On Friday 23rd August, I hauled myself out of bed, groggy and underslept, to make the long journey from my Ayrshire abode to my former home of Edinburgh. I was underslept largely due to having gone to bed late and quite furious due to the outcome of the Tickle vs Giggle case in Australia which I, and many other women globally, had stayed up to hear, demonstrating the international solidarity that is a relieving feature of the often exhausting battle against the illiberalism of gender identity ideology and its activism.
For those unfamiliar with Tickle vs Giggle, I recommend this interview with Sall Grover, the CEO of the female-only app, Giggle, which was set up by Grover as a social networking site for women to find other women to flatshare with, to date, to gossip, to network, free of the types of men that Grover had endured during her time trying to find flatmates in the States. Giggle was destroyed before it even got off the ground, due to the desire of males like R. Tickle to access it, thereby undermining its entire reason for existence; a desire so strong that Tickle pursued Grover relentlessly for over two years to argue for his inclusion, starting this litigious, punishing process while Grover was heavily pregnant. As Sall said in a recent interview, it is deeply ironic that she was forced to do battle to try, in vain, to retain Australian women’s rights to a woman-only service, while undergoing such a uniquely female experience.
Another woman who stayed up for the expected, though desperately anger-making result against Grover, was Lucy Hunter Blackburn, co-editor alongside Susan Dalgety of the historically important and extremely successful anthology The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht: Voices from the Frontline of Scotland’s Battle for Women’s Rights. (Constable: 2024) Seeing her tweets reminded me that I really should go to sleep, as I was coming through to Edinburgh to attend a Fringe event about the book, and would be expected to say a few words at the end, as I am one of the contributors to the anthology. As I rushed around getting ready a few hours after some snatched z’s, with Breakfast News telly on, as usual, to annoy myself awake, I realised I was thrumming with what can only be described as a weird sense of disassociation that went beyond tiredness. As I checked social media in-between attempting a bleary-eyed winged eyeliner, I was struck that I still cannot believe what is happening to women.
An image of Afghan women covered from head to toe. A headline announcing that the Taliban has banned women’s voices from being heard in public. Many social media comments couldn’t help but point out that in Australia, women have been rendered a malleable category that has no biological basis, while in Afghanistan it is quite clear they know precisely who to oppress.
Later in the day on Friday 23rd August, thankfully not in the morning, when I was still struggling with this odd and anxious weariness, a formerly respected human rights organisation, Amnesty International, tweeted that they welcome the result in Tickle vs Giggle, saying “This is a step forward in ensuring transgender women are not discriminated against on the basis of their gender identity.” Accompanying the celebratory tweet about the Australian judge’s decision to uphold that ‘women’ are not a definable category of human being; that, instead, sex can be changed by male declaration alone, Amnesty used a stock image of a young, pretty woman, giving the passing impression that she is R. Tickle.
Hundreds of comments and retweets pointed out the gaslighting, while gender identity activists gleefully celebrated women’s anger. Rivkah Brown of Novara Media, penned a lengthy thread of emotional coercion warning that such public scrutiny may be a suicide risk for Tickle. There is absolutely zero sympathy ever expressed for the scrutiny, and compounding years-long harassment and economic harm suffered by Grover.
Also later in the day on Friday, when I was on my way home from Edinburgh, I read a tweet from Helen Staniland, a feminist I follow, highlighting what she had found on Amnesty’s website about the Taliban: “under the Taliban, women and girls were (sic) discriminated against in many ways, for the ‘crime’ of identifying as a girl.”
Where to start with this word-salad? The use of the past-tense? The ideological language of ‘identifying as’? The idea that grown women ‘identify’ as ‘girls?’ The very idea that it is an ‘identification’ with being female that is the root of women’s oppression, with the logical consequence that, should they wish, they could just ‘identify’ out of it? The lack of any feminist analysis, which would instantly recognise that what is going on here, whether with Sall Grover in Australia, or the oppressed women of Afghanistan, or the enforced use of ‘cis’ in the decadent West, is men’s power to name and define the boundaries of what ‘woman’ is, means, and does, in a way that only benefits men?
