Rape & Gender Politics

Creepy obsessions of a safeguarding advocate

I feel like I begin a disproportionate number of posts here with apologies for not making content, but this time I am in a deliberate season of distance from the gender critical fight. This post will be a stream of consciousness more than anything, but if you require receipts I am happy to go back and provide them. I have been reassessing, and this is where I am.

When I came into the gender critical world, I did so as a survivor of child sexual abuse, and a family member of chronically disabled women. I was concerned about safeguarding failures very obviously emerging in Western states, who were adopting international population management strategies that involve erasing human sex categories from law.

I was never a writer, except at heart, but I have always had a way with words, and I have an academic qualification in political and cultural theory, so I thought I would give it a crack, since most of what I was reading on the subject was terrible. This has changed, and there are many who are now coming forward with well-thought-out critiques of gender identity ideology. The landscape has changed significantly.

The movement critical of gender identity ideology, “gender critical”, has grown so big now that we have factions, as all political movements tend to do. Unlike some, this does not frighten me, it’s a good thing.

I remember joking to Jonathan Kay from Quillette when I wrote my first piece in 2020 that I didn’t want to become the “rape girl”. By that, I meant that I didn’t want to be stuck in the position of a victim advocate, because I had so much more to say, but sometimes it’s the thing we are most afraid of, that is the most powerful tool we possess.

In my first article I criticised Claire Lehmann, who was the founder of the magazine I was writing in, for saying that conservatives had an obsession with paedophilia and feminists were obsessed with rape. This kind of framing, I was to find out, is commonplace and inescapable for victim advocates.

Women in the gender critical movement who are uncompromising on the sex boundary when it comes to language, and especially pronouns, are frequently accused of being motivated by hate, disgust or “damage”, more commonly they are motivated by personal experience of male pattern sexual violence, and understand the cost of moving a sex boundary.

Coming out as a survivor of sexual assault or domestic violence is always a two-edged sword. We are bringing to a very combative political world, something that has caused deep wounds, and that can still be sensitive to the indelicate touch of political debate.

When I first came into the political debate, Aiden Comerford told me that survivors who claimed to be frightened of men in public facilities, was the equivalent of racists being frightened of immigrants in their neighbourhood. The trope that rape survivors are a kind of bigot against men has been picked up more widely. Former Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) CEO Mridul Wadhwa, a man, suggested women were bigots to request a female only environment for rape counselling.

We all saw what happened to Henrietta Freeman, the profoundly disabled woman who advocates for choosing female intimate carers. Henrietta has be widely criticised by tans activists as a hateful person for her sexual boundaries, and was openly abused on Twitter by Kurtis Lemaster, a gender critical and extremely misogynistic gay man.

Gender critical is a diverse movement of people who have a singular objective but diverging motives.

The accusations that the gender critical women’s movement is “homophobic” that has been posited by some gay men, including Andrew Doyle, is easily disproven. You couldn’t throw a rock at a gender critical women’s event without hitting a lesbian. It is not gays that women in gender critical have a problem with, it is men.

Many gay men have been warriors for women, but ultimately, gay men are men, and gay men have their own interests. There is nothing “homophobic” about acknowledging this.

Women also have their own interests, and shielding women and children from male sexual violence is a powerful one. When you enter into the advocacy for women, because you know that sexual abuse reduces a person’s life chances, and that women disproportionately suffer the effects of sexual abuse, you can’t compromise on certain boundaries of principle.

It is men who are disproportionately the violent sexual offenders in our society, and it is disproportionately women and children who are the victims, and among children, female children are again disproportionately affected.

I am not a progressive, I don’t think we can fix men, my humble aim is to save as many women and children from violent sexual assault as we can, and to try to protect survivors from being re-victimised and traumatised in public facilities

At the root of my political objectives, is the acknowledgement that women and girls are subject to sexual oppression by men, or what classic liberals call tyranny. The oppression of women by men, and the obligation of the state to protect women and children from men, is a key feminist tenet. My inability to move from this foundation principle, in my opinion, is what makes me a feminist, and it is this uncompromising stance that has put me in the category of “the gender critical fringe”.

