to start. Getting tough with social media giants, rather than schoolchildren and their overworked teachers, would show that Labour means business. Internet pornography has now existed for decades, as has casual misogyny; the turbocharging factor is algorithms that push sexualized or woman-hating content.

Workshops squeezed between math and French will do little if Big Tech is permitted to run riot in the teen world. What good can they do when Jack the Bad Lad’s unrestricted access to social media since primary school has nuked his critical-thinking and interpersonal skills, or when a culture of nudes and porn one-shotted him before his age was in the single digits? In the absence of any substantial action on online culture, the patrician interventions of the Labour government ultimately try in vain to correct bad, undisciplined parenting by simulating the well-meaning mummy. The same parents who are sending children to school in nappies, shoving responsibility on reception teachers to toilet-train them, are letting their teenagers poison their brains with the guff of the internet; as a result, poor old teachers must become ersatz parents and do the hard yards of, variously, wiping bottoms and telling boys off for “undressing” classmates using AI. At what point can we start blaming Mum and Dad? If Labour won’t boot kids off social media, parents certainty should. In targeting schools, the Government flatters itself that it will reach the deep roots of boys’ anti-woman conditioning — as if children still learn the rules of society in the real world rather than online. Future generations of women will remember that assumption as hopelessly sentimental.

Yet because the true role of such workshops is to deflect accountability from institutions, none of these objections matter — and this happy-clappy initiative is destined to become yet another deflated rubber ring slung into the rising oceans of rape culture, quietly scrubbed from timetables in five years’ time when it emerges it made no difference at all. In the vast majority of cases, those who sexual assault know what they’re doing is wrong, and do it anyway. Initiatives like this, while well-meaning, do naff all. If you want my advice, kick kids off social media, spell out the punitive consequences of schoolyard misogyny, then give the police and courts enough power and funding to get justice for victims. That would be a start.

On this topic, however, things did not go smoothly. After the book was completed, due to the controversial nature of the material, the press sent it out to 26 readers for peer review. Most accepted the invitation — then backed out once they saw the manuscript. Only one delivered a report, criticizing my work for being “unfair” to gender theorist Judith Butler and “gratuitously unkind to trans people.” My insistence on embodiment — Beauvoir’s insistence — was treated as an embarrassing throwback. In 2025, the contract was terminated. 

I then sent the manuscript to several other presses, who also declined to take it forward. One respected university imprint rejected the book as “too controversial.” Another told me it did not publish books on “individual thinkers” — then six months later issued a book casting Beauvoir as a pro-trans icon. A third prestigious press told me my book “did not fit its list” — and went on to publish a title called Sex Is a Spectrum, inspired by Beauvoir.

The attempt to repurpose Beauvoir to shore up gender-identity orthodoxy represents an all-out attack on her thinking, and erases the actual contents of The Second Sex, a foundational work of feminist theory, first published in 1949. 

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Beauvoir is controversial today because she was the ultimate sex realist; she refused to separate body from identity, and believed that it was only through understanding women’s embodied reality that we could combat patriarchal cultural norms. Her essential position can be summed up simply: sex is the material ground of women’s lives, gender the cultural elaboration of that ground, and liberation comes not from denying the body, but by transforming the meaning imposed upon it.

She began The Second Sex with research on biology, spending long hours in France’s National Library, sifting through centuries of the science on reproduction. Biology is not everything, she argued. It does not condemn us to lesser lives — but nor is it nothing: nature commandeers a woman’s body, from puberty onward, for the service of the species. These facts don’t make us unequal, but social structures and norms turn reproductive realities into inequality.

In almost every species, Beauvoir emphasized, organisms are defined by the gametes they produce. Large gametes (ova) define the female, small gametes (sperm) the male. In humans, this is “a biological given, not a moment in human history.” We are born male or female, always in relation to each other — what Beauvoir, borrowing from Heidegger, called Mitsein (“Being-with”). Such sex differences themselves are not hierarchical, but patriarchy makes them so.

“One is not born, but becomes, a woman,” she famously wrote in The Second Sex. But this does not mean that gender floats free of sex. For Beauvoir, sex is the foundation; gender its cultural elaboration. A female body is defined by the norms of femininity of its time and place. These norms can change — and Beauvoir’s work aimed to push them toward liberation. Meanwhile, both biology and culture shape the body’s meaning, power, and visibility, qualities that change over a woman’s lifetime as she shifts through the various forms of girl or mother, or menopausal or old woman.

Today, however, Beauvoir is mostly taught through the lens of foundational gender theorist Butler, who claimed to extend her work. But as I argue in my book, Butler actually ignored Bouvoir’s book, collapsing the notion of “becoming a woman” into performance, where repeated gestures conjure the illusion of sex. In Butler’s version, gender is the creator of sex. She makes no mention of puberty, childbirth, or aging.

Butler’s understanding of what a woman is has shaped two generations, and has had noxious consequences for women. If “sex” is only an idea, then puberty itself can be rejected; the category “girl” is something to exit, hormonally or surgically. This is framed as liberation, but in practice, it erases female experience: it turns puberty into a pathology, encourages girls to disidentify from their own bodies, and makes womanhood optional or disposable. What drops out of view is feminism’s starting point — that sex is the basis of women’s oppression. And crucially, the rejection of women’s bodies and of femininity today does not generate demands to transform those constraining norms, but instead points girls toward escape by “becoming boys” — as if freedom lay only on the other side of sex.

Beauvoir’s difference from Butler matters because without sex, feminism loses its compass. If we cannot name sex, how do we name sex-based oppression? 

I have long felt the weight of trans orthodoxies in the classroom and the conference hall. When I teach that, for Beauvoir, the body is not a blank slate, students protest: “using ‘sex’ as a category rationalizes prejudice.” Later, their essays come in as cool hagiographies to Butler, scare quotes around the word “woman.”

In the past, I kept my feelings to myself, wary of complaint. At conferences, I heard how Beauvoir’s emphasis on freedom and authenticity meant that she would definitely support trans identities. When I reminded my fellow academics that Beauvoir explicitly said: “No woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex,” they looked away in embarrassment, and muttered that Beauvoir was being “weaponized by TERFs in the service of transphobia.”

To deny the female body is to dissolve womanhood into the ether. That is why Beauvoir is awkward today. She insisted that women are animals — embodied, vulnerable, enduring — not cartoons, cyborgs, or avatars. 

Nor, in reality, is the female body easily dismissed: it is a body that betrays us, bleeds, and contracts on its own schedule; it intrudes on our consciousness and ruins our plans. Beauvoir writes bluntly, even brutally, about menstruation, childbirth, and abortion. Some critics have called her misogynist. But nothing she said is false — if anything, she was understating the situation.

Erasing women’s biology and erasing Beauvoir go hand in hand. In syllabi, Beauvoir has become a footnote — and when she is taught, “becoming a woman” is misread as affirming gender identity, the opposite of her words.

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I’ve felt this erasure before. As a child, visiting my mother’s Spanish family, I encountered a strident machismo: speaking about politics and having opinions, were for men, not women; I was told to join the women in the kitchen. And it has persisted in subtle ways throughout my career. As an undergraduate at Oxford, my tutor told me, frustratedly, “You are very polite,” unaccustomed to this feminine constraint in what had been, until two years earlier, an all-male college. It was a habit that stuck with me; I found myself overly cautious, and less willing to take the imaginative leaps needed for originality.

The sting of being told to disappear has never left me. That is what today’s distortion of Beauvoir feels like: an instruction to step aside, to be silent, while others rewrite reality.

Beauvoir’s discovery was that sex cannot be evaded. Even though as a young woman she rejected the category “woman” — she “thought like a man,” she said, holding her own in a male world — she eventually realized she had been one all along, defined by her body and by patriarchy’s myths. “If I want to define myself,” she wrote, “I first have to say, ‘I am a woman’; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth.”

That insistence is what makes her urgent now. A feminism that cannot speak of puberty, pregnancy, menopause, or frailty abandons women. Identity without the body is not liberation, but denial.

When publishers canceled my book, they wanted me to cut my critique of Butler. I refused: this lay at the core of my endorsement of a Beauvoirian feminism. That refusal is why I write now — because freedom begins from naming the body we inhabit and at the same time refusing to let it dictate our destiny.

Beauvoir would not have recognized this denial as liberation. Her project was to remake the meaning of womanhood — to expand it, not abandon it. To challenge the myths and constraints that keep women from fulfilling our potential. That is why I call for a Beauvoirian feminism: a vision of woman as both flesh and freedom, subject and agent, irreducibly real.

Nothing was ever done about that officer. Kelly, generously in my view, thinks his behavior was emblematic of wider societal attitudes to women, in a force staffed by men who grew up in the late Fifties and early Sixties. By the time I joined the police, in the early Nineties, things had changed. My female colleagues reported how, yes, some of their fellow officers might “try it on” — but few suffered anything like Kelly’s ordeal. Yet, during my service, I saw a recurring problem with harassment. More than once, this involved officers who thought their rank protected them from scrutiny.

For the Metropolitan Police — Britain’s largest force — internal discipline means playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. In a sense, that comes with the territory. From false overtime claims to selling information to criminals, policing offers temptations for men and women hungry for fruit from the poisoned tree. Many officers taking this path drift down it due to financial or personal troubles. Many have issues with performance and attendance. This often overlaps: Wayne Couzens, for instance, was horribly in debt. This is usually a red flag for anti-corruption investigators.

Against all this are those officers patrolling the orchards where poisoned trees grow — the Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS), the “AC12” of fictional Line of Duty fame. DPS, to the average copper, is an unwelcome mixture between HR and Darth Vader. After joining DPS, where I ultimately served for five years, my invitations to office lunches and retirement drinks dropped off a cliff. At a police social club, I was once introduced to a retired detective. My posting to DPS came up in conversation. “The Funny Firm?” he growled. “I didn’t talk to those cunts when I was in the job, and I’m not talking to them now.” Then he walked off.

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Policing, as I often say, isn’t a popularity competition. What happens, though, when those policing the police pluck an apple from the poisoned tree? One recent case provides a shocking example of what happens when sexual misconduct and internal affairs collide. Earlier this week, five Met officers were arrested for allegedly suppressing allegations of sexual assault against a senior officer by a junior colleague. One is a detective inspector — from the DPS.

This raises difficult questions. Has the Met, after the Wayne Couzens and David Carrick scandals, adequately dealt with issues concerning sexual misconduct? I’m being rhetorical here: it clearly hasn’t. The report by the Government’s roving inquisitor of choice, Baroness Casey, was excoriating about New Scotland Yard’s culture of sexism. Then there’s the DPS itself. Whatever the alleged cover up says about policing’s ability to self-regulate, it likely isn’t good. Nor are these problems limited to London. To a lesser or greater extent, every force has similar problems. The complicity of officers, especially in Northern English forces, in the grooming scandal is only beginning to come to light — but I suspect the worst is yet to come.

During my own stint at DPS, I worked on proactive operations against corrupt officers. I saw firsthand how clunky and dysfunctional police misconduct procedures are. One example among many is how policing complicates what should be straightforward HR matters — taking a work car home without authorization or throwing a sickie — by treating trifles like potential crimes. Some of these problems are cultural and structural, “making the job work” by cutting cumbersome procedural corners. Others are legal, such as the thicket of human rights, equality and employment laws governing poor performance.

Yet when it comes to allegations of sexual assault, policing is particularly vulnerable. Like other traditionally male-dominated professions, the police has a tradition of macho, laddish culture. Then there’s the dynamic of rank and hierarchies, alongside a long and stressful working environment. It’s no surprise many police marriages are volatile, with many ending in divorce. Workplace affairs aren’t uncommon. As a DPS officer, I would log onto the intelligence system on a Monday morning, which would invariably reveal officers arrested for domestic disturbances, occasionally by over-enthusiastic county cops with no great affection for the Met. The November-to-January complaints generated by police Christmas parties constituted a DPS crime hotspot. Indeed, the alleged misconduct in that Met case supposedly happened at a festive drinks.

Despite these cultural pressures, of course, we rightly hold police officers to a higher standard. Managing coppers therefore requires strong line management — what we used to call leadership. Those line managers require unwavering support from their seniors too. This is where, too often, the system fails. At this point, the Irish playwright Brendan Behan’s dictum springs to mind: “I’ve never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.” The new cohort of police leaders, many of whom are women, talk a good job on change. Yet they struggle to deliver, preferring to attend conferences and giving speeches, rather than work the hard yards by developing a culture of leadership, one based on operational experience rather than virtue-signaling.

I recall a conversation with another female colleague, a retired detective inspector. A tough woman, a proud daughter of Essex. We were discussing “handsy” male officers. The former detective inspector had moved to a management role in the private sector. “It’s so bloody simple compared to the police,” she told me. “A bloke says or does something out of order to a female colleague. We either reprimand or sack him, depending on the circumstances. In the police, we can’t see the wood for the trees, everything becomes a major investigation.” Even today, despite numerous overhauls, policing’s bastardized misconduct apparatus retains paramilitary elements, with officers scurrying off for the job’s version of a court martial. I’ll never forget watching a constable vomit over his tunic on Vauxhall Bridge, shortly before his Central Discipline Board. Neither are police officers HR managers, which is possibly why minor, and not so minor, transgressions are sometimes ignored.

As for actual police HR, in my experience most staff were perfectly competent, albeit more focused on performance than actual misconduct (though there were outliers: including one woman known as “Claymore Mine” because she was anti-personnel). Then HR was cut like everything else, outsourced to contractors trying to manage complex cases via a telephone help desk. And so officers distrust HR decision-making, especially when some do experience tactical and malicious complaints, including from colleagues. This is why many argue complaints deserve forensic scrutiny for matters which — say in a supermarket — would be dealt with by HR. It is in this gap where potential sex offenders fester and, like Carrick, prosper.

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Another issue is one that dogs other areas of policing. Dealing with workplace misconduct is DPS’s version of neighborhood policing. And, like neighborhood policing, it’s something of a Cinderella, devolved to local support teams. The real focus, during my time on DPS, was on organized crime, corruption and the most serious cases of misconduct. Our tactics and methods were seen as disproportionate. In the few cases where we proposed covert operations against officers accused of sexual misbehavior, managers often considered them too risky. I also worked with coppers who, in confidence, reported wrongdoing. Most refused to provide written evidence for criminal proceedings. That culture will only change when leaders lead by example.

So what can the Met realistically do? After the Wayne Couzens scandal, it sought to investigate what it considered a toxic culture by setting up a new squad. “Forming a new squad” is a perennial way for police managers to pour old wine into new bottles. A new confidential reporting system and “WhatsApp squad” is all very well, but if the mechanism for following up on intelligence doesn’t work then what’s the point? The Met’s new squads will find some scalps. There’s certainly no shortage of low-hanging fruit. I doubt, however, that they will catch, identify or deter the worst offenders without a more intrusive strategy, of the sort the Met launched in the Nineties to identify racism.

The Met is in a genuine bind. Ten years of scorched-earth austerity, followed by a rapid uplift of staff, has created a young, inexperienced workforce led by young, inexperienced sergeants and inspectors. To save on training costs, meanwhile, the Met backfilled specialist posts like firearms from other forces. I suspect this is how Wayne Couzens, who came from the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (responsible for guarding power stations) ended up serving on the Diplomatic and Parliamentary Protection Group. And yet, still, nothing changes.

Sexism, like racism, exists in wider society. And some of that will, inevitably, percolate into the police. There, the problem becomes horribly magnified. The answers, then, are both tough and unglamorous. They involve cash-strapped forces investing in better recruitment, vetting and training. That would help make policing a more attractive career, widening the pool of quality candidates: urgent enough when some officers now need English lessons before they can even take a statement. And, yes, constant vigilance is needed too. As my superintendent on DPS used to say, “sometimes, you have to nail the crow to the barn door, to serve as a warning to the others.” Perhaps it’s time for police officers, especially those at the top, to issue their sergeants with hammers and nails.

Be honest: you’re filled with uneasy loathing at the sight of expensively dressed adults bored together on the morning playground, or by the sound of the patient-voice as gentle-parenting Mommy explains something, or when you cross paths with the attractive woman virtuously biking along with her cute kid in a big child seat on the front of the bike, as I did in Brooklyn this week. What’s repulsive is the combination of upper-middle-class safety-ism and faux-spontaneity: kids rocking their supposed individuality with wild hair, a year-round Halloween costume or Daddy’s favorite-band T-shirt.

A new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, by the cultural critic and social historian Hannah Zeavin, provides some striking context for the phenomenon by examining one of the most significant changes in modern parenting: the unprecedented penetration of media and technology into the American home.

Author and the book are both scholarly, focusing not on the great issues of the modern era, such as how much screen time is too much, and how to protect your children from porn — but on the underlying cultural and social structures that govern our relationship to parenting and technology. She focuses on a transformation that crystallized in the Fifties, when mothers, she says, became “media” — meaning, they started being viewed as a kind of dehumanized, information-bearing “technology” that could influence the child, for good and ill, and which required expert and scientific intervention to regulate. If “mother” and “media” are the same, Zeavin proposes, a comparative discourse will be illuminating.

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And so it is. Zeavin argues that the mother was originally a networked figure who might have been aided by a wet-nurse or servant. But with the rise of new labor-saving technologies and the demographic shift to the nuclear family, she became an isolated individual, concerned about dangerous outside influences on her family, and feeling pressure to do everything herself.

Zeavin illustrates such changes by analyzing the marketing for such items as an early “smart house” or a baby monitor made by Zenith and displayed in the Whitney Museum in 1939. What she finds is a vicious cycle — the technologies replace human labor, allegedly creating a safer and “purer” home fully controlled by a liberated mother. But the emphasis on purity makes both mother and technology suspect, blurring them together and fueling panics that can only be assuaged by more technology and more mothering.

In this reading, panics are really “about” family purity. Take the Satanic Panic of the Eighties, which cast suspicion on childcare workers as Satanists or possibly cannibals. Or Shaken Baby Syndrome, also a demonization of both mothers and childcare workers, now largely debunked. Such episodes serve to usher in new technologies such as nanny cams hidden in teddy bears. They also put ongoing pressure on women to perform intensive one-on-one parenting to protect their children from the imagined danger.

Zeavin is more concerned with the past, but a present example of such a panic might be the scandals that erupt from time to time about the iPhone babysitter. (For anyone unfamiliar with this trick, you establish a call between two parents’ phones, leave one in the room with your sleeping child, and go out nearby with the other one; it works like a long-distance baby monitor.) When TikTok influencers Matt and Abby Howard posted about doing this while having dinner on a cruise in 2024, all hell broke loose online. Other parents have been arrested for the practice. Whether it’s actually illegal or even dangerous seems unclear, but the hysterical character of the debate fits with Zeavin’s theory.

Mother Media draws many conclusions, but one is that the abstract demand that a mother be a kind of protection-and-surveillance machine for her child sets her running on the treadmill of purity and contamination, requiring her to be “infinitely rechargeable and always on”. I am a mother in this demographic, and I find the representation compelling — if I were a robot who didn’t need sleep, my life would be much more manageable.

The book is also especially interesting when she addresses the wider purity-and-danger issues we’re all now routinely responsible for, such as providing our children with organic food, vaccinating them (or protecting them from vaccines), policing environmental toxins, and, of course, guarding kids against technology itself. The best mothers, supposedly, have screen-free kids and wooden toys. The ‘best’ mothers also now track their child’s location through their phone and practice surveillance of their text messages and social media, a development that seems ripe for further analysis.

The book is less convincing, however, in its attempt to target the nuclear family as the source of the problem. Zeavin approaches the subject from a typical Left-feminist perspective, and another thrust of her argument is that “motherhood is a white bourgeois concept” that depends for its existence on the “carceral system” oppressing people of color. This argument works well enough within Zeavin’s parameters. But it leaves too much out — what is nonwhite, non-bourgeois motherhood, for example? All those low-income mothers of color are doing something, and surely they’d call themselves mothers. And it also seems to rely on a slight of hand between the ideal and reality.

What Zeavin calls “the exceptionalness of the family at midcentury” doesn’t make families, in reality, exceptional. Parents and their offspring of all races and social demographics have been a fundamental building block of households since long before the 20th century; neither they nor their “privatization” is really new. The monogamous two-parent family — arguably the most private arrangement of all — has been the standard in Western culture at least since Christendom. And the urge to split off into smaller and more autonomous dwellings has been a force in Western social development since premodernity.

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Other cultures may arrange things slightly differently, but to suggest that these practices erase the “possessive” parent-child bond or the family as a unit is its own form of idealization. If a toxic ideology has grown up around the nuclear family — which is only part of its story, anyway, or one theory of it — we must look elsewhere for the explanation of society’s ills. Perhaps to the actual new thing: the technology.

I suspect Zeavin’s various ideological commitments render her silent on another point that seems worthy of discussion. The transformation to mother-as-media requires a transformation from something — and she’s awfully quiet about what that might have been. We mostly have to extrapolate that motherhood was less intensive previously, less sentimentalized. Families were more likely to employ servants or live in intergenerational homes. And we don’t learn how non-Western societies parent differently, in the past or now. These are urgent questions if we want to stop the treadmill.

I’d propose that while there are many families that look ugly — the hovering parents on the playground, the child contained in the giant, almost comical wooden-purity-box — there are ones that look beautiful, too. Usually, the ones that make your heart ache or make you wish you had more kids are those manifesting a kind of visible care for the children, not in a superficial way, but in a real one. Panic and anxiety-driven behaviors aren’t the same thing, and it’s palpable. At the same time, modern parenting is full of new and real dangers, from the effects of screens to the flood of porn. Responding, somehow, with an openness to impurity, ideological and otherwise, is the best idea I’ve heard yet.

What Martin achieved in such a short space of time is remarkable. Like the criminalisation of marital rape, it is a change that forces us to reconsider social norms. When it comes to the body — particularly the female body — what is and is not illegal matters. It shapes how we understand both ourselves and how we expect to be treated by others. Following the law change, guidance on upskirting was added to the Department of Education’s Keeping Children Safe in Education booklet. This has not led to the imprisonment of multiple snap-happy teenage boys; its punitive impact is minimal. But as my partner, a teacher, tells me, there’s now an awareness in schools that it is unacceptable to dismiss upskirting on the basis that “boys will be boys”.

So, Martin deserves to feel proud of her activism. Yet in both her recent Guardian piece and her new book, No Offence, But, one gets the impression that she now feels torn. Partly, this is because she is now defined as “the upskirting girl”, her activism reduced to what was, for her, an experience of violation. But Martin also seems to be subtly distancing herself from what she actually achieved. “I’m proud that my political activism has had a lasting positive impact,” she writes, “but I also have a complex relationship with it.”

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This complex relationship is very obvious throughout No Offence, But. Billed as a progressive handbook offering “a space to explore the problematic, distracting or lazy comments we so often encounter”, its chapters each focus on a particular phrase: “Not all men”, “I see no colour”, “I don’t do politics”. Some are written by Martin, others by guest contributors. The tone is one of preaching to the converted. In her own sections, Martin is keen to emphasise her growth, but she also seems unduly embarrassed by her former self. Both her furious feminist awakening and the visible, measurable achievements that ensued are suddenly positioned as somewhat immature, unsophisticated and, worst of all, privileged.

There’s a certain strand of social justice activism that is not always kind to feminists who get their hands dirty. Ten years ago, when Caroline Criado Perez fought a successful battle to have Jane Austen appear on the new £10 note, her detractors were keen to denounce hers as “banknote feminism”. Criado Perez’s campaign had stressed the importance of female visibility and heritage; her critics zeroed in on the fact that Austen’s image would be appearing on money, something that marginalised women sorely lacked. A straightforward achievement was belittled because it was associated with the Bank of England.

In a similar fashion, feminists who work with, or to change, the criminal justice system can find themselves denounced as “carceral feminists”. “The thrust of the accusation,” writes Julie Bindel in Feminism For Women, “is that those of us that want consequences for men who rape and otherwise abuse women are unconcerned with the fact that the prison system is a problem in general.” The accusers tend to ignore the fact that many feminist organisations, such as Bindel’s own Justice for Women, state that they would prefer it if prisons were not necessary, accepting them only as a last resort, given that no one has come up with anything more effective. As Bindel argues: “It should be possible to challenge the race and class hierarchies upheld by the criminal justice system” without putting women at risk by junking it completely.

Indeed, it is possible. But if one does not wish to bear the taint of complicity, it is uncomfortable. Unfortunately for Martin, she seems to have realised this only after she succeeded in making the world a safer place for women.

Alison Phipps, a sociologist at Newcastle University, has made herself a leading voice against so-called carceral feminists. In her 2021 book Me, Not You, she includes Martin’s upskirting law in a list of things that should be opposed on the basis that they “move us away from our ultimate goals”. (She comments, disdainfully, that the new law was announced “to loud applause from mainstream feminists”, because if there’s one thing worse than being practical, it’s being practical and mainstream.) There’s a perfect world out there, and by making it illegal for a man to stick a camera between your legs and take a photo of your crotch, Martin has apparently made it that much harder for us to find it.

