For IWD 2023, I'm Saying 'No, Thank You'

Why it's more urgent than ever for women to fight back the incursion into our sex-based rights.

I don’t usually commemorate International Women’s Day.

In the past, I’ve viewed it as somewhat regressive and quite insulting that we only get a  day when we’re 51% of the population.

But this year, I’ve decided to embrace it.

Because, my goodness, it’s necessary.

This past year has been an interesting rediscovery for me towards realising how feminism, especially radical feminism, is more urgent than ever.

Around the world, we’ve seen the steadying incursion into women’s rights.

We’ve seen it with the Taliban in Afghanistan and how they have dismembered women’s rights from their right to access education, their freedom of movement and right to political participation.

Yet across the world, in the global west, a different orthodoxy is taking aim at the right of women: gender identity ideology.

This idea, which sets out that women and their protected characteristics are nothing more than a set of ideas, conventions and stereotypes has taken hold in societies, ranging from Malta, where it’s nigh on impossible for women to have an abortion to the United States where President Biden has embraced it as his cause celebre, calling it the “civil rights issue of our time”.

Under the pursuit of entrenching this so-called civil rights issue, male rapists have been placed in female prisons, male athletes have taken women’s places on female teams, children have been put on the pathway to sterilisation and mutilation in a bid to, in my view, bolster this phenomenon.

Ten years ago, I could not have envisaged a world where it would have been deemed an act of hatred to speak frankly about women’s sex-based rights and experiences, where the safeguarding of children’s rights would be politicised into a culture war by supposed progressives arguing for kids to be introduced to sexualised themes when they’ve yet to lose all their milk teeth.

Then there is the obvious question – what exactly is behind this phenomenon?

For a fuller explanation, I will direct you to read Helen Joyce’s excellent book “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality”.

But it’s obvious who’s raking it in and making money from the spike in kids disassociating from their own bodies.

Gender clinics have mushroomed, especially in the US, with its profits-before-people healthcare system.

But there has also been a spike in places such as Serbia, presided over by a populist-nationalist, misogynist and homophobic government, despite the fact that its Prime Minister, Ana Brnabic, is openly lesbian and is the first woman and same-sex attracted person in the role.

In the free-wheeling world of ‘gender-affirming’ healthcare, Serbia has emerged as a surprise hub for so-called sex-reassignment surgeries.

The country has marketed itself as a prime destination for medical tourism and as a centre of expertise for female-to-male surgeries.

Indeed, even the TikTok Doc Dr Sidhbh Gallagher who bragged about ‘yeeting the teets’ has even worked extensively in Serbia with pre-eminent sex-change surgeon, Dr Miroslav Djordjevic.

But even with her experience, her surgery can sometimes yield, frankly, horrifying results and, with that, the hopes and dreams of the patient splayed out into the reality of surgical complications and – worse – potentially fatal infections. A high price to pay for a dream.

This is the crux of the sex-change industry – bodily disassociation and dissatisfaction, chimes in with other parts of the cosmetic surgery industry, where perfectly healthy body parts are cut, drawn, reduced, enlarged, inverted, flayed in pursuit of an ideal in someone’s mind that will always fail to live up to the bearer’s phantasmagoric standard.

Women have always been susceptible to this most chauvinist of medical areas.

Between 90-92% of those undergoing cosmetic surgeries are women yet most of the surgeons performing those procedures are men – only 21% of cosmetic surgeons in the UK are women.

As women, we have a love-hate relationship with our bodies.

The female form is elevated and worshipped in high art, high fashion yet woe betide any woman who doesn’t fit the rigid standard.

Women’s mags may be paying lip service to diversity of body types but they still cling on to the same body types as if it were 1987.

It’s a tough drug to beat. For so long, they – us – have been chasing the dragon of that elusive body form, barely pubescent, where the full bloom of womanhood is still denied.

Like cosmetic surgery, the target is mainly women but in this new gender-fuck age, now men can be empowered to get a taste of that financial and emotional exploitation that go toward keeping us all perennially ill-at-ease in our skin.

Yet, now, we are being told, the mark of a woman, a real woman, is in her presentation.

It is wrong, nay, bigoted to refer to womanhood as sex-based. This is, we are being told, exclusionary. Womanhood is more than our bodies. Womanhood is a feeling, “an ultimate expression of humanity” according to they/them social influencer Jeffrey Marsh.

That’s all very well but it didn’t feel that way amid the sexual assaults, being paid less than male counterparts, being treated with less respect… etc… I could go on, but I won’t. It’s tiresome.

And there is a particular annoyance, I must admit, when a male is telling us what womanhood is all about despite the fact he has never had to undergo the blood and guts of being a woman.

A man, no matter how spinny his skirt may be, will never know what it’s like to have a heavy period while undertaking physically demanding work or even as a professional athlete.

Some trans-identifying males may even think that even raising this undeniable fact, that only women menstruate, is hateful because it is a painful reminder that they are not female and that they do not possess the organs that make it happen, as it were.

This may be quite surprising for any woman who’s had the misfortune of suffering endometriosis and any other issues related to the female reproductive system.

To have periods rebranded as some kind of symbol of oppression by women on to trans-identifying males might be the living end for many of us, especially when, globally, there are still major disparities in treatment between men and women.  

So, for this year’s International Women’s Day, I propose a return to reality, as uncomfortable as it may be for some.

The luxury of co-opting womanhood and assuming a menstrual cycle is just that: a fantastical indulgence with no basis in reality.

That doesn’t mean I don’t feel sympathy for those who strongly believe in this flight of fancy and have had it affirmed, validated by establishments, institutions and governments who seek to gender-wash their own bad records of promoting equality between the sexes.

In fact, I believe there ought be an urgent, compassionate redress of what ‘gender healthcare’ means and that it ought to involve a deep and empathetic method of working out what those needs are, perhaps along the system of other body dysmorphic conditions such as anorexia.

We know the greater majority of those presenting at the UK’s Tavistock Gender Identity Service clinic were teenage girls, 80% of whom were same-sex attracted, and 97.5% were either on the autism spectrum or had mental health conditions.

And giving fuel to the lie that changing sex can happen is, in my view, unbelievably cruel.

The patient is forever chasing the ideal but will have to cope with the tremendous let-down when their body betrays the truth of its sex-based reality.

No, the answer, more urgent than ever now, is to resist and refute the magical belief that anyone can change sex.

And in today’s world, where the omni-presence of phones and their apps promising encrypted messages that encourage a proliferation of sexual abuse, is it any wonder that so many girls today want nothing to do with the physical encumbrance of their changing bodies?

I remember it well enough, that extreme discomfort and embarrassment, how unwieldly and foreign my own body felt during puberty and the years that came after, too.

When we as women get told that we have ‘cis’ privilege by men who have no idea how cumbersome and painful it is to adjust to the reality of a female body, it speaks volumes of their ignorance and is proof, perhaps, of how redundant gender studies is when curated to preserve male entitlements.

To this, I say ‘no thank you’.

‘No thank you’ to being redefined by my body parts and biological functions.

‘No thank you’ to being gaslit into a privilege I’ve never enjoyed.

‘No thank you’ to the pseudoscience that threatens my sex-based rights.

This is my invocation for IWD 2023.