British feminists have mounted some of the strongest resistance in the world to the demand that self-identified gender should override biological sex. Over the last decade, the UK has seen a revival of grassroots campaigning for women’s sex-based rights, with a raft of new groups, publications, and conferences.
But why Britain?
One explanation, suggested by the media studies professor Sarah Pedersen and others, is the internet forum Mumsnet. Founded in 2000, this female-owned business became an online space where trans activist claims were hotly debated before they hit the mainstream. This meant these women were ready to push back when governments proposed legal changes that would undermine sex-based rights.
But there were other factors too. Perhaps British women had time to oppose gender self-identification because they were not preoccupied with a struggle over access to abortion, which is largely taken for granted. What’s more, because of a shared language and interlinked media, Brits were well-equipped to scrutinise trans rights campaigns in the United States, including the push for “gender-affirmative healthcare.” The UK’s health system also shaped public discourse on the issue. Because healthcare in Britain is government-funded, decisions over which treatments and medicines to provide are made by public agencies, not private insurers. The fact that a national data set existed—showing that referrals of teenage girls had risen exponentially—helped journalists and others to raise concerns about the impact of trans activist ideas, eventually leading to the closure of the gender identity clinic run by the Tavistock.
Another explanation for gender-critical feminism’s success in Britain is our laws. Under the Equality Act of 2010, gender reassignment is a protected characteristic. This law helped sex-based rights activists in three ways. First, they could argue against self-ID while pointing out that trans people were already legally protected from discrimination. Second, the act makes it legal to exclude transgender people from single-sex services in some circumstances. These provisions enabled feminists to frame objections to blanket policies of trans inclusion in terms of women’s sex-based rights to privacy, dignity, and safety. Third, the Equality Act protects religious and philosophical beliefs, and Maya Forstater’s landmark employment case established that gender-critical beliefs qualify for such protection. Since then, numerous other cases have been won by gender-critical women who have been discriminated against by employers. JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author, became a vocal supporter of these women and a figurehead for the wider movement (particularly on Twitter/X, where she has 14 million followers).
In addition to challenging self-ID laws, the UK’s feminist revival includes a new campaign to criminalise sex buyers and online pimps and efforts to tackle other sex-based harms to women, including domestic violence, commercial surrogacy, and the digital explosion of pornography. I consider myself part of this movement. Over the past several years, in my role as a social affairs journalist, I have also observed it.
In addition to the proximate causes cited above, I think there’s a more complex story to tell about how the history of feminism in Britain influences contemporary debates. My new book Sexed: A History of British Feminism starts in the 1790s and traces the major campaigns for women’s rights to the vote, education, equal pay, reproductive healthcare, and protection against male violence. In particular, I consider the way that different feminists have thought about how to reconcile the material reality of sexual difference with calls for equality between the sexes.
I do not argue that British feminists are essentially different from those of other nations. Mary Wollstonecraft was galvanised by the American and French revolutions, and women’s rights activists ever since have influenced each other across borders as well as within them. Still, there are contrasts as well as correspondences. In this article, I’ll discuss four important ways in which today’s British sex-based rights activism has been shaped by the past.
Fighting for Single-Sex Spaces
The first relates to the two-century-long tradition of women’s advocacy for single-sex services. This can be traced back to the Quaker prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry, and beyond her to women’s anti-slavery societies, which were an important component of the abolitionist movement in Britain.
In the early nineteenth century, Fry used her religious influence and private wealth to lead a movement for the humane treatment of prisoners, beginning with the women kept in horrific conditions at Newgate in London. As a result of her campaign, the 1823 Gaols Act mandated that women should have their own jails and female guards to protect them from sexual harm. Fry’s philanthropy was not limited to women: she also campaigned for schools and better conditions on the ships used to transport convicts. But the women’s prison societies she set up, which were copied in other countries, established an important precedent. This was that female reformers had a particular duty to help members of their own sex, and that separate services should be fought for where they were in women’s interests.
Several decades later, the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, an abusive set of regulations governing prostitutes, constituted itself along similar lines. Its leader, Josephine Butler, led a national movement of resistance to male sexual entitlement inspired by an ethic of compassionate sisterhood. In addition to outlawing the forcible genital inspection of women, the Ladies’ National Association offered practical support to former prostitutes in safe houses that were precursors of modern refuges, and lobbied to raise the age of consent (which was only twelve when they began).
