In the never-ending, and frankly boring, debate around “trans” issues, women are, in perpetuity, driven to raise objection — vocally, physically and legally — to what is being stolen from them. These losses include our jobs, women-only services, prison cells, sports team positions and podium places, amongst many other concrete and well-documented losses.

This morning many women with a keen eye on the debate were angry and upset when faced with the image of a man, dressed as a “pregnant” woman, pretending to have a still born baby and the subsequent “miscarriage”. The accompanying words — “This is the reality of trans pregnancies, some of our babies turn to angels” — were jaw-droppingly provocative.

There was no baby, because men cannot have babies. This man clearly set out to insult women; he found it thrilling. He was rubbing his overweight — not pregnant — belly and clearly deriving pleasure from performing this act. The video has now been deleted from his TikTok after uproar, but the desire and the fetish undoubtedly remain. One of the worst things that can happen to a woman is to lose a baby during a desired pregnancy, yet that distress has become one of the latest fetishes of “trans women” parodying the female experience. It follows men “breast feeding” and mimicking menstruation and period pains for kicks. Anything that is true only of women; any experience women suffer; any difficulty around our health or bodies, is now open to be performed by men for their pleasure. Nothing remains the preserve of women, whether it is something we desire, or the exact opposite. 

New horrors, new ways of degrading and humiliating women, are seen by those of us with a keen eye for such trespasses, but hardly ever brought to the notice of the wider public, many of whom seem aware only of the “lighter” side of “harmless” men in dresses, just wanting to be “their authentic self”. It is, ludicrously, seen as evidence of transphobia to point out that miscarriages are not the “authentic” experience of any man — but point it out we must, because it is a disgusting lie. 

Feminist women are swept up in a constant hurricane of events like this one, created by these jealous, deluded, bitter men. We simply can’t seem to stay on our feminist feet, maintaining the laser sharp focus we used to have on crucial issues, as we lurch from one jab to another aimed at the very core reality of our being female. Feminism is still alive, but depleted and exhausted. 

We can only assume that this is the plan, merely the latest way that men have devised to keep our eyes from all the things we should be doing to improve the lives of other women and girls. The devil makes work for idle hands, but the trans task master keeps making women work, and far too hard, at challenging this delusional nothing they have created, until feminists are too deliriously tired to see beyond the individual man in front of them performing a parody of female existence. 

Women are losing so much more than just our spaces and language. We are losing the ability, energy, and the time to fight to rid ourselves of all the other oppressions systemic and physical, which women experience under patriarchy. The majority of women’s historical feminist work, before the most narcissistic of men climbed into a pair of tights and a wig, and in ever increasing numbers, was chiefly to attain fairer treatment in society and in law, and to eliminate male violence from the world. 

It was a big enough fight before, a mountain we struggled to scale with the majority of feminist women knowing, even as they took up activist work, that such horrors as rape and domestic abuse may not be extinguished in their lifetimes. Nevertheless women devoted their lives to a movement against those things. 

These aims seem even less achievable now our mental, emotional and physical resources are directed towards telling men they aren’t, and can never become, women. No woman in the world, currently, can do anything specifically aimed at improving the lives of other women, without a man in lipstick asking, “WHAT ABOUT ME?”

If women attempt to campaign focusing on issues solely about women, there is an instantaneous, robotic, demand for the “inclusion” of men saying they are women. It is therefore rendered one of two things in an instant; either irrelevant because it includes men, or a target to be destroyed, if it does not. Women’s core organising and consciousness-raising efforts, to challenge the male perpetrated torments of our lives, are stamped into the ground before the seed of our activism grows green shoots above ground. 

This narcissistic sabre rattling — perhaps the most grotesquely obvious “look at me” that men have performed in history — is diminishing our feminist energy to the point where most of us are running on empty and some of us burned out by the roadside long ago.  

The difficulty with saying all of this is that it hands a “gotcha” moment to trans activists who regularly try to halt any challenge to men role-playing being women in its tracks, by telling women they are bad feminists, because they aren’t focusing on feminist issues other than trans activism. Women are thus caught in a bind where they are accused of doing too much, and too little. 

If we cease to be separate from them, by sex, our oppression because of our sex, ceases to exist

Whenever women who are being abused are taken back to the core of why the perpetrator is doing so, one of the hardest things to hear is that it is because the man hates her and is choosing to hurt her. These new forms of abusive men hate us, and so hard they want to be us so that we no longer exist as a sex without them. If we cease to be separate from them, by sex, our oppression because of our sex, ceases to exist. The aim is to blur the line so far between the sexes that we are effectively fighting ghosts no one can see. Feminism is for everyone, and therefore no one. 

