For over a century, International Women’s Day (IWD) has been celebrated across the globe to highlight the extraordinary achievements of ordinary women. Held annually on March 8, I used to think it was a positive day. This year, however, I just feel angry.
Although proud of the progress we’ve made, we find ourselves fighting on a new front — and in the unimaginable position of seeing hard-won rights being rolled back.
Incredibly, we’re at a point when even the word ‘woman’ is controversial. We’ve become ‘cervix-havers’, ‘uterus-owners’ and in extreme cases ‘non-men’. Politicians, meanwhile, flounder when asked: ‘What is a woman?’ As an MP as well as a mother, it makes me despair.
The reluctance to defend women and girls is due to a small but very vocal group of trans activists, determined to let men self-identify as women, under the guise of ‘gender ideology’.
What started as an attempt to ensure that a very small minority of people with ‘gender dysphoria’ (those who feel there’s a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity) were not discriminated against has morphed into a powerful global movement which allows men to claim to be women.
By uttering the magic words ‘I am a woman’ or ‘I identify as a woman’, suddenly men can enter female-only spaces such as refuges for the victims of rape or domestic abuse. This is without any commitment to have gender reassignment surgery or take hormones — not that that would make them women anyway.
It was inevitable that predatory men would take advantage of this. It is why we are seeing male abusers, rapists and murderers being called ‘she’ and ‘her’ in court and in many countries gaining access to women’s prisons.
I am proud to stand with a group of courageous women who are fighting back. We have taken part in this Mail photoshoot to raise awareness on the eve of International Women’s Day. Known as ‘gender criticals’ or ‘sex realists’, we believe in some — not all — circumstances, the sex of a person really matters.
The start of a quite long article in, not of course the Guardian, but the Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13165611/rosie-duffield-refuse-silenced-women-uniting-campaigners.html
Of course its obvious to question the motives of the Daily Mail, and no doubt TRAs will just say that being GC is right wing, but its a good summary of what has been happening to women's rights.
Just wish it could be in all papers, or even part of a news channel interview.