I am glad that I did not read that in the morning of Friday 23rd August, as I was experiencing the beginnings of what may well have been an anxiety attack, not uncommon when I am travelling to Edinburgh. In a fairly empty carriage, I had given in to the temptation to continue scrolling instead of reading my book, as I had planned, smashing that ‘like’ button on every sympathy for Sall Grover. It’s one of the many curses of being in the ‘gender wars’ (particularly if you’ve found yourself writing about them and having to keep up to speed on them.) There are always fresh injustices, sometimes one after the other in rapid succession.
Calm. Down, I thought, that morning, putting down the phone after retweeting Kathleen Stock’s take about the Taliban, unable at that point to articulate my own.
Women are materially definable; we are legislatively, culturally, and politically important on that basis; we have a right to meet, speak, and assemble with other women on matters that affect us profoundly.
I have repeated these three foundational principles over and over again as a sanity-retaining mantra over the last decade as gender identity ideology mainstreamed, rendering all three principles a new form of thought-crime. Sometimes, I’ve found myself writing them down in my journal, feeling like Winston Smith frantically and furtively scribbling Down with Big Brother! 2 + 2 = 4! But we are NOT living in Afghanistan, or Airstrip One, or a totalitarian state of any kind, as ‘Orwellian’ as things seem at times. Women in the west have a duty to not squander such privilege by acting as if we do. As my second train reached Haymarket station in Edinburgh, I’d managed to leave the phone’s rage-inducing takes, to look forward to exercising that third principle - to meet and speak freely on matters that concern us - with an audience of approximately 150 people, including many of the other contributors to the anthology. These offline gatherings are extremely important in order to keep the heid in dealing with what can be a disturbing online battleground.
The event was compered by Marion Calder of For Women Scotland, assisted by Susan Smith of the same (remarkable) campaign group who, from humble beginnings, forming in Marion’s living room, will soon be taking to the Supreme Court, in defence of clarifying that definition of ‘woman’ in law. On the panel, Lucy and Susan were chaired by MSP Tess White, someone relatively new to the Scottish Parliament, who admitted during the conversation that she had been shocked at what the passing of the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Scotland Bill had taught her about how badly scrutinised some of the legislation of the Scottish Parliament was.
Up for discussion in the lively conversation chaired by White were several questions: how the book came about (forged as an idea at Susan’s kitchen table); how they chose contributors (each part of the history of the last five years suggested an obvious person to write that part, all of whom said aye); what the overall story of the book was. ‘Institutional failure,’ Lucy included in her answer to this question, and it is true that the shocking accounts in the anthology, including chapters from those ensconsced in politics to universities, unions to the arts, education to those trying to access ‘captured’ rape crisis centres, is one of women being systematically discriminated against, ignored, or belittled, by people with institutional power. Both Nicola Sturgeon and Shona Robison’s names were playfully booed when mentioned; compared to lengthy rounds of applause for those such as Johann Lamont, and Joan McAlpine (the latter was alas not in attendance) who was the first legislator in the entirety of the UK to have challenged gender identity’s ideological language, as it stealthily tried to attach itself to the changes to the Scottish census.
There is an important Scottish context to the wider UK ‘gender wars’, Lucy said, rightly. I admit that I sometimes feel the wider UK ‘movements’ (I’d say there are perhaps three interlinking ones, though that is a far longer piece than I have time to write just now, and I also want to research a bit more before formulating any concrete conclusions) misses the quite specific features of how gender identity ideology came to Scotland, and how it managed to ‘capture’ so many of our institutions so fully, and how that has influenced how the ‘women who wouldn’t wheesht’ have fought back. Susan points out that it goes right back to the 1990s devolution settlement itself, as told in the first chapters of the book. The bulk of the book, though, is the five years running up to Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, with the book’s tight deadline from idea to publication imposed to ensure that it was released into what both assumed would be plenty of events and robust discussion about how well the Scottish Parliament was faring, on the twenty-five year anniversary of its formation.
In answer to a question about what they had found most ‘surprising’ about the reaction to the book (which has been in the Sunday Times bestseller list three times since publication), Lucy answered that the lack of robust discussion about the problems that are quite apparent with the Parliament’s function, which are starkly demonstrated by the anthology, had been both surprising and disappointing. Not one of the Scottish political party leaders has engaged with the book, Susan and Lucy said, despite them having delivered it to all of them; forsaking the Scottish Greens co-leaders, for perfectly obvious reasons. Douglas Ross, Scottish Conservative leader, to be fair, Susan said, had engaged with the arguments throughout the process of the GRR Bill. For those of us of the centre and left, while this has been very welcome, it has also been pretty disappointing that he was the sole leader to do so, given that, for us, this is absolutely an issue of women’s rights, which, traditionally, you’d expect any left-leaning politician to care about.
