Don’t kowtow to cry-bullies

As a wise woman once said, in the future everyone will have fifteen minutes as the voice of reason in the gender debate. Last week it was the turn of Kezia Dugdale, former leader of Scottish Labour and incoming chair of Stonewall, enlightening us all about toxicity on both sides and the virtues of more light, less heat.

To be fair, she wasn’t being all that reasonable. After many years of #NoDebate and death threats, gender-critical feminists have learned to accept the bare minimum when it comes to how those in power talk about sex and gender. In an interview with the Guardian, Dugdale stressed the importance of “persuading people” rather than, say, telling anyone who thinks sex is politically salient to die in a grease fire. 

“We want to be in the messy, grey bit … because that’s where consensus is found,” she explained, while also stating she still believed in a person’s right to change his or her legal gender by self-ID (which is neither messy nor grey, but an extreme position for anyone to take, let alone someone seeking to defend the rights of gay men and lesbians). Her overall message was that with “a bit of kindness, a bit of generosity of spirit” — the kind of qualities organisations such as  Woman’s Place UK exemplified for years while being denounced as “hate groups” — “common ground” could be reached. 

Dugdale did not specify what this “common ground” would be (for ideas, she could have looked at JK Rowling’s kind, generous blogpost of 2020). Nonetheless, many feminists were grateful for this small step in the right direction. Personally I felt a little frustrated by the lack of specificity and the refusal to recognise that reality denialism is linked to all the anger and hatred coming from one side of this “debate”. I don’t think it’s possible to have one foot in “let’s all be reasonable” and another in “a person is whatever sex they say they are, and anyone who thinks otherwise is committing actual harm”. Nonetheless, I could see that Dugdale was trying. It is possible to approach reality denialism with kindness and compassion. If she truly wanted to make progress, women’s rights campaigners would have been willing to talk. Not so those on the other side of the debate. 

“New Stonewall chair Kezia Dugdale says JK Rowling ‘absolutely has a place in public life’,” declared one appalled (yet frankly ridiculous) Pink News headline. Writing in the National, Steph Paton expressed deep “disappointment in charities […] who have abandoned their raison d’être in favour of making themselves smaller, quieter, more palatable to those who would snap them out of existence if given an iota of power to do so”. The Canary tore into Dugdale for having spoken to “the thinking leftist’s transphobic rag of note” at all. There and across Bluesky, the biggest source of outrage was Dugdale expressing respect for — but certainly not agreement with — Rowling. You can tell everyone that you believe men can become women but it means nothing unless you denounce anyone who doesn’t think the same.  

Whenever politicians and charity leaders bend to the will of extremists it reinforces a standard whereby any willingness to compromise makes you a loser

At this point, Dugdale had a choice. She could have thought “well, my ‘side’ seems to be a bit mental. Could there be some particular reason for this, perhaps one linked to the absurdity of insisting no one else is allowed to perceive reality on their own terms?” Or she could have done what many others before her — Judy Blume, Margaret Atwood, Jess Phillips, Macy Gray, even Rowling for one very brief moment — have done and pretend she didn’t really understand what she was saying the first time. Dugdale took the latter course, issuing a humble apology for the “worry, anger and upset” caused by her being insufficiently unpleasant to Rowling. It will get her nowhere. Some part of her must surely know it, but it is easier, in the short term, than taking the full force of trans activist rage. 

Whenever politicians and charity leaders bend to the will of extremists it reinforces a standard whereby any willingness to compromise makes you a loser. They are like parents who haven’t realised that in giving in to tantrums you only make a rod for your own back. They haven’t realised that never, ever being appeased is part of the identity of the group they are trying to win over. Dugdale can apologise now, but she cannot unsay what has already been said. No one is going to believe that when she spoke about Rowling she was not weighing every word with great care. She thought – and god knows, many of us have made this mistake – that she was saying something no reasonable person on any side of the debate could find offensive. In this she was right, but she is not dealing with reasonable people. From now on her card is marked. As O’Brien explained to Winston Smith, it is not enough to say you see five fingers before you if you still believe there are four. 

Looking at Dugdale now, I find myself thinking of some of the big name feminist writers and campaigners who, a decade or so ago, found themselves under attack from “progressive” narcissists and had to decide which way to jump. Do you carry on saying what you believe? Or do you try to appease sex denialists, even though ninety percent of your output and arguments rely on the fact that — whether you state it explicitly or not — you know that sex matters? In those who made the latter choice (without question, a career-protective one) I’ve noticed a decrease in self-confidence, a fear of being too irreverent, a growing self-censorship, a lack of clarity in argument — in short, a loss of many of the things that made them especially sharp and effective as writers and campaigners (whether I agreed with them or not). For any form of activism, you want people willing to stand up for what they believe, not people constantly watching what they say, terrified that the wrong perception of reality will accidentally slip out. 

If Dugdale had stood up to the cry-bullies — perhaps worn a t-shirt saying “I respect JK Rowling, get over it” — it may well have made her position with Stonewall untenable. As it is, she gets to stay, but at what cost? If your “community” can do this to you, when you said so little, what freedom do you really have to enact change? You will be watching every word, every movement, every action. You have to put your actual principles to one side, and instead be on hair trigger to respond to every potential tantrum. How can you do good in such a position? How can you do anything?