Me, Not You is a difficult book to read, because it is so staggeringly misogynistic. Women who seek legal solutions to sexual violence are routinely compared to racists and fascists, their desire for justice dismissed as an unhealthy reaction to trauma. “Being raped,” writes Phipps, “often involves a visceral fear of death, whether the rape is physically violent or not — it is what makes us freeze, instead of fighting back… And if we freeze, perhaps we need our ‘kill’ after the experience is over. Unlike Arya Stark, we do not do our own killing. Instead, we ask the ‘Angry Dad’ or ‘White Knight’ of the state or institution to do it for us.”

I won’t quote the rest of that paragraph, but suffice it to say that Phipps uses the fact that accusations of rape by white women have been used to justify violence against black men to argue that “allegations of sexual violence” — by which she means real ones, as well as false — are “tools of oppression”.

Rape victims have long been demonised, the narrative being that their violation has left them damaged, vengeful and morally suspect. Think, for instance, of Medusa, known not for what was done to her, but for the literal monster it made of her. Centuries later, these myths are still with us. In Down Girl, Kate Manne describes how the rape victim who goes to court “is envisaged not as playing her difficult part in a criminal proceeding, but rather as seeking personal vengeance and moral retribution”. Contrary to Phipps’s claims, imputing vengeful urges to rape victims is not intersectional feminism — or any form of feminism — but the same old patriarchy.

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Then again, in the non-carceral world that Phipps envisages, there would be no rape anyway: “There would be no national borders. There would be no prisons. There would be accountability, but not vengeance. … There would not be powerful groups dominating more marginalised ones through violence.”

One has to admire the chutzpah of a middle-class white woman writing a book that dismisses feminists who engage with the criminal justice system as “bourgeois white women” before offering up John Lennon’s Imagine as a radical solution to injustice. Then again, what is a feminism that retreats from engagement with tainted institutions left with, other than imagination?

In her chapter critiquing the phrase “the police are here to protect us”, Martin indulges in a similar form of straw-manning, only using her younger self, rather than other feminists, as the target: “I believed the police force to be a heroic institution that worked tirelessly to make society safer. They found the murderers and locked them up, they stopped violence before it got out of hand.” Did Martin really have such an idealised vision of the world? Or is it just necessary for her to pretend she did, in order to justify her earlier work? Has she heard the other feminists whispering behind her back, and decided to redeem herself, by rejecting carceral complicity?

I find it hard to believe that someone who went on to achieve so much was ever as naïve as she now implies. And I find it hard to read her undermining her activism. “It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I started to be more of a critical thinker,” she writes — meaning “someone who recognises cultural, social and geographical contexts and applies theories”, as opposed to someone whose analysis is “determined mostly by their automatic emotional response, their personal context and existing opinions”. Of course, Martin’s anger at being upskirted was an “automatic emotional response”; her highly successful legal campaign was rooted in her “personal context and existing opinions”. But now, it seems, she knows better than to let her feelings get the better of her.

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How is this anything other than a step backwards? Society has long taught women to consider our emotional responses unreliable, to view ourselves as less rational than men, less capable of seeing things objectively. The feminist claim that “the personal is political” is turned against us, as though somehow, anything that is too informed by what has happened in our own lives cannot be truly relevant to anyone else.

In this feminism designed for utopia, theory is always more attractive than flesh-and-blood human beings, especially the female body, which is too messy, too unsophisticated, too implicated. It is not a coincidence, I think, that anti-carceral feminism finds common cause with trans activism, both movements raging against the inconvenient women who continue to assert the boundaries of their bodies and the validity of their trauma.

This version of feminism is, in the end, not a turn away from complicity with power, but a turn away from women. It tells us to stay quiet in the aftermath of violation, for the greater good; it tells us to bear the costs of doing nothing, so that we may be pure enough for an imagined utopia. It tells us to behave as if we don’t have bodies, as if we can exist somewhere beyond the world as it is. Imagine there’s no upskirting. Imagine there’s no rape. Imagine there are no women. It isn’t hard to do, for some.

I flick through the papers on my lap. There it is, at the bottom: “Autism, without accompanying intellectual impairment and without accompanying language impairment.” I read that I fulfil all seven diagnostic criteria for what used to be known as Asperger’s Syndrome. In fact, on one of the rating scales where a score of more than 77 points supports a diagnosis, I come in at 154. I feel I’ve done well, by being such a clear-cut case.

Then, my past unfolds. It’s like watching a film with a twist at the end. The signs were there all along: literal thinking, obsessive interests, anxiety, struggles with change. I have always known that I’m autistic. And yet, I haven’t had a clue.

The assessment that led up to my diagnosis lasted for three months. The psychologist interviewed me and spoke to my close family; I did tests and filled out questionnaires. The self-report inventories were a little antiquated in their view on autism, the psychologist told me apologetically. He was right. The questions were based on stereotypical male interests, such as playing boardgames, noticing number plates on cars, or collecting information about different categories of trains.

I envisioned the person whom the questionnaire was aimed at: an anaemic male gamer who rarely leaves his apartment, collects soda cans, can solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute and monotonously drones on and on about the Cretaceous period. I thought about male geeks in popular culture, characters in TV shows like The Big Bang Theory or Atypical.

Until the Nineties, autism was regarded as a condition mostly found in boys — simply because all the early scientific research on autism was done on boys and men. This gender imbalance meant the diagnostic tools established were skewed. Doctors such as Hans Asperger noted that the boys he examined had limited, strong interests, and came to the conclusion that this was an autistic trait. Therefore, only “boyish” special interests came to be associated with autism.

In 1992, the Swedish child psychiatrist Svenny Kopp — one of the first authors to write a scientific article arguing that there were more autistic girls than previously believed — noticed that if a girl was obsessed with, for example, My Little Pony, her male colleagues wouldn’t recognise this as an autistic special interest. Instead, the girls were given other, less specific diagnoses like Semantic Pragmatic Disorder or “learning difficulties”. Autism was only recognised in a girl if the case was very severe.

Medicine did ask itself, at the time, why there seemed to be no girls with so-called “high-functioning” autism — that is, autism without accompanying intellectual impairment. The explanation, doctors decided, was that girls must have to experience a more extensive brain injury, a more profound intellectual disability, before they could develop autism. But Svenny Kopp didn’t buy it. Being female herself was pivotal to her scepticism, she says today. Her ground-breaking thesis, “The Girl Project”, showed that not all autism looks like the kind observed in boys. She is currently conducting a follow up-study of the girls she worked with in the Nineties, who are all now around 35. Her work has received an incredible amount of attention — and offered salvation to many autistic women.

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Autistic women are often good at masking their social shortcomings, because from a young age girls tend to be drilled harder in social intercourse than boys. Masking happens unconsciously, and from an early age; children with autism withdraw and make themselves invisible, as they carefully observe the play and speech of their fellows, before attempting to copy them.

When I was a child, my peers sometimes resented me without me understanding why. I realised that I must have been misunderstood somehow, but couldn’t see when or how. A fear took root in me. Without knowing it, I studied social interaction through the books, TV shows, plays and films that I devoured. I began to minimise risks in my friendships by letting others make decisions, so that no one would get annoyed. I often found myself in constellations that may have looked like a trio from the outside, but were really two best friends and one backup: me. I listened, asked questions, said yes to every suggestion, expressed almost no needs of my own, kept confidences but rarely offered any in return, and became everyone’s most amenable friend.

Girls with autism are often interpreted as “sweet”, shy and acquiescent. They don’t take up space in a group or stir up trouble. By adulthood, their masking can be so honed that they become social chameleons, who blend in seamlessly in any company. But the long-term suppression of their own true self often leads to exhaustion and poor mental health. Those who seek out an assessment almost always have a history of anxiety and depression, my psychologist tells me. If you don’t interpret reality in the same way as those around you, of course you will feel unwell. Research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry states that, in the UK, “10% of those who died by suicide had evidence of elevated autistic traits, indicating likely undiagnosed autism”.

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Nevertheless, moving through the world without masking at all is near-impossible for an autist. There would be too many conflicts and misunderstandings, as neurotypical people have a hard time grasping that not everyone is like them. In search of relief, as an adolescent I spent all my time at the stable. My relationship with horses felt peaceful and undemanding compared to my relationships with other people. I couldn’t decipher the codes, couldn’t understand what was implied. It was as though something went on between others that was imperceptible to me — something subtle and ever-changing.

The more “high functioning” you are, the easier it is to study expected behaviours, mask your autism and behave on the majority’s terms — in social relationships, in the schoolyard, and on the job market. After university, I transformed my special interests into a profession and started working in radio and television. There, communication was simpler; there were rules. You wrote a script before speaking and all you had to do was read it aloud. No one was allowed to interrupt. When the green light came on in the studio, the floor was mine.

But the better you are at “acting normal”, the less seriously you will be taken when explaining your difficulties. “Intelligence can compensate for so much,” the artist Linn, who was diagnosed at age 22, told me. The way her strengths have obscured her difficulties has been a constant frustration in her life. “If I hadn’t been so smart, they might have noticed something sooner. When others perceive you as intellectually clever, they struggle to understand that you can have all these problems. It doesn’t add up that someone who is good at thinking can fail so utterly at things that are easy for others.”

After my assessment, I searched for books on autism in grown women, but couldn’t find many. Most books focused on children and adolescents, but autism is not something you grow out of. You can get better at coping, but it can’t be trained away and there is no medication. It is a life-long condition.

And so, I decided to write a book to fill the silence, The Autists: Women on the Spectrum. I interviewed autistic women in Sweden, including Linn. Their stories echoed mine: growing up feeling different without understanding why; experiencing bullying in school and constant misunderstandings in communication with others; suffering from depression and anxiety as an adult; and then finally finding peace in being given the right diagnosis.

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Autism has always been present in humanity, according to neurologists such as Oliver Sacks. But throughout history, the language used to describe autistic people has varied, from “withdrawn” and “eccentric” to “odd”. The earliest descriptions of what is thought to be autism date back to the 13th century, and refer to the Italian monk Brother Juniper, one of the Grey Friars in St Francis’s following. Of course, we can never be sure about a posthumous diagnosis, but scientists have researched the lives of famous historical individuals — using source materials such as diaries, letters, testimonies from relatives and medical assessments — and tried to determine whether they might have received an autism diagnosis had they been alive today. Women often mentioned are poet Emily Dickinson, philosopher Simone Weil and author Patricia Highsmith.

But autism as a concept wasn’t born until the early 20th century — and back then it only really applied to men. To have grown up with undiagnosed autism is to have suffered difficulties that didn’t exist. I close my eyes and rewind my own tape again, seeing the clues from my childhood and teenage years and life as a young adult. What if I had known sooner? How would my life have turned out? I tell myself that the alternative is impossible: during my childhood, female autists without intellectual impairment, as a recognised category, didn’t exist. No one could have given me a diagnosis. My life thus far is not a series of years lost. But still, I mourn not being able to decipher the signs before. I repressed everything that was true in me, and kept striving towards further defeat.

My diagnosis is the best thing that has happened for my self-esteem. After the assessment, I went from failed neurotypical to regular autist. I understood who I was, and the relief was indescribable. My anxiety receded, and I lowered my dosage of antidepressants. I started to like my quirky sides. I found the strength to say no to things I had previously thought I must do. I shrunk my life, peeling away things and musts, protecting everything that made me feel good. I became proud of my difference.

It’s a new year. One day when parents are invited to join the children in class, I visit my daughter’s school. I watch the children colour in drawings of animals. When the bell rings for lunch, we walk to the canteen, where chilli fish and boiled potatoes are on the menu. We choose the table in the farthest corner. Sitting there, alone, is a girl from another class. I take a seat across from her. On her plate are three pancakes. No toppings. She looks at me.

“I get to eat this because I’m autistic,” she says, and puts a piece of pancake in her mouth.

“Me too,” I say.

As a beneficiary of this new-found openness, I do not wish to appear ungrateful. Even so, there’s something about it that unsettles me. When Lisa Snowdon calls her show Midweek Menopause Madness, or the writer Kate Muir describes her “deranged perimenopausal mood swings”, or the actress Martine McCutcheon compares the approach of menopause with “losing your damn mind”, I am desperate to empathise. But I worry about the renewed embrace of the language of craziness to describe being an older woman.

“Thinking about menopause,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Change, “is like thinking about the menstrual cycle: there are two schools of thought”: “One holds that nothing of any significance is taking place, and the other that the stress and strain of what is taking place are so acute that sensible behaviour is not to be expected. Both kinds of arguments conceal crude misogyny. The ‘nothing happening’ school reserves the right to despise women who are encountering difficulties, and the ‘Sturm und Drang’ school allows itself to treat femaleness as a pathological condition.”

In talking about menopause, it seems that we are still in thrall to these two extremes. I fear that in its desire to reject the “nothing happening” state of affairs, which makes women who struggle with menopause feel wimpish and inferior, today’s menopause activism risks going all-out for “Sturm und Drang”. But what about those of us who do not want to be co-opted into this narrative, either?

The legacy of medical misogyny means there is pressure on women to emphasise the severity of symptoms in order to be taken seriously; we have so often been told our pain is “all in our heads”. Yet there is a simultaneous, overlapping history of female emotions — things which are indeed “all in our heads” — being pathologised. Women’s feelings have long been stripped of any social and political context, and therefore treated as purely biological, which makes it easier to apply the label of madness.

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Given the ways in which women’s expressions of anger and anxiety are so often used to discredit us, I question just how liberating some of today’s “menopause madness” rhetoric is. “Some of our negative feelings about menopause,” wrote Greer, “are definitely the result of our intolerance for the expression of female anger.” For many of us, middle age is the first time we feel confident enough to acknowledge the validity of certain emotions. In her 2019 memoir Flash Count Diary, Darcy Steinke describes herself feeling “angry more often, a menopausal condition that doctors classify as hormonal irritability but that I’m starting to see as a gateway to authenticity”. If we see a woman’s expression of anger purely as an unpleasant biological symptom, rather than an acceptance of feelings that she might once have suppressed, we are in danger of undermining her. When I was younger, I was often told that my resistance to male authority was not “normal”, and I believed it. Is it pathological not to believe it anymore?

It is no small thing to tell the world that women your age are going insane, regardless of whether or not you blame this on hormonal depletion. As Elinor Cleghorn writes in Unwell Women, the discovery of oestrogen a century ago did not lead to a straightforward replacement of “old ideas about women being ‘naturally’ defective and deficient”: “Where female nature had, in the past, been blanketed as ‘hysterical’ and ‘neurotic’, now it was hormonal.” Personal accounts in a book produced by campaign group Menopause Mandate, entitled It’s Beyond a Joke, position the benefits of Hormone Replace Therapy as proof that women are not going “properly” mad, yet the distinction seems to me very fine. In the age of Karen, we have not evolved to a stage at which accounts of menopausal derangement can be treated as politically neutral. The shouty middle-aged woman is not taken seriously, regardless of whether she is categorised as mad, bad or simply medication deprived.

I am conscious that, in writing this, I may be accused both of being anti-scientific (because I find the biological realities politically inconvenient) and unsympathetic (because I am having a less extreme menopause than other women). In a piece for The Guardian, Kate Muir claims that “while some lucky women joyously ‘sail through’ the menopause with little more than red clover tea, the reality is that 80% have symptoms — from brain fog to anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, exhaustion, vaginal dryness and stiff joints”. I worry about being perceived as one of these “lucky” red clover tea women — a traitor to the menopausal cause, oblivious to the suffering of her peers.

I do not find this life stage easy. The reason I cringe every time a woman my age seeks to bond over our shared “craziness” is due to my own particular sensitivities. I have spent time as a patient in psychiatric hospitals; the credibility that comes with being perceived as “sane” is not something I treat lightly. I am not prepared to let go of it, in order to feel I am part of the “menopausal club”.

Besides, I am not the only person who finds the evidence base for “menopausal madness” shaky, and not all of us are feminists. Just how many women are having severe menopause symptoms is not a settled matter. Recent research puts those experiencing measurable changes in brain function during menopause at 23%. While this is not insignificant, it does not seem to justify the way in which all women are now primed to suffer from “menopause brain”.

It is also unclear why symptoms differ so much. A 2022 article in the BMJ argued that “social and cultural attitudes contribute to the varied experience of menopause”, and that over-medicalisation risks “collapsing the wide range of experience at the average age associated with this natural process into a narrowly defined disease requiring treatment”. The authors estimated the prevalence of moderate to severe symptoms to be 16-40%, based on a 2021 survey of 11,771 women. They also suggested that women’s expectations and experiences of menopause were strongly influenced by “personal, family, and sociocultural factors”, and by “social values around reproduction and ageing”.

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The article was controversial. Some read in it a puritanical insistence that women should “keep calm and carry on”, despite there being treatments available to alleviate their suffering. To these readers, the authors’ resistance to medicalisation sounded like a return to the “nothing happening” school of thought described by Greer. The debate captured much about the push-pull nature of women’s relationship to medical authority. Are we validated by being labelled, or does validation come when we resist? And what might be the relationship between validation and truth?

My own view is that it is not in the least invalidating to acknowledge that how we feel about our bodies and minds is influenced by how we are told we should feel. Indeed, this is something with which women struggle at all stages of our lives. When teenage girls are described as prone to social contagion, some see in this a claim that their feelings are less real or painful. What I see is that women and girls are always presented with a limited range of acceptable things to express. Right now, “menopausal craziness” is socially and politically forgivable in a way that middle-aged women’s activism regarding other issues is not. This is not to say that hormones or bodily changes are irrelevant, but that the “mad” middle-aged woman is being constructed and discussed using only fragments of an experiential whole.

To be clear, this is not a call to be silent about menopause, or a dismissal of medical intervention when it is part of a holistic view of potential symptoms. Much good has been done in recent years by organisations such as The Menopause Charity and Menopause Mandate. I know women who say Hormone Replacement Therapy has changed their lives, and fully support attempts to make it more accessible and affordable for those who need it. Nonetheless, I resist the tendency to identify as menopausal crazy women. There are enough people in the world who will do this for us; we don’t need to do it to ourselves.

Rosie moved into our ramshackle house 25 years ago, completely independent, and a fabulous support when we had school-aged children. A decade later, my parents threw their lot in with us, too. We bought a neglected and damp Edwardian pile around the corner, which had once been a care home. As my father’s Parkinson’s threatened to become more severe, we would need ramps, grab rails, widened doorways. And I would learn how to be a carer.

“Carer” is a tricky word. It’s a noun that brings with it a hint of transaction, of imbalance. The NHS defines it as anyone who looks after someone who “cannot cope without their support”, and clarifies: “The care they give is unpaid.” This definition is all the more uncomfortable if you are caring for someone you love.

First, I was supporting my mother caring for my father; then watching over her as she negotiated life without him; finally, after my Ma died, I became Granny Rosie’s full-time “extra pair of hands”, as she puts it. Each act has been one of love, but it has also been tough and distressing. It is challenging, caring for those who once cared for you, managing the physical and sometimes mental life without a loss of dignity, the tiredness and the loss of privacy. And it is endless. Being a carer is about meeting someone else’s needs, every single day, at all hours. If you can’t be there all the time, it’s about finding someone who can — a neighbour, a relative, a friend.

Many people, finding the relentless struggle impossible, have to leave their jobs. A spike in the number of people giving up work to care for family members was reported last year — 84% of them women. Most carers talk about feeling guilty whatever they do — that terrible disappointment on a beloved father’s face when the visit is over too soon, the falsely bright goodbye from a mother who is refusing to give in. The feeling, when you are caring for someone with dementia, when they can’t even recognise your face anymore.

On top of the emotional challenges are the practical ones, the financial ones. How do you agree with siblings over whether an ageing parent needs a residential home or a paid carer? Where do you turn, when you can afford neither to leave your job nor pay someone to care for a beloved relative? When there is so little state support on offer?

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Without unpaid carers, the NHS would collapse. There are 10.6 million of us in the UK, and we save the government £162 billion per year in England and Wales. (For context, in 2020-21, the NHS received an estimated £164 billion per year in funding.) Despite this, the Carer’s Allowance is only a measly £76.75 per week (up from last year’s £69.70). To qualify, you have to spend at least 35 hours a week caring for someone: a fulltime job. If an extra £7 a week seems paltry, consider the Carer’s Leave Act, which is about to come into force. It will give employees the right to take leave to provide care — unpaid — for a mere five days. But if carers withdrew their labour, the system would simply collapse. Hospital beds would be flooded, care homes would be unable to cope with the influx, the NHS would crack under the strain.

When the Dilnot Commission on Funding of Care and Support was published in 2011, one of its key recommendations was that there should be a cap placed on an individual’s contributions towards their own care. The figure was set at £35,000. The intention was to protect those who have spent their working lives paying National Insurance contributions from the sort of “extreme” care costs that would force them to sell their homes. The asset threshold for those in state-funded residential care should, it suggested, increase from £22,500 to £100,000. There should be greater integration between health and social care services, and better information for care users. The Commission was thorough, it was fair, and it achieved royal assent in 2015.

But nearly 13 years on — and despite the tough lessons taught by the pandemic — almost none of the Dilnot Commission’s key recommendations has been implemented. Cameron, May and Johnson all stalled. Theresa May changed the name of the Department of Health to the Department of Health and Social Care in 2018, as a nod to better integration. But, as in so many government departments, this one has seen a revolving door of ministers, who have made few lasting changes. Now, Britain’s care system is at breaking point. There is no fairness in who pays what; there is no plan for those who do not have children to step in and help, or those whose families are estranged or living too far away. As the NHS remains starved of funds — Rishi Sunak has just announced the “most radical” reform in NHS history: his plan to make £10 billion in savings — the situation is only worsening. In May, the Prime Minister killed off the Conservatives’ flagship social care plan.

Social care is not seen as a vote-winner. I’d hazard that this is at least partly because care is seen as a women’s issue. By the age of 46, women have a 50% chance of being a carer. Men don’t have equivalent odds until they are 57, which suggests that men mostly care for their partners, whereas women care for everyone. And though there are men actively campaigning in this field, the blunt fact is that the majority of carers, paid or unpaid, are women, and the vast majority of legislators are men. In September 2020, at the beginning of the period of local, tiered lockdowns, not a single woman attended Cobra meetings, and there was not one female nurse on the Sage Cobra team. If the Government is going to address the crisis in care, it needs to listen to those actually providing it. The trouble is we often don’t see the point in complaining. We just get on with it.

There is also a growing number of young carers looking after parents or siblings — the Children’s Society estimated in 2021 there might be as many as 800,000 carers between the ages of 5 and 17. If they have managed to stay in school, they are often alienated from their classmates because of the unpredictability of their lives. There are few advocating for this often invisible group of carers. Those that do, for instance the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Young Carers and Young Adult Carers, have little power to effect change.

Carers are everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Most of us, even if we long for compassionate support from the Government, take on the role willingly, regardless of the consequences to ourselves. I am lucky: I didn’t have to give up my job to become a carer, but many have no choice, and find themselves pushed further to the margins of society. The current political narrative is that a valuable life is a “productive” one — one that makes the nation money. It belittles both those who give care and those who receive it. It ignores the fact that women and men who have spent their lives contributing to society deserve to be looked after, not seen as a burden, or a “trouble”.

This is where things got hairy: with each selection, the rejected partners would exit past the person doing the picking, who would see their faces for the first time. The point was torment, obviously: behold the sea of beautiful people you just canned for totally arbitrary reasons. The potential for regret in this moment was so powerful that the show eventually introduced a new gimmick, whereby the featured contestant had one “golden lifesaver” that could be used to save a passing reject.

In the era of dating apps, users are of course spared the anguish of a physical confrontation with all the people they’ve categorically rejected; the algorithm is the man behind the curtain, mercilessly dismissing everyone who doesn’t fit your preferences, out of sight, out of mind. We tell ourselves it is more efficient this way, ordering a human being via the same box-checking exercise we use to build a burrito bowl at Chipotle. We tell ourselves, more importantly, that not doing this is a risky proposition, maybe even a dangerous one. Without the algorithm, who knows what you might end up with? He could be short. Or a Nickelback fan. Or, gulp, a Republican.

Everything’s Fine, a new novel by Cecilia Rabess, seems like a cautionary tale about the dangers of too-indiscriminate, non-algorithmic dating. The relationship in this story is between two people who would never have matched on Tinder: Jess, a progressive and professionally ambitious black woman who works as a Wall Street trader, and Josh, a pragmatic fellow trader who describes himself as a moderate, but who Jess insists (sometimes to his face) is the personification of conservative cishet white male privilege. As a complicating factor, clues littered throughout the book suggest Josh might actually be Jewish — or rather, this would complicate things, if Jess had an iota of curiosity about it, but she doesn’t. Her obliviousness seems to be shared by Rabess herself: the only definitely Jewish character in this book, the main antagonist, happens to be a grasping, greedy, tax-dodging hedge fund manager.

