Sex is not a dirty word

Examining a new book on the ups and downs of British feminist history.

BUT FIRST: a few brief posts on the far right violence and racism sweeping England and Northern Ireland for now more than a week.  

1) Much of the violence of the past week has been directed at scores of hotels where thousands of asylum seekers have been “warehoused” for months and years by successive UK governments. This piece in THE CONVERSATION documents the appalling conditions where asylum seekers, our fellow human beings fleeing danger , have been “living”.  

2) What do we call this far right violence and racism? PM Starmer has put on his director of public prosecution hat again and labelled it “far right thuggery” and “criminality.”

Yes, it is that. But it is also far more. A statement from “Greater Manchester Muslims” says these far right riots should be treated as “terrorism”. The reasons are given in this piece from THE SKWAWKBOX .  A former police agrees with the “terrorism” characterisation. The solutions required go far beyond “lock ‘em up.”  

3) The racism linked to this terrorism has come from many sources. Multi-billionaire Elon Musk has “re-platformed” far right activist Tommy Robinson on Twitter / X. Nigel Farage and the Suella Braverman’s of the Tory party deserve whatever criticism comes their way. Don’t expect much. ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE has exposed how a Labour MP has also poured petrol on the flames. Don’t expect a suspension.  

We need to connect the proverbial dots and understand that words matter.

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Sexed: A History of British Feminism

By Susanna Rustin / Polity Books

A book review and guest post by Dee Searle

It shouldn’t be controversial to believe that biological sex is relevant in politics and that the female body is exposed to sexual, social and health risks that must be catered for by policy makers, particularly given regular news stories about attacks on women and girls, the disproportionate impact of the cost of living crisis on women, the growth of online pornography and glamorisation of prostitution.

In late July, the National Police Chiefs’ Council declared violence against women a national emergency in England and Wales. The first national police analysis of the scale of the problem estimated 3 million women a year (one in every 12) to be victims of offences, including stalking, harassment, sexual assault and domestic abuse.

In fact, the police admitted the true figure is likely to be higher because many women and girls do not report sexual violence, partly because they don’t have trust or confidence in the police. In early August, a woman who reported in 2017 that she was raped described the criminal justice system as “absolutely broken” after a series of errors allowed the accused man to allegedly start stalking her. Despite taking the rape accusation to police the day after it happened, the case is not due to be tried in court until next May - eight years after the alleged assault.

In relation to the National Police Chiefs’ Council report, teenagers interviewed on BBC Radio 4 told how boys and young men idolise the social media influencer Andrew Tate, ‘the king of toxic masculinity’, who is facing charges of rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women. They said this is fuelling violent attitudes towards girls and women, including repeating many of Tate’s mantras that a woman’s place is in the kitchen and bedroom.

ONLINE ABUSE AND PORNOGRAPHY EXPLODING

Yet there has been inadequate action to tackle sexual and other violence against women and girls, the explosion of online abuse and pornography, and a range of other inequalities, nor to address the underlying misogyny, which many commentators say is growing in the UK. Instead, proposals to protect women-only spaces or services are frequently met by claims of ‘transphobia’ by transgender activists and their supporters.

One reason, according to ‘Sexed: A History of British Feminism’, is that transgender activists believe that everyone has a gender identity or inner feeling of being male, female or neither, and it is this identity that makes a person a man, woman or non-binary. Providing services for people based on their biological sex is therefore deemed ‘trans-exclusionary’.

This is probably not news to anyone who has put their head above the parapet and been met by hysterical accusations that they are endangering trans people and denying their existence.

What is revealing in Susanna Rustin’s book is that arguments between feminists and trans rights activists are just the latest incarnation of the hurdles faced by women in centuries of struggle to claim their sex-based rights.

Her highly accessible history of British feminism pulls no punches in tracing common splits and challenges from Mary Wollstoncraft to Mumsnet, with a focus on trying to understand the resurgence of grassroots feminist activism in Britain over the past decade and why it has been “traduced, attacked, ignored and misunderstood” by government and civil society organisations that claim to support women’s rights.

RUSTIN PROVIDES REFRESHING CONTRAST

Rustin attempts to be even-handed in documenting the positions of those advocating for women’s sex-based rights versus transgender rights. But, in a refreshing contrast to much of the ‘progressive’ or apparently neutral media and those on the political left and centre, she concludes that most of the violence and attempts to close down debate has come from trans rights activists.

