Of course Mhairi Black thinks we’re a bunch of “50-year-old Karens”. Years ago, it might have surprised me, back when I thought Black’s support for the WASPI campaign meant she respected older women’s right to be involved in politics.

Alas, the hags have now spoken out of turn. In a recent talk at the Edinburgh Fringe, Black referred to women who disagreed with her about the political salience of sex as “50-year-old Karens”. It turns out there are two ways of using older women to boost your political profile: supporting them and denouncing them. Ageist misogyny is fine, as long as you’re the one doing it.

One could argue that challenging pensions inequality for women born in the 1950s, and resistance to gender self-ID, are two very different political issues. Perhaps all the older women involved in the WASPI campaign are nice, and all of those involved in Woman’s Place UK are evil.

Ageing female bodies interrupt the pornified fantasies of trans activists

I think, though, that pension inequality cannot be separated from broader societal attitudes towards older women. I also think that by supporting trans activism, Black is aligning herself with a movement that is not just sexist, but deeply ageist — when it comes to women, at least.

Ageist sexism is central to trans activism. The idea of “womanhood” that it promotes is bound up in the social construction of femininity, whilst utterly dismissive of the material reality of ageing female bodies. Through history, patriarchy has not just sought to define and exploit women as a sex class; it has done so in different ways depending on where women are in the female lifecycle. Trans activism, as an expression of patriarchy, does this, too.

Whilst old-style misogynists would respond to the bodies of middle-aged women with open disgust — in 1969’s Everything you always wanted to know about sex (but were afraid to ask), David Reuben describes the menopausal female as “no longer a functional woman” — trans activists repackage their own distaste as justified resistance to “biological essentialism”. Of course, they protest, you wouldn’t want to define women in relation to biology alone. Some women — the young ones, the sexy ones, the male ones — are actual people.

Just as Reuben would rather declare older women non-women, than adjust his sexist view of what women are, trans activists cast older women as “fascist terfs”, undeserving of full human status. They pretend it is due to these women’s “obsolete” politics, but that politics cannot be separated from their ageing bodies. As long as female people age, many of them will, sooner or later, reach the conclusion that the female lifecycle is neither politically nor socially irrelevant.

Ageing female bodies interrupt the pornified fantasies of the likes of Andrea Long Chu, Julia Serano and Grace Lavery. They spoil the self-pitying narrative that depicts “cis women” as eternally youthful mean girls who’ve been handed “femininity” on a plate and, to quote Serano, “sadly take their female identities and anatomies for granted”. When Long Chu writes of transitioning “for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops and, my god, for the breasts”, it’s pretty obvious that the bodies being pictured here haven’t yet seen thirty.

No woman fully conforms to the male fantasy of untroubled “cis womanhood”, in which an ungrateful cohort of sexy ladies walk the world at peace with their bodies, secretly thrilled at objectification, only ever complaining to make those excluded from femininity (that endless Barbie dream house pool party) feel extra bad. It’s older women who offer the most direct challenge to the myth. Why don’t those bitches just, like, not age? I swear they’re only doing it to annoy India Willoughby. It’s bad enough that we carry on existing, but then we go and have opinions as well.

As I argue in my book Hags, disgust for the “impure” politics of older women can be a way of justifying their erasure from a vision of gender equality that fails to accommodate the realities of ageing and dependency. The insistence that everyone is whoever they say they are — that our identities are not, in fact, constantly defined and redefined through our relationships with others — is antithetical to a feminist ethics of care — to the kind of feminism which may become more important to us as we age.

Through her use of the Karen slur, Mhairi Black implies that older women are more resistant to trans activism because their politics are out of date, as though women who came of age in the nineties couldn’t possibly have heard of Judith Butler when Gender Trouble was first published (I was a literature post-grad, Mhairi; you have no idea). I am almost fifty. Contrary to Black’s own delusions of nonconformity, I, too, have short hair and wear trousers every now and then. I even wrote the odd crap essay on the mysteries of womanhood, back when I thought women of my mother’s generation couldn’t possibly have inner lives in quite the way women of mine did.

Karens, hags, shrews, witches — we’re not going anywhere

Black’s own work with the WASPI campaign should, but obviously didn’t, make her conscious of the cumulative nature of sex-based inequality, and how it relates to economic structures that still treat male bodies as the default. It’s all very comforting, when you haven’t yet experienced the drip-drip, interconnected nature of sexism from one life stage to another, to delude yourself that as long as you don’t name the female body, no one can target you for having one. It’s easy to blame the “Karens” for their own marginalisation — biological essentialists, begging to be biologically essentialised. You justify their low status by telling yourself they are “conservative” — that is, they chose it.

You have missed how for many of us, our politics started out like yours and changed because of what we learned about how patriarchy operates in relation to the female bodies and female life cycles. We are not the ones refusing to move on.

“To many women,” wrote Reuben in 1969, “the menopause marks the end of their useful life”:

They see it as the onset of old age, the beginning of the end. They may be right. Having outlived their ovaries, they may have outlived their usefulness as human beings. The remaining years may be just marking time until they follow their glands into oblivion.

Reuben was generous enough to suggest resorting to HRT (“because she has been castrated by Father Time is no reason for a modern woman to give up the battle”). The essential message, though — that older women are obsolete, no longer real women, not even “useful human beings” — is as alive today as it was back then. Trans activism is just a variation on the theme of “if men see no obvious use for women, women don’t have any business existing”.

We have plenty of business. That is what, from one century to the next, misogynists struggle to tolerate. Karens, hags, shrews, mothers-in-law, witches — we’re not going anywhere. For the younger woman, there is a status boost in positioning yourself against us, but it’s all so obvious and so repetitive. If you really wanted to redefine what it means to be a woman, you’d join us. Why cling to borrowed time?