Where other people see humans, Jess sees stereotypes. She is obsessed with voting habits as a proxy for character. If she had a dating app profile, she would emblazon it with one of those “Republicans swipe left” warnings. In this, of course, she would only be doing what the media has lately identified as the sole sensible strategy for selecting a romantic partner: in our obsession with “red flags”, political beliefs have become the ultimate dating dealbreaker. Everything’s Fine has already been cancelled on Goodreads by people arguing that a progressive black character dating a conservative white one is a way to “excuse racists”.

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A recent piece in the Atlantic reads out the writing on the wall, straightforwardly advising that politically heterogamous partnerships are a bad idea — “because research suggests that marriages across political or religious lines (when those things matter significantly to each partner) can be less happy, more conflicted, and more likely to end in divorce than marriages where spouses agree on religion and politics”. Note that the caveat appears only parenthetically, as if the eventuality that these things might not matter significantly to each partner is barely worth mentioning.

Indeed, to believe that politics is a mere drop in the bucket of multitudes that each human being contains is not only outré in elite circles, but often cited, contemptuously, as evidence in and of itself of a certain political affiliation. Jill Filipovic, in an essay responding to the Atlantic article, writes:

“There’s an impulse, especially among those on the moderate right, to talk about politics as simply a set of preferences, like what kind of shows you might select on Netflix. But politics, especially in the post-Trump era … reflect entirely different goals and certainly different values, as well as very different ideas about what our country and our world should be, and — perhaps most crucially for a marriage — very different ideas about the rights, rules, and opportunities for women, men, and children.”

It’s a bit of a Kafka trap: push back against the defining importance of politics, and ugh, that’s just what a Right-winger would say. Among progressives, it is increasingly an article of faith that the personal is, and always will be, political; if you don’t think so, well, you’re not one of us.

I suspect, though, that this extremism is less Trump’s fault than Tinder’s. Algorithmic dating is all about finding reasons to write off entire categories of people as undateable — and to be savage about it. If a certain type of human being doesn’t spark joy, then into the bin they go. For women, particularly, to be as discriminating as possible in one’s romantic life is positioned as an act of self-care: you are holding out for what you deserve, and what you deserve is a person who checks every box, meets every criteria. To give an unqualified man a chance represents a failure to respect yourself.

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And yet, I’m not sure that intentionally ensconcing oneself in a silo of perfect-on-paper people — and, by extension, seeing the values of everyone who thinks differently as an existential threat — is the best thing for any of us. Filipovic’s essay unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of entrenching oneself in this mindset: how intolerance gives rise to caricature, how stereotypes creep in to fill the empty spaces left by ignorance. Conservative men, in this view, are not just unsuitable partners but actual monsters: “With the demise of Roe v. Wade,” she writes, “a vote for a Republican politician is a vote to criminalise abortion, which is a vote to force women to risk their lives in pregnancy … If a man is willing to vote for that, why would you trust him with your body and your medical decisions? … Is he the man you want making medical decisions for your daughter, or teaching your son what masculinity looks like?

As visions of romance go, this one is absurdly catastrophic, not to mention dehumanising to everyone involved — the conservative men, obviously, but also the women who are depicted as brainwashed traitors to the sisterhood for even considering marrying one. (What of the fact that many of the most fervently pro-life voters are, themselves, women?) Its proponents might want to imagine how they’d feel if the tables were turned — if liberal women were being similarly caricatured and dismissed as amoral, unmarriageable ogres based on their voting patterns alone. In fact, this has happened within living memory: in 1992, the recently-deceased Pat Robertson decreed that feminism was “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. This was news to the happily married non-witchcraft-practising feminists of the world, who rightly roasted Robertson for his ridiculous pronouncement. Had the man ever even met a feminist?

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At the risk of stating the obvious, even couples who vote the same way still have differences, political or otherwise; they still disagree, fight, and get divorced. The Atlantic article frets that “fewer than half (47%) of politically mixed married couples report they are ‘completely satisfied with their family life,’ compared with ‘61% of couples in which both spouses are Republicans and 55% where both are Democrats’.” That’s one way to put it; the other way, of course, would be to note that your chances of marital satisfaction are roughly 50/50 whether you pair off within your own political tribe or not, making it a pretty impractical criterion for deciding who to marry.

Of course, this is the type of pragmatic take that Josh is always offering in Everything’s Fine, which inevitably infuriates Jess. “It’s just a hat,” he says, when she discovers a red MAGA baseball cap, a gag gift from a fishing trip, stuffed in a storage bin in the home they share. “It can’t hurt you.”

“But it’s not just a hat,” the book sombrely intones. “It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings … and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings—”

That paragraph continues for practically a full page — there is apparently no malady in the world for which the hat is not an avatar — but you get the idea. It’s all about going to extremes: your Republican vote is literally killing women, your feminist book club is full of lesbian witches, your little red hat might as well be a KKK hood. Josh, of course, is the bad guy for thinking that none of this makes any sense: he’s the oblivious toxic white male who not only brought the hat into the house, but is so blinded by his own privilege that he cannot sense its evil.

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Because this is how Jess sees Josh, she treats him terribly, not that she treats herself much better. Her perpetual sense of victimhood, her certainty that she is at a permanent disadvantage owing to her race and sex and middle-class background, leads her to both take advantage of others and to sabotage herself. And while the book ends on an ambiguous note, her relationship with Josh is almost certainly doomed — not because she’s black and he’s white, or because she’s a liberal and he’s a conservative, but because he views her as a person while she views him as a collection of labels. Jess sometimes says she loves Josh, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t even see him.

That inability to look past someone’s labels has always been with us, embodied by the concept of the dating dealbreaker. Sometimes it’s political (“I could never be with someone who votes Republican”), sometimes it’s practical (“I could never be with someone who hates dogs”), sometimes it’s utterly arbitrary (“I could never love a man who wears pants tighter than I do.”) But really, we have no idea who we could or couldn’t love. For all our attempts to plan and predict and control our romantic destinies, human beings have never been good at knowing what — or who — will make them happy. And god, isn’t that terrifying?

In a world where love makes fools of us all, red flags, political or otherwise, operate as a sort of fantasy: a story you tell yourself about what kind of person you are, or perhaps what kind of person you’d like to be, dressed up as a declaration about what kind of person you could never be with. The dealbreaker is a way of imposing order: I know where the line is. I’m in charge. These stories can be comforting. They can be exciting. But that doesn’t make them true.

For most people, this is obviously excessive and easily dismissed as laughable, if not mystifying (cigar store Indians are such an archaic item that most Americans have never seen one). But for those who believe strongly in editing books for sensitivity, stories like this present a conundrum: to acknowledge the inanity of this particular read would be to open the door to questions about the legitimacy of the whole practice. Hence, anyone who draws attention to something like the scalp/scalpel complaint — as I did when I stumbled across the article about it — is accused of “cherry-picking“, using outlier examples to slander an otherwise noble and useful profession.

If cherries are being picked, it is from an exceptionally well-endowed tree, to the point where it surely makes sense to ask whether there’s something about the concept of sensitivity reading — or the people attracted to it — that lends itself to this sort of excess. If these incidents are not representative of the norm, they nevertheless suggest that a highly authoritarian strain of identitarianism has penetrated publishing; even the relatively uncancellable Bret Easton Ellis came in for pre-publication criticism recently from sensitivity readers, who complained that his new novel “was not a ‘positive’ portrayal of homosexuality”.

But amid all the arguments about what sensitivity reading is, what seems far more interesting is what it apparently isn’t: there is not so much as a whiff of a pretence that this type of editing improves the literary quality of a book. One of the most common responses to those who question sensitivity reading is that they’re no different from any other subject matter expert, like the palaeontologist who reads Jurassic Park. This is an argument predicated on the somewhat crude notion that simply to be possessed of a given skin tone, genital configuration, or sexual orientation automatically conveys an unparalleled expertise in what all people of that given sex, race or orientation think, feel, and/or find offensive. The one time I served as a sensitivity reader, as a favour to a male writer who wanted his manuscript vetted for potential offences, it was not my “lived experience” as a woman that proved useful. It was my embarrassingly deep knowledge of the toxic dynamics and idiotic slap fights that periodically roil the world of young adult literature; indeed, anyone who shared a similar fascination with extremely online bullshit could have done the job.

But leaving aside the problematic nature of asking one person of a given identity to speak for all people of that identity, the idea that this is just another type of editing is belied by the way that authors themselves talk about the practice, which centres not on the quality of the story but the morality of the person telling it:

“I don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t want to be an accidental asshole — so I’m eternally grateful for the sensitivity readers who’ve saved me from myself.”

“EVERYONE is biased, we can’t help it. We are limited to our own perspective and our own upbringings and culture and education. And so it’s so important to have those sensitivity readers. Not only did they help me not offend people (I hope), they also taught me about myself.”

“It’s not being PC; it’s being a decent human being”

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It’s hard not to notice that for a sizeable contingent of authors, hiring a sensitivity reader is only nominally about accuracy, and really about ticking that “decent human being” box. The sensitivity read serves as an indulgence which, once purchased, gives you permission to tell certain kinds of stories. Whether the resulting story is entertaining or well-written is irrelevant; it’s morally good. That’s what matters.

Meanwhile, for writers who are perceived as out of step with the new orthodoxy, the conflation of getting a sensitivity read with being a decent human being can send a powerful message to capitulate and conform, or else. Nice story you’ve got there; it would be a shame if someone found it offensive. Sensitivity readers are not supposed to be censors, but in practice, the line is blurred: it is understood by authors that declining to make suggested sensitivity edits is likely to result in a book being cancelled, with all the reputational damage that entails — this, according to Anthony Horowitz, was his primary reason for not fighting the inanity of the scalp/scalpel conflation — and sensitivity readers are not above using their influence to kill a project before it’s got off the ground.

That said, this is not an argument for getting rid of sensitivity readers. Sensitivity reads are less a moral signifier than a matter of craft, one some writers will find useful, and some will not. To write fiction is to write imaginatively outside the bounds of one’s own experience, and any tool that allows someone to do this with confidence — including employing a sensitivity reader — is certainly fair game. In my own books, when writing about experiences that are truly foreign to me, I tend to collect research from multiple people and perspectives, establishing a baseline pool of knowledge and then letting imagination take over from there. But I also care less that the result is authentic than that it is engaging.

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Meanwhile, a cultish conviction has developed within the writing community of late: that the most important thing a novel can be is “authentic”. And yet, some of the best works of fiction are anything but: the satire of Gary Shteyngart, the lowkey horror of Shirley Jackson, the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the time-travelling raptures of Diana Gabaldon. These books aren’t authentic, but something far better: fantastical, or imaginative, or absurd, or terrifying, and to alter them in the name of authenticity would be to drain them of their spark. What makes a story compelling is not its adherence to reality; it’s whether it feels true, in the moment, on the page.

If anything, this is what troubles me about the push to normalise sensitivity reading: that it seems to signal a narrowing of the literary landscape, a massive cultural shift in what we understand the purpose of art to be. The new paradigm is one in which we worry less about communicating an idea than about the specific words we use. Consider the recent, viral chart suggesting more sensitive alternatives to “violent” language in the workplace, the apparent intention being to make people communicate with their colleagues in the colourless, ultra-literal style that we use to make ourselves understood by Siri. Despite their alleged purpose, these guides do not actually foment better communication; they hamstring it, imbuing every exchange with the subtextual fear of how an uncharitable person might misinterpret what is being said.

If this is a bad way to be in the office, it is a worse way to write a book — or to read one, for that matter. But of course, most people don’t read this way. One of the most peculiar things about sensitivity readers is how very far their concerns are from those of actual readers, who tend to be far too interested in what’s happening on the page to wallow in the offensive implications of this or that individual word choice. Three years ago, the New York Times review of the novel American Dirt made much of the book’s “strange, excited fascination in commenting on gradients of brown skin” — the type of thing a sensitivity reader would surely flag as potentially problematic. But when I read the book myself, even despite having been primed to notice said “fascination”, the mentions of skin tone were such a seamless part of the story that they didn’t even register. One imagines that the millions of readers who made the book a massive bestseller were similarly unperturbed.

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The question, then, is: who is actually served by this type of editing? The rare reader who would actually take offence at the use of the word “scalpel” in Horowitz’s book is entitled to his feelings, but he can always read another book (or better yet, write a scathing review complaining about this one’s rampant bigotry). The implication of sensitivity reading, though, is that every book should be written with this person in mind, that his sensibilities should form some sort of literary standard. I’ve tried to imagine how this might play out in other creative fields — what would happen if, for instance, the restaurant industry employed sensitivity tasters to flag any dish that contained too much spice? Certainly, the chefs would baulk at this: why should the sensibilities of those who can’t tolerate spicy food supersede those of the people who consume ghost peppers recreationally? What greater good can possibly be served in making sure every dish is tailored to the tastes of the most sensitive, when there are so many ingredients, and the table is so very big?

Of course, some creators want to centre sensitivity in their work, and they should — because diversity, real diversity, is about there being something for everyone, including those who read books in gleeful anticipation of finding something to get mad about. But surely there should also be room for readers, and writers, who simply don’t share those sensibilities. Writers who value an engaging story over an authentic one, writers who are confident and unapologetic in their ability to imagine the interior lives of their characters. Writers who don’t want to treat their readers with sensitivity — because they would rather tear your heart out, make you swoon or rage or cry, and leave you breathless.

I have lived through an abusive relationship and have spoken about it in Parliament. I was reminded of making that speech earlier this week — the daily trauma that inspired it, how hard it was to make and, afterwards, the overwhelming support of my colleagues. That was the Labour Party I joined.

On Tuesday, when two of those colleagues traded that sympathy for aggression, shouting down women in the Chamber, it felt like a very different Labour Party. I was defending the need to protect vulnerable women in single-sex spaces, and had just criticised Scotland’s Gender Reform Bill, when Ben Bradshaw yelled his disapproval at me. Sitting nearby, Lloyd Russell-Moyle went puce — perhaps less surprising — and started to heckle every woman who spoke of their similar concerns. Later, when Miriam Cates, a Conservative MP and friend, spoke of her concerns around safeguarding, he accused her of being a bigot before crossing over to the Tory side of the Chamber to sit on the side benches, very close to her, staring as if to intimidate her.

“I recognise that I failed to control [my] passion”, was how he later “apologised”. In other words, he had done nothing wrong. It wasn’t his fault; it was ours for daring to disagree with him. “Look what you made me do,” as my ex-partner would say when I had caused him to explode — perhaps by doing or wearing something he didn’t entirely like or voicing an opinion he didn’t want to hear.

After Tuesday’s outburst, came the silence. Not from Russell-Moyle, but from Keir Starmer’s office. It’s a cycle I’ve come to know well. First, speak up in defence of women’s sex-based rights. And then, face the consequences. Alone.

The only message I’ve had from the Party since the debate was from the Deputy Whips’ office yesterday — I was chastised for not attending a routine Statutory Instruments Committee sitting because… I was busy being shouted down by two Labour MPs and completely forgot. To be fair, Emily Thornberry, shadow Attorney General, did come out and say that the debate wasn’t “Labour’s finest hour”, before clarifying that this was because it distracted from “the most vulnerable in society, who are trans people”. Keir, meanwhile, said nothing. It was as if I didn’t exist — but, then, perhaps the Leader’s Office wishes I didn’t.

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I should have been the perfect Labour MP. I was a single mum. I was on benefits, which topped up my salary as a Teaching Assistant. I understood hardship, and what ordinary women wanted and needed from politics. The year before I was elected, I earned less than £10,000. On my first day in Westminster, I had to borrow money to pay for the train fare. I was a woman who knew what struggle meant. And I was a Member of Parliament, having turned a “True Blue” Tory seat Red for the first time in history.

So, what did the Labour Party make of my historic win? Well, it was exciting at first. My face was plastered on all the Big Screens at conference. They showed a film of my victory. When Labour’s leading men, such as Jeremy Corbyn, Len McClusky or Ian McNichol joyfully exclaimed “We won Canterbury!”, there were cheers and a standing ovation. They all used that victory in their speeches, but I rarely heard mention of my name. Not one of them had been to Canterbury to campaign. Nobody in the Party had expected me to win. The total outsider, the only red dot in a sea of blue, was only here because of the swell of Corbyn mania. Two years on, when that bubble burst with the Party’s crushing defeat and the rejection of Corbyn, my tiny majority increased ten times.

Then I liked a tweet.

It was fairly innocuous: Piers Morgan had replied “Do you mean women?” to a tweet advising “individuals with a cervix” to get screened for cancer. I think I probably knew there was a chance it would cause me some trouble, but it seemed a safe way to enter this debate publicly. That’s when the floodgates really opened. Faced with a tsunami of online vitriol, including calls for my job and even my life, I then posted a tweet of my own, asking why it was “transphobic” to say that only women have a cervix. What happened next was a blur. I received more threats. The alarm bells went off in Pink News that another Terf was in town (happy to be part of the gang!). Owen Jones issued a grovelling apology for attending my election rally (not as sorry as I am!), while seemingly every Labour university student group called on the Party to stop me being an MP (obviously not students of how politics works!).

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But from the Labour Party — silence. They think the transgender debate is nothing more than a culture-war issue. A weapon used by the Tories to whip up division. It is a smokescreen that has nothing to do with women’s rights. Ordinary people don’t care about mixed-sex changing rooms. Or the prospect of men entering women’s refuges. Or the erasure of the word “cervix”. What this debate is really about, women are told, is bigotry and prejudice.

I know that is not the case.

Then I think of the flowers. After I liked that tweet and started to speak up, the flowers started to arrive: more than 350 bunches in just two days. And there were messages. Thousands of them. From women and men telling me they were grateful for somebody speaking out. From people who voted Labour, Tory, Lib Dem and Green. Every day, survivors of domestic violence still message me, telling me not to stop. Keir may dismiss this as a culture-war issue, but for these women, it is most definitely not.

And I know I’m not the only MP in the party who thinks this — I’m just the only one who feels I have nothing to lose by speaking out. After all, there’s no front-bench job offer for the only Labour MP in my county. Many of us know that self-identifying as a woman does not make a person a biological woman who shares our lived experience. But for obvious reasons, these views are not voiced outside of closed rooms or private and secret WhatsApp groups. Even there, the most senior MPs often do not post a single word; they know exactly what’s at stake and not many of them want to be me. So for now, they mostly remain silent.

For all of Corbyn’s faults — and I was an outspoken critic of all of them — his party’s General Secretary, Jennie Formby, came to every meeting of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party that she was invited to, even when she was going through chemotherapy. David Evans, her replacement, has been two or three times, yet we are the biggest group in the Party, the largest group of women in Parliament, and we all won or held onto our seats against the odds in 2019. Who knows? Perhaps we may even know a thing or two about politics or winning? (His suggestion that us ladies would do well to read the latest doorstep scripts written by staff didn’t exactly go down well.)

Is it starting to look like Labour has a women problem? It certainly is for the 7,000-strong group of women members, councillors and activists who make up Labour Women’s Declaration and had a stall at last year’s party conference refused. It is for Lesbian Labour, who were also stopped from exhibiting at last year’s conference. It is for Dr Karen Ingala-Smith, the formidable feminist campaigner who compiles a list of women killed in the UK each year which is then read out in Parliament by Jess Phillips every International Women’s Day, and who had her membership rejected after she made a few gender-critical joke tweets featuring kittens. And of course it is for me, ostracised for voicing not only my own opinions but those of thousands of others who are starting to question the Party they have dedicated so much of their lives to.

In each case, a woman who dared to voice an opinion was ignored or neglected. One of the traits of being in an abusive relationship is “stonewalling”. The abuser will go quiet for days on end. They will stew, not speak to you, turn their back on you. Trust me when I say I don’t take this lightly: but what I feel now, after six years of being cold-shouldered by the Labour Party, conjures memories of how I felt in that abusive relationship. When I come home at night, I feel low-level trauma at my political isolation.

Sitting on the front bench with Keir are MPs who defended Corbyn or remained silent when the rest of us were calling him out for antisemitism. Sitting on our front bench is an MP who was voted in as a Conservative. Not sitting on the front bench, however, is a single MP who believes that biological sex can’t be erased at the stroke of a pen. To go into a workplace, when nothing you say or experience as a politician or a woman is of any worth — what’s progressive about that?

I may not be quite as radical a feminist as my wonderful friend Julie Bindel, but what I am is a progressive, Left-wing MP who cares about ordinary women, and now wonders whether the party I represent is capable of standing up for them. I am not going to join the Conservatives, or the Lib Dems or the Greens. But this party doesn’t always feel like home. In 2019, it was hard enough trying to convince my constituents that Labour wasn’t antisemitic. In the next election, when they inevitably ask whether Labour is sexist, I’m not sure I’ll be able to do the same.

Fashion is generally seen as a frivolous and simultaneously dangerous industry, populated by airheaded Marie Antoinette-like characters wearing £10,000 hats, and malevolent figures intent on spreading eating disorders across the land. Over the years, I offered up various arguments in fashion’s favour: it’s a billion-dollar industry, it reflects the culture around us, everyone gets dressed and therefore engages with fashion on some level, and it is populated by hugely ambitious and successful women.

None made much difference, and the high-ranking women within the fashion industry — Anna Wintour, Isabella Blow, Donatella Versace — were snickered at as cartoonish stereotypes. It often struck me that the journalists who covered film (in which enormous expenditures and egos are the norm) or sport (hello, unattainable perfect physiques) never had to begin their articles by justifying their industry. Was this, perhaps, because fashion — unlike film and sport — is largely for women, and one of the last bastions of journalism dominated by women? Or did the fault lie with fashion itself?

I’ve been pondering these questions again over the past week as I’ve read the adulatory press around Edward Enninful, the editor of British Vogue for the past five years and Vogue‘s European editorial director for the past two. Enninful’s memoir, A Visible Man, is being published today, and it comes festooned with quotes from Salman Rushdie and Kate Moss (“What fun!”) The reviews have been determinedly positive, albeit in a glass-half-full kind of way (“Happily his book is better than his interviews” – The Times). He scored the double whammy last weekend of being the cover interview for The Sunday Times Magazine (“How Edward Enninful became the king of fashion”) and The Observer Magazine (“The most important man in fashion”).

He is, as all the press has taken pains to stress, the first black and gay editor of British Vogue. He is also — although this has been less commented upon — the first man.

Coverage of Enninful has focused almost entirely on who he is rather than what he does. He was born in Ghana, moved to London as a child and was hired as a model in his teens. He became fashion editor of i-D when he was only 18, much to his family’s horror, and now here he is, editing one of the most important fashion magazines in the world. It’s an extraordinary story, but not a wildly unimaginable one in the fashion industry. John Galliano is another gay working-class immigrant who made it big in London fashion at an early age, Alexander McQueen was a gay East-Ender who did the same. Naomi Campbell is the daughter of a single mother from Lambeth. Alek Wek moved from South Sudan to London in 1991 and was soon after hired as a model.

As Enninful writes in his memoir, “Fashion is a borderless industry that is powered by immigrants. As I looked around New York Fashion Week in early March, I saw how 90 per cent of my colleagues living and working there were originally from other countries.” None of this detracts from Enninful’s enormous achievement, but fashion, and particularly British fashion, has been better at embracing immigrant, gay and working-class kids than outsiders give it credit for.

The little discussion there has been about what Enninful actually does has focused on how he has improved diversity in fashion. There is no doubt there are more black models and features about race and LGBT issues than ever before in Vogue, and this reflects the time as much as it does Enninful himself. There has been much comment on how different his Vogue is from his predecessor Alexandra Shulman’s, which was largely, and even infamously, white and posh. (I was briefly a contributing editor to Shulman’s Vogue, although she then let me go, so I have no loyalty to her.)

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Enninful has brought identity politics to the magazine, but it’s always interesting which parts of someone’s identity count and which don’t. For example, Vogue now features models such as Cara Delevingne and Adwoa Aboah talking about, respectively, sexuality and race, and Meghan Markle edited a special issue. Quite how much of a change these women are from the posh ones of yore is a debatable issue, given Delevingne and Aboah are descended from aristocracy and Markle is married to a prince. And of course, the models are just as skinny as they ever were, and the clothes just as expensive. Last month’s cover celebrating Pride featured LGBTQ young people, but it was indistinguishable from any other Vogue cover, given they were all beautiful and thin. The current cover features Linda Evangelista, airbrushed to near unrecognisability and almost entirely covered, lest anyone be offended by her 50-something flesh.

