Counting the cost

Is GC feminism worth it?

My entry into the gender critical feminism happened just over three years ago following an article I wrote for Quillette. The article was prompted by a comment made by Claire Lehmann, where she said that feminists were obsessed with rape. Looking at the comments now I can see that Claire received the gentle ratio of a person in the centre, with an anti-feminist take.

The Lehmann post currently has 917 Comments to 991 likes, so not exactly a lashing but there is an element of dissident women who have been making their presence known on twitter for some time and I have accidentally become one of them.

Prominent feminist Genevieve Gluck replied to Lehmann’s tweet saying “It's not feminists who are obsessed with rape, it's men who are obsessed with raping. Feminists fight to end it.” Given the offense the remark could cause to rape survivors, the replies to the tweet are very mild. 

Popular anti-woke commentator, Cathy Young, said “Your replies are as rational as I would expect”.  Implying that women lean to hysteria in regard to the issue of rape and child sexual abuse, this is a reliable and predictable trope. Gender critical feminists have to quietly scroll past a range of tropes directed at them from people, who in many other aspects, are on the same political side.

Looking back on the 2020 tweet that spurred me to write a piece for Quillette, I see in myself a very naïve middle aged woman.  In the piece I wrote for Quillette, I outlined my history of sexual trauma and personal devastation, and through the lens of overwhelming grief I had recently suffered through loss, I pleaded for the right of dignity.

When Aiden Commerford, the Irish transactivist and alleged comedian, told me that my felling of discomfort at the idea of having a strange naked man in my space, was the same as what racist people feel when other ethnicities move into their neighbourhood, I couldn’t believe anyone would say such a horrible thing out loud, in public, and to a rape survivor. 

As I was introduced to trans activists, it became very clear that they hate women.  Behind the misogynistic scrotes that are twitters trans activists, are a suite of massively well-funded human rights organisations and charities, and of course the United Nations. Women fight gender-identity in law against money, we ourselves give to the state to protect us from social tyranny. The political position at the moment of a gender critical feminist is unenviable, particularly in Australia and Canada.

When I look back on the Claire Lehmann tweet I can see the lines were already drawn, I just couldn’t see them.  The article I submitted to Quillette, in critique of Lehmann’s position, was about my experience of child sexual abuse and the massive impact that it had on my life, and how that informs my politics in favour of the protection of women and children. The reality is that a lot of women carry sexual trauma, and they do so in workplaces, shops, and through government funded facilities.

In the movies the person who stands up and says the true thing breaks the spell.  But that didn’t happen when I said the true thing. Nobody stood in applause, no contracts from publishers came.  I met a group of people, most of them middle aged women.  These women spend their free time making freedom of information requests, writing submissions, contacting MP’s, talking to people on busses, wearing triggering T-shirts and generally being a menace to the state’s plans to erase them.  

Over the years I learned a range of things in the gender-critical world. Trans activism and gender-identity ideology is systemically misogynistic and homophobic. Trans activism is the mockery of the feminine, the usurping of the feminine and the erasure of the female.  Trans activism wants no association at all between the feminine and the female body, except in mockery and imitation.

After my exposure to trans activism, all I could be was a gender critical feminist.  But it was gay men, believe it or not, who brought me over to the gender-critical side of the political tracks. I fell in with a group of gay guys who taught me how to evade being banned by reframing my language, and to use language as an activism tool. Resistance in language is a key gender critical activism tool of which we have few.

When I started to write I had people come to me and tell me their stories about how gender-identity had impacted their life, and to start with I enjoyed weaving their stories into the larger narrative about how the liberal state is corrupting to crush the rights of the most vulnerable.

Then one of my gay friends was doxed, and I bore witness to his pain and anguish while criminal doxing turned into a workplace investigation into his Tweets. My friend asked me to write about his story. After hours of interviews and texts I wrote how my friend who I called “Ben” re-lived childhood trauma at the hands of homophobic workplace bullies that were the human resources department of his company. This bullying had devastating consequences on my friends health.

When my friend died, I felt like the foundations had given way on my political universe.  The human face of the politics was a too much for me to stand and I considered finding another hobby.  One that didn’t involve everyone hating me and being right about things I’d rather be wrong about.

I feel a bit the same this week, as Andrew Doyle, a leading anti-woke gay man, has written in Unheard about being a “target” of gender critical feminists.  Andrew probably hasn’t had a great week to be fair.  Like Claire, Andrew had a take that was not appreciated by gender critical feminists. 

Among those also being ratioed by gender critical feminists this week is Janice Turner who told her following that she was using preferred pronouns for David Hayton out of “respect”.

At one point in his twitter bollocking by the gender-criticals, Andrew said that if women were so sure he was the enemy he would “stop platforming women” on his show.  Gender critical feminists are being warned to be nicer, its not likely to happen anytime soon.  Like any class movement all the gender critical movement have are numbers, and a few basic positions that are by necessity uncompromising.

But there is a bigger picture here. For several months I have been talking about the politics of the centre, the way they are pathologizing paraphilias, allowing paraphilias to be called “orientations”, philosophising liberalism to erase women’s activism, and compromising scientific realities. 

One of the key figures in this simply dumb politics is Benjamin Boyce, close podcasting associate of famous anti-feminist James Lindsay.  Doyle has now gone on Boyce’s YouTube channel and offered the women of gender critical twitter to take out a paid subscription to his substack so they can discuss the interview with him.

In an attempt to explain the class politics of the situation, I made the analogy that the public use of wrong sex pronouns is a kind of picket line that women’s right activists have drawn, especially for people who claim the support of the base for being gender-critical. I said that women were essentially calling people cross this line “scabs” and this was very reasonable. They are scabs.

I feel deep regret that I have placed my oppression at the feet of those who despise me in order to plead for the rights of women.  I wrote a piece a few years ago in defence of rape victims that Helen Joyce Called “excoriating” and “brilliant”. She noted I had been kicked off twitter for my “honesty in the service of women and children”. Her soft block this week hurt more than it should have.

Since coming out in support of the base I have now been unfollowed and blocked by may of the gender critical elite and I regret the emotional investment I had in gaining those followers. I did so because I thought that mirroring the UK politics will give us some help in Australia, but that is untrue. The UK gained ground by the grassroots support of women. The GC elite are not so frightened of the ratio when it is directed at characters like Owen Jones, they just like to be able to drive the ratio.

I don’t earn a living from this and my prospects of doing so are very slim. I have scorned my Christian following by siding with gays, I have scorned my right wing following by leaning into class politics, I have scorned my socialist followers by defending the existence of Israel, and now I have scorned the gender critical elite by siding with the base.

The moderates of gender critical twitter are not interested in debate, their political structure is weak and propped up by a watered down version of the philosophy they claim to fight, they are gaining ground only by compromise.

If I don’t have anything useful to give to women and girls I am happy to hang up my pen and move on to other things, but in Australia our situation is dire. Of all the things I know I’m right about, I know I am right about this. But I would be a fool to not reconsider investing things that cost me a lot into a movement that is being marginalised further by those who claim to champion it.