Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times:

Gender activism has become the permissible face of misogyny for a certain kind of allegedly progressive man. It gives him latitude to call women derogatory names and make spittle-flecked videos, insisting that anyone who has a problem with male-born people in women-only spaces is on the wrong side of history. The effect is men’s-rights activism, but the energy is very incel — shorthand for people who are “involuntarily celibate”. Incels rage online about women who selfishly refuse to have sex with them; gender activists rage against women who won’t just bloody well shut up about their concerns about safety and say what the men tell them to say….

Sturgeon has dismissed the UK government’s lawful blocking of her bill as an attempt “to stoke a culture war”, following the trend on the left to use “culture war” as a synonym for “irrelevant partisan distraction”. But culture wars are important — abortion, for example, is a culture war, and women feel as strongly about that as they do about this, because it’s their skin in the game. Much though the angry men shout and insist Britons support what they vaguely describe as “trans rights”, the actual polling shows how wildly unpopular Sturgeon’s much more specific bill is, even in Scotland. When I asked one MSP why Sturgeon was so determined to jam this bill through, they suggested a possible reason: she is highly aware that Alex Salmond, her predecessor as first minister, bagged equal marriage, and she sees this bill as her potentially equivalent legacy. That she was pretty equivocal about equal marriage back in the day may be another motivating factor, with gender rights offering a kind of atonement for her past.

Sturgeon is making a big mistake in thinking that by denying science and trashing women’s rights she looks progressive, because the public are smarter than that. And, as with all the angry “passionate” men, women won’t forget what she’s done, and they won’t forgive.

That "spittle-flecked video" would be Owen Jones, ranting earlier this week about how gender critical women  – "anti-trans zealots" – are going to be on the wrong side of history. He was saying the same thing over five years ago. 

In those five years he doesn't seem to have got to grips with, or even considered, quite why so many women are angry. He insists that it's all about acknowledging the existence of trans people, but as many have insisted, from JK Rowling on down, there's no problem with trans people per se…"Live your best life", etc.. It's about, on one side, the encroachment of men into women's safe spaces – an argument that just gets shrugged off by parroting the nonsensical "trans women are women" – and on the other side the horrendous medical abuse of young teens conned into thinking that they've been born into the wrong body and irreversible medical intervention is going to cure their problems.

Beside which, it's all based on the fantasy of magical gender identities. It was bollocks then and it's bollocks now. So yes, another angry man displaying his misogyny….