The War on Trans People and Colluding with the Politics of the Right

The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht Review, edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, Constable Press £22. 

Review by Gemma Clark

Some years ago in Glasgow, I was approached by a man who was giving away free copies of religious texts. He caught my eye and seemed perfectly pleasant, so I spoke to him for a while and felt it was alright to be open and honest with him. I told him I teach Religious Education in school and that although I am not a believer myself, I respect religion, want to teach it well, and would happily take a copy for educational purposes if that was alright with him.

He said yes, he was happy to give me a copy of the book for school. When he handed it to me, he looked me right in the eye and told me that if I read the book, he guaranteed that I would start believing in God. I never read the book, and this was partly because I was too scared in case his prediction was right. I am very happy being an atheist and I want to remain that way.

When I agreed to review the book The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, I had the same niggling doubt. Intersectional feminism is an important part of my identity. What if I read this book and started to question the views I have held since discovering feminist literature and having my feminist awakening? What if I read something very compelling and had to re-evaluate everything that I believe in?

Well, I did read the book, and I needn’t have worried. Not because I was pleasantly surprised and found the book to be nuanced or well-argued, but because unfortunately, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht was exactly what I thought it would be…

Although there are some anonymous contributors, one of the first things to strike me is just how many of these essays have been written by people with significant political power and influence, wealth, and/or privilege. Indeed, it causes me to reflect on the effective ban on trans voices in the mainstream media and that people like me, cisgendered feminists who support trans people’s rights, can’t seem to get a word in edgeways, despite frequent polling showing that women like me are the majority.

The book’s David and Goliath framing of the Scottish anti-gender movement felt rather disingenuous to me when it is in lockstep with a well-funded, global anti-gender movement. The phrase ‘gender ideology’ appears many times in this book and I do wonder if those using it realise that it was, if not coined by, then certainly popularised by the Pope.

This is a view of gender that is dogmatic, rigid, leaves no space for nuance, and is colonialist. We now know the indigenous communities of North America recognised and celebrated gender diversity as did other cultures before having a colonialist ideology forced on them. Trans people are not new. Whether the so-called ‘gender critical’ movement likes it or not, some deeply dangerous and misogynistic men share their views. I don’t know how it doesn’t stick in their throats to use the same rhetoric as Matt Walsh, Andrew Tate, Putin, and every male-led anti-abortion organisation.

The global anti-gender movement picks battles wherever it thinks it can win, whether it is attempts to interfere with equal marriage rights for LGBTQ couples in Romania or abortion bans in Poland and the USA. This is an ‘ideology’ with very narrow ideas about what women should be and has no room for LGBTQ people to exist at all (I recommend recent books by Sian Norris and Judith Butler on this movement).

Indeed, some of the women referred to and lionised in Wheesht have links to the so-called Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) who credit themselves with the overturning of Roe v Wade. The Southern Poverty Law Centre considers ADF a homophobic hate group… I consider them utterly terrifying.

The part of the discourse which probably gained the most attention in Scotland was women’s prisons. Isla Bryson is mentioned many times in this book. I will not disagree that this is an appalling and dangerous individual. Prisons deal with highly dangerous people all the time and my understanding is that this individual was always held separately and kept from harming others.

The fact that Bryson is mentioned many times suggests this was indeed a rare case. One good point that this book makes is that only a tiny percentage of women prisoners have committed violent crimes and 80% suffer from mental health problems. Why then, is the discourse not centred around why vulnerable women are jailed at all? Why are they not getting help and rehabilitation instead of being jailed? Something else that makes this case a rarity is that Bryson was jailed at all. Statistics frequently show only 1-2% of reported rapes result in a perpetrator being convicted. Where is the outrage for the women failed by this system every day?

One essayist in the book claims to have been told by a teacher that she had resigned because “I will not teach young girls that if they like playing with toy cars, they’re really boys”. This is an outrageous claim! Today teachers are aware of gender stereotyping and how gender ideas can send children messages about the roles they will be expected to perform or be excluded from in life. Most teachers try not to reinforce sexist nonsense like ‘cars are for boys and dolls are for girls’. Most will tell children toys are toys and they can play with whatever they like (but please share and take turns, of course).

For a movement that always tells us that they like to ‘speak the truth,’ I kept waiting for truths to be acknowledged in this book. For example, the truth that trans people are a tiny minority group, that trans women make up around 0.2% of the population, that trans men exist at all. That trans people are more likely to be homeless and unemployed, that the British tabloids constantly demonise trans people.

If I am to be honest, I found a lot of this book monotonous, but one thing in it I found very concerning and that was the parent of a trans child saying they hope to keep their child away from gender-affirming care until the age of 25. Apart from the obvious cruelty, this is a dangerous road. Some American Republicans are already fighting for a young person to need parental consent to obtain an abortion. Some high-profile leaders of the anti-trans movement in the UK have said they will happily sacrifice abortion and Gillick competence. I don’t need to explain how catastrophic that would be for some of the most vulnerable little girls in our country.

I have heard all of the rhetoric in this book before and probably, so have most people. I had expected that the ideas in this book would have at least been written in a more ‘measured’ way to lend a veneer of respectability. However, a lot of it just feels like scrolling through the Twitter/X discourse of yelling ‘man’ at trans women, which is sadly all too familiar. 

Added in was a dose of fear mongering that this was a brave act due to new Scottish hate crime laws. We now know that misgendering a trans person is not being treated as a hate crime no matter how hateful, deliberate, or just downright rude this is intended to be. The constant talk of mainstream feminist organisations, schools, and the health service being ‘captured’ sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory. References to other favoured Twitter lexicon like ‘mutilation’ and stories of children being indoctrinated by unicorns in books is pure hyperbole not based on reality.

Most of the essays were similar, repetitive, and lacking in nuance. However, I do hope though that my right to free speech on this topic is allowed and that I will not be expected to ‘wheesht’. The abuse and threats received by inclusive feminists, funnily enough, was another women’s issue conspicuously missing from this book.

Imagine what could be achieved for women if scapegoating trans people hadn’t become a distraction and a way for politicians who have done nothing for women to make a few dog-whistle tweets and then be applauded for it as if they have done anything for us?