TERF Island and the Legacy of the UK Women’s Movement
Women’s revolutionary work from past suffragettes to present ‘TERFs’
Fiona McAnena’s TERF Island: How the UK Resisted Trans Ideology is one among many more women’s works to come—we can hope—giving us portraits of women’s activism that we may learn from courageous and, perhaps more importantly, disagreeable women. Studying women’s social movement rhetoric, largely due to my mother who taught me how to read, it seems unavoidable how much TERF Island recalls the histories written by woman suffragists. Readers should read McAnena’s book to find much of interest with regard to the nature of women’s organizing exemplified in the efforts of Stephanie Davies-Arai, Dr. Nicola Williams, Kellie-Jay Keen, and Maya Forstater over these past years.
Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.
- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman1
O Liberty, we have seen thee hunted from country to country, crushed by conquest, groaning under slavery, insulted in courts, banished from the schools, laughed at in saloons, caricatured in workshops, denounced in churches! It seems thou shouldest find in thought an inviolable refuge. But if thou art to surrender in this thy last asylum, what becomes of the hopes of ages and the boasted courage of the human race?
- Josephine Butler, Introduction to Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture: A Series of Essays2
Some of them tell us that other things are more important than the liberty of women—than the liberty of working women.
- Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story3
Women’s Movement, Then and Now
“A passionate love of freedom, a strong desire to do social service, and an intense sympathy for the unfortunate”—Sylvia Pankhurst’s words from 1911 on the makings of the women’s militant suffrage movement remain applicable today.4 Fiona McAnena’s TERF Island recalls, for me, accounts of the UK women’s suffrage movement of the early twentieth century—this urgency of women doing what they felt necessary for women. For the present, McAnena gives remarkably detailed portraits of Stephanie Davies-Arai, Dr. Nicola Williams, Kellie-Jay Keen, and Maya Forstater—women on a great mission not unlike the suffragists before them.5
During the Spinifex Press book launch, this past month on August 14, Helen Joyce made a great point about the women McAnena has chosen, saying:
People are always asking—you’ll have been asked this a million times—what do you think makes all of the people who stepped up different from the people who didn’t. I think the word they want you to get to is ‘courage,’ and I always resist it because it feels too trite. So, you do what every good writer does, which is you showed; you didn’t tell. At book length, you show us what was specific, and what was generic, as in common to all of them, between those people. Alongside the word ‘courage,’ I don’t think any of the people in the book would disagree if I said ‘disagreeable’ is one of those words. We talk about this a lot ourselves inside Sex Matters: Women need to be a bit disagreeable in order to stand up and say when things are going wrong.
TERF Island does not tell a story of universal female agreement on all social and political issues, as such a consensus does not exist—seemingly obvious enough but nevertheless worth acknowledging. Varying ideologues trashing women’s rights activism today point to political differences among women as if they have not always existed not only for this movement but also for other social movements. Like the woman suffragists before women today, there has been no lack of disagreement in terms of approach and what issues matter to address.
To demonstrate women’s political difference, let us consider historical facts.