It must be a strange time to be a fashion editor. We are entering the worst cost of living crisis in most people’s living memory. The mental health of girls and young women is notoriously precarious, with rocketing rates of depression, body-hatred and self-harm. When Shulman was editing Vogue during the 2008 financial crash, every interview she gave included questions about what possible relevance Vogue had now, and I doubt she got through a single day in which she wasn’t asked by a journalist whether she felt responsible for anorexia. None of these subjects has been raised in the press around Enninful, who — lest anyone has forgotten — edits a magazine that exists to sell expensive clothes and feature very thin and beautiful women. The coverage has been entirely about him and his triumphant story. It has barely mentioned who Vogue is actually for.

In his memoir, Enninful recalls the speculation about whether he would be made editor of Vogue: “The fact that I was Black and gay was a big focus. My even being considered was presented as shocking. Hard not to see the connotations: this one doesn’t belong. I was well used to it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt every time.” And of course, that’s true. But it’s a lot more likely that he was seen as left-field choice because of his sex rather than his race or sexuality. After all, the fashion industry is not exactly short of gay men, and there have been high-profile black fashion editors before Enninful – although not at British Vogue — including André Leon Talley at US Vogue, Michael Roberts at Vanity Fair and Robin Givhan at The Washington Post, the first fashion writer to win a Pulitzer.

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Editing Vogue, though, had always been done by a woman. Not any more. You can argue that this is a good thing and jobs should be open to all genders. Yet Vogue is a magazine about women and for women, and now a man is in charge of it. Shulman edited GQ before she got the Vogue job and she was regularly asked how she knew what men wanted. When some wondered how he would know what women want, he said in an interview with the New York Times last month, he called his friends “Rihanna and Naomi, and they both told me, you just have to tune it out”.

After questions about skinny models, pricey clothes and fashion’s pointlessness, the fourth inevitable question was whether it was just an industry in which gay men dictated what women should wear. I always bristled at this, with its blaring overtones of homophobia. Enninful’s sexuality is not relevant to his ability to do his job. But his sex is surely a different matter, given he is editing a magazine for women. He has said “I never think in terms of sex or gender. I think in terms of what someone is bringing to the table.” This is the kind of statement only a man can make. In all the glowing press about Enninful’s identity, his sex — as a critique — is mentioned about as often as the fact that Delevingne’s godfather is Nicholas Coleridge, the former long-term chairman of Condé Nast. Which is to say, not at all.

Fashion is a joke. It’s an art, sure, and a hugely lucrative industry. But it’s also absurd: all these ludicrous clothes and accessories churned out month after month and then draped on bizarrely proportioned women in order to sell them to the trollish masses. Anyone who works in it knows that it’s a bit silly, which is why it’s so difficult to argue against the piss-takers. If fashion is referenced at all in the mainstream, it is usually done so sceptically and satirically, Devil Wears Prada-style.

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But there is no satire in the coverage of Enninful, even though his book offers plenty of opportunities for it, with his talk of “intelligent” dresses and his gush about Beyonce (“I can’t help thinking how all these walls that we perceive Beyonce putting up don’t exist to facilitate ego”). He is surely the only fashion editor in existence who is not snarkily asked in every interview about the prices of the clothes and the waist measurements of the models in his magazine. Instead, the tone around him is hushed, earnest and reverent. Some will say this is fair enough, given his background; Wintour and Shulman are both posh and white and therefore able to take the barbs.

But you can’t have it both ways: saying Enninful is the king of fashion, but also so fragile he must be wrapped in cashmere. Also, he has been working in the fashion business for more than 30 years; he got married at Longleat with Campbell, Moss and Victoria Beckham in attendance. When the New York Times asked him for the names of five friends they could contact when writing a profile of him, his list was “Beyonce, Rihanna, Naomi, Imam, Oprah.” He is more ensconced in the fashion establishment than Shulman ever was.

When I used to insist that fashion reflected the times as much as film or art or literature, people would laugh: of what possible connection to the common man could a £12,000 dress by Armani have? And at times, I questioned this myself. But the coverage around Enninful takes it as a given that he is overhauling the culture through Vogue, producing “a massively visible new idea for what Britishness could mean”, as he puts it in his book. Enninful’s Vogue is only a force for good, whereas everyone else’s, it seems, was and is toxic. Maybe. Or maybe the only way people can take women’s fashion seriously is if the person in charge is a man.

The Miserable Older White Woman emerges from the same blend of old-school misogyny and ageist ugh-mom-ism that brought us first the Wine Mom and then the Karen, in the summer of 2020. In theory, a Karen was a white woman who called the police on black people who were simply minding their own business. In practice, the term started getting used (and is indeed still used) in reference to any woman over the age of 25 who has spoken up, in any context. In the early pandemic days, I was once called “Karen” after asking some teenagers on public transit to put on masks. But anti-maskers also got labelled Karens too, so we can’t win (unless we stay silent).

Who has it in for these women? A significant number of the Twitter accounts piling hate on middle-aged women seem to be controlled by young men who give off incel vibes. They are also angry at young women for rejecting them, and their mothers for not sending their favourite meal down to them that evening in their proverbial basement. What is clear is that these women are an avatar for complaints that span, or defy, the ideological spectrum. The Miserable Older White Woman inspires an intense, if difficult to pin down, political fury. Both progressives and the Right seem to agree that “Liberal white women on antidepressants will be the end of our civilisation”, but the stereotype allows a range of people to channel a variety of frustrations. She’s the 53% of white women who supposedly (but not actually) voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but also the tear-strewn pussy-hat wearer at the Women’s March protesting that election’s outcome.

For the Left, the privileged lady wrangling a prescription for her non-problems can be blamed for all of society’s woes: racism, imperialism, the housing shortage, the cost of living, climate change, perhaps even monkeypox. Her antidepressant usage can be categorised as yet another indulgence she engages in while other people suffer, akin to a day at the spa: “White women live off of Starbucks and antidepressants.” The Left-produced caricature lives in a large suburban house with a rich husband and resents her perfect life: “Excess red wine, antidepressants, free time and money has truly done wonders to boomer white women.” This is a women whose problem is that she has it too good. If she had to deal with the same adversity as everyone else, this would build character, and she’d stop the whinging.

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For the Right, the Miserable Older White Woman is the opposition: “Democratic party supporters are self-hating college-educated white women. Basically if you live in an apartment in LA and own four cats, a massive ‘sex toy’ and consume a lot of antidepressants you are a Democratic party voter.” And she is getting her comeuppance for her decades of liberalism. She foolishly bought into the feminist myth that women have brains and should have high-powered careers and look at her now, all alone with her cats, pining for the life she could have had if she’d settled down when still turning heads. If she’d stayed a virgin until marrying Ward Cleaver at 22, she wouldn’t be popping pills of any kind. She’s sad because she’s alone, but don’t feel sorry for her, it’s a misery of her own making. A lesson for young women: get married before you’re middle-aged — and why not to one of the charming young men who spend their days online mocking older women?

And yet critics from the Right also have it in for the Miserable Older White Women who have settled down, but who fail to have either aged into traditionalist matrons or remained chipper 20-somethings. Pratt, of “Welcome to Hell”, more recently made the rounds for introducing Twitter’s cynical masses to the Peach Mom, a comic about the angst of an apparently well-off stay-at-home mom (albeit with side hustles) who despises her husband for doing less of the housework and childcare. The woman behind these evidently autobiographical comics then got widely ridiculed, in part because it is objectively ridiculous to post comics to the internet that bash your spouse, but also because she was a Miserable Older White Woman, unhappy with her lot, but for no good reason. Why wasn’t she grateful that she had a provider husband who also did some housework? (Much was made of the fact that he apparently does childcare when she goes out in the evening to teach yoga, as though the teaching of yoga is an indulgence and not a part-time job.) She should be grateful, was the gist.

But the common ground of why she’s demonised is that she represents liberal modernity, to people across the political spectrum who object to it. The Miserable Older White Woman is a normie, a Hillary not Bernie supporter. An AWFL (“affluent white female liberal”); a Twitter search for that very-online acronym paints a similar picture. Her reaction to Kamala is an enthusiastic yaaas. She posts milquetoast liberal messaging to her Instagram, about Black Lives Mattering and trans rights and abortion rights, but in a cringe way.

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There’s a perception, among her detractors, that liberal modernity has given women of this demographic too much ground, which has made them (as well as everyone else) worse off: “Affirmative action, war on poverty, and the modern feminist movement empowered white women. This newly empowered group remade society in a way that harmed men that couldn’t adapt. This new society is not so great and white women begin taking massive amounts of antidepressants.” Men’s rights activists agree with far-Left advocates for the true marginalised: white women are spoiled pseudo-victims. They are society’s actual most powerful, but imagine themselves oppressed.

Does it all come back to Hillary Clinton? Hillary — per her haters — the privileged complainer. Hillary, the embodiment of the dorky, stodgy mom who does not know how to relax. Unlike other ways of medicating away bad moods, antidepressants have exactly zero reputation for being edgy or fun. Much like you know who. Even Hillary’s supporters faulted her, during the 2016 US presidential campaign, for not appearing to have a good time. (Too young, too attractive, and too fun-loving is also a problem, as a certain Finnish prime minister could attest.) The people who wanted to vote Democrat in 2016 but just couldn’t stomach Hillary are, in their rhetoric, very like those who see a stat on older white women’s antidepressant usage and go: “makes sense.”

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There’s also cross-ideological consensus that older women have committed the crime of having aged out of hotness. A Reddit theorist suggests older white women are upset because “they’re the most protected and coddled class when they’re young. When their looks fade they stop getting preferential treatment which is hard for most to adjust to.” The thing where “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, in other words. So, according to their critics, these women used to have too much and are now bitter over a normal existence.

To appear old is, in a sense, to look miserable. Society values women for youth, a fleeting quality, which is enough to make anyone miserable. But there’s also the specific fact that the changes to facial features that happen naturally with age read, on women, as anger. Women sick of being told they seem angry seek Botox — an anti-aging treatment — to remedy the situation. One wonders whether Miserable Older White Women are as miserable as all that, or just look that way, and are disproportionately prescribed antidepressants because their doctors — fallible humans like the rest of us — interpret their ordinary facial expressions as ones of distress. The medical establishment has made stupider mistakes.

Women, particularly housewives, have long been prescribed drugs at a much higher rate than men. One can look at this as society throwing drugs at women to distract them from their situational misery so that they don’t question the situation itself. But one might just as easily see this as a case of men not having access to proper mental health care, or indeed to the drugs that can be used relatively safely to make them less miserable. Are the men who sneer at antidepressant-using women just repulsed, or are they also, perhaps, envious? Do they wish they could be like the women who face somewhat less stigma for going ahead and making an appointment with their GP? Is the Miserable Older White Woman’s crime being miserable, or is it valuing herself enough to do something sensible about it?

During this period, before feminism had had much of an influence, female police officers endured a barrage of sexist comments in the canteen, and out on patrol. Malton’s nickname among her male colleagues was “The Tart”. Nevertheless, she rose through the ranks to become a Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police, becoming the inspiration behind Helen Mirren’s character, DCI Jane Tennison, in the hit Nineties crime series Prime Suspect. Now, Malton has written a book, The Real Prime Suspect, which tells the story of Britain’s police culture from 1970 to the current day.

There couldn’t be a better moment for its publication. Awareness of misogyny within the police service has never been higher, public confidence in police attitudes towards violence against women never lower. I found feminism in 1979, during one of the most shameful periods of police sexism, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, an investigation doomed from the start because police decided that many of the 13 women brutally murdered by the serial killer were asking for it. But in the era spanned by Malton’s career, things haven’t changed enough.

The abduction, rape and murder last spring of Sarah Everard by serving police officer Wayne Couzens exposed the persistence of misogyny within the service. Indeed, the College of Policing was this month compelled to issue a statement reassuring the public that “officers who abuse their trust to groom vulnerable victims, or engage in sexual impropriety, including harassment, are more likely to be dismissed and barred from policing” (italics mine). The college admits that there are many officers still in post who have been found to have committed such offences.

The Real Prime Suspect documents recent events, and Malton acknowledges that all is not yet fair and equal when it comes to women in the police service. She certainly reveals the roots of the current toxic culture by telling her extraordinary story of success in the days when female police officers had barely any legal or employment rights, and were often seen by male colleagues as inferior irritants. But her book reads as though the bad old days are long gone.

It’s true that the police service Malton left in the late Nineties was a very different service to the one she’d joined. Women were by then serving in most areas of policing, and it was no longer deemed acceptable to openly refer to female officers as “bikes” or “dykes”. A lesbian, Malton chose not to be out at work in those early days — it was already hard enough being a woman in a testosterone-fuelled environment where resentment towards female officers was rife. But her colleagues soon suspected that Malton might not be interested in men, except as hard-drinking companions, and she would regularly be presented with vibrators, because, as she was often told, all women need is a good fuck.

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Despite her treatment, Malton persevered. She had always wanted to become a detective, and, following the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 — which led to a change in working conditions for women as well as equal opportunities with their male counterparts — her dream began to look like it might come true. “You’re the first split-arse DI we’ve had here,” she was told by her superior officer at her first Central London posting. By 1989, she had made Detective Chief Constable.

That same year, I met Malton at a conference. She was representing the Hammersmith and Fulham Domestic Violence Unit; I was campaigning against violence towards women. In a session on police responses to domestic abuse, a senior male officer claimed that things had changed significantly since the days when the crime was seen as a “private matter” between a married couple. Malton leapt to her feet and told her superior: “bullshit!” She then went on to outline every way in which the police were still letting down victims, winning applause from many of us in the room.

We didn’t know it then, but Malton’s life was about to change forever. In 1990 she had a meeting with a “striking, petite woman with a fabulous smile and a cascade of red curly hair”. Writer Lynda La Plante was developing a script for a TV series about a female DCI leading a murder enquiry. At the time, Malton was one of only three female DCIs in the Metropolitan Police. Soon, she began working as script consultant on what was to become the stratospherically successful Prime Suspect.

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Many of the best-known scenes in the show came directly from Malton. In the first episode, when Tennison is, against many of her colleagues’ better judgment, made head of a murder enquiry following the sudden death of her male counterpart, she is addressed by a young copper as “ma’am”. Mirren throws him a withering look and says: “Call me Boss or Guv, but don’t call me Ma’am. I’m not the bloody Queen.” I remember posters in lesbian clubs with those words coming out of Mirren’s mouth in a speech bubble. Tennison quickly became a major feminist icon. But, though Malton was by that point “out” at work, she advised La Plante that the public was not ready to empathise with a lesbian protagonist. Tennison was developed as a heterosexual woman who fails at relationships because she puts the job first.

Another line that ended up in Prime Suspect came from a story Malton told La Plante about the sexist banter to which women subjected, day in, day out. The character of DS Bill Otley, a vulgar misogynist, was based on an officer Malton had worked with, who had once pointed at a female colleague and asked his mates: “Who would fancy that skinny dyke?” But there’s one anecdote that shocked even me, told to me by Malton a few years ago, when we were working together on a Radio 4 documentary about sexism within the police service, Malton told a hilarious but grotesque story about how male officers, after a few Friday night drinks in the police bar, would see how many 10p pieces they could get under their foreskin. “One officer managed £3.20,” she told me.

When Prime Suspect was on air, a number of serving and retired female officers contacted Malton to tell her they recognised the misogyny exposed by the storylines. Thanks largely to Malton, the dire situation for women in the police became common knowledge. But in some ways that makes it even more shocking that male officers are still getting away with it.

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Meanwhile, as reported by the Centre for Women’s Justice, almost 700 cases of alleged domestic abuse involving police officers and staff were reported during the three years leading to April 2018. This data covers three quarters of police forces. It shows that police employees accused of domestic abuse are a third less likely to be convicted than the general public. Fewer than a quarter of complaints of domestic abuse resulted in disciplinary action.

Horrifying case studies abound, and there are hundreds we never hear about. A recent Times expose showed that many disciplinaries of male police officers involving vulnerable females are held in private. It has recently been revealed, for instance, that a number of serving male officers shared deeply offensive WhatsApp messages — such as one who wrote that he “enjoyed the need”, while on duty, to physically restrain a very vulnerable and disturbed 15-year-old girl, because he got pleasure from a “struggle snuggle”.

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Still, the impression one could be left with, having read Malton’s book, is that the vast majority of male police officers are exemplary, brave public servants. I don’t accept this version of events. Malton’s story is inspiring, but even though it’s now 25 years since she left the Met, she remains in many ways fiercely loyal to her tribe. You know the saying: once a copper, always a copper.

So, despite the candid scrutiny of old-style sexism in the cop shop, The Real Prime Suspect is a bit of a puff piece when it comes to the police service today. What we need is a book by a retired female officer who is willing to do a warts-and-all expose. Because it is only when the public becomes aware of the extent of woman-hating in the service that root and branch reform will become unavoidable. Let us hope there is a brave whistleblower out there, who can show the nation how much worse our police force is than DCI Tennison’s.

That the industry had a diversity problem was impossible to argue with: “an analysis” of the gender makeup of the New York Times list shows how heavily it once skewed male — and how, in the last decade, a massive push to diversify publishing has enjoyed no small amount of success.

But God help any writer bold enough to say so.

When James Patterson noted in an interview last month that older white men weren’t getting writing jobs as easily as they used to, outrage ensued. After being savaged for a week online and in the media, Patterson apologised (not that this mollified his critics). This week, Joyce Carol Oates kicked the same hornet’s nest, writing on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested”. This state of affairs, she added, was “heartbreaking for writers”, particularly those with the self-awareness to be duly aware of “their own privilege”. But the response from within the literary community was not sadness, but fury.

The outpouring of replies were split between people who argued that Oates’s assertion was false and people who argued that it was true but not heartbreaking, and in fact a real and unmitigated good. And then there were the people who argued both of these things simultaneously, sometimes even within the same breath. For whatever reason, this type of self-refuting argument is particularly ubiquitous on Twitter; the fallacy, which some have termed The Law of Salutary Contradiction, is best summed up as: “this isn’t happening, and also it’s good that it’s happening”. One representative reply read: “I am a literary agent. This is not so. And why ever would we invest our hopes in the continued success of white men in an industry which persists in shutting out queer and BIPOC authors?!”

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Is it happening? With more than one extremely high-profile person flat-out accusing Oates of lying, it’s worth surveying the statistics. This is only an informal snapshot of the data, but one that still tells a story: of the 100 most recent debut book deals listed on Publisher’s Marketplace, 83 went to women. Of the remaining 17, 12 went to white men — ten of whom appear to be under the age of 40, and thus young by literary standards. It’s not a total shutout, of course, but it’s also not parity. And the same trend can be observed in terms of not just who’s published, but who’s celebrated; for instance, of the 13 books on the Booker longlist, released this week, three are by white men, none of whom are under 45 (one is the oldest ever recipient of a Booker nomination).

Of course, there are additional layers of data here that could surface additional meaning: how big the deal, what genre the book, whether the author had previously published as a poet or essayist or journalist. And of course, those who get book deals have always represented only the tiniest fraction of aspiring novelists: if the uphill battle for young white men is marginally steeper now, it was plenty steep before.

But when Oates’s agent friend reported that, “he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers”, it’s hardly far-fetched to think he was telling the truth — if not literally, then directionally, in the sense that an exasperated parent might report that they cannot get their toddler to put his shoes on. “I can’t get editors to look at these books” is a cultural observation, not a statistical one. It’s about the vibes, the gossip, the buzz, the discourse, the things that agents hear from editors and authors hear from agents. It’s about an industry veteran’s general sense of which way the wind is blowing. And on that front, when it comes to debut authors getting book deals, it is certainly blowing more favourably in the direction of non-white non-straight non-men.

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Frankly, it would be weird if it were otherwise. From the moment that diversity became an industry cause, it enjoyed widespread, vocal support. In 2014, sparked by the revelation that white authors and characters absolutely dominated the YA marketplace, the We Need Diverse Books movement was born — and since then it has only gathered steam. Pitching contests were established for marginalised writers. Literary media pivoted to focus heavily on those writers. Submission guidelines were updated to explicitly ask for work from queer, gender-nonconforming writers of colour. Publishers announced that they were committed to diversifying their lists. Editors announced their intention to buy more books by marginalised writers. Agents publicly bemoaned how sick they were of reading submissions by white guys.

All of these sentiments were expressed vehemently, repeatedly, and in public, and all of them seemed to convey a consensus truth: an individual white man might still do okay in publishing, but categorically? White men were over, the rules had changed, and the anecdotal evidence seemed to support this. Did you hear about the guy whose book was yanked back on the eve of submission when his agent realised that his racial identity didn’t match the race of his protagonist? Or the white poet who couldn’t get published until he adopted a female Chinese pseudonym and won accolades — at least until he was found out?

The truth is, even if the data didn’t bear out the substance of Oates’s tweet, publishing culture matters when it comes to aspiring authors hoping to get a shot. Back when the problem was a lack of diverse books, it was known that the dearth of minority authors was at least in part a problem of preemptive discouragement: many promising writers, expecting the door to be slammed in their face, simply didn’t bother trying to get through at all. And yet, among those who advocated hardest for diverse books, it’s all but verboten to suggest that the movement has gained any meaningful ground, cultural or otherwise.

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The twilight of identity politics

By Park Macdougald

Why, after all this progress, do publishing’s gatekeepers resist any suggestion that diversification has been a success? It’s a paradox of the moment that a person is supposed to want this sort of change, demand it even, but also fly into a frothing rage at the notion that the desired change might in fact be happening. Maybe it’s that the survival of any progressive movement requires that you continually shift the goalposts, lest your organisation problem-solve its way into obsolescence. Maybe it’s a sense that however much has been accomplished, there’s work yet to be done. Or maybe it’s just the cognitive dissonance that always accompanies initiatives like this: everyone wants to say they’re hiring for diversity, but nobody wants to be seen as a diversity hire.

Or maybe the problem is that even a diverse publishing world will still never be fair — because this game has never been just about identity, or talent, but about timing, and resources, and pure dumb luck. If young white men aren’t the hottest commodity right now, it’s not just because publishers have convinced themselves it’s a moral imperative not to hire them; it’s because the industry follows the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist of the moment is deeply invested in identity. The debut novels bought in 2022 thus far are not just overwhelmingly written by women, but overwhelmingly focused on race, gender, sexuality, or class.

Is this annoying? Maybe. But is it more annoying than the state of play ten years ago, when publishers were falling all over themselves to find the next sexually-charged teen dystopian-fantasy series about a merman and a werewolf fighting over a girl who doesn’t know she’s beautiful? Well, that’s a matter of taste. And like all literary trends, this one won’t last forever. Eventually, some new, attention-arresting thing will come on the scene, and the identitarian reckoning of 2020 will be yesterday’s news. Whenever that happens, and whatever it is, a handful of lucky writers will get swept up by the cresting wave of the zeitgeist and carried to glorious high ground, while everyone else looks on and makes grumbling noises.

It is curious, then, to hear that ITV is planning a spin-off of Love Island for the middle-aged. Contestants in the provisionally titled Your Mum, My Dad will be between the ages of 40 and 60, and will, says one insider, “know their minds” and “be capable of intelligent conversation” — these being “ingredients regular Love Island sometimes lacks”. At first glance, this sounds like the path to a more edifying show about courtship, given the emotional advantages conferred by age and wisdom. The average age of a contestant on this season is just under 24, and most of them have been criticised for being either shallow or boring. Presumably middle-aged contestants will be not only more interesting but less nasty to each other — they’ve gone through enough in life not to lose it if a person they’ve been coupled up with for a day chooses not to “pull” them for a chat.

The Sun has also reported (under the headline “RUMPY PLUMPY”) that the contestants of the middle-aged version of Love Island will have “normal bodies”. In some ways, this makes sense: many have voiced the opinion of 2021 contestant Sharon Gaffka, who recently criticised the show for overlooking “midsize and plus size people”. Many brands have cashed in on the push to diversify in recent years. And yet this season the bodies are tauter and slimmer than in the last few.

That same insider also told The Sun: “Times change and the current generation in their forties and fifties still care about how they look, are fit and healthy, into fashion and are ready to let their hair down.” This offers a telling insight into the logic behind the new show. Just as ITV has no interest in filming emotionally mature young people, it has no interest in filming unattractive middle-aged people. If they do, those people will likely, and bleakly, become laughing stocks. From the vantage of youth, 55-year-olds fumbling in a hot tub, however sweetly, are likely to be merely mocked. Twitter will be flooded with a new wave of memes, only these will focus on being ancient and desperate. Becoming regulars on the MailOnline showbiz sidebar is inevitable — and may be worthwhile for those contestants lucky enough to be labelled Milfs and Dilfs.

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Rather than older people being put on the show to introduce a new and more salutary spectacle of what finding love might look like, it is far more likely that, forced into the framework of 20-somethings, they’ll be baited to behave just as badly. After all, the principal audience of dating shows are the young, and they want to be able to relate — not learn how to do better. In fact, the show will still rest on young people’s ideas of coupledom: in a bizarre twist, the contestants’ children will work behind the scenes to get their parents matched up — in what will no doubt become a proxy game for their own youthful dramas.

