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Inside the 'stay-at-home girlfriend' trend

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Inside the 'stay-at-home girlfriend' trend

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Inside the Rise of the “Stay at Home Girlfriend” Trend

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Like a stay at home mom minus the marriage and children, this arrangement is all over TikTok, sparking outrage—envy, too

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Seven years after allegations against him first emerged online, Harvey Weinstein is back in court.

When the accusations surfaced in late 2017, the American actress Alyssa Milano tweeted: "If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'Me too' as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem."

This gave birth to what we now know as the #MeToo movement and a flood of women - famous and not - sharing stories of gender-based violence and harassment.

Weinstein, 73, was jailed in 2020 and has been held at New York's notorious Rikers Island prison complex ever since.

On 15 April, jury selection for his retrial got off to a false start, with none of the 12 potential candidates or six alternatives being deemed suitable. One, an actor, described Weinstein as a "really bad guy" and claimed he could not remain impartial. A woman also bowed out after declaring she had been the victim of sexual assault.

Once jurors are selected, the original charges of rape and sexual assault will be heard again, with opening statements and evidence due to start on 21 April.

Here we look at why there's a retrial, why Weinstein will likely remain behind bars - and what has happened to #MeToo.
Why is there a retrial?
Weinstein is back in court because his first two convictions were overturned last April and are now being retried.

In 2020, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison after being found guilty of sexually assaulting ex-production assistant Mimi Haley in 2006 and raping former actor Jessica Mann in 2013.

But in April 2024, New York's highest court overturned both convictions due to concerns the judge had made improper rulings, including allowing a woman to testify who was not part of the case.

At a preliminary hearing in January this year, the former Hollywood mogul, who has cancer and heart issues, asked for an earlier date on account of his poor health, but that was denied.

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When the retrial was decided upon last year, Judge Farber also ruled that a separate charge concerning a third woman should be added to the case.

In September 2024, the unnamed woman filed allegations that Weinstein forced oral sex on her at a hotel in Manhattan in 2006.

Defence lawyers tried to get the charge thrown out, claiming prosecutors were only trying to bolster their case, but Judge Farber decided to incorporate it into the current retrial.

Weinstein denies all the allegations against him and claims any sexual contact was consensual.

Speaking outside court on 15 April, his lawyer Arthur Aidala, said he was "cautiously optimistic that when all the evidence is out, the jury will find that all of his relationships were consensual and therefore reach a verdict of not guilty".
Why won't he be released?
Even if the retrial ends in not guilty verdicts on all three counts, Weinstein will remain behind bars at Rikers Island.

This is because he was sentenced for a second time in February 2023 after being convicted of raping an actor in a Los Angeles hotel room in 2013.

He was also found guilty of forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object in relation to the same woman, named only in court as Jane Doe 1.

The judge ruled that the 16-year sentence should be served after the 23-year one imposed in New York.

Weinstein's lawyers are appealing this sentence - but for now, the 16 years behind bars still stand.
Has #MeToo made a difference - and what's changed?
"MeToo was another way of women testifying about sexual violence and harassment," Dr Jane Meyrick, associate professor in health psychology at the University of West England (UWE), tells Sky News.

"It exposed the frustration around reporting cases and showed the legal system was not built to give women justice - because they just gave up on it and started saying it online instead.

"That was hugely symbolic - because most societies are built around the silencing of sexual violence and harassment."

After #MeToo went viral in 2017, the statute of limitation on sexual assault cases was extended in several US states, giving victims more time to come forward, and there has been some reform of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), which were regularly used by Weinstein.

This has resulted in more women speaking out and an increased awareness of gender-based violence, particularly among women, who are less inclined to tolerate any form of harassment, according to Professor Alison Phipps, a sociologist specialising in gender at Newcastle University.

"There's been an increase in capacity to handle reports in some organisations and institutions - and we've seen a lot of high-profile men brought down," she says.

"But the #MeToo movement has focused on individual men and individual cases - rather than the culture that allows the behaviour to continue.

"It's been about naming and shaming and 'getting rid' of these bad men - by firing them from their jobs or creating new crimes to be able to send more of them to prison - not dealing with the problem at its root."

Dr Meyrick, who wrote the book #MeToo For Women And Men: Understanding Power Through Sexual Harassment, gives the example of the workplace and the stereotype of "bumping the perp", or perpetrator.

"HR departments are still not designed to protect workers - they're built to suppress and make things go away." As a result, she says, men are often "quietly moved on" with "no real accountability".

The same is true in schools, Prof Phipps adds, where she believes concerns around the popularity among young boys of self-proclaimed misogynist and influencer Andrew Tate are being dealt with too "punitively".

"The message is 'we don't talk about Andrew Tate here' and 'you shouldn't be engaging with him'," she says. "But what we should be doing is asking boys and young men: 'why do you like him?', 'what's going on here?' - that deeper conversation is missing," she says.
Have high-profile celebrity cases helped?
Both experts agree they will have inevitably empowered some women to come forward.

But they stress they are often "nothing like" most other cases of sexual violence or harassment, which makes drawing comparisons "dangerous".

Referencing the Weinstein case in the US and Gisele Pelicot's in France, Dr Meyrick says: "They took multiple people over a very long period of time to reach any conviction - a lot of people's experiences are nothing like that."

Prof Phipps adds: "They can create an idea that it's only 'real' rape if it's committed by a serial sex offender - and not every person who perpetrates sexual harm is a serial offender."

Part of her research has focused on "lad culture" in the UK and associated sexual violence at universities.

She says: "A lot of that kind of violence happens in social spaces, where there are drugs and alcohol and young people thrown together who don't know where the boundaries are.

"That doesn't absolve them of any responsibility - but comparing those 'lads' to Harvey Weinstein seems inappropriate."

Dr Meyrick says most victims she has spoken to through her research "wouldn't go down the legal route" - and prosecution and conviction rates are still extremely low.

"Most don't try for justice. They just want to be believed and heard - that's what's important and restorative," she says.

But specialist services that can support victims in that way are underfunded - and not enough is being done to change attitudes through sex education and employment policy, she warns.

"Until we liberate men from the masculine roles they're offered by society - where objectification of women is normalised as banter - they will remain healthy sons of the patriarchy.

"We need transformative, compassionate education for young men - and young women. That's where the gap still is."

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Harvey Weinstein is back in court - but what has happened to the #MeToo movement since 2017?

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Harvey Weinstein's original charges of the sexual assault of one woman in 2006 and the rape of another in 2013 are being retried. Here we look at why he's getting a retrial - and what has happened to the #MeToo movement since allegations against him emerged in 2017.

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Abolition Feminism on the Surviving Society podcast

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Abolition Feminism on the Surviving Society podcast

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Discussion with Chantelle Lewis, Alison Phipps, Nikki Godden-Rasul and Tina Sikka

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E161 Nikki Godden-Rasul, Tina Sikka & Alison Phipps: Abolition Feminism by Surviving Society

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Chantelle, Nikki, Tina and Alison discuss the new collective of scholars - Abolition Feminism for Ending Sexual Violence. 
This episode is part of the Alternative to woman's hour takeover with Tina Sikka, Alison Phipps and Nikki Godden-Rasul. 

https://www.redpepper.org.uk/subscribe/

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-sex-consent-and-justice.html

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'Trans-inclusive writers say they face abuse and censorship' - OpenDemocracy

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'Trans-inclusive writers say they face abuse and censorship' - OpenDemocracy

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A month before the Tab article was published, a tweet from Stock kickstarted a chain of events that would end the academic career of a young philosopher.

The tweet read: "Oh do fuck off, you complete and utter dickhead." It was a reply to Nathan Oseroff-Spicer, then studying for a PhD at King's College London, who had accused Stock of "publicly advocating bigotry and intolerance". Stock later called his statement defamatory - and allegedly emailed his boss at the American Philosophical Association (APA) to complain.

Oseroff-Spicer had been an editor for the APA blog as a side-job during his studies. "I was then told [by my boss] I couldn't speak out in support of trans people or criticise her publicly," he said, adding his boss also instructed him to apologise publicly to Stock. The APA did not respond to requests for comment.

Stock said: "To my recollection, I have never written to Nathan Oseroff-Spicer's employer," but added she was "happy to endorse the sentiment of the original tweet he complains of".

Oseroff-Spicer's tweets also attracted the attention of influential philosopher Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. On his philosophy blog Leiter Reports, he repeatedly pushed for Oseroff-Spicer to be sacked from the APA blog, which he eventually was.

Leiter defended his actions, telling openDemocracy that Oseroff-Spicer "repeatedly abused his position at the APA blog".

The events led both Oseroff-Spicer and his partner, a trans man, to conclude "philosophy just was not the right place for either of us".

Pressure

Christa Peterson, currently a final-year philosophy PhD student at the University of Southern California, has become an expert on the impact of 'gender critical' thought in academia, having clashed with 'gender critical' philosophers since the movement came to prominence. In 2021, she was invited by a group of postgraduate students at the University of Sussex to present her research on anti-trans thought in philosophy, scheduled at the same time as Stock was meant to give a talk.

She agreed, but then received concerned emails from the organisers. "My sense is that the students were getting pressure from the administration to cancel it," she said. "They were sent the university's conduct guidelines and were told they were responsible for everything I said, and that it could not be an 'anti-Kathleen' talk."

Peterson broadened the scope of her talk to cover anti-trans thought in academia more generally. "I changed the subject of the talk in response to these concerns - which is a clear-cut academic freedom problem," she said. "I was very worried about getting them in trouble."

Stock told openDemocracy that Peterson's talk was "certainly not a standard academic event in any sense" and added: "I am told it took place without any interference from management, so I am not sure I understand what she is now complaining of."

The revised talk, given in the summer of 2021, went ahead without issue, but weeks after resigning from Sussex, Stock told The Times that she "went off sick with a breakdown" because of it. She told openDemocracy: "The timing by the organisers was intentionally hostile to me, as was the nature of the invitation as a whole."

In November 2022, an academic article in the journal Impact referred to Peterson's invitation to present her research at Sussex as part of a campaign of "bullying" directed at Stock. The authors, Alice Sullivan and Judith Suissa, both influential 'gender critical' thinkers, omitted Peterson's name and credentials, calling her simply "a Twitter-troll primarily known for her obsessive interest in Stock". Sullivan had previously called her a "loony grad student" on Twitter.

Peterson says she complained to Impact about this portrayal of her in January of this year and was told she would receive a quick response, but has still not heard back. Impact has yet to respond to requests for comment from openDemocracy.

The dismissal of her work by senior academics has left Peterson concerned about her career opportunities. "I'm going on the job market this year and these people keep saying my academic work is bullying and harassment," she said. "I will not apply to jobs in the UK. I think most departments would have at least one person who would have a real problem with me being hired, because they think I've been bullying Kathleen Stock for years."

Peterson is not the only researcher into 'gender critical' academics who has felt pressured by a British university to soften their academic work on the subject.

Grace Lavery, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk in 2022 at University College London (UCL) about what she called "the mortal threat to academic freedom in the United Kingdom that has been mounted in recent years... by an alliance composed of the gender critical movement and the managerial class of administrators that govern the UK [higher education] sector."

The threat, she argues, is so great, partly because "the GC movement sees students as obstacles to be silenced, either directly or by the abuse of legal instruments".

When the editors of Think Pieces, an in-house journal at UCL, asked Lavery to produce a written version of her talk, she was happy to oblige - but started to become concerned when, months after she submitted an article, it had not appeared. Lavery understood editors feared they could face legal action for running the piece as was, something UCL appeared to confirm when we asked about the article, telling openDemocracy that it "must carefully take other factors into account when publishing articles including the risk of legal action against the institution".

Lavery instead published the article on her blog in June. "It was the first time I'd ever heard of university administration actually intervening in the normal course of publication of work," she said.

UCL added it was "firmly committed to ensuring that free and open discussion can take place in an atmosphere of tolerance for different viewpoints".

Another academic who says her career has been affected by her support for trans rights is Newcastle University sociology professor Alison Phipps, who was head of gender studies at Sussex University when Stock was teaching there. Phipps has been a vocal trans ally for the past decade, which she says has meant "some academics working on violence against women give me a wide berth, as do some third sector organisations".

According to Phipps, 'gender critical' women in her field "tend to set the mainstream agenda, with very few people willing to risk their own careers by challenging them openly".

For Lavery, the issue is fundamentally one of academic freedom. "It's pretty difficult to actually publish work that engages the gender critical movement on any level whatsoever," she said. "They have almost a monopoly within academic philosophy."

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Trans-inclusive academics say they face abuse and censorship

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Students and academics say they are bullied and threatened with legal action for opposing 'gender critical' views

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'Young people and the rise of antifeminism' - Dazed

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'Young people and the rise of antifeminism' - Dazed

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Thanks to the tireless work of campaigners and activists, women's rights in the UK have taken huge leaps forward in the past 100 years: in that time, we've won the right to open our own bank accounts; the right to abortion; the right to vote. That said, there's still a long way to go before true equality is reached. At present, the average woman in paid employment effectively works for free for nearly two months of the year compared to the average man in paid employment. Women take on more unpaid domestic and care work than men. Research published last year found that 99 per cent of rape cases reported to the police do not end in a conviction.

In spite of this, though, new research has found that the majority of young people believe women's rights have already gone far enough. The survey, conducted by Ipsos UK and the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College London, spoke to over 22,000 people aged between 16 and 74 from 32 different countries. They found that out of all the respondents, 52 per cent of Gen Z and 53 per cent of millennials thought that we've now gone so far in promoting gender equality that we're discriminating against men. Additionally, under half of the survey's Gen Z respondents said they defined themselves as a feminist.

Alison Phipps is a feminist scholar and Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University. She stresses that we shouldn't spiral into a panic about these figures. "It was a study of 32 countries, with 1,000 respondents from Britain, and across the whole sample Britain was amongst the most supportive of gender equality," she says. "In Britain 38 per cent of people said things had gone 'far enough', and nobody said things had gone 'too far' - that's 's spin."

Phipps also points out that it's not necessarily a bad thing if young people think feminism has "gone far enough", as that could imply that they've not encountered much gender inequality in their lives so far. " This is possible given the fact that girls now tend to outperform boys at school, young women tend to do very well at university, and some forms of discrimination against women - for instance, workplace inequality or issues related to motherhood - often don't make themselves known until later," she says.

However, she also acknowledges that equally, these figures could suggest that young people are more intentionally eschewing feminism. "There could also be an element of backlash - studies of 'lad culture' at university have found that it tends to be a way for young men to reassert territory and entitlements in the face of young women's relative success," she says. "It's likely that it's both - we seeing increased gender equality, but we're also seeing resentment of that."

So, evidently, despite some positive steps forward, we can't get complacent. "Things have not gone nearly far enough [...] in fact, in some ways we are going backwards - for instance, the impact of the cost of living crisis on women, attempts to roll back reproductive rights, online harassment and violence, and the outpouring of prejudice directed at trans women in particular," Phipps says.

She's right - there are signs everywhere that attitudes seem to be regressing, especially on social media. TikTok is full of marmalade-making clad in hideous floral-print dresses, who unironically say things like " we believe our purpose is to be homemakers ". Misogynistic influencers and podcasters are also ubiquitous, with teenage boys 21 per cent more likely to have heard of Andrew Tate than Rishi Sunak. " Everything we consume shapes our view of the world, and young people are increasingly looking to the internet for their education," Phipps adds.

