Why I Can't Sit Silently In The Back Seat Anymore

How Trans Rights Activists Feed Domestic Abuse (and Other Stories)

Last week, I watched (in disbelief; it’s always ‘in disbelief’ these days) when a diminutive British blonde of middle years — largely unknown to those who don’t engage with the increasingly deranged culture wars around transgender rights — was hounded during a recent appearance in New Zealand, campaigning on behalf of her feminist pressure group, Standing For Women.

It turns out that one of the (very many) people hounding Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (aka ‘Posie Parker’) was an old school pal of mine who has lived in NZ for decades. Her facebook timeline was full of palpably righteous rage at Keen-Minshull, peppered with snaps of her hanging with (much younger; she’s 60) trans people. What kind of useful idiot does she think she’s being, precisely? Does she really crave to be liked by twentysomethings with penises who call themselves women so much that she’s happy to be ‘unfriended’ by her peers who are indeed women? We both went to a girl’s school. How would she have felt, back in her teens, if some of those ‘girls’ in our changing rooms had in fact been boys?

I briefly considered asking her this—however, in the end I just did that pass-agg temporary muting thing. Obviously, I should have just unfriended her because supporting misogyny, even in ignorance, is a total friendship deal-breaker for me (more on this later).

So that was last week. Then, this week, there was the terrible school shooting in Nashville — made more terrible, somehow, by the female shooter identifying as a trans-man, because the senseless and tragic murder of three small children and three school staff members immediately became all about the bloody murderer. Swiftly, indeed, the more deranged trans allies were constructing for themselves a grotesque pyramid of victimhood: poor dead kids, obvs — their narrative ran – but poor-the-trans-people who are forced to do these terrible things because everybody hates them so much, too.

FFS… at the very least this sort of response is starting to ensure that ordinary people who previously may have felt a bit shruggy-meh about the transgenderism arguments that eat up social media (largely because they probably don’t live on social media, sensibly) may now think that ‘murdering kids because you perceive you’re not getting quite enough validation for your gender is, well… let’s try proper fucking mad, shall we? Having previously unengaged folk suddenly feeling that way would, in turn, seem to defeat the object for the Trans Rights Activists, wouldn’t it? Unless, perhaps, they are more identified with their perceived victimhood than they are with their pronouns.

A not dissimilar point is made by Jo Rowling [in the final episode of the podcast, ‘The Witch Trials of JK Rowling’] when she calls out the intransigent authoritarianism of the left on this very topic— a position that is successfully alienating so many used-to-identify-as-left-leaning women of a certain age who would prefer to see some non-binary bloody nuance but who are necessarily uncomfortable with being perceived as right-leaning as a result. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to work out how to talk to a girlfriend of mine whose left-wing male partner is busily conducting a high-profile pro-trans-rights/anti-feminist online crusade… What DO I say to her?! ‘Your husband needs to stop! Why are you putting up with all this nonsense? Did I mistake you for a feminist for the past 25 years?!’. I have no idea. I suspect I may lose my friendship.

Maybe people just aren’t as bright as I always used to think they were?! Maybe people read on Twitter/in The Guardian (same difference…) that Posie Parker is ‘Far Right’ and attracts ‘fascists’ to her pro-feminist gatherings and go ‘oh, yeah, in that case, fine–bring on the hatey, matey!’. Instead, what is obviously happening is that the Far Right are piggybacking any opportunity to bait/ruck with the Far Left — especially if there are some cameras around — while not giving a flying fuck about either transgender rights or women’s rights, or indeed anything other than being divisive and pig-ignorant for the sake of it. Anyway, ignorance appears to be equally distributed across the political spectrum, thus effectively undermining that political spectrum.

I’ve written before about not knowing who my tribe is anymore (I live in a small town; there’s not much choice!). If it were just the youngsters doing young-person posturing I could cope—however, when it’s your people, your generation, your actual mates, the ‘sisterhood’, indeed, who are cocking their heads to one side and saying, in effect, ‘poor the trans folk who want to keep their penises and use the Ladies, we really must hug them all… even though I’ve never actually met any’  or ‘if my daughter decided she identified as a man it would be my job as her mother to support her all the way’… well, I just despair.

Way back in 2020, I (foolishly) joined in a heated debate on a friend’s lengthy gender-themed facebook thread and subsequently received a private message from a transwoman whom I have never met (and with whom I am not facebook ‘friends’):

I ignored it; I didn’t feel the need to explain my position to somebody I didn’t know, however I was slightly thrown by the feelings this message evoked—it was the first time in a long while that I’d felt a particularly familiar, visceral combination of emotions.

Now, three years later, I know exactly why I felt the way I did — that is, nauseous with a churning solar plexus. I’ve also noted that this man (I understand that he retains a penis) actively enjoys ‘seducing’ kindly women into his friendship circle even as he attacks those who are immune to his charms; behaviour straight out of the narcissist-bully playbook.

Some women who know this person irl have told me ‘she’s lovely!’— however I personally believe that they have confused a performance — a kind of imitative feminine ‘loveliness —’ with actually being lovely, and that this is probably because they didn’t grow up witnessing abuse and/or domestic violence so can’t necessarily read the signs. This means they are also — imho — more likely to be women who unwittingly both indulge and enable trans-activists in their misogyny even as they proclaim their own (unreconcilable) liberal 'feminism’. 

This consumerism/capitalism-gone-postal is what allows Eddie Izzard to talk about activating ‘girl mode’ unchallenged, as though being a biological woman was a form of A.I.

