Why I stopped being a good girl. By Hadley Freeman. In which a progressive journalist (a staff writer at the Guardian!) gradually realizes her team are the bad guys on trans.
I was always a good girl, by which I mean a people pleaser, because that is what being a good girl is. I enjoyed the benefits that such a personality brings (straight As at school, a close relationship with my parents, a decent job) and endured the usual downsides (teenage anorexia, frequent bouts of insomnia, lifelong anxiety). I had what a therapist later described as “total conflict avoidance”, which is a therapy way of saying I would rather eat my hair than argue with someone. …
In 2016 in the UK, self-identification by a statutory declaration become the official way to switch gender. That effectively ended women’s sex-based rights, because all it takes to get those rights is to make a declaration. And she trusted the bureaucrats.
It is a pretty basic fact that male bodies are bigger and stronger than female ones, which is why sex-based rights exist in the first place.
So how, I wondered, would self-ID work in practice? Would a person born male now be able to compete against women in sport, or be incarcerated with female prisoners? I assumed the government had thought about this. I assumed wrongly. …
I started having tentative discussions about this with other progressive journalists, but I was invariably the only one at the table who believed (or was willing to say out loud) that there is a clear clash between gender-based rights and women’s rights. When I said to one journalist that women need women-only spaces, he replied, “So you’re defending segregation?” Another time, when I said it was ridiculous to make prisons mixed-sex, someone I consider a friend said, “You sound like a homophobe in the Eighties saying you wouldn’t let your kids have a gay teacher.” … Another one said that by arguing for women’s sex-based rights I was beating down on “the most oppressed minority in Britain”, i.e., transgender people. …
People who claimed to care ever so deeply about women’s physical safety during the MeToo movement now sneered at any woman who expressed doubt about sharing private spaces with male-bodied people. The most obvious example here was JK Rowling, who wrote about how her experiences with domestic violence informed her views, an inconvenient truth her critics conveniently ignored. Women are raised to fear male strength, and with very good reason. And now we’re called bigots for doing so.
For the first time in my 20-plus years of being a liberal journalist, I felt completely isolated. I knew I could make my life easier if I just reverted to being the good girl and shut up. “Be kind,” women were told by gender ideologues: be good girls, don’t ask questions, just nod and say what we tell you to say. You don’t want to be mean, do you? …
The virtue signaller’s basic question on any issue — am I good or bad? It’s all about them, every time!
So I questioned myself. Of course I did. Would my children be ashamed of me in twenty, ten, five years time? “Am I the baddie here?” I asked myself.
But it just didn’t make sense — her team were wrong:
But I just couldn’t make it square up: how can feelings (gender identity) always take precedence over material reality (biological sex)? Trying to convince myself that I was wrong and the gender ideologues were right was like trying to convince myself that one plus one equals a unicorn. How can you shut your eyes to your own experience and say something that makes no sense? Apparently some people can, but I could not. …
Whenever I or a female colleague dared to voice our doubts about gender ideology, we were pilloried; whenever a male colleague did, he was given a free pass. It was, in the vast, vast main, women who were condemned as bigots, all because they didn’t believe the right things, because they were trying to defend their legal rights. Left-wing men — both in person and online — told me that unless I repeated the mantra “trans women are women”, I was a bigot. …
Red-pilling begins:
I felt real anger, and I wrote an article in which I told them to get lost. This provoked a huge backlash on Twitter, and no, it wasn’t pleasant. But it was definitely preferable to staying silent just because I was scared.
Other people, however, did not react like that. It was astonishing to me how quickly universities, publishing houses, NHS services, political parties, newspapers and TV networks capitulated to the gender ideologues, who were often not even trans themselves. …
Many of the people demanding these institutional shifts were and are not transgender themselves. They are bullies who set themselves up as moral arbiters, using self-righteous hysteria and factually questionable claims to demand censorship, instilling fear that anyone caught engaging in wrongspeak or even wrongthink will be publicly shamed and professionally destroyed. …
I have seen some people refer to gender-critical feminists as bullies, but I have never seen a gender-critical feminist call for writers to be no-platformed, words to be banned, books to be pulped, or articles to be deleted from the web. Gender activists do all of that as a matter of routine. …
My anger is directed at the cowardly institutions that have allowed themselves to be bullied by a tiny misogynistic online minority instead of maintaining even a shadow of a backbone and doing what they know is right. …
And then there’s Twitter. When I wanted to write for a magazine about the vilification of JK Rowling, I was told no, because it would cause “too much of a Twitter storm”. A friend wanted to put together a book of collected gender-critical essays, but an editor told her “the Twitter kickback would be too strong, and it wouldn’t get past the sensitivity readers anyway”. It amazes me how much power some people give to Twitter, because as someone who has been the object of several Twitter storms in my time, I’ll let you in on a little secret: Twitter means nothing, unless you give it the power to mean something. People should really stop giving Twitter so much power, because it’s making them bad at their jobs.
The aftermath:
I’m lucky — I haven’t lost my job because I believe something that everyone believed up to five years ago, and most people still believe now. … I did, however, stop writing my column. …
I’m currently writing a book about anorexia. Multiple doctors have confirmed to me what I already suspected, which is that there are obvious parallels between what gender dysphoric teenage girls say today — about their hatred of their body, their fear of sexualisation, their assumptions about what being a woman means — and what I said while in hospital as a teenager. …
Repeatedly, women who write about this tell me they are subjected to impossible edits: pleas for balance, softened language, a more neutral tone, dissenting voices, more equivocation so as to render their original argument into meaningless slurry — everything editors do to a piece when, really, they would rather spike it and save themselves the bother. It doesn’t matter how many facts you have, what matters are the feelings. …
Lesson learned:
I don’t feel like I’ve become radicalised, because I don’t think anything I didn’t already think six years ago. I do, however, feel much better about myself for not just thinking it but saying it. I have learned that there is something worse than people telling me I’m a bad person, and that is allowing bullies to reframe the world, to dictate what we can all think and to define my reality. They might have triumphed over some institutions, but they haven’t triumphed over me. It turns out life is much better when you’re no longer the good girl.
She can’t leave the left for professional and social reasons, of course. But maybe she will over the next issue that impinges on her rights, or if she gets sacked.