"Things have not gone nearly far enough [...] in fact, in some ways we are going backwards - for instance, the impact of the cost of living crisis on women, attempts to roll back reproductive rights, online harassment and violence, and the outpouring of prejudice directed at trans women in particular" - Alison Phipps

As young people are facing particularly adverse socioeconomic conditions right now, many are looking for a simple answer for why their lives feel so difficult: and it's easy to see why some have pointed the finger at feminism. Many tradwives argue that, actually, feminism made things worse for women by encouraging them to enter the workforce in the first place, and becoming a tradwife is actually a smart way of 'cheating' the capitalist system and forgoing a thankless, underpaid job. "Unfortunately, 'lean-in' girlboss feminism tends to be what 'feminism' means in the mainstream, and it's selling a facsimile of liberation," Phipps says. "It's also a lot easier to blame feminism than to acknowledge the fact that we live under an economic system that requires some of us to matter less than others." Many also argue that they've 'solved' the problem of unpaid domestic work by receiving an 'allowance' from their partner for doing all the cooking and cleaning, and while unpaid domestic work a pertinent issue - as is the issue of work, more broadly - entering into a situation where you're financially dependent on your partner isn't the answer, and instead leaves tradwives incredibly susceptible to abuse.

As for anti-feminist young men, masculinity is in crisis. Since the #MeToo movement in 2018, it's (rightly) been impressed on men that women suffer so much sexual harassment and violence - but there's still no real 'blueprint' for how to be a young man in today's world. While it's probably for the best that 'lads mags' like and have folded, we've also lost other men's titles like in recent years, and while a young woman might resonate with one of Sally Rooney's characters, there are so few young male novelists capturing what it's like to be a young man in 2023. The number of single and lonely straight men is on the rise too, and in this context, it's easy to see how someone with views as extreme as Andrew Tate could emerge in this vacuum and radicalise great numbers of boys and men into thinking feminism is the source of all their ills.

Ultimately, the modern world is becoming increasingly difficult for young people to navigate. "Women are overrepresented in part-time and precarious employment worldwide, which means that when there's a recession their jobs are often the first to be at risk," Phipps says, and meanwhile men are experiencing widespread feelings of alienation. Both are wrong to pin the blame on feminism, but their feelings of disillusionment are undeniably very real. The real task for all of us is challenging all the misinformation which harshly criticises women's rights, highlighting the issues which are the root causes of these adverse socioeconomic circumstances - in the UK, I'd suggest these are years of appalling Conservative economic policy, modern work culture, and capitalism - and working towards an understanding that true feminism could actually offer us a solution to our disenfranchisement.

In any case, Phipps is hopeful. "My experience of millennials and Gen Z is that their politics are generally progressive, which is pretty amazing given all the reactionary content that's out there," she says. "It's up to us as older generations to support them as they navigate all the information and misinformation, and as they envision the kind of world they want to build."

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Young people and the rise of antifeminism

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New research has found that 52 per cent of Gen Z and 53 per cent of millennials think women's rights have gone so far that we're now discriminating against men

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The disappearance and murder of a young British woman, whose killer was sentenced this week, unleashed a torrent of anger-and exposed deep rifts in feminist approaches to criminal justice.

On the last night of Sarah Everard's life, she picked up a bottle of wine at a London grocery store and visited a friend before beginning her walk home. It was around 9 p.m. on March 3 and the 33-year-old marketing executive was wrapped in warm layers and wearing sensible sneakers. She took a main road, it is believed, that cut through Clapham Common, a park regularly populated by joggers and dog walkers. By 9:30 p.m., she was past the park and on Poynders Road, heading toward her neighborhood. The streets would have been emptier than normal, with pubs and restaurants closed due to the coronavirus lockdown. Sarah's image was captured briefly on a private doorbell camera as she walked by herself. Then, she vanished.

In the following days, the news of her disappearance hooked somewhere deep inside women in Britain and unleashed a wave of grief and anger. Online, women began sharing the everyday modifications they took to avoid danger in public-walking with keys thrust between knuckles, avoiding dark streets, adjusting outfits to cover up skin or obscure curves, calculating exactly what tone to use when responding to a stranger's greeting without provoking anger or inviting further conversation-the weight of this eternal vigilance came tumbling out in a stream of tweets and Facebook posts tagged #shewaswalkinghome. Much has been made of the invisible labor women perform in terms of planning children's birthday parties and refilling hand-soap dispensers, but this was another form of labor, comprised of constant, deliberate acts of survival.

Women in Clapham reported that they had been visited by police and advised not to venture out at night alone. The instruction was eerily reminiscent of what police told women in the 1970s when the Yorkshire Ripper, a notorious serial killer, was terrorizing Britain's female population. Back then, feminists in Leeds, bristling over the suggestion they should limit their personal freedoms to escape male violence, began organizing evening protests under the name "Reclaim the Night." Was it possible that nearly 50 years later, this was the best advice law enforcement had to offer? The simmering anger reached a crescendo six days later when police arrested one of their own, a Metropolitan police officer named Wayne Couzens, and subsequently charged him with Sarah's kidnapping and murder.

Alone in her apartment, Jamie Klingler, an event planner in her early 40s who runs the annual London Seafood Festival, was feeling useless and a little stir-crazy. "I needed to see other women. I needed people [who were as] angry and upset as I was," she told me over coffee at a café in Soho. Somewhat impulsively, Klingler decided she would organize a vigil for Sarah and announced her intentions in a tweet. She soon learned that another group of women were planning the same thing, organizing under the name "Reclaim These Streets"-a nod to the earlier feminist movement. The women teamed up, and over a series of Zoom calls, planned a vigil for Saturday, March 13. The plan was to hold a socially distanced, masked event at the bandstand in the common, which was already serving as a makeshift memorial, blanketed in flowers and notes to Sarah. But when organizers reached out to law enforcement to ensure the gathering could go forward without violating lockdown restrictions, Klingler said, they were told that the event was illegal. The group went to court to fight for their right to protest, but ultimately felt they could not proceed without legal risk. On the morning of the vigil, Reclaim These Streets announced that the event was off. Klingler appeared on several television and radio programs to urge people to stay home and participate in a virtual vigil instead.

It was, by that point, too late. A separate activist group, Sisters Uncut, which describes itself as an "intersectional feminist direct-action collective," encouraged people to show up regardless. "We are angry. We will not be controlled. We will not be silenced," they wrote on Twitter. Started by predominantly women of color, Sisters Uncut is concerned with compounding forms of oppression-how racism and misogyny and classism, for example, overlap to create graduated experiences of discrimination-and is deeply suspicious of police. To them, Sarah's death was not only a tragedy. It was also an extreme example of the harm law enforcement can pose to women, among other vulnerable populations. Reclaim These Streets, on the other hand, was motivated by a generic, but genuine feeling of outrage about male violence. "None of our agenda has anything to do with the police, other than more training," Klingler told me.

Klingler did not attend the vigil out of concern that she would be fined as an organizer. Instead, sitting at her dining room table, she watched live coverage on the BBC. She had naively thought that the police would be respectful of the grieving women, envisioning them kneeling in solidarity like some police did in the U.S. as protests over racial justice swept the country. At first, the police stood back, despite the violation of social-distancing guidelines. Women took turns addressing the crowd, sharing raw stories of male violence. By 7 p.m., the police had had enough. They began to press in on the crowd, ordering people to disperse. "Who do you protect?" the women chanted back at them. When the vigilgoers did not move fast enough, police pushed them to the ground and began making arrests. Klingler watched aghast as the event she had imagined as a peaceful remembrance devolved into violence. "We were hearing women scream and watching flowers get trampled," she said, tearing up. At the vigil, Sisters Uncut had distributed a pamphlet arguing that the answer to violence against women "does not lie with more police," but they needn't have; the heavy-handed actions of the men with badges made their points for them.

Not all incidents of abduction or murder receive national attention, but Sarah's case dominated front-page news, triggering a flurry of stories and opinion pieces about violence against women. Her disappearance tapped into the public's already fragile sense of safety, corroded by months of fighting an invisible, deadly virus. And it was easy to identify with her actions that night. If a woman wasn't safe walking home at nine o'clock on a main street in London, where was she safe? Also: She was beautiful and young and white. (Approximately six months after Sarah's abduction, a London teacher named Sabina Nessa was killed while out on a short walk. Some asked whether her death elicited less media attention because she was a woman of color.)

The overwhelming public sentiment in the commentary following Sarah's death was that something must be done. But what? To some, Sarah's murder was evidence that more policing was needed to protect women from male violence. Others drew the opposite conclusion.

By the time I arrived in London in April, Sarah's family had stopped talking to the media, retreating inside their pain like a cocoon. I got the impression that they felt she had been unwittingly turned into a national symbol, and that no one had bothered to ask how she would have felt about it. Sarah's cousin, Tom Everard, encapsulated his frustration in a tweet. "This is all just so crushingly sad. Sarah is the best. What happened was unspeakable. Unimaginable. Awful. But for her to be the lightning rod for this fury-however righteous? No. Tragedies happen, as do acts of evil. No woman should be in fear. But take a breath," he wrote. Another one of Sarah's friends felt that her death had been hijacked by people with political agendas. "It is not a tribute to her any more, it's about something else-and I don't like what it has become," Helena Edwards wrote in an article for Spiked, an online Libertarian magazine. "Her abduction and murder is not, in my opinion, a symptom of a sexist, dangerous society.... I will not be blaming 'men' or 'the police' for the actions of one individual."

It has since been learned that that one individual, 48-year-old Couzens, used his police authority to perpetrate his crime. According to prosecutors, Couzens approached Sarah in a rental car and pulled over. Security camera footage showed the two of them standing by his vehicle. Then, he handcuffed and falsely arrested her, likely using COVID protocols as a pretense. A couple who was driving by told prosecutors they assumed he was an undercover police officer arresting a woman who had done something wrong. Instead, they were observing an abduction. Couzens drove Sarah out of London before raping and strangling her. Then he attempted to burn her body. Prosecutors said the totality of his crimes could be summarized as "deception, kidnap, rape, strangulation, fire."

Couzens pleaded guilty to the charges of kidnap, rape, and murder in the summer. On September 30, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In announcing the sentence, Lord Justice Adrian Fulford said that Couzens had irretrievably damaged the lives of Sarah's family and friends and eroded the public's confidence in the police. "Sarah Everard was a wholly blameless victim of a grotesquely executed series of offences that culminated in her death and the disposal of her body," he said.

Serious questions remain about the culture of policing that allowed Couzens to serve on the force, despite a record of red flags. Before joining the Met in 2018, he was employed at the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), the armed police force in charge of protecting civil nuclear sites. There, he was nicknamed "the rapist," according to the tabloid The Sun, because his behavior made his female colleagues uncomfortable. In 2015, six years before he abducted Sarah, he was accused of indecent exposure after he was spotted allegedly driving while naked from the waist down. Kent Police, which received the complaint, is now being investigated over whether it handled the allegations properly. He is also accused of two incidents of indecent exposure in February 2021. According to news reports, Couzens allegedly exposed himself in a South London fast-food restaurant three days before Sarah's disappearance. Met police are now facing an inquiry into whether the agency properly investigated the claim.

Viewed through a wider lens, the tensions raised by Sarah's murder and the mishandled vigil illustrate one of the biggest rifts in the feminist movement in England and abroad today: what role the criminal justice system should play in addressing gender-based violence.

Historically many feminists, predominantly white, have found recourse in the law, arguing in favor of more aggressive policing, tougher laws, and longer prison sentences for perpetrators. The thinking is that once violence against women is deemed socially unacceptable and carries with it high penalties, behavior will change. But at a time of heightened awareness of police violence and racial inequalities in the justice system, a small but growing group of activists is questioning this crime-centered approach. Feminists like Mariame Kaba in the U.S. and Alison Phipps in the U.K. argue that not only are these measures not proven to work, but that broadening the powers of law enforcement, ostensibly to protect women, often ends up backfiring on those most vulnerable to violence. As they see it, "carceral feminism," as this approach is called, neglects to take into account those who may be less likely to view law enforcement as a source of support, or worse, who view police as a very real threat, such as women of color, immigrants, sex workers, trans women, and lesbians.

The prevailing emphasis on the safety of white, cisgender, middle-class women at the expense of others also helps explain the surprising strain of anti-transgender activism alive in U.K. feminism. Self-identified "gender critical feminists," more commonly known as TERFs ("trans-exclusionary radical feminists"), often argue that women's safety is endangered by allowing trans people full equality. In this calculation, though, only one kind of woman matters.

In the wake of Sarah's death, some activists urged the government to pass a law to criminalize street harassment, despite the somewhat tenuous connection between being catcalled (exceedingly common) and abduction and murder by a stranger (exceedingly rare). The Labour Party officially adopted this position in May when it released a policy paper outlining its plans to tackle violence against women. "Labour agrees with campaigners who say public sexual harassment is a crime, not a compliment," the paper states. I spoke to Fiona Vera-Gray, an assistant professor at Sarah's alma mater, Durham University, and author of The Right Amount of Panic: How Women Trade Freedom for Safety, about the concept. She said it would mean more policing of public spaces like parks, which would likely result in further oppression to already over-policed communities. She also thought it was unlikely Black and brown women would avail themselves of the law. Feminists campaigning for law reform need to start having important conversations about "who really is going to use that law and who is it going to be used against?" she said.

In the summer of 2020, two Black sisters, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, went missing in a park in Wembley, northwest London, in a case with similarities to Sarah's. The police were slow to respond, according to their mother, Mina Smallman. "They didn't care because they looked at my daughter's address and thought they knew who she was," she told the BBC. "A Black woman who lives on a council estate." Smallman organized her own search party, and the boyfriend of one of the sisters found their bodies in the park the following day. After Met police responded to the scene, two officers took selfies with the dead victims and sent the pictures around. They have since been charged with misconduct in a public office. "Those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, that they felt they could take photographs of dead Black girls and send them on," Smallman said.

To some observers, there was an irony in using the murder of a white woman at the hands of a cop to push for increased policing that would undoubtably fall on Black and brown people also engaged in an urgent fight for equality. Embedded within the feminism movement is a "deeply kind of ingrained impulse to reach out to the state for protection," said Phipps, whose 2020 book, Me, Not You: The Trouble With Mainstream Feminism, explores how some feminist activism can end up treating marginalized groups as disposable. "A lot of these women [campaigning for new gender violence laws] will have said, 'Black Lives Matter!'" she said. Now they were calling for more power to the cops.

Labour also announced that it supported making misogyny a hate crime, a mostly symbolic gesture that would allow judges to give longer prison sentences to people who target someone because of their gender or sex. In practice, though, it's hard to prove that a specific animus compelled a person to commit a crime. In the U.S., for example, 36 states consider crimes motivated by gender bias as "hate crimes," yet the charge is rarely successfully prosecuted. In the U.K., convictions for crimes against women, such as rape and domestic violence, have plummeted in recent years. As Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley and shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, bluntly told me, "rape is basically decriminalized in this country." And yet the policy paper did not address how passing more laws would help when police and prosecutors were failing to utilize the criminal laws already on the books.

In the charged days following Sarah's abduction, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a plan to assign plainclothes police officers to bars and nightclubs to patrol for "suspicious offenders," an idea that was widely mocked at the time. "[Think of] the people who exist in those spaces. Queer people. People of color," Jess, a Sisters Uncut volunteer who asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of police reprisal, said. Still, in July, the Tory-led government doubled down on the idea when it released its own plan on reducing violence against women. It also pledged to improve street lighting and increase CCTV coverage so "people think twice before committing a crime and can be identified and brought to justice more quickly." What these measures would have meant for Sarah, though, are not so obvious.

I walked the route that Sarah is believed to have taken, more or less, on an overcast day in late April. Clapham reminded me of a neighborhood in Boston I'd lived in during college: friendly, safe, with a plethora of bars and restaurants and easy transit options. There were few signs that the neighborhood had been the hub of a massive search party a month earlier. In the common, where the trees were starting to explode in green leaves, an outdoor exercise class for older people persevered even as a light rain began. At the bandstand, the sea of flowers that once encircled the stage was long gone, carted away in a flatbed pickup truck for composting. Sarah's family was given the cards and letters to do with as they pleased. A very polite note taped to a pole in the bandstand asked the public not to place candles on the floor as it posed a fire risk.

