Go right ahead and take away my rights...
Why are girls and young women the staunchest supporters of genderism, when it does them so much harm?
Something people bring up quite often, and which I’ve thought about a lot but I don’t think ever fully discussed, is why it’s women, especially young women, who are the most avid supporters of genderism. They’re also the people who suffer the most from it, so why does every opinion poll show that women aged 18-24 support it most?
Related to this is a question that often comes up on social media, often in the form of a gotcha. It starts when someone like me points out that transactivism is a type of “men’s rights activism” (scare quotes because my sons point out, reasonably enough, that this expression is unfair to men, who do in fact have rights; hopefully we all know that it is an inaccurate description for “anti-women’s rights activism”). And then someone points out that it’s women who support it most, and who proselytise for it, and that many of those women call themselves feminists. All of which is completely true.
The usual answer is female socialisation, and obviously there’s something to that. Girls and women are firmly expected to Be Kind in a way that boys and men simply aren’t, and punished – including by other girls and women – if they aren’t. Victoria Smith anatomises this explanation in her latest book, “UnKind” (here’s my review for the Critic).
As I was writing this, I saw a new article by Smith about Cerys Vaughan, a young woman punished by the FA for asking a man on a team she was playing if he was a man. “Repeatedly pressured to prioritise to downplay and deprioritise the needs of female people in relation to those of males, she refuses,” writes Smith. When an interviewer asked Vaughan whether she has any sympathy with “transgender women” who want to play with the woman, she simply responds “No”. As Smith points out, this is highly gender-nonconforming behaviour, and pretty risky given that girls Vaughan’s age are so in thrall to trans ideology. “When Vaughan is challenged on her assertion of boundaries — ‘there should be a priority on inclusion rather than exclusion’, the interviewer proposes — the implication is that she is the one rejecting the dismantling of restrictive roles,” Smith writes. “On the contrary — she is the gender rebel here.”
But I don’t think “female socialisation” is by any means all there is to say about why girls and young women are so in thrall to this idea, and why whenever you do public polling they are the only demographic group in which a majority disagree that trans-identifying men should stay out of women’s spaces.
I think a bigger reason is that they’re the group who have been most consistently and determinedly subjected to gender propaganda. This isn’t “female socialisation”, per se – it’s the socialisation, or training, of girls to accept that boys are much more important than they are, and specifically that boys who say they are girls are the best, most important and most vulnerable girls.
Both my children are boys (now young men), but I talk to a lot of parents of girls and it’s quite remarkable how the gender-related lessons in schools are always about opening up the category of women, not the category of man, and about girls budging up and putting themselves last, not boys. It’s girls who are told to accept boys in their toilets, changing rooms and sports, much more than the other way round.
A couple of years ago, when I challenged my younger son’s school about its unlawful and dangerous trans-inclusion policy (my complaint got nowhere, but I did at least have the satisfaction of writing about it), the school sent me the results of a “student listening exercise” it had carried out. It was one of the most depressing things I ever read. Instead of simply setting rules that complied with the law and kept students safe, the school asked pupil representatives what they thought about allowing students to access single-sex spaces according to gender self-identification. The girls overwhelmingly replied that they didn’t mind, indeed they welcomed trans girls because they were girls, and not just girls, but the most vulnerable girls and the girls for whom inclusion mattered the most.
These poor (actual) girls! They no doubt felt a delightful sense of virtue and generosity, but they had been played. Adults should have safeguarded them, and taught them to unapologetically stand up for themselves and centre their own needs. Instead those adults used a series of leading questions to get girls to demean and endanger themselves by agreeing that they should be nice and kind to sad boys, and accept less privacy and dignity in spaces that were supposed to be theirs. They trained those girls to be the “second sex”, and called it progressive.
The indoctrination continues at university, and again girls are subjected to much more of it. They make up the lion’s share of university students, for one thing; for another, they disproportionately take the subjects where genderism is most embedded. By now it’s in every department via EDI, and increasingly in corrupted core subject modules – I was struck by this story about engineering students at King’s College London being given an idiotic assignment to design a product for “LGBTQ” people. But it’s been in the majority-female subjects such as gender studies, sociology, English and drama for much longer.
This process is self-reinforcing. It’s young women who have studied these subjects who go on to make up the lion’s share of academics in these departments, and who pick up the job of indoctrinating the next generation of young women. They also go on to become teachers and HR professionals, two other mass-entry jobs with significant roles in setting and enforcing genderist rules for everyone, but especially for girls and women. (Not coincidentally, this is an acceptable way for a woman to exercise power – by standing up for the “most marginalised”. And people of both sexes do rather like exercising power.)
All this is to say that girls and young women have been much more heavily propagandised than boys and young men. But another reason girls and young women are more likely to identify as trans or non-binary – and to believe the tenets of genderism – is that girls and women are much more gender non-conforming than men and boys. This may seem surprising, since gender non-conformity in boys and men is much more stigmatised and therefore much more noticeable. Nonetheless it’s true.
The reason is that the constellation of personal characteristics that constitutes “femininity” is much more difficult and unpleasant to conform with than the constellation that constitutes “masculinity”.
It’s stereotypically masculine to do a whole range of things that people of both sexes aspire to and enjoy: to centre yourself, to be ambitious, to go after what you want without worrying whether that’s convenient for others, to succeed, to boss other people about, to run wild as a child, to refuse to help your mother out in the house or keep your room and clothes in good order, to earn well and receive acclaim for your achievements in the workplace… The only really difficult requirements of traditional masculinity I can think of are to maintain a stiff upper lip in all circumstances, and to never show grief or pain.