In the Victorian era, and since, philanthropy has been linked to social control as well as improvement. Ideas about the feckless, undeserving poor were mirrored in attitudes to prostitutes and other women who did not welcome reformers’ attention. The campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts included some who went on to become moral purity campaigners. This led to a schism, with Butler herself strongly critical of a growing tendency towards coercion and repression (for example, increased numbers of arrests of streetwalkers), which conflicted with her advocacy of welfarist protection. Nevertheless, these 19th-century campaigns set an example. Contemporary campaigns on behalf of women in situations of physical and sexual vulnerability have deep roots, as does the understanding that their sex and vulnerability are linked.
Advocating for Mothers and Wives: “Old” vs. “New” Feminism
The second link to the past is through the branch of women’s activism concerned with the legal and economic status of mothers and wives. This also has a long history. One pioneer was the aristocratic writer and activist Caroline Norton. After her abusive estranged husband took her children away in the 1830s, Norton successfully lobbied for the Custody of Infants Act (1839), which gave married women the right to petition for custody of children under seven. Later in the nineteenth century, a campaign for married women to be able to own property ran in parallel with the early stages of the campaign for the vote (as it did in the United States). But it wasn’t until the 1920s that the issue of mothers’ rights—and arguments over whether feminists should concern themselves with the economics of the family—really blew up.
The context was the tail-end of the suffrage movement and the question of what should happen next. One faction, who called themselves “old feminists,” wanted to stick to an agenda largely focused on political and legal rights. Their goal was to remove the remaining impediments to women’s participation in public life on the same terms as men. But a rival group, known as “new feminists,” sought to broaden the scope of women’s activism to incorporate new elements of welfare policy. In particular, they were concerned about women’s poverty and its connection with motherhood and family size.
There was an element of a power struggle in the conflict between Lady Rhondda, a former militant suffragette, and Eleanor Rathbone, a constitutionalist suffragist who later became an MP. But this was a philosophical argument too. Old feminists, including Rhondda, were equalitarians opposed to old-fashioned ideas about male-female differences, and the notions of women’s intellectual inferiority and unfitness for certain roles that derived from these. Also on this side was the writer Winifred Holtby, who in 1932 proposed that feminists should abandon the word “sex” in favour of “gender,” on the grounds that the latter was more neutral and less freighted with “amorous” baggage. To my knowledge, Holtby is the first feminist to have proposed this substitution, several decades before Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the same choice.
“New” feminists, including Rathbone, believed in equal pay and opportunities too. But they were anti-poverty and public health activists as well, who sought to build an agenda that encompassed the entirety of women’s lives. Rather than minimising sex differences, they zoomed in on them, drawing attention to the ways in which women were disadvantaged by pregnancy and motherhood. For twenty-five years, Rathbone led a campaign for family endowment: a social security benefit paid directly to mothers, which had the dual purpose of boosting their incomes and freeing them from total economic dependence on men.
This schism was echoed internationally. At a suffrage convention in Paris in 1926, the American National Women’s Party was blocked from affiliation on grounds that its aims conflicted with those of another affiliate, the League of Women Voters. In British terms, the League was a “new” feminist outfit, engaged in social work and favouring protective employment laws (including rules banning women from certain jobs), while the Women’s Party was closer to the “old” feminist equalitarians. Enraged by the convention’s decision to side with the former, Rhondda gave a speech denouncing her opponents for “putter[ing] away at welfare work.”
Japan had its own version of this debate. While Hiratsuka Raicho advocated motherhood allowances, others thought such policies risked reinforcing stereotypes, much as Britain’s “old” feminists did. These divisions were resolved (or not) in various ways where they arose. In Britain, as elsewhere, equalitarian liberals remained a strong presence in the women’s movement. But the practical materialism of the “new” feminists also survived, feeding into anti-poverty activism and the design of the welfare state. Organisations like Women’s Budget Group, a feminist economic think tank, are part of this legacy. So are women’s justice groups, which for decades have highlighted the ways in which laws, police and judges are unfair to women.
While such activism can be framed in terms of equality, it also places a strong emphasis on sex differences, since male and female patterns of criminality and violence are so different. One campaign, in the 1990s, called for women’s lesser size and strength to be taken into account when they were sentenced for killing violent partners using methods that required premeditation. Lawyers argued, successfully, that there are physical reasons why women in such situations often act differently from men. In a similar vein, Louise Perry’s critique of sexual permissiveness in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution draws attention to the differential effects of pornography, and other forms of commercialised sex, on men and women.
