It turns out water is wet

Why the TERF victory matters

An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.

So gie’s a hand in sisterhood, our sex won’t be denied

For dignity, reality, we are standing side by side

For women’s rights are human rights, we won’t let you forget

For women’s rights are human rights, this isn’t over yet

Except, just maybe, it is?

What joy to hear this sung by the For Women Scotland campaigning group, celebrating yesterday’s Supreme Court win. I won’t go into the legal details here – I’m sure there will be copious analysis in the days to come, and I’m not the person to offer a view on the technicalities. Suffice to say that this might all be over now, after decades of madness and waste.

As I argued in a recent essay, transgenderism is now out of fashion – the hot girls no longer regard it as cool, and the Left increasingly regard it as a political liability. We are now in the midst of a process of unwinding that will no doubt be frustratingly slow. The true believers will cling on for a long while yet, not least – as Helen Joyce has always argued – the parents who pushed for the medical mutilation of their children, who will resist reality until the bitter end. Nonetheless, this chapter of British political history is coming to a close. And, with any luck, other countries will soon follow our example.

For a long time, the TERF wars were dismissed by people across the political spectrum as a sideshow. On the Right, the bravery of women like Julie Bindel and JK Rowling was frequently met with a sneer by anti-feminists who argued that the whole phenomenon was a consequence of stupid feminists making their bed and then refusing to lie in it. To their mind, this was all just silliness and trivia – girly bickering, even.

Meanwhile, on the Left, TERFs were regarded as malicious weirdos: “this doesn’t even affect you”, “why do you care?”, “just be kind” (the Telegraph have produced a handy guide to the celebrities who most enthusiastically deployed these phrases).

Trans-inclusive journalist Marie Le Conte was among those who maligned the “obsessiveness” of gender critical feminists, writing in 2022:

[T]hough it is an issue close to my heart, I spend little time thinking about it. I have opinions on a wide variety of topics, and this is only one of them. The same applies to everyone I know who thinks the same as me; even trans friends have confessed to not thinking about their own transness all that much.

The other side, however, seemingly thinks and writes about little else. As exemplified by the Mumsnet thread and the Twitter profiles of the users in my mentions, being gender critical now means spending your days posting and arguing about trans people.

As I responded to Le Conte at the time, this issue took on an outsize importance in political life not because TERFs are addled in some way, but because trans activists were demanding something very radical indeed.