Championing the war and contrasting the Pankhurst family’s prior socialist pacifism, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst split from Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst, both of whom opposed World War I, both leading communists. Emmeline and Christabel leaned into nationalism and jingoism against Germany, as The Suffragette became Britannia in 1914, prioritizing the war effort over women’s rights. Many women followed, as seems the case in times of war no less today than one hundred years ago. These same years marked a split among the British suffragettes over the role of working-class women, with Sylvia diverging from both her mother and her sister. According to Sylvia, Emmeline and Christabel judged that “a working woman’s movement was of no value: working women were the weakest portion of the sex: how could it be otherwise? Their lives were too hard, their education too meagre to equip them for the contest.”6
Some former suffragettes, like Mary Richardson, first a socialist, went on to sympathize with Germany and what it framed in terms of a fight for national independence; some became Nazi sympathizers, believing the Germans to be victims of global injustice. Starvation and disease in the Allied blockade from 1914 to 1919 led to 763,000 German civilian deaths, according to the German Board of Public Health in December 1918, scrutinized and revised to approximately 424,000 by 1928. Given the circumstances, it would have been easy to argue that Germany had been subjected to imperialism at the hands of two powerful empires: the United States and the UK.7
Politically and geographically, Emmeline’s daughters went their very separate ways: Christabel became an evangelist in the U.S., who believed the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ was upon us; Sylvia remained a communist, opposing imperialism and colonialism, particularly involved with Ethiopian activism; Adela co-founded both the far-left Communist Party of Australia in 1920, later expelled, and the far-right Australia First Movement in 1941.8
I provide the above sketch to illustrate how the women’s movement resists the caricaturing by its most ignorant detractors at present, those who dismiss women’s resistance to trans ideology not unlike past dismissals of women’s rights activism. Moral panics about women’s political differences, as if unprecedented, miss the principle of disagreement intrinsic to women’s rights activism since its earliest years. The past of this social movement gives us a useful map for understanding the present, if only we read it.
(To the question of linking the present women’s rights movement to past iterations, Joyce has recommended Susanna Rustin’s 2024 Sexed: A History of British Feminism, which I plan on trying to get soon, pending some birthday book money.)
TERF Island as Social History
Returning to TERF Island in the present, women of great courage remain disagreeable by necessity, and being disagreeable seems necessary to being courageous. That McAnena’s book is “a social history—it puts people at the center of it,” as Joyce says, underscores the distinctness of her approach: portraits of people. I found it helpful that she used the example of her own book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, from 2021, to note the difference in McAnena’s approach. While Joyce’s Trans analyzes “trans” as an idea, the ideology behind the industry—every industry has an ideology—McAnena’s TERF Island takes us to “the people involved, the actors in this story,” as Joyce explained. Not forgetting the many victims, the survivors, Joyce emphasizes, there is value in telling social history that foregrounds responding to a crisis—in this case, trans ideology and its consequences for women, children, and families throughout society.
Because social movements can be troublesome put to paper, it is a tremendous achievement, courageous in itself, for McAnena to write TERF Island with such integrity in creating a record of women’s lives. I am reminded of Eleanor Flexner’s 1959 Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, although McAnena discusses the work of Davies-Arai, Williams, Keen, and Forstater rather than attempting to cover an entire movement and its various figures. McAnena’s TERF Island takes a micro-level approach viewing specific women, their contributions and their accounts, contrasting a macro-level approach to viewing the entire movement and discussing as many figures as possible.
Readers may ask why McAnena has chosen Davies-Arai, Williams, Keen, and Forstater—why these women, why not more, why not all, why at all, why. The same kinds of questions follow any recording of the women’s movement. Why focus more on, say, Emmeline Pankhurst than Millicent Garret Fawcett, this woman than another woman equal or greater in contribution? “It is risky business deciding whose story to tell, who to mention and who to leave out,” McAnena explains. “In Terf Island I have told the stories which I believe have been central to the UK becoming a beacon of resistance to gender identity ideology” (p. 262).
But, as McAnena understands, Davies-Arai, Williams, Keen, and Forstater are not “the movement,” as if all there is, any more than any social movement can be reduced to select key figures. During the launch, it was valuable that McAnena and Joyce alike insisted that we do need more books—and TERF Island represents one among what should be many women’s accounts to follow. There are so many women’s contributions that matter, many yet to be recorded, as women’s collective work has brought this movement’s victories into being—a point that does not escape McAnena.
Reappearing much the way storybook antagonists do, especially in the sections for Williams and Keen in McAnena’s TERF Island, Willoughby easily represents the quality of today’s opposition: uninformed, self-absorbed, petulant. As Rebecca West has reflected, “The real force that made the Suffrage Movement was the quality of the Opposition.”9 Today, women criticizing transgenderism have found such force true in our time with the various men—and women, unfortunately—not aiming for understanding as much as seeking to misunderstand.