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She Was Walking Home: How Sarah Everard's Murder Revealed Feminism's Fault Lines

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The disappearance and murder of a young British woman, whose killer was sentenced this week, unleashed a torrent of anger-and exposed deep rifts in feminist approaches to criminal justice. On the last night of Sarah Everard's life, she picked up a bottle of wine at a London grocery store and visited a friend before beginning her walk home.

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Last year Alison Phipps, Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University, published her book, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism.

The book focuses on the whiteness of the mainstream feminist movement and looks at how white women - especially white, middle class women - can sometimes use feminism for their own ends while ignoring the plight of less privileged women who took up the fight before them.

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In their conversation, Kean and Phipps discuss the exclusion of women of colour, sex workers and trans women from the feminist debate, how International Women's Day has become about the politics of representation, and how feminism is at risk of becoming another tool by which to judge people.

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Last year Alison Phipps, Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University, published her book, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism. The book focuses on the whiteness of the mainstream feminist movement and looks at how white women - especially white, middle class women - can sometimes use feminism for their own ends while ignoring the plight of less privileged women who took up the fight before them.

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Instagram live with The New Feminist magazine

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Instagram live with The New Feminist magazine

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The New Feminist (@thenewfeministmagazine)

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Around the Kitchen Table with Alison Phipps

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Feminist Library podcast - on intersectional feminism

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Feminist Library podcast - on intersectional feminism

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'Feminist Loose Ends' event at the British Library with Rafia Zakaria

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'Feminist Loose Ends' event at the British Library with Rafia Zakaria

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‘If they sound like a man, hang up’ – how transphobia became rife in the gender-based violence sector

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Article in Gal-Dem - transphobia in the VAWG sector

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Article in Gal-Dem - transphobia in the VAWG sector

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Surviving Society podcast interview - Me, Not You one year on

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Surviving Society podcast interview - Me, Not You one year on

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E024 The Reflection with Alison Phipps: Me,(still) Not You by Surviving Society

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Alison reflects on the reception of her 2020 book, Me not you: the trouble with mainstream feminism. We discuss disposability, the connection between t**er*fs and racism (& the far right) and we present some hopeful possibilities for our political culture.

Useful links: 
https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526155801/

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We are joined today by Alison Phipps, Professor in Gender Studies and the University of Sussex to talk about her newest book, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (Manchester University Press, 2020).

The Me Too movement, started by Black feminist Tarana Burke in 2006, went viral as a hashtag eleven years later after a tweet by white actor Alyssa Milano. Mainstream movements like #MeToo have often built on and co-opted the work of women of colour, while refusing to learn from them or centre their concerns. Far too often, the message is not 'Me, Too' but 'Me, Not You'. Alison Phipps argues that this is not just a lack of solidarity. Privileged white women also sacrifice more marginalised people to achieve their aims, or even define them as enemies when they get in the way. Me, not you argues that the mainstream movement against sexual violence expresses a political whiteness that both reflects its demographics and limits its revolutionary potential. Privileged white women use their traumatic experiences to create media outrage, while relying on state power and bureaucracy to purge 'bad men' from elite institutions with little concern for where they might appear next. In their attacks on sex workers and trans people, the more reactionary branches of this feminist movement play into the hands of the resurgent far-right.

Dr. Phipps is the author of Women in Science, Engineering and Technology: Three Decades of UK Initiatives (Trentham Books, 2008), an examination of the mixed results of the UK's attempts to address gender disparity STEM fields through policy and The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age (Polity Press, 2014) an award-winning look at the way feminists find themselves negotiating a very tight passage between the Scylla and Charybdis of neoconservatives and neoliberals, as well as a bevy or articles on similar issues.
Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Alison Phipps, "Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism"...

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We are joined today by Alison Phipps, Professor in Gender Studies and the University of Sussex to talk about her newest book, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (Manchester University Press, 2020). The Me Too movement, started by Black feminist Tarana Burke in 2006, went viral as a hashtag eleven years later after a tweet by white actor Alyssa Milano.

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Interview on Politics, Theory, Other podcast

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Interview on Politics, Theory, Other podcast

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#106 The trouble with mainstream feminism w/ Alison Phipps by Politics Theory Other

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Alison Phipps joins PTO to talk about her new book, 'Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism'. We chatted about the MeToo movement and what it reveals about the mainstream of feminist politics, how violence against women is necessary to the project of capitalist globalisation and how the image of the imperilled white woman has been central to the project of empire both formal and informal.

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Joint book launch with Sunderland Gender Studies Network

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Joint book launch with Sunderland Gender Studies Network

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Book launch - Me, Not You and Gender Equality in Changing Times

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This is a recording of a joint book launch event, hosted by the University of Sunderland Gender Network, for Me, Not You: the Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (by Alison Phipps) and Gender Equality in Changing Times (edited by Angela Smith). The first part is a conversation between Alison Phipps and Professor Donna Chambers, and the second consists of presentations by Angela Smith and two contributors to her book, Katie Ward and Alice Wu. This is followed by a Q&A with all the panellists.

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Interview with Climate Emergency Manchester

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Interview with Climate Emergency Manchester

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There's a new book that we think folks should read. It's called " Me Not You: the problem with mainstream feminism." It's by Professor Alison Phipps of University of Sussex, and she kindly agreed to an interview. A review of the book will appear on this site soon. You can buy a copy here. If your put the code OTH583 in at checkout you can get the book half price (making it £6.50 plus P&P).
Could you tell us a little about yourself - where you grew up, went to school, how you came to be a Professor of Gender Studies?
I was born in North Yorkshire, then lived in Teeside for a while before my family moved to Bristol. After doing my GCSEs at the local comprehensive, I left home at 16 - I wanted to be a dancer and went into full-time professional training. But I lacked the talent to pursue ballet (my real passion) and was too self-conscious for musical theatre. So I mixed cocktails in a nightclub, and wrapped soap baskets in a Body Shop, but wasn't content. I'd managed to get two A-levels at dance college, which in the 1990s was enough for a place at Manchester University - I chose politics and modern history. I was the first woman in my family to get a degree, and remain the only person ever in my family to be an academic. To start with, the language and ideas I encountered at university baffled me. But feminism was different.

I come from a long line of strong working women, but had been encouraged to aspire to white bourgeois femininity - feminist theory helped me understand why. I came out as queer, which was a personal and political revelation - in butch/femme communities and relationships I decoupled gender from assigned sex and learned femininity was something to experiment with and enjoy. I also realised that the state forces amassed against queer people - that were still raiding gay bars at the time - were not my route to liberation. And that there were some feminists who saw me as an impediment to theirs - in the lesbian 'sex wars' of the 1980s, butch/femme, BDSM and sex work were all seen as a capitulation to patriarchal dynamics rather than a way to subvert them.

I never planned to be an academic - but in between doing various office jobs I was offered a scholarship for my MA at Manchester, and won one to do my PhD at Cambridge. In 2005, just before I submitted my PhD thesis, I moved down to Brighton with my partner at the time. I was doing administration for the City Council and making sandwiches in a local café, when an hourly-paid teaching role came up at Brighton University. Then a temporary contract was advertised at Sussex - 9-months of cover for the Director of Gender Studies - and I got it. I've been at Sussex ever since. I ran Gender Studies till 2018, taking breaks to have two kids, and have worked part-time since 2011. I was promoted to Professor of Gender Studies in 2017.
How did Me, Not You come about, who do you hope reads it and what impact do you want it to have?
This book was in the making for a very long time. A year after I got my job at Sussex, something happened in my personal life - I was raped by a woman I was involved with. It happened in a small arts-based community, which largely closed ranks around her and ignored or dismissed me - this meant that apart from a few loyal friends, I only had books and writing to get me through the experience. I didn't entertain going to the police - the perpetrator had a young daughter and was much more marginalised than I was, so I knew police involvement would harm her, perhaps even more than she had harmed me. While I was dealing with my own trauma, I also began to be approached by students who had been raped, because of my role as Director of Gender Studies. So I became a scholar-activist - and supporting survivors, pushing for institutional change, and building relationships with services and organisations were all intertwined with my research on sexual violence.

Long before #MeToo went viral, activists in universities had been 'naming and shaming' perpetrators in the media - this was often the only option. But I was always left with the question: where did these 'bad men' go? I knew some of them went to other institutions and continued the same behaviour - the 'pass the harasser' problem. And I worried that the suggested solution - to exclude perpetrators entirely from academia - might just outsource them to lower-status sectors, where women had fewer rights and protections. This fear of creating collateral damage was magnified in relation to criminal punishment - even when it is visited on privileged white men, this creates massive collateral damage amongst Black people and other marginalised groups. This was where 'Me, Not You' came from - it's a play on and critique of #MeToo. It describes how mainstream white feminism is very self-regarding - my victimisation is the most important thing, and I will do whatever it takes to feel safe and/or vindicated, regardless of the consequences.

Me, Not You is written for fellow white women and white feminists. It's about how mainstream feminism fails to tackle the structures that cause sexual violence - especially the deep structure of racial capitalism - and ends up fortifying them instead. The book is built on Black feminist theory, and Black women and other women of colour won't need to read it - it won't tell them anything they don't already know. I hope the book will speak to white women who, like me, are uneasy about mainstream feminism and want to do things differently. In the conclusion, I discuss the concept of ' abolition feminism' as defined by Angela Davis - and as abolition moves into the mainstream lexicon following the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others, I hope my book will explain why white feminism is not abolition feminism, and suggest how it could move in that direction.
You must have been totally unsurprised by the video of white woman Amy Cooper being asked by Christian Cooper (a Black man, no relation) to put her dog on a lead in Central Park, and calling the police to say he was threatening her. Is this a perfect representation of what you mean by political whiteness, and the ways in which white women's vulnerability - real or imagined - is weaponised?
Political whiteness is the term I use in my book for the way mainstream feminism and other white-dominated forms of politics operate. It centres on victimhood, whether that's the genuine sexual trauma at the root of #MeToo and other mainstream feminist movements, or the imagined white victimhood of the backlash against feminism, the vote for Brexit and the election of Trump. Whiteness is predisposed to woundedness - from a position of power, one is naturally preoccupied with threat. In white feminism, sexual trauma becomes political capital via the media, which usually leads to demands for criminal punishment or institutional discipline. This happens with little regard for more marginalised people - and as we know, the criminal punishment system is not designed to deal with men such as Harvey Weinstein, but to protect the interests of white elites and 'put away' those deemed surplus to requirements in racial capitalist production.

The wounded white woman is the icon of mainstream feminism - she's also a trophy of the authoritarian right. Her power is rooted in colonial history - the 'protection' of bourgeois white women from indigenous, colonised and enslaved men (and subsequently, from free Black men) justified genocide and murder, and colonialism itself. And white women were deeply complicit - there is a long history of false allegations prompting racist state and community violence. Police in the US, UK and elsewhere continue to murder Black people, and (white) 'women's safety' continues to justify state violence and the politics of the far right. As Zeba Blay has written, Amy Cooper was well aware of this when she told the police 'there's an African-American man threatening my life'. This was a reminder that she could get Christian Cooper killed by a cop. This act was more deliberate than the political whiteness I identify in #MeToo and other mainstream feminist movements. But white feminism can easily become intentionally cruel - trans- and sex worker-exclusionary feminists, for example, are similar to the Amy Coopers of the world in their wilful use of stories of sexual trauma to ostracise and vilify their enemies.
The same day as the Amy Cooper incident, a police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck. This has prompted enormous protests in the US and other countries including the UK. What is your reaction to these events? Who are the most astute thinkers on this that we should all be following and reading?
To be honest, I'm not sure my reaction to these events deserves much space. I am in solidarity with Black people, and part of doing (as well as saying) that is to pass the mic. Black Lives Matter, and Black voices matter too - and the second is a precondition for the first. In other words, we can't claim to oppose anti-Black racism while objectifying and speaking over Black people. There is a wealth of commentary and analysis being produced by Black people on current events - such as these articles by Zoe Samudzi, Mariame Kaba and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, these discussions hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw and the Dream Defenders, and so much more besides. Many of these people are on Twitter, and if you follow them you'll find many others. I can also share some general recommendations for Black feminist thinkers who are important to me.

Angela Davis, of course, is a legend - you can download Women, Race and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? online, and you can also watch talks and interviews like this one on abolition feminism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is incredible too, and while I recommend her book Golden Gulag (and she has another one, Change Everything, forthcoming), there are also various pieces by and interviews with her available free. Mariame Kaba is an inspiration to me and pretty much everyone else I share politics with - I'll forever be proud and amazed that she endorsed my book, and I turn to her words almost every day. She is also hugely generous with her intellect and insight and can be found on many websites, podcasts and other platforms - the best thing to do is to visit her personal website and follow some links.

And in case any of your readers are under the impression that anti-Black racism is just a US problem, I'll make some UK-specific recommendations. Reni Eddo-Lodge's book has become a contemporary classic, and is a very accessible read for white people wanting to educate themselves on race. Lola Olufemi has a new book out, which is also very accessible and highlights issues with white bourgeois feminism as well as setting out her own feminist manifesto. I love the Surviving Society podcast - it's co-hosted by Black scholars Chantelle Lewis and Tissot Regis, and covers a wide range of issues but with a particular lens on race.

I also want to draw your attention to this article by Lauren Michele Jackson - 'What is an anti-racist reading list for?' In it, she rightly states that while book recommendations are easy to give and feel good to receive, at some point we have to do the work of reading, and the gap between recommendations and reading is often a gulf. Furthermore, she argues, merely reading work by Black scholars is not anti-racism in and of itself, and in fact this can lead to the kind of 'self-enlightenment' which replaces political action. This does not mean we shouldn't read - far from it - but reading the right things has to be part of a broader strategy.
Near the end of the book you have a brief section on things individuals can do, something you expand on in a recent blog post. How big a danger is it that a 'white fragility' focus will allow white people to try to 'purge themselves' of racism without fronting up to racist structures? How can we work against this and 'do' allyship (or comradeship as you put it) for the long haul, after the hashtags fade?
The drawbacks of 'white fragility' discourse are both a huge danger and an awful reality. Alison Whittaker and Lauren Michelle Jackson are among many writers of colour who argue that the psychological focus of 'white fragility', and the individualistic focus of 'white privilege', reduce anti-racism to navel-gazing and hand-wringing rather than work towards structural change. As I say in my recent blog, this is a re-centring of the self, not a genuine engagement with the Other. And in the midst of the current Black Lives Matter protests, white people have centred ourselves on an industrial scale. From kneeling in the street attempting to ' renounce our privilege', to making airbrushed celebrity videos confessing guilt and 'taking responsibility', to institutional proclamations with no evidence of anti-racist actions (and plenty of evidence of racist ones).

As feminism has long told us, the personal is political - and white people are heavily invested in racial capitalist structures. Divesting from these will require work on the self, but self-analysis is not politics. Perhaps we need to shift the focus away from 'how am I feeling?' to 'what am I doing?' This doesn't mean ignoring emotions, it means dealing with them in appropriate ways and not mistaking them for action. It means decentring ourselves and focusing on the Other; it means a politics of care. This isn't easy in our narcissistic, stingy neoliberal culture - and for white feminists, being asked to care may evoke the compelled care we have historically opposed. Contemporary white feminists tend to eschew care - ' nasty women ' are fuelled by rage. But this highlights the individualism of our politics, and its foundations in the nuclear family and binary gender. Rage on behalf of the self, which often seeks revenge, is perhaps seen as feminist because in the bourgeois nuclear family, the female self is diminished and denied.

