A follow up letter to the woman who called me a TERF
We are delighted to publish this guest post from Caroline – seven years on, she has written a follow up to the original Letter to the woman who called me a TERF.
To the woman who shrieked at me that I am a bigot and a TERF and a hateful transphobe for defending women’s rights,
It’s been seven years since I last wrote to you, and a lot has happened since then.
I thought it was high time we checked in.
You remember me, perhaps. I was the woman at the meeting in Edinburgh all those years ago, the meeting set up when this madness was beginning to take hold, arranged to enable women to gather and try to make sense of what this new assault on our rights meant. You tried to get the venue to cancel the event, a tactic that has served you well since then, though this time they stood firm and the event went ahead. You stood outside with banners nonetheless, shouting at the women who came in that they were TERFs and bigots and that you were standing against their hate. Even still, the organisers of the meeting invited you inside and told you that you were welcome, entreating you to at least come and hear for yourself that there was no transphobia here. You banged pots and pans once the meeting was underway, so loudly that you drowned out the testimony of a rape victim talking about how much women-only spaces meant to her. When my friend asked you after the meeting how it made you feel to know you had silenced a victim of male violence, you were only able to blurt out something about us wanting to take trans people’s rights away before a hulking man in a dress stormed over and instructed you to stop speaking with us. Because he knew, and we knew, and know still, that the quickest way to disabuse anyone of the notion that women protesting their rights are the bad guys is to simply let those women speak.
Do I sound angry to you? Less patient than I did seven years ago? That’s because I am angry. I’m furious in fact, enraged that women have had to spend these years battling to keep hold of the rights we thought were ours for good. The right to our own spaces, to have places in this world of male violence where we can go where no man can follow. The right to play sport against women, not cheating males who we have no hope of beating. The right to ask for a woman when we are at our most vulnerable and need medical care. The right to be tomboys without being told our bodies are wrong and that we need medicine, and surgery, to fix them. The right to our own words when we talk about our bodies and experiences and the very things that make us women at all.
We’ve had to do all of this when we should have been fighting for the terrorised women of Afghanistan, oppressed and silenced for no other reason than they are female. For the women around the world denied the right to safe abortion. For rape victims here in the UK, facing a justice system that is still stacked against them. For women everywhere, who still cannot feel safe walking home alone on a dark night, wherever they are in the world, always mindful of the threat of male violence that hangs over us from the moment we are born as girls. We’ve had to fight to hold on to those things we’d come to take for granted because you and your friends have taken women’s rights back one hundred years. The men’s rights activists whose demands for kindness and rainbows and newspeak you are too blinkered to see past would not have achieved the success they have without you by their side, helping them to destroy everything your grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for. Do you feel proud?
And what of the predictions in our last communication? Were they scare mongering hysteria designed to whip up fear and hatred?
If only.
Let’s look at how the last few years have panned out, so you can decide.
We’ll start with the thing I got really wrong,
Ten, fifteen years from now, I ask you to remember me.
Because it hasn’t taken fifteen years, or even ten, has it? It’s taken only seven years to get to where we are now, to the horror show for women that we find ourselves inhabiting today. It has been an object lesson in how quickly rights can be stripped away, a warning that worse is to come if we don’t fight back as hard as we can, because if we don’t God knows what the world will look like for women by the time the next seven have come around.
Remember me when you have your first baby and you’re referred to throughout your pregnancy as a birthing individual, a pregnant person, and it makes you feel kind of dehumanised and you wish they’d just call you a woman, a mother, because that’s what you are.
The theft of women’s words and of the language we use to describe our own bodies and experiences has been a swift and brutal heist. If we dare to point out that only half of the world’s people, the half who are women, can get pregnant, we are scolded that we should be more inclusive, that men can have babies too, even though everyone knows that every single person in the world who has ever existed came out of a woman. Breastfeeding organisations, desperate to prove how progressive they are despite the fact that progressive is so often now no more than a by-word for misogyny, now talk of ‘chestfeeding’ – just this week, a BBC documentary about breast cancer urged women at the end to ‘check your chests’.
