Should a man run a women's charity?

Maybe - but a trans woman probably shouldn't.

Yesterday the charity Endometriosis South Coast took to twitter (X) to proudly announce their new CEO, Steph Richards.

I have had some dealings with Steph, who is a trans woman in his seventies, not least because we both appeared on an hour long BBC Radio 4 programme together in June 2022.

I’ll be using male pronouns for Steph in this article, because, whilst I respect people’s right to choose their own identity and live as they wish, this piece is in part about why biological sex matters, so I think it’s important that we are really clear, for the avoidance of all confusion, that Steph is male.

Since Endometriosis South Coast announced the appointment, there’s been an outpouring of anger on twitter, and I’ve had some discussion with others online and contact from a journalist wanting my view. “Is it right that a biological male should be appointed to this post?”, they asked.

I think this question needs a little unpicking. There are actually three questions to answer here, and it helps to separate them out. Firstly, should a man ever be appointed to run a women’s organisation or charity? We’ve been here before with this question, most notably in my memory when Nick Wilkie was appointed as CEO of the National Childbirth Trust in 2016, a move that some found outrageous. On the one hand it was argued that this was just a job like any other, and that being a charity boss these days is more about business skills than empathetic advocacy. On the other hand the argument was that the NCT was a woman-founded, woman-centred organisation and that this was a matter of principle. Were we now to expect men at the helm of rape crisis centres, asked Catherine Bennett in the Observer at the time, in a way that reads somewhat eerily given what’s happened since.

And that brings us to the second question - should a trans woman be appointed to run a women’s organisation or charity? Because I think the answer to that is slightly different. A trans woman, whilst he is male, is not just your average Nick Wilkie style businessman. A trans woman is a male person who believes themselves to be a woman, and therefore dresses in stereotypically female clothes (lipstick, wigs, dresses etc) and adopts stereotypically female mannerisms (soft voice, head tilt, tinkling laughter etc) in order to try to be seen as a woman. Working in a women’s charity could be seen as another part of this ‘costume’ or ‘act’. For some, dressing ‘as a woman’ is also part of a fetish in which thinking you are being seen as female is arousing.

There is a specific interest among trans identifying males in women’s biological functions - menstruation, lactation, pregnancy etc - which again, can be a sexual fetish. This changes the appropriateness of a trans woman becoming involved in women’s health issues, and makes it a different matter to simply asking ‘should a man be running an endometriosis charity?’. Even if the trans woman concerned does not have any such sexual fetishes, it is still extremely likely that being involved in a women’s health group will serve to validate their desire to be seen as a woman. But women’s health groups do not exist to validate men’s desires. They exist to improve women’s health - an area (endometriosis being a prime example) that has been sidelined and overlooked for decades - by those with power and authority: men.

The third question which I have to ask is, what about this specific trans woman? What about Steph? Should he have been appointed? And, having had some dealings with him, I have to say no.

My first encounter with Steph was at FiLiA 2021 where he led the protests outside the venue of this feminist conference. At the time, I wrote in the press about the vile slogans used by trans activists at that event and have republished that piece here. Memorably, in a session from Julie Bindel, a woman from Tigray, Zemzem Mohammed, was talking about the rape and abuse of women in her region while protesters outside shouted ‘blow jobs are real jobs’. Anyone who wants to run a woman’s organisation, or indeed, be a Women’s Officer in a political party, as Steph currently is, ought to be standing up against such behaviour, not participating in it.

Since FiLiA I appeared on the Radio 4 programme with Steph and following that, he sent me quite a few direct messages on twitter, and we chatted a few times. Then, we were both invited to the Reith lecture with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I knew he was going to be there because he had messaged me beforehand and I hadn’t had time to reply. I saw him from a distance a couple of times but, in a busy and quite daunting evening, I didn’t get a chance to say hello. Remember - this was a person I had never met before and only had a brief online interaction with! After the event, he wrote a blog about how he had asked to be moved away from a seat just behind me, was provided by the BBC with extra security, and taken to a ‘safe room’ - all because of my presence. After I objected on twitter, he amended the blog (you can read it here and see the sentences he added in bold), but for me the damage was done. This behaviour seemed toxic and I didn’t want any more to do with him.

