In 2007, I spent time in Blackpool investigating the disappearance of Charlene Downes, a 14-year-old whose body has never been found. She was one of hundreds of girls in the town targeted by sexual predators who would groom and then …
Why do women’s spaces still need defending?
The battle to set up domestic violence refuges for vulnerable women was long and hard. After years of campaigning, feminists finally won it in the early Seventies. A few years later, rape crisis centres followed. Now, more than four decades …
The post-woke era is here
In December 2013, a PR executive named Justine Sacco was about to fly to Cape Town when she had a flash of inspiration. Not long before take-off, she pulled out her smartphone and tapped out a tweet and clicked “send”. …
Mermaids is a threat to gay rights
I’ve been involved in the campaign against homophobia for forty years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. For the first time, a tribunal is taking place in which one charity is attempting to strip another of its legal status. …
Do the Tories care about women?
In Orwell’s 1984, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Last week came the discovery, surprising to many, that Tory leadership hopeful Penny Mordaunt has always been at war with self-ID. This is the policy — first promoted by …
Why I’m suing Survivors’ Network
The first time Sarah — a pseudonym — was sexually assaulted, she was eight years old and an adult family friend paid her to do things to him she was too young to understand. Her mum later asked what had …
How the RA uncancelled me
It has now been a year since I woke up to nearly the entire UK press in my inbox, wanting to speak to me.
The Royal Academy of Arts had just publicly announced that they would no longer stock my …
I was hounded out of school for ‘transphobia’
The story of a sixth-former being hounded out of her private girls’ school for alleged “transphobia” was reported last month, but might not have been so widely noticed had JK Rowling not tweeted her disgust. It gained yet more attention …
Stella Creasy’s bourgeois feminism
In his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, Gustave Flaubert alphabetised some of the cliches and platitudes common among the French bourgeoisie during the 19th century. His aim, in his own words, was “the historical glorification of everything generally approved”. Under “Bandits”, …
You can’t be born in the wrong body
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d swapped bodies with someone else: your mum, the boy next door, “a monstrous vermin”, an older version of yourself? Would you still be “you”?
There’s a reason this setup is …
Disney has always spread propaganda
“Disney is the worst enemy of family harmony.” You’d be forgiven for thinking those words were uttered yesterday, given the number of conservative politicians and pundits castigating Disney for “grooming children” following its criticism of the “Don’t say gay” bill.…
Is Jamie Wallis exploiting his trauma?
The phrase “I’m exhausted” has been nagging at me. You hear it often from woke activists in their twenties or thirties. “I’m a privileged White cis gender woman and *I’m* fucking exhausted by the amount of Trans-hate I encounter daily”, …
The case that changed the gender debate
In 2019 I lost my job after tweeting about the difference between sex and gender identity.
Since then, I have heard from hundreds of women and men who have been discriminated against and harassed at work for expressing the “gender …
Why I stopped being a good girl
I was always a good girl, by which I mean a people pleaser, because that is what being a good girl is. I enjoyed the benefits that such a personality brings (straight As at school, a close relationship with my …
