A Rude Awakening

Books for burgeoning feminists...

This post is essentially a book list for anyone interested in feminism, gender critical feminism, and gender identity ideology, although it is by no means exhaustive. I’ve linked to Amazon so that you can read book details and reviews if you wish, but I like to support my local book shop when I can.

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When I was 15 or so I came across The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf in my local library. It’s a book about how women’s lives are impacted by unrealistic standards of physical beauty imposed by society. I hadn’t given feminism a moment’s thought at that stage, and I didn’t for a long time. Unbeknownst to me The Beauty Myth was a critically acclaimed and important feminist book and it shaped my thinking in ways that are still important. It enabled me to critically and cynically appraise the intensive marketing to which we were all daily subjected by the fashion and beauty industries. I loved clothes and make-up as much as the next young woman but I wasn’t a slave to it; I could see through the advertising. That was the 90s, and intensive though the marketing was, at least we didn’t have social media.

Fast forward many years through university, work, pregnancy and childbirth, mothering, home-educating, living. Much of my life has predominantly involved women, so I’m not sure how I came to reading about feminism so late in the day. I studied and worked mostly with women (I was a nurse), and I then spent 17 years home-educating my son. A large portion of that time was spent with other mothers and children, also home-educating. These women - colleagues, friends, co-learners, and mentors of sorts - have all been influential in my life. I am always so grateful for the company, support, and community of other women.

Recently, with a little more time and head-space due to home-school coming to a natural end and my boy heading off to college, I found my way back to feminism. Books are my go-to source of education, pleasure, escape, advice. So, I went searching and ended up following a literary path that lead me through familiar territory, into some grim cul-de-sacs, and ultimately to a place where the women are my women but the terrain is not easy to navigate.

You may be looking for a map, or some company, or you may be already at your destination. Wherever you are, if you have something to offer - a book suggestion, a story about your journey or about where you’ve ended up - please feel free to share in the comments. Too many people, especially women, are afraid of saying the wrong thing. We don’t want to be unkind. Women are generally socialised to be nice, gentle, not too pushy, not too loud, definitely not angry. Of course, it’s good to be kind and nice, but we also need to be able to be honest and assertive, and there are some things that we should get angry about. The women who fought for the vote, for the right to education, maternity benefits, for women’s categories in sport, and so many other things that we take for granted - they were angry and that anger motivated them to fight and those fights lead to the betterment of women’s lives in general.

But back to books… And if you don’t have time or inclination to read, remember that there are audio-books. There are also many great podcasts and documentaries covering the below issues.

So, thirty years on from The Beauty Myth, my first stop was Australian feminist, Clementine Ford, recommended by a friend. I bought her book, Fight Like A Girl, and found that this woman had a wicked way with words. She articulated my thoughts and experiences with such clarity and wit. The book was inspiring, rage-inducing, relatable, depressing, moving and on point. It lit a fire in me and I wanted every woman around me to read it.

Following on from that I read some bell hooks, Roxanne Gay, Rebecca Solnit (I loved her essay: Men Explain Things To Me). So far, so good. Almost everything I was reading supported what I instinctively knew and read elsewhere. All of these women were giving voice to experiences that I related to as a woman in the world. There was so much inequality, so much work to be done in order for women to have the freedom to move safely in the world and reach their potential personally and professionally.

I was still fuming from Fight Like A Girl when I moved on to Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates. It’s a horrifying and eye-opening look at the manosphere - the world of incels, men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, and the worst extremes of mysogyny.

At this stage, I was bubbling over with a mix of righteous rage and enthusiasm. I really needed to talk about this stuff but, much to my disappointment, none of my women friends were interested beyond a little superficial chat. People are busy, I get that, but also it’s painful to delve into this stuff. Perhaps we get used to justifying certain behaviours and limits on our lives because it just takes too much energy to remain angry about them, to fight them every day. They become unremarkable because they are so commonplace. I don’t talk about it every time I feel nervous walking a country road alone or standing at the bus stop after dark, or avoiding the gaze of a man who’s staring at me. I don’t know any woman who doesn’t have these type of experiences (and worse), but most of us just accept it as part of life.

In the words of feminist Andrea Dworkin:

“Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”

My period of immersion in feminist literature began during Covid lockdowns though, so my family were a captive audience. I’ve no doubt I was painful company at times, but we did a lot of talking and we all benefitted.

