Can Russell T Davies write “terfs”?

When I heard Russell T Davies had included a “gender-critical” character in his new drama Tip Toe, I didn’t have high hopes. Should a writer who is notoriously bad at creating female characters who do not exist solely in relation to male ones — either as support human or dried-up bigot — really go there? Given the history of writers creating fictionalised versions of “terfs”, only to make them mouthpieces for their own straw man arguments, what would be the point? Supporters of “trans rights” inventing fictional feminists always has the feel of marking one’s own homework. Even when it’s done in a way that purports to be sympathetic to the poor, damaged women with their poor, bigotry-addled minds, it only makes things worse. 

So I’ll admit to having been somewhat surprised by the character of Stephanie. She is the best friend of Leo, who dies in an act of homophobic mob violence led by Leo’s neighbour Clive. Stephanie is neither a support human or a dried-up bigot (for the latter, we have Clive’s wife Marie, with support human services provided by Leo’s bar manager Judy). Despite their disagreements, Stephanie remains Leo’s friend to the end. Naturally, this has really pissed off viewers who were expecting a little more vilification and shaming. 

Writing in Metro, Adam Miller complains that “Tip Toe’s gender critical character misses the mark”. It’s not that Miller doesn’t think people should be friends with those who hold different views to them — just not those ones. Women like Stephanie, contends Miller, are “celebrating the erosion of trans rights, pushing them people [sic] out of social spaces and leaving them petrified to leave the house”. We don’t actually see them doing this — either in fiction or in real life — but just by thinking such things as “adult human females should exist in law”, the Stephanies of this world might as well be the Clives. 

A similar line is taken by the Independent’s Louis Chilton. Chilton valiantly attempts to read Stephanie’s character as “damning, a figure conceived to represent the sort of passive prejudice that queer people must abide from those who are ostensibly ‘allies’”. However, he feels this is undermined by the fact that Davies himself has admitted to having gender-critical friends. Does Davies not realise that women like this aren’t allowed to sit with men like him? “The self-named gender-critical movement,” huffs Chilton, “is, of course, more than a set of personal opinions people have: it’s a political ideology that has led to real-world legislative change.” It’s an interesting take on what many women — who didn’t decide to call ourselves anything — have experienced as real-world legislative change regarding our rights, spaces and boundaries. Like Miller, Chilton wants Stephanie (and feminists in general) to stop questioning anything men on “his” side demand. For “passive prejudice”, read “anything other than total (and appropriately feminine) acquiescence”. 

I think it was brave of him to have written Stephanie the way he did

If only Davies had been more misogynistic! We all know he’s got it in him to blame women for everything (who can forget It’s A Sin’s Jill telling Ritchie’s mum Valerie, with reference to young men dying of AIDs, “all of this is your fault […] They all die because of you”?). It is strange to feel the need to defend him, but defend Davies I will. I think it was brave of him to have written Stephanie the way he did. I am sure he could have predicted the response it would get. 

That said, this doesn’t quite remove the “marking your own homework” feel. What we learn about Stephanie is that she has misgivings about trans activist beliefs and that she isn’t a monster. That’s certainly something. Yet there is no real interrogation of what she actually believes, or the way in which it might really relate to the hatred espoused by Clive and his mob (beyond the vague suggestion that yes, her irritation with self-identification might not come from the same place, but maybe she could shut up about it, given what’s at stake?).

We know Stephanie is a terf because in the first episode, she tells Leo that his “lot” are to blame for making her job as a social worker “insane”, due to the fact that someone she believes to be an adult male is claiming to be a child who must be housed with other children (“he self-identifies, which you lot invented”). Then in episode five, when trans character Zee rushes round to Leo’s house, Stephanie says — ludicrously — “the amount of hormones you’re on, no wonder you overreact” (this bit did, I confess, make me wonder whether Davies really does have gender critical friends). Stephanie also goes on about safeguarding and seems to think other women can do no wrong, what with them being women (not realising, for instance, that Marie is your classic bigot hag). In case we have still missed the signs, the series ends with a flashback to two years earlier, when Leo tells her “you and I can’t mention trans rights without a huge fucking argument so it’s all getting worse”.

