My top ten posts of 2024
Something to peruse whilst you dig deeper into your cheese selection
Hi all, I hope you have had the merriest of festive weeks, and are now enjoying the Winterlude, sometimes known as Twixtmas, or the Merrineum. A time to pause, eat and drink with impunity, and binge on classic movies. It’s also a good time to reflect on the past year and set intentions for the next, which is why I thought you might appreciate a top ten of my writings from 2024, in case you missed any. A side effect of creating this list is that it’s interesting for me to see which posts were most appreciated by you, as this helps me to zoom in on what you would presumably like more of in 2025.
Of course, many of the top posts were from The Word is Woman, but I’ve already done a round-up of those when we celebrated the 50th edition!
The Word is Woman #50
Fifty seems a significant birthday. I may or may not have a similar number looming for myself in 2025, and let me tell you it takes some doing to get to the big five-O. So, given the effort put in to rack up such a rounded and solid numeral, I thought we’d depart from the usual format this week and celebrate 50 issues of The Word is Woman with a Top Ten…
So, without further ado, load yourself up a cracker with that fancy brie, and let’s get started on a round-up of all the other posts from 2024 (and there were over 100 of them!)…
(the paywall is lifted on them all, by the way, so do feel free to share with your friends!)
At number 10 in our chart, it’s this post from back in March, partly inspired by the referendum in Ireland on amending the constitution to remove the word ‘mother’, partly by the Victorian photographs of ‘hidden mothers’ (and I got to them via the missing Kate Middleton and the conspiracy theories about doctored photos, remember that?). This post clocked up 6.6 thousand views.
What is a mother? A person who votes.
OK I admit it - over the past two days I’ve spent more time that I perhaps should have done reading wild theories about the true whereabouts of Kate Middleton, zooming in on ‘that’ Mother’s Day family portrait to see which bit of the sleeve didn’t match up, and deciding if her face really
In at 9, is this post in which I explored language changes in the world of menstruation, breastfeeding and birth, and explained why I think words are so vitally important. At the time, Elspeth Duemmer Wrigley was being sued for saying, amongst other things, ‘only women menstruate’ - the case against her was then dropped. 7.21 thousand people read this one.
Only women menstruate
Sometimes I feel like I am repeating myself here but then I remember there are new people coming to this situation every day and that in an ideological crisis of this magnitude, things probably bear a bit of repeating. As a writer I also have to believe that, just as words and language have got us into this mess, words and language can get us out of it. So…here are some more of those words.
The post in 8th place is a recent one, where I shared that a SAR (subject access request) I put in to La Leche League GB had revealed that the organisation had removed my books from their recommended reading list, and from their website shop. I’ve asked them for an apology and I will bring you news when I have it. 7.27k of you read this post.
La Leche League banned my books
As some of you reading this may know, I am a ‘cancelled’ woman, or to use the wonderful Jenny Lindsay’s term, a ‘hounded’ one. Back in 2020, I showed tiny, almost undetectable signs of questioning gender ideology. As a writer on the subject of childbirth and women’s health, and the founder of the global Positive Birth Movement, I had politely wondered a…
The 7th most read post was this one, written on the eve of the publication of the Cass review and explaining why I feel that those in the maternity world who capitulate with language changes are responsible for the harm being done to children and young people by so-called ‘gender medicine’. Just under 8 thousand of you read this one.
The Cass review should end the maternity world's capitulation to gender ideology
I just got off the phone with a woman who I’ve never met, but who reached out to me for support having experienced some toxic bullying in the world of maternity. To me, it was a familiar tale. I ran the Positive Birth Movement for nearly a decade and, whilst people found it difficult to bring me down because I was not linked to any official body, boy di…
At 6th place on the leader board, 8.2 thousand of you read this post about the Metro newspaper’s tweet that J.K.Rowling had ‘sadly opened her mouth again’ and attacked Sky news for describing a male murderer who had also put his neighbours cat in a blender as a woman. The post is a defence of both truth and the right to speak the truth.
Open your mouth and say it: he's a man
At what point do you know you’re in a dystopia? Or even just in a Very Bad Sociopolitical Situation? This question bothers me. I thought about it in the pandemic; how odd it is that so many of the small details of your life remain the same even though the world outside is carrying on like the film set of Contagion. Do people always just trot blithely forwards, making sandwiches and love and shopping lists even in the apocalypse? What was it like around the average family dinner table in Germany circa 1943, for example? And how does the school run play out in North Korea? “Pass the salt”. “Have you remembered your swim kit?” “Turn that radio off dear, let’s listen to the birdsong instead. Ah, there isn’t any. Oh well, radio it is then.”
At 5 in our charts, this post outlines some of the ongoing online bullying and harrassment I’d been experiencing, and good news of what now feels like something of a personal tipping point, an apology from Doula UK. Just under 9 thousand of you read this one.
