Judith Woods Don’t call me a womxn – it’s offensive

Tragically, girls now think modern life is ‘easier to bear’ if they become boys

Does anyone out there remember the classic Wayne and Waynetta sketch in which Waynetta Slob, played by Kathy Burke, informs husband Wayne (Harry Enfield) that she’s ashamed of only having white kids and wants “a little brarn baby” like the other mothers on the estate?

I’m not sure that gag is allowed in our current climate of humourless offence-taking, but it was very funny back in the now unacceptably liberal Nineties.

I was reminded of it the other day when I mentioned, en passant in mixed company, that my younger daughter, who has just turned 10, has given up on pink, something that happens with comical swiftness virtually overnight. One of my friends laughed in agreement that her daughter had undergone the exact same Year Five epiphany and would now only wear black.

This was the response of the much older teenagers and twentysomethings who were present. “They obviously don’t identify as girls, and why should they?” was the first rejoinder.

This was followed by: “You have to ask yourselves: are you guilty of having force-fed them ideas about gender norms up to now?” And then came the clincher: “That’s why your generation invented the term ‘tomboy’. It’s easier to label a child than listen to them.”

So help me, I wanted to lose it. Instead, I took a deep inhalation and, catching the eye of the other mother, muttered something along the lines of: “I know you must think me ancient, but ‘tomboy’ was first used to describe a boisterous girl in 1570, so not quite my generation…” To be honest – and I feel, dear readers, this is a safe space in which we can think the unthinkable, as long as we don’t get caught saying the unsayable – I was absolutely furious at such passive-aggressive, casual bigotry. I’m sure that it showed, too, and what is most infuriating is that they will have entirely misconstrued the reason for my rage.

I wasn’t cross because I’m transphobic or despise pansexuals, despite not really understanding what they are. No, I was livid because they had hijacked what was an inconsequential aside about my sweet little girl and blown it up into a self-righteous lecture about my heteronormative child-rearing.

When did the notion of a little girl growing up to be a woman become such an affront? I presume it was around the time some halfwit thought that renaming us as “womxn” in the cause of crackpot inclusivity was a good idea. The Wellcome Collection had to apologise this week after being criticised for using “womxn” – a neologism rather than a typo – to also include non-gender-conforming people in promotional material for its new exhibition, which explores “the presence of womxn through their art, thinking and speculations”.

How come non-gender people are assumed to be womxn, not mxn? I am surely not alone in feeling rather under siege from militant activists who accuse women of prejudice because we don’t want to share lavatories or changing rooms or prisons with men who “self-identify” as women.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, as a gender, we are viewed as soft targets, less likely to fight back, our instinctive empathy making us easier to bully in the skirmish over hurt feelings and LGBTQ rights.

Incidentally, the Q stands for “questioning”, but that is a one-way street. Last month, Girl Guide leader Helen Watts was sacked after having dedicated 26 years to the movement. Why? She had dared to question the wisdom of allowing boys-whoidentified-as-girls to share tents and showers with girls on camping trips. Moreover, men self-identifying as women could be appointed Guide leaders and supervise those trips.

“None of my safeguarding concerns were answered,” Helen says. “Instead, they tried to rewrite history by suggesting that, despite the new rules, we were just all girls together like we had always been. Girls’ needs were coming second to an ideology.”

Here we are, still trying to shake off the shackles of inequality in the boardroom, on the payslip and throughout the corridors of power, only for this vocal minority to try to diminish us and the rights we have fought so long and hard to achieve for ourselves and our daughters.

Am I a feminist? Yes, but reluctantly, in the sense that I dislike the dated connotations of the word, but can’t for the life of me coin a better one.

I wouldn’t describe myself as strident or hardline. But, to that lunch table of young people, I was a sexual oppressor for even intimating that if my daughter grows up to be a card- as well as chromosome-carrying woman like me, I’d be quite pleased.

I know a couple of people whose children are unsure of their sexual identity and they are doing their best to divine what the right course of action should be. Changing pronouns from “she” to “they” and “him” to “her” is the easy part. In eight years, the number of children referred for gender treatment has risen from 97 to 2,519; by far the steepest rise has come among girls, up from 40 to 1,806.

Tragically, one reason cited by psychologists and behavioural experts is that some girls think modern life is “easier to bear” if they become boys.

The demonisation of women who don’t wish to be called womxn won’t help address that awful conclusion or its underlying causes.

My heart goes out to any individuals struggling with their sexuality or feeling they are in the “wrong” body. But nor do I perceive any moral superiority in having a gender dysphoric baby like all the other trans activists on the estate.