The application of the Love Island format to older people smacks of a broader trend of infantilising adult sexuality. Emma Thompson’s most recent film, in which she plays a profoundly sexually anxious 55-something, who decides to hire a young rent boy to teach her the ways of the world, is a classic example. As reality TV, surgically-enhanced bodies and vast wealth become ever-more powerfully interconnected with the world of social media, concepts of beauty, attraction and love have been violently skewed towards a young audience, and public portrayals of the intimate lives of older people are being squeezed down to fit. No one wants to think about mums who fuck; they’re only interested in mums they’d like to fuck.

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This is a shame, especially for women. Not only are many women in their forties at their sexual peak, the hard-won accrual of comfortable self-knowledge and the ability to ask for what they want, amassed over decades, puts them in pole position for satisfying eros. Older men, whose sexual prowess will in most cases be in inverse proportion to their libidos, are also capable of more empathetic behaviour. Even dating apps — whose dynamics tend to begin from an infantile or at any rate perfunctory baseline (“looking for fun tonight: whose game?”; “No drama”) — have begun to capitalise on the baroque complexities of contemporary adult sexuality: “grown-up app” Feeld, on which 35% of users are part of a couple, is the industry leader for 30-somethings and older capable of articulating a highly specific cache of desires without repelling the target audience.

But Feeld, too, begins from the simple binary of a left or right swipe, entrenching the sense that a person is indeed the sum of their kinky parts, and that, if you just list the right things, you’ll get what you want. After years of digital mediation, sexuality and its subtleties have been overpowered, made to fit the screen. And the consequences of this aren’t just affecting young people anymore: they’re creeping beyond the generations that grew up on the internet. Sticking older people in the Love Island arena is no victory for them, or for love — it’s the opposite.

This month, media organisations and mega corporations will bend over backwards to find an LGBTQ angle to cover. But what you won’t see or hear is the underside of Pride: a culture of intense social and sexual pressure that’s pushing some lesbians back into the closet and encouraging others to identify out of womanhood altogether. 

It started with the push to redefine “lesbian” to be inclusive of heterosexual males who identify as women. But it didn’t stop there. Now same-sex attraction is out, redefined as a problematic “genital preference”. A surprising number of hardline activists vilify lesbians as “genital fetishists” and accuse them of practising “sexual apartheid”.

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Meanwhile, lesbians are bombarded with suggestions on “how to have lesbian sex with a trans woman”. Safe-sex guides for lesbians provide information on avoiding pregnancy and performing blowjobs. Healthline’s “How Do Lesbians Have Sex?” guide, which targets sexually inexperienced women and girls, reminds readers that “any person can have any type of sex”. “[D]on’t apply assumptions you apply to cis men to us, our body works in different ways,” a columnist for Allure scolded readers: “Keep an open mind, and remember you’re having sex with a woman who knows more about her body than you do about hers.”

Not convinced yet? “Estrogenized dicks are… a lot like if a vagina was shaped like a dick and testes… Sex with an estrogenized dick is its own experience, but it’s MUCH MORE like sex with a vagina than sex with a man’s dick!” This remarkable advertisement concludes with a denial of what’s being pushed and why: 

“Don’t have sex with anyone you don’t want to! You don’t ever have to give a reason why you don’t want to have sex with someone… But if you go out of your way to tell everyone that you won’t have sex with trans women, and your reasoning is that you think trans women are men, and that sex with us is like sex with men, don’t be surprised when people call you out as an uninformed bigot!” 

Or, as one “trans lesbian” put it: “Being shut off from the very idea of it, not even considering that having my penis inside you is different from having a man’s penis inside you? That hurts.”

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Somehow, telling lesbians that they “just haven’t tried the right dick yet” went woke.

Young lesbians get the message — from their peers in the “queer” community, their role models in arts and culture, the media, and medical providers — that their discomfort with any of this means that they may really be straight men trapped in gay women’s bodies. Sometimes, adopting an idiosyncratic gender identity — like “transmasc non-binary who’s attracted to women” or “feminamoric” — may be the only way a young woman can set boundaries around her sex life.

Last year, two friends and I launched Unspeakable LGBTQ. We asked: What do you wish you could say about your experiences as a woman in the LGBTQ community? 

Some women talked about intense pressure to identify out of womanhood. When femininity — not sex — makes someone a “woman”, women who don’t conform to stereotypes come under scrutiny: “I wish I could talk about how non-conforming women are being pressured to identify as a different gender to validate transwomen’s ‘femininity,’” wrote one respondent. “Feeling alienated by femininity is a near-universal female experience, especially for gay and bisexual women — not something that means you’re not a woman at all,” wrote another. Another respondent confessed that she now feels “​more comfortable around my conservative neighbors than I do in ‘queer’ liberal circles because my neighbors call me a lesbian and a woman… [in the LGBTQ community] I’ve had people ask me if I am truly non-binary or a trans man because I have short hair and don’t wear makeup or dresses.” 

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Relentless policing of lesbians’ sexual orientation and self-expression run through these stories. One woman compared the LGBTQ community today to her experience growing up in the Mormon religion, “where women are subservient in every way that matters”:

“We are allowed to have no leadership positions without the permission or surveillance of men, even in our own organizations… I was excited to join LGBT spaces and meet people like me. But it wasn’t like that. I left one cult and found out that what awaited me was another. In LGBT and other “progressive” circles, women don’t have the right to assemble without the presence of males who, by nature of being male, have no ability to relate to the experiences of female people. Just like my old religion, you aren’t allowed to question the ideology (in this case transgenderism) without being ostracized… Just like my old religion, men’s feelings and sensibilities must be taken into account in everything that women do.”

Another recalled her evangelical upbringing, writing: “I’d really really like, as a lesbian woman, to no longer be surrounded by transwomen who parrot the same talking points and shame tactics used, nearly word for word, by the youth pastor that tried to help me ‘pull away from sin’,” one woman wrote. “I never thought I would have to defend my sexuality against people in the community”, said another. “I get to feel wrong for how I am and how I love all over again.”

One university student described her brief involvement with the LGBTQ community on campus: “I hoped to meet other same-sex attracted people in the ‘lgbtq+’ club at my new university. It was not a community. There were some gay men and some lesbians, but there were also men who told me to my face that they were lesbians. That I should ‘be open to penis’. That I was a bad person for being a lesbian. I didn’t stay.” Another respondent admitted, “I forced myself to date trans women because I was made to feel like I was a bigot for not being attracted to them as a lesbian. It was incredibly traumatic and I was treated like utter crap.”

Responding to a climate where women who dissent from gender identity ideology face threats of violence, one woman wrote: “I want to talk about the incredible setbacks we’ve made in both women’s rights and same-sex rights without people threatening to beat, rape, or kill me.” 

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For women who have firsthand experience identifying as transgender or transitioning — before deciding to desist or detransition — the LGBTQ community reinforces patterns of thinking that caused distress and harm. One detransitioned woman reflected: 

“I spent years running from being a butch lesbian. I transitioned in order to escape the shame & fear I had. When I finally came to terms with the fact that transition had not really helped & I was still the same me I detransitioned… I wanted community more then anything. But there isn’t a place for me anymore. Before I transitioned there were several lesbian groups in my area. They aren’t here anymore. As far as I can tell there is no lesbian space or group anywhere in my area… I can not express how painful it is to not have a place to belong.”

One of the most wrenching submissions was also the simplest and shortest — speaking to something the community at large seems to have forgotten: “there is nothing wrong with women who are only attracted to the female body.” An LGBTQ community in thrall to gender identity and “trans inclusivity” necessarily sacrifices belonging and acceptance for same-sex attracted women.  

For women who want to be part of the LGBTQ community, there’s no escaping gender identity ideology. “The problem with leaving the ‘trans cult’ as a lesbian is that you can never really leave,” one young desisted woman wrote. “The ideology is in every LGBT space, every LGBT charity, every dating site, on the front page of our news sites every single day.” 

In other words, you can accept yourself as a lesbian. You can desist or detransition from a trans identity. You can accept your sex and your sexual orientation. But if you want to stand under that rainbow flag, you’re not allowed to say so.

Today, the veils and jewels have been replaced by fishnet body stockings and six-inch lucite heels, but the intrigue surrounding strippers remains — as does society’s conflicted relationship with them. These women (and they’re almost always women) inspire a mess of competing sentiments: we pity them. We envy them. We want to help them and also just want them, sometimes at the same time. Against a modern-day backdrop of shifting sexual mores, strippers occupy the dual archetype of cautionary tale and aspirational figure, fallen woman and girlboss. They are the living embodiment of feminist agency, but also agents of the patriarchy. That the strippers themselves tend to disagree on all of the aforementioned points makes things even more complicated.

Meanwhile, the eternal fascination with sex-adjacent professions — strippers, phone sex operators, and, lately, the online purveyors of self-produced porn on OnlyFans — periodically coalesces into a pop cultural moment. The last one, in the mid-Nineties, gave us a glut of films including Showgirls, Striptease, Spike Lee’s Girl 6 — and, in an entertaining riff on the intersection of objectification and emasculation, The Full Monty. In keeping with the more purity-centric conventions of the time, these stories were mainly warnings: taking one’s clothes off for money was an inherently undignified enterprise, the purview of desperate women (or, in the case of The Full Monty, recently unemployed steel workers) faced with the choice to strip or starve.

Now, 30 years later, the wave of stripper content appears to be cresting again, this time in the form of multiple memoirs from current or former strippers, and this time without the implied subtext that these are the stories of fallen women. Genre-wise, the books run the gamut: Wanting You To Want Me, by Bronwen Parker-Rhodes and Emily Dinsdale, is a collection of first-person narratives and photographs from more than a dozen strippers, many still employed in the industry. The Ethical Stripper, by Stacey Clare, is a pro-sex-work, pro-labour argument steeped in the language and politics of contemporary social justice activism. Paulina Tenner’s Laid Bare: What the Business Leader Learnt From the Stripper is a run-of-the-mill business book dressed up in nipple tassels and a thong.

The only thing any of these titles have in common is a nominal (and in the case of Laid Bare, painfully contrived) connection to stripping. And yet, this loose mutual affiliation is also the most striking thing about them: that in our present moment, what used to be considered a dead-end job for desperate women might now also be a launchpad to greater things, at least for those with the means to make it so. Both Stacey Clare and Paulina Tenner are strip club veterans, now leveraging that experience to become thought leaders in activism and corporate strategy, respectively. Their credibility is burnished, not diminished, by their affiliation with what is still understood by many to be a seedy, exploitive industry.

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It’s worth asking whether this credibility is deserved. For Tenner, the stripper connection feels desperately gimmicky — “In many ways company culture, no matter how evolved, is like a stripper’s arse,” reads one chapter opener — and only serves to highlight the relative dullness of the subject matter. (Despite the author’s best attempts to dress it up, the truth is that company culture is a great deal less interesting than a stripper’s rear end.) For Clare, the connection between the world of stripping and her central subject — the movement for sex workers’ rights — is both more organic and better executed. Her book artfully interweaves education with titillation, offering a detailed history of sex work activism in the UK alongside anecdotes from her own experience in strip clubs. That this narrative strategy in itself mirrors the push-pull of a striptease can’t be an accident: Clare clearly knows how to keep an audience’s attention.

And yet The Ethical Stripper is, in certain ways, even more tortured and grotesque than Laid Bare when it comes to massaging the truth. In service of its argument for fully legalised sex work, Clare dwells at length upon the labour issues inherent to stripping as a trade — including brutish club owners, exploitive business practices, and coercive customers — yet doesn’t engage with the potentially fraught nature of the work itself. In one anecdote about her experience with badly-behaved men at strip clubs, Clare writes of being “pretty much coerced” into a full-contact lap dance with a patron (in violation of the strip club’s cardinal “no touching” rule), yet her scorn is directed not at him but at the policies that constrained them both: “I consented because in truth I actually prefer giving full-contact dances, so it never feels like a violation, but I took a risk by breaking the rules of the club on my first night. It was a perfect example of how consent  is undermined time after time by the economic context of the business model the industry is built on.”

Meanwhile, the notion that being paid to simulate sexual intimacy with strangers night after night might do something to a person is simply absent. And in lieu of reckoning with it, Clare tends to fall back on the rote identitarianism that has come to dominate so many progressive spaces. What might have been a compelling discussion of workers’ rights in an industry that is historically, and perhaps innately, hostile to women instead becomes a bunch of empty bluster about the importance of “the narrative”, the scourge of “whorephobia”, and the “appropriation” of “sex worker culture” by drive-by eroticists with (pun intended) no skin in the game.

It’s deeply strange to encounter this particular form of cultural gatekeeping amid what is supposed to be a conversation about worker’s rights: everyone from investigative journalists to Hollywood writers to practitioners of pole-dancing as a form of fitness are dinged for encroaching on stripping as if it were a protected identity category rather than what progressives insist it is: work. In an extended lament over the film Hustlers, Clare complains not only that its promotional events exploited strippers, but that the plot (based on a true story about NYC strippers who drugged their clients with MDMA and ketamine and then robbed them blind while they were passed out) would only create more stigma against sex workers.

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But then, to focus at such length on offences given by a movie is a luxury in itself — which somewhat undermines Clare’s argument that strippers like herself represent an important faction within the larger category of marginalised persons known as sex workers. Publishing a book at all, let alone complaining within it that a Hollywood film failed to adequately represent your culture, implies a certain degree of privilege. But more than that, Clare fudges the lines between stripping and other, more dangerous forms of sex work in a way that feels a bit appropriative itself.

There is no better rejoinder to this approach than the collection, Wanting You To Want Me. The book features not only first-person narratives from a variety of different strippers who wouldn’t otherwise tell their own stories, but also this line, in the introduction, which captures the inherent tension of trying to roll up stripping and escorting and porn and prostitution into one big, sloppy sex work burrito: “[Strip clubs] are a form of escapism for everyone who enters, punters and strippers alike — an an enclave of desire and disappointment.” And yet, even in an environment steeped in sexual frisson, “the encounters that take place inside have very little to do with sex”.

Indeed, stripping is one of the few forms of sex work that not only leaves sex purely in the realm of unfulfilled fantasy, but in which the lack of satisfaction is the entire point of the thing. The men who frequent strip clubs are paying explicitly to be titillated, to be teased within an inch of their lives, and then to leave, without ever having touched the object of their desire. Why? What does this say about the men, about the nature of the transaction, about what is being really being sold when money changes hands in the Champagne Room?

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And what are we to make of the fact that amid this glut of stripper-themed literature, only the women of Wanting You To Want Me — the ones who not only will never write a book but may never do any job apart from this one — are willing to dwell in the uncomfortable, unvarnished complexity of the work they do? There are no easy answers here, no unified narrative. But there is honesty: about how stripping can be a source of both shame and freedom at the same time, about the diversity of relationships that incubate within the confines of a strip club, about wanting to stop but also not wanting to, about the rapid-onset despair that comes when the fantasy can no longer sustain itself.

“Always at some point it happens that the balance tips and they want something that you can’t actually give them,” one seasoned stripper notes. “They realise that this make-believe isn’t actually gonna come true, and it becomes too sad or too pointless and hopeless.”

Of course, books like The Ethical Stripper cannot afford to be so honest. But perhaps this is the lesson: that the most compelling narrative, whether it belongs to a stripper or someone else, is one that does not seek to sell anything extra, be it a business strategy or a worthy cause. The most compelling story is just the truth: that stripping is hard, and fun, and sad, and exciting, and messy, and human, and it’s no surprise that 200,000 years later, we’re still writing songs about it.

One explanation is that “Albo”, as Albanese is affectionately known, and his strategists got it right with their policy-lite, “small target” strategy. Labor unexpectedly lost the 2016 General Election by standing on a policy-rich programme which created many targets for their Liberal opponents to scaremonger about. This time, nothing was left to chance. The ALP’s promises were so minimal that there was no threat to any existing or potential voters. Their campaign was run, in Roy Jenkins’s famous phrase, like a museum curator carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished wooden floor — avoiding any slip at all costs.

Labor’s primary vote — the number of people making the ALP their first choice — dropped to a historic low, but while voting in some regions is set to go on for days, and indeed weeks, Labor are likely to get to the 76 seats they need to form a majority in the small 151-seat House of Representatives. That’s because the Liberal party, who govern in coalition with the National party, has lost at least 21 seats.

Why such a big loss? The simple answer is that, in the words of the Australian journalist Laura Tingle, this was “the climate change election”. Neither of the two main parties wanted the election to be on these terms — Labor because of their massive defeat at the hands of Liberal party leader Tony Abbott in the “carbon tax” election, and the Liberals because of a deep split between realists and deniers in their party. But voters had a different view: the increasing frequency of bushfires and flooding in Australia in the last few years ensured climate action was top of their agenda.

The Australian electoral system is an Alternative Vote (AV) system), in which you vote for first and second-choice parties. This entrenches the two largest parties by channelling the votes for smaller parties votes towards major parties once first preferences have been counted. But this time around, the system was derailed by the creation of a new party: the “Teal” Independents. The “Teals”, named for their campaign colours and for their political positioning — green-leaning “blue” politicians — are in effect an Australian form of Macron’s En Marche.

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First, they ran as a “start-up”, and like all disruptors were free of the constraints of legacy organisations. I remember being told by Ismael Melien, Emanuel Macron’s adviser and campaign strategist, that the most important book he read before setting up En Marche wasn’t a political campaign textbook but a book by the CEO of a successful software start-up, which gave him the confidence to “make it new” from top to bottom.

The Teals brought new people into politics. In the “Teal” target seats of Goldstein and Kuyong in Melbourne, and Warringah and Wentworth in Sydney, 800-900 volunteers came out: mainly cashed-up female retirees in their first ever political campaign. The Teals, then, are an expression of the continuing feminisation of Australian politics. The Liberal party had resisted positive action for women in selections for parliament. The Liberal leadership’s view, as often with incumbents. was that conservative-leaning women had nowhere else to go. They were wrong — and the Liberal party learned two hard truths: sisters could do it for themselves; and that once you break one link of party discipline (membership) you find it easier to break others (on policy).

And so they hit the streets, leafleting shopping centres and malls, and they hit the doorsteps, in many constituencies knocking on every single door. It was a tsunami of “Teals”. And they used humour, producing “Throw them out” posters that could be stuck on wheelie bins, so that at least once a week their message was rolled out through the electorate. One, now former, Liberal MP Tim Wilson, ill-advisedly took legal action to ban some posters opposing him; he won in court, but lost in the court of public opinion.

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There was a nimbleness and flexibility about the “Teals” that neither the Liberals nor Labor could compete with. They were a network rather than a party — a vibe as much as a movement.

In a sense the rise of the Teals is all about demographics. Since Liberal Prime Minister John Howard won a series of victories over the ALP by winning over “battlers” — the lower middle class, small business, “tradies” — Australian politics has focused on swing seats in the outer suburbs. The small ‘l’ liberal women voters in the inner suburbs were dismissed as “doctors’ wives” — well-meaning, bleeding hearts who wouldn’t determine any election. Well, it turns out they matter. They’re not “doctors’ wives” any more — they’re doctors, themselves or surgeons, lawyers, accountants, and executives. More importantly, professional women as a class are now larger in number than tradies. Demographic change isn’t political destiny, but it sure feels like it when you have been chucked out on your ear.

Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior research seminar. First, a visiting speaker from another University would spend an hour explaining the details of his new theory to an ostentatiously bored and listless audience. Grimacing through the faint applause, he would brace himself for what we all knew was to follow.

Previously slouched, comatose-looking figures in the audience would ominously stir into life. Hands would shoot up. The objections would start. Frank accusations of confusion, question-begging, inconsistency, and contradiction would be made, against which the stammering speaker would defend himself as best he could. Tenacious questioners would follow up on their original objections and follow up again, to be stopped only when the speaker eventually muttered the shaming words, equivalent to a “give-up” signal in judo: “I’ll have to think a bit more about that.”  Victory achieved, the questioner would fall back in his chair, visibly satisfied to an almost post-coital degree.

The speaker’s immediate ordeal over, he would be dragged to the pub and force-fed copious amounts of alcohol, then on to some probably awful restaurant, where colleagues who were particularly socially unaware — which, let’s face it, was most of them — would continue explaining to him precisely why he was completely and utterly wrong, with huge enthusiasm, late into the night.

When I was a Masters student at St Andrews, the stated aim of some faculty members was to humiliate visiting speakers, with a “win” for the “home” department declared afterwards. A distinguished Professor from Australia once told me that, years later, he still woke up in the night sweating, reliving how badly his paper at St Andrews had gone. At Leeds during my PhD, there were still a couple of Wittgenstein’s original acolytes knocking about. Apparently first learnt at the feet of the master, the habit had spread among staff of theatrically wrinkling and striking the forehead in an exaggeratedly contemptuous manner when they heard something they didn’t like, in full view of the visiting speaker. Sometimes they would wheel round, sneeringly turn their backs on the speaker, and hold their heads in their hands.

Frankly, these places scared the bejesus out of me. At St Andrews, I think I only ever spoke twice in class. The second time, I was scoffed at by the teacher so effectively that I didn’t speak in class again there, ever. In Leeds, I used to shake with anxiety walking down the endless departmental corridor. Towards the end of my time there, I finally dared to put up my hand to ask a question at a research seminar, and thought I must be having a heart attack, so loudly was my heart banging in my chest.

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Most places back then were like this. Academic philosophers were nearly all men, and many (most?) of them were eccentric, obsessive, grumpy men with minds like steel traps. Philosophy departments were places where derision, incredulity, and scorn were manifested on a daily basis without any attempt to hide it.

You probably expect me to say how terrible this all was. Actually, I wonder if it wasn’t the best of all possible worlds in comparison to what came next.

***

In 2011, a report came out that was circulated widely within UK philosophy departments. This was a joint initiative from the British Philosophical Association (BPA) and the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), entitled “Women in Philosophy in the UK”. Its aim was to present a new survey indicating women’s relatively low participation in higher echelons of the philosophy profession, despite large numbers of them at Undergraduate level. At the time, SWIP was an organisation I cared about partly for self-interested reasons, naturally assuming they represented me given my membership of the female sex. Later on, when more senior, I would get involved with their mentoring schemes for women in early career stages.

This report enthusiastically leaned into the fashionable theories and buzzwords of the time, hypothesising that the main causes of women’s diminishing engagement in Philosophy over time must be men’s “implicit bias” against women, and women’s experience of “stereotype threat”, rather than, say, the effects of early educational influences, economic or other structural influences ultimately to do with motherhood, or possible sex-based difference across populations. The salient point for us here, though, is that one of the report’s conclusions was that women were being deterred from postgraduate degrees and jobs in philosophy because of male aggression in arguments. For instance, the report noted:

“One piece of stereotypically male behaviour is an aggressive style of argument in the seminar room. This might include, for example, displaying hostility — by words, tone of voice or body language — towards a speaker or audience (or a class discussion) member whom one thinks has failed to grasp a point or adequately address an objection, or pursuing a point well past the stage where it is obvious that the speaker has no adequate response.”

Since stereotype threat and implicit bias were thought to be difficult to eradicate (and arguably are even more so now, since it’s turned out they probably don’t exist as robustly evidenced phenomena), by far the easiest-looking response to the report was to try to make philosophical discussions less intimidating. This project was taken seriously by many colleagues across the country, including my own. One by one, philosophy departments started to advertise on their websites that they abided by the BPA/SWIP’s new Good Practice Guide. By 2018, a study of the impact of this scheme was able to report that: “As a result of the seminar policies many universities reported that the atmosphere was more constructive and less aggressive.”

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Based on my own experience of both giving and attending talks around the country, I too can attest to a change in social norms in the philosophy seminar room during this period — fuelled partly by the influence of the report but also by the increasing numbers of North Americans getting jobs in UK Universities back then, and so bringing cultural norms of US academia with them. (Indeed, the two are arguably linked: one of the BPA/SWIP report’s main authors is American.)

The most obvious manifestation of this change was that younger British members of departments started talking like fake Yanks. An implausible degree of positivity in talks became the norm, even amongst the otherwise terminally morose. Upward inflection became commonplace, as did the intensifier “super”, an implied exclamation mark, and an unfeasibly perky demeanour. Ostentatious expressions of folksy informality became more common: some audience members started — shudder — bringing knitting along to talks. Meanwhile speakers, under a guise of flattening the hierarchies, could show off to others about their acquaintance with powerful figures in the profession by discussing their work on a casual first-name basis (“So here’s what Crispin thinks about higher order vagueness!”).

