Hadley Freeman Quotes

How much of one's ancestral identity must one give up to live in the modern world?

[From management at The Guardian.] I was told I wasn't to write about gender, and that actually women shouldn't write about gender, and suddenly things became very tricky for me.

This week George Galloway took to his video blog, the apparently unironically named Good Night with George Galloway, to defend Assange.

I certainly feel no anger or animosity towards trans people [...] The only feeling I have towards them is compassion. Not to the point where I’m willing to give up all of women’s sex-based rights, no. But I do know I can only imagine the trauma and pain they have endured in their lives.

Few things drive the British press quite so demented as the thought of a pregnant woman with a choice.

Anorexics tend to be unreliable witnesses when in the grip of the illness and, at times, there is an oddity about this book, a curious sense of separation between the suffering younger self and the aloof older self, but Freeman is a brave, illuminating and meticulous reporter and uses her experience wisely.

When I became an adult, I suddenly couldn't stop thinking of them. Moments I had barely noticed at the time, yet they made enough of an impact to leave a footprint in my memory, began to surface.

On Monday I went to the Jewish Vigil for Israel opposite Downing Street. It was nice, but it was also strange, because everyone I could see there was clearly Jewish: the men wore kippahs and tallits, and everybody knew the words to Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem. Across town a pro-Palestinian rally was happening. I looked at the photos in the papers in the next day and was struck by what a mixed crowd it was. Young Muslims, older white people, everyone marching together in defence of — what? Pogroms? Meanwhile, the Jews just had themselves. Now we know.

Before Israel was founded, Jews were "rootless cosmopolitans"; now they're "settler colonialists". Antisemites sneer that Jews went "like sheep to the slaughter" in the Holocaust. But when they fight back against terrorists, they are too elite, domineering and sure of themselves. The prospect of a ground invasion in Gaza fills every Jew I know with dread. More deaths there, more antisemitism here. Even when we "win", we lose.

This kumbaya approach is an increasingly popular one. Why can't we ladies all just get along? Hakuna matata! Yet no one is asking why more women than men are raising objections here. Perhaps people think this is just what women are like: uniquely catty. Lifelong feminists, especially older ones, who express any reservations about eliding the experiences of trans and cis women are dismissed as bigoted ol' bitches – and maybe some are. But there are real ethical issues here, and they overwhelmingly affect women.
Sport is one obvious example. Male-born bodies have had different testosterone levels and muscle distribution from female ones. No one knows what the solution is but pretending there isn't a difference is ridiculous. Then there are prisons. It's easy to cheer on Chelsea Manning, but should anyone with a history of crimes against women and girls really be in a female prison?

[Donald] Sutherland was a real man. I don’t mean that in the salacious sense (well, not only in that way). I mean he was part of that great generation of 1970s actors that emerged when Hollywood studios finally realised women didn't only want to watch pretty boys like Robert Redford and Warren Beatty. Glorious joli laid — handsome ugly — actors became the defining look of that decade: Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Richard Pryor, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson. Men who were masculine, but not necessarily macho. ... (The fact that the rubric for what constitutes beauty for actresses was and remains far narrower than it is for actors is a subject for another day.) These men looked intelligent and they looked filthy, a previously untapped combination in American cinema.

Obviously there have been some men in this argument who have lost work — most obviously Graham Linehan [...] But the vast, vast majority are women. It’s the women journalists who write about this who get singled out, whether it's myself or Sonia Sodha or Catherine Bennett or Helen Lewis. There are men who write about this — James Kirkup, David Aaronovitch, Matthew d'Ancona — but they've had nothing like the abuse that Julie Bindel has had or Suzanne Moore has had. It's totally a gendered thing. Which just goes to show that some people really do know what a woman is.

Next time Hadley Freeman comes to one of our parties she should relax, loosen up, have a glass of champagne and be sure to stay the whole night and really, truly … enjoy herself.

I know some people think I'm on the wrong side of history because I believe my gender is a feeling and my biology is a fact. This is known as a gender-critical belief and it is protected under the Equality Act. Nonetheless, I've lost at least a dozen friends over this – mainly from the US, but also in the UK, friends who have told me my beliefs are transphobic, even when I tell them that I support everyone's right to live the way they want. It's always heartbreaking, but also bewildering. Most of us are in the same political tribe, so when did differences of opinion become so unacceptable to so many liberals and lefties? Many of my friends supported Jeremy Corbyn, and even though I found his frequent proximity to antisemites truly upsetting, I didn't drop them from my life. I'm old enough to know there's a difference between denouncing bigotry and demanding everyone march in lockstep with you. If you're more interested in performing your own purity than understanding people's plurality, you're not looking at progress, you're looking into a mirror.

You have said that both sides in the gender debate are equally passionate — but only one side demands censorship. It seems to me that at The Guardian that side has won.