Victoria Smith in The Critic:

When Mary Ann Stephenson was announced as the government’s preferred candidate to take over from Baroness Falkner as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, every feminist I know was delighted. With three decades’ of experience, working for organisations including the Women’s Budget Group, the Fawcett Society and Liberty, plus advising the British Council, the UN and the TUC on human rights, Stephenson was the perfect pick — a serious candidate, with serious, in-depth knowledge across multiple areas of interest. Who — other than someone who objected to the existence of the role altogether — could possibly object to that? 

And yet some people did. Within days of the announcement, a petition was launched against Stephenson’s appointment. To be fair, it was hardly surprising at a time when anything which delights feminists tends to be considered a dogwhistle for hate. According to the petition, Stephenson’s history “includes making anti-trans statements and associations with groups advocating for the curtailment of trans people’s human rights”. 

The usual lie. Nobody advocates “for the curtailment of trans people’s human rights”. Gender skeptics advocate for women’s rights, and skepticism of new and peculiar “rights” that apply only to people who claim to be the sex they are not.

No one was going to put down in writing “we do not want this woman because she recognises the political salience of sex”. Instead, there’s that workaround with which all feminists have become familiar in recent years. Women’s rights are the one area where it is permitted to suggest that if you care about them a little too much — so much that you won’t allow sex to be overwritten by gender — then that’s all you care about, to the detriment of all other rights for all other groups. In the case of Stephenson this couldn’t be further from the truth. As for her detractors – I’m not sure what they care about at all. 

I have a particular interest in this because Stephenson was kind enough to allow me to interview her for my book Hags. Our conversation was not about “the trans issue”, but about the relationship between sex-based and age-based discrimination (age being another protected characteristic, albeit not one Stephenson’s critics have seen fit to mention). I felt — rightly — that Stephenson’s position as director of the Women’s Budget Group would give her particular insights into the cumulative nature of sex-based inequality. We discussed how women fall behind men due to lifecycle experiences, the impact of which are intensified due to factors such as race, class and disability. It was a conversation which acknowledged that sex matters, but only as a starting point. Of course, to anyone who has bought into gender identity ideology, such a conversation is only ever a flimsy excuse to hate on trans people, never to be taken at face value. 

The more I think about this conversation, and the smears to which Stephenson has recently been subjected, the more it highlights to me the way in which contemporary trans activism demands a completely different understanding of how we approach equality. There is an approach that is relational, which understands that who we are and where we stand depends on our relationships with other people, and that making the world fairer for all is not a simple matter of stating “I am who I say I am” and forcing everyone else to agree. It’s an approach that recognises the importance of bodies, the threat of violence, and the value of supposedly “lowly” work. It’s one that recognises the rights of all by acknowledging our dependency — socially, politically, physically, linguistically — on one another. Anyone who maintains this fundamentally intersectional approach will, like Stephenson, end up being called a terf, not because they have the slightest interest in “advocating for the curtailment of trans people’s human rights”, but because trans activism prioritises an individualistic validation of the “true self” over a relational, shifting understanding of selfhood. 

Exactly. Trans dogma / ideology / religion / theory is all about The Holy Self. The problem should be obvious. Or as Victoria put it –

If you believe that anyone who focusses on the needs of women — not least as a prerequisite to addressing the needs of marginalised subsets of women — is only doing so to make others feel left out, your problem is not their exclusionary tendencies. It’s your own narcissism.