Do I control… myself??? (and four other reads)

Five things on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism

Happy Sunday, dear readers. It’s very hot in London. Last week it was hailing. Highly confusing weather.

Now onto reads….

---

1) Taliban law legitimises child marriage

A new divorce law in Afghanistan legitimises child marriage, according to activists. As The Guardian reports:

There is no ban on child marriage in Afghanistan under the Taliban, but a new law on divorce approved last week appears to suggest that a girl who later says she was married against her will would not be permitted a divorce if her husband disagrees.

The new law also appears to suggest that a woman cannot divorce her husband solely on the grounds of his absence or failure to provide financial support.

Since the Taliban retook power in 2021, they introduced dozens of decrees removing women and girls from public life, including a ban on education. As Unesco put it last year, on the fourth anniversary of the Taliban takeover, “Afghanistan stands out tragically as the only country in the world where secondary and higher education is strictly forbidden to girls and women. Nearly 2.2 million of them are now barred from attending school beyond the primary level due to this regressive decision.”

The ban on girls’ education is thought to have led to a rise in child marriage:

One informal estimate suggested that since the Taliban had barred them from education about 70% had been pushed into early or forced marriage and that 66% of these marriages involved girls under the age of 18.

The piece mentions a recent case involving a young girl killed in an abusive marriage:

Earlier this month, a 15-year girl in Daikundi province, central Afghanistan, died after enduring months of domestic violence, including severe beatings by her husband. Her father said his daughter had married her cousin eight months ago, but the violence began only two months into the marriage. After each beating, he said, local Afghan elders intervened and persuaded her to remain in the marriage.

There have been reports of brave protesters demonstrating against the divorce law in Kabul.

2) A very British bathroom ban

This week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published updated guidance following the Supreme Court ruling last April on the meaning of sex under the Equality Act—a ruling hailed as a victory for so-called gender-critical feminists.

According to the EHRC’s new code of practice, trans men and women must be excluded from single-sex toilets and changing rooms, and businesses have to offer alternatives for people who do not wish to use facilities based on their biological sex. The guidance itself seems fairly confusing and hard to enforce (see the Bluesky thread below). The whole saga also begs the question: what is all of this for?

When I started this newsletter (all the way back in 2022! Oh how the world has changed, etc, etc), I wrote about whether the so-called trans rights debate was in some way a victim of the broader backlash against women’s rights:

Could it be that the reason fear and misinformation around transgender people has grown so extreme in parts of the women’s movement is that, amid the backlash to feminist progress, women are looking around at how far they have come and how much further there is to go? Maybe they are looking for something to blame.

This theory doesn’t necessarily apply to the more religiously based transphobia on, eg, the American right. But in British feminism, could it be that the fixation on the supposed threat from trans women (people seem far less concerned about trans men…); the idea that trans women physically threaten women who aren’t trans and that they are are trying to take away women’s rights and spaces; that they propogate sexist stereotypes; that their transness and gender dysphoria is little more than a kink—could it be that this focus on the alleged misogyny of trans womanhood is in fact a refraction of the sheer enormity, the pervasiveness, of men’s hatred of, and violence against, women and girls?

Maybe it’s because I’m a Jewish woman, but I can’t help but see parallels in antisemitism and in the scapegoating of Jews, in paranoia about a Jewish lobby, and so on, in how transgender people are being targeted. If a similar policy, pushed by an activist movement, targeted another minority because of the so-called danger they posed, however truly felt their fears, would we not see this clearly as a form of prejudicial generalisation? Of collective punishment? I realise that for the women who might describe themselves as gender critical, what I’ve written here will likely read as wilfull blindness, or even gaslighting. But even genuinely fearing a thing doesn’t give you a free pass to prejudice (and I don’t see how any of this makes a dent in the violence and inequality women and girls live with).

PS Some news from a decade ago has been doing the rounds since the EHRC guidance was released last week. In 2016, the UK issued a travel advisory for LGBT people, warning them about legislation in North Carolina and Mississippi, that “transgender people must use public bathrooms according to the gender on their birth certificates.”

