Use your voice. We are not in Afghanistan.

There is a lot of writing on Substack and elsewhere about “finding your voice”.  Some of it is good, but a lot of it is simply blandly motivational jargon passing for wisdom. 

If you ask me, anyone who uses the word “journalling” should never be allowed to write another word. But you wouldn’t come to me if you want to be soothed into self-deceptive noodling. Have I written such articles about this, or indeed taught “masterclasses” in it? Indeed I have and doubtless will again. Well, there you are: I speak in tongues.  

One of the best ways to “find your voice,” though, is to be told to shut up: to be told your voice doesn’t matter; to be told that the things you want to say cannot be said. This is fuel for the fire. If a voice does not come after that, you might as well give up. If you are told your voice doesn’t matter, then you need to make damn sure it does.  

Though you might find this easier said than done.  

I have been thinking about this a lot lately as I have watched so many women find their voices at a time when others are literally losing theirs. There is much discussion about whether people should stay on X, since Elon has (to no one’s actual surprise) proved to be an erratic and silly man whose pronouncements should be taken with a pinch of… whatever your preferred white powder is. 

Has he let down Twitter? More than likely. Has he promoted dubious lunatics? For sure. Will he smash up his own Lego? Quite possibly. 

But X remains the place where, despite vile harassment and threats, many women who did not, who would not, buy into the gender bullshit found each other, exchanged information and became a force.  

I have chatted on X with women in Canada, Spain, the US, New Zealand and Australia who were not convinced that trans activism was “the new civil rights”. On the contrary: they felt women’s rights were being eroded. These connections remain important.  

There is a strange source of patriotic connection to come from “Terf Island,” the place where women refused to lay back and think of England. Instead, where we could, we voiced our objections –  philosophical, moral, legal – to an “activism” that presented itself in progressive drag. Underneath and visibly bulging, though, was the denial of biology and of reality: the need of men to be included or even to own everything that women had fought for. Even our language. Our names. Our own bodies, our own experiences.