The no-girls allowed group chat (and five other reads) — Part 1

Three (out of six) things on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism

Dear readers, old and new. I haven’t written in a while because I had a busy and intense April, including my first visit back to Israel since January 2023. When I was last there, a new government had been sworn in, which was (and still is) the most religious, right-wing and extreme in Israel’s history. At the time I wrote a dispatch about what this government would mean for women. Needless to say, since then everything has changed, and this government has done more ill than I could have imagined—chiefly continuing the onslaught on Gaza for political ends, killing tens of thousands and starving the population, including many children, as well as abandoning hostages to their captors, leaving them for dead.

I was there for only a few days for work, so didn’t see many people aside from my family. I constantly watched the news, switching between the channels, including Israel’s Fox News equivalent, Channel 14, to try to enter, as far as possible, the state of mind that Israelis are in after so many months of this horror. The contrast between obsessively following what’s happening while in London, and the lack of attention to what actually happens in Gaza within Israel, was jarring. This collective, societal blindness is both willed and an act of survival, because if you actually see what is being done in your name, what would you do then?

Israel felt stuck in time, neglected, frayed at the edges. Outside, with the violence in Gaza relentless, the world barely mentions what happened on 7th October anymore. But inside Israel, that day, and the fact that Israeli soldiers keep dying in this pointless campaign, is everything. Everywhere I looked there were stickers commemorating fallen soldiers or those massacred on 7th October. Everywhere you see posters calling for the hostages to come home, but life continues, as it must I guess, around these background reminders of grief and pain. Meanwhile, Gaza is like a gap in the public consciousness.

What I wondered about women back in December 2022, namely that the new government of extremists would have few women in it, is not totally immaterial. But there are more fundamental matters to consider on that front. In Haaretz, Nadine Quomsieh has written a piece arguing that “feminism that cannot name Gaza is not feminism”. She says:

In Gaza, women are not asking for boardroom seats or missions to Mars. They are asking for bread. For water. For soap. For a sanitary pad. For their children to wake up in the morning. If our feminism cannot hold space for that reality, if it doesn't pause to hear the voices under the rubble, then what are we building, and who is it really for?

In one shelter, a mother tore strips from her daughter's dress to use as menstruation cloths. Another lined her shoes with cardboard, bleeding in silence, so she wouldn't stain the floor. These are not metaphors – they are Tuesday mornings in Gaza. And yet, too often, they go unspoken in the halls of international feminist solidarity.

Now, because I’ve taken a while to send this newsletter, I have a little more in it than usual. So, I’m sending today’s installment in two parts.

Here goes the first…..

---

1) The no-girls allowed group chat

A story that made some noise recently was Ben Smith’s piece about the group chats where Tech Right discourse is happening. As

Noah Smith

points out on his Substack, this is perhaps less of a totally new thing and more of a return to the days before the free-for-all of social media. “In the 2010s, discussions like this might have happened on Twitter or other public forums,” he writes, “now, they’re held in the modern-day equivalent of a smoky back room.”

As I read the Ben Smith piece, I noticed the preponderance of men in the story—setting up the group chats, being invited to them, participating. There must be women on there too (some of the chats have—or had, if they are now defunct—hundreds of members), but the story made me wonder about a world where we are returning to these closed door, invite-only discussions, where women are certainly not represented in equal numbers, let alone in the majority, and no one really thinks that’s a problem. Given that the Tech Right has hardly shown itself to be a big believer in gender equality (masculine energy, anyone?) I wondered if, aside from this being a story about big, era-defining conversations happening via group chat, this is also a story about women being sidelined or re-excluded from important fora. And are they being excluded by men who feel, whether consciously or not, that woman have asked for too much, or that they are sick of hearing from them. Or maybe they just aren’t all that interested in what women have to say. I have some experience of being excluded from an all-male group chat in a former job (more on that another time, perhaps), so this doesn’t feel theoretical to me. The Atlantic’s Signal chat scoop (remember that?) got me thinking similar. If anyone knows that this is completely off, and that these group chats are in fact gender-equal utopias, please let me know.

2) The Supreme Court ruling

Since I last sent this email, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that sex is biological under then 2010 Equality Act. Feminists who might describe themselves as gender critical or sex realist have been celebrating. The most prominent among them, JK Rowling, who funded the legal challenge by For Women Scotland which ultimately resulted in the ruling, posted a picture of herself on X smoking a cigar and drinking whiskey. She wrote: “I love it when a plan comes together”.

The ruling was followed by much confusion about what it actually means for trans people, and for the various organisations providing services that will be affected by the judgment. At Prospect magazine (where, for the benefit of new subscribers, I am an editor), we published an excellent piece by

Jess O'Thomson

, explaining what politicians seemed to misunderstand about the ruling and what it means for trans people in practice. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission has released an “interim update” ahead of guidance that is due this summer, and in the meantime, various organisations have announced changes of policy (or not). For instance, the English Football Association has said it will ban trans women from playing women’s football from next season (according to Sky News, the number of trans women currently playing professional football is zero; there are 20 thought to be playing at grassroots level).

