How many fucks should we give?

Thoughts on pronouns and being kind.

I’m 49, and I hear a lot of negativity about this phase of a woman’s life. The hot sweats, the chin hairs, the invisibility, the 3am chats with the Reaper: there’s a lot not to like. But there’s one brilliant thing about it, that you just don’t hear enough of, and it’s this:

You give a lot less fucks.

An opportunity comes along? You take it. Are you scared? Yes but also you don’t give a fuck. Someone you don’t like shows up at the party? You leave. Do you feel a bit rude? Yes but also you don’t give a fuck. Your hairdresser asks you what you do for a living and you end up giving her a fifteen minute TED talk about males in women’s sports. Are you worried she might think you’re a terrible terf and give you a revenge mullet? Yes, but again, no fucks to give.

In my twenties and thirties, I gave way too many fucks. Every decision I made in those decades involved some version of, “What will other people think?”, being run through my brain. Now, depleted not only of oestrogen, but also of patience and time, I marvel at just how accommodating I was, how readily I gave parts of myself away, and how quickly and easily people took those parts without so much as a by-your-leave. The world will happily take full advantage of a young woman with way too many fucks to give. If I could give my daughters and any other young women my best piece of advice it would be simply: be more menopause.

#BeMoreMenopause. If we could bottle the bold, change-making energy of middle aged women and give it to 19 year old girls the entire cosmos would transform overnight. Rather than asking all the time, “What will others think?”, they’d find themselves striding about, fizzing with angry energy and unapologetically putting themselves first. From bad sex to social injustice, they simply wouldn’t put up with it for five seconds. But instead, we keep telling them to,‘Be Kind’.

T-shirt by Dot Kids

Be Kind - a version of this message has predominated for the past decade in the girl’s clothing sections of every supermarket. The boy’s clothes urge them to explore, play, reach for the stars etc, whilst the girl’s tell them to be kind, or versions of this same message (happy, lovely, sweet, princess, yadayada). It’s been complained about endlessly and yet it barely changes, and even if it did, the wider cultural messaging would stay the same: women, think of others before yourself at all times! (otherwise you are a very nasty person / old / ugly / a Terf / a Karen / have a chin hair.)

Which brings us to pronouns.

I know this is currently the topic of hot debate (more so than usual). The incredible Janice Turner published a piece in the Sunday Times about trans woman Debbie Hayton, and used she/her pronouns for Hayton both in the piece and in a subsequent twitter thread. For the past two days, twitter (X) has imploded over it, and last night the presenter Andrew Doyle, also under fire for having Hayton on his show, deactivated his account.

The anger is not just about pronouns, although they are a crucible for it. People on both sides of the debate actively despise Hayton, trans activists because he is happy to be honest and say that he’s a biological male, and hard line gender critical feminists because (I think) they see him as a damaging individual who shouldn’t be platformed, ever. It’s the latter group who have objected, more than anything else, to Janice Turner calling Hayton ‘she’.

So, a word about pronouns. I am not in Janice’s league as a journalist, but I’ve written for all of the main UK papers over the past 13 years and, in recent times, have written a few pieces in the Mail in which I’ve been ‘edited’ to use female pronouns for trans identifying men. In the most recent, I wrote about a trans identifying man being made CEO of an endometriosis charity, and, although I used male pronouns for him in the piece I wrote here on substack, the subsequent piece in the Mail referred to him as ‘she’.

Did I want to use female pronouns in the piece? No I didn’t. Did I want to get paid to write and hopefully raise some awareness of the inappropriateness of the appointment? Yes I did. Did this compromise bother people? Yes it did, and some of them came after me for it. Did I care? No. I’m 49, remember?

Prior to that, I wrote another Mail piece about whether or not male people could - or should - breastfeed, and in that case, I documented on my substack exactly what copy I filed and how it was changed to refer to the man at the centre of the story as ‘she’. In fact, female pronouns were actively inserted into one paragraph where I had worked hard as a writer to explain the situation without using any pronouns at all. Here’s that piece if you missed it.

Persistence is fertile

Again, I went with it because I needed the work and I thought a piece on it with the wrong pronouns was better than no piece at all. Also of note is that in the original draft I wrote about AGP (the sexual fantasy of yourself as a woman that some men have), and how men breastfeeding is therefore potentially a child protection issue, and that part was removed. But as I said at the time (in the same substack), I knew it would be removed when I filed the copy, but I included it because I knew that by writing about it, I would force a discussion among the various editors about whether or not it should be cut. And that this would probably result in a very interesting conversation in the London offices of the Mail. I felt this was potentially a form of progress.