PPS Amnesty has published analysis of the influence of the gender critical feminist movement on media coverage about these issues.

3) The abortion culture war comes to British politics

At the end of April, new legislation came into force in England and Wales that decriminalises abortion. As per the European Medical Journal: “The landmark change, facilitated by amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, means women will no longer face investigations, criminal charges, or custodial sentences for ending their own pregnancy.”

At the same time as this “landmark change”, Britain’s populist right has increased its focus on abortion. According to Sian Norris’s investigation, which analysed “almost 80 Reform, Reform-supporting, and far-right X accounts… between April 2024 and April 2026, mentions of abortion increased by 40% compared to the previous two years”:

… nearly half of the selected accounts increased their abortion activity, with overall impressions of posts mentioning abortion almost quadrupling compared with the previous two years. These posts were shared around 153,000 times and received more than 800,000 likes.

What the data shows is a network of influence between anti-abortion groups and individuals and far-right politicians, with Reform-linked accounts reposting extreme far-right influencers, and vice versa, as well as anti-abortion organisations and activists posting support for Reform.

And also….

4) “Repeal the 19th”

My new podcast obsession, In Bed With the Right, has an excellent episode on the figures on the American right who are calling to repeal women’s right to vote. It’s an extreme position worth watching, given that members of the Trump administration are thought to be sympathetic to it.

Helen Lewis wrote a cover feature for the Atlantic on this issue recently, too, placing it within a broader trend of “masculinism” as a response to the “feminisation” of society. Here is a snippet:

How popular are masculinist ideas? Last year, research by King’s College London and Ipsos found that Gen Z men in 30 nations were far more likely than male Baby Boomers to say that the fight for women’s equality had gone so far that men were now disadvantaged. They were also more than twice as likely to say that a father who stayed home with his children was “less of a man.” Meanwhile, 83 percent of Republican men younger than 50 think society is too feminized, according to a survey by the conservative Manhattan Institute. Intriguingly, this survey did not replicate the usual trope of working-class men revolting against snooty female elites: It found that “college-educated Republicans are more likely than their non-college counterparts to endorse the view that society has become too feminine.”

And also:

This is a movement with real policy goals: the rollback of no-fault divorce. Tax breaks to reward male breadwinners and female homemakers. An end to anything with a whiff of DEI, even leadership programs for women in the military, like one cut by Hegseth. A return to the workplace culture of the 1970s, where sexual harassment was normalized. An open preference for male employees in hiring, promotion, and pay awards—in other words, affirmative action for men.

Yet masculinism also functions as a perpetual-motion machine of grievance, an inarticulate howl of anguish at the status quo—whatever that currently is. Masculinism is both serious and silly, sometimes camp and sometimes chilling, an attention-grabbing performance and a genuine proposition. No wonder it has become the cornerstone of Trumpism.

5) Do I control… myself???

Apropos masculinism… James Bloodworth has written a very interesting essay on how obsession with female power on the manosphere slides easily into antisemitic conspiracy theory. He writes:

In the conspiratorial imagination, female autonomy cannot simply emerge from social change, economic independence or shifting norms. It must have been engineered. And once a movement begins searching for hidden engineers – those who corrupt tradition, weaken men, control media, finance institutions and dissolve natural hierarchies – it is only a short walk into older and darker territory. The manosphere frequently rediscovers, in updated slang and meme form, the classic architecture of antisemitism. Women become marionettes, controlled by dark forces pulling the strings behind the scenes. Jews provide an answer to the question: who designed this system? The manosphere sells wounded men a fantasy of restored power while antisemitism supplies the villain who stole it.

And also:

… the structure of manosphere misogyny is analogous to antisemitism. Women, like Jews in the conspiratorial imagination, are portrayed through contradiction: simultaneously inferior and superior; weak yet all-powerful; irrational yet cunning; contemptible yet somehow dominant.

This is all very confusing for a Jewish woman. Do I control the world more than the average woman? Do I control… myself???

Bonus: Married at First Sight rape allegations (tw) | Evie Magazine’s sex issue | Godmothers of AI |Help a family in Gaza

Thank you for reading. See you next time.