By 'care', I mean an orientation to the social and natural world, not picking up your husband's socks. For marginalised groups, care is a necessity - for instance, the disabled people and working class people (many of them Black and people of colour) abandoned by austerity regimes, and the queer and trans people creating new support systems when their families of origin reject them. Care is central to Black feminism and other revolutionary politics because it rejects and undoes racial capitalist violence and creates different ways of life. I want white feminists to learn from this. I want responsibilities for care held in common, beyond the gender binary, care for other human beings globally (especially the most marginalised), and care for our planet. In racial capitalism, care can be violence because it is compelled, forced, outsourced and unevenly distributed, and withheld from those who need it most. But care is also at the heart of the alternatives we need. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, abolition means making the conditions for a better world. So if we are going to 'do' comradeship after the hashtags fade, we might begin by caring for each other.

Disclaimer: The views of interviewees on the CEM website do not necessarily reflect the views of CEM.

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Gender, Violence and White Feminism: Q&A with Alison Phipps

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There's a new book that we think folks should read. It's called " Me Not You: the problem with mainstream feminism." It's by Professor Alison Phipps of University of Sussex, and she kindly agreed to an interview. A review of the book will appear on this site soon.

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Who did JK Rowling become? Article in The Cut

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Who did JK Rowling become? Article in The Cut

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Edinburgh Castle, many centuries old, has been called the most besieged place in Britain. In 2005, on the night Melissa Anelli arrived, it was besieged primarily by children. The cover of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was projected on its outer walls. Inside, J. K. Rowling, a longtime Edinburgh resident, was celebrating the midnight release of the sixth Harry Potter book.

Anelli was then the 25-year-old web mistress of a Harry Potter fan site called The Leaky Cauldron. Rowling had personally summoned Anelli, along with Emerson Spartz (the proprietor of another fan site, MuggleNet), for an interview in her home. It would take place on the afternoon of the day the book came out. And so, after collecting their copies at the castle, Spartz and Anelli had some 12 hours to read the Potter series' 650-page penultimate installment. "We were sleepless and dizzy and euphoric," Anelli told me. By the time a car arrived to ferry them to Rowling's house, Anelli had a 66-page sheaf of questions prepared.

Rowling lived in an ivy-covered Victorian stone mansion set within landscaped gardens, and, like Edinburgh Castle, it was something of a picturesque fortress. After a stalker had taken to showing up at the house, Rowling and her husband had, despite their neighbors' objections, implemented increasingly strict security measures: first an eight-foot-high wall and an electronic gate, then CCTV security cameras. Anelli and Spartz were ushered into Rowling's office, an outbuilding with honey-colored wood and floor-to-ceiling windows.

Rowling arrived: She gave them hugs, and when her husband walked in with their 6-month-old baby, she made introductions all around. Then the family cleared out and the interview began. Anelli and Spartz asked Rowling everything they could about the world she had created. For example, the Sorting Hat - it peers into the thoughts of each new Hogwarts student who arrives, then assigns them to one of four school houses.

"Has the Sorting Hat ever been wrong?" Spartz asked.

"No," Rowling said, unequivocal.

The interview wound up running close to two hours, and on the car ride home, they opened the presents Rowling had given them: Anelli received a gold ring shaped like a snake with emerald eyes. The ring, Rowling wrote, was to thank her for her "invaluable protectiveness towards Harry and his fans."

That weekend, Anelli had lived a fan fairy tale: She had gotten everything she wanted. Rowling had too. Her authority was, indeed, the whole point of the exercise. Anelli and Spartz were there to receive authorial pronouncements ex cathedra.

Anelli stayed in touch with the author for years after that first visit and interviewed Rowling for her own book, Harry, a History. But over time, something changed - possibly for the author herself, certainly for Anelli and many other fans. By the summer of 2020, when The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet once more joined forces, it was to condemn J. K. Rowling.

In the past few years, Rowling began to share her skepticism of transgender identity online. She seemed to have aligned herself with a camp of people who often call themselves "gender-critical feminists"; opponents tend to call them TERFs, or "trans-exclusionary radical feminists," though they are not necessarily very radical. Then, in June of 2020, she posted a 3,670-word essay titled "J. K. Rowling Writes About Her Reasons for Speaking Out on Sex and Gender Issues." Here, she eliminated any lingering doubt: Yes, she did in fact believe the trans-rights movement was "doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode 'woman' as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it."

Outcry followed. Fans, including many trans and nonbinary fans, felt betrayed. Rowling, meanwhile, felt she was the victim of online harassment by a mob hostile to her free speech. By the fall, her attitude toward trans people had become perhaps the first subject on which both Judith Butler and Pete Davidson were asked to opine.

"What's wrong with her, Colin?" Davidson asked "Weekend Update" co-anchor Colin Jost. "She creates a seven-book fantasy series about all types of mythical creatures living in harmony with wizards and elves, and the one thing she can't wrap her head around is Laverne Cox?"

"I confess to being perplexed," Butler told a New Statesman interviewer, "by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against J. K. Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people."

"Perplexed" was a common reaction. Rowling had never been a particularly controversial figure. Her books sold hundreds of millions of copies, they inspired films that brought in billions of dollars, and she used the money she made to save children from orphanages. In 2012, she gave enough to charity and paid enough in taxes to knock herself off the Forbes billionaires list. In 2020, she was tweeting links to a store that sold pins that said F*CK YOUR PRONOUNS.

Read another way, though, the latest turn in Rowling's story looks perhaps less perplexing than inevitable. It is the culmination of a two-decade power struggle for ownership of her fictional world - the right to say what Harry Potter means. The Harry Potter books describe a stark moral universe: Their heroes fight on behalf of all that is good to defeat the forces of absolute evil. Though the struggle may be lonely and hard, right ultimately beats wrong. For fans, when it came to the matter of trans rights, the message of Harry Potter was clear. For Rowling, this was no less the case.

"She absolutely believes that she is right, that she's on a mission, and that history will eventually bear her out," Anelli told me. "She thinks she's doing good work right now."

Rowling completed the first Harry Potter book in 1995 in a modest apartment in the Edinburgh port neighborhood of Leith. The period of her life spent there has been a longtime fixture of the Harry Potter press - before Scholastic paid her an unheard-of $105,000 for the American rights to the first book, Rowling was a single mother on public assistance, nursing cups of coffee so she could write in cafés. This Cinderella story proved irresistible, as did the parallel to Harry himself. Like the orphaned boy wizard who slept in a cupboard, his creator had been recognized and swept off to well-deserved glory.

Rowling's circumstances were in some ways not quite so dire as this story may suggest. She was a college graduate from a solidly middle-class background considering a teaching career. Still, she moved into the Leith apartment during a turbulent stretch of her late 20s and early 30s in which she was eventually diagnosed with depression. When Rowling was 25, her mother died of complications from multiple sclerosis; grieving, Rowling moved abroad and took a job teaching English in Portugal. She married a Portuguese journalist, but the marriage, she has said, was "catastrophic." (Her ex-husband later told the tabloid press that he had slapped her the night she left.) Just over a year after the wedding, Rowling took her baby daughter and moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh.

She completed the seventh and final Harry Potter book at Edinburgh's five-star Balmoral Hotel. J.K. ROWLING FINISHED WRITING HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS IN THIS ROOM (652) ON 11 JAN 2007, she wrote on a marble bust in her suite.

As the series progressed, book tours and readings took on the pitch of Beatlemania. Rowling hired her own PR sentries and earned a reputation for guarding her privacy vigilantly. (In the fourth book, she introduces an unscrupulous tabloid journalist named Rita Skeeter, who is described as having heavy makeup and "mannish" hands. This is as good a place as any to mention that Rowling declined to be interviewed for this story.) She remarried after being set up with a Scottish doctor named Neil Murray, and she had two more children with him.

Rowling had resisted Warner Bros.' initial offer for the movie rights because she was far from completing the series and the studio hadn't promised that any sequels would come from her work. By the time they reached an agreement, Rowling was no longer an unknown debut author; she had a growing fan base the studio didn't want to alienate. She secured a deal that future films would hew to her books.

She absolutely believes that she is right, that she's on a mission, and that history will eventually bear her out.

When Oprah included an interview with "the billionaire mom behind the Harry Potter empire" in the final season of her talk show, such access was a trophy. Rowling had turned Oprah down once before, during the first flush of Potter publicity. This time, the author chose the Balmoral for their interview. As the two women spoke, a 1,300-square-foot suite stretched behind them; a tea service sat ornamentally in between. The red of a rug picked up the soles of Rowling's beige patent Louboutin pumps. Her hair was sleek and blonde, her delivery polished. The 13 years that had passed since her first TV spots seemed not to have aged her but buffed her to a higher sheen.

Winfrey did her best to probe personal trauma; Rowling responded with polite restraint. In her unhappy first marriage, she allowed, she had "repeated patterns" from the family in which she had grown up. She and her father were estranged, she confirmed - "It wasn't a good relationship, from my point of view, for a very long time." Surrounded by the opulence Rowling could now treat as office space, Winfrey also wanted to talk about success.

"Are you in a place now where you can accept that you will always be rich?" she asked.

"No," said Rowling. "Are you?"

Winfrey said she was ("Kinda. Getting there"). Perhaps Rowling's immediate reply had been British self-effacement, but it also suggested a certain alienation from the circumstances she had attained. Rowling had found herself an Oprah-level celebrity - but her idea of the perfect day, as she once said, was waking up in the morning two-thirds of the way through a book and knowing exactly where she was going, with nothing to do all day but write. Her fantasy was to be left alone in a world where she made the rules.

Finishing her work on the Harry Potter books was an occasion Rowling mourned like a death. Harry's world had been a reliable refuge, and she now seemed reluctant to depart. The final book concludes with an epilogue that stretches out her characters' futures - their marriages, their children, their children's prospective marriages. (She later told Anelli she tried to include more - more characters, more children, more details - but her editor had gently reined her in.) Shortly after the last book was published, Rowling made it clear that she wasn't quite finished yet. Addressing an audience at Carnegie Hall, she announced that, though it hadn't come up in the books, the Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay.

At the time, this revelation caused a stir that was enthusiastic - mostly. " Oh, lady, you had your chance!" Roger Sutton remembers thinking when Rowling unleashed the Dumbledore news. "I thought that was a real intrusion upon the reader's experience. And I'm gayer than five Dumbledores." Sutton is editor-in-chief of the American children's-literature journal The Horn Book Magazine, and when the Harry Potter books were first published, he was a rare dissenting voice ( The Sorcerer's Stone was "likable but critically insignificant," he wrote in 1999.) What repelled Sutton was precisely what had attracted many others: the way the author seemed determined to map and describe every corner of her fictional world. "Rowling showed you everything you would see. She told you everything you would hear," he said. "I need more air in the books I read." Down to the level of the sentence - her penchant for adverbs became a well-known foible - Rowling eschewed ambiguity.

One of the fans most devoted to Rowling's exhaustive world building was a former Michigan school librarian named Steven Vander Ark. His website, The Harry Potter Lexicon, had won Rowling's praise; it catalogued the minutiae of her books in such detail that she said she occasionally consulted it to fact-check her work as she wrote. In the months after the series concluded, Vander Ark contracted with a local publisher to turn his site into a print volume, and Rowling's appreciation soured. Suing Vander Ark's publishers for copyright infringement, she said, "I believe that this book constitutes the wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work."

Representing Vander Ark's publisher, the executive director of Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project pointed out that publishing companion guides to existing works was a practice that had been accepted "for hundreds of years." But Neil Blair, one of Rowling's agents, said that people who wished to produce such companions typically approached Rowling's representatives first. Before publishing anything, they would seek her approval and make changes where requested; they would, in other words, "fall in line." The judge ruled in Rowling's favor, awarding $6,750 in damages. Vander Ark had broken down in tears as he testified, but after the trial, he avowed that he would always be a Harry Potter fan.

Blair was working at Warner Bros. when he got into the business of Harry Potter. He was quick to sense the books' commercial promise and the potential for its author to play a powerful role. He left Warner Bros. to work for Rowling's agent; then, in 2011, he started an agency of his own and took Rowling with him. This inaugurated a period in which, books complete, the business continued to grow. Warner Bros. would eventually announce a Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Team. Two Harry Potter theme parks had already opened; plans were under way to expand and open others. Pottermore, an online publishing hub launched in 2012, allowed Rowling to control her own e-book rights and share her writing with fans. But what exactly the fans wanted from her remained to be seen.

"Rowling was very much an untouchable goddess in the 2000s, at the height of her power," Ebony Elizabeth Thomas told me. Thomas is a professor of children's literature at the University of Pennsylvania; back in 2000, she was a recent college graduate teaching fifth grade. That was when she discovered Harry Potter and soon became immersed in the fandom taking shape online. She had just led a 2003 fan panel on postcolonial readings ("Imperial Harry") when a Dr. Seuss scholar in the audience suggested she consider academia. From the fifth-graders she first taught to the graduate students she teaches now, Thomas has spent years following the millennials who grew up alongside Rowling's characters. It's the last cohort with any memory at all of a world where they couldn't read a story and fire off a public critique - or, for that matter, rewrite the story in a way its author never imagined, share it publicly, and find readers of their own. Thomas is only a decade or so older than her students, but she still marvels at the agency they claim as readers. Rowling fashioned herself an untouchable goddess at the exact moment untouchable goddesses became obsolete.

Rowling knew her books had a tremendous number of fans, and she knew the fans talked to one another online. Still, she had published four Harry Potter books before she permitted herself to do some Googling and explore. "I was concerned for the safety of the fragile glass bubble within which I wrote," she once explained. There was something about the internet's basic dynamics that unnerved her. "I had no idea there was this huge underworld seething beneath me," she told Anelli and Spartz in their Edinburgh interview. The plot of the second Harry Potter book hinges on a sinister enchanted diary - you write in it, and someone unseen and unidentified writes back. Although, at the time, Rowling had never been in a chat room, she realized later that this was basically what she had in mind. "Just typing your deepest thoughts into the ether and getting answers back, and you don't know who is answering you," she told an interviewer. "That was always a very scary image to me."

What Rowling initially found scary was exactly what others found exciting, even liberating: Identity could be slippery online. Flourish Klink was 11 in 1998, when Harry Potter fandom (and a Bondi Blue iMac) became the gateway to a new life. On the internet, after all, nobody knows you're a suburban middle-schooler. Klink could write, and that was what mattered in the Harry Potter for Grownups fan group - "so I was just, like, rocking out." There were plenty of fans who were reverential toward Rowling's creation, but many others reimagined her work so that dead characters were living, straight characters gay, or villains sympathetic. Rowling's creations felt ubiquitous, timeless; for readers who had grown up on Harry, J. K. Rowling was practically the Brothers Grimm. The archetypes and lore she assembled were raw material for new stories to be told.

In Rowling's world, for example, gender was an essential, immutable fact, and it had been that way from her first flicker of inspiration. "From the word go, it was a boy," she has said of imagining her protagonist. "I never thought, Oh, maybe it's a girl. Never once. It was always a boy." Yet Rowling also invented the character Nymphadora Tonks (known as Tonks) - a "Metamorphmagus" able to change shape at will. Klink remembers writing "the queerest fanfic I've ever written" about Tonks turning into a man. Since then, Klink has come out as nonbinary. "I loved Tonks - and for a lot of other people who are nonbinary, Tonks was a big deal," they told me. But "when you look back on Tonks, Tonks never changes into a guy. Tonks never changes into anything but different kinds of girl."

While the fandom emerged alongside the social internet, it wasn't until 2014 that Rowling herself embraced Twitter and embarked on a prolific posting career. Tweeting, she was delighted to discover, was writing. "You're swimming in your own medium," she told a 2015 interviewer. "Twitter for me has been an unmixed blessing." Rowling too found she could be the person she wanted to be online. For her, this meant shrugging off the trappings of celebrity. "There came a point where Harry became so enormous that, at a reading, there were 2,000 people," she explained. "You can't answer everyone's question. Twitter gave that back to me."

