For the first time in nearly a decade, Australia has a Labor Government. On Monday, Australian Labor Party (ALP) leader Anthony Albanese was sworn in as the country’s 31st Prime Minister. How did he secure victory?
One explanation is that …
Did hipsters start the gender wars?
What could Florida’s legislation banning the teaching of gender identity to children possibly have in common with the skinny-jean devotees known as hipsters? Only that both movements are responses to the unraveling of settled gender roles that is one of …
No woman is safe on Twitter
When the journalist Leta Hong Fincher wrote about forced marriages in Xinjiang, she was bombarded with online abuse for weeks. Games designer Brianna Wu was driven from her home during an online campaign against sexism in her industry. The account …
You can’t teach good sex
Where I grew up in the Sixties, girls were expected to marry straight from home. So when I went to That London at 17 to become a famous writer, I was widely assumed in the neighbourhood to have gone there …
How philosophy sacrificed the truth
Back when I was a graduate student in the Nineties, first at St Andrews University and then at Leeds, philosophy departments were terrifying places. Seminar rooms often felt like amphitheatres.
Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior …
Do we need a Trans Olympics?
When Ketanji Brown Jackson refused to define the word “woman” during her confirmation hearing on Tuesday, the US Supreme Court nominee put it down to the fact that she is “not a biologist”. She is also clearly not a sports …
Have we reached peak trans?
Is it really too much to ask those who struggle to define the word “woman” to refrain from running for public office? Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe’s Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, was asked to provide the dreaded definition during …
The fictional world of trans activism
When people say things like “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”, what do they mean? In my book Material Girls, I suggested that many of them are immersed in a fiction.
Getting …
Keir Starmer is gaslighting women
Does Sir Keir Starmer know there’s a war on? Last week the Labour leader visited a country literally on the doorstep of Russia. Speaking to a Times journalist at the biggest military base in Estonia, a Baltic state with every …
The taboo trans question
“Sexuality is who you go to bed with, gender is who you go to bed as.” Learn it, remember it, drill it into your brain: this is one of the most important precepts of gender identity activism, and one of …
How Ukrainian women will suffer
Suddenly, images of Ukrainian women are all over the internet. Most of them are mothers, fleeing Russian convoys, carrying their children across borders. Many of them are leaving husbands and brothers behind to fight. But these heart-wrenching photographs, published by …
Putin’s toxic masculinity
Of all the ill-informed explanations for why Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine, perhaps the most absurd is that he is afflicted with “toxic masculinity”. And yet, there are multiple commentators and think piece writers saying exactly that: the Russian President …
Putin doesn’t have mummy issues
Did Russia invade Ukraine because Putin wasn’t loved enough as a child? AnnaLynne McCord, an “actress/human rights activist”, seems to think so.
Last week, she posted a poem online declaring that if only she’d been Vladimir Putin’s mum, he would …
Is Margaret Atwood a coward?
Margaret Atwood never fancied herself a discourse power broker, but we thrust the role on her anyway. The year was 2016; the election of Donald Trump had sparked a brief, blazing feminist backlash that now feels like something out of …
The liberal case against pronouns
On the day that Vladimir Putin initiated his invasion of Ukraine, the front page of the Daily Mail led with a story about a leaked document from MI5 and MI6, urging spies to acknowledge their “white privilege” and declare their …