Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman interviews the For Women Scotland trio behind the Supreme Court victory:

[Susan] Smith started following this issue in 2016: “It was actually your fault, Hadley, because it was something you wrote that made me go, ‘Hang on a second, I need to look into this.’” This was a column I wrote for The Guardian about Caitlyn Jenner, who had undergone a surgical transition the year before and had just been named one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year. I wrote that this seemed a bit rum, given that same year Jenner had driven an SUV at what investigators described as an unsafe speed and crashed into two cars, resulting in in the death of a 69-year-old woman named Kim Howe. It was a clear example of an attitude that was already taking shape, that validating trans women’s feelings matters more than women’s safety.

“I only read The Guardian and the BBC in those days, so I had no clue about what was going on, because they barely covered it at all. I was really cross. I’d invested so much of my time and intellectual energy into these so-called bastions of liberalism and free speech, and they let me down,” Smith says. She assumed others in her centre-left milieu would be equally horrified at the growing prioritisation of trans rights over women’s rights, and so she posted her thoughts in a Liberal Democrat Facebook group.

“The response I got was like nothing I’d ever seen — all these vicious, angry young men calling me all sorts of abusive names. So that’s when I first logged on to Mumsnet and there were all these smart, funny women who really knew what they were talking about, and I thought, ‘Oh thank God.’”

Sums it up. The left/liberal media were always on board with the gender woo: if you wanted the truth you had to look elsewhere. Freeman's time at the Guardian was soon to come to an end, with her gender-critical views making her an increasingly isolated figure at Kings Place.