Accessorise This!

Fawcett Society to Women: Be Nice and Listen to Men in Dresses

Emily Wilding Davison under the king's horse,1913. Photo credit: LSE Library.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

—Desmond Tutu 

Ayesha Hazarika’s comment piece yesterday in the Evening Standard serves as a solid lesson to women everywhere. And it’s not the lesson Hazarika was hoping we should learn.

Hazarika is a trustee of the Fawcett Society, a UK charity that campaigns for “gender equality and women’s rights at work, at home and in public life.” The Fawcett Society’s mission as stated on its website is to campaign for “a society in which women and girls in all their diversity are equal and truly free to fulfil their potential creating a stronger, happier, better future for us all.” One can only surmise from Hazarika’s editorial yesterday that women’s and girls’ rights are dependent upon the suspension of rational thought and kindness, the two fundamental tools of oppression against which this organisation was founded to combat. It’s as much irony as it is a lesson. But first, let’s examine the irony.

Hazarika’s reproach of women not only employs some rather disturbing sexist tropes, but she fails to understand how her use the “master’s tools” in calling women’s political protest “cruel” neatly into the structural misogyny that women have been fighting for well over a century. Indeed, Hazarika believes that she is the first woman ever to take up the role of the “peacemaker” pretending that she is the person anointed to usher forth a debate as she invokes the need for “kindness and empathy.” She treats the women who have been fighting against gender ideology for the past decade as an adjunct to her one-woman show where she has entered the scene, yesterday apparently, and treats women’s labour and organising as trivial. 

Hazarika is here to save us, women. Now get back to your kitchens as she—and only she—understands the nuance necessary to calm the storm!

The irony here is that Hazarika’s words merely repeat the historical rinse cycle of women being told that their protests are impolite. We saw this in 1906 when women shifted from polite petitions and editorials arguing for their right to vote and they took to breaking windows shortly after Silvia Pankhurst moved the Women’s Political and Social Union (WSPU) to London. North London’s Holloway became the geographical marker for the suffragists as approximately 300 women were jailed at Holloway prison for window-smashing, arson and other acts of “sabotage.” This is when Britain journalists were tasked with covering the shift in the women’s rights movement which turned more militant and they added the suffix -ette which was invoked to mock the new wave of “hysterical” agitators and “violent cranks.” 

In the same way, Hazarika has come on the scene to referee women’s voices deciding which are acceptable in polite society and which ones cruel, it is remarkable how the head of a women’s rights charity has attempted to diminish the voices of women on the ground through precisely the same set of principles that male reporters in 1906 did when covering those silly suffragettes who really ought to have stayed at home instead of protesting.

Hazarika writes of being terrified of this debate noting her anxiety, “I even booked in an emergency session with my therapist to work out a coping strategy for my mental health. Does this sound right to you? No. Because it’s not. This debate has become utterly toxic.” Here’s a question for Hazarika: does it sound right to you that the head of a women’s rights organisation is terrified to speak up for the very women she ostensibly represents? Here’s another: does it sound right to you that a trustee of this same women’s right organisation includes men as women whilst calling out the very constituents it claims to represent? Just asking for a friend.

Hazarika goes on to write: “I’m sorry to disappoint but I’m not picking a side. The stakes are incredibly high on both sides, and I get that. But what I cannot and will not accept is the level of mindless cruelty and polarisation which is ripping apart progressive politics and making enemies of people who should stand shoulder to shoulder.” Here’s the clue that Hazarika does not understand the meaning of the word “progressive” (she’s in good company since the self-nominated progressives don’t either): calling “men” “women” isn’t progressive. It’s regressive and defies any right-left dichotomy given that both sides seem to share in this anti-rational stance. I can’t believe that I have to say this repeatedly in recent years but men are simply not women. Men in dresses, men in makeup, men with pink hair and men who have a penchant for “girly things” are still men. As cruel as Hazarika might find my words, there is a corpus of science and philosophy on this subject dating back to the Enlightenment that backs up the fact that science is not a feeling nor is it a belief. Facts matter. And facts matter to women even when the polarising forces include the head of a women’s rights charity that has lost its compass.

