I'm heading rapidly for 60 but I'm meeting more and more women who are the product of feminism's fights but not, it would seem to me, feminist.
In their late 30s and 40s, they're hospital consultants heading up large departments, they're heading council departments, they're aiming for political office, they're CEOs or they run their own businesses. They all, every single one I can think of, either run marathons or are triathletes or, at the very least, seriously competitive cyclists. Some of them are lesbians, few of them have children. Most of those I know are politically left-leaning. They are fiercely intelligent and driven and terrifyingly confident and accomplished. There's nowhere in the world they haven't been: most have worked abroad and they're globally connected. And this is just in my small and unremarkable city.
I was out last night with a group that included two of these superwomen. I sat there, the oldest in the group, watching and listening and acknowledging that they are the fruit of feminism: confident, intelligent women achieving their potential and helping to change the world.
And yet... Both of them talked several times about their transgender friends without any apparent questioning of the way some of them slip in and out of various identities. They believe gender is a 'thing' rather than a social construct. They think sex is irrelevant, just a random outcome to be ignored. Our evening of conversation covered homelessness, poverty, earnings — but never in the context of women. Women, men, all apparently equal.
One of them has funded a project in a deprived area to support transgender children and talked about how awful it was that a 13-year-old girl had found help too late to be prescribed puberty blockers and would have to undergo mastectomy at a later date. I and a couple of other women just looked at our plates and said nothing: it really wasn't the place to start talking about it.
I gave three women a lift home afterwards. All of us are old-fashioned feminists. We sat in the car till gone midnight, with the windows fogged up, wondering what happened to feminism that so many of the women who've benefitted from the struggles of their mothers and grandmothers are now what someone described as 'amazing men with vaginas'.