Sarah Ditum (pictured below) is a feminist and journalist. She argues that there are unavoidable conflicts between women’s rights and the current trans-activist agenda.

In June Cancer Research UK, a charity, tweeted: “Cervical screening (or the smear test) is relevant for everyone aged 25-64 with a cervix.” The odd phrasing—“everyone with a cervix” rather than “women”—was not accidental. The charity explained that it had deliberately chosen to use what it described as “inclusive language”. Similarly, the campaign Bloody Good Period, which donates tampons and sanitary towels to asylum-seekers, uses the word “menstruators” rather than “women”. And Green Party Women, an internal campaign group of the British Green Party, confirmed last year that its preferred designation for the constituency it represented was not, in fact, “women” but “non-men”.

These linguistic peculiarities are all responses to the astonishingly rapid advance of trans activism. Mara Keisling of the National Centre for Transgender Equality, an American lobby group, claims that it has made “faster progress than any movement in American history”, and the same holds true across the globe. In Britain, for example, trans people’s legal status is governed by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. Just 13 years after its passage, that legislation was deemed “outdated” by a Women and Equalities Committee inquiry. But while the trans rights agenda has moved fast, its impact hasn’t been felt equally by all parts of society.

Trans people face substantial injustices, most significantly violence (perpetrated, like all violence, largely by men) and discrimination. The process of applying for a gender-recognition certificate is intrusive and burdensome for many, and there are frustrating waiting lists for medical transition, which are compounded when doctors appear unsympathetic or obstructive. Yet rather than confront male violence or lobby the medical system, the focus of trans activism has overwhelmingly been the feminist movement, spaces and services designed for women, and the meaning of the word “woman”. It is notable that Cancer Research UK did not test its “inclusive” approach with a male-specific cancer. Its campaign messages about prostate and testicular cancer address “men”, rather than “everyone with a prostate” or “everyone with testicles”. (Addressing “people with a cervix” is, of course, only inclusive of people who know they have a cervix. Many women do not have that detailed knowledge of their internal anatomy. And those who speak English as a second language may well not know the word.) While organisations in the women’s sector have revised their language to avoid the word “women”, male-specific charities such as CALM (the Campaign against Living Miserably, a movement against male suicide) continue to refer uncomplicatedly to “men”. Women’s groups are aggressively picketed for being exclusionary; men’s clubs are left unmolested. This asymmetry is a problem. Gender equality has not been achieved. Men still earn more than women for equivalent work, run most of the biggest companies, dominate representative politics and commit the great majority of violent crime. But the drift towards gender-neutral language (at least when discussing matters that affect women) makes it increasingly hard to articulate all this. How can you describe the maternity penalty as a factor in women’s disadvantage in the workplace, without committing the “essentialist” faux pas of associating women with pregnancy and motherhood? Gender-identity politics (that is, the belief that a deeply personal sense of one’s own gender supersedes physical sex) tends, whether intentionally or not, to obscure women’s interests. Take, for example, Channel 4’s Diversity Lectures, given this year by Caitlyn Jenner (formerly Bruce, an American Olympic athlete)—a controversial decision not because this was the third speaker born male in the three years of the lectures’ existence, but because of Ms Jenner’s support for the Republican Party. When the Barbican, a performing-arts centre in London, attempted to make its toilets “inclusive”, it did so by relabelling them as “gender neutral”. Since men can use cubicles but women cannot use urinals (unless they are trans women with male genitalia), the result was that women had to queue for even longer than usual. In sports, trans inclusion means trans women (natal males, such as Laurel Hubbard, a weightlifter from New Zealand) competing against and beating female athletes, while trans men (natal females) present little threat to male competitors.

Too often, gender neutrality is accomplished by neutralising services or analyses centred on women. But it is also important to understand that, far from loosening the shackles of gender, modern trans ideology often tightens them. Feminism offers the radical proposition that what you like, what you wear and who you are should not be dictated by your chromosomes, hormones or any other marker of biological sex. Trans ideology reverses that. Perhaps men do like beer and women can’t read maps, runs the theory, but some individuals have simply been assigned to the wrong category.

In “I Am Leo”, a Children’s BBC documentary about a trans boy (an adolescent natal female), Leo’s mother explains that she knew her child was not a girl when Leo rejected traditionally feminine toys and insisted on having short hair. This naturalisation of stereotypes is compounded by the programme-makers’ decision to illustrate the trans experience with a cartoon of pink (feminine) brains in blue bodies, and blue (masculine) brains in pink bodies. Hormones (pink for oestrogen, blue for testosterone) are shown being showered on the bodies to make them match the brain. Whatever the intent, or the probably more complex story of Leo’s transition, the programme served a very fixed idea of masculinity and femininity to its young audience.

Pips Bunce, a director at Credit Suisse and a natal male, who has been celebrated for championing gender fluidity in the workplace, presents as Pippa on “female” days, in heels, dress and long blonde wig, and Philip on “male” days, in flat masculine shoes and a suit. Sex is reduced to stereotyped clothing. (Also: what a challenge for Credit Suisse’s reporting of the gender pay gap! Should Philip/Pippa be counted in with men or women depending on how he/she is presenting on the day of the survey? And if so, how do we account for the fact that this person has advantages unavailable to female employees, such as having become professionally established as a man and having the support of a wife in a heterosexual marriage? The interaction between subjective gender identity and objective data collection and analysis will be a significant challenge in the future, particularly for crimes in which natal women are rarely the perpetrators, such as serial and mass killings, paedophilic offences and domestic violence.)

There is a word for a situation where women talking about female bodies is considered impermissibly antisocial, where describing the consequences of sexism for women is systematically impeded, where resources for women are redistributed to male users while resources for men are left in male hands, and where “male” and “female” are rigidly associated with masculinity and femininity. That word is not “progressive”, “liberal” or any of the other terms usually associated with trans activism. The word is misogyny. Trans rights should not come at the cost of women’s fragile gains.

This is part of a two-week discussion on transgender issues, with ten contributors. The other contributions are available here.