Remember, the online wars took off because women have been threatened, harassed and physically assaulted for stating that sex is real. After publishing this piece on the gender debate in 2013, my six-month-old daughter and I along with my editor and his daughter were targetted by trans activists to the tune of over 100 death and rape threats. In the autumn of 2017 Venice Allan organised “We Need to Talk” before which there was a demonstration at Speaker’s Corner, Hyde Park where Maria MacLachlan was assaulted and her camera broken by Tara Wolf, a man. During the trial against Wolf, District Judge Kenneth Grant instructed MacLachlan to refer to Wolf by his preferred pronoun, “she.” This recalls many parallel moments in history such as when Italian scientist Galileo Galilei put his life on the line while convincing the religious establishment that the Copernican model of the solar system—in which the Earth and the other planets revolved around the sun—represented physical reality. 

Galileo knew when defending heliocentricism in 1633 that science was on his side even as he combatted the Catholic Church’s orthodoxy of the time that maintained that the earth orbiting a stationary sun was in conflict with literal interpretations of scripture as well as the Ptolemaic geocentric model. 

While Hazarika contends that the debate over gender identity is “extremist, unforgiving, rigid voices on both sides dominate the online war in a fight to the death of who can scream and shame the loudest,” I contend that the only extremism afoot is undertaken by the likes of the Fawcett Society which chastises women as “rigid” and “extremist” as it embraces the hogwash of gender identity to the detriment of the very women it ostensibly represents. 

I am equally as perturbed by Hazarika’s employment of sexist tropes that litter her op-ed as she puts us on the proverbial “naughty step” writing, “Sorry to get all supply teacher, but everyone needs to stop and reflect on their behaviour” while contending that you and I haven’t the right to call men in dresses, well, men in dresses. While it might escape Hazarika that her admonishment of women who name reality through words we were taught from books and mostly female teachers—supply teachers included—she ought to take some time out on the naughty step to understand the fiction of “misgendering”, much less gendering. Take it from me, a woman who is daily referred to as “he” online and in written correspondence. I have never complained about this act of “violence” against my person and I doubt any employment of pronouns is a matter of “vile” behaviour is a matter of the law to oversee and enforce.

“There has got to be a way through this because newsflash—the only group benefiting from this vile punch up are the forces of social conservatism who are no true friend of either side,” Hazarika writes. Here’s another newsflash for Hazarika: the only social conservatism afoot is hers where she marshals in the notion that it is socially conservative to contend that “woman” is neither a feeling nor an identity. Hazarika’s diatribe against women fully demonstrates why organisations like the Fawcett Society need to go the way of Stonewall. There is no justice in an organisation that claims to represents the rights of gay men and women while telling lesbians to suck “female cock” any more than there is in an organisation that pretends to represent the rights of women while telling us that men are women so “be nice.” We are in this mess currently because of women like Hazarika who maintain the delusory—if not moronic—notion that men are “welcome” and “cherished in a Facebook group for women experiencing menopause. To that sentiment alone I throw a brick through a window.

As for Hazarika’s contention that these men offer us lessons in fashion (eg. “we have all learned from their stories and world class ability to accessorise”), I throw myself under the king’s horse alongside Emily Wilding Davison.

I’m not saying all of this is easy, but there has got to be a way through this which moves on from women like Hazarika taking lumps out of women who utilise their intellect. It’s certainly not that “powerful cis men sit back and laugh” at us. It’s the very men for whom she unfurls the red carpet who are having a laugh while Hazarika mistakenly believes that her voice alone is the “more moderate” (or that moderation and kindness will get women anywhere). Even the men fighting alongside us in the social media debates know quite well that all they have to do to unfetter themselves from their “cis-ness” is to declare themselves women. It’s literally that easy. If you don’t believe me, just ask Zuby.

Here is the lesson that Hazarika’s op-ed yesterday can teach us all: we must be vigilant about our rights and the organisations we stand behind. The Fawcett Society is funded by its members and it is time its members show this organisation the door. As for access to a good therapist, women have been there and done that. The recycling of telling women to “get therapy” was, I thought, undone when Luce Irigaray took Freud and Lacan to the cleaners. 

That Hazarika has learned “to accessorise” from men in dresses while skooling women to be “kind” is to her detriment. Let it not be to ours. Men are not women.