Menopause, that difficult time of a woman’s life that used to only be talked about behind closed doors, has finally broken free of its stigma and is part of the conversation now, a step forward we should celebrate. That’s provided we don’t dare talk about women when we refer to this experience shared by all females of a certain age, of course. We must refer to people, not women, going through the menopause, according to NHS literature on the subject which manages not to mention women once, or ‘bodies with vaginas’ according to an article in the Lancet. And heaven help you if English isn’t your first language, because the NHS adverts calling ‘cervix owners’ to come in for their next smear test might pass you by. Meanwhile, a leading female health charity refers to ‘anyone with ovaries’ when talking about the victims of one of the deadliest cancers a woman can suffer from, because who needs clear, concise language in a public health campaign anyway? The writer of a Guardian article this month about polycystic ovary syndrome was unable to bring themselves to say the word ‘woman’ even once, referring instead to ‘people who menstruate’ and ‘people of reproductive age’. (Ask the same publication who suffers from prostate cancer, on the other hand, and their answer is far simpler. Men.) Then there’s everyone’s favourite, adopted by a worrying number of people in healthcare who should know better, ‘birthing parent’ because it would be calamitous if we forgot to be kind and inclusive and referred instead to a woman in labour as a mother, wouldn’t it? We must also be sure we don’t dare to refer to the place from which babies emerge from their birthing parent’s body as a ‘vagina’ either. It’s a ‘front hole’ now. Just ask Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, who provide this suggestion in a handy glossary on their website – though don’t worry, if ‘front hole’ doesn’t work for you as an alternative to ‘vagina’, why not use their other suggestion, ‘bonus hole’, instead?
Remember me when your elderly mother, who has lost her mind to dementia, goes into a care home
and is told that her carer, Susan, is a woman, because you asked that she only be cared for by women. And even in her addled state of mind, she knows that Susan is a man, and you know Susan is a man, but you cannot object, and she has to allow Susan to perform her intimate care, because to object would be hate speech.
This would have been bad enough, but who could have guessed how rotten our NHS would have become with gender ideology over the course of a few short years. Five nurses in Darlington are currently suing their local NHS Trust, for forcing them to share a changing room with a male who says he is female, though he’s also reportedly trying to get his girlfriend pregnant in a display of his femininity. The nurses were told to educate themselves when they first complained, and have now been reduced to coming to work with clothes on under their scrubs, so they don’t have to stand in their underwear in front of a heterosexual male who watches them as they change. So progressive! So inclusive! Then there was the woman raped by a male who claimed to be a woman on an NHS ward. In a sickening display of gaslighting, the hospital told the police that it was not possible for this crime to have occurred, as there were no males on the ward at the time. And a special prize for endangering women’s lives goes to the management at the Princess Grace Hospital in London, who cancelled a woman’s crucial surgery the day before it occurred as they ‘did not share her beliefs’. The beliefs in question were that the patient had stated she wished to be cared for by women, further to which a male dressed as a woman entered the consulting room uninvited and attempted to intimidate her before the hospital informed her they refused to carry out her life-saving operation.
Remember me when your daughter comes home from school crying, the daughter who has spent the last five years training to be the best athlete in her class, her school, her district, she’s crying because Lucas in her class, one of the fastest boys, has decided he identifies as female for now and so is allowed to run in her race, and she knows it doesn’t matter how hard she trains, he will always beat her, and she can only ever hope for a silver medal now. Or bronze, if there is another Lucas.