Forceful in his own way, Willoughby has performed the role of an unwitting billboard. His “exchanges” with both Williams and Keen did as much for me in seeing today’s spin on the anti-suffragist: a man in a dress claiming that women’s rights belong to him, sabotage from the man inside. Fortunately, neither Stephanie nor Maya seems to have been close to the Least India Company in an interview setting, not like Williams and Keen.
But this story, as I think McAnena would agree, is one for the women, for every woman to see herself in today’s women’s movement.
Female Friendship
Women’s togetherness in TERF Island reminds me of a quote from Janice G. Raymond’s 1986 A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection: “Female friendship helps create the woman of woman’s own inventiveness.”10 Women’s rights activism resisting transgenderism is women’s resistance to men inventing women according to men’s image. Women resist what Simone de Beauvoir analyzes in Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex): “[I]f she did not exist, men would have had to invent her. They did invent her. But she also exists without their invention” (emphasis added).11 During the launch, Joyce discussed the significance of female friendship in McAnena’s book:
A pattern I had already noticed that I think comes up in the book over and over again is it’s a book about female friendship. Female activism, I think, is somewhat different from male activism. It’s not something I’d thought about before, but, at the center of this book, are not just individuals but friendships and, often quite noticeably, couples: two women. You, of course, work with Nic; the two of you did Fair Play for Women together. There were many other people involved, I know, but that friendship was central to it—and, of course, continues even though you’re now at Sex Matters. For Transgender Trend, I think it was absolutely crucial for Stephanie to find Shelley, and that friendship continues. As we’ve become a more developed movement, the sizes differ—Sex Matters is bigger now. Nic is still friends with all of us, but she’s doing her own thing. I think Transgender Trend probably would see itself as more of a larger group now, too. LGBA is no longer that central thing of Bev and Kate; it’s now a bigger thing as well. But it’s striking that there are these pairs of women and that they’re non-hierarchical: Each of them acts as Boswell to the other’s Johnson; it’s not one Boswell and one Johnson. It’s not one Watson and one Holmes. I think that in a world where there are so few books that women are centered, and the dynamics are so different than when you’re talking about men’s activism, this is a book that is almost entirely about women and how women do things. And that’s beautiful. I would love to think that we would live in a world one day where a book like that would be a reading in a feminist course. Now, we’re not there because feminism has gone right off course, but, maybe one day, it will be a book, and that’ll be one of the things that will come out of it: What is women’s activism like that’s so specific?
Davies-Arai and Shelley Charlesworth with Transgender Trend, McAnena and Williams with Fair Play for Women, Forstater and Joyce with Sex Matters, Bev Jackson and Kate Harris with LGB Alliance—these pairs of women organizing. With Keen, interestingly, we must note the work of Julia Long and Venice Allan—a triad rather than just a dyad! Whether two or more women, female friendship remained a way for these women to maintain a sense of rootedness in their shared work and lives as organizers. Referencing United States historical context, readers may think of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, life-long friends and collaborators in writing and oratory. Back to Raymond’s point in A Passion for Friends, women organizing together “create the woman of woman’s own inventiveness,” creating a politics beyond the partisanship conveniently alienating groups of women from each other. What she has written applies very well to McAnena’s TERF Island and the point Joyce makes about the specificity of women’s activism:
Friendship gives women a point of crystallization for living in the world. It gives form, shape, and a concrete location to women who have no state or geographical homeland and, in fact, no territorial ghetto or diaspora from which to act. Friendship provides women with a common world that becomes a reference point for location in a larger world. The sharing of common views, attractions, and energies gives women a connection to the world so that they do not lose their bearing. Thus a sharing of personal life is at the same time a grounding for social and political existence.12
Nevertheless, from a radical feminist point of view, Raymond gives us a warning not to idealize female friendship:
A hopeful vision of female friendship is not based on some ontological essence of female energy or vitality that women naturally possess by virtue of a more refined capability for love, caring, and respect for others. Rather it is anchored in the historical, cultural, and material bonds that women have created for our Selves in spite of the ‘State of Atrocity.’ The obstacles to female friendship and the divisiveness that often attends diversity serve as correctives to a shallow sentimentalism about women’s affinities with women.13
Women can betray other women—a very typical obstacle to female friendship, no less so than for men in relation to male friendship (of course, men do murder other men—including supposed friends—far more frequently than women murder other women). Women can lie about other women and denigrate other women’s contributions, dismissing others while demanding acknowledgment for themselves in rather hierarchical fashion. Women can trash and denigrate other women to an excessive degree and dress it up as philosophy or critique, even appealing to other women for solidarity, none of which truly applies to misrepresentation and lies. As much as men can be narcissistic and deluded, women fairly compete with them as manipulators and exploiters of solidarity plundered and good will subordinated to egotism. Downsides all factored, we cannot deny the possibilities of women organizing and working on women’s behalf—what I see there in TERF Island.
