I am sixty-nine years old, and never in my life have women’s struggles for dignity, equality and rights felt so threatened or so precarious. I believe it has become imperative to speak out on behalf of the female person. By this, I mean a person gestated, birthed and nurtured through childhood as female on account of her biological characteristics and capacities, who will, in nearly all circumstances, begin menstruating, develop breasts and acquire a capacity for biological motherhood in early adolescence. All these biological realities will influence and even determine whom she is permitted to become, what level of education she is offered, what impact poverty and violence will have on her life, and what domestic and social roles she is allowed to occupy. The fact that some western women have broken free of these restrictions does not negate their pervasive hold on the world’s cultures and religions, nor does it secure these fragile and hardwon freedoms against growing threats from different directions.
There are complex situations associated with Differences in Sexual Development (DSDs), which sometimes lead to ambiguous sexual characteristics. People with these conditions are becoming outspoken in their resistance to being coopted as “intersex” in the name of identity politics. It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore these issues, but such conditions are rare and should not be used as a get-out clause to deny the fundamental rights and protections to which women and girls are entitled on account of their sex.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that feminism has failed, even if its failures take diverse forms in different contexts. The most extreme example is Afghanistan, where the Taliban have published a new set of rules for enforcing moral behaviour that they say is in keeping with Sharia law. These rules affect men and women, but they are draconian for women. They reinforce already strict laws requiring women to cover their bodies and faces in public. Women are forbidden from speaking loudly, singing, reciting or reading aloud in public, and they must not even look at any males who are not relatives. Shabnam Nasimi, a former Afghan policy adviser now living in London, tweeted that “Women in Afghanistan are being obliterated – no voice, no face, no existence.”
Other recent stories may be less institutionalised in law and culture but are no less shocking. Iranian mother of two Arezoo Badri was reportedly left paralysed when Iranian police shot her after trying to stop her from driving without covering her hair. The rape and murder of a young Indian woman trainee doctor who was resting in a hospital room after a 36-hour shift has shocked the world, but it is part of a pattern of rape and violence against women in that country. In situations of war and conflict, rape forms a swathe of violence around the globe, from the brutal rape and murder of Israeli women during the Hamas attack of October 7th 2023, to reports of Palestinian women being sexually abused and raped while in Israeli detention, from the sexual torment of women and girls in Sudan to the raped women and girls of Ukraine.
While all humans, irrespective of sex, are threatened by violence, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators when it comes to sexual violence. In Britain, The Guardian newspaper has started a regular feature on femicide. An editorial explains:
It is around half a century since the idea of femicide was introduced by feminists. It is, wrote the activist and scholar Diana Russell, who was key in its development, “a term that specifically points to and politicises the sexist, patriarchal, misogynistic killing of women and girls by men”. … The concept was rapidly taken up by campaigners globally. Although men are the most common victims of homicide, women are far more likely to be killed by men than by other women. … The persistence of these crimes reflects not only their deep social and cultural roots, but also the failure to fully take heed of them and work harder to tackle them.
The acknowledgement that women are sometimes guilty of violence is too often used as an excuse to deflect attention away from the fact that probably every woman and girl on the planet knows that the greatest threat she faces comes from male aggression. Even those of us who live in relative security take precautions that are almost second nature: avoid lonely places at night; make sure the windows and doors are secure before you sleep alone; be vigilant if you find yourself alone with a male stranger; cross the street if you sense someone following you; warn your children not to talk to strange men; text your friends when you get home after a night out so that they know you’re safe, etc. etc. The list is long.
But a new and more insidious attack is being played out within the much-vaunted liberalism of Western societies, with women being obliterated by stealth rather than by physical violence or social annihilation. A court case in Australia has acquired notoriety among groups campaigning for women’s rights since transgender woman Roxanne Tickle won a discrimination case against the women-only app Giggle for Girls (the name is intentionally humorous). Sall Grover started the app as an online safe space for women. Members had to upload a selfie to gain access, and gender recognition software used by the app initially approved Tickle. Grover subsequently revoked Tickle’s membership, insisting that Giggle was only for biological women. Tickle fought a three-year court battle against Grover, claiming that “persistent misgendering” had led to “constant anxiety and occasional suicidal thoughts”. Contrary to Grover’s insistence that Tickle is a biological male, the judge said that case law had established that sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary”. Grover shut down the Giggle app in July 2022, after receiving death threats and rape threats.
It is significant that Grover’s defence appealed to Australia’s ratification of the UN’s 1979 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to argue that the State has a duty to protect women’s rights, including the right to single-sex spaces. BBC journalist Sofia Bettiza observes that the
ruling in favour of Tickle will be significant for all the 189 countries where CEDAW has been ratified – from Brazil to India to South Africa. When it comes to interpreting international treaties, national courts often look at how other countries have done it.