But, as Jess explains in the piece, there has been a lot of confusion and disagreement over the significance of the ruling. There have also been various initiatives rejecting the very premise of the legal challenge that led to the ruling. One open letter from non-trans feminist academics had 2556 signatures last time I checked. They write:

Anti-trans campaigners say they want to exclude trans women from women’s spaces in order to protect cis women. We do not need protection from trans people. We need action against sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence and everyday sexism. We need policies that guarantee women get equal pay for their work, affordable childcare and the eradication of childbirth-related deaths. And we need the state to stop the violence that trans people face at the hands of cis men and cis women.

We need to stand together in defence of everyone's bodily autonomy, gender expression, reproductive rights, and individual freedoms. We cannot have a state or society that checks people’s genitals when they go to the toilet, go to work or school, play sports, access healthcare or use facilities.

We unequivocally reject the idea that women can be defined by their biology, a claim which is neither feminist nor scientific. For centuries, women have fought for the right to do, wear and be what they want to be. It is essentialist and patriarchal to assert that body, genes, chromosomes and reproductive capacity make women (or men).

Some people have pointed out that the text of the 88-page judgment itself is far more humane than Trump’s executive orders against “gender ideology” and defending “biological truth”, for instance, and that the Supreme Court took care to clarify that, despite the ruling, trans people will still be protected from discrimination under the Equalities Act. That is true, though it also seems a low bar. Reading the judgment, however, which includes a very detailed overview of how legal protections for trans people developed over the years, and seeing various organisations go through the motions of considering whether or not to exclude trans people from service provision, it seems hard to argue that trans people have not lost rights here. At the very least, the debate itself has been dehumanising. After the 16th April ruling, politicians were once again being asked repeatedly to clarify whether or not trans women are women. As Jess points out in their piece, legally trans women are still women, even after the judgment.

The discourse over trans rights and women’s rights has long been an impasse in British feminism, and a nasty one at that. Both sides accuse each other of bullying and harassment. Seeing the aftermath of the ruling here, it’s seems like a “sensible centre” in the UK is identified with the gender critical argument, as if protecting the rights of a vulnerable group is a fringe position. That is not to downplay the fears of women who are abuse or rape or domestic violence survivors, and who say they want to safeguard, say, shelters for women. But doesn’t excluding an entire group of people on the basis that there might be someone violent among them very clearly amount to discrimination or collective punishment? Wherever you are on this debate, it is worth revisiting “The right to pee is everything” by Grace Byron in The Nation.

I have also been trying to understand where feminism goes from here. To me, the ruling feels like a dead end in terms of feminist progress. If this is a feminist victory—and for some it seems to be the feminist victory—where next? Answers on a postcard please….

3) He wants a “baby boom”

The Trump administration has reportedly been looking into policy ideas to increase birthrates—from $5,000 “baby bonuses", to keeping 30 per cent of Fullbright scholarships for married scholars or those who have children, to funding programmes to educate women about periods partly in order to help people get pregnant. Another proposal, according to the New York Times, is for a “‘National Medal of Motherhood’ for mothers with six or more children” (NB the Nazis introduced such an award in 1938).

On her Substack, the autocracy expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat places these developments in the US in the context of fascist history and developments in Italy and Hungary. She writes:

These pro-natalist measures the Donald Trump administration is considering are part of a larger attempt to use government to re-engineer the American population. Detaining and ejecting immigrants, disparaging “childless” women, privileging motherhood as central to female identity, and incentivizing White Christian births to “natural families” –unions of one man and one woman –are part of this plan.

Great Replacement Theory, or the idea that White Christians are being outperformed demographically by non-Whites, threatening the survival of the race and “civilization,” was central to Fascist ideologies and practices and it is central to anti-immigrant and other racist platforms of far-right parties and governments today.

MAGA is the American hub of this transnational racist project, and the proposals of the Trump administration also reflect the obsession with increasing White Christian birthrates among many prominent Republicans, including Vice President J.D. Vance and unelected co-U.S. leader Elon Musk.

RBG joined the podcast I co-host recently to mark 100 days of Trump. You can listen (obvs) or watch on YouTube.

P.s Last month, the right-wing philosopher Nina Power wrote a dispatch from a pronatalist conference she attended in Hungary. Power reflected that “it is admiration for Hungary’s efforts to buck the trend and create a society that is genuinely family-first that brings the speakers, many of them American, to this excellent city.”

P.p.s There has been some intra-conservative friction over feminism of late. On the Daily Wire, the right-wing commentator/podcaster Matt Walsh (he of the anti-“gender ideology” doc What is a woman?), dedicated a post to a conservative influencer who had shared a video criticising the current popularity of the tradwife lifestyle. The video, writes Walsh, “represents a growing, or at least increasingly evident, problem on the Right. The problem, in a word, is feminism”. He continues:

Feminism is not compatible with any meaningful definition of conservatism. Whatever conservatism is trying to conserve — like marriage, the family, western civilization itself — feminism militates against. And yet many feminists have become mouthpieces in the movement, and are accepted as such, as long as they wear a MAGA hat and say that they don’t like illegal immigration or whatever.

Bonus: “The return of the housewife” | The new indie press championing men

Thank you so much for reading. Look out for Part 2 in your inbox soon, featuring reads on Virginia Giuffre, Kenya, and the hotness gender gap.