Four years ago, an article I wrote was to change my life. Everyone else’s life was changing too. My diaries from that time are confused, angry and fearful.
In early March 2020 , I published a column in The Guardian asserting that biological sex matters. I had been appalled that Professor Selina Todd, a Professor of History at Oxford, had to have bodyguards because she had attended a Woman’s Place meeting.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2020/mar/02/women-must-have-the-right-to-organise-we-will-not-be-silenced
I maintained then that saying biology is real is not transphobic. It was all rather mild. I spoke of fighting Section 28 and of a former political adherence to queer theory.
I wrote: “The radical insight of feminism is that gender is a social construct – that girls and women are not fated to be feminine, that boys and men don’t have to be masculine… Male violence is an issue for women, which is why we want single-sex spaces. Vulnerable women in refuges and prisons must be allowed to live in safe environments – the common enemy here is the patriarchy, remember? How did we arrive at a situation where there are shocking and rising numbers of teenage girls presenting at specialist clinics with gender dysphoria, while some who have transitioned are now regretful and infertile?”
Then came the bold and apparently ‘controversial’ assertion: “You either protect women’s rights as sex-based or you don’t protect them at all.”
A few days later, the shit hit the fan. A trans person who had resigned from the newspaper dramatically resigned again. Three hundred and thirty-eight Guardian employees wrote a letter complaining about transphobia in the paper. I was targeted as a terrible transphobe, an allegation that would lead to me receiving abuse and death threats, and, ultimately, me leaving that paper. It was a horrible time. The point of rehashing this now is to understand where we are and how we got here.
My jottings of the time are not, as you might think, centred simply on this. They are also full of worries and questions about the coming pandemic. It was March 2020: no one yet knew how seriously we should take it. I saw on the news what was happening in Italy, but was still in some denial. On a group family chat I see my daughter warning me: “Mum, stop saying it’s just a cold!”
On returning from a trip to Amsterdam, I was contact-traced as Covid had been diagnosed at my hotel. A Danish doctor I had met there messaged to tell me he had been called back to work in Intensive Care in Denmark. Stuff was happening, but we had not yet been told to lock down.
A few months earlier, in January of that year, I had been sitting in a bar in Pondicherry in India, feeling bereft as I has just dropped my youngest daughter off to stay in the mysterious community of Auroville. She had booked herself into a hippy house on stilts with a rope ladder. How would she fare? The never-ending challenge of motherhood is finding the balance between holding them close and letting them go. One constantly spins between these poles, and I was swirling.
A white-haired Russian man approached me with what he said was a message. He was a famous artist (I Googled him, obviously). He wanted nothing from me and we just chatted about our kids and the town of Tiruvannamalai, where Shiva is worshipped, which we had both been to. He did the pilgrimage around the mountain every year. He wanted to tell me that my life would change. He couldn’t say when, exactly, but it would be in March. March 23, he reckoned.
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