In the midst of the murky trans mist the concrete harms that would have been the sole focus of feminist women thrive. We are stretched to snapping point, fighting this ideological spectre whilst in Paris today a child rapist, Steven Van de Velde represented the Netherlands at the Olympic Games, after serving a ludicrous one-year sentence for raping a 12 year old girl three times. There were boos for him, but there was also, maddeningly, clapping and cheering. A woman was gang raped in Paris last week by five men and reports veered into victim blaming because she was in an area where women are prostituted by and for men. Rape, prostitution, misogynist reporting and a failure of criminal justice for women. All of these are feminist bread and butter issues. This is where our activism would once have been channelled with vigour. 

This week a report showed that 2 million women are victims of a criminal act of male violence every year, to the extent that the NPCC called it a “national emergency”. They struggled to name the key perpetrators as male. They blamed one man, Andrew Tate as instigator, rather than millions of men as perpetrators. Feminist women are needed to act like a plague on men committing violence against women, to ensure this dire situation improves. Our feminist voices are needed more than ever. We are here, we are as angry as our foremothers, but we are also elbow deep in protecting our right to every single thing that is female, up to and including the very language about ourselves. 

Feminist women are still fighting hard. Julie BIndel still investigates and tries to abolish the prostitution industry. Groups like “Surrogacy Concern” fight the abhorrent practice of child trafficking via surrogacy. Laila Mickelwait fights to bring an end to sex trafficking in the porn industry. Professor Gail Dines is relentless in her fight against the porn industry, though many women still don’t know her name or what she does. The Centre For Women’s Justice are huge in tackling systemic injustice for women, particularly in court. Joan Smith tackles misogyny wherever she finds it as she has for decades. Many feminist women, working on many different issues of concern for women, continue to try to do what they’ve always done. They now do it against a background of the overwhelming assault by the trans lobby to keep them busy fighting merely to retain the meaning of being female. 

The trans activists frequently accuse feminist women of being “obsessed with trans people” and at the same time trans-identified men insert themselves into each and every area of women’s space demanding to be seen, acknowledged and validated. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so sinister. The same men who paint women as obsessed with them, suggesting we are harridans full of hate who talk of nothing but them, ceaselessly parade their offensive adoption of what we are under our noses. We don’t want to look at you playing dress up, we want to look at men who hurt women. Some of those men are also you. 

So, what sort of shape are women in now that we are fighting on so many different fronts? Not good if we are honest. It takes a huge emotional toll on all of us at some point. It feels overwhelming a lot of the time. One day there is a court win, or a Cass Review and the next some man is being applauded for sticking his nipple in a baby’s mouth. I don’t know how we aren’t all screaming all the time.  

Alongside all of this, women negotiate group politics which are ever more divided and divisive. Sometimes it seems like a “GC” version of the European football championship, where you must pick your team and your players (leaders) and fight it out in the stands, rather than on the pitch. There is to be no switching sides and no truce for a kickabout. The men naturally seem to love this and often roll up their sleeves to help maintain the division. 

What we have not lost is our ability to collectively shine our torch on the crimes committed against us by men

Amidst all this, women try to maintain friendships and family bonds with people who tell them they are bigots. They must work with colleagues who call them hateful. They need to lay out careful arguments, over and over again, until they are hoarse with trying to make others see the blindingly obvious fact that men cannot become women or be called lesbians. They are forced to raise eye-watering sums of money while fighting to retain the right to speak freely about themselves, whilst women with no recourse to public funds, fleeing abusive men, sleep in their cars with their children to remain alive. It is enough to make us weep, and we do. 

Of course, hanging around the women’s movement, there are a minority of problematic egos, opportunist band waggoners, grifters, misogynists, racists, liars and bullies, but there are also thousands of feminist women who are weary but undefeated, downhearted but determined. 

We have lost a lot of things over the last decade or so, things we didn’t know we would have stolen from us. What we have not lost is our ability to collectively shine our torch on the crimes committed against us by men, whether it is the child rapist at the Olympics or the rapist in a women’s prison. 

Men can deliberately drain the feminist battery, and my god are they trying, but we have found the ability to recharge ourselves over many decades now and we will continue to do so. All is not lost.