This means that women may no longer have the right to exclude biological males if those men claim to be women under whatever gender identity laws prevail in their countries.
When, in the early 1990s, the language of feminism yielded to the terminology of gender studies, I felt uneasy. Having spent most of my early life in sub-Saharan Africa (Zambia, Kenya and Zimbabwe), I knew that the work of feminism and the struggle for women’s rights had hardly begun. Women and girls were still oppressed and excluded in multiple ways in different cultures. Could gender studies take over the work of feminism without the latter gradually dissolving into the more amorphous category of gender? Given that at no time in history nor in any culture have women truly broken free of male domination and power, I feared that gender studies would become colonised by male aspirations, desires and demands until women’s voices would once again be confined to whispers in the margins.
I was right to be cautious. Gender has become a Trojan horse. It has eclipsed women’s struggles for justice and silenced the voices of women who refuse to comply with the non-negotiable demands of an ever-expanding movement of gendered identities and sexual rights clustering under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. I have written a Substack post expressing some of these concerns.
Let me be clear. I believe that adults should be free to adopt whatever sexual and gendered identities, orientations and relationships they desire, so long as they are not causing harm to others or violating the rights of vulnerable individuals and groups. It is a fundamental principle of the Catholic theological tradition that the law should be used to protect the common good of society and not to police individual morality. I believe gays and lesbians are entitled to all the respect, rights, and legal protections enjoyed by heterosexual people, including the right to marry – a position that has earned me condemnation from the Vatican. But even in situations which some might believe to be immoral, in a free society we must respect other people’s rights to choose how to live and how to behave, as long as they are not harming others.
Still, at a time of dramatic change around western society’s values regarding gender, sexuality and identity, respecting people’s freedom cannot mean silencing debate. Any criticism or questioning of the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ movement risks being branded as Far Right, and a wave of misogyny has been unleashed. The vitriol targeted at gender-critical feminists such as J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock goes far beyond the kind of informed and intelligent debate that one might expect over controversial social issues. The labelling of women as “terfs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) is often accompanied by venomous abuse in social media and activist slogans.
The fact that advocates of right-wing extremism have appropriated the language of gender-critical feminists is a cynical exercise in populism, for nothing reduces women to the status of broodmares, handmaids and sex objects more effectively than the politics of the Far Right. US culture wars offer abundant evidence of this, but to polarise such complex issues exacerbates the problem. It eliminates the middle ground – what philosopher Gillian Rose called “the broken middle” – where we navigate conflicting rights, and struggle to reconcile the principles of law, universality and metaphysics with the ethical challenges of particularity, subjectivity, and fragmentation.
Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, is an example of this polarisation, which brooks no negotiation or dialogue. They (sic) risk dividing the world into LGBTQIA+ advocates and authoritarian fascists. They dismiss all arguments against allowing biological males who identify as women (including lesbians with penises) full and equal access to all women’s spaces, activities and relationships. This is because the problem is not biological sex but “the social organisation of patriarchy and masculine domination”. Our aim, writes Butler, should be “to keep everyone safe”. Well, yes, that would be wonderful, but as I point out in my review of Butler’s book, “not everyone is safe”:
Butler fails to acknowledge that, whether we argue from biology or social conditioning, women and girls around the world are at risk from male violence and sexual domination. Trans women are often victims of these misogynistic and violent realities, but the solution is to address the problem of male sexual aggression, not to insist that women abandon any attempt to maintain protective boundaries.
Far from offering support and solidarity for women around these issues, church teaching is part of the problem. When Pope Francis uses his frequently repeated mantra that “the Church is a woman”, he is affirming that the female body has no significance, for the Church is in no meaningful sense a materially embodied woman. The fact that the female body only has particular significance in the negative – it excludes women from ordination – means that the Catholic Church is a global pioneer in men’s colonisation of the house of language (Heidegger) when it comes to the linguistic significance of “woman”. When woman functions as an abstract ecclesiological concept it is a vacant signifier for all to occupy, but when it functions as a marker of female bodiliness, it is a sign of exclusion. All this contradicts the sexual essentialism that is a foundational aspect of modern church teaching on sexuality and procreation, which insists that male and female constitute an insurmountable difference written into the order of creation by God. I’ve written extensively on this elsewhere.
In all my writings on gender, I’ve tried to be as inclusive as possible. I’ve now decided that I must use my voice to speak out for women and children. That does not violate the rights of other groups, nor does it qualify my respect for human rights for all. But when rights conflict, women and children come first for all the reasons I’ve outlined above.