If you think Saoirse Ronan is right about women's safety, then you agree sex matters.
You can't have it both ways.
When I was 18 I used to drive my parent’s car to parties. Living rurally, these hour-long trips were my only chance of a social life at a time when, like all teenagers, I desperately craved one. I would have to drive myself back, alone, through winding country lanes, in the middle of the night.
On the passenger seat, I carried a weapon of self defence: a blue fedora hat.
Before setting off, I would bundle up my long hair and shove it all under the hat. This way, if anyone saw my silhouette in the car as I drove past in the darkness, they would be more likely to think I was a man. This way, I would be less likely to get followed, attacked, raped or killed. On every homewards journey, I wore the hat.
In my twenties, living in London, I’d have to walk home in the dark. In the winter in the UK, it gets dark around 4pm, so most walks back from the tube station after work would be lit only by street lights. The later it was, the more vigilant I would be. To begin with, I learned to clutch my keyrings in my fist so that a key poked out between each finger. That way I might be able to hit anyone who attacked me with my metallic fist, and deter them. It was a vain hope, but I threaded my keys through my fingers each night, nevertheless.
Then I got a mobile phone, and this became a new form of defence, not to call for help, or to slam someone in the throat with, but because I used it like the hat, as a form of fakery. Any time it was late and I was walking home alone, I used to make an entirely fictional phone call. “Hi honey! Yes, it’s me. I’m just walking back from the tube, yes I’ve had a brilliant night thanks, yes, yes, I’m on my way, nearly home now…”, and on and on I would ad lib. I hoped that any assailant would be less likely to attack me if I was mid conversation with someone. This was probably also a fairly pointless tactic but I did it nevertheless because it made me feel a bit less scared.
Being scared of being out in the world alone: just driving home; just walking home; just being in a bar; just taking the dog out; just getting into my car at the train station in the dark (check the back seat); just walking down a long hotel corridor at 11pm on a work trip; just leaving the party early; just exploring a wood; just getting a taxi; just opening the door to a delivery; just asking directions, just minding my own business…for my entire adult life I have never stopped thinking, either in the back of my mind or the very front, about the possibility of being attacked. This possibility has also been there in many of the things I haven’t done - a myriad of trips and opportunities big and small that I’ve decided against doing because I’m female and therefore potentially unsafe.
“That’s what girls have to think about all the time”. Saoirse Ronan has gone viral for saying this simple sentence on a chat show. Sandwiched between Paul Mescal and Eddie Redmayne, Ronan struggled to get a word in whilst the two men, backed up by a guffawing Graham Norton, hooted their heads off about how ridiculous the idea of defending yourself with a mobile phone was. Eventually she managed to say just ten words: “Thats what girls have to think about all the time”.
There is a beat of silence after she speaks during which you can visibly see Redmayne and Mescal’s blood run slightly cold as they realise they’ve committed that most heinous of modern crimes - forgetting to check your privilege. This only lasts a few seconds though as they then remember with relief it’s only male privilege they’ve forgotten to check and that this one carries zero penalties - phew! Ronan herself makes this even easier for them by diffusing the tension with a joke - something else women have spent a lifetime doing, because making men feel bad or awkward could also render us unsafe: “Am I right, ladies?”
Everyone then goes back to chuckling and guffawing and the opportunity to discuss this issue that affects every woman every day on live TV is lost. But not by the internet, which has been dissecting it since it aired last Friday, leading to much praise for Ronan in the press: “Saoirse Ronan's ten words about violence against women earns actress widespread support”, glowed the Evening Standard; “Saoirse Ronan silences men on Graham Norton show with brutally honest remark”, ran the Independent; “Saoirse Ronan shows that when it comes to women’s fear of violence, even the good guys don’t get it”, said Vogue: “The viral Saoirse Ronan/Paul Mescal moment is the perfect demonstration of male privilege” opined BuzzFeed; “Saoirse Ronan's truth bomb reveals men like Paul Mescal have lots to learn”, said the Metro.
Following Ronan’s example, may I make myself a little unsafe here and break up the back-slapping by pointing out the elephant in the room? Because if you’re going to jump on that circus train and start clapping like a performing seal about women’s safety, male privilege, and male violence, then you’re admitting you know what a woman is, and what a man is, and what sex is, and why women want and need safe spaces away from men. And yet this is a position that is consistently framed as pearl-clutching bigotry. So: which is it to be? Do you believe that male people pose a threat to female people, or don’t you?
In Darlington, four NHS nurses have been accused of transphobia for not wishing to share their changing room with a male who identifies as a woman.
