“Strength in numbers, solidarity and, ultimately, love”

Writing in The Guardian, Zoe Williams takes a very different stance from the majority of Guardian pieces on trans rights. As she points out, it isn’t the anti-trans feminists who are being silenced here.

All kinds of voices have been excluded. The experience of trans men, for instance, has been more or less erased, because the core issues have been whittled down to such a sharp, conflicted point – do cis women need protected status? – that the very existence of trans men has become too inconvenient to accommodate. The mainstream feminist view, which is trans-inclusive, has been sidelined to maintain the fiction that this is a generational battle between old and young feminists.

…Women-only space was a realm protected from our Harvey Weinsteins, where we could talk about our Harvey Weinsteins; it was not a hallowed place where we communicated through our ovaries. It was where we came together in unity against people who hated us. I can’t imagine the mindset that would exclude a trans sister from that.

I’m not going to say anything mean here: I’ve always liked Williams’ writing, and while it’s a drop in a very poisonous ocean of anti-trans pieces the paper has run in recent years it’s still a welcome drop.


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