However, he kept messaging me on and off, asking my views on certain questions etc, and I mellowed again a bit, thinking that perhaps he deserved a second chance. He even asked if his daughter could write a review of one of my books on his blog, which I agreed to. Not feeling able to fully trust him though, I found his messages a bit persistent, and didn’t reply to all of them, keeping a polite distance. Then he made an insensitive remark in response to this tweet, he’s deleted it now but it was along the lines of ‘women who are smiling aren’t being harassed’. Again, there he was in my DMs, apologising for the tweet. It felt a little obsessive. Finally, he messaged me asking my view on this tweet from Katy Mongomerie. “Any comment on this tweet?”< he asked. “Personally, I always viewed you as a reasonably moderate GC and not like PP and HJ.”

I replied: “I adore Helen J and admire the courage of KJK. Nobody wants to remove any human rights. We just don't want women's rights eroded. You can't change sex, not literally. You can change how you dress and get your certificate. But it doesn't make you literally magically become a woman and become entitled to be in a woman's ward, prison, shortlist or sports team. You and Katy are trans women. I respect and support your right to live in this way. But it does not make you magically change sex.”

“I agree we can't change sex totally but we can a bit”, said Steph. “Anyway can I suggest we meet up one day? I share your concerns about language and worry about the number of girls who say they are trans.”

“Thanks but it's unlikely I'll be able to do that”, I said. “I live a long way away. Please do keep voicing your concerns. And I'm sorry but you can't change sex 'a bit'. I know that's hard to hear but it's the truth. You are still male. I have less oestrogen now than I did in my 30s. I look different too. I am still female.”

And Steph then replied: “I'm more than happy to travel up Milli, I know you live in Somerset. Think about it.”

Perhaps Steph didn’t mean anything odd by this comment but it did jar with me. The kindest possible thing I can say about it is that it’s naive for a male person to message a woman - particularly against a backdrop in which threats are made against ‘terfs’ etc - and say, effectively, “I know where you live.” As a woman who has had death threats from trans activists, Steph’s comment made me pause. I tried to think nothing had been meant by it, but it made me uncomfortable and I did not reply.

This was in October. I’ve had no contact from Steph until today, when, in response to my tweet questioning his appointment as CEO of Endometriosis South West, he tweeted this:

This is a bizarre statement from every single angle. First of all I did not ‘refuse to meet him’ and it’s pretty unfair to tell the world I did. Secondly, what does he mean ‘sex didn’t come into it’ and what on earth are those documents he shared - two random pieces of paper from SIDS research twenty years ago? And finally - and this is the bit when I really felt like blowing my stack - I HAVE OFFERED TO SHARE MY KNOWLEDGE WITH YOU TO IMPROVE YOUR BOOKS???

That comment just goes to show that there is unfortunately no way to surgically remove male arrogance and entitlement.

So no, I don’t agree with this appointment. I don’t think any of these behaviours, in particular when seen together, add up to a person who has women’s best interests at heart.

Although I wanted to share these personal stories about Steph with you as part of the picture, I don’t think we need to get bogged down in a character assassination in order to conclude that the appointment was wrong and that women have every right to be angry about it. It’s important to remember that this is not a ‘one off’, we are increasingly seeing trans women - men - being nominated for Woman of the Year, being nominated for best actress, being encouraged to apply for a BBC programme to encourage more female camera operators, taking women’s places on sporting teams and podiums etc. We have to see Steph’s appointment as another incident among many other examples that women find worrying and insulting. We might not object to a one off incident (although, arguably, we should) but we do object to this wholesale takeover and colonisation; to people mimicking our sex being given more praise and attention than we have ever got for just getting on with the business of being female; to our language being changed, our words to describe ourselves and our biology being replaced and erased; and to the message that ‘woman’ is a costume you can put on or take off. Steph’s appointment to a role concerning women’s health is a part of that insulting picture.

In response to my tweet telling Steph I didn’t need his help to improve my books, he replied:

I think these men forget they are talking to women who’ve seen this all before. I’m 48. Men have been explaining things to me since the early 1980’s, I’ve been ‘told off’ for not being prepared to ‘learn’ from them on a million occasions, and I’ve had decades of creepy men in my DMs, and in my real life too, pestering me to ‘meet up’ with them so that they can have what they consider is a two way conversation but which in reality is a one person radio station stuck on transmit whilst I politely sip my tea and wonder how to escape. We women are familiar with all of this territory. And this is why we’re calling it out. The same old paternalistic misogyny we can spot a mile off, just this time feigning interest in endometriosis. Well, let us ‘share our knowledge’ with you: we’re not buying it.

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