Like many people in Britain, I was horrified by the violence at pro-transgender demonstrations last weekend.
Admittedly, we face issues we’ve not had to deal with before. For instance, I would not want a fully transitioned transgender woman to be placed into a male prison, where she would be vulnerable to attack. At the same time I do not want a man who still has a beard and balls to be in any female ward of any National Health Service hospital. These are challenges, and they won’t be solved by defacing statues.
As a writer, I’m naturally interested in language. Many demonstrators on Saturday carried placards with the words ‘cis woman’. I didn’t even know what that meant until a male gay friend used it. This same guy, let’s call him X, had a habit of insulting other men with another ‘c’ word. When I pointed out to X that he was misusing the word – he was talking about men, after all, not women – he said, ‘Ah, but c— just sounds so much worse.’
The casual sexism X displayed is so common, most people don’t even notice. But the sneer gave him away.
If you haven’t heard of ‘cis woman’, don’t worry – it’s really not worth knowing. The term is used by loud-mouthed transgendered activists and their supporters to describe biologically-born women like me, known to everyone else simply as ‘women’. The fact that I even have to talk about ‘biological women’ is proof of how insane parts of the world (mainly in the West, it must be said) have become.
That’s why judges had to get involved. What better use is there of the UK’s Supreme Court members’ time than to rule on what ‘woman’ means? On April 16 2025 they issued their unanimous conclusion: ‘sex’ under the country’s Equality Act of 2010 refers to biological sex. So, there is such a thing as biology after all.
I did not need a court to tell me. I had my first period at 13.
I’ve suffered from the cramps that come with them – that’s biology. I could have given birth naturally to a child – thanks to my biology. Chemotherapy, having saved my life, induced early menopause – also biology.
My experience of life and that of any transgendered woman are surely different. Saying this in no way denigrates either one of us.
Let me be clear: I respect the desire of anyone to change his or her biological sex. Every single person should be able to live life to the full. But please don’t tell me that a boy who goes through puberty as male, who is therefore socialised as a man, and then transitions to becoming female, is the same as me.
Indeed, difference is the essence of diversity. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, diversity means the condition or fact of being different or varied. Isn’t the whole point to accept and celebrate our differences? Silly me, that’s what I thought.
Instead, mobs are trying to erase our differences. They forget that you cannot celebrate differences without first acknowledging they exist. It’s ironic that the people who shout loudest about diversity are the ones least able to countenance any utterance with which they disagree.
Until now, I assumed my activist days were past. But the sight of Millicent Fawcett’s statue being defaced in London changed that. And the image below galvanised me.
A lobotomy – are you serious?
Looking back in history, such vitriol should not surprise us. Whenever women have stood up and demanded rights, there has been a backlash. Always. This isn’t the first time we’ve been called names and it won’t be the last.
Women are used to fighting. We had to fight to be legally recognised as our own persons (a battle which remains unfinished, as an American history professor discovered when she tried to get a mortgage).
We had to fight for access to education, and then for access to equal education. We had to fight for the right to vote.
And now, once again, we have to fight to protect women-only spaces. Somehow, the thought of spaces from which they’re barred seems to make male stomachs churn.
I learned this first-hand when I helped establish a women’s disco in Southampton in the mid-1980s. We were ridiculed – ‘No men? Hahaha! It’ll never last!’ Except, it did; our little disco grew and was so successful that it continued for decades after I’d left town. I never imagined we would one day have to have the same battle for space, only, in a world so changed that a man can simply say he’s a woman and the law would allow him to walk right in.
This cannot be right. Incredible as this may sound, it has been the way the Equality Act has been interpreted. Worse, Stonewall, an organisation I used to support, led the charge, effectively silencing dissent. Well-meaning folks who were too scared to object fell in line and helped to conflate ‘inclusivity’ with ‘anything goes’.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that a female patient on a NHS ward was raped by a transgendered woman. Most people don’t even know this took place because the hospital covered it up, telling police that rape could not have taken place because ‘there were no men on the ward’. The incident was only revealed in the House of Lords when Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne spoke during a debate about why we must not lose single-sex wards.
It’s astonishing to me that no public figure has asked why we hear a lot more about transgendered women than transgendered men. Could biology possibly play a role? Hmm, let’s see… Transgendered women were born boys; transgendered men were born girls; and we all remember that old chestnut, don’t we, of how boys will be boys?
Guess what… boys are boys, and the profiled activists on transgender rights websites are overwhelmingly transgender women, not men (see this and this). If one side shouts more loudly than the other, what we end up with, surely, is… the same old bias.
Another legitimate question is: why has ‘T’ been lumped with ‘LG and B’? I’ve never wanted to be a man; how did the Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual movement, of which I was once a proud member, turn into a wi-fi code? LGBTQA+++; don’t blink, lest another letter gets added.
Because politicians of all stripes have colluded with this nonsense, virulent misogyny has been allowed to fester. At the Labour Party conference in September 2021, Kier Starmer famously replied that it was ‘not right to say that only women have a cervix’.
P-LEASE. And I’m the one who should get a lobotomy?
Not only is his cowardice an insult to women, it’s also a disservice to transgendered men and women. They deserve clarity, not spineless prevarication.
We need everyone, especially politicians, to stand up for the vision of the pluralistic society we wish to see, a country which seeks to accommodate different groups, but which also does not permit a free-for-all. Transgender men and women make up no more than 0.55% of the UK’s population (even this minuscule proportion is thought to be an overestimate) and while they must be supported and protected, it is not right that their protection should come at the expense of women who make up half the population (51%).
People seem to think that the story ends with last week’s Supreme Court ruling. I’m not sure. I recognise contempt when I see it. And last weekend what I saw was pure contempt.
I wasn’t angry before, I now am. How dare you call me names I never chose! In recent days I’ve signed up to the LGB Alliance and Sex Matters . Goddamit, we will not let you walk all over us. I want to say this loudly and clearly.
We are Women. You were born by One of Us. We’re not going anywhere. Get over it.
Window into Other Worlds 