It was also an ideal conduit for a constant stream of Harry Potter amendments. Readers learned that Fluffy, the three-headed dog, had been repatriated to Greece; that Luna Lovegood's birthday was February 13; and that there was at least one Jewish student at Hogwarts (his name was Anthony Goldstein, and he was a Ravenclaw). They learned that Hogwarts was tuition-free and that, among wizards, homophobia did not exist. The journalist Brian Feldman's tweet poking fun at her relentless output went viral: "*J. K. rowling wakes up* what's today's tweet *spins large bingo cage* hagrid ... is ... pansexual and ... he later joined isis."

Rowling's updates sometimes seemed like retroactive gestures toward inclusion. She often described the series as a plea for tolerance. A fixation on blood purity is central to Voldemort's villainy - he and his followers look down on wizards of non-magical birth. A 2014 study by Italian psychologists suggested that reading Harry Potter "improves attitudes toward stigmatized groups," and young fans seemed to bear this out. An organization called the Harry Potter Alliance sought to channel the energy of fandom into activism. The group launched campaigns to fight genocide in Darfur and bring medical supplies to Haiti; it championed literacy, net neutrality, girls' education access, gay rights, and immigration reform.

Jackson Bird worked at the Harry Potter Alliance from 2013 to 2018, eventually serving as communications director. He is the author of , a 2019 memoir about coming out as trans and being a Harry Potter fan. "The fan community had to evolve on LGBTQ+ issues in the same way that the larger Western world has in recent decades," Bird told me, "but did so a little bit more quickly and a little bit earlier - probably just because there were so many closeted people in the community." In 2016, the Harry Potter Alliance ran a campaign called Protego, named for "a powerful shield spell, used throughout the magical world to make a space safer." Fans working on Protego contributed to a worldwide map of gender-neutral bathrooms and sent postcards to North Carolina's Republican governor to protest the state's anti-trans bathroom bill.

The Harry Potter books are about tolerance, but they are also about identity and the experience of being identified. Harry's story starts when he learns the reason he has always felt different: He's a wizard, and the world he inhabits is divided into non-magical muggles and people like him. Upon arriving at Hogwarts, Harry and his magical peers are sorted into four houses based on their characters. The process reveals their truest selves and shapes their fates. While this may seem like a grave crossroads for an 11-year-old to face, sorting has always held a powerful appeal. The self-proclaimed millennial Gryffindor (or Slytherin or Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff) is the stuff of generational caricature. And for fans like Jackson Bird and Flourish Klink, Harry Potter was the realm in which real-life identities crystallized.

Rowling published adult fiction regularly through the 2010s, primarily a crime series under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. (When her real identity was leaked through a partner at her law firm, she sued the partner. The books then became best sellers.) Still, she hadn't left Harry's universe behind, and her efforts at expansion could raise fresh questions of identity and inclusivity. In 2016, with a film adaptation of her fictional textbook Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them on the horizon, Rowling released new writing on Pottermore. This time, she cast her gaze beyond Britain, to unfortunate effect. According to "Magic in North America," the Magical Congress of the United States of America was founded in 1693, or 83 years before there was a United States. In 1777, wizard president Elizabeth McGilliguddy worked out of Washington, D.C., a city that did not then exist. While these mistakes were partially corrected on Pottermore, larger concerns remained: Rowling had taken the Navajo concept of shape-shifting "skin walkers" and adapted it to suit her magical world in a way that struck many Native American readers as trivializing. "Rowling is known for responding directly to fan questions on Twitter," wrote Cherokee academic Adrienne Keene on her blog, Native Appropriations. "Despite thousands of tweets directed at her about these concerns, she has not addressed it at all." Meanwhile, readers pointed out that the wizarding school Rowling placed in Uganda had a West African name; the wizarding school in Japan had a name that didn't make sense in Japanese.

Flourish Klink now advises entertainment franchises on building relationships with fans. The approach Rowling took to global wizarding struck them as a waste. "She missed a big trick there," Klink told me. There had been an opportunity to collaborate with writers who had relevant expertise, but it would have meant ceding some creative control. "People always get pissed off about anything where you're using cultural beliefs in any way," Klink said of the response to Rowling's take on skin walkers. "But I think that if it had been well done, and in consultation with someone who had even a remote amount of knowledge about it, it would have been a lot less offensive."

Between the Pottermore updates and the constant tweets, "she was beginning to revise her canon in ways that became increasingly cringeworthy," said Thomas, the children's-literature scholar. Revisiting books published ten or 15 years before made more readers pay attention to things that might have slipped their notice as children. (For example: Wouldn't it have been a better choice, all things considered, not to make the bankers of the wizarding world a race of hook-nosed goblins? And surely it wouldn't have taken too much work to find a better name for Harry's generically Asian love interest than Cho Chang?) Yet none of this was, in itself, destructive to Harry Potter's appeal. The fandom had grown into a vast community independent of one woman in Edinburgh. By the time Klink took Flourish as their legal name, they had long since come to feel that Rowling, "while great, was not, you know ... the greatest writer who ever lived." What started out as a reference to her work - the wizarding bookstore Flourish and Blotts - had been Klink's screen name for more than two decades.

The year 2016 also brought the closest thing yet to a new Harry Potter book. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part play lasting over five hours, was based on a story by Rowling conceived in collaboration with director John Tiffany and playwright Jack Thorne. The three joined Will Gompertz of the BBC for an interview before its opening in London's West End.

"Is there a sense," Gompertz asked Rowling, "in your own mind - philosophically, more than sort of literally - that you don't own Potter anymore, that it's owned by the fan base?"

"I wouldn't go that far, Will," she said, not quite smiling. (Someone with Rowling's taste for adverbs might note that she said this rather sharply.) The collaborators sitting alongside her laughed. "I'm deadly serious," she continued. "Because that would be to disavow what that world was to me. Seventeen years, that world was mine. And for seven of those years, it was entirely mine; not a living soul knew anything about it. And I can't just uproot that from all the personal experiences that informed those stories and say, 'I'm throwing that away now.' And that's how that would feel."

The dawn of the Trump era found the vocabulary of Harry Potter deployed with new urgency. Hermione signs proliferated at the Women's March. A meme juxtaposed the grim Inauguration Day faces of Barack Obama's staff with a movie still from Voldemort's arrival at the climactic Battle of Hogwarts. "Order of the Phoenix, mount up," tweeted Lin-Manuel Miranda alongside a Harry Potter GIF.

Rowling, for her part, fired off insults at the new U.S. president with palpable delight. Her politics had always been comfortably center left. Back in 2005, she had chatted with Spartz and Anelli about how much she loved The West Wing; in 2009, she contributed to the " Time 100" with an ode to Labour prime minister Gordon Brown. Like her fans, Rowling translated politics into the language of Harry Potter: Voldemort was "nowhere near as bad" as Trump, she declared. Sometimes the analogies were more complicated, as when she cited Dumbledore to explain her opposition to a boycott of Israel. And sometimes she objected to the parallels others saw. Quote-tweeting a woman with 44 followers (Rowling had at the time some 7.5 million), Rowling took issue with her description of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as "a political Dumbledore."

"I forgot Dumbledore trashed Hogwarts, refused to resign and ran off to the forest to make speeches to angry trolls," she wrote. She stressed the point two months later: "Corbyn. Is. Not. Dumbledore." Rowling issued long threads decrying "Saint Jeremy" and lambasting a Corbyn supporter who had called Theresa May a whore. Corbyn, though hardly above reproach, was, notably, pro-trans-rights. He supported making gender self-identification less onerous; he would later, on occasion, introduce himself with his pronouns. One of Rowling's early gestures that attracted scrutiny on trans rights was her liking a tweet that referred to young Corbynite Labour figures who were trans. "Men in dresses get brocialist solidarity I never had. That's misogyny!" it read. Rowling's publicist dismissed the like as "a clumsy and middle-aged moment," but, if it had been an accident, it was not one her client chose to correct.

At the time, transgender rights were becoming a lightning rod in the U.K. The British government called for a public consultation on the country's Gender Recognition Act in 2018, which moved the issue to the center of national debate. In the Labour Party infighting Rowling had joined, the "trans-rights activist" had become a figure discussed in much the same way as the "Bernie bro" across the Atlantic: They were young, they were angry at their Establishment elders, and, crucially, for many prominent British feminists, this anger was coded as misogyny. British feminism's leading voices, writers who had been setting the feminist agenda in Britain's major papers for years, advanced the view that trans rights were an attack on women's rights (or even an attempt at "female erasure"), that trans women were men seeking to invade women's spaces, that trans men were women lost to homophobia and self-loathing, and that all this represented a grave threat to "natal" women and girls. On Mumsnet, a popular British parenting site, anxiety over the dangers of trans rights overtook the "Feminism" message board.

The divide here between mainstream British feminists and their American counterparts is striking: American opponents of trans rights tend to be right wing. The difference reflects, perhaps, the relative insularity and homogeneity of British feminism. In America, challenges from feminists across marginalized groups have increasingly pressed those who would speak on behalf of "women" to reexamine whom they mean.

Fans began to note with alarm that Rowling followed vocally anti-trans Twitter accounts. Some had also taken note of certain things in Rowling's crime novels - like the trans character her detective hero taunts by saying that jail "won't be fun ... not pre-op." All of this mostly passed beneath widespread public notice, however. More prominently controversial was Rowling's support for Johnny Depp. Set to star in a new Fantastic Beasts movie, he stood accused of domestic abuse. In a statement, Rowling said that, based on her understanding of his case, she was "genuinely happy" to have Depp stay on. Others may disagree, she acknowledged, but "conscience isn't governable by committee." Depp was her peer in a rarefied world; they had (at different times) owned the same yacht.

I can't imagine having had that much cultural significance and power, feeling as if the ground is shifting underneath your feet. Being told that you're wrong.

Meanwhile, Rowling undertook a new courtroom battle. In 2019, she brought a lawsuit against Amanda Donaldson, a former personal assistant who, between 2014 and 2017, had used a business credit card and unauthorized cash withdrawals to defraud Rowling of some £18,743. (Rowling said she intended to donate any money she recovered to Lumos, her children's charity.) "The expenditure on Molton Brown toiletries of £3,629 was extraordinary," Rowling testified, according to court records. She "had never asked [Donaldson] to buy these toiletries. She does not like them. She finds them overly-perfumed." Donaldson's exploits suggested a portrait of Rowling's life that (according to Rowling) was all wrong. "It was darkly comical to suggest that the things [Donaldson] bought were what [Rowling] would want or need. She was staggered that [Donaldson] thought she would not be caught."

Animating the Donaldson lawsuit is a sense of shocked violation - alarm at a sanctuary breached. Ever since vaulting to fame, Rowling had sought the protection of some private realm. After selling the Edinburgh house Melissa Anelli had visited, she purchased another, this one behind fast-growing hedges; they soon approached 30 feet high. But her safest space had long been the one she found in writing. There, she knew all the secrets, ordained good and evil, and decided how everything would end.

"I can't imagine what it would be like to exist in her shoes," Thomas said of Rowling's recent years. "Where this story that lived in your head during the worst time in your life - when you're a single mom, abuse survivor, living on welfare - your wildest dream comes true. Your story is the best-selling children's-book series of all time. You transform children's literature and media ... I can't imagine having had that much cultural significance and power, feeling as if the ground is shifting underneath your feet. Being told that you're wrong."

Maya Forstater was a British tax researcher at a think tank, and after she repeatedly voiced her belief that trans women are men, the think tank chose not to renew her contract. Forstater challenged the decision, an employment tribunal ruled against her, and at this point Rowling was inspired to speak up. "Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who'll have you. Live your best life in peace and security," Rowling tweeted. "But force women out of their jobs for stating sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill."

The tweet marked Rowling's first direct statement on trans issues. "This Is Not a Drill" is the title of a Medium post on the case by the British philosopher Kathleen Stock, who had taken up Forstater's cause. Apart from advancing philosophical objections to trans identity, Stock's work focuses on aesthetics, and in that field, she is a proponent of "extreme intentionalism." Set in opposition to Continental theory, this view holds that fiction is "a set of instructions to imagine certain things" - a book means whatever its writer says it does. The author is always right.

After the outrage over her Forstater tweet, Rowling stepped away from Twitter. She returned in the spring of this year. She was preparing for the release of a new children's book called The Ickabog, and besides, it was lockdown. She was taking Harry Potter quizzes. She was reorganizing her books by color, she reported, posting a video of her library. She seemed to be recapturing her old enthusiasm for the medium when, in June, she shared a story with the headline "Opinion: Creating a More Equal Post-COVID-19 World for People Who Menstruate."

"I'm sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?" she wrote. The tone called to mind her Trump-heckling days; it was a tweet that anticipated applause. It bombed. Rowling returned a half-hour later on a note of affronted righteousness. "It isn't hate to speak the truth," she wrote in a thread insisting that she respected "every trans person's right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them."

Four days later, Rowling elaborated in her long essay on reasons for "speaking out." She had been following trans issues for a couple of years now, she wrote. In part, her interest was professional: One of the main characters in her crime novels is a young woman "of an age to be interested in, and affected by" such issues. The connection between the Galbraith books' heroine and trans issues was not at first apparent, but this character is a rape survivor, and, as Rowling's essay progressed, it became clear that this went to the crux of her argument. "I've been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor," she wrote. She had hesitated to discuss these things not out of shame but because they remained so difficult to revisit. "My perennial jumpiness is a family joke," Rowling wrote. "I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven't heard them approaching." She brought up her experiences now "out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who've been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces."

"When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he's a woman," Rowling wrote, "then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth."

In the U.S., right-wing supporters of "bathroom bills" have long conjured the specter of a male predator in the ladies' room. Yet there's an element of psychological reality to an argument like Rowling's that makes it something more than cynical scare-mongering. Alison Phipps is a professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex and the author of Me, Not You: The Trouble With Mainstream Feminism. In her observation of the self-styled "gender-critical" feminists, their position "has a lot to do with trauma, and it has a lot to do with anger," she told me. "I'm not excusing this politics, but I think that that is a reason for it. I think there are a lot of women involved in gender-critical feminism who have been really, really badly hurt by men - cis men." The problem is that "gender-critical feminism completely misrepresents where the danger is. Very few people are going to be raped by somebody in a public toilet." (A 2019 Harvard study, meanwhile, found that policies restricting bathroom access by birth sex were correlated with a greater likelihood of sexual assault for trans and nonbinary teens.) Fears can be ungrounded or unfair and still be genuinely felt. "People's triggers are not politically correct," Phipps said. You can support people who are triggered, try to help them manage their fears - but "that doesn't mean that people's triggers should be used as the basis of policy."

The experience of womanhood that anti-trans feminists present often seems to be defined by fear. Maya Forstater, for example, shared an essay in 2019 called "Pronouns Are Rohypnol." The pseudonymous author writes that she refuses to "use female pronouns for anyone male": Extra mental effort might be expended in using a trans woman's preferred pronouns, and therefore their effect is akin to a date-rape drug. "They dull your defenses. They change your inhibitions. They're meant to. You've had a lifetime's experience learning to be alert to 'him' and relax to 'her.' " Forstater called it an "important article," adding, "every woman has learnt from experience that politeness is exploitable & can put us in danger."

"I think there's a certain attachment to victimhood," Phipps said.

"I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since," Rowling wrote in her essay. "I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death." Describing herself as "a much-banned author," she cast her choice to write anyway in terms of free speech and later lent her support to the "Letter on Justice and Open Debate."

