War, feminism and percentages of rights

In 1982, Australian theorist Dale Spender published her seminal work Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, which used prominent feminists from the Global North as case studies to chart hundreds of years of the policing of women’s speech. 

Spender argued that, under patriarchy, women who reveal themselves to be intellectually competent risk retribution. The dominant systems would prefer them to be unthinking beings — nodding along without disrupting too much of the status quo, or at the very least parroting previously approved lines. 

The rules governing women dictate that independent thinking is frowned upon because a free mind — or worse, a free mouth — is uncontrollable. “How smart are you, truly?” question the suspicious detractors. If you reveal your intellectual prowess (even accidentally), there is hell to pay. Best conceal your astuteness, lest others sniff you out as competition and try to squash your mind, voice, and livelihood. 

I have reflected on Women of Ideas a lot this past week. Do women have a fundamental right to freedom of expression? If they do and the views are lawful, does that mean that all women share the same right to free speech, or are there degrees of freedom based on which woman is saying what and when? 

To test the bounds of this question, we need not dig through hundreds of years buried deep in the history pages: we need only analyse speech (particularly women’s speech) related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The official ceasefire to stop Israel’s 15-month military campaign in Palestine has now, purportedly, come into effect. But debate about the conflict rages on. Generally speaking, the feminist movement in the Global North (particularly in the United Kingdom, where anti-Zionist views are considered a legally protected belief) has been shamefully silent on this issue, with many either downplaying the gravity of the situation or skirting around the issue. I am referring, of course, to support for the pro-Palestinian position. Because from the very beginning, pro-Israel perspectives have been welcomed and widespread across media platforms far and wide. 

They should be, I might add. But the pro-Palestinian position? Oh God, no. That’s The Great Unspeakable. When the conflict started and I made my views clear, a supportive editor told me that I could continue writing for his platform, as long as I never touched this topic. I feel grateful for his candour and honesty. Others simply stopped answering my emails.

Feminists speak about the rights of women all over the world; from the fight for reproductive rights in the United States to the right to education for women in Afghanistan, the repression of political dissidents in Iran, and everywhere in between. All urgently important and righteous topics, but Palestinian rights still represent the greatest taboo of the feminist movement. Why is that? Over the past 15 months, there have been more articles denouncing, mocking or infantilising the pro-Palestinian position than laying out the knottiness of the arguments and the core issues at stake.

On this topic, Palestinian women and girls face unimaginable violence and oppression, which will always be the most concerning issue. According to a report from the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, nearly 70 percent of verified deaths in the 15-month conflict were women and children. Similar reports from experts on violence against women and girls corroborated these concerns. These figures were first exposed by courageous voices from women on the ground and local journalists.

It is worth pointing out how voices that are sympathetic are targeted and intimidated into shutting their mouths and toeing the previously approved line. A South Africa civil freedom monitoring organisation called Civicus published a report, titled “Rights Reversed: A Downward Shift in Civic Space”, which suggests support for Palestine represents 10 per cent of all global repression of free speech in 2024. 

The report argues that “the lack of open civic space is rooted in a number of issues.” For example, in Israel and Jordan governments have “instrumentalised laws to target and prosecute people expressing solidarity with Palestinians through anti-war protests and social media.” In the United States, the report argues that just in April and May 2024 alone:

Authorities detained over 3,200 students, faculty, staff and journalists in nationwide campus raids. University authorities have accused students and organisations showing solidarity with Palestinians of offences such as ‘material support for terrorism’, despite a lack of evidence, and have proposed discriminatory actions such as visa cancellations and deportations. 

According to the report, this has led to “a discernible rise” in the closure of civic space around the world.

I have experienced this “cancellation” process in the form of a backlash against my unapologetic pro-Palestinian views and anti-Zionist beliefs (which, again, are considered to be legally protected philosophical beliefs under the United Kingdom’s Equality Act 2010). It is feminists who are trying to “cancel” me by advocating that I be sacked from my job, removed from positions, and some joking about having me deported from the country because of my perfectly lawful views. She must have no reputation left, they argue. None of this is new territory for me, as I have faced equivalent wrath from transactivists furious that a woman like me would have the temerity to go off-script. Which script was I expected to follow? Who wrote it? 

