International Women's Day? What about the men?

Women can't seem to have anything that's just for them.

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, and you don’t have to have too much female intuition to predict how it might go. In a media group I belong to, someone was looking for PR for a male client who wanted to get publicity by asking why people pay more attention to IWD than to International Men’s Day - after all, men do have a tough time, apparently. This tone-deaf need to centre male people on the one day of the year female people get for themselves happens every 8th of March, so much so, that each IWD the comedian Richard Herring spends the whole day painstakingly replying to men on twitter who ask, “International Women’s Day? When is International Men’s Day then?!”, with the simple reply, “It’s November 19th”. It’s long been observed that the idea that women get something ‘just for them’ - IWD being one example, feminism being another - makes some men more than just a little bit uncomfortable.

Herring’s IWD antics are starting to feel a little dated, though, as we find ourselves in a place where, rather than continue to laugh at people who don’t want women to have anything ‘just for them’, we have instead allowed this behaviour to go stratospheric, with the idea that women can have their own spaces, sports, shortlists, panels or even prisons now hotly debated and considered by some to be regressive and bigoted. And of course, we can’t have IWD ‘just for us’ either - Hershey’s are one of several companies who have come under fire for including trans identifying males in their advertising and promotion around IWD.

At the moment I’m working hard on book 4 and much of what I’m writing is about the ‘androcentric narrative’ and how this has skewed the way we understand the female body - and how we women feel about living in one - for centuries. (Androcentric is a most useful word, literally meaning ‘males at the centre’). Yesterday I explored deeper the stories we tell about the sperm and the egg (some of which I touched on in the new edition of Give Birth like a Feminist) and read all kinds of fascinating pieces of scientific research into conception. Did you know that, rather than just sitting around hoping to get fertilised by the heroic ‘winning’ sperm, the egg in fact plays a key role in attracting the sperm to her, not only by using her hormones to make them stronger swimmers, but even by choosing which sperm she does or does not attract? This story is probably a long way from the one you were told at school, often illustrated by a cartoon of an ‘active’ sperm in a superhero cape meeting up with the ‘passive’ egg who has lipstick and long fluttery eyelashes. Over the top of the biological reality of human conception, we superimpose our culturally constructed and androcentric ideas about gender. Even at a cellular level, we centre and prioritise men.

When we write about biology, it’s vital we try to override this centuries old habit of androcentrism and make clear the distinction between sex and gender. In the news today, the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender have called for the NHS to reinstate the word ‘woman’ on their cancer and pregnancy web pages, with a letter signed by over 1200 people (including me, and you can sign it here). Another petition that it is crucial to sign is this one from Sex Matters, that calls on the government to update the Equality Act to clarify that the characteristic ‘sex’ is biological sex. To protect women and their rights in a world that consistently and unashamedly centres male people - everywhere from the stories about our bodies to our international ‘day’ - it’s never been more important to be clear about the distinction between our biological reality and our inner sense of who we are or wish to be. Words, and the definitions of words - sex, gender, male, female, woman, man - really matter here.

Some of you who have been following me in the Book Forge for a while may remember that last Autumn, as I started thinking about book 4, I bought a few books, some of them about female bodies.

I was reminded of them this week when I read a Guardian review about Womb by Leah Hazard. Hazard has been clear on social media for a while now that her book will be ‘inclusive’ and describes herself as a ‘devout believer in the power and wisdom of birthing bodies’. She too seems to have written about the androcentric narrative of the female body and yet at the same time is able to disassociate the womb from the woman - which becomes easier if you are willing to assimilate dehumanising concepts like ‘birthing bodies’ and ‘uterus owners’ I guess. We all simply become ‘meat lego’ - bodies with organs which can be removed from those who dislike them, and transplanted into those who do (according to Hazard, uterus transplant will allow trans identifying males ‘new paths to family life’.) To me there seems a huge disconnect between Hazard’s acknowledgement of the sidelining of the female body in science and her denial of biological reality, just as there is between the apparent aim of her book to recentre and celebrate female power, and the disregard for womanhood and motherhood you have to have in order to reduce them down to organ ownership.

But it is de rigueur. Whether done willingly or as a sort of ‘hostage statement’ made under duress from editors and ‘sensitivity readers’, most books about the female body seem to be falling over themselves to apologise, often right from the start, for the fact that they’ve dared to write a whole book solely about women. Lucy Cooke’s brilliant ‘Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal’, begins with a full page ‘note on language’, in which she explains that, “most scientists agree that non-human animals do not have gender. In this book, the terms female and male refer to an animal’s biological sex…I also use gendered terms such as ‘mother’…most of my audience will understand what or who I refer to with these terms - for instance ‘mother’ may mean the egg producing parent”. The whole thing sounds garbled and anxious from an otherwise assured academic.

