For me, the first big sign that the UK might be returning to a more pro-women stance was when Liz Truss announced that she wasn’t going through with self-ID and instead would be strengthening women’s rights to single sex spaces. And I think women like us did that, by commenting very coherently on the GRA consultation. There were a few big pushes to write to MPs as well.
I didn’t trust that entirely. It seemed huge at the time, but afterwards it felt as if nothing else had changed. It was a shock, having won what had seemed a significant battle, to find the juggernaut continuing plough forward as if nothing had occurred.
Stonewall, for me, is another sign that something did turn back then, but that it takes ages for such a huge movement to stop and go into reverse. I think the UK situation turned back then, and it may be starting to accelerate.
Sport should have been another major highlighter of the folly of claiming that men are women, but the delay in the Olympics has prevented that from happening. That said, it’s given countries extra time to wedge their candidates in, so when it does happen, let’s hope it has a spectacular effect.
And everything is not alright in the medical world. That’s starting to wobble as well. But like all the other strands, there’s a huge head of pressure there: massive forward direction, and many very convinced people in positions of influence.
This was never going to be fast, but the size of the machine was revealed to me after the GRA was turned. So many huge companies behind it. But how real is their support? My guess is that it’s more about virtue signaling than a true belief that this is a righteous cause.
The industries that will be hardest to turn (unfortunately they have huge influence, which has definitely been a factor) are those in Silicon Valley, where there are a great many men claiming they are women. Whether that will prove to be a permanent problem remains to be seen. If public opinion really turns against them, we might end up with the fall of huge corporations like Twitter. It would be interesting to see whether use of Twitter has already reached its peak.
accelerate.
But whether and how long it will take the rest of the world is anybody’s guess. And if the rest of the world doesn’t turn, I don’t think the UK will manage to resist for ever.
That said, I think there are small seeds of resistance everywhere. Look at the rise of the LGBA in many different countries. There are signs of women waking up in the US and in some of the countries where self-ID is already in place. I know many people don’t care too much about women in prison, but the optics of locking in rapists with groups of women is pretty awful.
I still believe in the sunlight mantra we have been chanting on Mumsnet for a while. It’s not just prisons where the optics are poor. In so many ways, misogyny has been rearing its head, and women are rising up in numbers. I hope that the fall of Stonewall might begin to have a domino effect on other organisations. Keep pulling!