I agree with Joyce that, as seen in McAnena’s book, women’s activism noticeably differs from men’s activism, and these qualities deserve careful study for us to think about how women organize for women’s rights and what they do. Painted relative to other women, the portraits of Davies-Arai, Williams, Keen, and Forstater together make a portrait of women’s organizing through collective action. Joyce is right, too, that, ideally, a feminist course at university would assign a book like TERF Island for students to learn about women’s rights activism and how women organize.
Stephanie Davies-Arai—Reasoning and Compassion
TERF Island gives such brilliant detail, nearing three-hundred pages, that it would be difficult, if not virtually impossible, to note everything in a review, so I want to focus on the woman most influential in my understanding: Stephanie Davies-Arai. She launched the website for Transgender Trend in November 2015, and its significance can be demonstrated in the many who have valued Davies-Arai’s work. It has been one of the most important resources for not only parents but also researchers and journalists who have written critiques of transgenderism and its harms to children.
The section about Davies-Arai is the first in TERF Island because, as McAnena explains, the individual women follow the chronological order of the campaigns in their work. Here is her discussion from the launch underscoring the impact of Davies-Arai and Transgender Trend:
Stephanie’s first because she founded Transgender Trend ten years ago, which is incredible, isn’t it? Ten years. This autumn, they’ll be celebrating that. She’s always been about protecting children. And, when you read her story, which is perhaps one of the most personal ones, I covered that because it helps you understand why her focus is children and how she how she’s qualified, actually, to do what she’s doing. I think that—and she didn’t want me to say this, but I think I kept it in the book—that I feel that she is, if you have to pick one person in the UK who’s done the most to protect children from the harms of those medical interventions that take them down a blind alley, I would say that’s Stephanie, and her work continues.
An early work McAnena references from Davies-Arai is her piece titled “Is My Child Transgender?,” dated March 6, 2015, raising the issue of parents increasingly believing their children must be “transgender” from toy or clothing preferences. Trans ideology’s diagnostic framework dictates the following: If a boy prefers things associated with girls, then he must be a girl; if a girl prefers things associated with boys, then she must be a boy. Like radical feminists Janice G. Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys, critics of transsexualism and transgenderism over the past few decades, Davies-Arai sharply critiqued how “sex change” medically enforces sex-role stereotyping.14 Davies-Arai noted the role of “the increasingly influential trans activist lobby who insist that gender identity is an innate brain state irrespective of male or female biology or the effects of socialisation.” The fact that girls and boys experience sex-role conditioning demonstrates the force of ideology socializing them into transgenderism and its profitable industry.
