Mildred's World

(a response to Amnesty International's 'anti-rights' report)

It’s as predictable as sunrise: a formerly respectable organisation will soon go rogue after supping from the genderist cup. Up becomes down, right becomes left, and the human rights of Mildred and her penis become so important they are pushed relentlessly.

It has happened so often, so depressing in its regularity. Book festivals, charities, publishing houses, political parties, museums, funding bodies, your formerly sane friendship circle… As soon as genderism enters, the world turns turtle.

And so to Amnesty International, whose activities in recent years have been an utter betrayal of their founding principles. No longer interested in universal human rights, they’ve spent an inordinate amount of time defending Mildred’s desire to turn reality on its head, no matter how shat on lesbians, gay men, and women are in the process.

Not satisfied with being one of the interveners in the Supreme Court case last year brought by For Women Scotland (on the losing side, the one that wished lesbians to have no rights) this week saw the publication of a new report from the discredited organisation: ‘A Growing Threat: The Anti-rights Movement in the UK.’

Sounds terrifying, right?

That is until you read it and realise they’ve included the mild-mannered Edinburgh-based policy outfit Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, the Women’s Rights Network, and female-only rape crisis service Beira’s Place in their summary evidence of the sinister dangers encroaching against dear, saintly Mildred.

As ever, brilliant, important women’s groups, organising - often on a shoestring - to defend their rights; to help other women through this profoundly abusive, misogynistic era, are painted in a terrible light by the monstrously righteous.

As the always reliably on-point feminist and author Victoria Smith has put it, Amnesty have “come out against a rape crisis centre and support networks for abused wives and children. There's a word for people who consider these things hateful and it's not progressive or kind.”

It’s absolutely dire that an organisation with Amnesty’s heft and power is acting this way. The report calls for the organisations it mentions to be defunded.

And, though it is just yet another example of an organisation being completely mental, I don’t want to get used to seeing this kind of maddening, dangerous bullshit, or just laugh it off as evidence of more of the crazy, even though I’m sick to death of it all and would rather be writing about how lovely tulips are.

It’s always worth remembering that Amnesty, and a majority of genderist activists, continue to expend their fuming energies against women whose views they cannot even articulate.

Every single one of the women’s groups included in the report would happily never mention ‘trans’ ever again, if people would simply cease trying to destroy women’s rights, the English language, and social stability itself.

Contrary to the claims in Amnesty’s ludicrous report, we don’t fight this because we hate ‘LGBTQIA+’ people, though we find that grouping of letters completely idiotic, given how many of the women so thoroughly maligned this past two decades have been lesbians or bi, and the men lambasted have predominantly been gay.

We do it because all of this is so endlessly stupid, a waste of everyone’s life, time, and energy, and so fundamentally untrue it is causing enormous harm.

If only the naked emperor of genderism had been stopped the first time someone pointed and laughed at its nonsensical central claims. We’d all be clinking beers around the camp fire together by now, reminiscing about those few mad years where people said lesbians have penises and violent men were nailing dead rats to rape crisis centre doorways. What larks!

I know not all women give a single solitary fuckitty hoot about women’s rights or child safeguarding, but for those of us who do, this feels existential. And, for those who slam such women as ‘obsessive’, you’ll thank them when you’re 85 and needing single-sex intimate care, I reckon.

The ‘gender wars’ are harming every single person involved, from the deranged lunatics who smash things up in defence of Mildred’s penis, to the lonely teen convinced there’s something wrong with her for hating her body, to the women losing their livelihoods, to the people bystanding it and biting their knuckles in fear, to those beclowning themselves by thinking this issue will somehow just disappear if everyone stops talking about it.

So much of the problem is because genderism - and its scathing hatred of women’s rights campaigners - is based on utter lies.

Here is what Amnesty thinks the women of the ‘gender critical’ ilk (I do so hate that we have to even label ourselves that) believe:

(from page 5 of the report)

That’s Julie Bindel all over isn’t it? The whole ‘being a gender-nonconforming lesbian feminist’ thing is just a ruse. She’s all about defending marriage and bigging up the white picket fence and 2.4 sprogs way of life. Mm hmm.