Janice Turner’s piece is notable for being the first time - as far as I know - that AGP has been explored in detail in one of the major UK papers. In Hayton’s words, it is brilliantly explained and exposed as, “an embodiment of how that person (the trans woman) would like the ideal woman to dress”, and as, “a rare window into male heterosexuality”. The fact that this article has been published and widely read by people who have never heard of this motivating factor in middle aged straight men’s suddenly announced trans identities, has unfortunately been lost in the twitstorm.

Instead of being lauded for their work, Turner and Doyle have been hounded and attacked. Turner has been bravely writing about gender issues for absolutely years - in this piece from 2013 (2013 people!) she writes of Izzard, “Why are feminist ladies so mean to Eddie? Well, because he’s no longer saying “I’m a bloke who likes pretty nails”. He has declared: “Because I like pretty nails I am female.” He is reducing being a woman down to make-up and sparkly shoes.” Doyle has been consistently the only journalist to platform almost every gender critical feminist woman who has ever done or said pretty much anything, including me.

Doyle and Turner are casualties in a war in which women have run out of fucks. Some of those women have been in marriages with AGP men and are, quite rightly, as angry as it is possible for a person to be. Many of the rest of us who hadn’t had that life-changing experience used to think that it was the right and kind thing to do to use female pronouns for men who wanted to be women. After all, what harm could it do? Then we began to realise the scale of the demands. It wasn’t just about pronouns. Pronouns were just a signifier that the user had bought into a wider ideology that said a person’s gender identity trumped their biological sex in absolutely every situation. This meant men in women’s sports, toilets, changing rooms, prisons, refuges, short lists and data sets. And it meant that to protest any of this made you bigoted and in danger of losing your livelihood.

So women said fuck being kind, we’re not using pronouns, EVER. But this seems to have set in motion a spiral in which are all forced to choose an absolutist position between two extremes, with ‘be kind’ at one end and ‘zero fucks to give’ at the other. Anyone like Turner or Doyle or even Hayton trying to tread a more nuanced path (or indeed, feeling like they have to tread this path to preserve their livelihood), is fair game for attack. The argument is we shouldn’t care about Hayton at all because he is Bad. Turner and Doyle are also Bad and undeserving of sympathy now that they have platformed him. Nobody should ever use the ‘wrong pronouns’ for someone under any circumstances, and they shouldn’t give a fuck about the feelings of that person, either, nor of Hayton, Turner, Doyle - none of them.

Is this the #BeMoreMenopause energy I want to bottle and dole out to 19 year old girls globally? No, not really. Saying what you think and putting yourself first is fantastic, but as much as I have very few fucks to give, I hate to see destruction. When I was attacked online in 2020, as much as the people doing the attacking felt they were in the right, literally nobody gained from it - unless you count the enjoyment of booing and hissing at a pantomime villain as a gain. After the show was over, a few thousand women were prevented from ever reading my pregnancy books, the audience moved on, and I was left feeling damaged and devastated. Of all the things that experience took away from me, the worst was probably my long-held belief that all people are essentially good. I’m still trying to rebuild that, because I think the alternative is a rather sad and dangerous position to live with. Yes I’m bolshy and opinionated and low on oestrogen but that’s not the same as the destructive energy that comes when you lose all compassion.

I suppose you want me to end this piece on some kind of pleasing moral conclusion, but I don’t have one. We swim currently in a complex soup. AGP is not a nice thing and it’s probably the driving force behind the trans movement, which is also not a nice thing. Humans caught up in all of that will be flawed and difficult and unpleasant and also - maybe - essentially good. Did I use female pronouns for Hayton in this piece? No. Would I use them if he came round for dinner? Perhaps. Would I have him round for dinner? Probably not. Should people be attacked for making different choices to me? No. We are going to have to find a way through all this, and it’s a shame if that has to involve destruction, but then, on the other hand, sometimes you do have to burn shit down in order to make real progress. Just maybe not Janice and Andrew. My field of fucks may be barren, but I think they are both quite nice.

---

See you on Friday for The Word is Woman. Milli x