We’re reached the tragic position in 2024 that in many sports the women’s category no longer exists, as males are eligible to compete on the condition they say they are women too. There’s Lia Thomas, a male swimmer who female college athletes were forced not only to compete against, but also to change in front of, despite the fact Thomas was and is a fully intact male and is easily able to swim faster than the girls competing against him. There’s Laurel Hubbard, a middle-aged and mediocre male weightlifter who stole the chance to represent New Zealand in the women’s category at the 2021 Olympics from a young indigenous woman. There’s Craig ‘CeCe’ Telfer, a muscular male runner who has dominated the female category in college athletics. Telfer recently announced an intention to ‘win everything’, and ’wants all the records’ in national competitions, in response to the decision to prevent males from entering the female athletics category in the Olympics. And there’s ‘Ash’, a male rugby player now playing as a female, whose opponents described being tackled by him as a brute force they have never experienced anything like before. To name all of these cheats would take an essay, and we can take solace in the fact that thanks to women’s campaigning on this issue a number of sporting organisations have realised the unfairness, and danger, of letting men compete as women and changed their rules accordingly. Yet far too many have not.
Which brings us to this year’s Paris Olympics where perhaps the worst, most heinous consequence of your activism played out. The world watched as two biological males punched women harder than those women had ever been punched in their lives, and cheered and rejoiced when those men won gold medals for hitting women. Shame on you and every woman who has helped to create this world where violence against women is an Olympic sport. You brought us here, to a place where men can hurt women on a global stage and win prizes for it. Are you even a little bit ashamed?
Remember me when you go into a toilet late at night, perhaps in a bar, and there’s no one else around, and a guy walks in, he has a beard and is wearing jeans and a t shirt, and the way he looks at you seems off, and you feel afraid and unsettled and worried he might hurt you. But you can’t challenge him, because if you do he’ll say he’s a woman and has as much right as you do to be in this toilet, a place where many years ago you might have come to feel safe.
We just want to pee, they say as they barge their way in to the places where we once felt safe. You can pee next to me! you and your friends trill, who cares about the women who might feel uncomfortable as a result! But they don’t just want to pee, do they? The 10-year-old girl assaulted in a toilet in Fife by Katie Dolatowski, an 18-year-old man who claimed to be a woman, can testify to that. As can fifteen-year-old Jane Doe in Virginia, sexually assaulted by a male student in a skirt in the school bathroom who identified as ‘gender-fluid’. Or the female students in a Mexican university who watched as trans activists staged a coup in their bathroom, painting a lesbian pride symbol on the wall before verbally abusing and threatening them, going on to vandalise the biggest female toilet on campus with offensive graffiti. And the women threatened online by Thomas Jay White, the trans activist who told them that objecting to his presence in the women’s toilets will be the ‘last mistake they ever make’, alongside the girls in the Oklahoma high school who were assaulted by a boy who identified his way in to their toilets, thanks to the useful idiots like you who campaigned for him to be able to do so. I could go on, but I’m not sure of how many abused women count as acceptable collateral damage in your quest to make the world more comfortable for men? Do you have a figure in mind that represents a point beyond which even you cannot stomach?
Remember me when you go for a promotion, for a board position at work that’s designated for a woman. You’ve put in the hours, you’ve worked so hard, you know you deserve it. And the position goes to Lola, who until last year was a 50 year old man. Lola will never do anything inconvenient like needing time off to have babies, or to deal with any health issues that you, a woman might face, like endometriosis, breast cancer, PND. Lola is a woman just like you, and your company are happy that they have fulfilled their quota of women members on the board.
I have my own story for this one, about a training course for women I applied to do a few years ago when I worked for a large organisation, a course specifically created for women that taught leadership and the confidence that I was severely lacking after time out of the workplace to have children. I applied for the course, which if successfully completed would result in a prestigious accreditation. I spent hours on the application form. I was so excited about the opportunity, though I knew that there were only limited spaces and I might not be offered a place. And indeed I wasn’t offered one, but a male colleague who had decided he was a woman in his fifties a couple of years before, someone who was a husband and who had fathered children, was. I knew there was no point speaking out. I’d be accused of transphobia and told to educate myself.
You’d think some jobs for women would be sacred, though, beyond the reaches of an ideology that teaches men can be women by saying a few words and changing their pronouns. You’d be wrong.
