No compromise thanks

Sonia Sodha’s piece on Stonewall has been much discussed. I had one problem with it, in the conclusion.

Two of Stonewall’s founders have accused the charity of losing its way. An independent review by a barrister into the unlawful no-platforming of two female academics found that Essex University’s policy on supporting trans staff, reviewed by Stonewall, misrepresented the law “as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than as it is”, to the detriment of women. And following the Equality and Human Rights Commission leaving Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme, the equalities minister, Liz Truss, has reportedly pushed for government departments to follow suit.

Stonewall pretends it’s all right-wingers who object, which is just another example of how shamelessly they bully feminist women and related critics.

Gender-critical feminists believe that in a patriarchal society women’s bodies and their role in sex and reproduction play a major role in their oppression. Gender identity – the feeling of being a man or a woman regardless of one’s biological sex – can therefore never wholly replace sex as a protected characteristic in equalities law and women have the right to organise on the basis of their sex and to access single-sex spaces.

Gender identity not only can’t wholly replace sex as a protected characteristic, it can’t partly replace it either. Sex as a protected characteristic must not be replaced at all, not even a little bit.

[M]y feminism has matured into the understanding that male violence is a more important tool of oppression in a patriarchal society than board appointments. In case you think I’m exaggerating, almost one in three women will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime, a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every four days in the UK and seven in 10 of us have been sexually harassed in public spaces.

I’m surprised that three out of ten women haven’t been sexually harassed in public spaces.

Women must be free to express the view that it is risky to allow men who self-identify as women to access female-only spaces as default. It’s not theoretical: abusive men go to great lengths to access female victims and we have never been able to rely on institutions such as the police and prisons to protect us. Karen White, a trans woman who committed indecent assault, gross indecency involving children and two rapes while a man, was placed in a women’s prison where she sexually assaulted female prisoners.

Shrugging this off as of no account is not the best way to convince us 1. that they’re women and 2. that they give a rat’s ass about our concerns.

By equating gender-critical views with racism, Stonewall is losing the opportunity to win the argument and build solidarity via compromise: we understand why some women want safeguards for certain single-sex spaces; can you see why in many other circumstances there’s no reason why trans women should be treated differently from those born female?

It depends on what you mean by “many other circumstances.” If you mean basically in private, among friends, and so on, then sure. If you mean in many parts of public life, then no. Same old same old. We’re still working hard to get a fraction of the time and attention and promotions and rewards that men get, so no, we don’t want to make that fraction even smaller by sharing it with men who call themselves women. No. We get to fight for our own rights just like everyone else.

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