There’s also a tremendously clunky scene at the start of the final episode, in which Stephanie gets to tell Leo that sometimes he “can look down on woman”. Having responded by telling her to “fuck off”, Leo amends his response to “so Clive’s next door and you’re having a go at me”. There then follows a broader discussion about Leo’s support human expectations of women, which feels somewhat box-ticking (but a good effort all the same). Yet this initial contrast — Leo, yes, being a bit of a chauvinist, but look, evil Clive and his footie lad mob are next door! — seems fundamental to me. It might as well be a metaphor for the way in which men on the left have presented their options to women, not just in relation to “the trans debate”, but anything to do with sex and power. You could have it so much worse — and if you don’t, I could have it worse if you don’t stop raising your comparatively minor concerns. In this framing, Stephanie’s complaints about Leo’s sexism are made to look petty. The very least she could do, given the devil is at the door, is properly pick a side. There’s bog-standard sexism, and then there’s full-on hate sexism. Aren’t these completely different things?

A central problem of Tip Toe — and of the dominant “progressive” understanding of sex and gender — is that “hate” is only ever about problematised masculinity. Davies is right that shame, paranoia, toxic masculine norms, fear of emasculation, lad culture, suppressed desires, all serve to fuel bigotry and violence. The scenes in Clive’s house shortly before the denouement — the lads, supposedly having “fun” — look grim indeed. Clive’s attitude towards his sons, his utter terror of them embarrassing him by not being “real men”, rang very true to me of the worst misogynists I have known. But in this — and in many trans activist texts I have read — what is missing is any serious corresponding analysis of femininity, other than as a glittery, life-on-the-easy-setting refuge from the hell of masculine conditioning. This luxury refuge is presented as something Clive’s son George could have, if only if it wasn’t for the haters. There’s no awareness that male understandings of femininity trivialise and punish women (both for conforming, and for failing to conform). When Stephanie responds (again, ludicrously) to a photo of Clive’s son George in make-up by telling Zee “so you thought you’d recruit him”, it is a lazy reinforcement of the trans activist position that “terfs” are jealously restricting access to the Barbie Dream House experience that is being a woman. We’re allowed — in Tip Toe, as in Adolescence — to contemplate how hard male conditioning is, and how it distorts the mind. Female conditioning? Not so much. Do that, and you take the Dream House refuge away. 

He wrote a series about hate, only to be criticised for not being hateful enough

Somewhat related to this, at least if the topic is how hate and extremism develop, is Tip Toe’s complete oblivion to the hateful messages, threats and actual acts of violence taken against gender non-conforming women — women who’ve committed the ultimate unfeminine act of saying “no” to men — by trans activists. It has been profoundly disorientating to witness the way in which mobs of activists taking to the streets holding placards which promote killing “terfs”, vandalising venues which hold feminist gatherings, or even trashing the offices of MPs, have been completely ignored. For some reason, we are not allowed to think this kind of hate could be a precursor to something bigger. I’m not suggesting this should have been the theme of Davies’s series. Nonetheless, if part of your message is that the world is getting darker for vulnerable people because of men driving themselves crazy with hatred online, you need more than “just the masculine men, mind. Just the ones who buy into footie and lager and birds”. That’s simply not true, and it matters too much, for everyone, to distort your own analysis in this way. 

In the week Tip Toe came out, Darren Rigby was jailed for sending threats to all-girl schools such as “I’m going to shoot and stab all of our girls. You TERFs are going to learn to stop mocking, deadnaming and misgendering transwomen like me”. There’s a reading of male paranoia and shame, projected onto “inferiors”, which could be connected to the kind of bigotry and violence embraced by men like Clive. Perhaps this is something for Davies to explore in later work, incorporating a more nuanced understanding of how both types of men view and treat women. After all, he has already been condemned for his impermissible friendships and an unduly reasonable feminist character. He wrote a series about hate, only to be criticised for not being hateful enough. I hope the irony isn’t lost on him, and I hope he doesn’t go back.