We don't need Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill to police the borders of womanhood

Two ‘feminist’ writers, Julie Burchill and Suzanne Moore, urgently need to update their thinking about what it is to be a woman and realise that trans women fighting back is not ‘bullying’, writes Dr Brooke Magnanti.

'There are two things I love about the Jews – their religion and their ancient, reclaimed country'
Julie Burchill needs to update her thinking from that of the 1970s and accept that there are new sheriffs in town. Credit: Photo: REX FEATURES

People can say whatever they damn well please. But they shouldn't be surprised that someone, somewhere, may object. That's been my takeaway this week, as a piece by well-known British columnist Suzanne Moore in the New Statesman containing an unfortunate slur against trans women was followed by a Twitter tirade, a very public flouncing off of social media as Moore objected to her "bullies" and "trolls", and a subsequent Guardian column by the infamous Julie Burchill that not so much poured oil on troubled waters, as crouched down with a flamethrower and set it alight.

As I see it, there are two issues at stake: the first is trolling, and the second is transphobia. Both are not good, and also widely misunderstood.

Let me explain trolling properly

Perhaps in the world of columnists who came up in the largely pre-mainstream internet age of the 80s and 90s, there's been a certain amount of being sheltered from criticism. Without an outlet - such as social media or the comment box - most of those who disagree either shook their heads and turned the page. A few might have written letters.

There is the widespread misconception that only anonymous commenters can be "trolls". This usually stems from a misunderstanding of what trolling is. It's not anonymous criticism. That's just the thing we call life, and it has existed in some form from ancient graffiti at Pompeii to the internet today. Interacting with other humans means that, inevitably, you will do or say something others disagree with. Do it from a media platform with a national audience that reaches beyond the myopic confines of Twitter, and even more people will criticise.

Similarly, some people have equated "trolling" to making vile threats. It's not that either; that's just called making vile threats and has a similarly long pedigree to criticism. Sometimes the two overlap; often, they don't.

There's a third, rarely stated but often obvious, misunderstanding of the word "troll" to mean "person on Twitter with fewer followers than me." And while these definitions can overlap, they are all wrong.

No, the true meaning of to troll is to say or write deliberately provocative things in order to attract attention. For example, something like: “Cut their dicks off and be more feminist than me.” (a line Moore tweeted in response to criticism about her earlier piece.) She should have been aware of the effect this would have. She was, in the classic sense of the term, trolling.

This above-the-line taunting and dehumanising of trans women is Grade-A trolling.

If you are provocative, do not be alarmed if people are provoked. At one stage I thought that was what columnists did, or at least, what a fair number of them aim to do. Apparently they are just delicate little flowers after all?

Transphobia and feminism

Then there's the matter of transphobia, and its very real presence in feminism.

Second-wave feminism may be old hat but it still reigns supreme on the opinion pages of Britain's papers. And in its radical form it can be downright ugly: as reductionist and essentialist as the patriarchy it claims to fight, endlessly obsessed with what "real women" are.

Trans women have spoken up, and this time perhaps, people will listen. Please be sure to read Roz Kaveney who answered back in the Guardian; Jane Fae in the Independent, and Paris Lees whose open letter was both emotionally powerful and incredibly measured. They saw red, as Moore endorsed women doing in her first piece. But rather than letting their rage take over they answered the provocation with restraint and good sense.

Trans allies are also making themselves known even on the right. I am a cis woman - that means my outwardly apparent sex matches the gender I know myself to be (cis being Latin for "on the same side") - but also the sort of woman who is frequently dehumanised with language not altogether different from that used against trans women: Julie Burchill, for example, is widely quoted as having said: "When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women." Suzanne Moore meanwhile used her Mail column over a number of years to snipe about "the sex workers as we must now call them." The venn diagram of people who dislike sex workers and people who dislike trans men and women has a huge area of overlap.

While I do not have the same life experiences as trans women, I relate to the horror of realising people quote casually dehumanise you and call for your death pretty much all the time without repercussions. Often as a punchline. They would say they have the right to freedom of speech and saying these hateful things, yet get a bit tetchy when others exercise the right to criticise. Hey, we all get tetchy sometimes and especially when the critics come out. But claiming it amounts to "bullying"? Sorry, you don't get to enjoy one side of that equation without feeling the other.

Frequently, bringing up this ugly set of phobias deeply nested in some factions of feminism gets you told to shut up, to go away, to stop calling yourself a feminist - or worse - stop calling yourself a woman. To sit back and let the "real battles" (whatever they are) be won before anyone deigns to call you human.

It's easy for second-wave feminists to decide who gets to being to their club, because it's an ideology, not an identity. It's harder for them to say who's a woman and who isn't, though bless them for trying. This is a war they will not win.

Want to be a woman? You're in

Here's an idea, not mine, and not a new one. If you want to be a woman, you're in. If you feel or know you are a woman even if the majority of the world claims you're not, you're in. Born with the reproductive organs of a woman? You're a woman. Trans women, who struggle for the right to be recognised and fight against some of the highest instances of violence, depression and suicide in the world? Are women no less "real" than me. As John le Carré so astutely put it in Smiley's People: "Society is an association of minorities."

The concept of woman is not narrow and fragile, it is robust and will take all comers. Its borders do not need policing. It does not threaten me, lessen me, or lessen anyone's womanhood, to acknowledge other women and to hear their lived experience. Let's stop this "real women" rubbish before it lives to poison yet another generation of writers and journalists - because that way of thinking is very much last century.

Burchill comes close to admitting as much when she says of herself and her mates that "many of us are now staring HRT and the menopause straight in the face". Getting older is a blessing - but no excuse to leave your thinking in the 70s. You're not a hip young gunslinger anymore. There are new sheriffs in town. That's life.