Ellen Page — a person who no longer exists, and who by strict application of the rules of gender identity never existed — became famous at the height of an exceptionally dark era for young women and fame. In 2007, …
The fantasy of dating a Republican
More than 20 years before the advent of Tinder, an MTV show called Singled Out offered an unwittingly prescient insight into the dangers of algorithmic dating. The premise was simple: a dating pool of 50 potential suitors milled around in …
I was sacked for writing about trans censorship
For a quarter of a century, on and off, Melbourne’s “quality” daily newspaper The Age not only published my words — it was my intellectual home.
I had joined the paper’s staff around the turn of the century as a …
The plot to redefine conversion therapy
The majority-Muslim city of Yogyakarta, on the humid southern coast of Java, is rarely associated with progressive politics. While being gay is not illegal there, it is certainly not tolerated: the Indonesian island has a history of shunting homosexual men …
Women are pawns in the contraception war
Davina McCall’s new special, Pill Revolution, starts with an eye-catching visual: McCall, wearing a red dress and a megawatt gameshow host’s grin, spins a giant roulette wheel labelled with all the potential side effects of hormonal birth control. A dizzying …
Women are pawns in the contraception war
Davina McCall’s new special, Pill Revolution, starts with an eye-catching visual: McCall, wearing a red dress and a megawatt gameshow host’s grin, spins a giant roulette wheel labelled with all the potential side effects of hormonal birth control. A dizzying …
The battle over breastfeeding
My eldest son is currently in the middle of his GCSEs. I’m not worried about the results, though, because I breastfed him.
Babies who were breastfed “get better GCSE marks” apparently. Get in! I did this for all three of …
The gender wars are not a gift to the Right
As a critic of transactivism, one thing you hear a lot is how you are “propping up” the Right — or even the far-Right. You may think that all you are doing is pointing out some fairly obvious downsides to …
‘I was hounded out of Oxfam over JK Rowling’
It’s hard to imagine a more agreeable place to work than a charity bookshop. Staffed by civic-minded volunteers, the shelves groan with musty old paperbacks, lovingly donated in the hope they’ll find a new home and also raise money for …
The Oxford kids are alright
Life as a gender-critical feminist can be quite strange. The first time I ever entered the Oxford Union, I was a 19-year-old fresher. All I really remember is getting very drunk on peach schnapps, crashing into a trestle table, and …
Why should lesbians sleep with men?
If you are a late millennial or early Gen Z-er, life is probably quite hard right now. Chances are that you can’t afford to buy your own home, or even go out socialising that much. Perhaps you can’t avoid feeling …
The fatal attraction of victimising women
The erotomaniacal villainess of Fatal Attraction is something of a cipher. Only once in the 1987 film do we see Alex Forrest alone. Really alone, that is — not stalking Michael Douglas’s Dan Gallagher at a distance, or obsessively calling …
How women colonised yoga
Last year, my husband and I got into a curiously heated debate, along with two other couples, about whether or not it is manly to eat fruit. A surprising consensus emerged among the men, that fruit was categorically feminine. The …
Is trans the new anorexia?
When teaching freshman composition in New York colleges in the mid-Eighties, I picked up a peculiar pattern in one-on-one conferences with my female students. With improbable frequency, they’d confide that they were anorexic. The term had only entered the popular …
Women don’t need another girlboss
Heavy lies the girlboss crown on Rain Newton-Smith, freshly appointed director-general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Brought in last week to rebuild the CBI’s reputation after a scandal involving her predecessor, commentators are already predicting her failure. Some …