This is a journal incorporating some thoughts about a very important, and legally interesting, case which concluded yesterday but which will, assuming permission to proceed is granted, and any settlement aside, continue to a second preliminary hearing on the employment issue in late January 2020, then a full hearing on the merits in May. As is common for feminists, before I can even speak about the case itself I have to speak about the difficulty in speaking at all. The obstacles are many. It takes time to interrogate one’s own writing to assess whether it will pass by the censors, and then you must wait to see whether they grant you a pass. Frankly, it’s a chore. I feel increasing impatience that I am expected to tie myself in knots to convey my own experience. And that’s what writers are for, right? We should – to help keep society healthy – be allowed to say it how we see it. In practice, there are penalties for describing our point of view, something Maya Forstater learned when she tried to have a conversation about sex and gender.

Although women such as myself tend to write to keep one another’s spirits up, to share information about what matters most to us, and to keep a record of the details of our political struggle, we write and speak online in the knowledge that our words are subject to surveillance by people who would strongly prefer it if we did not speak at all, and by moderators who execute our monitors’ intention to silence us. Even on Mumsnet’s Feminism and Women’s Rights board – an enduring bastion of gender critical discussion – we are accustomed to our threads looking like Swiss cheese after the mods have combed through them, because the things we used to be entitled to say – observable facts and philosophical beliefs – have been framed by gender ideology-based policies as hateful and unspeakable.

We also write in the knowledge that not every silent lurker wants to shut down our conversation, that there are many, many more (and the data on readers who visit Mumsnet primarily for FWR speak to that) who just want to learn about what’s going on, and to evaluate for themselves whether or not gender critical feminists really are the evil witches of contemporary lore. In general, once people actually engage with what feminists have been saying these past few years, they grasp the point pretty quickly. Of course, one wouldn’t want to hide the conversations within secret groups because then the basic message – that sex matters, that it can’t be changed, and that society has a serious problem when those two facts are replaced with pseudoscientific dogma – would not spread, and it is vital for women’s rights, for children’s safeguarding, and for everyone’s freedom of speech and belief, and freedom from persecution by public authorities, that the message should spread to every institution currently captured by gender ideology.

This makes for an interesting tension. Is it best to simply ignore the monitors, and carry on writing to one’s intended readers, when such a strategy makes it more likely that one’s efforts to communicate in writing will be erased at the behest of unintended readers who monitor us to find any pretext to report us to employers (e.g. Maya Forstater), police (e.g. Kate Scottow), embassies (e.g. Caroline Farrow), and social media firms (e.g. Posie Parker)? Or should one alter one’s speech to be less-intelligible, and less true to one’s perceptions (humour can be an effective way to do this, but you have to be in on the joke to be understood)? Or, just swerve the whole issue, give up, focus elsewhere, and so let the monitors have their wish – the Automatically Self-censoring Woman?

This is what a chilling effect feels like, from the perspective of a woman in England in 2019 who wants – needs – to speak about the impact of gender ideology on our laws and institutions. It is not unusual for me to make the effort to write something on this topic, only to decide to hold back, knowing that publishing might mean I will have to spend time I don’t have jumping through hoops to be allowed back onto a platform, each time a step closer to a permanent ban, or will summon the stalkers and rape/death-threat merchants. The atmosphere of fear, paranoia and confusion caused by these gender ideology-based policies is very real. It causes a drain on the energy and morale of the writer who confronts it, which I imagine is precisely the effect desired by the totalitarian-inclined activists, and their uncritical enablers, who have brought society to this place for the sake of imposing their counterfactual demands. On the other hand, every instance of suppression merely serves to spring-load resistance, and it is in the nature of genuine grassroots ‘movements’ that, when one individual is down, another steps in to take her place.

It is too early to say whether the chill is beginning to thaw. The outcomes of the two cases in court this week #MayaForstaterCase2019 and #FairCopJR will be definitive. Until those decisions are released, the pressure to self-censor remains intense, the expectation of reprisal occasionally overwhelming. I will attempt to write through it, and that in itself will feel like a small victory for freedom of expression and thought.