Twelve years before, at a Harvard commencement, Rowling had delivered a speech in which she extolled the importance of imaginative empathy. "Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's place," she said. But "many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are."

Rowling now seemed unable to think her way into her critics' point of view. Comfortably within the bounds of her own experience, she could not imagine the reader who detected a threat, if not in the person of Joanne Rowling herself, then in the audience her words might reach.

I ❤️ JK ROWLING, read a poster that appeared in the Edinburgh Waverley rail station in July. It stayed up only briefly. Network Rail said its "political nature" violated its advertising rules. But it lasted long enough to make an impression on Chris Elston, an insurance broker in British Columbia. Elston told me that in the past year or so, he had begun following "all of the things to do with gender ideology." He was troubled by what he read. "This self-identification law Canada has just passed will enable any man to suddenly declare that they're a woman," he said. "I have two little girls, and I just got really tired of all this nonsense." When he saw that the Edinburgh sign had been removed, he decided to commission a billboard of his own in Vancouver.

The September morning that Elston's billboard went up, it received little reaction until he tweeted it out. "It went boom on Twitter," he said. The billboard was paint-bombed overnight; a city councillor called it hate speech. The sign company "buckled to the pressure right away" and brought in a crew to cover it up. Afterward, Elston sent out a call on Twitter, where he has 25,100 followers. He sought funding to put up more billboards, and he received an enthusiastic response.

For those opposed to "gender ideology," Rowling's embrace of their cause has made her an icon. How, proponents ask rhetorically, could it possibly be "hate speech" to proclaim a love for the best-selling children's author of all time? Around Vancouver, Elston likes to go out in a sandwich board that reads I ❤️JK ROWLING on one side and GENDER IDEOLOGY DOES NOT BELONG IN SCHOOLS on the other. "I stand on street corners, and I go to wherever there are crowds downtown, and I have conversations with people. I'm really calm," he said. Even so, "I've been making a lot of waves." In October, he wore his sandwich board to a rally held by a trans candidate for local office. Later that month - the same week an Edinburgh street was shut down so Rowling could comply with a city order to trim her hedges - Elston was arrested at a protest in Vancouver for allegedly causing a disturbance.

"J. K. Rowling has absolutely been the inspiration for all of this," Elston said. "In her books, there's a journalist called Rita Skeeter. And Rita Skeeter is one of these lying journalists who has a poison pen and constantly lies about people and writes fake news. And that's what's going on about J. K. Rowling. And that's what's going on with me." He is determined to stay the course. "It's really hard. My pulse is often elevated way beyond what it should be, because there's so much hate and lies and stress coming at me. So that's physiologically going on. But in my mind, I'm crystal clear. And I'm totally at peace with what needs to be done."

Elston began the Harry Potter books for the first time with his 8-year-old daughter this year. When we spoke, they were just starting the fourth. "Honestly, as I read these books, I feel J. K. Rowling's character just shine through," he said. "I consider her to be a genius among geniuses."

*This article appears in the December 21, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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Edinburgh Castle, many centuries old, has been called the most besieged place in Britain. In 2005, on the night Melissa Anelli arrived, it was besieged primarily by children. The cover of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was projected on its outer walls. Inside, J. K.

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Me, Not You webinar: talk and Chapter Five reading

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This is the recording of a webinar hosted by Manchester University Press on my book Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism. It consists of a short talk followed by a reading from Chapter Five of the book (there was a Q&A after this but that has not been included on the video).

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Pre-publication interview on Surviving Society podcast

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Pre-publication interview on Surviving Society podcast

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E059 The Surviving Society Alternative to Woman's Hour: Alison Phipps by Surviving Society

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Chantelle visited the University of Sussex to speak with Prof Alison Phipps about her forcoming book (March 2020) - Me, Not You: The trouble with mainstream feminism. 

Useful links -
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-political-whiteness-of-metoo
https://genderate.wordpress.com/

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Inside the Great British TERF war - article in VICE

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Inside the Great British TERF war - article in VICE

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The Great British TERF War illustration by Ashton Attzs.

This is how the debate over human rights for transgender people ended up dominating mainstream media, poisoning newsrooms and dividing British feminism.

In North London there are man-made swimming ponds that attract people from across the city, regardless of the weather or time of year. The passion of its regulars is captured in The Ponds, a British documentary about the lives of swimmers at Hampstead Heath. "The things that life throws at you are so painful," a woman explains on a bench, "then to get into water that's two degrees centigrade is nothing." Another woman in her 70s shares that swimming in the ponds at 7AM on her 70th birthday gave her a new sense of strength.

The film was released in January 2019, exactly one year after a tumultuous period for the Ponds. In 2018, it became a real-life site for the "trans debate", where the rights of cisgender women appeared to collide with the rights of transgender women. (In an email, one of the filmmakers told me that "things are pretty sensitive down there right now" and he can't speak on "the trans issue".)

The timeline went like this: in December 2017, the Daily Mail published a piece announcing a war at the Ladies' Pond. A regular user was quoted as saying they saw a "male-bodied" person using the ladies pond. Prominent women's rights activist and Pond user Julie Bindel, agreed that for anyone other than cis women to use the pond - for those "pretending" to be a woman - was "completely unacceptable".

The Kenwood Ladies' Pond Association (KLPA), a voluntary organisation of women who promote the interests of women using the Pond to the local council, swiftly put out a statement in support of trans women using the Pond. The following month, its members met to discuss the issue. According to one KLPA member, confusion and unease erupted among some members as a direct result of the Mail article, despite the reality that trans women had been swimming in the Ladies' Pond for decades.

Other publications began to run stories on this issue and in May, a small group of women protested by entering the Men's Pond - some wearing mankinis and fake beards. It was part of a campaign organised on Mumsnet called #ManFriday, which encouraged participants to "self-identify" as men for the day to protest trans rights. LGBT charity Stonewall criticised the "toxic" media debate surrounding the Ponds, and highlighted that trans women were legally allowed to use the pond already due to the 2010 Equality Act.

The Ladies' Pond is not a unique site for these tensions around transgender people. It includes many of the factors that have dominated debates around trans rights: bodies, public space and the safety of cisgender women. But it is surely no coincidence that the Pond is enjoyed by the London arts and media elite: its clientele include Esther Freud, aforementioned Julie Bindel, Emma Thompson and Kate Moss. It is, quite literally, on their turf.

In February 2019, the New York Times published an op-ed with the headline " How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans". The lead image was the Ladies Pond sign. It immediately translated the very particular and peculiar Britishness of our anti-trans sentiment for a progressive US audience, for whom trans rights is an unquestioned tenet of human rights and feminism. (This reputation was solidified this month, when Harry Potter author JK Rowling doubled down on her tweets about trans people with a self-published essay originally titled " Terf Wars".) A number of mystified US publications have spent entire articles questioning just why the UK is so transphobic. "TERF ideology," one Vox article declared, "has become the de facto face of feminism in the UK."

"There's this fantasy that the British are not narcissistic like Americans - we would never be so arrogant as to come up with an identity for ourselves and force other people to comply with it," says Dr Sophie Lewis, the feminist theorist and geographer who wrote the NYT op-ed. "'What an incredibly vain, American notion. Here in England, we call a spade a spade, men are men and women are women.' This is itself a form of identity politics." It is the British self-fetishisation of being no-nonsense.

Trans-exclusionary protests and strategies were appearing IRL, particularly at feminist events. And yet the Ponds became, perhaps unfairly, the singular focal point for British transphobia. Nicky Mayhew, the co-chair of the KLPA, repeats that the Pond is for all women, including trans women, and that as far as she knows, no Ladies' Pond swimmers engaged with the Men's Pond protest: "The media has made transgender issues so inflammatory."

Mayhew seems sincerely perturbed by the scale of publicity it got, attributing it to the high-profile women who use the ponds. "It was something that was whipped up out of nothing, really, out of a trivialisation and a really uncompassionate desire to make headlines. I would prefer not to see that being whipped up again, because there are people out there who appear to have nothing better to do than to try to make other people's lives more uncomfortable and painful, which I think is despicable."

But friction over the Pond is a modern take on a years-long story; or rather, a one-sided slow-burning war between the British media and the small percentage of the public who are transgender.

When trans writer and critic Juliet Jacques grew up, there was little information available for those wishing to transition. This was the 90s, the era of lad culture and beer and Oasis. By the 2000s, comedians were still regularly making jokes at the expense of trans people. In BBC comedy Little Britain, Matt Lucas played a Thai bride named "Ting Tong" who is later revealed to be a "ladyboy". Right-wing tabloids called trans people "trannies" (Daily Mail) and focused on sex change or trans pregnancy shock stories with headlines like "Womb man" (the Mirror) or "Bloke: I'm having a baby" ( Daily Star).

Jacques worked in a series of office jobs in Brighton and watched certain gains be made around trans legal rights: the Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004 and treatment was provided on the NHS. She asked herself: "If the government is doing us less damage, which other social institutions are doing us damage? And a lot of people hit on the media at the same time. We'd all grown up with wall-to-wall transphobia in the media and it was never seriously questioned."

Indeed, the media posed a large roadblock in the fight for trans rights. "In the Guardian in particular, it was journalists like Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer setting the terms of the discussion," Jacques said, of what inspired her to move to London and take up journalism. In articles from that decade, Greer calls trans women "a ghastly parody" while Bindel describes a trans woman as a "man in a dress". This existed without much in the way of actual trans voices.

It was in this climate that Jacques began writing a Guardian column about her experience transitioning, believing the publication to be a good place to change the minds of the average reader. The majority of her writing, on issues from hormones to clothing, was published between 2010 and 2011, but continued sporadically until 2012. In a penultimate column documenting her gender reassignment surgery, Jacques writes of her recovery at her parents home. To pass the time she listened to the radio: "One afternoon, the DJ plays Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', which was constantly on my stereo during my alienated youth. As I hear its opening bars, the entire transition, from my childhood gender dysphoria to this pain-filled moment in the house where I grew up, 20 years later, replays itself in my mind, and suddenly I'm in waves of cathartic tears."

It was a touching and informative insight into the life of an estimated one percent of the population. "Plus I realised quite quickly that I could get quite a lot of politics into it," Jacques says. The column had impact: it was longlisted for an Orwell Prize in 2011 and was the springboard for Jacques to get her book deal for Trans: A Memoir, the first autobiography from a British trans writer in decades. But Jacques retreated from the media; the Guardian continued to publish pieces she felt were transphobic and she received personal abuse in the comment section.

"I ended up unwittingly shouldering the burden of representation," she says now. "I got burned out, and couldn't really do it anymore, then you had people like Paris Lees coming through, who was a lot more able to handle the bigger platforms."

Only months after her decision to pull back, Jacques and other trans people saw two major moments in British anti-trans history. In January, Julie Burchill wrote an Observer column "attacking" (the words of the paper itself, in a later apology for printing it) transgender people, calling them "screaming mimis", "bed-wetters in bad wigs" and "dicks in chicks' clothing". The piece, which was removed online, was written in defence of her friend and fellow writer Suzanne Moore, who had written that women were too often expected to look like a "Brazilian transsexual".

"I realised I wanted to have a voice when I saw a piece by Germaine Greer in the Guardian calling trans women 'ghastly parodies' of women"

Then in March, a trans teacher named Lucy Meadows died by suicide. This came a few months after the Daily Mail printed a column by Richard Littlejohn about Meadows' transition and return to work. The scaremongering piece, which misgendered Meadows numerous times, had been published in December the previous year and was swiftly and silently taken down from the website. Over 41,000 people signed an online petition demanding that the Mail fire Littlejohn. He was not fired, but an inquest into Meadows' death found she had called the Press Complaints Commission over the press harassment and the coroner chastised the paper for the attempted "character assassination" of "ill-informed bigotry".

The US had long since moved on. The " transgender tipping point", as coined by a 2014 Time cover, had arrived. Actor Laverne Cox, American presenter Janet Mock, rockstar Laura Jane Grace, activist Chelsea Manning and others were thriving in the spotlight. When Jacques talks of writer Paris Lees taking the gauntlet, it felt like Britain's concession to a wider moment of optimism for the trans movement. Lees had a vivacious attitude and wrote funny and frank blogs for VICE from 2014 onwards, discussing issues such as American conservative attempts to block trans people from using the bathroom of their gender to trans-exclusionary feminism in British media.

As young working class writer, Lees was galvanised in the same way Jacques was. "I realised I wanted to have a voice when I saw a piece by Germaine Greer in the Guardian calling trans women 'ghastly parodies' of women," she says. "It was really upsetting. I was at university and reading newspapers for the first time and trying to be political and realising, 'hold on a minute, this is supposed to be a nice newspaper, they're supposed to be speaking up for people who are persecuted.' It was acceptable to ridicule people like me."

What Lees did was unprecedented in British media: she worked not just with liberal, progressive publications, but with tabloids like the Sun and the Mirror to offer trans perspectives on gender and related issues. "I'm interested in getting what I want," she says on this today. "Sometimes that involves making compromises. Ultimately, I want equality for trans people and that involves using accessible language, and writing in places that we may not align with politically. I'm not interested in living in an echo chamber. We have to reach the mainstream."

Young trans writer Shon Faye was the next to rise to prominence through the Guardian and youth media platforms like VICE and Dazed. In the mid-2010s, when she came out as trans, she felt a cautious optimism about trans rights. Debates about trans rights that typically involved a trans person on one side and someone against those rights on the other were fairly routine, both on TV and in print media. The obvious advantage to this was the obvious visibility: trans people were being seen and heard by British public.

But the debate has remained the same: are trans people who they say they are? "We've found that the purpose of the debate isn't to move the conversation on at all," Faye says. "It's to have the same debate again and again and again, almost as if that's a strategy in and of itself, to keep us debating and to keep a question mark over every aspect of trans lives and rights." The optimism quickly wore off. "We thought visibility meant people will understand us better and they'll relate to us better and we'll be accepted. That doesn't happen. We don't have control of the media - the discussion is never on our terms."

The question suddenly became not one of visibility, but of questioning the visibility given. "We've not gone backwards - it's not like it was before," says Faye. "Now we're literally in the news all the time, and in the media all the time, but in the most hostile way. And there's no way I could've anticipated that."

§

In 2018, the debate shifted into outright toxicity. The consultation on the now-outdated Gender Recognition Act, which allows trans people to have their identity legally recognised, changed everything. Currently, the GRA mandates a years-long, medicalised process for trans people to prove they are trans. This involves psychiatric interviews, medical assessments and a £140 application fee. It also requires them to give two years of proof that they have lived as their "acquired gender" before being approved by a panel of experts.

The reforms suggested by LGBT charities like Stonewall were fairly minimal: the recognition of non-binary identities, no medical diagnosis or presentation of evidence needed and self-determination through a more streamlined process. The media commentary around the subject suggested otherwise. As Faye says: "Suddenly there was a deluge of anti-trans pieces every day. The Mail and the Sun were happy to join in there, but the Times - which is a paper of record - taking a committed level of anti-trans stance... That's when I realised we were fucked in terms of the media."

The final domino to fall was the Guardian. To many trans people and trans allies, the one progressive broadsheet in the UK posting its editorial view on trans rights in October 2018 was almost as striking a landmark moment as the overall response to the GRA. Rather than support the fairly minor reforms to the Gender Recognition Act, the Guardian highlighted the differing rights of trans people and women. It concluded with something no one on either side would disagree with: "Social media have unhelpfully amplified the voices at both extremes of this argument. The current divisions are troubling." Trans activists and allies noted that the editorial was fence-sitting: it didn't entirely invalidate trans rights, but it did dodge the issue.

Faye - along with other trans writers and readers - was shocked. "That editorial was a slap in the face and a watershed moment for me too, because I knew I couldn't, in all conscience, work with the Guardian again. I'm self-aware enough to know that people would think I'm a bit of a sell-out, and fair enough. It's grim to be taking payment from somewhere that the next day may be running something transphobic."