This passage indicates precisely why the ‘No Debate’ bullshit has been so harmful. It also indicates the total lack of engagement with anything feminists have ever said. It’s one thing to be unfairly maligned, but when it is based on such an illiterate interpretation of one’s actual beliefs it’s fucking infuriating.

Let’s deal with this prickly, strawiest of men: yes, there are largely right-wing people and groups out there whose support for ‘GC’ women extends solely to sharing the belief that the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ have a fixed and unchangeable meaning in life and in law.

Contrary to what genderist activists want to believe, this is a majority opinion across all demographics outside of ‘Edinburgh International Book Festival Author’s Yurt,’ or ‘National Theatre of Scotland programming meeting.’

But agreement between traditionalist conservatives and ‘GC’ feminists ends there. The former do indeed think men and women should have distinct roles, based on the traditional nuclear family; man = breadwinner, woman = homemaker.

In and of itself, having such a view and living one’s life accordingly is absolutely grand. There’s plenty to commend it; it’s just not for everyone.

Feminists, rather famously, think mandating gender roles based on biological sex is dangerous, regressive, anti-liberatory horseshit. There’s far more agreement between genderists and conservatives on gender roles, in fact.

Both think they should be reified: the former that performing femininity makes one a woman, the latter that being a woman means you should perform femininity.

And the rest of us are over here pointing out the batshittery and harms of both sets of ideas being made in any way mandatory. But, having had both conservative and genderist friends in my time, it’s only the latter who try to impose their belief-system on you, shunning and punishing you for disagreement.

I have never met a tolerant genderist of the ‘true believer’ camp who hasn’t instantly lost their faculties when confronted by basic feminist thought. The nearest I’ve ever got is an agreement that hounding women to the point of suicidality is a bit wrong, but even then you can sense most aren’t sure if some of us might actually deserve that. After all, we’re denying the story Mildred is telling himself about himself. How mean! Look at how saintly she is!

Can there really be so little common ground? I fear so.

Perhaps it’s difficult for some to see while living through it, but this is a totalitarian ideology whose power relies on ignorance and fearful silence. Not being afraid of the people pushing it is therefore vital in stopping it. That’s how all such ideologies and movements end, or at least cease to dominate.

Genderists have thoroughly bastardised feminist thinking, turning it on its head and mangling it entirely, because that is what the ideology does: it fucks with words and meaning and does (not literal) violence to both.

Being male or female is unchangeable. ‘Gender roles’ do indeed change across place and time. And they also change throughout your lifetime, as all women know.

The way I have to navigate gendered tropes and expectations as a 44-year-old woman growing old fairly disgracefully, is very different to how I had to navigate them when I was a pretty, slim young thing performing on stages in a then male-dominated stand-up poetry circuit in my early twenties.

This knowledge is precisely why feminists and women’s rights campaigners think young girls taking hormones and undergoing dangerous surgeries is so appalling. We know the urge to obsess over appearance; we know how gender operates. We know it fucks with you, your time, your mind, your happiness.

And ‘transition’ is being undertaken by so many young women in pursuit of an unattainable goal - literally changing sex - and in hock to a belief-system that is completely upside-down. I neither mock nor deny the genuine anguish these young women are experiencing, but time and actual feminism would do so much more good than ruminating over one’s body, and being applauded by the culture for doing so.

It isn’t real. ‘Gender’ - as it used to be usefully understood - is a word to describe a set of stereotypes and cultural tropes applied to men and women in whatever society they’re born into. Kick against them, for god’s sake! Don’t internalise them; particularly not the harmful ones!

I diverge from some women on my side of the fight on this: I think ‘gender’ remains a useful word to sum up the hierarchy of value placed on things coded masculine versus things coded feminine.