Let’s take a wander down to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, a place where for decades women in Scotland’s capital have been supported through the worst trauma imaginable. And still are, though there are those who no longer seek the help that’s offered behind its doors, because until very recently Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre was run by a man called Mridul Wadhwa, appointed by a board of female trustees in the full knowledge he was a man. Wadhwa, who claims to be a woman, was recently forced to resign after an investigation found that – to no one’s surprise – he had created a culture at ERCC that had caused damage to survivors. When Wadhwa wasn’t talking about women having orgasms when they’re raped, he was busy telling women who required his centre’s services that they needed to ‘reframe their trauma’ to deal with the fact they may find themselves being counselled by or alongside men, and that they should expect to be ‘challenged on their prejudices’ if they objected. Is it any wonder that survivors in Edinburgh have chosen to suffer in silence? We can only hope that with Wadhwa’s departure ERCC will go back to being the safe space for women that it was until women like you chose to allow a man to take charge, though the damage done in his years at the helm is impossible to measure – who knows how many women have opted out of using the centre’s services in the face of the hostile culture he created?
And on the subject of work, let’s pause for a minute to consider the women who have been brave enough to stand up to this madness, and paid the price. Maya Forstater, who lost her job as a researcher in business development for stating that trans women are men. Lizzy Pitt, bullied and harassed at her job at Cambridgeshire County Council for expressing her gender critical views. Ursula Doyle, hounded out of a thirty-year career in UK publishing for believing that sex is real. Sara Morrison, suspended from her job at Belfast Film Festival simply for speaking at an event about women’s rights. These women are a few of many who have lost their livelihoods for speaking the truth, and in today’s work place it is far from safe to venture the opinion that men cannot be women. I know many women who have tried, and who have lost out on workplace friendships and opportunities as a result. I’m one of them.
Remember me when you read on the news that crime statistics for women committing rape and murder are on the increase, and now women carry out a much higher number of rapes and murders than they did when you were a teenager or a young woman. And you know that these ‘women’ are men and that the statistics are wrong, but to challenge this would be hate speech. Remember me too, when these women rapists are locked up with vulnerable women in female prisons and cannot escape, because to challenge the presence of the women rapists with penises in prison with them would be hate speech.
According to the Department of Justice more than 70% of transgender prisoners in the UK are in prison for sex offences or violent crime. Given the fact that 99% of sexual crimes are committed by men, we can infer that these prisoners are all, or almost all, male. Tell us again though, about how trans women pose no threat to women, so we should let them into our spaces? But before you do, let’s talk about Isla Bryson, the Scottish man who raped two women and was about to be transferred to a women’s prison following his sudden epiphany that he was a woman himself before the public learned of this proposed act of revolting women-hatred and forced the government into a U-turn. Let’s talk about James Blessent in Illinois, who sexually assaulted his two children and will serve 87 years, though it looks like that time’s going to be spent in a women’s prison since he changed his name to Michelle. Let’s talk about Tremaine Carroll, a violent male serving time for sexual offences, robbery and kidnapping, transferred to the Central California Women’s Facility after an eleventh-hour conversion to womanhood, where he raped a woman. Let’s talk about Shakira Reed, assaulted in a New Jersey prison by Jermaine Gibson after she refused his sexual advances. Gibson found his way into the prison following an ACLU lawsuit which resulted in a settlement that would allow males to self- identify into women’s prisons. Let’s talk about Ramel Blount, sentenced to seven years after raping a woman prisoner in the Singer prison facility in New York, where he was serving time after claiming a female identity. There are many more, before you accuse me of cherry picking, and again, I’d like to know. How many raped and abused women will you accept as sacrifices at the altar of your belief that men can become women, before you say enough is enough?