One of them is a victim of sexual abuse and says that seeing a male bodied person in the space where she has to undress, triggers her PTSD. But when the nurses raised the issue with their manager, HR said they needed to be ‘re-educated’. The nurses are now suing.
In Scotland, the row over the provision of single sex space for women in rape crisis centres continues. You may be completely familiar with this story, but for those who aren’t: the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre had been run by Mridul Wadhwa, a male who identifies as a woman, since 2021. When he appeared on the Guilty Feminist podcast in 2022 and was asked about the issue of ‘trans inclusive rape crisis centres’, Wadhwa stated that, “sexual violence happens to bigoted people as well”, and that any woman coming to ERC for help who had an issue with male people in a single sex space could expect to be, ''challenged on their prejudices”, and encouraged to “reframe their trauma”. (This was not an isolated case - the issue of ‘trans inclusion’ in women’s rape crisis centres was global - Vancouver Rape Relief, for example, decided to maintain their space as single sex and had their centre repeatedly vandalised, twice having a dead rat nailed to their door.) J.K.Rowling, consistently framed as a bigot, responded to the situation in Scotland by funding an entirely new and single sex rape crisis centre in Edinburgh, Beira’s Place. A month ago, Wadhwa was forced to resign after an independent review found that he had caused ‘damage’ to survivors by failing to protect women only spaces - this after a worker from ERC, Roz Adams, won at a tribunal for unfair dismissal. She had dared to suggest that rape survivors should not have to question the sex of their support staff. Adams described what happened to her as a ‘heresy hunt’.
In the world of women’s health, changes to language that undermine the reality of sex are enforced to the extent that to challenge them, as I did, can lose you your career. Over and over again, as I document weekly, organisations set up by women, for women, now insist that pregnancy, birth, menstruation, breastfeeding, abortion and menopause are all ‘genderless’ experiences that happen to ‘people’.
By uncoupling us from the reality of our biology, and stating absurdities as if they are facts, the meaning of the word ‘woman’ is repeatedly confused and eroded. Meanwhile women continue to state clearly that if this erosion continues and we cannot define what a woman is we cannot protect women’s rights or safety. Without being clear about sex, we cannot defend single sex spaces, or women only panels or shortlists, or women’s sport, or the recording of data relevant to women, or single sex intimate care, or safe spaces from women’s prisons to the ladies loo. The women raising these concerns continue to be told that they are transphobic, alarmist and unable to move with the times. Many other women feel silenced on this issue, such is the power of the heresy hunt.
As I write, two topics are trending along side each other on twitter.
If you’re happy to applaud Ronan’s ‘insight’ on ‘women’s fears’, but you think holding the boundary on single sex spaces is unkind or hateful, then, like Redmayne and Mescal, you need to check your privilege. It’s either bigotry to talk about the reality of sex and how this impacts on women’s safety, or it isn’t. You can’t applaud Saoirse Ronan one minute, and decry J.K.Rowling and other feminists raising concerns as ‘terfs’ the next. They are all saying the same thing: sex matters. And whilst men obviously don’t give it a second thought, women ‘have to think about it all the time’. We’ve known it since the first time we travelled home alone at night, our hair tucked pointlessly under our hat, our keys clutched optimistically in our fist.
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This is what makes Labour politicians bleating on about Male Violence Against Women and Girls so meaningless and sickeningly virtue signalling. We used to be safe from 98% of sex attackers when only females were allowed into women’s changing rooms - when there was even such a thing as segregated women’s changing rooms. Now women and children are exposed to 100% of them due to policies that Labour and Lib Dem Councils are implementing all over the country. That does not square with any professed desire to reduce violence against women and girls.
I wish they would be honest and just say that the desire of a few aggressive men and some deluded youngsters is too scary to oppose, and while they would like to reduce violence against women they are too afraid to do anything about it. Then we might be able to elect some politicians with courage and integrity like Rosie Duffield or Joanna Cherry who might actually do something to retain the safety we had in the last century. So much for “progressive” politics.
This issue has taught me so much about human psychology & that so many people will do or say anything that stops them being ‘thrown out of the tribe ‘ . Obviously, for our distant ancestors this could have meant literal death & some survival instinct seems to lurk in the modern brain , overpowering logic & compassion .
The biggest disappointment for me has been older , high profile women , that I’ve previously really respected pretending to be blind to the issues that this pernicious ideology creates for women & girls when we know they’ve had the experiences Milli details above but are now personally ‘safe ‘ due to wealth & celebrity status .
It’s been extremely ‘unmooring ‘ for me to listen to interviews with - for example/Sandi Toksvig or Dawn French & realise that the ‘ bonds ‘ I felt existed between us , as women understanding & supporting each other within a patriarchal society could be so carelessly destroyed by them .