The engaged audience asked several questions, and all of the contributors who were in the room were asked to say a few words explaining their particular chapter. Particularly moving were the words from Ann Henderson, former rector of the University of Edinburgh. The failures of that university are another thread that runs throughout the anthology. Visibly upset, she recounted how difficult it was to write about her experiences being targeted by student-activists during her tenure, and how emotionally upsetting it is to have downright falsities spread against one’s reputation and character. When I came to speak, I reiterated this, saying I was glad that I had already written such an intricate and detailed account of my own ‘hounding’ three years prior to being approached by Lucy and Susan, and had been able, therefore, to provide a condensed version and an update fairly swiftly for them, given the tight deadline, and the fact I was up to my ears with the equally tight deadline for finishing my forthcoming book Hounded. (Yes, I will be mentioning my forthcoming book wherever possible until it is published! Pre-order now! Make me and my cats happy! In March 2025! When any royalties come in! (Shameless plugging… - ed.)
One of the questions from the audience has stayed with me, and it is a foundational issue I have found with friends in the arts who are significantly younger than me. (I am forty-two; I’m thinking specifically of artistic and musician friends who are still in their twenties or early thirties.) Essentially, how do we make younger women understand how brittle and easily lost women’s rights are? How do we make them understand that these rights were not just handed to us but that they had to be fought for? That many of them (women’s right to have their own bank accounts and mortgages; domestic violence shelters; the right not to be raped in marriage) have happened in living memory. Until I was ten years old, for example, it was quite legal for a husband to rape his wife.
And that’s before we even get to the other cultural battles and norms which legislation alone cannot solve, all of which are ongoing, and all of which I perceive as getting worse. As JK Rowling, also a contributor, noted in her 2020 essay addressing why she was entering the ‘TERF Wars,’ we really are living through the most profoundly misogynistic period of her lifetime. Another problem I have had has been trying to persuade younger women that it really does not need to be like this, and resisting this new, identity-based interpretation of ‘gender’ is one of the most liberating things you could do as a young women, instead of ruminating over whether you are ‘femme’ enough or not. It feels like everything has been turned upside-down there, which is an inevitable result of a powerful movement with a compelling set of ideas (for some), that has persuaded so many that they are ‘cis’ and therefore that they ‘identify’ with the ‘feminine/ female gender,’ which might be a playful thing to do for a man, but is a ‘profoundly disabling notion’ for a woman, as Germaine Greer said, given the ‘feminine gender’ would have to include you mutely, cutely centring the desires of men, because that is what ‘gender’ is and how it functions.
Lucy answered firstly with a reminder that there are several younger feminist voices in this battle, and that the generational divide is not as strong as our own opponents would have us think. Susan pointed out that it is specifically in the interests of men to have women divided and conquered, with younger women hating older women and fearing becoming them, therefore meaning the latter can be more readily dismissed as women’s rights campaigners always have been. Another central theme of the book? ‘Don’t piss off women who are over forty,’ Susan quipped, as the event ended with laughter, book-buying and a signing, as any traditional, non ‘Fringe’ book event would do.
An audience member, who I will call ‘J’ (and knows who she is) came to chat to me afterwards. During our conversation she told me that she was unfollowed by approximately seventeen people on Twitter when she tweeted a couple of weeks ago about my Fringe event with Darren McGarvey. ‘Oh!’ I said, feeling guilty, despite such stupid ghosting of someone not being strictly my fault really. J told me she checked who they were, and almost all were writers or people involved in running literary magazines, some of whom she had met during a creative writing course a few years back. ‘Oh.’ My tone changed. ‘That’s…yeah, that’s very typical.’
Another thing that has been so striking as someone so thoroughly ostracised from the Scottish literary world this last five years, despite making my entire living out of freelancing in it for years prior to that, is how utterly disconnected that literary world is from the world of the women’s rights and feminist movements, and the wider but interlinked freedom of expression movement, that I find myself part of now. After Covid, while theatres fretted, and literary events panicked about bums on seats, feminist and free speech events sold out regularly.