Suffragette Militancy: A Radical Inheritance
More visible than either of the above, in the current British sex-based rights movement, is the legacy of the suffragettes. The colour scheme of violet, white, and green that was adopted by the Pankhurst-led Women’s Social and Political Union in 1908—as they embarked on their most radical phase of direct action—has been widely taken up by gender-critical feminists. This repurposing has been particularly pronounced in Scotland. That makes sense, because this is where gender-critical women have found themselves in the most direct confrontation with the state. Scotland’s Nationalist former first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, was the UK’s most powerful advocate of legal gender self-identification. Her party gave up trying to introduce it in Scotland only when blocked by the government of the UK (which retains powers in some areas of law).
Suffragettes are among the most celebrated direct-action campaigners in the history of the western world. Today’s sex-based rights activists emulate their uncompromising insistence on placing women’s rights at the forefront of politics.
The British suffrage movement, at the start of the twentieth century, was split over the issue of priority when it came to expanding the franchise. Some working-class women believed that working-class men had the more urgent claim, and that granting the vote to middle-class women risked entrenching power in the hands of the rich. (There is a parallel with the argument in the United States over whether white women or black men should be enfranchised first). Founded in 1903, the Women’s Social and Political Union was a single-sex organisation which, from the outset, was determined to put women’s sex-based demands first. In the parlance of second-wave feminism, they were radical feminists who believed that the exclusion of women from the franchise was intolerable and—crucially—distinct from other forms of discrimination. Rather than seeing it as part of a wider class struggle, they believed that it had to be fought on its own terms.
British women were enfranchised in two stages. A law passed in 1918 granted votes to those over 30 who met a property qualification, but it took another decade for women to be enfranchised on the same terms as men. In its editorial marking this achievement, the feminist weekly Time and Tide declared that “the vote was not won by sweet reasonableness, it was won by self-sacrifice and… the courage to appear violent, unreasonable, ugly.” I am not convinced that the militants deserved as much credit as this. Both then and since, the contribution of the constitutionalist (and more boring) wing of the movement has too often been overlooked. But suffragettes set a formidable example with their bravery and commitment, and utterly repudiated social norms according to which women were docile, patient, self-effacing and polite. The bloody-minded resilience shown by gender-critical feminists, over recent years, is part of the suffragette inheritance.
Intersectionality, Women’s Liberation, and Sex-Based Rights
A fourth way in which present-day sex-based rights activism in Britain has been shaped by the past relates to the distinctive character of the women’s liberation movement in the UK. As the Sisterhood and After oral history project and other research has shown, second-wave feminism in Britain was not an exclusively English, white, middle-class affair. Black and Asian women ran groups and conferences, and immigrants (including Germaine Greer and Doris Lessing) were massively influential figures.
There is a popular misconception that “intersectionality” was imported to the UK from the US around 1990, after Kimberle Crenshaw published her famous essay on combined sex and race discrimination. But while the term was new, efforts to combine anti-racist, post-colonial, and feminist practice have a longer history. As mentioned above, heated debates about how to reconcile class and sexual politics date back to the suffrage and early trade union movements.
The idea that intersectionality and sex-based rights have something to do with each other is counter-intuitive. More often, these days, intersectionality is associated with identity politics, social constructionist theories, and oppression hierarchies. But I think these earlier challenges and negotiations around inequalities of different kinds helped feminists in Britain to stand their ground, and resist efforts to replace sex-based rights with something else.
This is not to say that gender identity politics are not influential in Britain. Just as in other countries, feminists who insist on the importance of sexual difference are characterised by progressives as essentialists, dinosaurs, and bigots. Despite all this, an international movement of women committed to the advancement of sex-based rights and the prevention of sex-based harms has come into being, and British feminists have played a key role in it.
This is far from a complete explanation of the current scene. Like others who have documented the events of the past few years, I consider my efforts a first draft of history—no more. Still, when trying to understand the present, it’s good practice to look to the past, understanding how today’s political battles were shaped by those that came before. I hope that feminists in other countries who are fighting to advance women’s sex-based rights—and prevent their erasure or replacement by gender identity politics will be encouraged by the history of Britain’s resistance.
