Please vote for Labour - even if they won't say what a woman is

I’m seeing a lot of people on my timeline say that they won’t vote for Labour, because Labour “doesn’t know what a woman is”. I am going to plead with you to suck up Labour’s imperfections and cowardice, and vote for them on 4 July – because the alternative is terrifying for women.

As a country, right now, we are in a dire state; and most of the horror is being visited on women.

The period of Tory rule – especially in the last 4 years – has been unspeakably awful for women and girls.

Lockdown saw a huge rise in domestic abuse of women and children; and an intensification of abuse and assault of women in public space. Rape prosecutions have decreased, and there’s been a rise in forced marriage and FGM.

Health inequalities between men and women have widened. Women receive worse healthcare than men, experience poorer outcomes, are less researched, less likely to be given pain medication, and live longer in much poorer health than men. Birth trauma is growing rapidly.

The inequality of division of unpaid domestic labour and childcare between men and women has hugely widened since lockdown, and women have much less time, money or energy for leisure than men than a decade ago. The proportion of men paying child maintenance has decreased.

Men spend more time consuming porn in problematic ways. The number of men paying for sex has risen to c.1 in 10. This directly correlates to a rise in men & boys hating women. Look around you! Look at the love for Andrew T*te. Look at your own husband & his contempt for you.

Women are the chief victims of the cost-of-living crisis, which exacerbates the inequalities of lockdown. Women are more likely than men to be in low-paid & insecure work, have less savings, have more domestic responsibilities, & tend to be in charge of household budgets.

Women are going without food, clothing & heating to feed families. Deprivation is highest among women with disabilities, ethnic groups with high poverty rates, survivors of domestic & financial abuse, & migrant women. Women are suffering most under the Tories’ migration policies.

The effects of this abusive erosion of everything that a person needs to flourish are clear: mental health problems in women are escalating far faster than in men.

Don’t be fooled by the disproportionate amount of funding given to male mental health services: women suffer depression, anxiety & suicidal ideation at far higher rates. Women attempt suicide more – men just succeed in higher numbers because they opt for more violent means. (I keep meaning to write more about this but, for obvious reasons, it feels too difficult.)

Women’s and girls’ wellbeing has fallen off a cliff. It’s not something ‘chemical’ or random, and it can’t be solved by breathing and mindfulness classes. It’s a response to how dreadful it is to be a woman or girl living in Britain in 2024.

I DO agree with people who say that it’s necessary to have a clear-sighted understanding of how inequalities and abuses are visited on women because of our sex – and that, therefore, it’s important to use the word ‘woman’ to refer to a sex class.

And, like many people on here, I’m also concerned by the ambiguities and loopholes in equalities legislation that render the protections afforded to female-only spaces and sports vulnerable.

I would love for Labour to use the word ‘woman’ clearly and unashamedly, and I’d love for them to put right the mess they created in the rushed-through 1975 Sex Discrimination Act (the ancestor of the 2010 Equality Act).

BUT LOOK AT THE TORIES. Do you honestly think they have the remotest understanding or sympathy for the ways that women, as a class, have suffered under them? Do you think their commitment to clarifying one small aspect of the Equality Act really makes them feminists?

There is a BIG difference between the feminist position of saying “woman means biological female, and allows us to understand how men visit oppression onto women as a class, and often in ways that exploit or abuse our bodies” and the conservative position of saying “woman means biological female, and that comes with a raft of biological determined aptitudes and behaviours, which justify women being subordinated and men being dominant”. As someone on Twitter pointed out, the Republicans who tore apart Roe v. Wade have a clear idea that “woman means biological female”, but they’re far from friends of women.

(sidenote: If the Tories *really* cared about the EA’s ambiguities and its adverse affect on women’s sports, they would also be looking at s.34 and the rules around private golf clubs etc being able to remain single-sex – but of course they won’t be doing that)

I am imploring you to vote Labour because, in my view, they DO “understand how men visit oppression onto women as a class, and often in ways that exploit or abuse our bodies” (the feminist position).

It’s extremely disappointing that Labour won’t say “woman means biological female” (because they’re afraid of alienating a certain part of the left). But their policies & politicians DO show commitment to improving the lives of women as a class. In my view, that’s the most important thing.

They’re committed to shrinking health inequality, tackling men’s violence against women and its prosecution, tackling child poverty, & enforcing transparency in tackling the gender pay gap.

These policies show that Labour understands that women are oppressed, not because of our ‘identities’, but because we belong to the female sex class - and they act on it too. They just won’t say it out loud, because they’re cowards.