A moment showing connection between the US and the UK movements was Denise Caignon, who founded 4thWaveNow a few months before Transgender Trend, first meeting Stephanie in person at the 2023 Genspect conference (see pp. 16-17). Into the late 2010s, both 4thWaveNow and Transgender Trend were important early resources for me because of the stigma around criticism of transgenderism being, essentially, “conspiracy theory.” Legitimate concerns would be dismissed, and writers now frequently take for granted the early work necessary to make present discussions possible.
When first researching more into transgenderism in my late teens and early twenties, about 2015-2019, I found Caignon and Davies-Arai to be contemporary voices of reason against madness. I saw them as not only relatable politically but also really committed to women’s rights, children’s rights, and human rights. For Caignon and Davies-Arai, resources and information for parents and those concerned formed the basis for concrete political goals rather than abstract social theories.
(For reference, Caignon’s 2023 Genspect talk “The Hidden Dangers of Gender Medicine for Minors,” as linked here, demonstrates her thoughtfulness and fact-based critique of medical harm, this quality in the work at 4thWaveNow.)
Years of work done with Transgender Trend in the UK, Davies-Arai’s labor communicating with parents and working in favor of children’s dignity, have been essential to the work in resistance to transgenderism. More have joined the fight, fortunately, which not only lessens the burden on Davies-Arai but also gives parents more resources to help them understand the issues and know the facts. McAnena provides a helpful summary of how grassroots groups have formed specifically in response to the needs of parents and their children:
Stephanie Davies-Arai started Transgender Trend to give parents and others an alternative to the simple ‘trans is good, affirm them, give them puberty blockers’ narrative of pre-2015. Since then, there’s been an explosion of grassroots groups aiming to help children with gender confusion and their parents: supportive networks of parents like Bayswater and Our Duty, schools-focused groups like Safe Schools Alliance, clinical groups like Thoughtful Therapists, Genspect, CAN-SG, and SEGM. She’s being contacted by women in other countries asking for advice on how to set up their own groups. Stephanie did what was needed when only a few were speaking up, when parents had nowhere else to go. (pp. 72-73)
I find what Davies-Arai says valuable: “I can see a time when Transgender Trend won’t be needed, and that will be success for us. When I feel the transgender trend is fully over, that’s when I will stop” (qtd., p. 73). The point should not be writing infinite blog posts about this issue, monopolizing it and monetizing it for personal and financial gain. Davies-Arai has modeled a principle of fairness in crediting others and seeing the value of collective action for social change. Far more work remains here, but present conditions are no more inevitable than the formerly more widely accepted dogma around “transitioning” children pre-2015. There is a kind of nihilism in the belief that no small thing done helps short of abolishing the industry, but, as was the case in the abolition of slavery, a centuries-long effort, many reforms came along the way in anti-slavery work. A bit presumptuously, I think, some have assumed the fight has been won, but abolition takes its time. Practical advocacy for parents and children gives hope for new directions, possibilities of a different world, rather than surrendering to narcissistic cynicism at the eleventh hour.
Why Feminism Matters
“Feminism,” Andrea Dworkin explains, “is opposition to woman hating in order to achieve a truly egalitarian society”—so much easier said than done perhaps more than any other political goal.15 Neither right nor left makes it easy for women: one side is right-wing flavored woman hating, the other is that left-wing flavored variety; the choice there is no true choice. Woman hating rots everything across right-wing and left-wing political ideologies, manifesting within totalitarianisms of fascism and communism—and in every man-made religion in between. Women coming last corresponds to social conditions that, in political terms, reify them into a subordinate class from pedestal to gutter. Men’s revolutionary promises virtually always translate to revolutionary compromises for women. Woman-hating ideologies provide the rationale for institutions and industries, with trans ideology representing one case of religious/ideological fundamentalism demonstrating why feminism matters.
