The scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how much money you’ve made by JK ROWLING
In a deeply personal and compelling defence of women’s rights
This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but i know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. i write this without any desire to add to that toxicity, though i have been subjected to so much of it myself.
In return for my views on trans, gender and sex issues over the past two years or so, i have been labelled transphobic, called a c***, a bitch and threatened with ‘cancelling’, punching and death. ‘ You are Voldemort,’ said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language i’d understand. i have been told i was literally killing trans
People with my hate, and faced my books being burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.
Above all, i have been labelled a ‘Terf’. if you didn’t already know — and why should you? — Terf is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called Terfs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. examples of so-called Terfs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms.
But accusations of Terfery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations i once admired, who are cowering before the tactics of the playground.
So why have i decided to write this now? Well, last saturday i read that the scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will, in effect, mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, i was ‘triggered’.
I spent much of saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault i suffered in my 20s recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where i was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity.
I couldn’t shut out those memories, and i was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way i believe my government is playing fast and loose with women’s and girls’ safety.
Endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, i refuse to bow down to a movement that i believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.
I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who are standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who are reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces.
FOR more than two years i have followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. i’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media.
On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because i’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself. But on another, it’s intensely personal, as i’m about to explain.
I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new transactivism, and deciding i need to speak up.
Firstly, i have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. i also fund medical research into Ms, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women.
it’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes i support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.
The second reason is that i’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, i have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.
The third is that, as a much-banned author, i’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.
The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. i’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably and taken away their fertility.
some say they decided to transition after realising they were same- sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
Most people probably aren’t aware — i certainly wasn’t, until i started researching this issue properly — that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4,400 per cent increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely over-represented in their numbers. The same phenomenon has been seen in the U.s.
The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria i’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm
and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge.
I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.
When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens.
Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.
I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60 to 90 per cent of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria.
Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people’. I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful.
Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe ( and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned.
But being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation.
The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.
We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 1980s, I imagined my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn- saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls.
Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the p***y’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re- educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble.
Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else. I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynist and regressive.
As many women have said before me, ‘ woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘ inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘ people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning.
I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who have had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.
Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.
I’ve been in the public eye now for more than 20 years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember.
I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too.
However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.
I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who have been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.
I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. The scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made.
My perennial jumpiness is a family joke — and even I know it’s funny — but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.
If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship.
I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.
I believe the majority of transidentified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection.
Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk.
I want them to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman — and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones — then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth. The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them.
POLITICAL parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard- won rights and widespread intimidation.
None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary.
Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but they are facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse.
The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teenyweeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim.
I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions.
I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.
All I’m asking — all I want — is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.