During question periods, there was also a noticeable shift. Elaborate rules would be announced by the chair at the beginning of every question period, the better to try to control unruly audience members. “Junior and minority scholars” would be prioritised over others to ask their questions first; “a hand” should be raised for a main question; “a finger” for a subsidiary follow-up; “hands” absolutely could not be smuggled in as “fingers”, and so on. A typical interaction between chair and questioner would go: (Chair:) “Is that really a finger, or is it a hand?” (Questioner:) “It’s definitely a finger!” (Reader, it was hardly ever a finger).

It also became much more common for audience members to start by thanking speakers fulsomely for their talk, then offer banal and unfocused lines of questioning such as: “I was really interested to hear you say X in your talk. Could you say a little more about that?” (Other audience members, inwardly: please God no!). Instead of trying to eviscerate the speaker with a devastating question, the new tendency was to try to be constructive and collaborative in one’s approach, identifying not what was wrong with the speaker’s argument, but what was right about it. Generally it seemed to me that, as ostentatious expressions of civility went up, standards of inquiry dropped — because as a questioner, you no longer had to have grasped the form of the argument to ask an acceptable question.

Unlike the authors of the BPA/SWIP report, I’m not convinced that the originally dominant argumentative style within philosophy departments was ever particularly testosterone-fuelled, though males were certainly its principal authors. They weren’t beating each other up, after all. In fact, outside the seminar room, I have found most male philosophers fairly passive and confrontation-averse, which presumably partly explains why so many have proved supine when it comes to rejecting fashionable gender metaphysics.

Whatever the truth about its origins, the demise of the old approach meant that aggression was still knocking around, but now it had to go somewhere else. As the numbers of PhDs being disgorged into the philosophy job market every year increased, and the number of jobs available decreased, competition amongst philosophers, always high anyway, became even more intense than usual. Where that aggression had formerly been expressed and so somewhat contained within the combative rituals of the seminar room, it now sought new outlets. And what it found was the internet.

***

Though more sensible academics tend to eschew social media altogether, Facebook is a favourite platform for many. Many spend lots of downtime scrolling and commenting throughout the working day. Even the most antisocial of philosophers is usually able to build up large numbers of Facebook “friends” on the basis of shared acquaintances in a close-knit profession, and this often includes lots of graduate students and post-docs.

Around the same time as the BPA/SWIP report was published, and as the popularity of Facebook as a platform was taking off, some senior philosophers realised it provided them with the means to build up secure little fiefdoms — not really private, given the large numbers of colleagues and students looking on, but not really public either. Within a few years, high on the fumes of the media attention being given to a few high profile sex scandals in the profession, these same people were furiously cementing a narrative that philosophy was a terribly dangerous and threatening place, not just for women but for other minorities too.

Now, whether or not academic philosophy was (or is) a truly terrible place for minorities is not my question here, but what was clear back then was that these people really, really wanted to believe it was. Particular stories about harassment and prejudice to individuals that emerged online would be seized upon as obviously indicative of what must be happening to a particular minority at scale in the profession, accompanied by heartfelt exhortations to “listen” to that minority, as if its members were functionally interchangeable. And because a narrative like this needs both heroes and villains and a clear storyline, there was also a lot of sneering about white males and other ideological enemies, and the emotional blackmailing of presumed weaklings into recanting public opinions the in-group didn’t like.

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As these figures virtue-signalled, gate-kept, and generally queen-bee’d around in virtual spaces, they consolidated their own power. An example was being set for younger onlookers, desperately hungry to get into the profession permanently, and standing relatively little chance given the paucity of jobs and the high number of competitors. It told them that self-aggrandising and bullying others was acceptable in the philosophy profession as long as it was in the name of social justice. And it told them that drawing attention to their own presumed victimhood was good for their careers, since it was likely to draw the approval of more powerful others.

One website for early career researchers, started around then, was called “The Philosopher’s Cocoon”, helpfully indicating the profession’s new favoured approach. Roughly speaking, this approach goes: tell junior researchers in some particular identity group that the world of academic philosophy will be particularly harsh for them, because of who they are; isolate them from evidence that might disconfirm this, or explain it differently; uplift any narrative that apparently supports it; and reward their ensuing expressions of anxiety with ostentatious cosseting, soothing, and patting. (And also — for the love of God and the continuing flow of student fees and cheap labour — don’t mention that for most philosophy postgrads, there will be no glorious butterfly stage after the cocoon, because there just aren’t enough academic jobs to go round.)

Soon enough, ambitious youngsters who were able to tolerate the obviously infantilising element got the hang of this new game. Via self-published blogposts, comments, and open letters pleading with the profession, they readily became the sort of public victim they sensed their elders would like to see.

Around this time, lots of Facebook groups and dedicated blogs sprang up to support particular identity groups in philosophy. The dynamics of these online spaces were sociologically fascinating to witness. I was a silent member of the group “Academic Mamas in Philosophy” for a while, as well as its parent group the gruesome behemoth “Academic Mamas”, and I still grin when I remember the implicit hierarchies, barely suppressed rivalries, moralised hyperbole, and passive-aggressive spats about exactly who was having to do the “emotional labour” of “educating” others about their linguistic transgressions. (Most of all, I remember the off-the-charts humblebragging: “Hey mamas, just wanted to get your views on whether an hour a week of screen time — supervised, of course — is excessive for a seven-year-old kiddo? And if so, can anyone hook me up to some cool educational websites?”. Ruefully, I would lift my gaze from my computer to wink at my own children, mainlining Penguin biscuits and watching Cars 2 on a loop for the 14th time that day).

But to get back to the main point: by 2017, when junior philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published her article in the journal Hypatia arguing that if transwomen are women, “trans-racial” people like Rachel Dolezal must be black, the groundwork for a debacle of carnivalesque proportions was already prepared. Though Tuvel was earnestly treating her argument as a modus ponens (i.e. since the premises about transwomen seemed true, the conclusion about trans-racialism and Dolezal must also be true), it was obvious to most readers that equally, her argument could work as a modus tollens (i.e. since the conclusion about trans-racialism and Dolezal seems obviously false, there must be something wrong with the premise about transwom… OH SHIT HELP LOOK OVER THERE!).

The resulting attempts to distract from this inconvenient implication involved mass denunciation on a hundred Facebook pages and blogs, widespread public huffing about “failure to engage with the scholarship of trans people and philosophers of colour”, and a comically pompous open letter alleging Tuvel’s incompetence as a researcher signed by big names in feminist philosophy and gender studies. A craven public apology from Hypatia’s own associate editors for having published the article in the first place followed.

The outcome of all of this, predictably, was fear. No-one wanted to be the next Tuvel, and especially not younger and more precarious members of the profession, but the more established ones didn’t much feel like it either. The traditional means of defending a position — using arguments — wasn’t fashionable in online spaces anymore. Instead, moves formerly condemned in first year logic classes were in the ascendancy: ad hominems, failures of charitable interpretation, begging the question, confusion of sufficient conditions with necessary ones, derivations of “is” from “ought”, and all the rest. Any white male over the age of 40 with a permanent job and a modicum of self-awareness took the temperature of the times and slid away to the edges of the online world, confining their robust discussion in public to impenetrable questions about panpsychism or metaphysical grounding.

In 2018, I wrote my own blogpost, having noticed that it could be quite an effective medium for getting philosophers’ attention. I wanted to suggest to them that there was a peculiar and undesirable silence in academic philosophy on the obvious problems around legal self-ID in relation to the Gender Recognition Act, which at that point was being discussed furiously elsewhere in the UK as part of a government consultation.

Reader, you probably already know the rest.

***

To date, to my knowledge, neither the British Philosophical Association nor the Society for Women in Philosophy have ever commented publicly on the circumstances of my resignation from my post at Sussex University. But in October 2021, at around the same time I was facing the prospect of men letting off flares at my campus workplace, angry with me for holding views about the importance of naming biological sex, they published another report on “Women in Philosophy”. This one followed up on their original one after ten years and summarised what they thought had changed. Utterly predictably, one of the things that had changed was that by now they weren’t talking about women anymore.

This new report, written by the original two authors, pretends not to notice that the old one was aimed at improving the lot of females in philosophy. It now says that the focus is “gender”, and talks of “woman” and “man” as “identities”, so making a nonsense of the idea that its aim is somehow continuous with that of the previous project. A “methodological note” describes a “newly included nonbinary gender category” in the associated survey of philosophers, but complains with regret that the number of non-binary people recorded in the survey is probably inaccurate, because departments have “inadequate reporting processes for students to change the gender on their records”.

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The report seamlessly adapts to the present cultural climate in other ways too. Though the notion of “implicit bias” is still hanging in there, “stereotype threat” — so heavily leaned on in 2011 — is out with barely a mention. And “intersectional oppression” is now in, a mere 33 years after Kimberlé Crenshaw first wrote about it.

Also predictably, the new report also declares that “philosophy is unwelcoming to trans philosophers”. By “philosophy”, they mean me, and a handful of others still hanging in there within the university system, argumentatively defending age-old, culturally ubiquitous, and still perfectly functional understandings of “woman” and “man” in terms of “adult human female” and “adult human male”. To try to demonstrate their lurid assertion about the environment for trans people, the authors link the reader to an article in the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly, in which non-binary author Robin Dembroff writes:

“The situation in philosophy is, to be blunt, a massive, complex, and thorny transgender trashfire. This trashfire manifests most explicitly in the context of social media, blogs, interpersonal interactions, and the occasional journal publication, and it has serious repercussions. (To name one, a number of high-profile court briefings opposing trans rights in both the United States and the United Kingdom cite blog posts by philosophers such as Kathleen Stock … as evidence that trans persons are dangerous and deluded.)”

Now as a matter of fact, none of this is true, and the footnote supplied by Dembroff to supposedly demonstrate the truth of the last parenthesis doesn’t even come close to doing so. But the energy drains out of me when I think about seriously trying to get the report’s authors, or Dembroff — or anyone at all working in feminist philosophy in a University these days — to correct the public record. For I know by now that in their line of business, stating the truth isn’t remotely the point.

This is adapted from a post originally published on Kathleen Stock’s Substack.

Jackson hadn’t been asked to explain how blood is deoxygenated, or to offer an intricate overview of the molecular mechanisms by which protein function is regulated in cells. The question “what is a woman?” is hardly the riddle of the sphinx; a reasonably intelligent six-year-old would be able to give an adequate answer.

Increasingly, the question has become seen as a “gotcha”, but it is a useful gauge of the extent to which figures in authority have been ideologically captured. How can we possibly trust politicians if they cannot acknowledge the most basic realities of human biology? While most voters have a limited understanding of various key political issues, we can all see that a failure to define “woman” is either delusional or dishonest, neither of which are qualities we seek in our elected representatives.

For a long time, most people have been unwilling to express what they know to be true for fear of being monstered as a “transphobe” or, even more absurdly, as a “fascist”. But we appear to have reached a turning point. Today, the term “peaked” is used to describe the moment when an individual realises that he or she has been blindly following the dogma of trans activism at the expense of the truth. To reach this point is an inevitability for the intellectually curious, given that gender identity ideology will always dissolve upon scrutiny.

This has been most aptly demonstrated in the recent tribunal of Maya Forstater, a tax expert who is taking legal action against the Center for Global Development (CGD) for wrongful dismissal. Her erstwhile employer’s case rests on the view that Forstater’s belief that sex is immutable is a sackable offence, and it has been fascinating to read the live tweets of the tribunal in which Ben Cooper QC, counsel for Forstater, has been able to interrogate representatives of the CGD. The typical strategies of gender ideologues — to cry “hate” or “transphobia”, or to proclaim that there must be “no debate” — simply cannot be deployed in the context of a tribunal. As a result, perhaps for the first time, we are seeing what happens when the high priests are forced to defend their creed.

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So when Luke Easley, the CGD’s Vice President of HR and Operations, claims that “identity is reality — without identity there’s just a corpse”, the religiosity of this movement is on full display. He is reiterating the view among gender ideologues that we each have a kind of soul that determines our identity, what trans activist Julia Serano has described as a “subconscious sex”. Forstater’s crime was to deny this essential doctrine, or to refuse to pay it the necessary lip-service. Like heretics throughout history, she was willing to exclaim that the emperor has no clothes.

Virtually all of us support equal rights for transgender individuals, and so it is understandable that we would sympathise with those whose happiness depends on presenting as the opposite sex. I am convinced that in most cases the intonation of the mantras “trans women are women” and “trans men are men” comes from a place of empathy.

The recent case of trans swimmer Lia Thomas, however, has prompted many to reconsider the uttering of falsehoods even for compassionate purposes. Thomas ranked 554th in the college league tables when competing among men, but soared to the top of the rankings in the women’s category. The biological advantages of being a man in a woman’s competition became obvious when a photograph was widely circulated of the winners in the 500-yard freestyle in Atlanta: Thomas towers over the other athletes on the podium.

Even those who are determined to hold fast to the view that “trans women are women” will find it difficult to look at the image of Thomas mounting the victor’s podium without sensing a collision with the brick wall of reality. As William Hazlitt put it: “Facts, concrete existences, are stubborn things, and are not so soon tampered with or turned about to any point we please, as mere names and abstractions.”

Yet this hasn’t prevented certain media outlets from disregarding the significance of biological sex, even when reporting on male violence. Only last week, an article appeared on the BBC website that outlined the vicious crimes of an 83-year-old woman in New York who had dismembered another elderly woman she had met online, having already spent 50 years in prison for murdering two female friends. Those new to the story would be forgiven for feeling that something is amiss in the reporting. After all, there are very few female serial killers, and even fewer who target other women. It is only towards the end of the article that the writer acknowledges that the killer had “recently identified as a woman”. This detail is presented as an aside, as though it is an inconsequential aspect of the case.

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But perhaps the revelation most likely to “peak” members of the public came last week when Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne spoke in the House of Lords about a woman who had allegedly been raped on a hospital ward. Apparently, when police contacted the hospital they were told that there were no men on the single-sex ward, and “therefore the rape could not have happened”. The attentive reader will have already filled in the gaps.

This kind of gaslighting is part of a policy known as “Annex B”. The NHS accommodates patients by gender identity, not biological sex, and if a female patient complains that there is a man on her ward, she is to be told that this is not true; there are no men present. As the official NHS guidelines make clear: “Views of family members may not accord with the trans person’s wishes, in which case, the trans person’s view takes priority”.

In the same NHS document, it is asserted that sex is “assigned” at birth. Everyone knows that sex is observed and recorded, often before birth, and so it is surprising to see the holy writ of this new religion find its way into an official report. For medical practitioners it is particularly important that there are records of our sex, which is why we each have a unique NHS number to store this information. Yet patients are currently able to change this number on request so that it reflects personal identity rather than biological reality.

Even more worryingly, a 2010 document from the NHS Information Standards Board entitled “Mixed-Sex Accommodation Specification” explicitly states that the public must be misled on these matters in order to avoid general confusion: “The policy commitment relates to gender, not sex, but to ensure a better public understanding it is referred to as Mixed-Sex Accommodation (MSA)”. In other words, although the then Health Secretary Andrew Lansley had announced that NHS wards must be segregated by sex, behind the scenes it was understood that gender was to be the determining factor. It seems that the plebeians cannot be trusted with the truth.

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Today, the public are seeing for themselves the impact of gender policies in the real world: male athletes are competing in women’s sports, the media is reporting on male serial killers but using female pronouns, and a rape victim is told that the assault she experienced must have been a figment of her imagination. Incidents of this kind, now occurring too often to be dismissed as aberrations, have led us into what Jürgen Habermas described as a “legitimation crisis”, a general loss of confidence in institutional authority.

This is why it is crucial that we find a way to restore the primacy of truth in our public discourse. It isn’t a “gotcha” to ask a politician to define terms such as “man” and “woman” — it is a means by which we can assess the honesty of the ruling class. Their white lies might be compassionate in nature, but they clearly have damaging effects and the public is losing its patience. For all the false accusations of “hate”, “bigotry” and “transphobia” that stifle open conversation about these important issues, the tipping point is undoubtedly near.

Getting immersed in fiction is a familiar state for most of us. Nearly all of us do it, and some of us do it several times a day. When you dip into a novel, binge on a box set, or even just daydream furiously about succeeding romantically or seeing your enemies fail, you’re doing it.

When immersed in a fiction, your direct aim isn’t to recognise and respond to the world as it actually is. To borrow a phrase from philosophy, your thoughts and behaviour aren’t directly “truth-tracking”. That’s usually ok, because fictions are supposed to be harmless bits of fun, or interesting encounters with possible-but-not-actual scenarios. But what they are not supposed to be are accurate reports of reality as you personally find it now. When immersed, it’s as if many of your thoughts are flying parallel to earth without touching it.

As a trans person, there are different possible motives for immersing yourself in fictions of changing or escaping your sex, such as strong feelings of dysphoria. If you’re highly uncomfortable about the sexed aspects of your body — say, because they fail to fit prevalent bodily norms, or you think they do — you might experience relief to act as if you are of the opposite sex, or of no-sex.

It’s reasonable to analyse the worryingly high rise of girls and young women in this position in the context of the invention of the smartphone, the related spread of social media and pornography, and the over-sexualisation and objectification of young women in our culture generally. A less well-known motive for immersion, specific to some but not all within the male trans demographic and also likely to be influenced by pornography, is the presence of a fetish known as autogynephilia (or “AGP”).

In plain language: AGP is a sexual turn-on for some males to enter into the fiction of being a woman. There’s a huge effort made by trans activists to deny this. And it seems particularly hard for people without much experience of the adult world of sexuality — idealistic young people, say, or university lecturers — to believe it. But numerous sources attest to it, and it’s important we recognise it clearly when it comes to discussing incursions into women’s rights.

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See, for instance, this Vice article from 2016, published before progressive media started to pretend autogynephilia could never happen, that frankly describes a club night where men cross-dress as women for sexual pleasure, sometimes also role-playing that they are being “forced” into “feminisation” by a dominatrix. Residual doubters should also read Deirdre McCloskey’s transition memoir Crossing, where the sexual element is cheerfully admitted. Or just look closely at this picture of a transwoman addressing the New York State Democratic Party.

When it comes to people who aren’t trans, the typical motivations for immersion in trans activism’s foundational fictions seem of four main sorts. First, there’s a desire to be kind to trans people, without a lot of further thought about what that might look like. Second, there’s those who want to seem kind because of the social capital it brings these days. Third, there’s a desire to avoid ostracisation, since you know you will be socially punished if you don’t. And fourth, there’s a desire to undo human sexed categories with the power of words, because you heard from some whackjob academic that this was a coherent and politically desirable thing to aim for.

Now many of the fictions in which we immerse ourselves are harmless. But that isn’t the case with trans fictions, when disseminated at industrial scale and coercively maintained by the progressive establishment. At the other end of this particular story arc are unhappily infertile young adults; women prisoners made to share facilities with male rapists; sportswomen crowded out of competition by men they can’t hope to beat; young lesbians guilted into dating males; wives being coerced into participation in the cross-dressing fantasies of their husbands; and trans people with wholly inadequate healthcare relative to their well-being.

Horrific as those plot twists are, though, I want to take a more oblique look at the story leading up to them. For it seems to me that trans activism provides a fascinating case study of what can happen when a political movement abandons truth as a direct aim and pursues fiction instead. Maybe all movements pursue fiction some of the time, but few have truth-denial so firmly built into their foundational axioms. So here are four instructive features.

1) Providing a convincing back story 

What does a fiction need in order to seem vivid and realistic — to grip your attention and draw you in emotionally? Partly, it needs background detail that looks compelling to the average reader, and is distracting enough that she doesn’t question any plot holes. And what more convincing-looking detail could you find than that supplied by people whose day job it is to be clever and to know things? On this basis, parts of academia have been enlisted, enthusiastically, to furnish surrounding details for the foundational fictions of the trans industry.

A just-published article by philosopher Dan Williams describes a related phenomenon. In today’s world, he argues, “pundits and opinion-producers” provide apparently supportive arguments and other justifications for conclusions that people were already motivated to believe anyway — and they do so “in exchange for money and social rewards”. A marketplace for the rationalisations of desired beliefs has developed, he suggests.

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In the domain of trans activism, I think that the rationalisations offered by academics tend to support immersion in fiction rather than full-blooded belief. After all, when deciding who to bully first, the trans activists still seem to know who the women and who the men are. But otherwise the process is similar to that described by Williams.

The game for some academics is to provide convincing-looking backgrounds for predetermined fictional conclusions such as “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”. Since the system currently rewards them for doing this, I think their unconscious motive is often career advancement and social recognition from peers, though it’s inevitably dressed up as something moral.

In the area I’m most familiar with, academic Philosophy, a dedicated band of thinkers seeks to provide complex and technical post-hoc rationalisations for mantras first expressed by adolescents on Tumblr in 2011. The fact that truth in its traditional sense is not their object of inquiry could not be made plainer. See, for instance, philosopher Katharine Jenkins, who starts her 2016 article on the nature of womanhood, published in prestigious philosophy journal Ethics, by declaring: “The proposition that trans gender identities are entirely valid — that trans women are women and trans men are men — is a foundational premise of my argument, which I will not discuss further.” (It’s telling that “valid” is used here in the Tumblr sense of identities being validated like passports or parking tickets, and not in the sense of logical validity more traditional for academic philosophy). The conclusion of Jenkins’s paper, not enormously surprisingly under the circumstances, is that we should use the term “woman” to refer to all and only people who have a female gender identity, whether they are actually female or male.

Another example of this peculiar genre is a 2020 article by Elizabeth Barnes, who like Jenkins, makes explicit that her reasoning has been constrained in advance by a desire to fit with the conclusion that anyone who wants to be classified as a woman should be counted as a woman, and anyone who doesn’t want to be classified as a woman should not be. Barnes then advances a hilariously tortured rationalisation for claims like “transwomen are women”, arguing that there aren’t any “deep, language-independent facts about which people are women, which people are genderqueer, etc”.

She justifies this partly by making an extremely involved analogy with metaphysical discussions of tables. In a nutshell: she argues that in metaphysical terms, there aren’t any tables, strictly speaking, though perhaps there are “simples arranged table-wise”. Nonetheless we can still utter the true sentence “there are tables”. Similarly, though for somewhat different reasons, the metaphysical facts about womanhood and other “gendered” groups come apart from the truth conditions of sentences involving … oh I give up, I don’t have to pretend to take this stuff seriously anymore. (I confess, though, that I remain disappointed Barnes didn’t try to argue that women are “simples arranged woman-wise”.)

In the social sciences, meanwhile, things don’t seem much better. Here the aim of research often seems to be to rationalise certain background beliefs. These beliefs are designed to make immersion in the original fictions appear beneficial or at least cost-free; or else to make refusal look costly in moral and social terms. For instance: “there is an extremely low prevalence of regret in transgender patients after surgery” (i.e. medically-assisted immersion is harmless); “administering cross-sex hormones to gender dysphoric adolescence lowers suicidal ideation” (i.e. medically-assisted immersion is beneficial); “questioning the ‘ontological reality’ of transgender identities leads to transphobic harassment” (i.e. as a non-trans person, refusing to immerse yourself in the fictions of trans people causes trans people to be harassed); “non-suicidal self-injury is common in trans youth and emphasises the need for interventions that reduce transphobia” (i.e. as a non-trans person, refusing to immerse yourself in the fictions of trans people causes trans youth to self-harm); and so on.

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The main point of such articles seems to be to operate as a giant guilt-trip for the reader. As with the philosophers earlier, the ultimate aim here isn’t a relatively neutral pursuit of truth but rather a simulacrum of academic discourse which will bring the reader to accept certain predetermined conclusions. This is suggested, partly by the fact that many of the people who produce these sorts of articles seem to have vested interests, economic or personal, for keeping the whole fiction on the road; but also partly because what they produce is so often full of sloppy mistakes, and failures to observe even basic methodological norms. Others are more qualified to illustrate these flaws but, with respect to the research articles I linked to just now, this piece, this one, this one, this one, and this one seem revealing.

A charitable explanation of this unusual level of incompetence is that the goal was never truth in the first place. If motivating others to become immersed in fictions is your aim, then the actual use of reliable truth-tracking methodologies is bound to be less important than the superficially convincing appearance of their use.

2) Exploring a parallel universe

A compelling fiction can give us a snapshot of what life might be like if our starting point was different to the world we know: what else might be true, say, if British people lived under a totalitarian dictatorship with powers of mass surveillance (1984); or if there was a species of otherwise human-like beings that had no fixed sex (The Left Hand of Darkness); or if Germany and Japan had won WWII (The Man in the High Castle), and so on. Filling in the fictional consequences of an initial made-up scenario is another way that authors make certain stories vivid and interesting.

Kids immersed in make-believe stories do something more basic but still similar, using toys and other household props they have around them. So for instance, a kid’s make-believe game might go: if this doll is a “explorer”, and this chair is an “elephant”, then, if I put the doll on top of the chair, “an explorer is riding an elephant”.

