I’ve missed the ladies’ pond, but not its politics

I’m as excited for the reopening of our social lives as the next woman, but the most important reopening for me is that of Hampstead ladies pond.

This means I swim daily in freezing water, amid the ducks and glowering skies. But there is one drawback: the volatile community who also swims there. In America, I swam daily in the sea: this was at times a bit frightening, but from a political vantage all was quiet.

The pond, however, has prompted an explosion in debate since the introduction of a law stating that anyone who identifies as a woman can swim there, including people with male genitalia. As you can imagine, not all swimmers – especially the older ones – are so keen on this. But, as ever, the young warriors won out.

The Facebook group can get pretty nasty. An older woman recently posted that she was uncomfortable with the prospect of sharing changing areas with woman-identifying people with male parts. She was instantly mauled; told she was essentially a transphobic hate crime-commmiter and so on. The posts have since been removed.

The aggression doesn’t seem limited to that most vexing issue. Last week I saw a teeth-gnashing post reporting on some women spotted in the swan pond, rather than the swimming pond. There might be a spot of lockdown madness in all this: people are emotionally fraught and quick to turn on each other. But it’s not just that, as the long-raging dispute over trans women in women-only spaces makes clear. No, the culture war has certainly engulfed the ponds, too. Oh, for the simplicity of the sea.