Remember me when your son comes home from school and says that he’s learned at school that you can change sex and that some girls have penises and some boys have vaginas and that his teacher said that because he likes playing with girls and dolls that maybe he is really a girl in the wrong body. And you think, no, you are just my wonderful, unique, son, and you were born in your own body. Remember me when a few months down the line the teacher calls you in and says she’s concerned that you are not validating your son’s identity and that she’s noticed you are still referring to him by the name you so carefully chose for him when he was born, and calling him a boy, when he is actually a girl, and that she doesn’t want to have to involve social services but she’s worried she might have to if you continue to misgender your son and deny his real identity. And you know that she will, because it’s happened before in a school near you, and you are afraid.
Children as young as four are being taught all of this, and worse, in schools. Unscientific dogma which refers to ‘sex assigned at birth’ and the idea that the doctors might have got it wrong when it comes to a child’s biological sex is being presented to confused children, and woe betide anyone who questions it. 17-year-old Murray Allan presumed to at his Scottish school by telling his teacher there are only two sexes, and was told he should keep his opinions at home before being suspended for two weeks, then expelled. A 13-year-old girl in East Sussex was told by her teacher that it was ‘despicable’ to say there are only ‘two genders’. Brighton and Hove Council wrote to parents telling them to encourage their four and five-year-old children to ‘choose their own gender’ on school forms. And a UK school sent a newsletter to girls age 11 up which explained how they could bind their breasts for a ‘flatter, more masculine’ appearance. Thankfully, following the Cass Report – an informed, reasonable consultation which I’m sure you’ve already disavowed as a transphobic hate crime – and parental pressure, it looks as though the pendulum is swinging away from the mass brainwashing of children in schools, with a potential ban on teaching about gender identity in England. The picture is less hopeful across the Atlantic, where children have been compelled to refer to their obviously male teachers as female and educators confuse children into believing they are the opposite sex whilst encouraging them to hide their transition from their parents.
And then there’s been the stuff no one could have predicted, though wiser women than me might have hazarded a guess. Germaine Greer once said that women have no idea how much men hate them. I heard this as a young woman and I’m ashamed to admit that I rolled my eyes. I’m not rolling them now, because if any movement in history were to lend truth to her assertion, it would be trans activism. Who could have imagined the great well of hatred for women that boiled and festered within so many men, undammed by this movement that offers them free rein to wield their loathing of us so publicly and virtuously, untouchable behind their banners of social justice? We see them, together with the women like you who stand with them, at every event we hold. They come in their masks and with their baseball bats, in their T-shirts soaked in blood they wish was ours, holding placards that threaten us with rape and violence and death, furious that we refuse to bow down to their intimidation. Yet it does not matter how many times we tell them, still they fail to understand that we are not afraid. Even though the media look the other way and refuse to report on women being terrorised simply for standing up for themselves, and even though the police will not help us, and only a few brave politicians will speak up, and the women who have made careers out of their self-serving brand of luxury, male-pleasing, feminism remain silent, we will not.
Who could have predicted that a woman would be taken to court by a man after preventing him from accessing the women-only website she created, simply because he says he is a woman too, and that she would lose, to be told that sex is changeable and that there are no spaces, digital or real, from which men may be excluded in her country? And that the same man would be backed by the media, the government, and the human rights organisations whose core purpose has been subverted and twisted beyond all recognition so it’s men’s rights they fight for now, the basic rights of women forgotten.
Who could have imagined that a billboard poster displaying the dictionary definition of women in Liverpool would be removed as hate speech? That it would be an act of bravery to wear a T-shirt that proclaims what a woman is, and that even defining a woman as an adult human female would become thought crime?
Who could have imagined the level of betrayal to which our political parties and institutions would sink? The ACLU in America, backing the rights of a man who murdered a baby to have ‘gender affirming surgery’ while in prison so he can maintain the illusion he is female, claiming it is a ‘medical necessity’. Police in the UK, arresting women for saying that men cannot be women. Our most senior politicians, afraid to answer honestly when asked what a woman is and spouting offensive word salad instead. Almost every woman’s charity whose sole purpose is to fight for the rights of women, capitulating so appallingly that women had no choice but to create their own grass-roots movement – and what a movement it is, full of wonderful, bright, talented, strong and fierce women who I feel privileged to share this journey with.