The editorial stance didn't come without warning. Concerns had been raised by trans people and allies over tweets and columns by prominent Guardian columnists and writers Hadley Freeman and Suzanne Moore. In a March 2018 Weekend column, Freeman argued against trans women using women's facilities, implying that the dangers of a move towards self-identification was a danger to the safety of women. She notably calls Mumsnet "a pleasing hotbed of radical feminism" (elsewhere, Mumsnet has been accused of radicalising a whole generation of transphobes, with one Outline journalist writing: "Mumsnet is to British transphobia... what 4Chan is to American fascism").

According to some Guardian UK staffers, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions, distress arose among younger members of staff and those supportive of trans rights. "The editorial was clearly trying to avoid alienating that portion of our readership - but in doing so it created a false equivalence between the two views, as if they were both equally valid," says one staff member. "This was obviously disheartening for those who believe trans rights should be protected."

Public-facing opposition to this view was deemed necessary from within the company: two weeks after the Guardian UK view, a response from the US team was published. According to someone directly involved with internal US discussions, a formal letter was written in the US and delivered to leadership in London. Based on follow-up conversations, it was strongly felt by American staff that they should publish their own response, which drew links between the language and ideas purported by the UK's view and the Trump administration's desire to deny trans people basic recognition.

Internal unrest over this issue peaked with a March article by Suzanne Moore about the "silencing" and "no-platforming" of Professor Selina Todd at an Oxford University event. Black feminist writer Lola Olufemi had withdrawn from the event, citing Todd's support of Women's Place UK, an organisation set up to fight for the protection of sex-based services and refuges. It prompted organisers asking Todd not to speak. "Male violence is an issue for women, which is why we want single-sex spaces," Moore writes. Where, commentators asked, does that leave trans women, to whom the patriarchy proves an even greater risk?

The power of such pieces is in how they speak to cisgender women's very real pain. Often writers centre experiences such as abuse or rape and then set these up as distinct and separate from the experiences of trans people. As Alison Phipps writes in her book Me, Not You: The Problem With Mainstream Feminism: "Sexual violence is terror; so is the way it is tackled and policed. And (white) 'women's safety' is used to justify violence against marginalised communities." She later adds: "The investment of sexual trauma in the outrage economy allows the 'good' woman (cis, 'respectable', implicitly white) to be used to withhold support and resources from the 'bad' ones."

No attempt is made to tackle the economic and social causes that cause suffering for all: when JK Rowling's abuser was doorstepped by tabloids and made front page news, it is damning evidence of misogyny in the press. It is arguably sad proof that both cisgender and trans women need each other to fight the patriarchy as much as ever. But when single-sex services are discussed in gender-critical pieces of editorial, the politics doesn't instead focus on better-funded women's services for both cis and trans women. There is no consideration of where trans women are expected to go.

After Moore's column was published, LGBTQ activists worked with a Guardian staffer to put together an open letter with more than 200 names of prominent British feminists - many Black or women of colour - as well as Guardian staff who disagreed with it. One sympathetic Guardian staffer said: "It may seem as if we are attacking the company, but it comes from a place of wanting to protect it. In the long run, the newspaper is probably going to be judged for promoting these views, so when we look back on this time in the future at least we will be able to say that there was opposition to them."

Simultaneously, an emergency meeting for LGBTQ+ Guardian staff members and allies gathered to discuss how best to respond. Most people in attendance were reportedly under 40. A letter to the editor was drafted that afternoon and signed over the following days by more than 300 members of staff. It was also submitted for publication to Buzzfeed, who protected the anonymity of its signatories.

The letter stated that signatories were distressed by the resignation of another trans colleague in the London office, the third in less than a year. The colleague in question had, according to Buzzfeed, received anti-trans comments from "influential editorial staff" and had vocally criticised the publication of Moore's column - "the straw that broke the camel's back" - at the editorial morning conference. The letter added that "the pattern of publishing transphobic content has interfered with our work and cemented our reputation as a publication hostile to trans rights and trans employees".

One anonymous signatory says: "We specifically chose to avoid mentioning the columnist's name because we didn't want it to seem like a personal attack - the problem is more widespread - though [Moore] chose to portray this civility as cowardice."

On 19th March, Moore leaked the letter signed by 338 in full, featuring the names and roles of those who had signed. According to staffers, this came after an email was sent to staff members stating: "It is never acceptable to attack colleagues whose views you do not agree with, whether in meetings, on email, publicly or on social media."

The sources - one of whom purports to have felt scared about anti-trans activists and trolls and "intimidated" by Moore's action - also say that the company has not issued more information on Moore's actions internally, nor has the company checked to see if those named are OK. A signatory said: "I think what happened after Suzanne doxxed us, [that] there were no repercussions for her, it's testament to the level of power she has in our organisation. There was not even an apology from her for doing that."

In a statement to VICE, a Guardian spokesperson said: "The editorial remit is to engage with the important issues of the day, and never shy away from difficult subjects." They add: "We have put a lot of work into diversity and inclusion in the last two years, and we will continue to do all we can to support the rights of trans and non-binary people through our employee policies."

Why might an internal debate come to this? A newspaper, as many Guardian staffers have publicly pointed out, is not a monolithic entity. While all sources emphasise their love and respect for the company, a pattern emerged: whenever a piece on trans issues was published and sparked heated debate among the public and staffers, concerned staffers would attend the usual morning conference to discuss it. The writer in question and a couple of senior editors might be there to represent one side, and on the other members of the Pride Group - an organised group of LGBTQ+ staff - or younger staffers might contribute their view.

Sources describe a "difficult atmosphere" where concerns about aggravating the wrong person - a senior editor or writer - will impact their own careers. They note that BAME and working class staff, who are widely and openly supportive of pro-trans editorial, feel more at risk of the repercussions of raising concerns. Another staffer says: "You have to consider all that before you build up the courage to speak out."

"Without wanting to sound too self-pitying, I've been targeted very badly in the name of feminism." - Shon Faye

The reality is that there are relatively few prominent cultural commentators on gender in the UK. But as Dr Sophie Lewis claims, when speaking to VICE, they present a united front. She says that they have risen through the ranks together and have longstanding relationships of some kind with each other. "It's obviously easy to overstate this because there are structural factors I think as to why the ideological terrain is the way it is, but it's also just because they're all mates: Julie Bindel, Suzanne Moore, Julie Burchill. These are - in some cases erstwhile working class and radical - highly educated journalistic privileged people. They're defending each other and doubling down, partly because of the interpersonal ties and also because British class society's particular texture amplifies the echo chamber element of it."

Against the unmistakable flavour of a cohesive defence, the very few trans journalists have a narrative of their own. Like Jacques, both Faye and Lees are withdrawing from the media due to the toll it takes on their mental health. This means transgender people are going unheard in the mainstream media, and the debate continues to be had by white women centring their own experience as it purports to trans lives.

Faye has written a forthcoming political non-fiction book about the systemic transphobia in British society and says, quite sincerely, that the hardest chapter to write has been on feminism ("without wanting to sound too self-pitying, I've been targeted very badly in the name of feminism"). Lees hasn't written for a newspaper for the past two years. She's semi-retired from journalism and doesn't consider herself an activist anymore. "I'm planning to leave the country because I don't want to live here anymore, and I am probably one of the most privileged trans people in the country. So if I'm feeling like this, I can tell you a lot of other trans people are feeling like this," Lees says. "OK, you've got to have your god-given right to keep telling me again and again and again that I'm not a real woman, that's fine. I just don't want to stick around and listen to it. I feel guilty because a lot of people can't do that, but it's not like I've not made a contribution. I'll always use my voice when I can, but I'm not allowing these people to upset me for the rest of my life. These people never stop, it's endless."

Lees half-jokes: "I'm glad millennials and Gen Z get it - part of my activism now is just waiting for people to die."

§

Some might remember this as a British story of furious debate and outright transphobia. But its key theme is an imbalance of power - one weighted against trans people and present within the internal and external make-up of the media and public life today. British trans people represent an estimated one percent of the population. One in four trans people has experienced homelessness and more than a quarter in a relationship in the past year have experienced domestic abuse. Their plight is firmly a class problem when one in three employers is "less likely" to hire a trans person, and in Ireland, half of trans people are unemployed.

Those who oppose their rights are frequently white, middle or upper middle-class people, or working-class people whose successful careers have afforded them a significant measure of social mobility. They have concerns over being silenced and yet hold large platforms with tens of thousands, even millions, of followers. They appear on Newsnight, radio shows or in reputable newspapers everyday.

Even a global pandemic has not slowed the decades-old debate on whether trans women are women. Father Ted creator Graham Linehan has continued to tweet about trans lives to his over half a million followers every single day. Bestselling author JK Rowling, who has an estimated net-worth of £795 million, was impassioned enough about trans people during lockdown to write a 3,600-word essay about them. At a time when Black Lives Matter is becoming a global movement, domestic violence is growing during lockdown and a recession threatens people's livelihoods - all issues that deeply concern cisgender women and trans women - the news cycle has been sacrificed to the trans debate.

The past week for trans people culminated in the news that Boris Johnson plans to scrap potential changes to the Gender Recognition Act, despite the fact that 70 percent of respondents to the GRA consultation supported trans people having the right to self-identify. The PM is said to be preparing new protections that would prevent some trans women from using single-sex spaces like toilets and refuges. At the same time - and on the fourth anniversary of the Orlando massacre - US president Donald Trump announced that gender-based health protection for trans people would be revoked. All around the world, plans - long drawn up, executed consciously or unconsciously by right-wingers, the mainstream press and a minority of British feminists - are being rolled out to exile trans people from public life.

Meanwhile, the regular swimmers of the Ladies' Pond are desperate to get back to their water. As hotter months begin, the water is a haven for feeling at one with the world, for dissolving the boundaries between body and earth.

But the romantic light in which the Ladies' Pond is seen is only a half-truth: it's a man-made reservoir on a heath with a rich history of who can and cannot access it.

In their contribution to the 2019 Ladies' Pond essay collection At The Ponds, non-binary critic So Mayer points out that the Heath's Kenwood House was home in the 1800s to Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an African slave and a British naval officer. A decade after she arrived at Kenwood House, a marsh was drained to add to the reservoirs. Fifteen years later, just before Belle left the house to marry an abolitionist, Thousand Pound Pond (now known as Concert Pond) was dug.

"The fetishisation of landscaped parks created by the aristocracy and maintained by Britain's colonial expropriated wealth, without any consideration of the history of its making," Mayer writes on email, "colludes in creating implicit exclusions." In other words: even the bucolic spaces that anti-trans feminists wish to protect have class and segregation baked into their DNA.

When the Men's Pond protest happened, the small group was led by one woman - and founding member of the #ManFriday movement - Hannah Clarke. In the Daily Mail coverage of the small event, Clarke was quoted at length as being "articulate, measured in her language, and solidly middle-class". Her father is a retired Army major, magistrate and Tory councillor; her mother has also been a Tory councillor in the Home Counties for almost three decades. Her husband worked in finance. She's never protested before, she told the reporter, but finally she has a cause.
@hannahrosewens

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TERF War: Transphobia In the British Media, Gender Critical Feminism and Its Effects on Trans Rights

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The Great British TERF War illustration by Ashton Attzs. This is how the debate over human rights for transgender people ended up dominating mainstream media, poisoning newsrooms and dividing British feminism. In North London there are man-made swimming ponds that attract people from across the city, regardless of the weather or time of year.

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Interview with Sussex digital media guru Josh

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Interview with Sussex digital media guru Josh

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Is mainstream feminism broken? | An interview with Prof Alison Phipps on MeToo and white feminism

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Trans Rights: Discussed, not debated • Liverpool Politics Hour - via Podcast Addict

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The Politics Hour Investigates: We discuss the state of affairs for trans people in the UK in terms of political action, education and sport. Discount code for Me, Not You: The trouble with mainstream feminism by Alison Phipps: OTH583

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Meet the feminist academics championing trans rights - Buzzfeed

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Meet the feminist academics championing trans rights - Buzzfeed

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These Women Are Making The Feminist Case For Trans Rights

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The fight over transgender rights has ignored a key group: pro-trans feminists. Here, leading feminist thinkers told BuzzFeed News why feminism should include trans people.

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Education sector yet to learn lessons of #MeToo, critics say

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Schools, universities and others in public sector urged to do more to fight sexual harassment

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Women's Writes Presents Alison Phipps, Author of Me Too, Not You

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Alison Phipps - Me Not You - reading from Chapter Six

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This is an excerpt from Chapter Six of Alison Phipps' new book 'Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism' (see https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526147172/).

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The carceral feminism of Linda Fairstein - The Appeal

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The carceral feminism of Linda Fairstein - The Appeal

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A nearly 30-year-old New York Times Magazine profile of the infamous prosecutor may reveal as much about Linda Fairstein as Ava DuVernay's acclaimed new Netflix series.

In journalist Katherine Bouton's profile of the now-infamous Central Park Five prosecutor, Fairstein is a heroine of sex assault victims, spurning homicides-"the aspiration of prosecutors"-for rape cases because "there are victims to be vindicated."

The headline of the profile, " Linda Fairstein vs. Rape," suggests that Fairstein was involved in a cause more profound than simply avenging women who have been sexually assaulted. For Bouton, from Fairstein's perch as the head of the sex crimes unit at the Manhattan district attorney's office, she was prosecuting the concept of sexual assault itself.

It was a rape case that brought the already prominent Fairstein even more fame-and, much later, infamy. On April 20, 1989, the body of a badly injured jogger named Trisha Meili was discovered in Central Park. Meili survived a brutal sexual assault and beating and within days, five African American and Latinx teens-Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam-confessed.

Ava DuVernay's Netflix series about the case, "When They See Us," was released on May 31 and has already spurred a head-spinning sequence of long-delayed public reckonings for the prosecutors. To date, more than 200,000 people have signed a calling for retailers to stop selling books by Fairstein, who is now a best-selling crime fiction author. On June 7, Fairstein was dropped by her publisher. On June 12, prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer said she would no longer teach at Columbia Law School. And a recent New York Magazine recounted Reyes's many victims who "were written out of their own story."

It's the nearly 30-year-old New York Times Magazine story about Fairstein, however, that accidentally tells us the most about Fairstein, the culture of true-believer prosecutors, and the profound failings of the criminal legal system. In Bouton's account, Fairstein is at once a high-flying law enforcement figure toying with the idea of holding high-profile jobs like NYPD commissioner and Manhattan district attorney, as well as a prosecutor avenging rape victims "who spends her days thinking about vile and abominable acts."

Like the Central Park Five prosecution itself, the profile of Fairstein is imbued with racism and classism. In the opening paragraphs, Bouton contrasted the "suburban born, classically educated, intelligent, impeccably dressed" Fairstein against the people she prosecuted such as "a stocky Hispanic man with a drooping mustache, charged with rape and sexual abuse."

Even the victims in the piece come off as grim and colorless compared to Fairstein, who is described as residing in a "gracious upper East Side apartment with a panoramic view of the East River and Queens" who spends summer weekends flying to a Martha's Vineyard home she shares with her husband, and whose life is characterized by such glamour that Bouton is left to breathlessly capture it as a kind of "Sex and the City" set in the criminal legal system:
"The flash and bravado, the elegant wardrobe and ever-blonder hair, the high heels and fancy restaurants...."
Bouton, however, reminded Times readers that there is virtue in the prosecutor's lavish lifestyle: "they too are perhaps part of coping."

