Compiled and edited by Sarah Phillimore and Al Peters, paperback, 295 pages, ISBN 978-8362927219, P&P Publishing, 2022, £10.
This is a very impressive collection of essays and thoughts. The Irish television writer Graham Linehan writes in the Foreword of 'the absurdity, incoherence, misogyny, homophobia and toxicity of the trans movement, which is really a men's rights movement in drag'.
One contributor observes that a girl who said she was a boy "was pushing for her mental perception of herself to take precedence over her material body."
Another contributor writes, "I thought I wasn't a woman because I didn't identify with that role and didn't have that personality and mindset. But of course, that can only logically mean that I believed women are the people in society who do have a certain mindset and behaviour. One based entirely on sexist stereotypes because there is no other possible way of defining it without biology."
She asks, "What does feeling like a woman actually mean? What is non binary without stereotypes? Neuroscience said there is no such thing as a man's brain, so how can one think like a man?"
She concludes, "gender was a regressive social construct, and men and women can have any personality, and dress and behave in any way they like …"
Another writes, "on a left-wing political page where I was discussing Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), something that turns my stomach with how evil and barbaric it is. I got a warning for using 'gendered language'. I couldn't understand what was happening. Surely they could see the entire drive of FGM is an attack on the body of women, of millions of girls all over the world. If you erased sex, you erased the horrific sexism. To try and claim FGM isn't about women is so insulting to all the survivors. For this opinion I was banned from the group and have since seen actual FGM survivors attacked by TRAs [Trans Rights Activists] for the same reason." Which side resorts to abuse, bullying, cancelling, job loss threats, rape threats, death threats?
Trans rights activism ends with "pushing autistic and troubled (mostly) girls towards sterilisation, mutilation, and drugs for the rest of their lives …"
In sum, "the end point of transactivism, in re-defining us in terms of gender identity and doing away with sex as a relevant variable, means erasing the category that protects women in law. Does an organisation pay females less? How can you tell when all you record is self-defined gender? Are the employment practices unfavourable to women? How can you tell when all you record is self-defined gender? Need a same-sex medical professional? Will you be provided with a same-sex or a same 'gender' practitioner? Sex is one of nine protected characteristics in UK law. To do away with it by replacing it with gender identity is to strip us of the ability to observe, record, and oppose discrimination against women and girls. Transactivism, by accident or design, is a movement of misogyny."