This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Susanna Rustin is one of the surprising survivors of the present trans culture war, having managed to remain a Guardian columnist despite her heretical view that sex is biological. When at that paper, Suzanne Moore found that when she wrote about “female experience belonging to people with female bodies”, it was always “subbed out”. 

Her column in March 2020, “Women must have the right to organise. We will not be silenced”, caused a storm: when subsequently 338 editorial, tech and commercial Guardian staff denounced the paper’s “pattern of publishing transphobic content”, she resigned.

Rustin’s colleague, Hadley Freeman, barred from writing about gender issues, quit in December 2022 amid what she described as “an atmosphere of real fear”. She had endured the paper running — her words — “glowing profiles of trans activists” such as the homophobic, racist misogynist Munroe Bergdorf, while being forbidden to interview gender critics such as J.K. Rowling. (Those who think the tide of trans insanity is ebbing, note that Bergdorf, a biological male, was last January named as the first UN Women UK Champion.) 

Rustin seems to have survived because she wrote on social issues in general and only occasionally on trans matters; she is first and foremost a calm explainer rather than a polemicist.

 Over the past few years she has only occasionally — and always carefully and soberly — addressed Guardian readers on toxic issues such as the University of Sussex’s craven treatment of the beleaguered philosopher Kathleen Stock, the abuse of critics as transphobes and “TERFS” and the appalling corruption of language by misogynistic ideologues replacing the word “sex” with “gender” and “women” with “cervix-havers”.

She has also written of the “fascist” smearing of groups as Woman’s Place UK, which campaigns against sexual violence. (Labour’s Dawn Butler, Lisa Nandy and Angela Rayner supported a campaign calling for the expulsion of its supporters from their party.)

As faux-intellectuals led the charge, academics, educationalists, public servants and the thinking classes in general, government bureaucrats, institutions such as the NHS and so on, succumbed spinelessly and at terrifying speed to a shocking ideology that, inter alia, encouraged disturbed children to have their bodies mutilated. 

With the help of self-identification introduced by “progressive” politicians, notably in Scotland, and imposed by box-ticking bureaucrats, vulnerable women were trapped in prisons, lavatories and changing rooms at the mercy of — among others — straight, predatory men claiming to be women. Lesbians were told that to refuse to have sex with a man denoted bigotry.

Rustin is no bomb-thrower, but she looked on at all this with a clear eye and a brain unfogged by fashion. She wondered why British women, with the help of many good men, led by the unlikely figure of J.K. Rowling, were at the heart of the movement to resist the ideology that said every human being has an inner gender. Over the course of researching and writing Sexed, she became convinced that “one reason is the depth and range of the political tradition they have drawn on — with or without knowing it”.

Her book, she says, “has been written in defiance of illiberal efforts to suppress sex-based rights feminism and to delegitimise it in favour of an alternative discourse of gender identity and gender — a highly contentious position that has been uncritically adopted by many human rights and feminist organisations, as well as groups that advocate solely for trans rights”.

She has put this social earthquake in context, telling the story of the 231 years since Mary Wollstonecraft kicked off feminism with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which argued for women to be accepted as rational beings and released from their gilded perches through education and the elimination of discriminatory legislation and male domination.

After her came the fighters for social justice such as the penal reformer Elizabeth Fry; the campaigners for married women’s parental and property rights such as Caroline Norton; the educationalists who gradually opened doors in medical schools and universities such as Barbara Bodichon; and social reformers such as Josephine Butler, who went public to protect prostitutes from exploitation in the sex trade. 

There were triumphs, such as the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 1870s and 1880s, and finally enfranchisement, after 60 years of struggle during which the suffragists, led by Millicent Fawcett, formed alliances with trade unionists and did the patient work of persuasion — though it was their violent and often counterproductive wing, the suffragettes, who seized the headlines. 

It was the First World War, and the respect for women’s contribution to it, that made the vote inevitable. But there were many disagreements about, for instance, class-based and sex-based rights; quarrelsome feminism was turning women off. Despite the major contribution of women in World War II, paternalism and occupational segregation returned — until the American women’s movement crossed the Atlantic in the late 1960s and with it came women’s groups, consciousness raising, the angry radical women’s liberation movement, and misandry. 

Margaret Thatcher did not think herself a feminist, but she was a role model for millions of women all over the world while being sneered at by left-wingers such as Glenda Jackson, who in 2013 had an interesting twist on gender-bending: “The first prime minister of female gender, OK. But a woman? Not on my terms.” 

My father and husband were feminists and some of my most encouraging mentors were men. I thought the battle was won by the 1980s, often found the women’s libbers and what was called the second wave of feminism absurd, and opted out. 

Now here I am, a septuagenarian, and once more a signed-up feminist. I’m terrified by the damage being done to women and children by dangerous rubbish promulgated by gender activists and women-haters and implemented by fools. 

Like Rustin, I believe that sex is biological, that for their safety single-sex spaces for women should be maintained, that children should not be medicalised via hormones and surgery, and that trans people should be treated with respect and dignity — though I’m clear they should not be kowtowed to.

Rustin is optimistic: “I am certain there is an accommodation to be found between feminists (and gay men and lesbian women) who want their sex-based rights to be upheld, and transgender people, who want their gender identities to be respected.” Yet how this is to be achieved, the book cannot tell us.

“The previous pages revealed the colossal efforts that have been required to win new rights and protections for girls and women, at every stage, and the fierce resistance that campaigners have had to overcome.” While Rustin cannot point the way forward, the story of all these dogged, brave, inspirational role models provides the right start.