Why is it that when detractors of women’s free speech are faced with a woman like me, their go-to response is always sacking, removal and deportation? 

My unwomanly crimes have always been plentiful. But focusing exclusively on this topic: I have written five pro-Palestinian articles for Spiked, UnHerd, The Critic (two pieces) and Newsweek, so far. These were the only ones my exasperated editors have allowed me to write since the war began, but I have pitched plenty more. I have attended perhaps 10 pro-Palestine national marches in London (I lost count a while ago), and shared pictures about it on social media. I mock the Israel Defense Forces — one of the most powerful armies in the world — on a regular basis, humorously but always seriously.

This is all eyebrow-raising enough to make me the enfant terrible of the movement, but none of it is anywhere near illegal or unlawful. Women should not be cancelled for sharing lawful views, particularly in solidarity with other women and girls, and especially within feminism. 

There is a double standard within the feminist movement. Some women are encouraged to enjoy 100 per cent of rights (for example, the right to free speech, freedom of assembly, religious freedom and the right to protest) while others must make do with a percentage of those rights. That is not good enough: a political movement as powerful as feminism must either advocate for all women to have and exercise the same rights or it should not advocate for these issues at all. 

Have some issues been quietly excluded from the list of subjects where women’s outspokenness is welcome?

What about the right to not give a damn? This may be the most sacrosanct feminist virtue. In this movement, some women popping off and letting loose are celebrated (as they should be). Are some women more allowed to express their outrage than others? Have some issues been quietly excluded from the list of subjects where women’s outspokenness is welcome? If so, who made that decision, and why? Are women like me allowed the right to irreverence and to be impertinent only 50 per cent of the time or 75 per cent of the time? Who calculates those percentages?

In October 2018, I delivered a speech before the University of Bristol’s Free Speech Society in which I made the case for women’s right to freedom of expression. I stated:

Every time a woman gets no-platformed or faces barriers to speaking freely, on account of her sex, the idea that the intellectual sphere is the sphere of men is reinstated and perpetuated. Some of the rhetoric and the theoretical arguments used for shutting and shouting down women in all aspects of public life (academia included), may have changed a bit but the underlying framework remains the same.

We do not police whether men are allowed to exercise their human right to free speech based on every single position they hold on every political issue. It would be gargantuan to even have to remember which man holds which view. If academia invited and disinvited male speakers depending on how acceptable totalitarian and aggressive activists find their every position, there would be no events held on campuses at all!

I wrote and delivered that speech, but I had no idea what I was talking about because, for me, the worst was yet to come. Since then, I have learned that the most formidable enemy of free speech is not tyrannical governments or the dreaded ostracism: it is the internalised fear that drowns our voices. The women who say the unspeakable (whether it be express support for sex-based rights or a pro-Palestinian position) are testing the limits of how free we truly are. 

As a fellow discourse analyst, the great Dale Spender has always been a personal heroine of mine. But her phenomenal work can always be built on. Yes, all women’s speech is policed. But some women are hyper-policed more than others. 

I will go one step further: Spender was right on the money in analysing the dynamics of male silencing of women, but she is missing a wholesale chunk of analysis about how, oftentimes, minoritised women like me are just as likely to be policed by members of their sex … if not more harshly than from men. 

This is the truth, so why not say it aloud? For women like me, the mistreatment, discrimination and oppression oftentimes do not come from the big, dreaded boogeymen of feminism (men) but from fellow women who belong to better cohorts than mine. 

I have zero intention of living a fractioned life for anybody. Am I guilty of being too empowered and outspoken within a women’s movement? I hear the backbiting of my detractors as I express my lawful views and protected beliefs without fear or self-censorship. “Who does she think she is?” Exactly: who am I to feel so free?