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.

It was inevitable that the trans movement would eventually collapse: its leaders were too psychologically unstable, its demands too incoherent, and – above all – it asked far, far too much of the public. The ability to recognise the sex of another human being is hardwired into us. We clock cues like forearm length, hand size, and hairline shape without conscious thought. You can coerce people – just about – into saying what you want them to say. But you cannot coerce them into thinking as you want them to.

As the trans writer Andrea Long Chu has perceptively observed, transitioning obliges people to become permanently dependent on the “structural generosity of strangers” because non-passing trans people – which is a very large proportion of trans people – desperately want the people they encounter in everyday life to suppress the instinct to correctly identify another person’s natal sex. Their unique tragedy is that there are so many people in the world who are incapable of giving them what they want: young children, elderly people with dementia, foreigners who don’t understand this phenomenon, and the neurodivergent or mentally ill. I quoted detransitioner Ray Alex Williams in a recent article, and his insight very much bears repeating:

One of the worst parts of my trans identification was how much it made me literally fear children because of the potential for them to cut through polite liberal niceties and point out the obvious fact that I was born male.

Long Chu, again, is refreshingly candid on this point:

I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period.

No one has the power to grant this wish. What trans activists have done – out of misery and fear and anger at God – is to harness the power of the state to attempt to force compliance.

And, incredibly, the state did their bidding (exactly why it did so will be a key question for historians). In the long and sorry history of the British criminal justice system forcing progressive ideology on the public with the threat of violence – that’s what policing is, remember – never forget the autistic teenager who in 2020 was found guilty of an aggravated public order offence for asking “is it a boy or is it a girl?” during an encounter with a police community support officer who identifies as transgender. That particular story isn’t often remembered, but it always stayed with me. The Lucy Connolly case did not come out of nowhere.

Transgenderism has caused a lot of personal suffering, including to the whistleblowers who paid some terrible professional, social, and financial costs. But the total number of people directly harmed by this movement is relatively small, in global terms. The reason it matters so much is because it represents a state-sanctioned assault on reality itself.

It isn’t unusual for political regimes to insist that their subjects repeat slogans. Havel’s Greengrocer is just one famous example. But what is unusual is for the state to force its subjects to say that the most fundamental distinction between human beings does not exist. That is a much more profound imposition, akin to forcing people to say that sugar isn’t sweet or that water isn’t wet. I don’t find it funny when the current Prime Minister stutters on camera that women don’t have cervixes, I find it sinister. If they’re wrong about this, what else are they wrong about?

A lot, I reckon. The trans movement told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Some very brave people refused to do so. This week is their moment in the sun.