OK, what follows is a sidenote that comes from posting the above on Twitter. But I think it’s important, although it probably won’t make me any friends:

I’m getting increasingly depressed and pissed off by a very large group of people who call themselves ‘feminists’ and ‘critical thinkers’ and say they’re fighting for ‘women’s rights’, but who show VERY LITTLE interest in ANY issues or rights that affect women beyond the fact that certain spaces and activities should be ring-fenced for biological females. There’s also a remarkable lack of critical thinking on display. For people who call themselves ‘free thinkers’, there’s a lot of parroting of the same old mantras and groupthink.

I do get it. I do understand the utter enraging frustration that is induced when you come up against people who are essentially denying your own life experience when they say that ‘a woman can have a penis’ and that a ‘woman is anyone who identifies as one’. I feel that rage and frustration myself, all the time. When I describe the systemic medical mistreatment of women through pregnancy and childbirth, and how it’s fundamentally linked to (among other things) the medical establishment’s chronic distaste for female bodies, it’s enraging to be told that this issue affects (trans)men too and thus isn’t a women’s issue. It feels similar to being told, after talking about men’s appallingly widespread domestic abuse of women and girls, that ‘women perpetrate abuse too’.

I share the hurt and rage that comes from being gaslit like this. It’s AWFUL and breath-taking to be told that I’ve somehow misconstrued my experience of life as a woman - a life in which, every day, women across the globe are all coming up against interwoven forms of oppression and violence and constriction, which are visited on us, en masse, by men, via their greater strength and propensity to violence and sexual entitlement and hatred of women. It feels abusive to be told that this isn’t a structural matter of men oppressing women, but that actually it’s all a random constellation of individuals oppressing individuals; and that it’s done, not on the basis of men exploiting and abusing female bodies, but on the basis of ‘people who identify as men’ abusing ‘people who identify as women’. And the implication that, somewhere along the way, I could therefore have identified out of the abuse that’s been inflicted on me by men, is, well, abusive. So I get the rage and the passion that accompanies this subject, and I feel it too. In my own writing, it’s extremely important to me to use the word ‘woman’ as referring to ‘people who share certain sex-based characteristics and, because of the social treatment of female bodies, experience, as a class, certain forms of oppression at the hands of men, and also certain joys too.’ Snappy, huh?

But I have become concerned that the call for the word ‘woman’ to be used in a roughly similar way as this has become a point of fixation for certain ‘gender critical’ people, to the extent that it’s obscuring (and potentially even working against) numerically more significant material issues for women. ‘What is a woman?’ is an easy and attractive mantra to pose to politicians: it’s snappy and simple and it makes politicians look like ideologically-conflicted idiots when they won’t reply.

And it’s an issue that *is* important - I’m not saying that it’s not important. I do believe that biological males, however they identify, do not belong in the female prison estate, and that their presence makes women extremely vulnerable.
I don’t believe it’s fair for biological males to compete in female categories in the competitive forms of most sports, nor in sports or activities where women’s safety is compromised by close physical proximity with males (although I do think that sport could make a little more room for activities that aren’t about competition and are more about participation - which I think would work in the favour of everyone). I think it’s important to use the words ‘female’ and ‘woman’ in public health messaging about female bodies. I think that female changing rooms should be for females, and that the exceptions of the Equality Act should be used - are they are being - to allow women-only exercise classes to continue to run. I think these, and related, issues are important, and I am glad that there are clear-sighted women with expertise in these areas of law and sporting regulations who are resisting changes to the law that might erode these protections, and are (largely successfully) lobbying for ambiguities to be firmed up to protect women.

But…there are a disproportionate number of women who, mostly anonymously, campaign on this issue and show interest in NOTHING ELSE relating to women or feminism; and who demonstrate a remarkable lack of flexibility, willingness to tolerate disagreement, and willingness to endure compromise and imperfection in order to achieve the best outcomes for women (which is an essential part of the political process).

Numerically, there are far FAR more women affected by the economic and social issues that I’ve listed above, which have decimated the quality of life of women and girls across the nation, than are affected by the Equality Act’s ambiguities about ‘what is a woman?’. In terms of women’s access to sport and exercise, far more women and girls are hindered by barriers such as men’s violence in public spaces; the rise in obesity (which is especially pronounced in women) which is partly a result of the cost-of-living crisis and cheap processed food, plus dreadful rates of poor mental health among women; and relative lack of disposable income and time, than by the possibility that there might be a trans-woman in a women-only exercise class.

I do think it’s important to fight for the legality of female-only sports classes, because all the evidence shows that single-sex facilities and sessions WORK in boosting the numbers and the quality of women’s participation in sport. But I think that fight has to be accompanied by tackling the other issues too - and I think that those former issues shape the sporting participation of SO MANY MORE women than are affected by the possibility that a particular leisure centre might not feel comfortable in exerting the EA’s exceptions that would allow it to state that a class is for females only, AND that a trans woman would choose to attend that class.

