Midway through 2024’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler takes time to address the issue of feminists (or TERFs, as she likes to call them) being hounded by supporters of her own theories. “TERFs fault ‘trans advocates’ for being shrill and for attacking them on social media,” she writes, “and some of these insults and threats are surely unjustified and self-defeating.” 

While “unjustified and self-defeating” isn’t quite what I’d call this sort of thing, perhaps we can agree that this is a start. Thanks, Judith! But wait! “At the same time,” Butler adds, “[TERFs] seem not to understand that they are calling into question the very existence of those with whom they argue”:

This is not the same as simply having a different viewpoint and a reasonable disagreement, since the TERF stance is nullifying the claims that trans people make about their lives, their bodies and their very existence.”

Or to put it another way, what are a few “unjustified and self-defeating” threats and insults compared to denying another person’s very existence? Five sentences on from Butler’s initial conciliatory words, we are being told it is “no wonder those who confront this attempted existential nullification are sometimes screaming”. So there you have it, TERFs. You might not like the abuse but what do you expect? If you will keep “inflicting a form of psychic violence on trans people”, a few measly rape and death threats are bound to come your way. 

I’d be lying if I said I was shocked that Butler takes this approach. It is, as Jenny Lindsay shows in Hounded, her brilliant new book on the harms caused to women by the gender wars, entirely predictable. The “crimes” of feminists who chip away at the beliefs of gender identitarians must always be exaggerated, or even invented, to match the punishments already being meted out to them. 

At the start of Hounded, Lindsay lays out the three core beliefs which multiple women have faced threats of violence, loss of work opportunities, psychological bullying, social ostracism and more for daring to express:

… women are materially definable as a class of human being […] women (as adult female humans) are culturally, legislatively and politically important, with their own sets of needs, rights and concerns […] women have a right to meet and discuss freely that which affects their lives profoundly.

Even as she does so, however, Lindsay acknowledges that anyone of the Butler persuasion who happens to be reading will feel that “everything I have written above contains several problematic phrases often referred to as ‘dog whistles’”. 

Such people might argue that even if Lindsay’s statements appear benign, their implicit intent is to discredit trans people’s account of themselves. In the world of Who’s Afraid of Gender?, a belief such as “women are materially definable as a class of human being” is recast as meaning “TERFs […] think of their sex as property, something stolen from them”. “Like Trump, Orbán, Meloni, the Vatican, and all others on the Right who refuse self-determination as the basis for sex reassignment,” writes Butler, “trans-exclusionary feminists argue that gender mutability is an illegitimate exercise of freedom, an overreach, an appropriation.” To which I would say, no, they don’t. Feminists just know humans can’t change sex, and that this has social and political salience. There’s no extra hidden meaning. Then again, I would say that, wouldn’t I? 

It’s been ten years since I first wrote about this particular topic. “It is a common feature of many women’s houndings,” writes Lindsay, “to see statements or acts they believe to be fairly neutral or, if definitely ‘gender critical’, well-expressed statements or reasonable opinion, be reframed as less benign or even malicious”. I did not experience the same degree of suffering as the women whose job losses, public shamings and physical assaults Lindsay covers — women such as Jo Phoenix, Rosie Kay, Gillian Phillip, Maria MacLachlan, Maya Forstater and others (including Lindsay herself). Still, I remember the shock and bewilderment of “but I didn’t say that at all”, that feeling of watching, as Lindsay puts it, as a comment “starts to take on a life of its own, spiralling into accusation after accusation, twisting itself out of all recognition along the way”. 

Today, when I read that Judith Butler thinks women such as me “unwittingly affiliate with right-wing politics, some of which are overtly fascistic”, it doesn’t upset me in the way it once would. It is too mad, and it is nothing to do with my words not being clear enough (as Lindsay reminds us, “the position of women who find [gender] ideology harmful has been set out repeatedly” — it doesn’t stop it being grossly misrepresented). This is not to say the misrepresentation is acceptable. The harms outlined in Hounded are, as Lindsay writes, not “something any woman should become wholly used to”. 

This is why, of all the books that have written about sex, gender and feminism in recent years, Hounded is the one I would most like those who declare themselves to be somewhere in the middle — “the pleasantly ignorant or curiously baffled friends, loved ones and family who do not completely understand what is going on” — to read and engage with. Hounded is a calm, meticulous, compassionate book on a deeply painful topic, a book which somehow manages to capture the insanity of it all and expose the human cost. So many women have been utterly monstered, only to have their suffering justified by ludicrous accusations of “existential nullification”. If you are watching from the sidelines, you can use that as an excuse to say “both sides are as bad as each other” — but this is simply not the case.  

Like so many others, I have lost count of the number of conversations I have had with people who declare themselves “in the middle” — meaning, they agree with some or all of the core beliefs Lindsay sets out, but have convinced themselves that “TERFs” must believe something different, otherwise no one would treat them so badly. Or else they agree with the beliefs, but justify their silence on the basis that they are kinder and more empathetic than the women who dare to express them out loud (the kindness and empathy tend to be somewhat selective). Or else they find it inconceivable that anyone would make the kind of statements trans activists make if they were not in some sense true. Scratch the surface, though, and what it often comes down to is a combination of ignorance and fear. 

For years, cowardly politicians have been telling feminists that what the gender wars needs is “more light, less heat” — a response that ignores the sheer quantity of sober, reasoned discourse that has already been provided, instead suggesting that everyone just needs to calm down. We are beyond the point at which feminists need to make their case that sex matters, a case that Lindsay neatly sums up on the first page of her book. 

What we should do now is take account, as Hounded does, of how and why such terrible behaviour towards good women took hold with such speed, amongst so many who consider themselves the “good” guys. It wasn’t deserved. There was never an excuse for the “screaming”. If you don’t actually think the next woman being shamed is “existentially nullifying” others — and no one actually thinks it — now’s the time to speak.