I’ve been writing about sex and gender for a few years now, largely because it’s a subject that needs to be better understood. Far too much about this issue is shrouded in misinformation and dishonesty, not least because some of the people and groups interested in the issue have made considerable efforts to keep this stuff out of the public gaze.
Slowly, the veil is being lifted and questions of sex and gender more freely discussed. It’s not yet getting the media coverage it deserves, but the employment tribunal case of Allison Bailey is helping. It’s seen Stonewall and other trans rights advocates saying in public things that most people not familiar with the gender wars find it hard to believe are ever said out loud: humans can change sex; it’s transphobic to say that abusive men might misuse trans rights laws to harm women; it’s not coercive to persuade lesbians to sleep with male-bodied transwomen.
Whatever the outcome of the Bailey case – which is ongoing – the evidence it’s heard so far has added significantly to the debate around sex, gender and the law. Keep watching that one.
In the meantime, another facet of the issue that’s important but misunderstood is politics. Some people are keen to depict a tension between gender-critical feminists and trans rights campaigners as a right-left split. This interpretation is most common on the trans rights side of the issue, where proponents try to cast those who dissent from trans rights orthodoxy as social conservatives and even ideological allies of the US Christian right.
This is nonsense, of course, but it’s quite likely we’ll see more such nonsense in the next couple of years if the salience of this issue rises. That’s partly because there are signs that, sadly. Conservative election planners think they can use trans questions as a ‘wedge’ issue to discomfort Labour and cast their opponents as woke metropolitans more interested in identity issues than things that are more important to voters. That’s another story for another day.
Today, I’m returning to sex and gender issues because of a case that proves – yet again – two key points about this stuff. First, concerns about the impact of trans rights policies on women’s welfare are not right-wing. Second, women who raise such concerns face problems.
This is about Onjali Rauf, an author and charity leader. Rauf is probably best known for The Boy at the Back of the Class, a 2018 book about a refugee child’s experience of school in Britain. It won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Blue Peter prize and bucketloads of praise: the Guardian called it ‘timely and compassionate.’
Before Rauf found fame as an author, she founded Making Her Story, a charity that supports victims of domestic abuse, including refugees fleeing such abuse. She talked about these things in a Guardian interview in 2019, where she also discussed her experiences of racism and discrimination as a Muslim of Bangladeshi heritage. In short, Rauf has spent her adult life doing things to help people in need and help increase the sum total of understanding and compassion in the world. I have no idea about her politics, but you’d be hard-pressed to align her with the US Christian right or describe her as right-wing in any way.
This week, Rauf wrote something on Twitter. It was about Ricky Gervais, whose Netflix show is getting some attention because of the jokes he makes about the way some people debate trans-related issues. Now, dear reader, if I told you that a charity worker and author who has been lionised by the Guardian had gone on Twitter to talk about Ricky Gervais, what would you guess that author had said? Would you assume that she’d joined in the criticism of his alleged transphobia? If so, you’d be wrong. Rauf praised Gervais:
That ‘dinosaur’ reference is a link to Gervais’s lines about attitudes to women and transwomen:
Oh, women. Not all women, I mean the old-fashioned ones. The old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs. Those fucking dinosaurs. I love the new women. They’re great, aren’t they? The new ones we’ve been seeing lately. The ones with beards and cocks. They’re as good as gold, I love them.
The rest of this bit deserves more attention:
And now the old-fashioned ones say, ‘Oh, they want to use our toilets.’ ‘Why shouldn’t they use your toilets?’ ‘For ladies!’ ‘They are ladies — look at their pronouns! What about this person isn’t a lady?’ ‘Well, his penis.’ ‘Her penis, you fucking bigot!’ ‘What if he rapes me?’ ‘What if she rapes you, you fucking Terf whore?’
I don’t think that’s a joke about transwomen. I don’t think it’s a suggestion that transwomen pose an inherent threat to women. I think it’s a joke about people who dismiss women’s fears of sexual crime and regard such concerns as less important than the feelings of transwomen. I think such people exist and the point of the joke is worth exploring.
But what’s important here is that some people – many of them women – have concerns and questions about the impact of trans rights policies on women’s welfare and standing. And those concerns cannot possibly be described as right-wing.
Indeed, there’s a good case to be made that the origins of British resistance to trans rights orthodoxy are actually on the left of politics. Probably the most important organisation in this area is Woman’s Place UK, which organises public meetings for women to discuss the impact of trans rights policies on their rights and status. WPUK is apolitical but was founded by women with deep roots in the trade union movement; the old-fashioned skills of political organisation have been hugely important to this very contemporary debate.
Despite the attention it’s getting this week, Rauf’s tweet about Gervais isn’t her first foray into this territory. In 2019, she gave a quite brilliant speech to a WPUK meeting in Brighton, which deserves to be read in full. Though I might not be doing Rauf any favours by highlighting that speech now, because her tweet alone could end up causing her trouble. According to Rachel Rooney, another children’s author with gender-critical views, Rauf is under fire in the publishing world. There is even talk among other authors of bringing pressure to bear on Rauf’s publishers:
Which makes this a sadly mundane story: a woman speaks about concerns for the rights and status of women, for which she faces criticism and potential harm. Dog bites (wo)man, as the journalistic cliche goes. But the nature of the woman being bitten here makes this iteration of the story especially deserving of notice.
If you ever come across the claim that concern about trans rights policies’ impact on women are the preserve of the conservative right, think of Onjali Rauf – inspirational author, charity worker, migrant rights’ advocate, feminist campaigner and ‘female Muslim dinosaur’.
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