Doula UK apologise to me for distress caused by online bullying
Yesterday I was preoccupied with my eldest daughter’s sixteenth birthday which felt like a momentous occasion for me as well as for her, and was a mixed bag of hugs, tears, frantic wrapping of extremely grown up gifts and the first day of her GCSE mocks. Amidst that rollercoaster, an email pinged into my inbox: a response from Doula UK to a complaint I …
In at 4 with 9.2 thousand views, this piece about pronoun use, written when Janice Turner and Andrew Doyle were both under fire for platforming trans woman Debbie Hayton and calling him ‘she’, tries to tread a nuanced path through everyone’s understandably barren field of fucks.
How many fucks should we give?
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:
My 3rd most popular post of 2024 with 13 thousand views was this one written after Saorirse Ronan raised the issue of how women have to think about their safety ‘all the time’, on the Graham Norton show. How could people be applauding her bravery on one hand, and declaring that sex and women’s safe spaces didn’t matter, on the other, I wondered…
If you think Saoirse Ronan is right about women's safety, then you agree sex matters.
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.
At 2, with 14.2 thousand views, this post about the resignation of the founder of La Leche League, Marian Tompson, over the issue of admitting men who wished to lactate and breastfeed to LLL meetings. In her resignation letter, she wrote, “This shift from following the norms of Nature, which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organization.”
Founder of La Leche League resigns over 'breastfeeding men'.
I know a little bit about being a ‘founder’ of something. In 2012, I established a network of meet ups for pregnant women, linked up by social media: The Positive Birth Movement (PBM) - an idea that snowballed rapidly into over 450 free to attend groups all over the world. I was partly inspired by my own experiences at another similar network, the breastfeeding support groups of La Leche League (LLL). Like The PBM, LLL brought women together in the same room to champion and support each other. Like the PBM, LLL was grassroots, with nobody involved making a profit or selling extra products or services. Like the PBM, LLL was a thing of beauty, an absolute oasis for women in need in a world which often tosses pregnant women and new mothers casually aside. And like the PBM, LLL is being destroyed by the falsehood that people can change their sex.
But in 2024, by far and away my most popular post was my expose of the BBC’s false reporting on ‘trans milk’ - read by over 35 thousand people. I’m actually really proud that I was able to dig into the story and get to the truth and I’m grateful for the platform of substack for being a space where such journalism is possible, in these times of slightly ‘alternative facts’. Eventually, of course, the BBC were forced to admit that their report was ‘misleading’ and ‘inaccurate’.
Dear BBC, you've got your facts wrong about 'trans milk'
Last night an interview took place on BBC News with Kate Luxion about the current news story that ‘trans women’s milk is just as good for babies’, according to an NHS trust. In the interview Luxion, who is a researcher at UCL and trainee lactation consultant, claimed that milk from a trans woman was of equivalent or better quality than milk from a biolo…
So it seems like the posts you’ve appreciated the most in 2024 are those that question, probe and expose. Those that say the unsayable, and at the same time work hard to analyse why we find ourselves in this place where so many people are afraid to speak. I hope to up my game on this in 2025 and bring you more of the same, with bells on.
2024 has been an intense year for me, as alongside this substack I’ve written a brand new book, Ultra Processed Women, which is out in April. (Please do preorder it if you can, as preorders really help in lots of ways!) I’m currently considering starting up a whole new substack where I can focus on the topic of ultra processed food and women’s health, with explorations of the impact of UPF and other ‘processed’ aspects of our current world, alongside practical suggestions, videos, recipes, podcasts and more on ways we can all ‘unprocess’ our lives. If you would be interested in this, please let me know in the comments.
But please know how much I appreciate your support here on this substack, and that I intend to keep questioning, probing, exposing and speaking truth to power here in my own style, for as long as is needed. Those of you who are paid subscribers, I literally could not have done it without you. Those of you who can’t pay but who support me any way with the odd ‘coffee’, or just by sharing my writing and encouraging others to subscribe, I also really really appreciate you! Thanks to all of you.
All that remains is for me to wish you the absolute best time as you celebrate the end of one year and the start of another, and send you much love and gratitude for being such wonderful readers and supporters. See you on the other side! Milli x
The whole issue of “trans women are women” came up over on a blog called The Friendly Atheist. I don’t frequent the blog but someone pointed it out.
I entered a comment saying trans women shouldn’t be allowed in women’s sports and washrooms.
Are they ever unfriendly. Accusing me of being a religious nut (not true), a failed athlete (not true) and a MAGA voter (it’s an American blog, I’m Canadian).
These people are completely irrational.
It’s a free to read and comment piece.
https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/atheist-group-faces-backlash-after