Suzanne Moore Quotes

Should you wind up in a car crash, private medicine will be as useful to you as homoeopathy.

Everyone pays lip service to diversity, and the idea of a female leader, but the position of women in the party continues to be that they can be deputies, lovely assistants to the main act. Labour brought in women’s shortlists, overnight upping female representation, but how that would happen now I don't know – as they have tied themselves in ever more ridiculous knots by being unable to define what a woman is in order to appeal to their activists. They are confused about who has a cervix and whether womanhood is biological or just a feeling in someone’s head. At this stage we can surely define "woman" fairly easily: someone who can never be actual leader of the Labour Party.

Most people want the tiny percentage of the population who are trans to have the best lives they can. Living your best life would be one free of male violence. It is not feminists who murder trans people, although this might be the impression you would be left with if you relied solely on Twitter for your information.

Security issues, it appears, are more important to Western countries than women’s rights. What matters is that the region is more stable and opium production is down.
This, though, is another insane situation. We pay Turkey to grow poppies. Where do you think codeine and diamorphine come from? It is possible to move from illicit to legal trade and without it Afghanistan will remain cripplingly poor. The other people who see the openings here, of course, are the Chinese who have built roads into the country and want to mine the lithium there.

Female oppression is innately connected to our ability to reproduce. Women have made progress by talking about biology, menstruation, childbirth and menopause. We won’t now have our bodies or voices written out of the script. The materiality of having a female body may mean rape or it may mean childbirth – but we still seek liberation from gender. In some transgender ideology, we are told the opposite: gender is material and therefore can be possessed by whoever claims it, and it is sex as a category that is a social construction. Thus, sex-based rights, protected in law, can be done away with.
I know from personal experience the consequences of being deemed transphobic by an invisible committee on social media. It has meant death and rape threats for me and my children, and police involvement. I also know that the most vicious stuff takes place online and not in real life. Still, I can’t stand by. As Roman Polanski was being rewarded for his latest film at the César awards, Todd was being silenced.

Before he died in 2018, a long-term user of the NHS who had motor neurone disease warned against insurance systems run by private companies. Stephen Hawking, for it was he, said the fairest way to deliver healthcare was the NHS.

There is no women's space or activity, from bathrooms to prisons to rape refuges to sports, that some male-bodied people are not lobbying to enter.
The reverse, I note, is not happening. Male spaces remain sacrosanct.

Reasonably sitting around waiting for equality while empowering oneself with some silicone implants does not really seem to have worked wonders, does it ladeez? Postfeminism – as personified by the Sex and the City generation – basically confused sexual liberation with shopping: a mistaken strategy even within its own market-driven terms. So we live on a permanent diet of crumbs from the table. A woman over 50 gets to be on TV! Whoopdiwhoop! It's a victory, sure, but is that all there is? It's time to wake up and smell the skinny latte.
A woman is murdered in Bristol and the response is to tell women to stay at home?! For their own safety. Though no one thinks it's a woman doing the murdering. A curfew on men would be considered a monstrous idea, even though most women live with internalised curfews anyway.

If the idea of women organising autonomously is transphobic you are walking into a cul-de-sac, which absolutely traps people in boxes that benefit the patriarchy. Because there is nothing the patriarchy fears more than women who no longer rely on male authority.

That we well understand how difficult it is to grow up in a porn-saturated world where the selfie is more valued than actual selfhood?

The emails then came pouring in from people who wished they could say what I had said. I wished people would stop calling me brave. Columnists are meant to be made of titanium; I felt more like papier-mâché. But the orthodoxy which demands that Mary Beard must refer to an ancient statue with a little penis as "assigned male at birth" is powerful. The no-platforming of feminist warriors like Kathleen Stock and Julie Bindel is abhorrent. I like freaks. I like fluidity. I just don’t like one set of rules being replaced by another. I was hurt that so many of my 'colleagues' denounced me, but I suppose everyone needs a hobby.

When I raised the question of the competing rights between biological women and trans women in the paper I then worked for, The Guardian, my world went bonkers for a while. A trans person who worked at the paper (I never went into the office) who had already resigned earlier, resigned again and 338 staff signed an anonymous letter about transphobia in that organisation. I was not named except the person that the letter was leaked to indicated it was clearly about me.
It all ended up with me choosing to leave a good job because I could no longer say what I wanted to say there. This is not a sob story. I was welcomed at the Daily Telegraph, who have honoured their promise that I would not be censored.

I regularly ask these people a few questions. What is gender identity? When was it invented? At what age does it come into being? How is it different from stereotyped gender roles? How much money is to be made through surgery and lifelong hormones? What is the need for men who identify as women to make women feel uncomfortable? What happens when you want to have a child if you have been made infertile or in fact don’t have a womb? Do you just hire one? Is surrogacy the next phase of dehumanising women? I have yet to receive answers.
The sheer anger of certain trans activists puts me in mind of men’s rights activists; they want what women have and that means access to us all. In response, there is still huge cowardice. The fear of being called transphobic means silence. Silence = Death, as we used to say when we were campaigning around Aids.

Is there anything that women can have for ourselves alone that certain men do not want to take away from us? Or get access to? Anything at all?

Stonewall had successfully captured every organisation and rewarded it for being "trans inclusive." What did this mean? Believing that womanhood was a feeling in a man’s head? Rewriting equality law so that people with male genitalia could now be in female prisons and rape crisis centres? Bad statistics were bandied about concerning suicide - all wrong and based on one tiny study. What has been censored on the Left is actual information, not opinions: information about puberty blockers, information about the number of sex offenders who claim to be women in prison, information about what JK Rowling actually said, information about trans athletes who have gone through male puberty, information about public attitudes. Most people are liberal and sympathetic to trans people, as we should be. When told most trans women retain male genitalia, they become more uncomfortable about females sharing intimate spaces with them.