So, preliminaries dealt with, onto Maya’s case.

Recently, I’ve been live-tweeting from Maya Forstater’s sex and belief discrimination hearing in the Central London Employment Tribunal, so that Maya’s oral evidence – and the oral evidence of the other witnesses for both sides – will be in the public domain, in an accessible form, for all those with an active interest in the case’s outcome. For those who weren’t following live, the Judge explicitly gave permission for us – feminists without press passes – to tweet from the tribunal. The preliminary hearing was on the issue of belief, specifically whether or not Maya’s feminist beliefs (and attendant knowledge of the fact of human sexual dimorphism) are weighty enough to merit protection from discrimination. While the obvious answer is ‘yes, of course, why is this even a question?’ there remains the small matter of legal process, and the judge has said he will attempt to reach a decision on whether or not to grant the claimant permission to proceed in the next few days. We await his ruling on tenterhooks.

The importance of this case for women’s – and, indeed, men’s – rights to think and to speak on matters of profound public interest cannot be overstated. If no-one whose job requires an analysis of sex (not merely gender identity) can acknowledge and think aloud about it without being sacked and vilified, the outlook for a public realm based on reason and evidence is decidedly bleak. Some have suggested that it represents the start of a descent into totalitarianism, a post-facts State. Others suggest we are already there. I prefer to believe there is much in this society which is worth defending, not least of which are the sex-based rights, freedoms, and responsibilities won by dedicated women over the past century. I want to believe in the resilience of our key institutions, and the goodwill and intelligence of people working in them. I believe they have been gaslit and mislead, by gender ideology activist groups, on a nation-wide scale, and that some of the damage and harm already done can be repaired once everyone understands the details of cognitive capture.

So much for my motivations, concerns and hopes.

Several things happened in rapid succession when I began to live tweet: first, my followers grew from 300 to 1,900 including numerous journalists – suggesting a hunger for insight into the way the judiciary will handle the conflict between women’s sex-based rights and the maximalist (to put it generously) claims of gender activist groups (which are in direct conflict with the former, in that one cannot have both simultaneously).

Secondly, Twitter deboosted my replies so that the thread would be less visible across the network. Ever the optimist, I’ve taken that up with them. Let’s see whether a non-partisan moderator does the right thing and removes the muffler. I shan’t hold my breath, but I wonder how much further the thread would reach beyond my tiny corner of the platform if my account wasn’t deboosted?

Thirdly, I was banned from tweeting or interacting on Twitter for twelve hours, following an unsuccessful appeal. At first, they said I could still browse, but the company mysteriously reneged on that offer and I was locked out completely. The company characterised my report of what I saw with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, as “hateful conduct” – that phrase which has become so blurred and stripped of meaning by misuse. I would respond that Twitter has behaved in a discriminatory manner towards me, on the basis of my sex and my feminist philosophical beliefs (I reserve the right to name reality, to say that the sky is blue and not yellow), but such a claim would have limited traction until – and unless – a precedent is set by the ongoing tribunal case. At some point in the near future, a feminist will take Twitter and Ors to court, and she will win. In this country, women still have some rights, even though nearly every public authority and private company pretends otherwise (I’m singling out the Equalities and Human Rights Commission for pretty brutal side-eye, right now).

Large gamete producers who centre the needs and rights of other large gamete producers in their politics, recent events have shown, must mind our Ps and Qs, and never forget upon which sex class’ grace and favour we depend when venturing into politics to fight our corner. We are welcome only on sufferance, and the condition that we don’t talk about the things which matter most to us. Of course, such desperate suppression always backfires in that it stokes the very defiance the suppressors seek to quash. As strategies for managing difficult women go, how perfectly neoclassical it is to turf women out of the digital public square, just like the good ol’ days in ancient Athens! Almost like the tech dude bros never heard of Barbara Streisand and her eponymous Effect! At least English courts and tribunals appear, so far (touch wood) to be more robust than U.S. private companies in accommodating the reality that over half the population are producers of large gametes, and that we have legitimate political interests to defend and advance. I do wish the tech companies would wise up, but the path back to reality will be a long and arduous one in the U.S where many of them are based. Hopefully, here in England, our sane, so far ideologically-uncowed, reason and evidence-oriented judiciary will side-step the Orwellian injustices created by Obama’s gender identity laws, by re-asserting settled rights which are already on the rolls.

