My day on the front line with Britain’s new suffragettes
Judith Woods comes faceto-face with trans activists in Bristol and enters a new world of identity politics
Ayoung woman with aquamarine hair is striding around with a megaphone leading a call and response, as a policewoman watches from a distance on a Bristol street. “Trans rights are human rights!” The motley crowd of students answer as one: “Trans rights are human rights!”
“Protect trans students!” “Protect trans students!” they parrot. Then she gets a little over-aerated: “Terfs can suck my boy d---.”
Nobody says a word, they just shuffle uncomfortably.
Terfs, in case you don’t know, are “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”. This loosely translates as “any woman who doesn’t want some bloke claiming to be a lady joining her in the changing rooms in Monsoon, or a boy saying he’s a girl sharing a tent and, quite possibly, a shower with their daughter at a summer camp started by former PM David Cameron.”
In effect, Terfs are those who disagree with the militant orthodoxy that anyone “identifying” as a woman must have full access to single-sex spaces – be they public loos, rape crisis refuges, female prisons or women’s sport.
Sensing she might be losing her crowd, Aquamarine then reels her angry acolytes back with a more familiar incantation: “Trans women are women!”
A woman in a Harris tweed coat passing by catches my eye, pauses and observes with perfect timing: “But they’re not, are they?”
We grin conspiratorially. She briskly turns right, along with a stream of other women, both young and old, and disappears into a side door of the university.
Welcome to the insane world of identity politics in Britain in 2022, where a police presence is required to monitor protesters shouting at those lawfully attending a public meeting entitled, “A Woman’s Place is With Woman: Feminism, Birth and Motherhood”.
I have been invited to the 30th meeting of Woman’s Place UK, an organisation set up in 2017 by a group of women from the labour and trade union movement to defend women’s rights and safeguard single-sex spaces and services.
The alternative view, scrawled on one placard, is that “Woman’s Place is a F------ Hate Group” – one that spews dangerous bile against trans, nonbinary and all the other bespoke genders. Quite a position to take when it’s the protesters who are swearing and hurling abuse.
I’m just pleased to finally be here. For hours I have been wandering round the historic centre of Bristol, awaiting my orders. I feel like a spy. My presence in the city – dubbed the “woke capital” of Britain – feels uncomfortably illicit.
Why? Because of the extraordinary veil of secrecy surrounding the event that I, and many others, have travelled hundreds of miles to attend.
Details of the venue were only released to ticket holders at 4pm to prevent trans activists from bullying the venue and harassing the largely female audience as they enter. Oh.
“An insider must have tipped the protesters a wink,” sighs a steward. “But it’s interesting that women are walking in with their heads held high – at previous meetings they felt so intimidated they would wear hats and sunglasses.”
It sounds laughable. But it’s not. It’s intentionally horrible and frightening. And regardless of how you feel about JK Rowling getting cancelled on Twitter for believing men can’t become women, this matters.
Whether or not you care that American stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle was physically attacked on stage this week for making fun of transgender people, it’s impossible not to feel under siege.
And even if you are sceptical of female academics across Britain being silenced for their mainstream view that men can’t have babies, once you actually witness the vitriol from these self-appointed gender guardians, you will be shocked.
A few days ago, Julie Bindel, a lesbian feminist writer, was almost mobbed by protesters at the University of York where she had been invited to attend the Free Speech Society.
Among the many outrages she has perpetrated is the entirely mainstream belief that transgender women are not “real women”.
I might not have understood the strength of animosity she faced were I not running the gamut myself, with a bug-eyed youth following and repeatedly photographing me. When I ask him to identify himself, he tells me it’s none of my business. He is just “gathering intelligence”. But none of this is intelligent.
“Woman’s Place UK puts on events with a message of rights for women – but when you go inside all they are f------ doing is ridiculing transgender and non-binary men who give birth,” a masked protester shouts at me.
Kiri Tunks, one of the Woman’s Place UK founders, smiles back warmly, which really annoys her. Or him. Or them. I daren’t guess because misgendering has taken on the mantle of a war crime.
“This is a public meeting and everyone is welcome,” says Tunks. “Pay your £5 and join the debate, we’d love to talk. Progress will come through discussion and dialogue.”
At this point, Raquel Rosario Sanchez strides into view, wearing a gold dress and a smile that entirely belies the fact that just over a fortnight ago, the PhD student lost her court case against the University of Bristol.
She had claimed her university had failed to protect her from a “hate campaign” because of her links to Woman’s Place UK. But although the judge acknowledged she was the victim of “violent, threatening, intimidating behaviour or language”, he ruled that the university had not breached its duty of care.
The protesters boo her like a pantomime baddie. She is greeted with hugs by the women attending the meeting.
“You become resilient,” she says. “But why should women have to be resilient just to meet and talk?”
We file inside, and Sanchez, who is chairing the meeting, introduces the panel: Prof Marianne Hester, head of the Centre for Gender and Violence Research at Bristol University; Milli Hill, author of Give Birth Like A Feminist; Mara Ricoy, founder of the Roses Revolution Against Obstetric Violence; and journalist Victoria Smith.
“Thank you to the University of Bristol for allowing us to use this beautiful space,” Sanchez says, graciously. “We’re not here to police people’s language. Nobody wants to cause offence – we just want to ensure women’s voices will be heard.”
Over the next hour, the talk is of childbirth, obstetric violence and domestic abuse. It’s powerful stuff even for someone of my vintage and I wonder if the student protesters might not keel over at all the explicit gore.
Then talk moves on to womanhood, menstruation and the denigrating impact of gender neutral terminology, introduced without thought, in the name of inclusivity
“Calling us ‘gestators’ or ‘birthing people’ is a negation, a steadfast refusal to celebrate our unique femaleness,” says Smith. “It is a denial of who we are.”
For Hill, the fastidiously applied phrase used in the transgender community “sex assigned at birth” is a nonsense. “Sex is innate,” she says. “It is established at conception and can be observed at 20 weeks. It’s not decided by a doctor at birth.
“This whole drive to change the terminology surrounding childbirth and biological sex is all part of a quasi-religious doctrine that insists men can have babies and the punishment for questioning that is intimidation and bullying,” she adds.
She goes on to list the terms used by a range of high-profile organisations including The Lancet: pregnant people, post-natal people, breast-feeding families, bodies with vaginas and non-prostate owners.
“Once activists normalise the idea that it’s not just women who give birth, a citadel will have fallen,” says Hill. “We’ve lost our grip on biology.”
Not just on biology. On common sense. As the meeting breaks up, the chants continue outside.
A woman beside me murmurs: “They’re so young, they’ve had no life experience. They think we’re attacking them but we’re just defending our own hard-won ground.”
I no longer feel like a spy. I am a bona fide member of the Resistance.