Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce reviews Victoria Smith's new book UnKind at The Critic:

"What about men?” Anyone who runs something solely for women — a women’s centre, a course for female leaders, International Women’s Day — gets used to being asked this question. 

In recent years, the spread of trans ideology has strengthened this assumption that anything reserved for women must be a theft from men. Women’s toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres, even prison cells: women who want them protected can’t possibly be motivated by concern for women. Their true aim must be to spite men. Why can’t they just be kind?

In this elegant and insightful book, Victoria Smith dubs this mindset JustBeKindism: a “toxic mutation” of an entrenched belief that when women focus their care and attention on other women, they are being big meanies. Womanhood itself is now a good unjustly hoarded: TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), with their insistence on recognising that men cannot be women, are the epitome of unkind. Even feminism cannot be for women. In the words of American writer Julia Serano, a trans-identifying man: “It is negligent for feminists to focus only on those who are female-bodied.”

In JustBeKindism, Smith points out, men make the best women. Proving her point, since 2013, when the BBC started an annual award for 100 “women of the year”, nearly every list has included at least one trans-identifying man. This year’s is Brigitte Baptiste, a Colombian biologist who “uses a queer lens to analyse landscapes and species” and gave a TedX talk in which he claimed that the Quindío wax palm, Colombia’s national tree, is transsexual. These meagre achievements were deemed more worthy of recognition than anything done in 2024 by 4 billion actual women.

In JustBeKindism, actual women are beneath contempt. Smith quotes Andrea Long Chu, a trans-identifying man and the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Females: A Concern (the title alone merits an award for mansplaining). “Female,” says Chu, means “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another … [The] barest essentials [of femaleness are] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”

Just Be Kind is of course the mantra churned out by those who support trans women (men) competing in women's sport: refusing to be "inclusive" – so cruel – and hey, there are only a few of them so what's the big problem? Just be kind, can't you? Ditto for trans men (more often than not, it seems, sex offenders) in women's prisons. And men like Spanish trans actor Karla Sofía Gascón up for best actress at the Academy Awards. The list goes on. Never works the other way, somehow.