I was on this grim roll of reading when a neighbour gave me a copy of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce. This was almost three years ago and beyond knowing what the terms transgender and non-binary meant I had given the issue little thought. I was a parent of a teenager so there were occasional mentions of gender identity in relation to peers, but this was a whole new world…

Helen’s book is a rigorous exploration and analysis of gender identity ideology and how it’s undermining much of what feminism has achieved. Gender identity ideology is the idea that the gender you feel like, be that man, woman or other, trumps your biological sex, so if you feel like a woman, even if you were born male, then you are a woman.

Whether you are blissfully ignorant about gender identity theory or you’re au fait with all 70+ genders I highly recommend Helen’s book. There is information in it that we all need to know, given how pervasive these ideas have become and the impact they are having on women and children in particular.

From there I moved on to Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier, a book focusing on the unprecedented number of young women wanting to identify as men. More shock, horror, and heartbreak but again, important to know. Why is this happening?

At this stage I was wondering how on earth I could have been so oblivious to what was going on. I quickly realised that most other people were either equally unaware of the issue, or they were aware enough to know that they had to tread very carefully lest they be called a bigot or worse, ‘cancelled’. As a result, there was little open discussion about it. I was frustrated, again.

The more I read about feminism, the more I understood how gender identity ideology impacted women’s rights. If being a woman was about how you felt, rather than your actual, biologically female body, and any man could declare himself a woman, then surely women’s rights, single sex spaces, women’s scholarships, awards, clubs, support groups, refuges, forums and so on become superficial and meaningless? They would now be for women and men-who-feel-like-women, so not just for women after all.

Women know that we are different from men and that we have different needs because of this. We have needs based on our biology, the fact that we are, in general, physically weaker than men, that we have periods, that we may be pregnant, breastfeeding, menopausal, that we are mothers. Hence (and none of these things happened without women fighting for them) we have women’s bathrooms and changerooms, women’s categories in sport, women’s health centres and support groups, etc.

We teach our children about these things so that our daughters will be safe and healthy and our sons will be considerate, respectful and supportive to the women in their lives. We want them to be healthy and comfortable in their bodies, knowledgeable, informed, and realistic about their potential and their limits.

In my naivety, I assumed that all women/feminists would agree on this but as I carried on up my learning curve I realised that no, they definitely didn’t. I was disappointed to discover that Clementine Ford, she who I had briefly idolised, believes that if a man says he’s a woman, he’s a woman. I learned a little more about different waves and types of feminism and found myself at home with the gender critical feminists - those women who believe that sex is binary and immutable (we are either male or female and it is not possible to change from one to the other).

I read Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation by Julie Bindel, an articulate and accessible primer on feminism. One book inevitably leads to another so that was followed by:

Material Girls: Why Reality Matters For Feminism by Kathleen Stock

Gender Critical Feminism by Holly Lawford-Smith

The Abolition of Sex: How The "Transgender" Agenda Harms Women and Girls by Kara Dansky

Defending Women's Spaces by Karen Ingala Smith

Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes

Born in the Right Body: Gender identity ideology from a medical and feminist perspective by Isidora Sanger

If you’d like to delve deeper into how we’ve ended up in this situation, I recommend Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity... and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.

A couple of other books which will get your feminist hackles up, but with less focus on gender ideology, are: Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith and Invisible Women: Data Bias in World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez.

I’m not gonna lie, this reading list will provoke some despair for the world we live in. It’s downright awful stuff, but it is real. The more we know and understand, the better we can continue to fight for the rights and safety of women and girls and the protection of children.

It is not easy to speak up about gender ideology. Many people are afraid to ask questions about it, never mind express any negative sentiment. I meet many women who have been quietly despairing about it. In the absence of adults speaking up, however, children are being harmed and women are losing rights.

You don’t have to read all the books, you don’t have to be an expert. You can and should ask questions. Ask your friends, your family, your local politicians what they think about women’s rights and gender ideology. We should be able to have conversations about ideas, laws, policies, social expectations, issues that impact our lives.

Don’t forget to remind yourself that there is truth, goodness and beauty in the world too. Go sit in your garden or walk in the woods, read some poetry, hug your children, listen to music, swim in the sea. Remember that most women and men believe that biological reality takes precedence over feelings; many are just either afraid to say it or they don’t realise that they need to say it.