Happy International Women’s Day! A few years ago, this jaunty greeting would have left me snorting with derision. I pooh-poohed the very notion of International Women’s Day. Back then, it seemed that women were smashing glass ceilings, narrowing the gender pay gap and overtaking men when it came to education and entering the professions. Set against all these successes, a day to celebrate women seemed like either an excuse to wallow in long-lost victimhood or a naff marketing campaign.
Now, just being a woman – an adult, human female – feels like an act of defiance
That was then. This year you can send me all the flowers and chocolates you like. I am celebrating. Now, thanks to the dominance of transgender ideology, just being a woman – an adult, human female – feels like an act of defiance. There are constant efforts to erase the word ‘woman’ from public life, to redefine womanhood as nothing more than a feeling and to abolish female-only spaces: prisons, hospital wards and changing rooms. In this context, International Women’s Day is not merely an excuse to wave a flag and cash in (Pride month – I am looking at you), it is a badly needed opportunity to reassert the objective reality of being female. And it is a chance to remind those who need to hear it that there is a word designed exclusively for us female beings: woman.
Attempts to erase, redefine or gender-neutralise women are everywhere. Just yesterday it was revealed that the NHS had removed the word ‘woman’ from pages on its website relating to female-specific medical conditions. Look up ovarian cancer, uterus cancer, menopause or miscarriage and you would find references simply to ‘people’ not women. Women become ‘people with a vagina’ or ‘people who have suffered a miscarriage’. This language is dehumanising and alienating. Not all women experience periods, pregnancy and menopause but anyone who does is a woman. To pretend otherwise is to collude in a lie.
Yet when women try to speak out against such injustices, they are silenced. At a symposium being held today, three professors hope to discuss the importance of academic freedom and their fight to undertake research based on people’s sex. Such research is vitally important. We need data relating to sex, not some vague notion of ‘gender identity’, in order to identify sex discrimination, sexual harassment and a range of medical conditions and social circumstances that impact only women and girls. Yet when academics attempt to engage in such research they are labelled ‘transphobic’.
Incredibly, transgender rights activists are now trying to prevent today’s symposium from going ahead. They have launched a petition and plan to protest outside the venue. We know from past experience that such attempts to stop women speaking have often been successful. Protesters will go so far as to employ violence and intimidation in order to prevent women discussing the importance of sex and the need to defend sex-based rights. Silencing women on International Women’s Day shows that irony is truly lost on these misogynistic bullies.
The corporate sector is no better than academia or the NHS when it comes to defending women. This year’s prize for the most insulting International Women’s Day marketing campaign goes to Hershey’s, the chocolate bar beloved by North Americans. Woke brand managers in Canada decided that what Hershey’s really needed was an advertising campaign that highlighted the ‘she’ in the middle of Hershey’s and featured a transgender woman, Fae Johsstone, a 27 year-old self-declared ‘2SLGBTQIA+ advocate’ as one of the campaign ambassadors. Because clearly, the best kind of women – and the rightful owners of feminine pronouns – are men who identify as women. The message this sends to girls, struggling to make sense of their place in the world, is appalling.
But for all this attempted erasure of women, there are some things to celebrate. Hundreds of doctors and nurses have written to the NHS to demand that the word woman is reinstated on its website. The professors planning to discuss academic freedom and sex-based research are determined to go ahead, no matter the scale of protests. And the Hershey’s campaign has been ridiculed on social media with many threatening to boycott the brand. All of this is good news. Women have been emboldened to push back by brave warriors like J.K. Rowling, Maya Forstater, Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce. These women have repeatedly exercised a moral courage that has inspired others to follow in their footsteps. This International Women’s Day, I will be raising a glass to them.
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