Mick Hartley

Male commentators, the latest being David Aaronovitch, are wondering what the fuss is about. Why can’t women just be nice and use people’s – well, trans women’s – preferred pronouns. Victoria Smith at The Critic sets him straight:

At a time when the work of gender critical campaigners finally seems to be paying off, it seems we are expected to be magnanimous. We are clawing back our sports categories and rape crisis centres, are we not? No need to stick the knife in! What this misses is the fact that referring to male people as female because they wish it imposes — and always has imposed — a kind of moral injury. This is because gender is relational. Respecting someone else’s religious beliefs does not require me to share them; by contrast, using language which includes male people in the category “woman” — when I am a woman myself — forces me to express a view about myself which I do not hold. 

It’s a view that says male-imagined femininity, not femaleness, is the thing that differentiates me from men. It’s one that completely erases the difference in power as I experience it. It’s a denial of my own inner life and rejection of sexist norms, and to go along with it is humiliating. Just because it is a form of humiliation that women are used to — and have been conditioned to accept in the name of kindness — does not lessen its cruelty.

That’s the point. Saying someone’s looking fine when we see they’re not is a kindness that costs us nothing. Saying a man is a woman asks us to join in their view of what defines a woman – “femininity”, rather than the reality of sex.

A woman’s right to prioritise her perception of herself, refusing to allow it to be overridden by male fantasy, is never a luxury. It is fundamental to there being any equality between the sexes. That women have used incorrect pronouns to “be kind” before is not proof it costs us nothing. It’s merely proof of how much we have given already and how much we are owed.