Friday’s event was not advertised publicly, tickets were sold via private networks, and were gone in a matter of hours. My own events, run under the ‘Platformed’ banner last year sold out too, and Magi Gibson’s WomanWord and Unbridled poetry events have also. There is a clear desire for such events and such publications from readers and audience members, and their continued ostracisation from mainstream, funded events and festivals programmes, particularly for performer/writers such as myself and Magi Gibson, who used to earn part of our living from the appearance fees at such, is an ongoing disgrace that I hope will be rectified if new minds are willing. Of course, as I tweeted last week in the face of Creative Scotland’s decision to close the Open Fund for Individuals, which, as Alex Massie points out ‘falls squarely into the “you had one job” category of failure’, who knows what the future of any of our arts sectors are even going to be, given the state of things currently.
I found myself in the odd boat of finding common cause with my literary hounders this week, in that I’m as gutted as they are for what the closure of that fund means for individual writers, artists and creators. I imagine they draw a line at really caring that the situation they’ve found themselves in this week with the closure of the main fund for individuals and those who operate as sole traders, is one I’ve been facing with whole swathes of former clients and institutions this last five years, captured as so many are by activism-over-free-expression types who make up such a large proportion of cultural gatekeepers, and who would literally rather eat their own thumbs than chuck me any paid work whatsoever - work wholly unrelated to my views on gender identity ideology, I must add, and work I’d been ably providing for them for years prior extremely successfully. It doesn’t pay (literally) to feel down in the dumps over this constantly, and there is little point in ruminating on it rather than pulling my socks up, but I do have to bite my tongue a bit about calling out their hypocrisies at times.
But, as ever, should everything close and be shut down; should courageous voices find themselves shunned and shut out, despite a demonstrable desire for them to speak, we will bloody well find ways to make that happen. After the event, I enjoyed lunch with a diverse group of like-minded women and some men, from all walks of life, and from all different political parties, both pro and anti-Scottish independence, all united solely in our opposition to illiberalism, as demonstrated by the democratic failures of those individuals and institutions who tried to ‘wheesht’ us all. As Nicole Jones, one of the younger writers in the anthology states, ‘What we’re saying isn’t unlawful - it’s not even unreasonable. Do not internalise the idea of yourself as being toxic.’ While J’s unfollowers ghost and shun, chittering gossipedly behind blocks about ‘TERFs’ whose views they cannot ever be bothered learning to articulate, as I sat surrounded by the brave writers and readers of that important anthology, I was reminded that I know whose company, and whose courage, to place my hopes in.
Susan and Lucy have achieved a remarkable thing with this anthology, and I could not be more grateful to them for doing it. It is an important record, and, they urged, everyone must make sure they keep their own records, whether private journals, campaign materials, printed blogs, records of emails sent to politicians. As they say in the final chapter, ‘This isn’t over yet.’ Whatever happens in ‘the gender wars,’ we must ensure that it is women and our needs and rights, that are kept central. There are many ways that these battles might be said to be ‘won,’ and it will be voices like the ones in that room, both contributors and audience, who get us to a good win, which is one with women’s rights at its centre, and in recognition of the contributions of every single woman in this battle, however they have or can organise, whether speaking out in their own names or having to do so anonymously; whether doing vital public awareness campaigns, or challenging the ideas in the places they started, namely, in universities and in the elite sectors of society such as the arts and politics.
We all stand on the shoulders of the giantesses who’ve come before us, and I strongly believe that it is a feminist, liberal, democratic movement, that supports other women internationally, that gets a ‘win’ that will endure. Lucy noted, she said, that many of the contributors - and other women - have said they sense that they ‘took their eye off the ball’ in terms of thinking that women’s rights were secured and we had nothing to worry about. As I look worldwide at what is happening, from Australia to Afghanistan, I know that I for one will not be taking my eyes off the ball again.
Such an interesting piece and you are right to show the link between misogynistic Australia and even more gruesomely woman-hating Afghanistan! Perhaps that is what we should be showing young women: Afghan women jurists have been given help to escape because of the threat to their lives in the country of their birth. They can remember how life was in Kabul before the Taliban came to power the first time, and how bad it is now for women in that country. While ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is fiction, removal of our rights in the West is not only possible but happening now, in USA as well as in Australia. We must ensure that we fight back to prevent it getting worse here.