Similarly, I think it’s really important to assert the legality of ensuring that certain services for victim-survivors of rape and domestic abuse are for women only; but we also have to be (more) alert to which political parties are likely to maintain funding for those and similar women’s services in the first place AND tackle the very issues of male violence that lead to those services being dreadfully necessary. Do gender-critical people really want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good? Would they rather that no funding for women’s services exists, and nothing is done to tackle male violence against women, than that one particular centre theoretically allows trans women into their women-only sessions?

Sadly, from the responses to my Twitter thread earlier today on this, I think there are an awful lot of gender critical women who DO want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and who can’t think about any women’s issues or rights beyond the ones affected by the EA’s ambiguities.

I’ve been pretty astounded (and not in a good way) by the reductio ad absurdum on show in some of the gender-critical responses I receive when I write about, for example, the utter decimation of women’s rights in Afghanistan. One person told me that it was important because it showed ‘what a woman is’ (ie. it was important because the Taliban were oppressing women on the basis of their sex rather their gender identity, and thus it proved that gender ideology was nonsense). But what about the importance that Afghan women themselves might have found in their own subjugation, the loss of freedom and the violence they’re subjected to? I doubt that they would have been consoled by the fact that their oppression provided material for gender critical people to put on Twitter. That response totally decentred women.

Similarly, Karen Ingala Smith has recently tweeted about her frustration with people who responded with ‘what is a woman?’ to Jess Phillips MP, when she was reading out a list of all the women and girls who have been murdered in the last year. As Karen says, “Jess Phillips has said in parliament that she believes women survivors should have single sex services. But even in she hadn’t, can we focus on the issue of sexual violence, please…It pisses me right off when so-called GCs de-centre women.”

I was brought to tears at a GC-and-feminist event earlier this year, where there was a noticeboard on which attendees were asked to stick stars beside the women’s issues that they thought were more important in the present moment. Around 95% of the stars were stuck beside “trans women in women’s spaces”. Male violence WASN’T EVEN ON THE BOARD. I asked for a pen to write it on, and a woman said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea. I hadn’t even thought of that’. I actually cried. So, as well as pleading with you to vote for Labour, I also want to plead with you to consider that maybe there are enough people already dealing with the EA’s ambiguities and how they affect women - and that, yes it is an important issue - but we could really do with more women fighting on behalf of other issues too, please - especially the ones (such as male violence) that are particularly hard to confront, have no simple or snappy slogans, and have no easy solution.

A common retort of gender-critical people is that unashamedly possessing a clear definition of ‘woman’ is the foundation for any and all woman-oriented action and that we can’t tackle health inequality, gender pay gap, male violence, etc, if we can’t define the word ‘woman’. I think we need to look beyond Labour’s reluctance to repeat the gender-critical mantra, and look at their policies, their politicians, and their past record. Labour use the word ‘woman’ ALL THE TIME, and clearly in relation to the structural oppression that women experience. Their manifesto refers to ‘women and girls’ as survivor-victims of male violence and misogyny. They’re not talking about ‘uterus-havers’ or ‘menstruators’; they’re talking about ‘women’, in the sense that 99.9% of the population use the word all the time. If anything, their reluctance to use the word ‘men’, in the context of naming the agent, is more unfortunate. They are clearly not engaging in some post-modern exercise of removing the word ‘woman’ from common parlance and law, and Labour are hardly about to completely dismantle the Equality Act and its exceptions, which is legislation that THEY put together. And so what if some Labour party politicians consider trans women to be part of the group of people vulnerable to male violence, along with women and girls? (I mean, they are.) Would you really rather that women’s services were defunded by the Tories, and that male violence was approached without a proper understanding of misogyny, than that the odd trans woman might benefit from increased political investment in this area?

There are many who criticise the trans rights lobby for trying to make politicians repeat the dogma of ‘trans women are women’ but who, themselves, can’t allow politicians off the hook of repeating the gender critical dogma of ‘a woman is an adult human female’. This issue is enormously divisive, and while I’d much rather that Labour were more unashamed in defining their terms, I also understand why they’ve made the political decision to obfuscate.

Labour aren’t perfect.

There *isn’t* a perfect feminist party; that’s why feminism exists. Someone on Twitter told me that I was voting for crumbs, when I should be voting for cake. But no political party is offering cake to women in this election. We need to vote for the party that will end the enormous suffering that women are enduring under the Tories. And voting for Labour is the only way to do that. Even better, join Labour and lobby for women’s rights from the inside, because they’re the only party who has a history of actually understanding women’s structural oppression. And please, if you’re a gender-critical woman reading this, think about putting your time and energy into a wider variety of feminist campaigns.