By contrast many of the feminine characteristics are a swizz. Okay, we get liking babies, flowers, beautiful fabrics and crafts such as knitting and embroidery, all of which I’m personally keen on. But we also get painful and expensive grooming practices such as epilation, Botox, lip fillers and wedding diets. Our ideal body type – skeletal with big boobs – has been unattainable for far longer than men have been supposed to have six-packs. The ways we’re supposed to behave are also quite a bore. We get being quiet and compliant, putting other people first and being followers rather than leaders. As children we are supposed to do boring housework, help out with younger children and be “ladylike”, and as adults – especially post-menopause – we get the tedious busywork of both home and office, and we’re supposed to like it.
Most boys and men are ordinarily masculine, that is gender-conforming, without any effort. They just wear comfortable, conventional clothes they don’t pay much for or put much thought into, go to the barber every six weeks, and even if they worry that they’re getting a beer belly don’t feel that it has much to do with their value as a human being. I accept that falling short of the “success” collection of masculine stereotypes must be very painful for a man, whereas a woman can lean in on family or looks, if she has them. Joblessness is more harmful for a man’s mental health than a woman’s. But that isn’t gender conformity, per se, it’s trying and failing to live up to gender norms.
Now think of your average woman rating herself on feminine stereotypes. Unless she’s actually a plastic-surgery addict who spends all day doing makeup and hair and going to the gym, she is failing to live up to the beauty ones. Every time she makes demands of other people, prioritises her own wants over those of other people, especially men, is too loud, rude, unfriendly, or uninterested in what other people have to say, she’s behaving unfemininely.
My point isn’t that either sex actually does behave in such stereotypical ways all or even most of the time. It’s that we all know which characteristics and behaviours are coded masculine and feminine, and no matter whether you’re male or female many of the male ones will feel natural or aspirational to you, and many of the feminine ones will feel quite distasteful. In other words, “masculine” and “feminine” don’t actually mean what they should – the characteristics and behaviours that are, on average, more typical of one sex than the other. Rather, they mean what is idealised and imposed upon the two sexes, with most of the good stuff reserved for men.
The result is like Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average” – a statistical nonsense. Girls and women artifactually come out as more gender non-conforming than boys and men simply because one set of standards is a closer fit to actual humans than the other is.
Now imagine you’re a teenager, and you’ve been taught in school and online that what makes you a boy or a girl is adherence to gender stereotypes. Most boys will think “then I’m a boy”. But a girl who compares herself to stereotypes is much more likely to think they don’t fit her – to think “I’m not a cross between a sex doll and a doormat, ergo I’m not a girl.” This, I think, is why so many girls identify as non-binary – they’re not (just) trying to say “I’m special”, though there is a bit of that; they’re trying to say “I’m human.”
And so by now, most girls and young women know at least one person of their age and sex who identifies as trans or non-binary, probably more than one. They know these girls aren’t dangerous, and often that they are quite sad and vulnerable. When they’re asked whether they believe trans people are the sex/gender they say they are, it’s personal, and people generally prioritise going along with their friendship groups over being right or logical.
And when they are asked if “trans women” should use women’s spaces they know that answering No is not what their “trans men” friends want to hear (even though said “trans men” often continue to use women’s spaces, especially if they haven’t medicalised). They’re mostly too inexperienced at life to understand the asymmetry between female people going into male spaces (risky for the female who does it) and male people going into female spaces (risky for the females in that space).
A final reason that more girls and women declare genderist beliefs is that this is our fight, not men’s. It’s caused by men, sure – the small minority of men who insist they are women and must be treated as such. (Yes, I know men deserve privacy too, and I think young trans-identifying women intruding on gay men’s spaces are horrible – but this is small beer compared with the men in women’s spaces and claiming to be lesbians.) There are no women ruining men’s sport, it’s 100% the other way round.
So most men can simply ignore this topic, and they do. If a pollster happens to ask them what they think of it, they say “it’s nonsense” and move straight on to thinking of something else. Women don’t have the luxury of ignoring it. We have to have a view.
And the sad truth is that, given the longstanding facts about who has power and what benefits each individual woman as opposed to women in general, asked to decide between a position that benefits some loud and entitled men, on the one hand, or pisses those men off but benefits all women, on the other, many women will choose the men. It’s more dangerous to piss men off, and potentially more beneficial to please men. Plenty of women are much more interested in what men think of them than what other women need.
It even makes sense in evolutionary terms: you want a man to regard you as his partner, protect you and your children and share his resources with you, while other women are to a large extent competition. Even if you don’t like evolutionary arguments (I do), men simply have more to offer.
All of this helps explain why so many self-proclaimed “feminists” and nominally feminist organisations have fallen to genderism. and why men like Matt Walsh can claim, ahistorically, that genderism is an offshoot of feminism. Girls have been propagandised. They think that if you don’t feel “feminine” – and they don’t – then you’re not a girl. They have feelings of loyalty to the girls who go as far as “coming out” as trans or non-binary. They’ve been explicitly taught that boys and men make the best, most important, most vulnerable women, and that it’s their job to pander to those boys and men. And in the last analysis, it’s men who win and women, on aggregate, who lose – which works out fine for the women who’ve aligned themselves with men and aren’t personally among the victims.
This is brilliant, absolutely loaded with insights. Thank you.
Yes, to all of this, Helen. Non-binary identified women are, in a way, saying “I’m androgynous.” They’re trying to opt out of gender stereotypes. But missing the big picture.