Commentary
Last week, a woman I don’t know but who follows me on Twitter, tweeted her despair over the “tsunami wave of obscurantism wash[ing] over women’s rights in Canada.” A responder commiserated that it was indeed a “sad time to be a woman” and “especially sad that so many women do not see the threat to our most fundamental rights.” The first writer then tweeted: “All journalists, apart from a few exceptions like @BarbaraRKay, are failing women.”
It would be hard for me to overstate the irony implicit in this compliment. It is true that I have made defence of women’s sex-based security and fairness rights in sport, prisons, and other privacy-paramount spaces a cornerstone of my opinion writing over the past six or seven years. But most of the women who thank me for my allyship identify as feminists, and assume I do too. I do not, nor ever did. In fact, I spent many more years defending boys and men from the inherent misandry in the feminist movement than I have spent defending women from the inherent misogyny in the trans activist movement….