How progressive misogyny works

It happens a lot lately. Not just in a Twitter DM or an email but in real life. Someone tells me they can’t really say what they think in their workplace any more. What awful things do they think? Mostly that the rights of vulnerable women should be protected and that children should be allowed to express their gender however they like without being whisked to a clinic.

In the café the other day, a woman I vaguely knew from the playground asked me if I had received a letter she had sent to the Guardian. I hadn’t. She needed me to know that she and her friends who work in the public sector are fed up with being ‘silenced’. Note, in all these conversations, transgender folk are barely mentioned, nor is any hostility to them expressed; these chats always centre on women and children but with an implicit fear about prioritising them.

But this is how progressive misogyny works: you campaign vigorously for the rights of a tiny minority of people, ignoring the voices of the many women who say ‘hang on a minute’. You pat each other on the back for saying things like ‘trans rights are human rights’. I agree. So are women’s rights. The holier-than-thous discuss my gracelessness. It’s true I am not very ladylike but when rights collide we negotiate, surely?

Some of us panic because we take nothing for granted. We were not born to power, we clawed our way in and we see what is to be lost. Those incredible images of women in short skirts in Afghanistan in the 1970s? I have one on my wall. Progress is not linear.

Oh, but isn’t it wonderful that London Zoo is raising a genderless penguin? Or that I can identify as moon gender — my gender only comes out at night.