Institutional feminism against women

This year, the prosperous end of Britain’s middle classes packed up their John Lewis hampers and flocked to Hay Festival to applaud a men’s rights activist. Naturally, she would never describe herself that way. On the contrary, Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, still presents herself as a feminist icon. To that end, she was invited to sit alongside a glittering panel of esteemed political women who have each done their utmost to demonstrate that females can be every bit as venal, self-serving and catastrophically detached from ordinary people as their male counterparts.

Chair Katya Adler was reluctant to break up the girl boss love-in on stage by accepting tough questions from the audience. But thankfully, two lesbian protesters were braver. Standing with a banner reading “Julia Gillard Destroyer of Women’s Rights”, the pair forced the panel members to confront their legacy.

One told me why:

It was all just so unbearably smug. One after another they talked about misogyny, sexism and the abuse women in public life face, but not one of them was prepared to confront what their own politics has done to ordinary women.

There was Julia Gillard, whose government embedded gender identity into Australian law, Harriet Harman, the architect of the Equality Act which protects “gender reassignment” and Ruth Davidson, who backed gender self-ID in Scotland, all congratulating each other for being brave feminist truth-tellers while completely ignoring the biggest grassroots feminist movement in decades. Jess Phillips was nodding along from the front row.

And uncomfortable though it may be for Hay’s feminist aristocracy, she is right. In practical terms, Gillard has done more to roll back women’s rights than a manosphere goblin like Andrew Tate or any of his greasy online imitators ever could. Unlike the bros who sell misogyny to disaffected teens online, Gillard embedded it into law while being applauded for her feminism.

In 2013, her government inserted “gender identity” into Australian anti-discrimination law while leaving sex-based protections dangerously porous. The consequences have since rippled through female-only spaces, services and associations, allowing men who identify as women to challenge exclusion from everything from women’s gyms to lesbian networks.

Most absurdly, the recent Giggle v Tickle case saw a women-only social-media app successfully sued after excluding a man who identified as female because he looks obviously male, which was deemed to only apply to “transwomen”.

Yet there is little sign of remorse. If anything, Gillard appears more embedded than ever within the institutions that helped normalise this ideology. As the protesters pointed out to me, she now serves as chair of the Wellcome Trust, an avowedly trans-inclusive health research body.

Gillard is far from the only political woman to have shafted her sisters. The tents at Hay were stacked full of them. Towering (metaphorically) above the rest was Nicola Sturgeon, who is set to take time out from auditing the cutlery drawer to have a “candid conversation about a high-profile career played out in the glare of the public gaze” with Francine Stock.

Sturgeon’s obsessive pursuit of gender self-identification brought Scotland to the brink of effectively abolishing legal sex categories altogether. Under her proposed reforms, men would have been able to become legally female by declaration alone. Women who objected were treated not as constituents with legitimate safeguarding concerns, but as “transphobic”, “misogynist”, “homophobic” and even “racist”, in Sturgeon’s telling.

It was only the extraordinary vigilance, tenacity and courage of For Women Scotland campaigners Trina Budge, Susan Smith and Marion Calder that prevented Scotland effectively adopting legal gender self-ID. Oddly, the three women behind one of the most significant feminist legal victories in modern British history did not receive invitations to the festival.

Just as no one owns the word “Christian” or “conservative”, no one owns the word “feminism”

Of course, the political women platformed at Hay call themselves feminist. Perhaps once they were. But now, looking at the deeds below the words, it seems quite clear that “feminism” is simply something they grip onto to deflect criticism.

Just as no one owns the word “Christian” or “conservative”, no one owns the word “feminism”, and the factions and tensions within it are every bit as deeply held and combustible as disagreement over transubstantiation. It is a philosophy and movement which attempts to represent the interests of half the globe. But the one central tenet anyone claiming the term must surely accept is that sex shapes human life; at its worst, it determines who is raped and who is the rapist, who is the punter and who is the prostitute. At its best, who is mother and who is father. Yet all of the elite political women platformed at Hay deny this most basic truth. This is in part because, as very successful women, they are more insulated from it. Julia Gillard will never have to suffer the indignity of being on a mixed-sex hospital ward, and Sturgeon quite clearly won’t be using the unisex changing rooms at Marks and Spencer (though bets are now off with prisons).

As the self-identified “gobby feminist” Jess Phillips acknowledged at Hay, all institutions are sexist. Asked why Labour has never had a UK-wide female leader, she explained, apparently without a flicker of irony, that “every institution that every single person in this room works for is led by the patriarchy”.

Curiously, Phillips did not stop to consider whether her own willingness to subordinate female safeguarding to gender ideology might have helped smooth her path through those institutions. She did not reflect on her role in attempting to weaken protections for women whose husbands adopt trans identities, nor on her vote against a national inquiry into grooming gangs.

Politics, of course, is the art of compromise. But when women advance their careers by sacrificing the rights and safety of less powerful women, they may well qualify as successful politicians. Feminists, however, they are not.

It is telling that the women platformed at Hay were drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of elite institutional feminism and trans activism. The women who fought back, the grassroots campaigners, whistleblowers, dissenters and ordinary women forced to absorb the consequences of these policies, remained largely outside the tent.

Apparently institutional sexism is everywhere, except within the political culture that rewards women for ignoring the interests of other women.