The trouble with witches is knowing how to spot them. As the narrator of Roald Dahl’s The Witches complains, “REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ORDINARY JOBS.” A bit like me, really. 

“Oh, if only there were a way of telling for sure whether a woman was a witch or not,” he laments, “then we could round them all up and put them in the meat-grinder”:

Unhappily, there is no such way. But there are a number of little signals you can look out for, little quirky habits that all witches have in common, and if you know these, if you remember them always, you might just possibly manage to avoid being squelched when you are very much older.

The collection and distribution of tips for identifying bad women is an age-old practice. This is because women have a sinister habit of keeping our badness under wraps. Obviously we are just as evil, if not more so, than men, but we lack the basic decency to do as much evil in plain sight: killing, raping and whatnot. We might even go so far as to condemn such things. This makes it harder to pick out which women are to blame for all the violence in the world. Thankfully, some people work tirelessly at bringing our evil to light. 

Only last week, over five hundred years since the appearance of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s witch-hunting classic Malleus Maleficarum, an LGBT staff network at the Ministry of Justice provided employees with further “little signals” to look out for. These included the use of phrases such as “adult human female” and “protecting women and girls”. 

Cunningly, I’ve disguised my violent tendencies by not killing anyone

To the ignorant, such phrases may not sound particularly bad — indeed, they’re hardly “choke on my dick, bigot” — but that’s just what the witches want you to think. In fact, these phrases are worse than “choke on my dick, bigot” because they are examples of “transphobic coded language”. As Kramer and Sprenger put it, you can always trust witches to find “an easy and secret manner of vindicating themselves … All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman”. 

This recent guide to spotting the “quirky little habits” of the true witch is in keeping with the current trend of blaming witches, not for crop failures or plagues, but for the fact that people have sexed bodies and for the social/political implications thereof. In these cases, the word “witch” is often swapped for “terf” (this is not, however, an example of “coded language”, because only terfs/witches use that). 

Just like Dahl’s ordinary-looking witches, terfs are incredibly sneaky. As another recent witch-hunting guide, the CUSU Women’s Campaign’s “How To Spot Terf Ideology”, puts it, “Terf ideology uses a lot of the same phrases and tropes, which often seem innocuous on the surface but are actually being used as dogwhistles … Because of the veiled nature of terf ideology, well-intentioned feminists can be tricked into buying into terf arguments.”

The more I read these things, the more I start to fear that I, too, am a witch. It’s not just the fact that I don’t wear a pointy hat or fly around on a broomstick, instead choosing to look “very much like an ordinary woman”. It’s not even the fact that, rather cunningly, I’ve disguised my violent tendencies by not killing anyone. It’s that I, too, use “coded language” to get my meaning across. I’ve done it for as long as I can remember. 

Ever since I was small, I’ve believed two things: one, I am a person in my own right, with my own inner life and boundaries; and two, that saying this out loud often displeases people. Indeed, as today’s witch-splainers would have it, female inner lives and boundaries are but a fiction created by bad women to justify their primary impulse, which is to exclude others and make them feel bad. 

I have tried very hard to find the right words to explain why female inner lives and boundaries exist and matter. I’ve endlessly tweaked and adjusted in order not to sound entitled or greedy or aggressive or mean. The problem, however, with endless adjustment is that one then gets accused of using “veiled” tactics and of “tricking” people. 

Right now, I have no particular desire to describe women as “adult human females” or to talk about “the sex class who gets pregnant”. I’m perfectly happy with “women” or “women and girls”, only I wish to avoid endless, disingenuous lectures on why “it’s not just women who get pregnant!” or “women-only spaces are for women with penises, too!” Women are forced to over-explain or resort to circumlocution when describing our own bodies and lives, whereupon the words left to us are seized upon as “dogwhistles”. Look! She’s still saying it, only this is even worse!

One of the things which annoys the witch-hunter most, and makes the constant renewal of witch-hunting guides a necessity, is the failure of designated witches to “act evil” in a straightforward manner. When we are ordered to avoid particular phrases, the expectation is that we will fail. Our true intent will be exposed, and everyone will agree that all we ever wanted to do was offend. 

Otherwise it might start to look like we are the victims of bullying here

That so many of us continue to find workarounds, in order to say what we mean, must then be recast as particularly sinful. Otherwise it might start to look like we are the victims of bullying here. 

A domestic abuser will get a degree of satisfaction from provoking a reaction that he can claim shows that his victim is crazy, or that he is acting in self-defence. It can be the calmest response that unsettles him the most. Calmness is superior, cunning, proof of just how devious women are. The abuser is forced to explain to others what we are “really” like and what we “really” mean.

This is what I think of when I see the latest Malleus-style missives, offering to explain to the uninitiated what “terfs” are really up to. They remind me of the man who tells your colleagues, your friends, all potential allies, not to be taken in by you, however reasonable you sound. 

It’s the man who is priming his audience to respond to the most carefully worded complaint with suspicion. The man who plants the idea that the more evidence you collect, the more of a plotter you are. The man who can convince people that your failure to match his rage and aggression shows that you prioritise making him look bad. 

It’s the man who makes others feel clever by steering them clear of the trap you’ve been setting with your careful words, your logic and your appearance of vulnerability. The contemporary witch-hunter’s guides — just like the originals — appeal to a desire not to engage with difficult realities (male violence, female inner lives) whilst flattering the ego of the reality-shirker. Ha! Thought you could catch me out with “female boundaries”. I know your game!

Witches do not exist. If they did, no one would have to go to the trouble of writing guide after guide on all the subtle, blink-and-you’d-miss-it evil qualities to look out for. 

As Maya Angelou put it, “when people show you who they are, believe them the first time”. Even when they’re that most frightful of things, a woman expressing feminist beliefs whilst sounding “innocuous”.