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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have known Kathleen since 2018, when I discovered her research on gender identity and women’s sex-based rights. We have remained close since then, and I have looked on with horror at the abhorrent treatment she has been forced to endure in recent months.

Watch the full 50 minute interview on UnHerdTV below, or listen to the podcast version here:

When I interviewed Kathleen for UnHerd this morning, she detailed the true extent of the aggressive campaign of targeted harassment she’s been forced to endure. Kathleen might be a mild-mannered, liberal academic, but she is not one to shy away from a fight. Her decision to leave Sussex after 18 years teaching there was no easy decision.

“I went to work as normal, and saw stickers all over my building about the ‘transphobic shit that comes out of Kathleen Stock’s mouth’,” Kathleen says. “That was obviously distressing but the next day it escalated.” As she walked to campus from the train station, she was confronted with a number of posters calling for her to be sacked: “Fire Kathleen Stock”, “Kathleen Stock’s A Transphobe”, “We’re Not Paying Our Fees For Transphobia With Kathleen Stock”.

“They were setting off flares… And they later took a picture of a man in a balaclava, all in black, looking just like Antifa. The imagery was obviously intimidating: holding a massive banner saying ‘Stock out’, while setting off pink and blue flares because those are the colours on the transgender flag.

“I ran back to the station, got the train home, tried to teach a class on Zoom, burst into tears and my dear students said I must be having a tough day and they let me off,” says Kathleen. “It was the beginning of the end of the campaign to intimidate me out of my job.”

The campaign to push Stock out of Sussex began after she self-published a number blog posts critical of extreme transgender ideology. Kathleen was concerned that the majority of academics, including philosophers such as herself, were reluctant to criticise campaigns to introduce self-identification for transgender people. After all, she thought, why should we just ignore material categories such as sex?

But to implement self-identification without question is to ignore a key safeguarding problem. As Kathleen puts it, “Self  ID policies trade on a fantasy that suddenly putting on a dress or saying ‘I’m a woman’ will change your basic nature. But, in fact, what was there before will be there after. Humans are humans, and if you make it the case that you can self identify into a better situation than you were in — i.e. a woman’s prison as opposed to a male prison, which are usually less intense, aggressive places — then some people will do it, whether they’re trans or not.” And as both Kathleen and I keep saying, this isn’t about every trans person. It’s a safeguarding policy.

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“These academics were not attending to the obvious consequences for women,” she says. “Yet on the other hand, there were plenty of academics who were cheerleading self-ID, ostentatiously moralising about it, and talking about Terfs and transphobia.”

Kathleen continues: “Gender identity theory is egregiously false. It is terrible, pseudo philosophy and would fail a first-year essay. As a philosopher who cares about logic and truth at a basic level, I couldn’t believe that all these academics were just waving it through.”

One aspect in particular that baffled her was the claim that a person’s belief about their psychological identity, whether they are male or female, is more important than their material sex at birth — not least due to the impact such categories have on medicine, sport, science, education and more.

“I’m a lesbian and a feminist,” states Kathleen. “I assumed that academic feminists were covering women and girls’ rights and I didn’t need to get involved. I started to see that they were not only not covering it, but they were also actively undermining women’s rights in the name of feminism, and there were all these knock-on consequences for lesbians. On all those levels, it annoyed the fuck out of me.”

Although Kathleen is understandably upset by the conduct of the small number of abusive students, she is adamant that many of them are taking a cue from the influential adults around them. “I don’t think they’ve actually read what I think. There’s a lot of enabling, or inciting, of individuals in this story,” she says.

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“Many of these academics contribute to an environment in which some pretty terrible things are happening to, for instance, children in gender identity clinics. I can see why they had a vested interest in shutting me down.”

She stresses: “I absolutely believe that trans people should be protected in law, so I’m never going to waiver from that. I just disagree about the laws that should be used.”

Like a number of other women in the public eye who have been deemed to be transphobic, Kathleen is tired of being “lumped in with holocaust deniers” as the personification of all evil.

“I’m not even a free speech absolutist,” she says. “This is preposterous framing and entirely set up by our enemies to mean that we can’t win. All we’re doing is insisting on basic obvious facts of biology and their social significance. Nearly 99% of the planet agrees with us. The most I can get out of people is a tentative ‘Well, we absolutely support Kathleen Stock’s right to say what she thinks’ but they won’t say ‘And yeah, of course we agree with her because it’s bloody obvious’.”

