Mick Hartley

Melanie Reid in the Times gives a thumbs-up to Julie Bindel's new book, Feminism for Women:

This is a hot book, but not in a Sally Rooney way. This one is going to stir up the trans activists and provoke all kinds of Twitter pile-ons, bullying and de-platforming. It’s even got a puff quote from JK Rowling on the cover, describing it as “timely, necessary and important”, which in these strange times is like a red flag to a bull. And the author doesn’t give a flying fig, because her name is Julie Bindel and her mission is to reclaim women’s biological sex.

Take a ringside seat as Bindel, one of the biggest names in the long struggle for women’s rights, enters into battle with the newly ubiquitous transgender orthodoxy that decrees “woman” can mean anyone who identifies as such, even if they’re still in possession of a penis.

Trans activists (the Queer ISIS, she calls them) have gone, she says, from requesting we use she/her pronouns for transwomen to demanding we believe that they are women. Now we must call ourselves “cis” women and accept womanhood is fluid; and lesbians should have relationships with transwomen. She describes the “gender madness” that is forcing women to share single-sex spaces — toilets, changing rooms, clubs, refuges and prisons — with transwomen; and which denies women biological reality by substituting “chest feeding” for breast feeding and “front hole” for vagina. Even the word woman is being obliterated in favour of “menstruater” and “womb-haver”.

Should women fail to agree with any of this, she argues, they are labelled transphobic, bullied and “cancelled”, which is of course why the vast majority of us, however unhappy we are at the expropriation of our sex, are too scared to say anything. But Bindel, already de-platformed, abused and physically attacked by trans activists, has spent a lifetime defying bullies.

How have we got to the place, she asks, where gender has trumped sex and obliterated lesbian, gay and bisexual identity? Gender, she argues, something that feminists resisted because it meant the imposition of stereotypes, is now being served back to women as an immutable individual identity. Why have we let the rights of transwomen override everyone else’s rights? Why should young women in universities and other settings be silenced, forced to accept a form of feminism that benefits men and is harmful to women?

That's the nub of it: gender stereotypes used to be something that needed to be challenged, but now they're "being served back to women" as something fixed, some mysterious gender identity that supposedly overrules the facts of biological sex. How so many people have come to believe this nonsense is one of the more perplexing aspects of the whole trans business.

Female sport is under threat; Girlguiding allows boys who identify as girls to join without anyone being informed they’re natal male. That also goes for adult volunteers and includes overnight camps. Scottish Rape Crisis has opened its service to all self-identified transwomen, who, Bindel says bluntly, could be “men with fully intact genitalia who merely decide they are women at the time”. (It’s a shame her book went to print before the news that Edinburgh Rape Crisis has appointed a transgender woman as its chief executive, a job that was advertised as reserved for a woman.)

In some cases there’s nothing left to do but laugh. The American feminist Mary Kate Fain was reprimanded by a non-binary member of an animal rights group for mentioning the abuse of female dairy cows. Her accuser found it personally “hurtful” — “you’re not allowed to say dairy comes from female cows or eggs come from female chickens because we don’t know their gender identity”. […]

Feminism for Women isn’t always the easiest read. It is repetitive and polemical, largely because Bindel is a purist, as unapologetically radical and uncompromising as she ever was. But it is an important, courageous book, standing up for the millions of ordinary women being bullied into silence by a tiny minority. And crucially her key question burns as brightly as it has for a hundred years: why should women, forever the oppressed sex, prioritise every cause above their own?

Bizarrely, the Amazon entry lists the book as #1 Best Seller in Ancient Mayan History. A mistake?…or some disgruntled trans activist….