When someone calls my name in the street or comes up to me unexpectedly, I flinch. I do not like this reaction at all, as it is usually someone telling me they like my work or giving me a ‘thumbs up’ or telling me to “Fight the good fight ”
Gratifyingly, those that approach me these days are younger and younger. Increasingly 20 and 30 somethings, male and female ,who are beginning to resist dogma and understand that fighting for women’s sex-based rights is necessary.
So why do I flinch? Why this debilitating hypervigilance? It is because for years now I have had death and rape threats, and I would be lying if I said they never ever affected me.
When I saw Rosie Duffield who has been paying for her own private security, announce that she will not attend hustings (she is the Labour candidate for Canterbury and Labour’s only MP in the whole Kent) I was sad. But I got it.
I saw on X ,a huge outpouring of support for her as well as the usual hatred and basic refusal to understand what “gender critical” women go through.
Like many, I am now uncomfortable with that phrase (gender critical) but will use it for now. My beliefs are simple: gender non-conformity is to be celebrated and not cured with hormones and surgery. Biology matters. Women’s single sex spaces must be maintained.
Rosie Duffield has had enough and the fact the leader of her party cannot even speak up about the harassment she has suffered is despicable. What is clear though, is that most folk do not know what it is like to live with death threats and I pray they never do.
To be blunt, it is fecking horrible. I am no big fish rather a minnow in a dirty puddle, and I know this. I am a journo whose picture appears above some of the pieces I write. Some properly famous women that I know live with round the clock security and this affects every minute of their waking lives. How have we come to this?
Why should I have received rape and death threats for years because I state that biology is real, and that “gender identity”, a vague, undefined feeling does not trump it. Why should my children be menaced? Why when I do a public event, do lunatic strangers tell me they may be there, but I will not know who they are? Why do I have to walk into meetings shouted at by men in masks? Why am I told to “be careful” even though I am “too ugly to rape”, so they will have to wank into my disembodied head. You get the gist…
Most of this garbage comes online. Is it even real? I cannot know. My kids’ school and several others were once closed down because of bomb threats which turned out, the police thought to have emanated from Germany. Were they real? Who knows? IP addresses are ever shifting.
The police have been not helpful in my case because if they were to investigate every vile threat to women online, they would not have time to do anything else. The paper I once worked for ,The Guardian ,never once asked me about such abuse. In Duffield’s and Rowling’ s case, some action has been taken and a man has gone to court. This is but a drop in the ocean compared to what they deal with on a daily basis. Dr Cass has also been threatened.
You see, the anonymous death threat just evaporates into the ether and women like me have to fake a robustness that we don’t actually feel. Oh I am so laissez -faire about reading graphic descriptions of how I am to be tortured…
Some threats come in writing and these are d
eadly. These people have gone and got a stamp and everything. That is serious. Weirdly, I am now nostalgic for pre-online death threats. When I got them at the Mail on Sunday, both the police and the paper were very supportive. The threats were to do with my ant-racist stance and called me “a Jewish whore” amongst many other unrepeatable epithets. As I said to them, only one of those things is correct.
These letters and phone calls were from Combat 18, a known fascist group. They started leaving me voice mails telling me that because they I had children, they were not going to kill me , just disable me.
Was I jumpy every time I left the house? You could say that. Then I got a lovely letter of support from Norman Tebbit, of all people, telling me that a death threat was a sign that I had made it, which further blew my mind.
The point here, is that everyone acted very differently when the threat came from an organised group whereas now the intimidation is from anonymous strangers. It is designed to silence you and I think, to send you slightly mad. It does send women mad because just about every woman has been subject to male violence at some point in their lives.
This is why I am so sick of those who have never lived with this shite refusing to even acknowledge what it is like to hold this ‘imaginary’ brutality in our minds. At all times. Of course, we let it go a lot of the time or we would not leave the house.
All of it serves as a warning to others to keep schtum. The anger that provokes in me is enough to keep me going even though of course I, have days when I wish I had never spoken up about this assault on women’s rights. Sure I wish my passions primarily involved soft furnishings and artichokes and I wish I could say I am never afraid.
We are not afraid only of violence but of losing our livelihoods. There is no choice for me now. It’s all too late. So I say hold your nerve. The thing to be afraid of is …silence. We are not yet bound and gagged. That is the fear not the reality.
Every day I remind myself of this, not because I am without dread but because I trust that we are the many not the few. We have our eyes on the prize and none of us ever thought defending women against the backlash would be the easiest thing to do. We stepped up that’s all. There is no standing down now.
These threats are absolutely despicable. All the love and solidarity to you and every other woman getting them.
Ditto to what Kelly says Suzanne x