Nice men and the reality of sex

Recognition and bafflement

I am lucky to know lots of nice men. 

Many of the nice men I know agree with me viscerally and whole-heartedly about the reality and importance of sex, and are willing to speak up about it. They get it that women are entitled to our own boundaries when it comes to washing, undressing, sleeping, using the toilet. They understand that we don’t have to be religious or unusually vulnerable to be entitled to use the toilet in a public place without glimpsing a man’s size 9s under the partition between cubicles. They understand that when we express a preference for a female health-care provider, we shouldn’t be asked to explain why; and that if we see a man approaching us with a speculum, we are entitled to our “no” whatever he may be wearing and however he may describe his identity. They can even guess (no flies on these chaps) what might possibly go wrong if a teenage boy who says he’s a girl is allowed to share a dormitory on a school trip with a roomful of teenage girls (or vice versa). They see why rape victims of either sex might not wish to be counselled by a man, however he identifies, and whatever government certificates he may hold. 

Some of these men have even heard the word “autogynephilia”, and understand that some proportion of the men who call themselves women and dress as women, including in the workplace, are doing so to indulge a sexual fetish. They understand why we feel quite strongly that we shouldn’t be asked to sacrifice our privacy in order to indulge a fetish. And why the possibility that the owner of the size 9s in the next cubicle is getting off on our discomfort is particularly angering and disturbing. 

I know nice men in another category, too. These nice men are friendly to me. They know my views, and they clearly don’t think I’m a hateful bigot because they’re willing to chat to me about many things — including this, up to a point. 

It’s the “up to a point” I’m interested in here. 

The point is that when I’m talking to this category of nice men, I’m allowed to say forthright things like “humans can’t change sex” or “men who try to get into women-only spaces are exactly the men who most need to be kept out — they’ve demonstrated their contempt for women’s boundaries”. I won’t be monstered or excommunicated for saying those things. All the same, these nice men fight very shy indeed of assenting to them. 

They know. I know they know, because in truth this is the sort of thing that every person of sound mind on the planet knows. You don’t even have to be of particularly sound mind to know this, it’s that obvious. Remember when they had to stop asking “who is the Prime Minister” as a diagnostic test for dementia because even the demented knew it was Margaret Thatcher? What is sometimes called “gender-critical belief” is in that category. Everyone knows that sex is real and sometimes matters. I know lots of people deny it, because to admit you know it can lose you friends or your career. But they know it still. 

But these nice blokes won’t admit, even in private, that they know this. They say things like “it’s complicated”, “I haven’t every really had the time and inclination to form a properly-informed view ”, “I’m just too tired to get into this right now”. 

There’s one sense in which I recognise this manoeuvre, and one sense in which I’m baffled by it. 

Recognition 

I know this manoeuvre because I recognise it, a bit sheepishly, as one I have performed myself. That penny dropped with me when one of these nice men said “I’m not going to argue this with you — it would be like me trying to engage my plumber in a debate about TUPE.” 

That was disarming. It’s true that I am well-versed these days in the facts and the law relevant to the sex-and-gender debate, much more so than most of my friends and colleagues. But what I recognised was my own nervous backing away from a different subject, that of Israel and Palestine. On that, it’s genuinely true to say that I don’t have any well-informed views. Beyond an unequivocal willingness to condemn atrocities like rape and torture whoever perpetrates them, I’m aware of a hugely gnarly and ancient tangle of wrongs and counter-wrongs on which I simply do not have the learning to venture an opinion. I back away, if invited to, making very much the same sorts of noises made by the second sort of nice men. I’m not proud of my ignorance, but there it is: it leaves me unequipped either to agree or to join battle with those who have firm opinions. 

So I’m familiar with the move. I do know what it feels like to think one of the urgent contemporary issues just too complicated for me to have a chance of forming a defensible view on it during my one short life, and to respond with that same anxious disengagement if anyone tries to draw me on it. 

Bafflement 

But my bafflement comes back to the simplicity and obviousness of pretty much everything about the sex and gender debate. Sure, there are a few tricky questions round the edges, but most of it really is dead simple. 

Obviously men can’t become women. 

Obviously no-one should be bullied into pretending to think that some men are women. Obviously women are entitled to privacy from men when they are undressed, using the toilet, etc. Obviously that means all men. 

Obviously “all men” includes men who say they are women.

Obviously a certificate doesn’t make it ok for a man to invade women’s privacy. 

Obviously only an idiot would let a teenage boy share a dormitory with teenage girls on a school trip. 

Obviously if a man competes in a women’s athletics event, he’s a cheat. 

Obviously if a man wants to use the women’s changing room at the gym, he’s a creep. 

Obviously where there’s a real need to segregate the sexes, you have to do so on the basis of bodies, not identities. 

Obviously rape victims are entitled to know the sex of their counsellor. 

How has it come about that decent, intelligent men who unmistakably care deeply about the individual women in their lives have been made so frightened to assent to these obvious truths? Obvious truths whose recognition is foundational to the privacy, dignity and safety of all women (including those individual women who are close to them)? 

This is one of the great triumphs of the gender identity cult. It’s not that it’s persuaded anyone that  any of these observations is not true. It’s swerved that, and instead made these truths unsayable by nice, kind, polite people. 

If I thought the gender cult was a conspiracy, I’d be ruefully tipping my hat to its cleverness at this point. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I think it’s something more like the cultural equivalent of a virus, adapting to the conditions in which it finds itself in a manner that looks like fiendishly clever design but which is in truth much more analogous to evolution. One of the killer mutations of this cult is its co-option of nice people’s instincts of kindness, empathy and politeness. 

I’m still baffled, though. Evidently it is the case that a version of “kindness” has been co-opted by the cult. But I don’t really understand how or why this works. I get that people like to think of themselves as kind, etc. I like to think of myself as kind. But my instinct to kindness prioritises the interests of female athletes over the entitled men who are stealing their team places and medals; it prioritises the needs of disabled girls and women to same-sex intimate care over the claims of men who want to be validated as women by being permitted to provide that care (or have worse motives — come on, don’t flinch and look away: it happens — do I have to mention Jimmy Savile?); it prioritises the needs of female prisoners over the claims of men who would prefer to be imprisoned among women they can dominate and terrorise; it prioritises the needs of ordinary women who want ordinary day to day privacy from men over the desires of men who want to invade that privacy. 

And in service of all those things, it prioritises truthful language over the misplaced politeness that calls some men “she”.