And this insistence on keeping silent has had a toxic impact on the transgender debate, allowing small groups of extremely vocal and aggressive activists to fill that gap. For example, Kathleen firmly believes that Stonewall is in large part responsible for the current witch hunt mentality. As someone who has experienced the ensuing vitriol first-hand, it is hard not to agree. During the past few years, its business model has prioritised promoting a very narrow conception of what they would call trans rights.

“I would say these rights don’t benefit trans people,” says Kathleen. “But they were already embedded in all these national institutions, government departments, the CPS, the EHRC, almost all of our universities, schools and local authorities. And being in one of their schemes means these institutions get a constant stream of instructions such as: ‘We would really appreciate it if you would put out a tweet lobbying for this project’. Our national institutions have almost unwittingly been instruments to be used by extremists.”

Those extremists are swift to accuse Kathleen of “weaponising her trauma” if she ever dares talk about how the attacks have affected her personally. Which they have, obviously. She insists on talking about it, though, because it’s not just affecting high-profile characters like us two. “It’s what’s happening now in every institution, not just universities, to women who feel like they’re choking,” she explains. “They cannot get their words out — or if they do, then they’re put through complaints systems, they’re socially ostracised, they are told by their bosses, ‘we’re watching your Twitter feed.’ There’s just this feeling of surveillance that is unacceptable. So that’s why we have to talk about the human cost.”

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What was the final straw for Kathleen? She tells me it was when the Sussex branch of the University and College Union (UCU) put out a statement in support of “our trans and non-binary students” and against “institutional transphobia”.

“At that point I was just hanging on. I was teaching from home. I saw the posters. I was advised to stay at home for my own protection. The police were coming round. I’m getting security stuff delivered to my house, trying to think about the future. I thought I’d  have to stay off campus for the rest of the term but at least I can teach on Zoom. I hoped they would support me.”

And then her UCU branch issued its damning statement. “It was a pompous peroration about ‘standing with our trans and non binary students against institutional transphobia’” Kathleen explains. “And all they could possibly mean by that is that I was there”.

“There’s nobody else who speaks out like I do. Plus, every second communication that comes out of the university is about trans and non-binary spaces in the library and trans or non-binary support groups and LGBT issues. There’s a staff network; there’s a Centre for Sexual Dissidence; there’s a Centre for Gender Studies.

“It’s literally saturated with positive messaging. It’s in Brighton, one of the most queer-friendly places in the world. So all they could mean by institutional transphobia is: ‘We haven’t shut that bitch up yet’. It came through on my email and it just felt like a punch in the gut.

“But this is a union! They are supposed to protect employees from their bosses and to offer solidarity with anyone who is an employee — especially in a university where they are being targeted for their academic research and their philosophical beliefs, which are also protected in law under the equality act.”

And, Kathleen tells me, this intolerance trickles all the way down from the top of UCU. As far back as 2019, for instance, Jo Grady, UCU’s general secretary, boasted of her decision to instal ‘Terf Blocker software’ on Twitter, which automatically blocks any account that has been deemed transphobic.

“Grady is not unusual in academia,” says Kathleen. “She has these relatively extreme views but they’ve become the norm and it’s all so moralised. These people are a small number of hardcore totalitarians.”

I ask Kathleen if there’s anything we can do. How can we enable students to critically examine controversial topics without being scared to speak out?

“What we can do is demand that universities reduce the influence of lobbying groups like Stonewall, and insist that senior management do not make politically loaded pronouncements in controversial areas of public dispute.”

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She explains that having transgender flags on campuses, holding quasi-religious ceremonies such as Trans Day of Remembrance and so on are not neutral gestures, despite how they are presented. These are political gestures and managers should not be participating in them.

Despite all the abuse she’s received, Kathleen believes there is better news on the horizon. She has seen a tsunami of support from Government ministers, students, feminists and, of course, right-minded liberals who are now less afraid to speak out, having been inspired by Kathleen and others who have put their heads above the parapet.

“We’re obviously having some success because I see more and more people speaking out. I think as the public becomes better educated about the basic issues and our particular position, which is the opposite of how it has been represented.

“One thing that’s happened recently is that the Guardian and the BBC are no longer presenting our views as anti-trans or transphobic. And at least some of the people working there seem aware that there’s actually a proper intellectual dispute here. Beforehand, I honestly think Guardian readers hardly knew about any of the implications of self-identification. They just were being protected from that information, because it wasn’t serving the newspaper’s business model very well.”

What will Kathleen do next? “I’m not going to stop,” she tells me with defiance. “In leaving Sussex, I’ve become even more able to speak out and now I’ve got a bigger platform.”

What she does with that platform is yet to be seen. But I suspect it won’t be long until we find out.