A fourth thing happened, too: counsel for the Respondent applied to the judge, on the second day of hearing evidence, for live tweeting to be banned from the tribunal because the witnesses were vulnerable. However, no supporting argument or evidence was given for this contention. Let’s remind ourselves, briefly, who didn’t lose their livelihood in this scenario, and reflect for a moment on who precisely has been shown to be vulnerable to such loss, and whether or not they just happen to produce large gametes. The judge refused the application on the basis that earlier representations ought to have been made, and that it would be contrary to the principle of open justice, pointing out that court reporters used to duck out to telephone-in their report to their newspapers. How is live tweeting any different? We are all grateful that the English court system is (fingers and toes still tightly crossed) robust enough to recognise the strong public interest element of Maya’s case, and that such information should be freely circulated. The judge in Fair Cop’s judicial review yesterday held to the same principle of open justice, thank goodness. Reason for cautious hope.

We already know about the hostility of the Left-ish men who own silicon valley social media firms towards (actual) feminist speech, and how professing to have a special internal sense of gender identity elevates an individual to a near-sacred status (in that their subjective perceptions are – uniquely – held up as self-evident, objective truths) within institutions. In contrast, the list of women kicked off their platforms grows daily. See, also, feminist journalist Meghan Murphy’s infamous permanent ban from Twitter for referring to a notorious vexatious litigator as ‘him’ (even though that individual, at the time, went under his masculine given name). The ban was enacted against Murphy before the company publicly changed its rules of service to compel ‘correct preferred pronoun’ use via a prohibition on ‘misgendering.’ Although Murphy took Twitter Inc to court, she lost (on what grounds I do not know) and had to appeal, and the company continues to decline to reinstate her account. A very specific category of journalist is unwelcome in Twitterland, even as it remains the key platform for members of that profession to network and disseminate their writing. By this point – in England, at least – the company’s heavy-handed approach has begun to seem hopelessly out-of-step with current events. Much of the U.S. is clearly hamstrung by gender identity laws, institutions cowed by the threat of litigation, individuals within them effectively indoctrinated in deed if not in thought, but here we have not reached that extreme – not yet.

Last year, UK feminists successfully fought off Stonewall et al’s proposed Gender Recognition Act reforms which would have erased sex as a legal category, replacing it with gender identity. That does not mean that our institutions have ceased to behave as though that proposed reform was made law, but we at least have a stable footing from which to push back. The grassroots fightback against the top-down imposition of gender ideology by public and private institutions is well underway, and there are signs that we are making ourselves heard. Yesterday, I could not live tweet from Fair Cop’s judicial review at the High Court because Twitter had suspended me, but others were tweeting, and countless others read what they said. Wasn’t this vision of an empowered citizenry central to Twitter’s founding mythology? What a shame they, too, have gone the way of all the tech giants.

Which brings me back to Maya, and the courageous way she has chosen to defend her – and, by extension, women and men’s shared – right to think, and to speak, and not to suffer loss of a livelihood and reputation damage because of it. In case you’re unfamiliar with the details, Maya Forstater was an expert in illicit tax flows, working for the Centre for Global Development think tank. In 2018, using her work Twitter account out-of-hours, she initiated a conversation – amongst development professionals – about the unintended consequences, for their field, of conflating sex and gender. Although evidence was given on Monday that numerous individuals within the CGD were sympathetic to Maya’s right to have that discussion in the way she did, the net outcome was that the company fired her on the grounds that her speech had been offensive to people with trans identities. Maya stating that, as a matter of fact, humans can’t change sex, and her belief that sex matters in public policy, were deemed tantamount to denying the existence of trans people. This, when she had won external funding to continue her own research project. CGD dropped like a flaming potato this eminently capable, self-starting woman who declined uncritically to parrot the dogma of gender ideology. She was her family’s breadwinner.

