Freethinking Young Women Are Finding The Courage To Organise...I Am One Of Them

A part-reflective essay, part plea to young women to resist gender ideology in the face of peer pressure

THE PEAK

A month ago I officially started leading a double life.

For about two years, I’d been silently screaming. It wasn’t a hysterical scream exploding out of nowhere, fuelled by blind, fiery anger. It was a scream with a thousand parts, a thousand unuttered questions and comments about gender ideology and its greater role within the culture war. My collective moments of silence (of being silenced) stuck like beads of broken glass in my throat. As my scream force it’s way through, it hurt as much as it anaesthetised.

I had read about Stephen Woods i.e. Karen White.

I had read about women’s shelters in North Lanarkshire being defunded because they refused to become ‘gender neutral’.

I had followed farcical yet chilling stories on J. Yaniv and seen clearly the logical end point of unchecked self ID.

I had listened to the CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland Mridul Wahdwa say without shame that female victims uncomfortable with a biological male counsellor would be encouraged to ‘reframe their trauma’ to tackle their supposed bigotry.

I had read articles about male serial killers who appropriated a trans identity once arrested, who were referred throughout the article as ‘she’ and ‘a woman’ while their natal victims were referred to as ‘dismembered female body parts’.

I had witnessed academics I had once called mentors go out their way to smear and, frankly, lie about the contents of J.K. Rowling’s nuanced and compassionate essay, all because (so it seemed to me) there were simply too arrogant and drunk on their own sense of ‘virtue’ to engage with the possibility they might have something to learn.

I had watched those same academics un-ironically tweet #nodebate.

I had watched those same academics denounce and smear Kathleen Stock for being one of the last intellectuals in the public eye with genuine integrity.

I had sat in Zoom seminars while undertaking my Masters and felt the palpable tension in the air as tutors tiptoed around students with pronouns listed beside their names. I had self-censored and watched others bite their lip too after perfectly innocuous discussions ‘triggered’ the Xe/Xer in the class.

I had watched the tutor look down like a parent who knows their spoilt child is ruining the party for all the other children but is too afraid to reprimand them lest they worsen the tantrum.

I had been unfollowed, blocked and targeted by members of my Writing Group on Twitter for liking a Tweet by J.K. Rowling that wasn’t even to do with gender ideology. I had felt pressured into deleting my entire account as I feared screenshots would be sent to agents or used against me in contests/publication opportunities.

I had read Keira Bell’s story and listened to the Tavistock Centre whistleblower.

I had seen transsexual people who were trying to live their lives peacefully and honestly be vilified and ostracised by TRAs and, indeed, ‘cis’ people because they refused to let their hard-won rights to be accepted as transsexuals within the bounds of common sense and respect be sacrificed on an alter of delusion and narcissism.

I had watched a slow war on the language of motherhood. Chest-feeding, pregnant person, gestator, incubator...

I had been called a bleeder and menstruator by journalists.

I had watched First Minister Nicola Sturgeon make a video imploring young SNP members not to leave the party over so-called ‘transphobia’ while not offering so much as a word of support to Joanna Cherry, who much like Kathleen Stock, was demonised and threatened for doing her job with integrity.

I watched the same First Minister and any number of other MSPs in Holyrood gaslight and disregard the fears of abused women, women who worked in domestic violence shelters and rape support services, detransitioners, mothers and fathers of young children and countless others.

I watched politician after politician refuse to define a woman, to avoid using the word ‘women’ in relation to abortion when Roe Vs Wade was overturned.

I watched the NHS temporarily remove all reference to female biology.

(The word ‘man’ however, stayed put).

I witnessed victims of male violence (as I once was) disclosing their trauma in a desperate bid to make people accept that the vast difference in physical strength between men and women could not be ignored in bathrooms, changing rooms, prisons, anywhere; that to be able to play down biological reality was a luxury belief.

I had watched those victims be accused of ‘weaponising their trauma’ by TRAs and women who called themselves feminists.

“What peaked you?” asked my fellow young gender critical friend, who I’ll call Sara. It was the first time we’d ever conversed online, neither of us at that point daring to show our face. After mulling it over, I went for J.K. Rowling’s essay and the silencing of female abuse victims.

A more honest and concise answer would have been: Everything.

THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

Not long ago, I was sitting in a bright French bistro drinking white wine with a friend whom I’ve know since undergrad. She is loquacious, vibrant, hilarious. I think the world of her and she loves the bones of me too.

That day, she was ranting to me about JK Rowling - quite out of nowhere. She was not just annoyed, she was practically foaming at the mouth. I wasn’t sure how we’d gotten onto the topic. A second ago we’d been having a tipsy chin-stroking discussion about Silicon Valley and Big Tech.

“Why doesn’t this billionaire just f**k off instead of using her platform...”

“This is the hill she’s chosen to die on...?”

“Using her power against marginalised people...”

It was like bingo. Vitriol without evidence. Check. Platitudes without arguments. Check. Grandstanding without a whiff of self-reflection. Check and check again.

I thought about folding my napkin and sighing, “I have to be honest, I’ve read Jo Rowling’s essay about four times and I still can’t understand why it’s generated so much backlash. Could you help me understand?”

As responses go, it would have been pathetically tame. It wouldn’t even be defending the essay, just querying the hysteria around it. It would have been an invitation for her to speak and me to listen, not the other way around.

So why I didn’t say it?

The answer lay not in my friend’s words but in her manner. The unwavering conviction that she was right. It had not even crossed her mind that I might disagree, that I might have a different opinion. To her, I was (am) good person and feminist and good people/real feminists support trans rights gender ideology without question. Any doubt, any failure to recite trans women are women, trans men are men, non-binary is valid without hesitation is not necessarily transphobic but most definitely enabling transphobia, being problematic. I would be invited to recant, to educate myself.