Bouton was also wrong about where the criminal legal system fails victims. "The rapes that don't get prosecuted, for the most part, are the rapes that don't get reported," Bouton wrote. She believed that evidentiary laws limiting prosecutors, such as a New York statute requiring corroboration of not only the identity an assailant but the nature of the attack, prevented justice for sexual assault victims. That law was dropped in 1974, and a June 14 Washington Post noted that Fairstein "helped revolutionize certain aspects" of a criminal legal system that disadvantaged victims.

Such statistical manipulation in rape cases has been documented in cities like Philadelphia , , and New York City, where police supervisors ordered street cops to downgrade crimes wherever possible , which led police to misclassify valid rape complaints. Victims have also said police pressured them to sign "withdrawal forms" allowing detectives to close cases as either unfounded or "C-3 Uncooperative Complainant." In 2018, the NYPD closed nearly 25 percent of 1,965 reported rapes due to alleged non-cooperation by the complainant.

So, tinkering with the back end of the criminal system-whether by changing evidentiary rules, lengthening sentences, or creating registries-has not improved the place in the process where most rape complaints falter: investigation by police. In the decades since Bouton's article, budgets for law enforcement have ballooned and crime-solving technology, including DNA testing and databanking, has vastly improved. At the same time, however, the percentage of rape cases closed by police by nearly half between 1964 and 2017.

Perhaps the most dishonest defenses of the Central Park Five case come not from prosecutors (who while characteristically disinterested in accountability at least acknowledged the injustice) but from the police who investigated it. One officer who arrested two of the teens continues to claim that Kevin Richardson's confession wasn't coerced even though he wasn't present during the interviews of any of the five.

It can be true that Fairstein prosecuted rapists and raised money for charity, but also helped inflict great trauma on five innocent teens and robbed them of their formative years.

"Linda Fairstein vs. Rape" is also a potent reminder that prosecutors can misunderstand what the criminal legal system can actually do for victims as well as the damage that true believers like Fairstein can wreak. After all, the best the criminal legal system can do is prosecute someone accused of a crime in a legal manner. But the system cannot undo the damage done by victimization, nor will our only solution to harm-human caging-rehabilitate people who have harmed others.
Meaghan Ybos is the co-founder of People for the Enforcement of Rape Laws.
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The Carceral Feminism Of Linda Fairstein

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In journalist Katherine Bouton's profile of the now-infamous Central Park Five prosecutor, Fairstein is a heroine of sex assault victims, spurning homicides-"the aspiration of prosecutors"-for rape cases because "there are victims to be vindicated." The headline of the profile, " Linda Fairstein vs.

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Ep 2: the fight for trans rights

Episode Summary

This week Julie talks to three fantastic academics and activists about resisting transphobia, how the Pride movement can best support trans people, and what we can do to make sure trans rights are protected. Cleo and Rhy are trans and non-binary PhD students who have been working to tackle transphobia within academia; Alison Phipps is a Professor of Gender Studies at Sussex University and author of 'Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism'

Episode Notes

You can find Alison's book Me, Not You. The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism here: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526147172/

Music for The Road to Pride podcast is provided, with permission, by Jess Morgan. You can find more of her music at jessmorgan.co.uk

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This week Julie talks to three fantastic academics and activists about resisting transphobia, how the Pride movement can best support trans people, and what we can do to make sure trans rights are protected.

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Lighthouse | Alison Phipps Takes on Mainstream Feminism

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PinkNews - Gay news, reviews and comment from the world's most read lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans news service

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White feminism has a lot to answer for, according to Alison Phipps - academic, activist and author of Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism.

And that's why she wrote this book, which reckons with political whiteness, carceral feminism - the kind that sees prisons as solutions, rather than problems - and the exclusion of trans women and sex workers from the mainstream (white) feminist movement.

Phipps tells PinkNews that she wrote this book for people like her: white women who identify as feminists, who might be involved in feminist activism and are curious about intersectionality, but who might have sometimes felt uncomfortable with mainstream feminism and are unsure why.

While white, middle-class feminists promote a certain kind of "gender critical" feminism, Phipps' book is a reminder of how much is left wanting by this.

In this way, Me, Not You acts as a reckoning for white feminism, which it calls out in chapters ranging from 'Gender in a right-moving world' and 'Political whiteness' to 'The outrage economy' and 'Feminists and the far right'.

These are the key takeaways.

Capitalism needs women to do work for free.

"Capitalism needs the gender binary in order to sustain its economic model," Alison says.

"Capitalism relies on the work of social reproduction - the work of reproducing and caring for human life, so having babies, looking after elderly relatives, teaching kids, nursing sick people - but it doesn't really want to have to pay for it.

"So, capitalism profits by first defining that as women's work, and then either confining women to the home to do it for free, or segregating women into parts of the labour marker that do that work for extremely low pay and in really crap conditions."

The gender binary truly sucks for women.

"Although not everybody identifies with the binary, it basically sorts people into one of two categories.," Alison says.

"One category is about productive, useful, honourable, well-rewarded labour... and the other category is about all the shit stuff."

Anti-feminist and anti-LGBT+ movements are all part of the same package.

"Right-wing politics," Alison says, "is about preserving the capitalist market and the economy - as we've seen really clearly during this pandemic - but is also about preserving that sphere of social reproduction for free."

"So, making sure that women do the work of social reproduction, either for free or for very low pay, but also making sure the nuclear family survives.

"Because the nuclear family is an economic unit, as well as a reproductive unit. So anything that threatens that - like LGBT+ people - is really, really dangerous. And anything that threatens the gender binary is really, really dangerous."

Right-wing crackdowns on trans rights will come for women's rights next.

"You can see it in these right-wing movements worldwide. So, for example, Orbán in Hungary - he cracked down on trans rights first, and now he's cracking down on laws against domestic violence.

"It's all part of the same package. Preserving the gender binary. Preserving the nuclear family."

When we talk about people on Mumsnet, who say things like, "I don't agree with Trump, but on the trans issue he's spot on" (one thread title, about Trump's 2018 move to legally erase transgender people, is ' S**t. Now I agree with Trump! "), Alison is very clear: this is strategically "really stupid".

"You want to say to them: 'Do you not think that once he's done with the trans people, he's not going to come for the lesbians? And then all of the other women?'"

'Gender ideology' is a far-right dogwhistle, and it's not clear why mainstream white feminism is still using it.

"I don't really know how it's happened, but it has happened, hasn't it?" Alison says, slightly incredulous.

"These feminist groups are using the trope of gender ideology in their attacks on trans people. And they know - they must know, it's been pointed out to them so many times - that this is a far-right dogwhistle.

"'Gender ideology' originated with the Christian right. Bolsonaro uses it, Orbán uses it, Trump probably uses it. They can't not know! But they continue to use it.

"These feminists just don't seem to care. Their hatred of trans people seems to just trump any other consideration they might have."

Mainstream feminism wants to be in charge of defining who counts as a woman.

"White feminism has always been very one-dimensional," Alison says. "It has only really been able to see gender in terms of its analysis of oppression."

" Flavia Dzodan has called 'TERFism' a kind of settler-colonial mentality, because it's about policing the borders, basically.

"It's about naming, and having the power to name: I'm a real woman, you're not a real woman. And I think that is an incredibly white thing to do, the need, and the power, to name."

And white, middle-class women are the main transphobes in the UK.

With the important caveats that there are some working-class, very socialist women on board with transphobia, which Alison admits she understands less well, as well as a number of Black women and women of colour in the UK's TERF movement.

"But mostly, it is white bourgeois women. Also the same kind of women who think that sex work is not real work, and that sex workers are damaging to feminism.

"Again, this is about who counts as a woman, but also who is a respectable woman, a good enough woman who is allowed to be a feminist."

The question feminism must take on is not who is a woman, but who does the work of care.

It's mostly, but not only, cisgender women who do the work of care, Alison says, "and trans and non-binary people especially do a huge amount of that care work in society".

"'Who does the work of care?' is one of the key questions for me, for a feminist movement," she says. "And then, 'How do we reduce harm?', 'Who is exposed to violence?'

"Cisgender woman are massively at risk of violence. But we're not the only ones."

'Authentic womanhood' is a weird hill to die on.

"What I don't understand," Alison says, "is a feminism that seeks to shut the door against other people who are doing the work of care and social reproduction, who are really deeply at risk of violence, in the name of 'authentic womanhood'.

"Why? Why is that the hill you die on?"

The Venn diagram of people who want to keep trans women out of feminism and people who want to keep sex workers out of feminism is basically a circle.

Alison notes that she can count the number of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) who are not also SWERFs (sex worker-exclusionary radical feminists) on the fingers of one hand.

Why? "It's rooted in disgust," she says.

"It's a white bourgeois disgust in bodies that are unnatural, or bodies that are not respectable enough, and not wanting those bodies to be part of our feminism.

"It's a disgust at difference, which is really deeply bourgeois, and it's also a kind of obsession with our own victimhood.

"White, privileged feminists, a lot of them have experienced sexual violence or domestic violence, and they've had terrible experiences. And they deserve empathy and support for those experiences.

"But what they should not be able to do is to centre those experiences to the exclusion of other people."

White feminism finds sex workers threatening.

"I think these feminists find sex workers deeply, deeply threatening because to them sex work is something that commodifies women's bodies and causes sexual violence.

"And we can argue that point, you know, whether we think they're right about that or not.

"But there is no ability to go beyond that and think well, even if that is the case these are women who are trying to survive in the best way they can, as we all are, and should we really be punishing them for what's wrong with the system?"

White feminism and the Karen discourse.

"I think the defensiveness about Karen is because white feminists do not see themselves as anything other than victims," Alison says.

"They get so attached to the idea of themselves as victims, that to expand their view to think of themselves as perpetrators of white supremacy or class supremacy or to think about somebody else's victimisation becomes really threatening, so they get really, really defensive.

"It's because [they think] only privileged white women count as women. So anything that criticises them has to be misogyny. Anybody who disagrees with them must be a misogynist."

Somehow, white feminism thinks Rihanna is a misogynist.

You'll have to read the book to learn about this one, though, because the convoluted and tangled web by which the video for Rihanna's bop "Bitch Better Have My Money" becomes "misogynist", in the eyes of white feminists, is far too long and complex for this list.
You can get a copy of Alison Phipps' book 'Me, Not You: The Trouble With Mainstream Feminism' here.

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13 troubling problems with white feminism, according to a white feminist who's seen them firsthand

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White feminism has a lot to answer for, according to Alison Phipps - academic, activist and author of Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism. And that's why she wrote this book, which reckons with political whiteness, carceral feminism - the kind that sees prisons as solutions, rather than problems - and the exclusion of trans women and sex workers from the mainstream (white) feminist movement.

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@blackwellbooks 3. This draws on a long tradition of Black feminist thought, from Ida B Wells' work on the lynching of Black men, to postcolonial feminists' writing on sexual violence against Native peoples, to the work of contemporary prison abolitionists such as @prisonculture #BlackwellsVF

@blackwellbooks 7. The book also concentrates mainly on feminism focused on sexual violence. Its key case study is #MeToo, but it also covers the Women's March, the Slutwalks, Reclaim the Night, movements around sexual violence on campuses and hashtags such as #bringbackourgirls
#BlackwellsVF

@blackwellbooks 8. The key concept I propose is that of 'political whiteness', building on HoSang, @GKBhambra and others. I argue this characterises almost any politics dominated by privileged white people, and the book explores in detail how it operates in white feminism #BlackwellsVF

@blackwellbooks 10. Contemporary white feminism is led by self-described 'nasty women'. Anger has a long & productive history in feminism of colour (see @monaeltahawy's new book), but inspired by @SaraNAhmed, I ask: what happens to 'wilfulness', when it is channelled via whiteness? #BlackwellsVF

@blackwellbooks 11. I argue that the political whiteness of mainstream feminism demands punitive redress for personal injury - campaigns such as #MeToo name and shame bad men in the 'outrage economy' of media and social media, often demanding institutional or criminal punishment #BlackwellsVF

@blackwellbooks 16. This feminism, as @redlightvoices says, is explicitly colonial. It is about the power to name & categorise, to hoard resources & protection, and police borders. Reflecting this, there have been alliances between some reactionary feminist groups and the far right #BlackwellsVF

@blackwellbooks 18. For instance, connecting campaigns such as #MeToo with prison abolition, activism against workplace harassment with sex workers' rights, struggles against reproductive coercion with trans equality, campaigns against trafficking with campaigns against borders #BlackwellsVF

@blackwellbooks 19. I also argue that we need to imagine a world without sexual violence - which would also be a world without patriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. We will not get there in our lifetimes, but that does not mean we cannot use it as our touchstone and guide #BlackwellsVF

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Thread by @alisonphipps: @blackwellbooks 1. Hello all! Me, Not You asks: what violence can we do, in the name of fighting sexual violence? And by 'we', I mean privil...

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Thread by @alisonphipps: @blackwellbooks 1. Hello all! Me, Not You asks: what violence can we do, in the name of fighting sexual violence? An I mean privileged white women and white feminists (including me). The analysis centres the intersections between...

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Erin O'Callaghan is a Phd Candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, US. Her dissertation will be a mixed methods study of survivors of sexual assault involving substance use at the time of the assault, in addition to investigating survivors' pleasurable and/or wanted experiences. In this conversation, Erin expanded on these topics. Research Discussed: Ullman, S.E., O'Callaghan, E. and Lorenz, K., 2019. Women's experiences of impairment and incapacitation during alcohol/drug-related sexual assaults: Toward a survivor-informed approach to measurement. Archives of sexual behavior, 48(7), pp.2105-2116.

Alison Phipps is a Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Sussex. She has previously been Director of Gender Studies and Equality and Diversity Chair for the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at Sussex and is currently Research and Impact Lead for the Sociology department. Alison advised National Union of Students (UK) on the groundbreaking 2010 Hidden Marks survey, the first prevalence study of violence against women students and co-authored That's What She Said, the 2013 report on women students' experiences of 'lad culture'. In this conversation, we spoke about Hidden Marks and That's What She Said. We also spoke about tackling lad culture, how it interacts with rape culture and Alison's new book about political whiteness in feminist movements- Me Not You: The Trouble With Mainstream Feminism. Me Not You Research Discussed: Phipps, Alison (2019) The fight against sexual violence. Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 71. pp. 62-74. ISSN 1362-6620 Phipps, Alison (2016) (Re)theorising laddish masculinities in higher education. Gender and Education, 29 (7). pp. 815-830. ISSN 1360-0516 Phipps, Alison and Young, Isabel (2015) 'Lad culture' in higher education: agency in the sexualisation debates. Sexualities, 18 (4). pp. 459-479. ISSN 1363-4607 Phipps, Alison and Young, Isabel (2013) That's what she said: women students' experiences of 'lad culture' in higher education. Project Report. National Union of Students, London. https://www.nus.org.uk/Global/NUS_hidden_marks_report_2nd_edition_web.pdf

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sexual violence research academic social science

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Talking Research features in-depth interviews with prominent academics and researchers who study sexual violence across disciplines. The aim is to make academic knowledge and research on sexual violence accessible. Every other Wednesday, guests talk about their research, their findings, the process, the challenges and everything else in between.

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Interview with Professor Alison Phipps - The Sociology Show

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In this episode, Matthew talks to Professor Alison Phipps from the University of Sussex about her new book 'Me not you: The trouble with mainstream Feminism'.

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Introducing the new book 'Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism' by Alison Phipps. Available now from Manchester University Press at https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526147172/

Transcript for text readers: 
Why was #MeToo dominated by white women?
Whose victimisation counts?
How can feminism do more harm than good?
A new book tackles these questions
The book asks: what violence can we do in the name of fighting sexual violence?
It argues mainstream feminism centres privileged white women
And treats more marginalised people as collateral
Or even as enemies when they get in the way.
Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism
Available now from Manchester University Press

Photos by Delia Giandeini, Suzy Hazelwood, and Monica Melton
Music by Bensounds