Domestic abuse is about control and power and silencing someone. It can take many forms. A text. A glance. A threat disguised as a promise. The idea is to manipulate you; to paralyse you.
I have lived through an abusive …
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 …
Mermaids’ useful idiots
It’s incredibly easy to criticise Susie Green, the influential and, as of Friday, ex-CEO of Mermaids. But I’d like to say this in her defence: she never lied about who she was.
From her early interviews in 2012, when her …
The toppling of the trans extremists
Another week, another successful legal challenge — and another dent in the armour of extreme transgender ideology. This time, the weapon was a case against Nottingham City Council (NCC), who I threatened to sue for de-platforming me from one of …
Real feminists don’t need strongmen
Last week in Hungary, I experienced two very different sides to lesbian activism in the age of Orbán. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
First, I attended the “EuroCentralAsian Lesbian* Conference (EL*C)”. It was …
Why has Starmer banished feminists?
Are feminists welcome in the Labour Party? I mean the old-fashioned kind of feminist, who knows the difference between men and women. The answer appears to be that we’re not. Delegates to this year’s party conference in Liverpool will be …
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. …
The surgeons exploiting trans misery
It’s never been easy to get gender reassignment surgery on the NHS. More than a decade ago, when I was living in Birmingham, I was referred by a psychiatrist to a Gender Identity Clinic in London. NHS England funded seven …
The Left has mummy issues
A little friend of my daughter’s has just had one of her parents walk out, to start a new life with a new partner. Given that they were a heterosexual couple, and based on your observations about the world, can …
How woke is Nietzsche?
“There are no facts,” said Nietzsche, “only interpretations.” Some think the philosopher, who died on this day in 1900, went mad through syphilis; others that he had brain cancer. But whatever the cause of his death, a type of madness …
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 …
Ricky Gervais doesn’t punch down
The curse of the literal-minded strikes again. This time it’s Ricky Gervais’s new stand-up special SuperNature which has sent the congenitally humourless into conniptions. Predictably, Pink News led the charge with a report that disapprovingly quotes the most offending lines. …
The corruption of the feminist library
It was a feminist bookstore that led me to the Women’s Liberation Movement. I was a shy 17-year-old, in Leeds, in 1979. I nervously opened the door of the shabby shop front, which had posters of Audre Lorde and Kate …
Joe Biden’s gender agenda
Right-thinking Americans, until very recently, tended to believe that heated arguments over transgenderism were a peculiarly British phenomenon. While the UK had been inexplicably captured by anti-trans bigots, and the country become a “Terf Island”, Americans had largely accepted that …
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”, …