This conclusion is all the more surprising given that Rustin is a leader writer on social affairs at The Guardian, which has been particularly enthusiastic in promoting gender identity at the expense of sex-based rights. Former Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore was infamously hounded out of the paper after her articles on transgender-related issues were censored by editors and she was widely assumed to be the target of an internal letter signed by 338 editorial, tech and commercial staff at the title which criticised its “pattern of publishing transphobic content”.

Arguments about whether transgender women (formerly known as transsexual women) should be regarded as women have formed part of a wider debate about separatist and sexual politics since the 1970s. The difference now, according to Rustin, is that previously the expectation was that transgender women would undergo a medical transition, usually involving hormones and surgery, whereas today trans activists assert the right to be recognised in their acquired gender purely on the basis of self-declaration.

This effectively means that any man who declares himself to be a woman can have access to women-only spaces, including rape-crisis centres, refuges, female hospital wards, changing rooms, prisons, toilets, all-female shortlists and sports. From around 2015, in a spirit of inclusivity, male-bodied self-declared transgender women were given pretty free access to wherever they desired, urged on by the LGBTQ charity Stonewall. People who tried to point out that vulnerable women could be put at risk by violent males posing as transgender women or that it’s dangerous to allow male-bodied transgender women to compete in women’s contact sports such as rugby or boxing were dismissed as ‘Terfs’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), faced speaking bans, hostile crowds and were sometimes physically assaulted.

In the 2019 General Election, the Labour Party, Liberal Democrats, Green Party, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalists all included pledges to formalise self-identification for transgender people in their manifestos.

A FIGHT BACK AGAINST RISKS OF SELF-IDENTIFICATION

However, over the past couple of years there has been a fightback as the risks of self-identification became increasingly apparent after some clearly unfair or dangerous instances. These included in January 2023 when convicted double rapist Isla Bryson, a 31-year-old Scottish transgender woman, was remanded to a women’s prison to await sentence. Bryson committed the rapes in 2016 and 2019 while still known as Adam. After a furore, Bryson was moved to a male prison to serve out the sentence.

By this year’s General Election, Labour, SNP and the LibDems had dropped their self-identification pledges, while Plaid Cymru and the Greens maintained their support.

“The Greens are the most obviously captured of the group, with their support for the whole alphabet soup of ‘LGBTIQA+’ with no discernment between those categories or curiosity about what the ‘plus’ means,” found lobby group Transgender Trend in their analysis of the main party manifestos. “In thrall to ‘gender’, the only time the word ‘sex’ appears in their manifesto is the pledge to decriminalise ‘sex work.’ The Greens also want ‘LGBTIQA+ content and resources’ to be included in sex education in schools.”

Inside the Green Party, there have been years of mass suspensions and expulsions of members who have supported women’s and girls’ sex-based rights. Examples include the removal of former Deputy Party Leader Shahrar Ali from his position as a Party Spokesperson (which a London Court subsequently found to have been an act of unlawful discrimination and in breach of the Equality Act); the suspension for 19 months without any hearing or due process of Alison Teal, the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Sheffield Central (a much respected local Green Party councillor who led the campaign against mass tree-felling); the repeated suspensions and attempted expulsions of Emma Bateman, former elected co-chair of Green Party Women (GPW); and the serial suspensions and expulsions of successive other elected co-chairs of GPW Dawn Furness, Zoe Hatch, and Jude English; and many more.

An insight into the Green Party leadership’s peculiar view of women’s sex-based rights came in early August when the Greens’ Baroness Natalie Bennett was the only existing or former leader of any of Britain’s main political parties to wade into the controversy in Olympic boxing to publicly support Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, respectively Algerian welterweight and Taiwanese flyweight boxers. They are reportedly intersex, also known as DSD (differences of sex development), with XY (male chromosomes) and high natural testosterone but were allowed to compete in the women’s competition, attracting criticisms of unfairness and forcing one opponent to quit after 46 seconds because she feared being seriously injured.

While neither Khelif nor Yu-ting are transgender, Bennett’s outspoken support for them illustrates Rustin’s observation that: “...calls for climate justice are sometimes joined by calls for gender justice. I think such demands are especially attractive to idealistic young people, who remember the imaginative freedom of childhood and do not want their futures to be hemmed in by biological constraints.”

Rustin hopes her book will be useful in uniting feminists to tackle issues of common interest, such as health care, the prevalence of rape and economic unfairness.I can think of a few senior politicians who would benefit from reading it.

Dee Searle is an ecosocialist writer and activist. A former foreign correspondent, she went on to hold senior positions in broadcasting and major national and international organisations.
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