Who could have imagined the lies, the endless, absurd, offensive, dangerous untruths, trotted out with apparent conviction by people who must surely, surely know that deep down what they are saying cannot be, will never be, true. Some women have penises. Men can get pregnant. Men can become women. Some people are neither male nor female. War is Peace. Women are being gaslit every day by this madness, and to stand against the endless falsehoods with our sanity intact has been the greatest test of it that most of us have ever faced.
Who could have envisioned the depths to which those with a voice and a platform would descend, cowardly men and women so concerned with their reputations and careers that they refused to condemn the horrific and thousandfold threats of violent rape and abuse levelled at a beloved female author, choosing instead to publicly denounce her for stating biological facts. Yet despite this betrayal she is more beloved than ever before, and will be remembered for her courage in standing for women long after your and your friends’ names are forgotten. Because there have always been women like you, women throughout history who have stood at the side of men as they beat us and torture us and burn us at the stake.
I saw Goody Rowling cavorting with the Devil at midnight.
I saw Jenny from Accounts at a Let Women Speak rally.
Your treachery is as old as time.
Aunt Lydia has taken many forms across the years, and the good ‘ally’ you consider yourself to be is nothing more than her latest iteration, a patsy for the patriarchy to be used and discarded when no longer of service. They might not shoot you first, but they will shoot you. Be assured of that.
And what of the men who you’ve dedicated yourself to campaigning for? What have they lost in this fight? Many of those who stood with us have lost a great deal, not least their careers, their friends, their families, and their reputations, though others are given a free pass, because where’s the fun in bullying and intimidating men? As to the ones who stood against us and called us TERFs, bigots, whingeing fuckers, and dinosaurs, cheered on by you? They’re riding high, at least for now. They’ve lost nothing except the respect of the women they despise, something they attached no value to in the first place. They win awards, are platformed, rewarded, and elevated to dizzying heights they have done nothing to deserve. The tide is turning, though. Their misogyny will not be forgotten, and one day they will face the reckoning they deserve as they search desperately to excuse themselves for standing up for the rights of rapists and championing little girls having their breasts cut off.
You might wonder why I’m writing you this letter. Is it because I want to say I told you so? And I did tell you so, let’s be clear on that. We all did, and you refused to listen. But that’s not what this letter is for. I’m writing it because I want you to know that there is a way back. Not for everyone, not for the ones who will fight on, as Helen Joyce so brilliantly put it, like the Japanese soldiers long after World War Two had ended because to admit they were wrong would be too devastating after the awful things they’ve done to their children.
For you, though, I hope there is a path out of this. I know that the climb-down might feel too huge, the admission you were wrong too humiliating, the apologies you owe too many, and I understand that. But if you want to get up off your knees and stand with your sisters in this fight, it’s not too late to walk away from the men you’ve fought for and join us in pushing back on this tsunami of women hate that has taken so much from us and will take more still, if we do not fight on.
This letter is for you, the woman who called me a TERF. It’s for Emma Watson. It’s for Anneliese Dodds. It’s for Katharine Viner. It’s for Nicola Sturgeon. It’s for Julia Gillard. It’s for Angela Rayner. It’s for Kamala Harris. It’s for Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s for Judith Butler. It’s for every privileged woman who has stood beside men and chanted mantras and hurled abuse and held fast to their luxury beliefs as they tried to stare down the heroines who faced them on the battlefield who were risking everything to stand up for their own sex.
Know that I still have your back. We all do. Women have stepped forward to be counted, women with everything to lose in every part of the world where this ideology has sunk its claws in. And while you think on that, know that we will not shut up. We will never, ever wheesht, no matter what names they call us and however much they threaten us with. We will not be silent, and we will prevail in the end, because the truth always does.
Your sister,
Caroline
Twitter/X: @carofrancelynch