So too does trans activism, with the help of the media and the academy, work to fill in the consequences of the original fiction that transwomen are “women”. Partly this is a matter of working out what would follow logically, given the way the concepts “woman” and “man” usually work. For instance, if transwomen are “women”, then transwomen are a sub-set of women generally, so we also need a special word for the sub-set of women that aren’t trans: “cis women”. If transwomen are “women”, then, since women before the age of sexual maturity are “girls”, transwomen before the age of sexual maturity are “girls” too. Since women who have children are “mothers”, transwomen with children are also “mothers”. Since women exclusively sexually attracted to other women are “lesbians”, transwomen exclusively sexually attracted to other women are “lesbians” as well (and so on and so on).

And then there’s the practice of extending the entitlements and resources of women to transwomen, because transwomen are “women”, so they are imagined to share precisely those entitlements and need exactly those resources too. As we now know to women’s cost, being immersed in the fiction that transwomen are “women” has led to the dismantling of single-sex services and resources built painstakingly over years, largely in the pursuit of aesthetic verisimilitude for males.

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Meanwhile, if transwomen are “women”, and certain events and experiences characteristically happen to women, then the logic of the fiction dictates that transwomen must undergo these too. So for instance, transwomen are supposed to suffer from “misogyny”, because women suffer from misogyny (a fiction given further oomph by the fact that experiencing misogyny or even sexual violence is a common sexual fantasy of autogynephilic males). Transwomen have period symptoms, menopause symptoms, and so on.

This working out of fictional consequences goes on at the particular as well as the general level. Martine Rothblatt is a transwoman, and transwomen are female; Martine Rothblatt is paid more than any woman CEO in America; so this makes Rothblatt the “the highest paid female executive in America” according to New York magazine. Lia Thomas is a transwoman, and transwomen are women; Lia Thomas is a faster swimmer than any woman at the University of Pennsylvania; this means Lia Thomas has broken “women’s records” for swimming. Novelist Torrey Peters is a transwoman, and transwomen are women: this means Peters’ novel Detransition Baby is eligible for longlisting in the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022.

In this story-world, women’s achievements are gradually reduced, to be replaced with altogether grimmer kinds of headline involving “women” engaged in characteristically male crimes such as paedophilia, violent assault, and indecent exposure. Last week, the Scottish Daily Record reported that Shay Sims, “a female” in court who had “pleaded guilty to three charges of assault by beating, criminal damage and outraging public decency”, had “raised her dress up and lowered her pants to reveal a penis and continued to walk 40 feet with the penis exposed”. And last Wednesday, the New York Times reported that an “83-year-old woman”, already guilty of killing two other women, had been discovered carrying the torso of a dismembered woman out of an apartment building.

What, meanwhile, of the consequences of the original fictions that transmen are “men”? In the contrasting case of the fiction that transmen are “men”, given the centrality of the concept “man” to so many discourses, in theory there should be ample material for campaigners to get stuck into. To some extent they have: for instance, in the ongoing campaign in the UK to have a transman registered as a legal “father” on a birth certificate. But curiously, in most other areas men’s spaces, resources, entitlements, and achievements are being left untouched.

3) Retconning the past

Some story-makers engage in “retconning” — making new stories continuous with old ones by changing elements of the old one retrospectively. Famously — at least, for people my age and older — in the soap opera Dallas, the character Bobby, previously killed off, was brought back a whole series later, alive, with the explanation that it had all been a dream while he was in the shower.

In trans activism, a form of retconning takes place all the time, as a further means of producing convincing back stories for current fictions. So much of the trans activist story-world depends on trans people having been a permanent feature of human life throughout history, no matter what the surrounding cultural or historical context. And so we find the retrospective fictional transing of notable sex-non-conforming figures from history: for instance, Marsha P. Johnson; Ewan Forbes; James Barry; Joan of Arc; Queen Hatshepsut; Kurt Cobain. We also get the creative reinterpretation of other cultural traditions, with the Hijra, Fa’afafine, Fakaleitī, and Kathoey people all anomalously represented under the essentially Western, relatively modern concept of “trans”.

And then, of course, we also get the fiction of the “trans” child — the most audacious retcon of them all. Transwomen who are “women” must once have been “girls”, and transmen who are “men” must once have been “boys” — which, by extrapolation, means that there must be “girls” in the population of male children, and “boys” in the population of female children, right now. “Trans” children (so often female, but never mind about that) “know who they are”, and should have the “freedom to be themselves”, we are told. Yet this “freedom” may well involve a child’s taking drugs that will make her infertile; or give her premature osteoporosis; or bring about the surgical removal of her breasts, ovaries, and womb before she’s had any chance to reflect on the implications.

Thousands of children and teens worldwide have been encouraged by adults to thoroughly immerse themselves in this fiction – indeed, to start believing in it, full stop — instead of treating it as one make-believe game among many, as part of a healthy development. Children’s bodies are being used as props in adult dramas they have no way of properly understanding until it’s too late for them.

4) Remembering to turn off your phone

When you go to the cinema, you’re sometimes reminded to switch off your phone. Annoying ringtones can grab the attention of someone immersed in a fiction and return them unpleasantly to consciousness of the real world.

Reminders of reality are also lurking out there, ready to distract those currently immersed in trans activist fictions. There’s the annoying fact that biological sex in humans is immutable. Remembering this can be a real buzzkill when you’re trying to persuade yourself that Lia Thomas is just an ordinary woman unusually good at swimming. This, I think, is why trans activists systematically object to statements that biological sex in humans can’t be transcended.

In a recent case, several student editors of the academic journal Law and Contemporary Problems publicly resigned when they found out their journal would be publishing an article of mine entitled: “The Importance of Referring to Human Sex in Language”. (Please do read it to annoy them.) There are several precedents for this, of course — most obviously, the anomalously severe treatment of Lisa Littman’s paper on rapid onset gender dysphoria a few years back.

A fear of breaking the fourth wall is also, I think, what makes trans activists panic so much about J.K. Rowling’s forthright interventions on the harms of modern trans activism to women and girls. Rowling has the courage to describe the reality of male behaviours that harm women and girls, regardless of the identities of either. Perhaps precisely because she understands so well the difference between fiction and reality, the creator of “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” is both willing and able to name things that others dare not. She also has the communicative power and cultural clout to get her message out to millions. To those emotionally or indeed financially invested in trans fictions, and who desire others to remain immersed too, this must be terrifying.

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And then there’s the Detrans Subreddit. It has 27K members, mostly young, and many of whom talk frankly about the harms to their bodies and minds caused by premature transition. Some of those who post on this subreddit are desperate for help, and their testimonies are truly shocking. You might well wonder: why don’t those in the progressive media report on the phenomenon more unambiguously? For this is a medical scandal unfolding in plain sight.

The answer is that the existence of detransitioners reminds people that psychological identifications can be temporary, especially in adolescence, and that there’s no inevitability about transitioning on the basis of feelings of dysphoria. The idea that someone is “born trans” or has no choice but to transition, given “who they really are inside”, is a myth. Detransitioners establish this. Now, not all trans people are committed to ignoring this fact — far from it. But many do seem to be, as do large numbers of self-styled trans allies. And collectively they seem motivated to exert pressure on others to ignore it too, no matter what the public cost.

Even more painfully, perhaps, the phenomenon of detransitioners reminds parents of transitioned children that they might well be making a terrible mistake in allowing their child to be medicated — a mistake that may later cause grave and irrevocable problems for their child’s well-being. I hear that some of the prominent figures publicly engaged in trying to shut down balanced discussion about the welfare of trans children in the UK are privately in this position, and often wonder how it can be that such vested interests go undeclared.

These people remind me of Christof, the Creator-character in The Truman Show — desperate to stop their child from reaching the artificial horizon of the little world that has, unbeknown, been shaped just for them.

This is adapted from a post originally published on Kathleen Stock’s Substack.

In Stage Three of this process as seen during the Black Lives Matter protests, you’ll remember, right-wing media were filled with hair-raising scare stories about what BLM really wanted. “Revealed:” burbled the Daily Mail. “The British arm of Black Lives Matter’s full agenda – abolish the police, smash capitalism and close all prisons”. No reference to this loose and decentralised racial justice movement went unaccompanied by mention that three of the prominent figures in it had described themselves as “trained Marxists”. You feel on stronger ground, I suppose, resisting a movement that you’ve decided wants to tear capitalist society and its institutions to bits than one that asks us to give people of colour an equitable stake in society and the hope of walking the streets without being harassed by the cops.

Yet, capitalism being miraculously forgiving, we have now entered Stage Four. Robin DiAngelo, of White Fragility fame, makes her main living as a “diversity consultant”, and is reported to charge north of £10,000 for a speech. She lectured Coca-Cola last year on “Confronting Racism”. And a brace of new books in her tradition indicates that far from wanting to smash for-profit workplaces, the diversity-industrial complex now wants to make capitalism safe for diversity. We have reached the stage, in other words, that trained Marxists would call co-optation.

Two books — one by Y-Vonne Hutchinson, How To Talk To Your Boss About Race: Speaking Up Without Getting Shut Down, and the other, A Judgement-Free Guide To Diversity and Inclusion for Straight White Men by Felicity Hassan and Suki Sandhu — are similar in scope and approach, though Hutchinson’s primary focus is race, while Hassan and Sandhu cover racism, sexism, ageism and homo/bi/transphobia too. They’re both aiming squarely at the business how-to market, most shamelessly in the case of the latter, which again and again mentions the “business case” for diversity and inclusion and barely makes the moral case at all.

In genre terms, we’re seeing the collision of two well established discourses: the boilerplate of antiracist discourse folded into the numbing cliches of the business self-help manual. This has the unfortunate effect, at least stylistically and in publishing terms, of making the case for antiracism or workplace diversity read like another vogue in management style — the new “mindfulness”, say — rather than an urgent moral imperative.

The books adhere to the same, by now familiar, theoretical framework — with leading anti-racists DiAngelo, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Ibram X Kendi liberally and respectfully cited, and microaggressions and privilege given the traditional working over. They both address the reader in a buttonholing, folksy way. “If you feel concerned that you may now be labeled ‘cisgender’ for the first time in your life, hold onto that thought”, say Hassan and Sandhu. “It’s all part of the learning curve”. Hutchinson opens with the words: “Let’s cut the bullshit”. If you resist any of this, in other words, it’s just another sign that you need to do “the work”.

That doesn’t mean, I should say, that the ideas they’re selling are in broad strokes wrong. We can agree that people from historically marginalised minorities continue to be disadvantaged even when they achieve de jure equality. To take one of the most obvious examples, racial disadvantage in the US is generationally baked in in all sorts of ways, and prejudice survives and adapts to legal remedies. This is why it makes sense to talk about “structural racism”.

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There is much evidence — cited generously in both these books — for the notion that not only are black and brown people disproportionately under-represented in agreeable and well-paid jobs, but that more black and brown people in those jobs would make everyone, not just the black and brown people, richer and happier. And that what goes for black and brown people goes, in the broadest sense possible, for other minorities. It’s also true to say, as both these books do, that privileged people – white, cis-male, straight, able-bodied etc – can get a bit defensive when confronted with their complicity in such a system. Hassan and Sandhu address themselves, primarily, to the notional white dude standing in the way of reform; Hutchinson, primarily, to the person of colour seeking to start a Difficult Conversation with that white dude.

They both offer, in styles apt to the genre (Hassan and Sandhu: Venn diagrams, bullet-points, away-day exercises and wince-making tint-panels in which the likes of Richard Branson puff themselves by spouting abstract bromides about how much they value diversity), explanations of the jargon of the territory for bewildered newcomers, and hand-holding step-by-steps on how to help to centre marginal voices, be a good ally, and be the change in the world that you want to see. Most of the practical advice is not unobvious. Hutchinson, that said, has useful points to make about the way in which the task of changing workplace culture can all too easily fall on the unpaid labour of minority employees, and warns all too plausibly of how corporate HR departments are generally more interested in shielding the company from legal and financial risk than treating individual employees fairly.

But there’s little sense in either book that the received ideas or the received vocabulary of antiracism or gender politics needs any interrogation. This is, perhaps in keeping with the turn in identity politics where an individual’s own sense of themselves (in the case of the argument over aspects of queer and trans identity) or of their experience of oppression (in the case of much race discourse) holds an almost theological authority: that unless you have “lived experience” you don’t just have an inferior standing to consider the issues, but no standing at all.

Both books proceed from a position of epistemic confidence. “Is your workplace racist?” asks Hutchinson. “The short and simple answer is nearly certainly yes. The more nuanced answer is still nearly certainly yes”. What can the reader do? They can start, say Hassan and Sandhu, by “learning the language of diversity and inclusion”. A set of terms, rather than a set of ideas. “Set up a debate to debunk the philosophy that women compete more with each-other than their male counterparts”, they advise chirpily at one point. Foregone conclusions, regardless of the subject, isn’t what debates are traditionally about.

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Yet the vocabulary is contested; and the remedies, when it comes down to fine detail, are contested too. Hassan and Sandhu make a distinction, for instance, between “diversity” and “inclusion” (though they seem to muddle the two at other points) and between “equity” and “equality”. They disagree with Hutchinson, a little, on “unconscious bias”. The Judgment-Free Guide finds the notion useful; How To Talk thinks we should stop pussyfooting around and call it racism, so as not to centre white people, their intentions and their feelings in a conversation about the harms done to people of colour. Do you capitalise “Ally”, as Hassan and Sandhu do, but leave “white” lower-case; or do you capitalise “White”, as Hutchinson does, and leave “ally” lower-case? At this point, I should say, my fragility is perhaps causing me to indulge in what Hutchinson identifies as the racist-in-denial tactic of “sealioning”: “focusing on details and small points of argumentation rather than the larger themes of the discussion”.

What I can say, which I don’t think is my fragility talking, is that however we may endorse those larger themes, or humbly submit to be educated by the emotional labour of their authors, this subject’s established orthodoxies can make for wearyingly abstract and repetitive writing. “Power is not binary”, Hutchinson writes, “It’s multifaceted and fluid”. I lost count of the number of times Hutchinson uses the word “leverage”, or Hassan and Sandhu — the front of whose book promises “everything you need to lead positive change” — talk about “journeys” and “driving change” (though, be it said, these are more the failings of bollocksy business books than identity politics books per se). As a side-note, isn’t it careless when writing about diversity and tolerance to quote, as Judgement-Free Guide does, Henry Ford and Chairman Mao — one antisemite, one mass-murderer — with approval? That’s a bit more judgement-free than many of us will be comfortable with.

Both these books default too often to a tissue of generalities and buzzphrases that tend to leave little or no impression on the mind. That isn’t sealioning. You can agree that the elimination of structural racism and all the other structural-isms is an urgent necessity, and still wish that writing on the subject were lively and original and precise; indeed, the more you recognise the urgency the more you’ll want some decent books on the subject. It’s a bit depressing to think that wine made from the vineyards of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin has found its way into bottles designed by Tom Peters.

But is he really the best candidate to speak about sexism? This is the same man who dropped Joan Smith from her role as Co-Chair of the Mayor’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board without explanation, although it is thought to have been because she has campaigned against giving biological men access to women-only refuges. Khan, like so many prominent Left-wing men, is on the “trans women are women” side in the gender war; he appears not to understand what sex is.

The gender wars have proved useful for these men over the past few years. They have used the issue to firmly and incessantly position themselves as progressive superheroes, bending over backwards to be seen as supporting the oppressed and marginalised at all times. These men signal their support for Black Lives Matter — and spout, at every opportunity, “trans women are women”. But scratch the surface of Left Man and you will find all kinds of hypocrisy.

Left Man uses liberal feminism as a smokescreen to mask his misogyny. He is unwaveringly committed to the “sex work is work” and “porn is empowering” ideologies. So long as there are a few female voices claiming that women freely choose to rent out their body parts for men’s one-sided sexual pleasure, the social structures that underpin porn and prostitution worldwide — the racism, colonialism and misogyny — can be set aside.

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While men on the Right tend not to bother pretending to support feminism, progressive men not only claim to be feminists, but also then try to dictate feminism’s terms. Recently, in the interval of a play exploring the history of racism in the US, I heard a white, bearded dude shout, “my feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit”. He was sitting with a group of mates, sipping real ale, and I heard mumbles of “transphobia” and “TERFs”.

The mantra that the young man shouted out was coined by Flavia Dzodan who, in her scathing critique of feminism, argued that “intersectionality” means including men in the category of women, and celebrating prostitution. It is a twisted version of the original definition, which was created by the feminist law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the specific challenges faced by black American women in the workplace. If you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of oppression and exclusion, Crenshaw argued, you are likely to get hit by both.

The shouty beard at the theatre brought home to me what a gift Dzodan’s bastardisation of Crenshaw’s concept has been to so many men on the Left. They get to look progressive, while still disdaining women.

Likewise, as Tom Farr, a lawyer and pro-feminist campaigner against violence against women says, the reason so many white men are keen to attach their name to anti-racism activism is because they can look as though they are challenging their privilege without actually doing anything. They have precious little awareness when it comes to their own racism — or indeed their sexism.

“The championing of ‘sex work’, which is in part built upon the racist objectification of black women, makes it clear these men care not one iota for deconstructing their actual privilege”, says Farr. “But to actively challenge sexism and misogyny they would be required to change their behaviour and own up to their own contribution to male oppression and exploitation of women”. They can virtue signal about ending racism, but to work towards ending misogyny, they would have to give up the advantages associated with their male privilege, and their right to treasured modes of sexual release.

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Some men get it, and their genuine commitment to tackling misogyny shines a light on the posturers. Robert Jensen, the author of The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (2017), believes that men on the Left who celebrate pornography and prostitution tend to downplay the prevalence and devastating effects of rape and other forms of violence against women. It is no longer possible for men on the Left to claim that racism, economic or global inequality is irrelevant to their work, he tells me, “but men on the left can, and routinely do, ignore the relevance of patriarchy”. He writes not only about the misogyny explicit in pornography, but also the racism; unlike many men on the Left, Jensen understands Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, and is able to apply it.

But for every man like Jensen, there are ten like Owen Jones. The leftist uber bro insists he is a massive supporter of feminism, while defending men’s use of pornography, despite its inherent racism and obvious harms to women. Jones has even defended MPs and judges — our public servants — accessing it during office hours, because however much men like Jones want to be seen as on the right side of history, they will almost always defend the right of men to debase women. As Jones himself said, magnanimously forgiving the disgraced judges, “There’s clearly a sound argument that judges should be doing their jobs, not getting off on porn. Fair enough, but there’s all sorts of procrastination that goes on in the workplace.”

Men tend to bond over sexual entitlement, and porn specifically. The American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson waxed lyrical about the commendable anti-racist values of Hugh Hefner — the pimp and pornographer responsible for transforming images of women being sexually degraded from a niche market into mainstream entertainment. Hefner “featured” black women in his pornography, because selling the racist stereotype of “exotic” women to white men makes money. Jackson was thrilled to be interviewed in Hefner’s flagship porn rag Playboy, and in an article following Hefner’s death in 2017 lauded him thus: “Very few whites associated with blacks publicly. But Hefner opened his nightclubs to African-American performers and patrons.”

Hefner hated women and referred to them as “dogs”. But boys stick together and damn those bitches that make a fuss about being degraded and abused. It is almost as if they only support social justice movements in which men have a stake. Or, as feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon put it, “It seems that if your oppression is also done to a man, you are more likely to be recognized as oppressed, as opposed to inferior”. As these men of the Left might put it, it’s bros before hoes.

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And, in their quest to put men first, they tell actual feminists how to do feminism properly — using intersectionality, again, to silence women. There was a particularly egregious example at Washington’s march against Trump in 2017. Perched on a plinth above the crowds were two young white men, sporting smug expressions, standing either side of two young black women. The men were holding the poles of a huge banner bearing the slogan “White feminism was built on the back of women of colour”. The imagery is clear, and straight out of the Marvel Universe: Left Man saves the poor powerless heroine, while pouring scorn on the lady villains of “white feminism”. This is a toxic combination of white knighting and virtue signalling, covered by a progressive smokescreen.

And you can see this toxic mix guiding policy. Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch (and a highly paid white man), has lobbied for the removal of all laws pertaining to prostitution, including pimping and brothel owning. When criticised by feminists (including black women) for his support of the sex trade, Roth erected a façade woven from arguments about free choice, and economic empowerment for women from the Global South. “All want to end poverty, but in meantime why deny poor women the option of voluntary sex work?” tweeted Roth. To which sex-trade survivor Rachel Moran responded with: “Wouldn’t you say, if a person cannot afford to feed themselves, the appropriate thing to put in their mouth is food, not your cock?”

But patriarchy is depressingly resilient. It can thrive in all sorts of environments. “As a member of the Labour Party my whole adult life, I’ve always taken it for granted that lefties were the progressives ones, and the racism and sexism was left to the nasty party (the Tory’s)”, says Lucy Masoud, a former firefighter who was one of the very few black elected officials in the Fire Brigade Union, and the only black lesbian. Like many feminists, she is sick of the new breed of progressive man. “They describe themselves as ‘cis’ and hang around in Dalston drinking stout and declaring that trans women are women. But under all the faux progressiveness always lays the same entitled misogynist.”

What worries me, a life-long leftist, is how much power and influence Left Man has over young women looking to find their way as feminists. It is hard to see and believe that these men are seeking only to protect their own interests. But these sexists in sheep’s clothing can’t be allowed to set the agenda.

This might seem an uncontroversial policy for organisations providing accommodation for female victims of domestic violence — but that was far from the case. Research by Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of an organisation that supports victims of domestic violence in Hampshire, found that service providers “understood that they risked their funding if they spoke up in objection to trans women in female-only spaces”.

And so in the summer of 2020, I wrote to Sophie Linden, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, warning her about the chilling effect of Sadiq Khan’s mantra that ‘trans women are women’ on organisations that might seek funding from City Hall. I didn’t get the clear assurance I sought so in October that year I wrote to the Mayor, asking whether he believes that single-sex spaces are lawful in certain circumstances and necessary for the protection of the most vulnerable women in London.

It should have been an easy question to answer: back in 2009, when he was a Labour MP, Khan voted for what became the 2010 Equality Act and its list of exemptions, one of which allows organisations to provide single-sex spaces. In my letter to the Mayor, I said we are entitled to know if he has changed his mind about a piece of legislation that’s vital for the protection of women. That was sixteen months ago — and he still hasn’t replied.

My sacking as Co-chair of the VAWG Board came the following summer. I was aghast at the insensitive way it was done — by email, on a Friday afternoon when the entire country was stunned by a horrific mass shooting in Plymouth the previous evening. The killings were carried out by a young man who appeared to be an incel, a phenomenon I had written about in Home Grown, my book on the links between misogyny, domestic violence and terrorism. I was in the middle of doing broadcast interviews, explaining the background to the harrowing events in Plymouth, when the email arrived from City Hall. Within days, more than 4,000 women had signed a petition calling for my reinstatement. They’re still waiting for the Mayor’s response.

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At the time, Linden dealt with press inquiries, insisting that my removal was due to a restructure and had nothing to do with my views on transgenderism or any other issue. In a phone call, she apologised for the way I was informed and asked me to stay on as an ‘advisor’ to the board. I couldn’t see any point, given that I would no longer have any influence over the agenda. All the while, violence against women was reaching epidemic levels, with the number of rape reports in London climbing to a ten-year high in March 2021.

In that very month, Sarah Everard had been abducted, raped and murdered by a serving Met Officer. On the morning after Cressida Dick revealed the news that Ms Everard’s remains had been found, I received a phone call from Linden. Somewhat to my astonishment, she said she was calling to ask me what Khan should say about it. A few weeks later, I got another call from Linden, asking what the Mayor should say about VAWG during his campaign for re-election.

None of this inspired confidence in the regime at City Hall, to put it mildly. I kept on raising important issues, however, such as the Met’s egregious failure to identify sexual predators within its own ranks. I insisted that senior officers should attend the next meeting of the VAWG Board to tell us how they intended to deal with violence committed by police officers, and I called for a public inquiry into misogyny at the Met. I got no support from City Hall; suffice it to say that I wasn’t surprised by the series of scandals that culminated in Dick’s sudden resignation earlier this month.

After my phone conversation with Linden in August last year, amid a blizzard of emails cancelling all my scheduled meetings at City Hall, I agreed to write to her formally. I reiterated my view that the board needs a Co-chair who isn’t a salaried employee of the Mayor, and asked for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to my question about Khan’s support (or otherwise) for the crucial exemption in the Equality Act. In a pattern I’ve come to expect from the current administration at City Hall, Linden did not write back for five months.

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In a letter that finally arrived earlier this month, Linden says that she and Khan “have always been clear that the commissioning of all of our services will be based on the best interests of the user”. But if we are talking about a women’s refuge, who is the user? Many of us would say it means natal women, but here is Linden’s answer: “It is vital that anyone seeking refuge is able to access the services they need and that women, including trans women, fleeing abuse from men should be able to access spaces where they feel safe”. (My italics.) If the Mayor intends to fund separate refuge spaces for people who are transgender, no one would argue with that. But does he?