When Helen Pluckrose was coming against the gender critical feminists with a “liberal ideology” that acknowledged the material reality of sex, but denied the oppression of females based on sex, I was openly critical of her. I was openly critical of Stella O’Malley when she supported the Pluckrose position, and because of that, Kathleen Stock pointed to me as a bully. Stock counselled O’Malley to protect herself from me by muting my political criticism and both Stock and O’Malley blocked me.

I was then targeted by a number of gender critical gay men as an extremist for supporting grassroots activists’ criticism of The Times journalist Janice Turner for using wrong sex pronouns for David Hayton. It was then suggested by a popular gender critical gay man that I was just like a Nazi and a Fascist for my criticism of Stock and Janice Turner in the pronoun debate.

Colin Wright chimed in, claiming that I was a fundamentally unreasonable person, before he blocked me. Wright’s girlfriend, a Ms Buttons, then said in light of the pile-on I was receiving, her and Colin were “laughing their asses off”. Following this, Helen Joyce soft-blocked me along with many of the prominent gender critical women in the UK.

Since this time, O’Malley’s organisation Genspect has faced ongoing criticism that they have ignored the stories of trans widows in favour of supporting the aim of normalising men with a cross-dressing fetish. O’Malley has openly aligned herself with pedophile advocate Michael Bailey, who calls for reduced prisons sentences for men convicted of child rape and a greater burden of proof on child rape survivors. I can’t turn my head from this.

As a survivor of CSA there is no way I can walk past any of these disagreements in the gender critical world without staking my opinion as a victim advocate, and it is here that I am unable to unwilling to move from who and what I am.

If I’m honest, the root of my stance is because I am a survivor of child sexual abuse, and I think this is true for many of the grassroots women’s activists in the gender critical world. Sexual assault is materially damaging and won’t tolerate anyone saying that it is not without challenge.

In the drama, lawyer Sarah Phillimore came forward with claims that women like myself, who were now being called “ultras”, didn’t really have safeguarding for children and women at the heart of their activism, but “disgust”.

The anti-feminist faction of the gender critical political world went on to claim that women were objecting to “gender critical” cross-dressing fetishists, simply because they were men who were feminine. In what was a step to far for me, Benjamin Boyce has compared a prominent cross-dressing fetishist who engaged in pedophile apologia, with the late pop-star Prince. Prince, the musical and performance genius, was being compared to a man who’s only claim to fame is to admit to wearing dresses for sexual gratification. The bows are getting longer and longer in an attempt to accuse safeguarding advocates of hate and prudishness.

Andrew Doyle has recently denied that women were called extremists during the “great unfollowing”, but this is just more gaslighting from a man who doesn’t want to acknowledge that he has a fundamentally different set of interests to women.

Ultimately, men can’t speak with authority on women’s issues; only women can speak with authority on women’s issues, and there is a place for women who speak almost exclusively on women’s issues and this is the corner I have been painted into, but not by myself thankfully.

Gender critical men and women have targeted Genevieve Gluck for her investigative journalism that exposes perverts, fetishists and rapists. Genevive's work has been called “creepy” and “obsessive” by Jennifer Bilek and a few of her anti-feminist associates.

So what's my point?

There is no point trying to avoid the kind of criticism that comes with being an advocate for women and children who are sexually assaulted and raped by men. It’s a futile exercise, and it’s exhausting.

If you are a woman, and you come against men sexually assaulting women, performing fetish publicly, or men who display open entitlement to women’s bodies for sex or reproduction, no matter how reasonable you are, no matter how meticulously you ground your argument in data and legitimate political thought and tradition, you will get called creepy, obsessive and extreme. There will be some women, even prominent, educated women, who will believe men over women, just based on facile accusations of poor character and dark motives.

Now that the gender critical world is full of people writing words and saying all the things, I don’t feel the need to write as much about the broader debate. I have accepted my fate in a more specialised field of feminism.

I am taking a bit of time out to work on a website that I hope will help educate women and girls about the political position of gender-critical and grassroots feminism. Keep posted, I still have a broad range of opinions that I will express far too liberally, but I wanted to acknowledge here to the people who so kindly subscribe to my ramblings that I am becoming more and more what I already was. “I yam what I yam” as Popeye would say.