The hidden toll of genderism

The public victims represent just a tiny fraction of the true cost

I read a striking sentence yesterday, in a post by Serena Worley, a young American woman who had ended up sharing a supposedly “female only” bedroom at university with a trans-identifying man. After trying and failing to gaslight herself into thinking it was alright she requested a dorm move and ended up being ostracised by everyone she knew, dropping out and moving to the UK to pick up her education. You can read more at her Substack (she’s also one of the founders of the Cambridge University Society of Women).

Here’s the quote:

“It is hard to remember that there are cases that we never hear about (largely because we never hear about them), but it is important to remember that this social phenomenon has had far more victims than we can ever know.”

The reason that it resonated with me is the double consciousness experienced by all of us who stick our heads above the parapet on this topic. Publicly, it seems like there are very few victims of gender-related cancel culture — very few stories of ostracism, sacking and the like caused by refusal to play along. But privately we hear from these victims all the time. Most don’t share their stories openly, whether because they are too embarrassed or traumatised, because they fear even worse happening if they do or because they think going public will cause them problems in their future lives.

This disconnect between private and public knowledge is unsettling, and one of the reasons for making these stories public is to help reconcile the two. So in that spirit, I’m sharing another such story, less dramatic perhaps but at least as shocking, in that it involved the full might of an institution deployed in an attempt to destroy a young woman’s life. Thankfully, she was able to fight back and come out relatively unscathed, but in such cases the process is the punishment.

I met the young woman in question a while back, when she came up to talk to me after an event at which I spoke. Some time later she emailed to say that her university had just notified her that she was being investigated for having breached several of its policies, including those governing student misconduct and equal opportunity. She wanted to know if I would write a letter in support of her that she could add to her written response, which I did. (So did several other campaigners against gender ideology and for women’s rights.)

Her crime? Writing a rebuttal to an article in a student magazine about how TERFs are not just wrong but bigoted. The magazine had published her response, someone had complained and now she was required to provide a written response to the allegations and then attend a misconduct hearing. If the allegations were upheld she risked expulsion.

Fortunately, she is an intelligent and articulate young woman with a strong support system. She was able to write a compelling rebuttal of the accusations and express herself convincingly in the hearing, with the result that the accusations were dismissed in their entirety.

But that best-case outcome is still shocking. A student who did nothing but respond to a (badly argued and written) article in a student publication was put through a terrifying ordeal that can, without exaggeration, be compared to being charged with a crime of which she was totally innocent, on the basis of an anonymous accusation. Okay, she wasn’t going to end up with a criminal record or in jail – but being expelled from university is a serious penalty for a young person, with potentially life-changing consequences. And the fear and emotional strain she was put through will take quite some time to recover from.

Some of the victims aren’t as well-placed as “Anna” (not her real name) to defend themselves. They either end up sanctioned or – and this is probably more likely – apologise, retract and go dark. Even those who, like her, succeed in rebutting the allegations rarely want to talk about what happened publicly for fear that doing so will tarnish their reputation and complicate future job-hunting. As Serena says in her post, this sort of thing is happening all over the place. But we rarely get to hear about it.

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With this young woman’s permission, I’m sharing my letter of support, with her name changed and a few minor details redacted.

I met Anna at an event at which I was speaking on the enormously important topic of the medicalisation of childhood gender distress. She impressed me as a compassionate, thoughtful and brave young woman whose own experience of gender distress and mental-health struggles had given her a wisdom and insight rare in someone so young, and a determination to use that painful experience to help other young women struggling to find their way in our rapidly changing society that would be rare at any age.

As Anna told me when we talked, her worldview has been shaped by her struggles to accept the unalterable fact of her femaleness while rejecting the stereotypes associated with her sex. This is a task that complicates adolescence for many intelligent, sensitive, non-conforming young women, not least because our society puts extra obstacles in their way while they try to do so.

During the 20th century women’s status in many countries, including my home country of Ireland, improved beyond all recognition. Women gained the right to vote, own property, gain a full education, join the professions, leave unhappy marriages and control their own fertility.

But no sooner had we achieved substantive equality under the law than a new — and I would argue extremely harmful — ideology emerged. It overturned the progressive and liberatory message that being female was a neutral but unchangeable aspect of human biology, and that nowadays girls and women can do anything because we have finally recognised that the norms and strictures imposed on the female sex were discriminatory, harmful and senseless. In its place it reified those norms and strictures by turning them into the definition of what it is to be a girl or woman. A girl or woman is now a human being who “identifies with” feminine stereotypes; a person born female who finds those stereotypes unappealing is invited to identify out of her sex. If she declines to do so, she is assumed to “identify” with, or as, the sort of person who fits those stereotypes.

This novel and regressive world view is the opposite of progressive and liberatory! It is harmful for any adolescent, but most especially an adolescent like Anna, who not only wanted, naturally enough, to grow up to be a full, rounded human being but also had to negotiate the emergence of same-sex sexual orientation. I also have a gay child — a son who is now a young adult — and I am well aware of how, even with the most supportive parents and friends, teenagers who are realising that in this respect they are unlike their friends pick up homophobic messages from the society around them, even if they are not overt in the way they were when I was a teenager in the 1980s. I am full of admiration for the young gay adults who navigate this extra complication in their teens and come out stronger, kinder and more insightful, as both my son and Anna and her girlfriend did.

I have read both the original article to which Anna was responding, and Anna’s own article. The first is intellectually superficial: full of unevidenced smears by association, circular reasoning and question-begging. It would require not one but several articles to fully debunk it. However I fully support the author’s right to write it. Young people deserve grace as they are learning and navigating conflicting theories and visions of the world.

Anna’s article, by contrast, is logically coherent and supplies the evidence for all its claims. Her compassion and joyful vision of a world in which all humans, both male and female, can be free to flourish without the impositions of traditional notions of masculinity and femininity shines through in every word. It is clearly the product of profound thinking as well as painful but ultimately transformative personal experience.

In other words, I am not merely defending Anna’s article on the grounds of free speech and academic freedom. I am defending it as precisely the sort of brave, rigorous and insightful evidenced engagement with big, scary and important subjects that all of us, but most especially academics, should be actively fostering in our youth.

I’m proud to know Anna. Her university should be proud that she is among its student body and, once she graduates, proud to have her among its alumni.