Very evident in TERF Island, women’s disagreeableness is an important element, a reluctance to submit oneself to easier political and ideological avenues, but McAnena noted during the launch that independent thinking is also significant. She explains:
One thing I would say: You said that they were ‘disagreeable.’ They certainly are not afraid of disagreeing. But what I definitely think, and I found this working with Nic—and it’s very clear working with Maya as well: They really are independent thinkers. They don’t just take a superficial statement and roll with it. And we can all be independent thinkers. It’s just that, most of the time, we mostly don’t; we don’t think for ourselves. There isn’t time or things aren’t that important or interesting to you. And, of course, it’s risky on this one, but I think that’s what really has enabled them to be as clear and have as much cut-through as they have is that just not accepting things at face value and going and digging. That gives you great confidence when you really know your stuff, and you know that other people don’t.
Thinking for oneself can be difficult when both right and left, as male-defined political ideologies, offer superficially easy answers to women’s problems that, in the end, come at very great cost to women. Scapegoating women is one very typical “solution.” Adela Pankhurst’s life demonstrates that, from the far left of the Communist Party of Australia to the far right of the Australia First Movement, neither wing of this contrived political dualism ultimately works for women.
While I know well that women have collaborated in transgenderism, as women have collaborated in all man-made religions mostly at their own expense, I must agree with Julia Long: Feminism should not be relinquished any more than womanhood. Here is how she has explained it:
The word ‘Feminism’ was hijacked & used to mean its opposite, just as ‘woman,’ ‘mother,’ ‘lesbian’ & all the other ‘female’ words were hijacked. Don’t blame feminism for what’s been done in its name by those who stole it. I won’t relinquish ‘feminism’ any more than ‘woman.’16
By historical analogy, Christianity being “the bulwark of American slavery” during the nineteenth century, as Matilda Joslyn Gage has noted, made it no less true that abolitionists opposed to slavery were overwhelmingly Christian themselves. Transgenderism’s appropriation of feminism is like American slavery’s appropriation of Christianity. Accepting costumed antifeminism crossdressing in feminism’s place may as well be like seeing a male rapist in a wig as a woman and insisting that more women have started committing rape.
Feminism is remembering that women exist and make the world and life itself. To quote McAnena on why she wrote TERF Island: “I wrote this book because I wanted to make sure that the work of these courageous women was recorded, acknowledged and remembered” (p. 271). McAnena’s sense of remembrance is feminist in the way that feminism is not about—or should not be about—collaborating in prostitution, surrogacy, and transgenderism but resisting them and refusing to comply. Today’s feminists have a great spiritual inheritance coming from the suffragists—and, of course, from suffragettes like the Pankhursts.
“We women Suffragists have a great mission—the greatest mission the world has ever known,” said Emmeline Pankhurst in 1912, telling her audience: “It is to free half the human race, and through that freedom to save the rest.”17 Pankhurst’s words live in the work of Davies-Arai, Williams, Keen, and Forstater—and so many women today living that legacy of social improvement toward community for woman and man alike. Liberty has been essential to women’s work from Mary Wollstonecraft, Josephine Butler, and the Pankhursts to present day TERF Island and today’s women organizing for women.
Below, I have made a “TERF Island Moments of Being” section with a snapshot contribution from each woman in McAnena’s TERF Island. Although I spotlighted Davies-Arai’s influence for me, I want to give readers a sense of the other women and their work. I have chosen Davies-Arai’s 2015 essay, Williams’s 2017 “exchange” with Jonathan/India Willoughby, Keen’s 2018 “exchange” with Willoughby, and Forstater’s 2019 Woman’s Place UK speech. For Williams and Keen, I know it was difficult, but those appearances were revealing moments that showcased trans ideology’s flaws. Back in 2017 and 2018, the belief in “puberty blockers” being, as Willoughby says, “like a pause button on the old video record machines,” the suicide threats, the false analogies to racism—all held tremendously more power than now.