Another woman in Maya’s position might have checked the prevailing currents and decided to keep a lower profile, hope for a useful reference, and move on while carrying the anxiety that her ‘crime’ against gender orthodoxy might come back to haunt her at any stage, diminishing her lifelong ability to earn a living. The internet never forgets, and some gender extremists have distinguished themselves as deficient in the qualities of empathy, mercy, restraint, forgiveness or any sense of proportion when it comes to their occupation of destroying their opponents’ public lives, i.e. women who publicly reject the pseudoscientific belief that humans can change sex, and who question the wisdom of teaching children that they can’t know which of the two sexes they are. Instead, Maya called on her fellow Mumsnetters and raised £60,000 in 24 hours on Crowdjustice.com, enabling her to instruct one of the leading feminist lawyers of our times, Anya Palmer, to fight her discrimination claim in the Employment Tribunal. Thank goodness she stepped up.

The judge will have to decide whether or not Maya’s feminist philosophical beliefs are sufficiently weighty to pass the Grainger test. Perhaps we should post photographs of our bookcases heaving with feminist literature to assist him, or images of the Suffragettes’ struggle to get recognition of women’s right to participate in the political process, in case portraits of the women who, in the late 1800’s, campaigned for female single-sex public toilets don’t have the same visual impact? The tribunal will also have to rule on the nature of the employment relationship between claimant and respondent. The claimant might be vindicated on one point, and not the other. Of course, I hope she is compensated for her losses, too. Either way, with a finding that Maya’s right to express her philosophical beliefs was indeed protected, we all win: her name would be cleared from the point of view of future employers who fear the wrath of the gender extremists, and every woman and man in England and Wales (plus the many jurisdictions influenced by our legal precedents) will be reassured of their right to publicly criticise gender ideology. This right is absolutely key to a properly-functioning democracy in this era of growing numbers of children being medically ‘transitioned’ as an ineffective cure-all for all manner of psycho-social complaints, and the wholesale attempt to dismantle the sex-based protections our feminist foremothers devoted their lives to fighting for so that we could move through public space in relative freedom.

Some tweeters have asked what it was like sitting in that Tribunal. I can only repeat an adjective which has cropped up many times in the replies and comments: surreal. It was little short of surreal to hear Maya being cross-examined on the fitness and seriousness of beliefs based on feminist philosophy developed over centuries, and on hitherto-uncontested scientific reality. It speaks to how far this society has drifted from both truth, and a recognition of women’s humanity, that these issues have to be fought for anew – and, be assured, Maya and Anya were fighting, and they were embattled by opponents who refused even the most modest recognition of Maya’s dignity, and the ordinary, sound nature of her understanding of the world. The Respondent’s strategy was to cast material reality itself into radical doubt, while advancing the postmodernist idea that there is no reality which is not reducible to discourse. That, in itself, was thoroughly mad. How else to characterise the inflexible, irrational, totalitarian belief that if you say the sky is yellow, and outlaw anyone who insists it’s blue, then for all purposes it is yellow? Have these people never read – or at least watched the film adaptation of – 1984? “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”

While I understand that the price of freedom is constant vigilance, I never expected this in my lifetime. It has been a profound wake-up call to the fragile nature of women’s sex-based rights, and basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and conscience. I now understand what the Christian baker in Lee v Ashers Baking Co Ltd must have gone through, before he won us the right not to promote a message we fundamentally disagree with, on appeal to the Supreme Court. As predicted, each generation will indeed have to fight for these freedoms anew. I want to be able to tell my daughter I fought with my words to hold her rights on trust, rather than let them slip away, or – goddess forbid – hand them away to men and boys in the misguided belief that to do so is ‘kind’ (tell that to the teenage girl crying, in despair and disbelief, in this week’s video footage of the U.S. school which voted to open her changing rooms and toilets to boys on the basis of self-identification) and to protect both of my children from the deeply invidious trend of denying the material reality of sex, normalising and enforcing sexist gender stereotypes, and medicalising gender non-conforming children. If ever there was a hill worth dying on (socially speaking)…