This hashtag-be-kind approach to so many of the more absurd contemporary ideologies is why ‘feelings’ started trouncing ‘facts’—one of the so-called ‘luxury belief systems’ of the West. This brand of consumerism/capitalism-gone-postal is also what — at one extreme — allowed the debacle/horrorshow/scandal of the Tavistock Clinic to be acted out in plain sight and, at the other (for eg), Sam Smith to demand The Brit Awards drop its gendered award categories and not get told ‘hey, thanks for your suggestion, Sam, however this decision is not actually part of your remit’. Or, indeed, allows Eddie Izzard to talk about activating ‘girl mode’ unchallenged, as though being a biological woman was a form of A.I.

This tiptoe-through-the-tulips-while-avoiding-walking-on-the-eggshells approach is broadly ‘feminine’ (though, again, not feminist) and liberal-left, I guess. It’s also why so many Millennials/Gen Z-ers (Smith, for eg, is 30) have never really been challenged by their Boss Class—ie their own parents’ generation. I think of people like Sam Smith as the ones who have only ever encountered rubber matting underneath their playground slides-and-swings, who always got a prize for coming last in the egg-and-spoon race; kids who perhaps grew up constantly seeking happy-landings wherever they roam and demanding that that their innate specialness — they got a ribbon for coming last, remember — be ‘safely’ looked after. (Over the past thirty-odd years schools have been actively feminized when they would have been better off being Feministed. But, hey, that’s a topic for another day…).

A fundamentalist approach to the centrality of one’s own needs clearly manifests in your safe-spaces, trigger-warnings, de-platforming and the trolling of perfectly normal women as ‘TERFS’ simply because we know that men pretending to be women are no more REAL WOMEN than we are MEN when we WEAR TROUSERS.

It is also the job of grown-ups not simply to cower in the corner when their kids say ‘hey, it’s my world now, daddio — parentio! — so get with the programme and call me ‘They’!’. If the kids stamp their foots and shout ‘but you’re on the wrong side of history! BE KIND!’ perhaps explain what history actually means? Then maybe chuck in some random old-person-shit like ‘kindness is as kindness does’ and watch as they try to get their heads round the fact that saying ‘be kind’ and doing ‘be kind’ may not, in fact, amount to the same thing. It’s important to point out that while deciding you want to ‘identify’ as a man/woman is absolutely fine (fill your kitten-heeled boots, guys n gals!) you’re not a woman/man just because you decide you want to be — while transgender people’s potentially ‘hurt feelings’ do not trump all biological women’s actual reality.

You’re the parent of a thirteen-year-old girl who suddenly fervently believes they’re really a bloke? Chances are, they’re a gay woman (and hurrah for that) or maybe they’ll just grow out of it (and hurrah for that, too). A teeny-tiny minority of confused teenagers will turn out to be genuinely gender-dysphoric — in which case maybe step away from tik-tok while you’re all coming to terms with that?

Anyway, midway through writing this ‘stack I got a phone call. A few weeks ago, I applied for a job (as an unpaid volunteer) on Refuge’s National Domestic Abuse Helpline and the caller told me my interview is next week. I’m really looking forward to it (and hope I get through it without sounding too much like a Mad Karen!) then, fingers crossed, I will move on to the training.

Because domestic violence and its effects are a subject I have felt strongly about ever since, late one night, I watched from the back seat when my father pulled our car over into an A road lay-by and punched my mother unconscious while she sat next to him. He had done this before, however on this particular occasion I thought he’d killed her. I also thought he was going to kill me… so I made myself very small and quiet, holding my breath while he drove the rest of the way home in silence. (Whatever happened after that has been erased from my memory).

I was seven or eight when this happened. And I know that some people who knew and loved my (very fun and funny, creative and charismatic) father will probably read this and feel uncomfortable—perhaps even angry with me for writing it. However, I first wrote about this incident briefly in my memoir ‘The Heart Shaped Bullet’, which was published in 1999, so it’s not breaking news.

(For the record, my father was, unsurprisingly, furious with me when the book came out: ‘that’s not who I am anymore,’ he told me—which I’m sure was ‘his truth’. Being a violent man caused my father’s victims great personal unhappiness—however, I know it caused my father great personal unhappiness, too. As my parents are now dead I feel it’s high time I ‘owned’ the story again; it’s not only one of the defining moments of my life but, as a mother of sons, it’s important for me to ensure that this painful cycle has been broken).

These days, then, when I spot bullying misogynists (currently very much alive in the form of Trans Rights Activists; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) it no longer makes me cower silently in the back seat, it makes me boil with rage… and then spend two or three months, on-and-off, writing what turns out to be this very lengthy substack (apologies; I’m sure it could have been much shorter but I found it difficult to edit).

Finally, an average of two women a week are killed by a current or former partner while one-in-four women in England and Wales experience domestic abuse in their lifetime and 25,000+ women and children were supported by Refuge last year. I find it matters a great deal to me that Refuge describes itself —unequivocally — as:

For Women and Children.

Against Domestic Abuse

And so, in order to escape the faux-trans-hysteria and the TRA’s misogyny (and all the other ongoing, deranged ‘virtue-signalling’ culture war insanities), it is in both real and imagined places of refuge that my thoughts will — must — always keep landing.

You may wish to donate to REFUGE right here:

https://refuge.org.uk/i-want-to-support-refuge/donate-now/

And while my substacks remain free I’d absolutely love it if you wanted to BUY ME A COFFEE!

Thank you. X