Last weekend brought surprising news: an unprecedented spike in the number of West Ham fans identifying as trans. According to the 2021 Census, the London borough of Newham has the highest proportion of trans people in England and Wales, coming …
Did heteropessimism kill the rom-com?
Men are trash. Or at least, this is the consensus in places where single, educated, liberal, youngish women gather to lament the heterosexual state of affairs. Actually wanting to be loved by a man now represents an embarrassing shortcoming, and …
The darkness of dance
I was a quiet, nervous little girl who didn’t much like the chaos of life. I could escape that, though, in the safety and discipline of the dance studio. With hair scraped back and uniform strict, the daily repetitions of …
Keep child abusers off the rainbow flag
“Julie Bindel takes to right wing GB News to smear the trans community with the same trope that was used against gay men in the 1980s — that they are all paedophiles. Has she forgotten that made gays a target …
What Posie Parker learnt from Brexit
When I call Posie Parker the Nigel Farage of Terfs, I mean it as a compliment. I can’t think of another single-issue campaigner so effective at popular communication, so successful in reordering the political landscape — and so reviled for …
The Taliban’s lessons in masculinity
During the US evacuation of Afghanistan, as the mainstream press argued about the fate of translators, or the evacuation of Pen Farthing’s dogs, the online Right had fun tweaking progressive noses by cheering on the Taliban. The return of veiling …
Is France too sexy for the trans wars?
A bit like Napoleon, radical transactivism is moving swiftly and imperviously across Europe. Blithe to the consequences for women, lesbians, and gay men, pan-European LGBT organisations such as ILGA Europe are lobbying hard for governments to introduce self-ID, and also …
Did Medieval women have it better?
Geoffrey Chaucer imagined a woman who even now feels progressive. She had a job, married several times, chose her own partners, inherited their money when they died, went on holiday without her husband, enjoyed having sex and also loved talking …
Margaret Atwood’s frustrating feminism
If you are the kind of person who absolutely must know where your favourite novelists stand on any given political issue, Margaret Atwood presents a confounding figure. In an era when so many fans demand that artists advertise which side …
Why Progress isn’t feminist
It’s now an open secret that most Instagram influencers edit their images: smoothing skin, whitening teeth and plumping curves. Last year, OnlyFans content creator Diana Deets, also known as “Coconutkitty”, was castigated for making her NSFW images and videos seem …
The gender wars started in 1531
“A man in his natural perfection is fierce, hardy, strong in opinion, covetous of glory, desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable. The good nature of a woman is to be mild, timorous, tractable, benign, of …
Coercive men hide in plain sight
“He would wait until I was relaxed, and then start doing things like making me take off his boots and telling me how ugly I was,” Cheryl tells me. Six months ago, she escaped an abusive man who routinely humiliated …
Hag feminism is the future
At the beginning of the year, a scandal erupted over a TikTok trend of young women in tight clothes posting videos shaming men for hitting on them at the gym. As recently as 2018, the story would have been one …
Scotland turns on gender ideology
The polarising effect of the transgender debate on public opinion in Scotland is revealed today in new research for “UnHerd Britain”. A poll of 5,000 people across Great Britain, conducted this month, put four different statements to voters about the …
The problem with ‘trans women are women’
Once upon a time, pollsters would phone you up and ask how satisfied you were with the railways on a scale of one to ten, or how you intended to vote in the next general election. These days — as …