I’m familiar with criminal and civil court procedures, and the norms of the adversarial system, contentious litigation, and the strategies of cross-examination. Even so, watching a barrister from a highly regarded set of chambers use the cross-examination process to throw shade at the claimant, veering between undermining her understanding of her own direct experience, and reproving her for being motivated by sheer meanness to trans-identified males, as though any woman with a family to house and feed would indulge in bigotry, for fun, at the expense of her livelihood, I felt discomfort. Nobodies’ ideas should be respected, but people should. Maya was treated – because of the beliefs she expressed – as though she was fair game for what would look remarkably, in any other context, like smearing and bullying. All she did was say that sex matters in development policy, and that some men would abuse self-ID to harm women. She is hardly public enemy number one, but from the intensity of the Respondent’s allegations, one would think she had committed an atrocity. Counsel for the Respondent played the woman, not the ball, a dynamic which is baked into patriarchal business-as-usual. The message boiled down to ‘you’re a bad, mean woman/conspiracy theorist/bigot, how dare you upset fragile individuals – whose beliefs are far superior to yours – by doubting the sincerity of their internal sense of gender identity?’

Notably, it was reported yesterday that Caroline Farrow – another feminist journalist – was denied boarding onto a flight to the USA, no reasons given for revoking her tourist visa. She is a home counties mother of four, married to a Vicar, who writes for the Catholic Herald and is publicly critical of gender ideology. If she, too, is being treated like public enemy number one, where on earth will this end? Are we seeing creeping fascism take root, or are some gender activists weaponising flaws in the system for the coercive control of women? Is this the beginning, or the beginning of the end? If so, is it not incumbent on all of us to fight these developments at every turn? Fascism has, historically, started with the disobedient women – the soft targets – then moved on to deprive everyone else of basic freedoms and rights. We should take what is happening extremely seriously. Some gender activists do appear to be doubling down, upping the ante in terms of controlling non-compliant women, although I hope and pray this is merely a desperate grasping at power which is on the wane. It may be relevant that Stonewall lost the L, the G, and the B to a breakaway group in recent weeks, so all it has left is the T’s claims to an ethical legitimacy which is now being comprehensively called into question.

We know how female victims are treated in criminal proceedings, the social norms and presumptions which work against women in the family courts. It was a jolt to see a similar dynamic at play in the treatment of an employment claimant, as a problem to be bullied into submission, an awkward scapegoat to be run out of town, and compelled to carry all the blame and shame of a society acting in the most unjust and worrying manner. A commenter pointed out that these are the classic tactics of patriarchal coercive control. While I am familiar with counsel’s duty to do their utmost to put their client’s case, and respect the professional skill and capacity for objectivity it takes to fulfil the role of devil’s advocate, I was surprised that the level of discourse failed to rise above the gaslighting, bullying and irrationality we are familiar with from what passes for debate on social media. I wondered whether, if the Respondent employer had no better arguments, it was wise of them to plough ahead as they did. Of course, it is possible counsel advised them in similar terms, but her advice was ignored. There would have been other, less extreme, options to pursue which integrated the kind of nuance and concession to elements of the opposing side’s beliefs shown by the claimant’s case. It was unsettling that counsel for the Respondent deployed standard antifeminist tropes (meanie/bigot/phobic) in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Maya’s position. That seems to be all the employers had: an Aunt Lydia equipped, by her clients, with gender dogma and slurs.

The evidence which caused the greatest number of simultaneously-raised eyebrows included the footwork of the employer’s HR executive, Luke Easley. Having acknowledged the fact that Rachel Dolezal, in a childhood photograph, was ethnically white, he went on to claim that, for the purposes of U.S. human resources data gathering, “the reality is she’s black.” Across the pond, and in this context at least, ethnicity is already a matter of self-ID, even when this policy results in the patent absurdity of a white person claiming blackness. Further on, he clarified that the impact of gender ideology-driven policies on women and girls was “a non-zero consideration” at CGD. An interesting management-speak neologism. What does it actually mean? When challenged by claimant’s counsel on exactly how much consideration he meant, the witness had nothing to say, so we must guess. Non-zero, logically, could mean any number other than zero, from minus seven hundred and four, to googleplex, and beyond. However, I’m told that, in U.S. parlance, ‘non-zero’ is a (in my opinion, completely silly and obfuscatory, jargonish and – yes! the capital sin! – exclusionary) synonym for ‘a bit,’ or ‘just more than none.’ No doubt anyone who is anyone in management will be sprinkling it into their boardroom discussion soon.