I think it is routinely misused, particularly by genderist women’s organisations who wang on about ‘gender-based’ this or that, as if male violence is an attack on the feminine, rather than an attack on the female.

This conveniently brings trans-identified men into the grouping under discussion, when they’ve no business being there, given they’re as likely as any other bloke to pose a threat to women. Rather more so, given the insistence on having access to every single one of our spaces and services, which is a boundary-violation in and of itself.

Anyone labouring under the delusion that those who identify as trans are somehow ‘smashing the patriarchy’ should note how much more powerful trans-identified men, or non-binary identifying men are, compared to women who identify similarly.

One of the reasons men who claim to literally be female (note that not all who identify as trans do this) are so offensive is because, in performing what they think ‘femininity’ is, they are adopting something that brings actual harm to women: we are punished whether we go along with femininity or not. They, on the other hand, are rewarded handsomely in some areas for aping it.

In the arts and publishing in particular, men who identify as women have been treated as kings, rewarded for their hounding of women, treated as saintly gods; handed book deals, theatre commissions, gushing interviews, and opportunities far beyond their talents, in the rush to bow down to this new and exciting human.

I mean, fair play, it’s really hard to make a career in the arts. Doing so by shaming and crying ragefully about anyone who doesn’t book, or publish, or platform ‘enough trans people’, when - as we’re constantly reminded - they are a very small group of people, is a pretty manipulative way of conducting yourself, but hey ho.

They’re just men who like feminine things, and who fancy themselves quite a bit when being what they believe is ‘womanly.’ They’re not special. Some are struggling with life, I get that, but it’s really not on to demand everyone else makes that person’s issues their problem. We’ve plenty of our own, thanks.

They’re not a new kind of human at all, but a very ordinary set of demanding men, who people have foolishly indulged for far too long. It hasn’t helped them. Women who refuse their demands are treated particularly abysmally, which should have been a red flag for everyone ages ago, but unfortunately wasn’t.

Why? Well, misogyny is very powerful, and people would rather not think about it as it’s pretty difficult to face, and who the bloody hell wants to get cancelled. I know I didn’t. It was fucking horrible.

Just shut up. Say nothing. Go silent. Let them get away with it. Mildred’s quite a nice lass, why would anyone be a dick about Mildred?

(Don’t get Mildred angry though, you wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.)

I don’t know how this ends, people, I really don’t. I’m not certain it is going to end in my lifetime, but hopefully the edges will continue being taken off by the fact that seriously shit times have brought forth such a brilliant fight-back. For a good list of excellent organisations doing that, and helping often deeply traumatised women through this, see all the ‘Gender Critical’ groups in Amnesty’s report.

I don’t want to live in Mildred’s world, and am very glad I don’t. It’s dreadful there. Everyone’s tying themselves in knots, lying about reality, hating women for no good reason, slagging them off all over the internet, shunning them from polite society, watching everything they say in case they get cancelled by a bunch of wankers in their workplace, and convincing themselves of existential rights-threats that simply do not exist. And everyone is very, very angry, all of the time. Fuck that.

Reports like the one from Amnesty should be tossed in the bin, subscriptions cancelled, and, should they prove as incapable as Stonewall is of seeing sense, they should simply cease to be. What’s the point of them?

We are all male or female, with personalities, navigating stupid gendered expectations; life is pretty tough sometimes, and I’d like it not to be made needlessly harder, please. It helps absolutely nobody to deny the reality of biological sex, and the consequences of doing so are so thoroughly well-documented at this point it defies belief that this is still not universally accepted; that women are still being punished, insulted, maligned, and sometimes violently attacked.

That’s gender for you, though. And it’s those who are gender non-conforming - the women who said NO to living in Mildred’s world - who defy its sorry, repressive expectations most admirably.

(The Schism Ring is a reader-supported publication, and my entire income comes from freelance writing. Do consider subscribing, or becoming a paid subscriber if you are able. You can also buy ‘Hounded’ here, poetry collection ‘This Script’ here, or make a one-off donation here.)