TERF Island Moments of Being
Stephanie Davies-Arai
For children, ‘I’m really a girl’ or ‘I’m really a boy’ is the only language they have to understand and explain their personalities in a world that reinforces the correct gender behaviour everywhere they look. Society does a pretty thorough job of conditioning children into boy and girl roles as it is, can’t at least we parents feel and express confidence in our tough girls and sensitive boys? In jumping straight to the assumption of the statistically most unlikely outcome that a child is transgender, aren’t we just reinforcing those gender stereotypes, and in fact doing exactly the same as the parent who forces a child to conform?
- Stephanie Davies-Arai, “Is My Child Transgender?” March 6, 2015 (see p. 16)18
Dr. Nicola Williams
WILLOUGHBY: All that happens in that situation with the children—they give you puberty blockers, so basically it’s like a pause button on the old video record machines. Nothing permanent happens. You just pause the development.
WILLIAMS: It’s not true to say that we know that this is safe. Puberty blockers have never been used in children to stop natural puberty, and so we don’t know what effect that will be. Social transition, which is where a child changes the way they dress and they’ll be referred to as a different name as, say, as a boy. Psychologically, that will have an impact, so if you’ve got a four-year-old that likes to play with trucks—
WILLOUGHBY: Sorry, this is somebody with no gender issues whatsoever talking about something—
WILLIAMS: Because this is about stereotypes as well and a lot of children—
WILLOUGHBY: This is very similar to the question time program: Four people around the table talking about transgender and not a single transgender person there. Now, if they, if you, had a table of white people talking about Black issues and what it meant to be Black, would that be permissible?
WILLIAMS: We don’t have to be transgender to have views on children transitioning and the risks to women or children—
WILLOUGHBY: Yeah, but what is your experience of it? Probably all you’ve read in the Daily Mail.
WILLIAMS: Over 80% of children that begin to have questions about their gender, they change their mind before puberty so we need to let the children go through puberty—
WILLOUGHBY: No, no, I’m sorry, again, I think that’s absolutely incorrect. You’re referring to data from the 1950s.
WILLIAMS: We need to let the children go through puberty to be able to understand what they actually are.
Good Morning Britain, “Transgender Prisoners Could Soon Be Able to Swap Prisons if New Law Is Passed,” YouTube, November 21, 2017 (see p. 81)19
Kellie-Jay Keen
WILLOUGHBY: So, you wouldn’t want me legally recognized as a woman, so let’s say, for an instance, I could go out on a night, and I got raped—so would I go to a women’s refuge, in your world?
KEEN: Well, no, because then it wouldn’t be a women’s refuge, would it?
WILLOUGHBY: So, where would I go?
KEEN: Well, you could raise money and make your own refuge.
. . .
HOLMES: Are we agreed there is just terrible confusion, and there is a long way to go with all of this?
KEEN: No, I think I am agreed that this is an absolute assault on women and womanhood, and we are losing—
WILLOUGHBY: None of my women friends feel that.
KEEN: Well, that’s your women friends.
WILLOUGHBY: I don’t think the nation feels—
HOLMES: So, you don’t respect her journey in any way, I mean, I think—
KEEN: I don’t see why that matters.
This Morning on ITV, “Feminist Blogger Believes Trans-Women Aren’t Real Women,” YouTube, September 28, 2018 (see p. 138)20
Maya Forstater
The more people who stand up and talk about it, the easier it is for the next people. I only began to tweet and talk about it after reading and listening to so many people here. And I thought because I worked at a think tank that does not take institutional positions and that supports academic freedom of speech I could talk about it. But it turned out I was wrong. I don’t want this to be a cautionary tale, and I hope that what I am doing in taking the organisation I worked for to tribunal it will help to enable a whole lot of people to be a bit braver. If I win my case will give some legal protection. But if more people speak up it becomes easier for others to speak up. If each of us speaks up within our organisations, our professions, and our communities, we can turn this around.