So that’s all good, then. A little more than no thought was given to the avoidable suffering, detriment, and diminished opportunity afforded to women and girls when men and boys are allowed access to their spaces, services, activities and resources. That strikes me as far from sufficient consideration, given the seriousness of the issue, and potentially exclusionary and discriminatory towards women and girls. We know women generally matter only insofar as we serve as Support Humans, but it still stings to be reminded of one’s precarious, derived, secondary status in so cavalier a fashion. Non-zero indeed. And this from a development think tank which purports to want to make the world a better place, a world in which women hold up half the sky? The gap between CGD’s image and its values, when it comes to women and girls, is notable. Even so, I wish people to be completely free to express such views and takes in public fora. It’s vital that we see where people are really coming from, don’t you think?

Similarly, when counsel for the Respondent was attempting to undermine the seriousness of Maya’s gender critical beliefs in cross-examination, she segued from declaring feminism to be a “toddler of beliefs” (i.e. not long held by her) to describing the fact of human sexual dimorphism as a mere belief “also found in Genesis.” Reader, my head was spinning: feminism started in 2017 when a woman opened the first page of the King James Bible, only to fling it on a bonfire in disgust at the transphobic idea of ‘binary’ sex penned there by ancient scribes. Who knew? A further moment of collective eye-rolling came when the same counsel ventured that when we observe a baby’s sex “it’s just guesswork, isn’t it?” Sure, in less than 0.02% of births and, even in that minute cohort, sex is accurately determined via further tests, but this bizarre rhetorical question begged a larger one: why weaponise rare genetic disorders of sexual development in the service of Stonewall et al’s aim to erase sex-based rights, and dismantle children’s safeguarding, anyway, when the debate about trans claims vs women’s rights has nothing whatsoever to do with intersex people?

An aside: what’s in it for these ‘kind’, ‘non-exclusionary’ professional women, long-term, after the fee is spent, the CV updated, the article posted, the grant made – apart from income (hush money? bribes?) and woke credentials, which might command a premium in some fields? Admittedly, in the fourth estate, in academia and teaching, and in the third sector, woke credentials – or, at least no black mark against your name for wrongthink – can seem as important as an up-to-date professional certificate in other occupations. However, in other fields such as law and medicine, it’s still OK to diverge from woke dogma, is it not? I could be wrong. When media discourse has been distorted, and people’s scope to speak freely about the issue has been stymied, it’s hard to get an accurate impression of where we are. Are they wise to seem so confident that the dismantling of sex-based rights won’t come back to haunt them in the coming years? Were they party to a memo I missed which guarantees they’ll remain on (and here comes that dreaded phrase) the ‘right side of history’? Perhaps they sense better than I which way the winds are blowing, and it is women like me who will have to take jobs beneath their competence and resort to photocopied samizdat in the 2020s.

I’m thinking, also, of the Canadian women patting themselves on the back today for helping to ensure that Vancouver women who have suffered violence at the hands of male partners will soon have no option but to share refuge with male strangers. They really, genuinely, seem to believe they are doing a good thing here, but I can’t quite see how that works (what about the females???), or are they perhaps so shallow and morally bankrupt that they would spout any popular, politically correct soundbite for likes and comments? At any rate, my mind boggles when I try to walk in their shoes. The discomfort of cognitive dissonance! The energy mis-spent trying not to follow one’s thoughts to their logical conclusion! The sheer impermeability to empathy for women who have far, far harder lives…It’s not as though there is any dearth of reading material out there, for any woman beginning to question the gender ideologue’s narrative.