Gabrielle Jackson’s excellent ‘Pain and Prejudice: A Call to Arms for Women and their Bodies’ begins the introduction with a stonking few pages on the way women are sidelined and ignored in health care, but then ends with a ‘note on language’. “I am a cisgender woman”, she begins. Although she does seem to get it - “these conditions are under-researched, under-funded and largely unacknowledged because they solely or predominantly affect women” - she does also tell us that “There are many people who have female sex organs…who are not women.” By this logic, presumably those people are not affected by medical sexism?

Elinor Cleghorn’s ‘Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World’, seems less apologetic - there is no stammering, tongue-tied introduction, at least. However, she does write that, in the past, '“being a woman was conflated with, and reduced to, ‘female sex’”, seeming to suggest that the sexism inherent in the idea that female bodies make us inferior could somehow be solved if we stopped conflating being a woman with having a female body. “Of course”, she adds, “not all women have uteruses, and not all people who have uteruses, or who menstruate, are women”. This is only true if you change the definition of the word woman, and as I’ve repeatedly said since I started writing about these issues, the people you are serving when you do that are male. It is male people who wish to identify as women, who are the key beneficiaries of the uncoupling of the word ‘woman’ from the reality of biological sex. Unless you keep repeating the messages that ‘not all people who menstruate are women’ ‘it’s not just women who give birth’, etc, that thing we are all supposed to believe - that a trans woman really IS a woman - can’t really be true. If you can get an authoritative voice like Cleghorn to repeat these reality denying messages, it’s even better.

Strangely, whilst trans activism on the one hand wants to divorce the idea of periods, pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding from the idea of ‘woman’, on the other hand there is a growing drive to suggest that male people can experience all of these things, in particular the most accessible - menstruation. I can still remember when I was first writing My Period, and I was discussing my excitement about the project in a facebook group of doulas and midwives. One of them suggested that I make the book inclusive to young trans identifying boys (remember this is a book for 9 to 12 year olds), by including information on how to simulate a period. She sent me this video, which as you can see has been on youtube for 7 years now and had 1.4 million views. This is neither new nor niche.

And just this week I was sent this youtube video, a compilation of trans identifying males who speak about a variety of different female biological experiences. Again, do not make the mistake of thinking this is niche. At least two of the people featured in this film have a huge following on social media, lucrative advertising deals with leading period product brands, and one of them - Dylan Mulvaney (pictured with the tampon in the centre of the still) - has been received at the White House.

So - female people have to deny our biology, whist male people simultaneously lay claim to it? I hesitated to share the above clip, because it really seems to be lampooning people and, well, I guess putting it here doesn’t really fit with my personal female socialisation to ‘be kind’. So let me be clear, I am absolutely fine for people to identify as they wish, dress as they wish, and love who they wish. But, if you watch the film, you will see that this takes us into somewhat different territory. This is delusion, and science denialism, as well as the appropriation of female experiences that feels, frankly, insulting. And the funny thing is, that almost everything the people in this clip are saying, is echoed in the book ‘disclaimers’ I shared with you above. “Being a woman should not be conflated with female sex” “Not only women bleed” - Cleghorn, Jackson, Hazard et al said it, so it must be true.

Ideologically, this biological denialism - so easily spread by apps like tiktok - is harmful, in particular to young people (most often females), as has been documented this week in Hannah Barnes’ bestselling Time to Think, which exposes the medical scandal at the Tavistock, where large numbers of young people who were gender non conforming, autistic, gay, or struggling with mental health issues or difficult backgrounds, were affirmed as trans and put on irreversible medical pathways. People who participate in the so-called ‘inclusivity’ of saying that ‘there are people with female sex organs who are not women’, presumably feel that they are ‘being kind’, but in fact, the reality is quite the opposite - they are propping up the precise misinformation and confusion upon which the Tavistock scandal was built. A book about being female that confuses the reality of our sexed bodies with the nebulous concept of gender identity, and a female teenager who thinks they can literally become male are not unrelated - they are both parts of the same picture.

And it’s a picture that, as always, centres men. So happy IWD everyone. Until we’ve reached a point where sexism no longer exists, I’ll be sticking with the reality of sex. In an androcentric world, I’ll continue to upset people by being gynocentric. I’ll keep centring women and insisting that some things - days, feminism, sports categories, spaces, shortlists, books about female bodies, periods, childbirth - are ‘just for them’. And I will tell the truth, even if it is unkind.

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