I also doubt whether service providers will feel reassured by the legalistic language in Linden’s letter, which stands on its head to avoid offering an unequivocal endorsement of single-sex spaces: “Our approach in commissioning services does not penalise any agency that is working within the boundaries of the law… No agency we fund is required to act any differently from the requirements of equalities legislation.”

So what happens if the board of a refuge has a different interpretation of the Equality Act from the Mayor? If the CEO refuses access to a male-bodied trans woman, prompting howls of outrage from activists, will her organisation be treated by City Hall as “working within the boundaries of the law”, or accused of transphobia? Would any service provider funded by the Mayor dare take the risk?

There is one significant revelation in Linden’s letter. In a major climb-down, City Hall now accepts that the VAWG Board needs an independent Co-chair. It’s back to the status quo, in other words — but I’m not going to be reinstated. Despite offering fulsome thanks for “the vital work you have done for women and girls through your role on the VAWG Board”, City Hall has been having discussions about appointing an “external expert”. Members of the board will be ‘notified’ when an appointment is made.

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Forgive me thinking there is a bitter taste to all this. Khan went on supporting Cressida Dick, calling into question his judgement, long after I pointed out that the Met’s culture was mired in misogyny. Now Dick has gone and the country’s biggest police force has been left rudderless. Four and a half million women and girls live in London, where they face quite unacceptable levels of violence, yet the Mayor’s attachment to gender ideology appears to mean that no one at City Hall can talk about women without instantly adding ‘including trans women’.

More than ever, women in London need someone to stand up for their rights and make sure their voices are heard. As a feminist who believes in biological reality, that person evidently won’t be me.

Since then, I have heard from hundreds of women and men who have been discriminated against and harassed at work for expressing the “gender critical” view that human beings cannot change sex, and that sex matters. Some cases, like mine, have become publicly known, but they are the tip of the iceberg. Many of the people who have endured complaints, and been subject to internal disciplinary processes, go unnoticed. As do those so afraid of losing their jobs that they remain anonymous when expressing their views online.

Despite this, the debate has gone mainstream in the last three years. Today, the gender debate can be heard in parliament, academia and the media, as well as on social media and in discussions between friends. There have been best-selling books on the subject and all manner of public figures — from Trevor Phillips and Tony Blair to Martina Navratilova and Tanni Grey-Thompson — have spoken up on the issue.

More people are speaking up about the need for clarity about sex, for safeguarding and women’s rights. They work in education, healthcare, in parliament and the media. Most of all, there are parents speaking up to their children’s schools.

I first started tweeting about the issue in 2018, back when the UK government was consulting on whether to reform the Gender Recognition Act to gender self-ID. My remarks were deemed so outrageous that the Center for Global Development (CGD) decided not to offer me further employment.

In 2019 a judge declared that my belief (that there are two sexes, that human beings can’t change sex, and that sex is important) did not count as a philosophical belief for the purposes of the Equality Act, that it was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

The day after I lost my case JK Rowling tweeted about it, bringing me more public attention than I had bargained for. When my case became internationally newsworthy, lies were circulated about me, meant to discredit Rowling. Tweets and YouTube videos and even newspaper articles have said I “misgendered” or harassed a trans colleague. In fact, I had no trans colleagues, and I told CGD from the start that I would always treat people with respect and politeness in any professional situation.

In June 2020, I won an appeal to overturn the initial judgment. The President of the Employment Appeal Tribunal determined that my ordinary belief about male and female people, which I share with the vast majority of people in the world, is not only in line with the UK legal definition of the sexes, but also “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. This meant I can continue my discrimination case against my ex-employer. It also means that other people can now seek legal redress if they are harassed or discriminated against, at work or as a service user, for believing that men are male and women are female. If people face workplace harassment for speaking up on this issue, they can point to the precedent of “Forstater”.

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The transgender lobby wants to rewrite the law

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Stonewall’s strategy of “no debate” on its push for gender self-ID has backfired. The unreasonable and unrelenting attacks on people as obviously calm and compassionate as Professor Kathleen Stock and JK Rowling have led more people to look again at the policies being promoted in the name of “trans inclusion”, which chip away at areas of life formerly designated female-only.

My case will be back in the Employment Tribunal starting on 7 March, three years to the day from when I lost my job. It has been a long, slow process to clear my name. And it is vital that I win this final stage — not just so I get justice, but also to demonstrate to employers that these rights don’t just exist on paper. You cannot disregard the usual frameworks of non-discrimination and respect for everyone’s human rights, just because someone points a finger and whispers “transphobe”. And employers should stop doing the bidding of organisations like Stonewall that tell them to do so.

By standing up to the gender bullies in whatever way we can, we are breaking through the culture of fear. My case and others have shone a light on areas of institutional capture. Harry Miller challenged the College of Policing over Humberside Police Force’s heavy-handed response to a complaint about his comical tweets. Keira Bell, a young detransitioned woman, brought a case against the NHS Tavistock gender-identity clinic challenging the experimental medical treatments being given to gender non-conforming children. Other cases are coming, most notably that of Allison Bailey, a barrister and a lesbian who is suing Stonewall, the influential LGBTQIA+ organisation, for colluding in a witch-hunt against her by her legal chambers.

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All these voices and so many others have brought the debate out into the open. As a result of that debate, the UK government ditched the proposal for gender self-ID (although Scotland is still planning to go ahead), and has commissioned an independent review of children’s gender-identity services. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK’s human rights law watchdog, intervened in my case to say that my belief is indeed protected. And it has gone on to change its position on gender self-ID laws.

If it wasn’t obvious before that my belief is “worthy of respect in a democratic society”, it is now.

One of the worst things about being a claimant in an employment tribunal is how it isolates you. People who know you professionally keep their distance. They imagine I might have done something awful to lead CGD to argue that I engaged in speech so offensive that it “causes harm to trans people, and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act”. And I could not clear my name. My tribunal is the first chance for the full truth to be heard.

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It is perhaps worth noting that the organisation I worked for is the European subsidiary of a parent organisation based in Washington DC. The complaints by people who read my tweets came from the US. The consultants who investigated me were from the US, and so were the decision makers who decided to let me go.

Radical gender ideology arose in the campuses of elite North American universities and has spread to the UK, and other countries. This is not a positive cultural import. The idea of replacing sex with “gender identity” is institutional kryptonite, corrupting organisations, preventing people from speaking truthfully and recording data accurately. It turns organisations away from their principles, in ways that particularly harm women and children, even while allowing those organisations to wave a superficial flag of “inclusion”. This is an American import we should reject. We would be better off without it.

And yet, with the presidential election less than a month away, the conservative candidate Yoon Seok-yeol is showing a slight edge in polling over his liberal rival Lee Jae-myung. How have the country’s conservatives been able to regroup in just five years?

A major reason for this resurgence is the sharp conservative turn of young South Korean men, who are increasingly animated by aggressive misogyny and anti-feminism. These young men have found their champion in Lee Jun-seok, a 36-year-old, Harvard-educated political pundit who became the leader of the conservative opposition party last summer. Warning of the “totalitarian tendency” of feminism and accusing the ruling Democratic Party of fixating on a “pro-woman agenda”, Lee and his supporters have injected a jolt of energy into the South Korean Right.

Until recently, South Korean politics followed a conventional demographic pattern. The younger generation leaned liberal and the older generation leaned conservative, with only marginal differences between the sexes. That began to change, however, after the emergence of the country’s #MeToo movement in early 2018. Since then, politics has polarised along gendered lines.

A January 2022 survey by Gallup Korea, for example, showed that 48% of male voters in their 50s approved of President Moon, as did 46% of female voters in same age group. For voters in their 70s, the gender gap was similarly minuscule — 36% approval among men against 34% approval among women. But among voters in their 30s, only 35% of men approved of the President, compared to 51% of women. The gap was even starker for voters in their 20s: 18% approval among men versus 42% among women. In other words, men in their 20s are more conservative than men in their 70s.

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While sexism in South Korea is nothing new, the aggrieved misogyny animating young men is of a more recent vintage. In their 2019 book Men in Their 20s, journalist Cheon Gwan-yul and data scientist Jeong Han-wool found that the young generation’s misogyny was marked by over-the-top hostility against feminism: 58.6% of South Korean men in their 20s said they strongly opposed feminism, with 25.9% rating the intensity of their opposition as 12 on a scale from 0 to 12.

Unlike older men, who held to a patriarchal worldview defined by rigid gender roles, young men reject the sense of masculine duty that typically accompanies old-school sexism. Rather, they see themselves as victims of feminism and define themselves politically by this sense of victimisation.

Among young South Koreans, gender is emerging as the primary dividing line between liberals and conservatives. For the older generation, politics was largely about attitudes toward South Korea’s dictators and the democracy movement of the 1970s and 80s. But for South Koreans under 30, who were born into a wealthy and secure democracy, debates about whether economic growth is more important than freedom are no longer relevant.

Today’s young people came of age after the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 had destroyed South Korea’s previous model of lifetime employment, and they have spent their entire lives preparing for and taking a series of ruthlessly competitive examinations — for prestigious high schools, then colleges, then large corporations. Instead of poverty and oppression, their main struggle is to achieve economic security in a society that is often brutal to those who lose out.

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In this new environment, young women have fared better than before. Sexism, of course, remains a problem: a recent study estimated that structural sexism depresses South Korean women’s wages by between a quarter and a third compared to South Korean men. But since 2009, more women have attended college than men, and in some standardised examinations, they dominate to such an extent that men now benefit from affirmative action. In an exam selecting mid-level civil servants, for example, a rule requires an additional hire if one of the sexes fall below 30% of the overall staff; that is, if a department is hiring ten new employees and two men and eight women make the cut, the department is required to pass one more man and hire eleven employees. In 2021, 79 men and 22 women benefitted from this rule.

The effect of rising autonomy among young women is particularly visible in dating and family formation. In a 2021 study that surveyed residents of Seoul, only 58% of men in their 20s said they had had sex in the past year, a lower rate than for men in their 60s. The numbers were similar among women in their 20s, but for a different reason. While most celibate men said they didn’t have sex because they couldn’t find a partner, most celibate women said it was because they had no interest in sex.

Young Korean women are also increasingly sceptical of marriage and childbirth. According to a survey by the magazine SisaIN, only 8.1% of young women and 0% of self-identified feminists agreed with the statement “People must marry”, versus 37% of the population overall. And South Korea’s fertility rate, which fell to 0.84 births per woman in 2020, is the lowest in the world.

As sex and marriage become matters of individual choice, they are also becoming, for men, a luxury for the economically secure. In the Yonsei University study, men who rated themselves as upper middle class were 12 percentage points more likely to say they had had sex in the previous year than men who rated themselves as lower class. A 2019 analysis by KBS News, which studied men in their 30s, found a clear linear correlation between income and marital status: 86.3% of men in the top income decile were married, compared to only 20.3% in the bottom decile.

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These divisions around sex, marriage, and feminism are increasingly mapping onto political divisions. For instance, another study, a December 2021 survey of people aged 20–35, found that those who say they could marry but did not want to were more likely than average to be college-educated liberal women. On the other hand, those who said they wanted to marry but couldn’t were more likely than average to be conservative men who did not attend college.

Frustrated by these arrangements, many young men have focused their ire on women and feminism, which they blame for their economic and sexual frustrations. These young sexists have poured their anger into conservative politics, reviving the country’s formerly moribund Right. They scored their first major political victory in the Seoul mayoral by-election in April 2021, in which exit polls showed a staggering 72.5% of male voters in their 20s voting conservative. This win was followed by the rise of Lee Jun-seok, who made anti-feminism his calling card. Despite never previously winning an election — he had tried three times and failed — Lee was elected president of the main conservative party, the People Power Party, in June 2021.

In the current presidential race, Lee and his sexist supporters have been a major force for the PPP presidential candidate, Yoon Seok-yeol. Lee and Yoon initially feuded, until Lee loudly quit Yoon’s campaign in late December, in part because Yoon courted the support of a few prominent feminists in an attempt to appeal to young women. With Lee and his backers gone, however, Yoon’s support cratered. His double-digit polling lead over his main rival, the liberal Lee Jae-myung, evaporated, and by early January, he had fallen into a double-digit hole. To regroup, Yoon ditched the feminists and welcomed Lee Jun-seok back to the campaign.

Since Lee’s return, Yoon has strongly focused his campaign on appealing to the young misogynists. He has, for instance, promised to eliminate the Ministry of Gender Equality, a bête noire of the sexists, who consider it to be a feminist cabinet ministry. And on his Instagram account, he has peddled alt-Right memes, including a photo of himself buying anchovies (“myeol-chi”) and beans (“kong”) at a supermarket — a dog-whistle for “myeol-kong”, or “Exterminate Communists.” After the shift in tactics, Yoon’s polling numbers soon bounced back, taking a narrow lead over Lee Jae-myung at the time of this writing.

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By Dorian Lynskey

South Korean politics is undergoing a transition. Since the end of dictatorship in 1987, the country’s politics was largely about litigating that past. Conservatives argued that political oppression had been worth it to escape dire poverty, while the liberals focused on the lack of freedom and the crimes of the dictators. The humiliating 2017 impeachment of Park Geun-hye, the daughter of dictator Park Chung-hee, was the final nail in the coffin for that old conservative argument.

Rather than evolving toward the embrace of sound conservative principles like the limited government, however, Korean conservatives have found a new lease on life by appealing to sexism and male grievance politics. If Yoon Seok-yeol does prevail on 9 March, his victory will be touted as the triumph of anti-feminism. That will be an ominous sign for South Korea’s future.

She is the subject of First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson, a critical book by Lord Ashcroft, the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. In response to this portrait, we are told attacks on Mrs Johnson are an affront to women’s rights, often by men who usually treat feminism — I mean real feminism — as a dangerous aberration. Having secured Mrs Johnson with their peculiar feminism, will they turn next to domestic violence, to low wages, to poor housing, and their gruesome impact on women, who are, as a class, always at the bottom, a form of human sludge?

Don’t be stupid. Feminism, which is a movement taken hostage, has long been going this way: from the universal feminism that protects all women to the particular feminism that protects just one, and at the expense of others: the feminism of oneself. That this pitiful thing should be marshalled to support a very privileged woman in the palace of her privilege is desolate, but not surprising. That is what it is for.

The defence is dishonest, of course. A woman — a person — with vast and unelected (and therefore unaccountable) power is criticised because she is feared. And she should be feared because she is an affront: to the democratic process. If this criticism upsets her, I don’t much care. The feminism of hurt feelings has no truck with me, and nor does the feminism of an inalienable right to a sympathetic press. That is the detritus of tyranny, and we are still, at least nominally, a parliamentary democracy.

Do they care about what matters most? Democratic processes were subverted to secure the golden wallpaper in the previously repulsive “John Lewis-style” flat above the office; donations were sought; self-serving lies were told. That it was trivia — the wallpaper is golden! — makes it more of an offence, not less.  You would subvert democratic processes — for this?

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Elements of the country lost faith in the democratic process due to the Johnsons’ treatment of the rules under pandemic. There was a party celebrating her victory over a rival faction while people died alone in fear, and that cannot be undone. If you wield power — and she does — you must be willing to be judged for how you wield it. You should welcome it. She should have done a better job as the Prime Minister’s partner, unless you think her so pathetic, being female, she could have done no better. Of course, it is easier to hate women, and pretty women more than any other kind, for they have a combustible kind of power. It comes more naturally. That doesn’t mean it isn’t fair.

So, we have a woman with unaccountable power treating feminism, a prostrate political movement, as a defensive earthwork. We also have a consuming personal drama that, though fascinating, is no substitute for a functioning state. Carrie Johnson is a symptom of two things: a failing and empty parliamentary Tory Party and a failing and empty man.

For years we have treated Boris Johnson like a riddle, a fortune cookie, a Reality TV contestant we long to tear apart and divine. What is inside him? What is at the core of his contradictions, this supposed scholar who dangles from a zipwire with a tiny Union flag? Nothing, we now know, is the answer. Nothing. His laughter is ashes and his sunlit uplands a mirage of his invention. He is essentially a void, and you can project anything onto a void.

There is one story in which Johnson makes sense, and it is in Tom Bower’s recent biography The Gambler. According to Bower, Johnson’s father, Stanley, assaulted his wife Charlotte, who was an artist. Bower has this quotation from Charlotte Wahl, who has since died: “He broke my nose. He made me feel like I deserved it.” Charlotte was also hospitalised for depression, and her children were scattered.

This is the root of Johnson, his dreams of optimism and control — the remaking of oneself as powerful and happy is a lonely child’s dream — and the root too of his actions to women, which are so repetitive as to be barely worth repeating: seduction and betrayal. He has Don Juan syndrome, which is a desire to cleave to, and to punish, the mother who abandoned him. He has betrayed every woman who cared for him, and many who didn’t. The stories of his adulteries are too legion to type out. If he has a longing for transformation, it is not political at all. It is entirely personal, and that is why people were drawn to him, and why he has failed them.

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According to those who have left Downing Street in despair, Johnson mirrors his wife. He mirrors everyone and tells them what they want to hear, because then they will love him. A weathervane will shift to the wind because it is easy. If Carrie Johnson has too much power, it is because he took it from those who should have it and gave it to her instead. I think his premiership will be destroyed by it and, considering what he has done to the women he has known, it is a mad kind of justice.

If this drama goes on, and it will until the Tory Party stops it dead, she will be hated. And yet, none of it would have happened without him. She is a symptom of his unfitness for office and yet another woman he has ruined.

As the mainly female group shared their despair at the new administration, the older grey-haired man sitting on my left — conservative suit, flamboyant tie — smiled quizzically, before calmly remarking in his Southern drawl: “Well then, I suppose I am the only one here who supports our new President?” He was.

I can’t reproduce my conversation with this doctor from Arizona as accurately as I wish. I wasn’t taking notes and his story did not seem as significant to me then as it does now. But this is the gist of it.

In his small hometown, he ran not only the abortion clinic but two gun stores; he was a member of both the National Abortion Federation and the National Rifle Association. He was, he explained, a man whose values were shaped by the writings of Ayn Rand, whom he had met as a student in the Sixties. He said, and this is the one bit I do remember verbatim: “My support for a woman’s choice about abortion comes from the same place as my support for her right to bear arms. An individual’s freedom matters.”

This is not a conventional view for today’s supporters of legal abortion, many of whom seem to believe personal freedom, autonomy and self-determination are the preserve of the neo-con Right. I am not sure my gun-trading friend would now be welcome in a similar meeting. Perhaps, given what I am about to say, I would not be either.

How we talk about, indeed how we think about, abortion has changed fundamentally since it was dragged from the dowdiness of shame and secrecy to the centre of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Access to abortion was clearly about self-determination and moral autonomy. Yes, abortion was — at least in early pregnancy — a simple medical procedure that was a benefit to personal and to public health. But to those campaigning for its legalisation, abortion was so much more than healthcare. It symbolised a choice for a woman when her life was in crisis; it symbolised a new sense of personal agency, the personal power to shape nature’s plan.

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Birth control gave us control of our reproductive destiny, freeing us from the socially constructed, imposed gender-role of mother and carer. It mattered not whether a woman actually used birth control — what mattered was that she could choose to do so if she wished. With contraception to prevent pregnancy and abortion to end it, the spectres of birth and motherhood were pushed away — unless we invited them to us. It’s hard to see what else could make a bigger contribution to a woman’s liberty.

Of course, not all who claim they’re committed to freedom and liberty believe that women should be free to choose to have an abortion. No doubt an abortion doctor would be as alone in a meeting of defenders of the Second Amendment as our gun-shop owner would now be among clinic staff. But when we go beyond the feelings and self-identification of different tribal members, there remains a consistency of a principle: that the state should step back and stay out of private personal decision-making.

Crucially, this foundation is not contingent on a woman’s situation or experience — her race, or class or privilege. We live intersectional lives but some beliefs and principles remain universal concerns because we are more than our own experience. Indeed, the pro-choice principles that won abortion access only did so because they united women beyond personal experience or need.

They mobilised those who would never become pregnant because they were older, or infertile, or expressed sexual feelings in a way that didn’t risk pregnancy. Men joined us in solidarity because they understood how an involuntary pregnancy is a living nightmare. The social movement was built on an idea of what was worth fighting for.

Today, the focus is different. The sails of the movement now seem to be buffeted by winds from a different continent. Freedom of choice, once our principle, has been thrown overboard — not to anchor us as it once did, but to cut the movement loose from a legacy of white supremacy. “Freedom”, as in the personal moral freedom that gives each of us command of life, is dismissed as a privilege of the advantaged, not to be extended to all but instead to be “checked”. “Choice”, in particular the choice between abortion and motherhood, is now dismissed as elitist or consumerist or too binary.

Today’s destination is no longer a world where we have freedom to decide what is right and wrong in the private personal domain. Instead, it is a world where self-determination, autonomy and personal freedom are dismissed as privileged and arcane and insufficiently inclusive. It is as though these ideas, by being anchored in a Western philosophical canon, are forever tainted with a stench of old, white patriarchs.

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Of course, how we experience reproductive rights and wrongs are woven with the rest of our lives. But, when every aspect of life is thrown into the pot of oppression and denial — racism, poverty, homelessness, educational disadvantage, disability, sexual marginalisation — it is unclear with whom solidarity can be won.

Does my older, white, male, privileged Republican abortion doctor have no place in this movement? Does the rich, white, conservative Texan woman with a $300 haircut and Gucci shoes not suffer the same degradation as her cleaner when she is told that the law no longer permits her to end an unwanted pregnancy? Where does privilege begin and end in this intersectional quagmire? Who is inside our tent, and who is outside it? Crucially, who decides?

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) grew out of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League, changing its name in 1942. While its origins are tainted in eugenics (like every other mainstream medical organisation formed in the early 20^th Century), it has provided birth control and sexual health care for generations of women since, particularly poor women without insurance.

So what is a poor, white, woman — with no job, no education, no home to call her own — to believe when she reads the following statement given by the President of PPFA to the New York Times last April: “By privileging whiteness, we’ve contributed to America harming Black women and other women of colour. And when we focus too narrowly on ‘women’s health’ we have excluded trans and nonbinary people…”

Might not she herself feel excluded by the very organisation on which she relies no less than a poor, black woman? And when she reads that once-champion of women’s choice go on to say that “we’ve claimed the mantle of women’s rights to the exclusion of other causes that women of colour or trans people cannot afford to ignore”, might she not howl with despair that her own colour and absence of “queerness” casts her aside?

From the perspective of today’s reproductive justice warriors, pregnancy by its very nature is problematic. After all, it defies the progressive framing of every issue around social constructions, to the exclusion of hard-wired reality. Pregnancy is starkly binary: you either are, or you aren’t. It’s old-fashionedly objective and challenges self-definition: feeling and defining yourself pregnant or unpregnant won’t make it so. It relies on, and resides in, mature, female physiology — even if you don’t define yourself as “woman”.

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Is this why so many young activists insist that I cannot or should not talk about pregnant women when I talk about abortion? Because pregnancy makes it obvious that a woman is more than just “a body with a vagina” or “someone with a cervix”? Her woman-ness is so obviously, physically real that a world committed to social constructionism simply collapses.

And does the fact that pregnancy happens to an individual, not to a community — and so calls for a personal decision that speaks to an individual’s sense of right and wrong — disrupt a narrative that seeks to frame itself as communitarian? It is not a community’s womb that becomes pregnant. It is not a society’s belly that grows, or a people’s breasts that are made heavy as they fill. All of this happens to an individual.

There is something grimly ironic about the tendency among today’s activists to deny this: namely, that their retreat from an old-fashioned commitment to individual choice leads right back to the eugenicist basis from which those of us committed to individual freedom have tried to wrest the birth control movement. A personal choice must be personal — otherwise it isn’t a choice, but social engineering.

Already we see social movements insisting that personal choices are being made for the “wrong reasons”. Advances in antenatal screening, for instance, are blamed for allowing women to make the choice to terminate pregnancies affected by conditions that a pregnant woman understands as disability, but which justice warriors see as “difference”. They protest that women are making discriminatory choices, that the world will be less diverse. But why, a woman might ask, should they get to decide for her? When it comes to her body, choice isn’t something that a woman can simply abrogate: it’s what makes her her.

The freedom to make moral choices is the most important freedom we have; the freedom to act on those choices is the most important freedom we can claim. And while Trump may be gone, that freedom is still far from guaranteed. In the battles ahead over who decides about abortion, I know I can count on the pro-choice, gun shop-owning white Republican to have my flank. I wish I could feel so confident about the twenty-something activists shouting him down.

Ann Furedi’s latest book The Moral Case for Abortion: A Defence of Reproductive Choice is available for pre-order on Amazon or directly from the publisher, Palgrave Macmillan