I know being at the Bar means being a hired gun, more often than not, and I know about the Cab Rank Rule, but I remain puzzled that women in such positions – of working to undermine their own rights – apparently don’t find it unsettling, even Orwellian, to argue against their own direct political interests. An established professional women may be vanishingly unlikely to end up locked into a prison with a convicted sex offender like ‘Karen’ White, but surely an intelligent, educated individual who reads the news would discern how women and girls, as a class, are being backed into a very tight corner by the gender agenda? Or can denial run so deep that no mountain of data, or news reports, regarding the negative impact of self-ID policies on women would enable the penny finally to drop? As a woman, would one not want to retain at least the option to have a female perform one’s smear test? No? All Women Shortlists are disposable, are they? Girls’ sports teams and scholarships mere fripperies, not worth saving? Single-sex schools and toilets just a relic of the bad old days when boundaries around public single-sex spaces provided a buffer from male violence and predation? No? Still?

Oh….kay. You do you.

To those women who are working so hard, right now, to make my daughter’s life more risky, and less burdened with opportunity, than it could be, I am at a loss. I hope the rewards of playing Aunt Lydia are worth it, personally, and capable of compensating for what women as a class are losing with the advance of self-ID policies. Without wishing to sound too holier-than-thou (I know people have mortgages, and make mistakes, and are in different places in their understanding of current events, and that we all have feet of clay), I was relieved not to be in counsel for the Respondent’s shoes, and I don’t think there is a sum I could be paid to argue such grimly sexist positions in court. I would have viewed it as an inherent conflict of interests. Still, we should all be free to make terrible arguments in public, and sound ridiculous, and be argued against, because then others can make up their mind about whether or not to admit those ideas into their own thinking. I might think that no self-respecting, intelligent woman should be expected to work for her own disempowerment, as those ‘useful idiots’ who campaigned against women getting the vote did a century ago, but the useful idiot might vehemently disagree. It’s even possible that I am the useful idiot but, on the basis of what happened in court this week, I doubt it.

I know we are all, to a degree, cogs in the machine, but doesn’t holding onto one’s humanity require lines to be drawn? Hasn’t it been shown to be true that all it takes for tyranny to spread is for ordinary people to do nothing, play dead, play along, stop questioning, stop thinking, stop sticking their necks out to voice critique? On that metric, Maya Forstater is an individual of exceptional moral courage, and everyone else who is still playing along is a passive enabler of this insidious totalitarian takeover.

If the Respondent’s positions are dignified with a ruling in their favour, we are – collectively – in deep trouble. It will mean that the key mechanism of political coercion, used to silence and sideline critics of gender ideology, will be inestimably strengthened. Here’s hoping the judge sees through the smoke and mirrors of boundless sympathy for autogynephiliac and cross-dressing males’ boundary-busting sexual predilections, through to the full import of what it is the Respondent demands that society forget: that sex matters, that sex is not the same as gender identity, and that humans cannot change sex. Because we are not clownfish, or indeed gerbils. Clownfish are not gerbils, therefore all humans are clownfish, and that’s logic dontchaknow.

And lets not forget the ur-fact which makes the Respondent’s defence rather delicate: that, for millennia, women have been oppressed and discriminated against on the basis of their sex, a form of oppression which continues to this day, whether she is being fired and maligned in the courts for saying ‘men aren’t women’ and ‘sex matters in policymaking,’ or replaced by a male as Women’s Officer in a political party, or veiled head-to-foot to walk the streets of Afghanistan, or whether she never gets to live her life at all because her newborn female body was discarded in a ditch in India. These are but four examples of the silencing and marginalisation of women and girls under patriarchy, of differing degrees of extremity. The history of women’s liberation from sexist oppression is all too real and, while we have made headway in some parts of the world, we have far from reached its end.

Many have alluded to the parallels between Maya’s case and Inherit The Wind / the Scopes Monkey trial. I’m letting that settle into a more creative response to the surreality of watching a woman compelled to defend facts, and women’s humanity, and the reality of our political struggle, in an employment tribunal. For the moment, I hope this journal – and the tweet threads prove of some value in capturing the strangeness of #Peak2019, if they are not made to vanish into the ether by the click of a modern-day Winston Smith’s mouse.

[Note: I amended this on 22 November to correct the hearing dates, and to clarify the ‘non-zero’ comment]