- Maya Forstater, “Sex, Gender, and Development,” Woman’s Place UK, May 20, 2019 (p. 214)21
Here is the launch for McAnena’s TERF Island:
Readers seeking to purchase McAnena’s book can do so at the following link to the Spinifex Press website:
https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781922964267
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Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men/A Vindication of the Rights of Woman/An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993/2008), 103.
Josephine Butler, “Introduction,” in Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture: A Series of Essays, ed. Josephine Butler (London: Macmillan and Co., 1869), lxiii.
Emmeline Pankhurst, Suffragette: My Own Story, originally titled My Own Story in 1914 (London: Hesperus Press, 2015), 241.
Sylvia Pankhurst, “Preface,” The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910 (Boston, MA: The Woman’s Journal, 1911), n.p.
Although I will be writing about it more in detail later, it seems worth noting that a UK reporter coined “suffragette” in 1906 for derogatory use against militant woman suffragists, akin to the use of “TERF.” It was specifically used to describe women involved with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by the Pankhursts in the UK. Therefore, use of “suffragette” does not apply to Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) or Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) in the US. Frances Willard (1839-1898), yet another example, was not a suffragette but a woman suffragist; for one, she died before 1906, obviously, and she would not qualify among the more radical woman suffragists like the Pankhursts. Willard was far more politically conservative than Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), for instance—even more so than Stanton and Anthony, co-editors with Gage for The History of Woman Suffrage.
Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals, 1931 (London: Virago Press, 1988), 517.
Mary E. Cox, Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany, 1914-1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 242.
For some details about The Suffragette becoming Britannia and the split directions for Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughters, see Rebecca West, “Mrs. Pankhurst,” in The Post-Victorians (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, LTD., 1933), 496-498.
West, “Mrs. Pankhurst,” 493.
Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection, 1986 (North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2001), 5.
Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), 1949, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, 2009 (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 203.
Raymond, 152.
Raymond, 211.
See Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, 1979 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994); Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2003); Sheila Jeffreys, “The Transgendering of Children: Gender Eugenics,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 35, no. 5 (September-October 2012): 384-393, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2012.07.001; and Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism (New York: Routledge, 2014). How quickly some have seemingly “forgotten” they did not coin “gender industry” or pioneer the critique of transgenderism—unlike radical feminists like Raymond and Jeffreys who actually did the pioneering.
Andrea Dworkin, “Woman-Hating Right and Left,” in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, eds. Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond (New York: Pergamon Press, 1990), 39.
Julia Long (@OnChairs), X, July 16, 2025, 2:39 PM, https://x.com/OnChairs/status/1945569044418920494: “The word ‘Feminism’ was hijacked & used to mean its opposite, just as ‘woman,’ ‘mother,’ ‘lesbian’ & all the other ‘female’ words were hijacked. Don’t blame feminism for what’s been done in its name by those who stole it. I won’t relinquish ‘feminism’ any more than ‘woman.’”
Emmeline Pankhurst, “Albert Hall London: 17 October 1912 Speech,” in Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women, ed. Joyce Marlow, 2000 (originally Votes for Women: The Virago Book of Suffragettes) (London: Virago Press, 2015), 177.
Stephanie Davies-Arai, “Is My Child Transgender?” March 6, 2015, https://stephaniedaviesarai.com/is-my-child-transgender.
See Good Morning Britain, “Transgender Prisoners Could Soon Be Able to Swap Prisons if New Law Is Passed,” YouTube, November 21, 2017, https://youtu.be/2fGDqtwaUdQ.
See This Morning on ITV, “Feminist Blogger Believes Trans-Women Aren’t Real Women,” YouTube, September 28, 2018, https://youtu.be/fDSOP_j7HZE.
Maya Forstater, “Sex, Gender, and Development,” May 20, 2019, Woman’s Place UK, May 30, 2019, https://hiyamaya.net/2019/05/30/sex-gender-and-development. See Woman’s Place UK, “A Woman’s Place Is Back in Town: Maya Forstater (20 May 2019),” YouTube, May 29, 2019, https://youtu.be/LToFWj6skvE.