(The massive irony, of course, being that it was through doing exactly that I saw through the deceiving mantras of gender ideology cloaking themselves in ‘kindness’.)

My friend had social justice tinnitus and any aspersion I cast would have been heard as a dog whistle. I could list off every reason, every example that peaked me cited in the first section of this article and most likely, would have been accused of ‘cherry-picking’ extreme cases and ‘spreading misinformation’. That or she’d just fall icily silent. There was no point in even trying.

A few weeks later, I met up with a male friend, and was subjected to an almost identical experience, this time being slightly baited by him to disagree. I changed the subject.

The same thing happened with another female friend within the space of a few weeks. The pain in my chest was making it hard to breathe.

“I sometimes feel like the last unbitten person in a zombie apocalypse film when I’m around people my age,” I said later to Sara, my new gender critical friend. I couldn’t see her face but I heard her clapping through the screen.

“Yes! Yes! That’s a great way of putting it. I felt I was in a burning building and desperately shaking my friends in their beds, telling them to wake up, only to have them roll over and tell me to go away.”

Useless as trying to talk to my own friends might have been, I still felt very cowardly for not doing the right thing. Sara warned me against it though. She told me she’d confided in someone she thought she could trust only to have them turn on her. She’d spend weeks in fear of being exposed, of her secret Twitter account being found out, of being doxxed (her address published online).

Stay anonymous for now, was her advice.

I realised then, the problem. Millennials thereabouts my age (29) or younger who don’t agree with gender ideology and the new ‘trans rights movement’ are very much around but scattered about, unsure how to test the water in social situations to seek each other out. It’s not just our peers but the culture we’ve grown up in. ‘Progressive’ politicians who are incredibly popular amongst young people - Nicola Sturgeon, AOC, Lisa Nandy, The entirety of the Green Party - are endorsing this. Musicians and actors and comedians and writers have pronouns in their social media bios and recite the platitudes as though they were gospel. Universities...do I even have to say? To be young and sceptical about gender ideology feels as good as being an infidel. I won’t call us the silent majority because my gut tells me we currently are a minority within our generation, and most definitely in Gen Z.

But my gut also tells there are a lot more of us than it appears. I do, in fact, have an old friend who hugged me once on a night out and whispered in my ear that she knew why I’d deleted my old Twitter and that she agreed with everything J.K Rowling wrote.

“Men can’t be women,” she blurted out, and amidst the shock of hearing these ‘blasphemous’ words out loud, of speaking the truth without consequence, we both kissed each other in relief.

This, in essence, is what young gender critical women need. To find a way to connect. To be reminded that we are not infidels or traitors or bigots, even when our leaders and role models are making us feel this way. We are the ones refusing to pretend to admire the naked emperor’s finery even when it feels all our peers are pressuring us to do so. We are the ones courageous enough to say NO, even if it’s only to ourselves.

We have the strength. What we need is the numbers.

And we are building them.

IF YOU BUILT IT, THEY WILL COME

Sara has put together an online club, one specifically for young GC women. Since being set up a few weeks ago, it has attracted hundreds of young women, namely in Britain but becoming more and more international - to the point she has had to take a temporary break from screening new members out of fatigue. It is comprised of detransitioners, concerned Mums, young lesbians and assault survivors, each with their unique story. Many of us have personal experiences being discriminated against and intimidated by gender ideologues. Many of us are simply sick of watching the western world descend into Gilead crossed with a John Waters movie.

In this group we organise, make plans, put forward ideas to spread the word and make our voices heard in this fight; everything from offering each other lifts to pro-women rallies, to getting hashtags trending (check out #YoungGCWomenUnite for a plethora of inspiring and illuminating testimonies). When I penned my open letter to Nicola Sturgeon, the community helped kickstart the retweets that ultimately ensured it went viral. We give each other support and guidance on how to peak family members and friends, and we have each others’ backs should one of us fall prey to TRA bullying or, indeed, bullying by our own friends and colleagues.

I was the second member to join the group and so have had a front row seat to how fast and fiercely this wildfire has spread. In a year, the community may well have thousands of members. I hope so. One thing is certain, the tide is not turning back. In this fight, once you’re on board, you can’t un-see the truth. You can’t un-find your voice.

If there are any young women reading this (or men) who deep down know they too are sceptical of the gender contagion that has - for an assortment of reasons I will try to cover in depth in future articles - been blindly swallowed by our generation, and if all that’s keeping you from speaking out is fear of being ostracised, let me share with you something that’s been on my mind for a while.

As much as I love my friends despite my disappointment in their conformity and sheer lack of willingness to engage, and as much as the idea of them severing ties with me over this makes me very sad and uncomfortable, I have to ask myself: who would I really devastated for - me or them?

I am the one who is open to discussion, I am the one willing to believe what is right, not what is popular. I am the one willing to agree to disagree, even. I am the one who would not throw away friendship over this.

I am not afraid of disappointing them. I am afraid of them disappointing me. I am afraid of realising I deserve better friends, that the wonderful people I thought they were might turn out to be false. I am afraid of the faith I might lose in the world and more generally, in people, should they respond with such irrationality and small-mindedness. I am afraid at the anger I will feel at myself for letting myself be silent so long.

If you admit to yourself the truth about gender ideology and start using your voice - whether it’s anonymously, as part of our online community or out loud and visibly, remember that you are not ‘breaking away’ or ‘turning against’ anything. It is this new authoritarianism dressed in baby blue and pink that tried to turn you away from reality and integrity. You’re not jumping off a cliff edge, they are - the politicians and celebrities and academics and those who blindly topple after them. Employers. Colleagues. Friends. You are staying put on the ground. On Earth.

And we’re standing with you. Come and say hello.