The vicious intolerance of the student gender zealots

The Cambridge University Society of Women is self-explanatory. It has been set up for and by women currently studying at the University of Cambridge.

A month or so before I arrived there to begin my year of MPhil study, I spoke to my close friend and current Cambridge undergrad, Thea Sewell, about my excitement to join a women-only group while I was there. Laughing, I told her that, worst-case scenario, we’d have to start one ourselves.

I wandered around the Cambridge Freshers’ Fair a couple of weeks later and found no women-only groups that didn’t also fall over themselves to ensure we all knew how ‘inclusive’ they were of ‘transwomen’, ‘nonbinary people’ and, as I understood it, anyone who called themselves a woman. Students with haircuts you might call ‘bold’ stood behind stalls covered in pastel-coloured information leaflets and narrowed their eyes at my questions about how they defined ‘woman’ for the purposes of their groups. Hadn’t I heard of intersectionality? Didn’t I know what feminism was these days? I needed to get on board, apparently, for risk of falling behind the times or ending up on the dreaded ‘wrong side of history’.

The message was clear – there was no space for young women like me at this university.

Leaving the fair, I rang Thea up with the news that my hasty ‘plan’ made in a pub back in summer was now going to have to be enacted.

In mid-October, I got together with her and our friend Serena Worley, also an undergraduate at Cambridge, and explained the idea. I had met them both at a talk given by Julie Bindel and Helen Joyce in Oxford in April, and we had immediately bonded over our disbelief at the state of women’s rights and the aggressive enforcement of trans ideology at universities.

We began messaging constantly and meeting frequently, making decisions together about how we would approach launching a society that proudly accepted members on openly sex-based terms. I’m getting my head around the fact that in an era so often called ‘progressive’, starting a women-only group is somehow ‘daring’. Tell me feminism hasn’t gone backwards.

Writing our constitution, we agonised over how explicit to be. Our desire to reclaim the word ‘woman’ to mean, as it always has, ‘human being belonging to the female sex class’, felt somehow ridiculous alongside our knowledge that people would pick holes in such a definition. We found ourselves thinking like trans-rights activists and ideologically captured university administrative staff, pre-empting what complaints they would have and planning our responses.

Before our launch, Serena and I often met at her college, Newnham, a historically all-female college, founded in 1871 and with alumni including Germaine Greer. Sitting in the beautiful grounds, she pointed out the long disused building that used to be the women’s laboratories. ‘They weren’t allowed to use the men’s labs, so they had to build these’, she explained. The whole place is evidence of women’s historic efforts to challenge oppression and push back against their exclusion from spaces by building their own.

Newnham has openly accepted trans-identifying male students since 2017, and so is now an all-female college in name only. Places like it, built for and by women to combat their sex-based oppression, are themselves now infiltrated by – no language games here – men.

Our launch on the morning of 27 October consisted of posts on X and Instagram and the publication of an article by journalist Nick Wallis. I had been a student at the university for about two weeks. We advertised the society as being concerned with the promotion of women’s sex-based rights and causes. We didn’t mention the word ‘transgender’ in any of our statements.

Everything was shared and reposted hundreds of times. Likes flooded in and comments mounted up. The outpouring of support floored us, and I hastily built a website so that the dozens of alumni who had reached out to give their support could become officially affiliated with the society. There are currently over 120 of them.

Hundreds offered to donate, to come and speak at our events, to defend us legally if we needed it. We received messages from people across the UK and beyond, with people talking about daughters and sisters they wished had the same kind of society at their universities and schools. ‘Maybe she will start one, too’, one mother said.

Our anticipation of pushback, though, was more than justified. On Instagram, a social-media platform with a far higher student-age digital footfall than X, notifications of people calling us ‘evil’ and ‘bigoted’ were popping up on our phones all the time. The small trans flag emoji was littering our comment section, as if it were a kind of new battleground for the ‘Be Kind’ brigade to conquer.

We were called ‘disgusting’, likened to ‘fascists’ and accused of being uneducated and backwards. From anonymous, private accounts came vitriolic jabs at our appearances. The more egregiously misogynistic among them laughed at how members of our committee supposedly looked ‘like men’. I would call uneducated those who don’t know that ‘womanhood’ is not, in fact, clothes or haircuts.

I received messages to my personal account calling me ‘scary’, even ‘violent’. One young woman helpfully informed me that ‘TERFs should go die’. And they got worse. ‘Far-right bitches deserve rape lolllll’. These are by no means the worst messages, but even the most frightening don’t necessarily surprise me. As far as these nameless, faceless people are concerned, their response is the right one.

Over 30 other societies at Cambridge, many among them self-proclaimed ‘Fem Socs’ or similar, put their names to a statement on Instagram declaring that ‘feminism without intersectionality is not effective, considerate or productive’. These groups, predominantly run and attended by young women, openly and actively hate a feminism that dares to factually define ‘woman’.

The anonymous confessions page for Cambridge students on Facebook, Camfess, has and continues to post dozens of comments to its 13,000-strong following disparaging the society and calling it ‘an embarrassment’. Although I have my doubts about how willing the supposedly impartial admins are to post the confessions that come in defending the society, those that do come across our timelines are quickly inundated with scoffing, abusive comments. Ironically, roughly half of our members tell us that they first heard of the society via Camfess. ‘No publicity is bad publicity’, and all that.

And so it goes on – students and non-students alike peddling outrage at the audacity of a group of women to set up a group for other women. We are glared at in the street and whispered about in pubs. Out with friends on a Friday night not long after the launch, I was shoved in the back and called a bitch by a young woman I had never met. The launch of the society has got under the skin of militantly ‘progressive’ members of the student body in part because it proves what to them is an inconvenient truth: we won’t all go along with this.

Our society accepts as a member any woman who is a current student at the University of Cambridge. This includes women who identify as men (‘transmen’), which negates pearl-clutching accusations that we are ‘trans-exclusionary’.

We have a vetting process, which is simply an in-person meeting in a café with any applicant for membership. We ask her how she heard of us, why she wishes to join and what she would like to see the society do. There are no wrong answers, and we have yet to reject any application. Membership is free.

Women come to meet us and are visibly nervous, worrying that they may be seen to be heretics by association. They speak quickly and urgently, with many explaining that they can’t continue to hide their gender-scepticism at all times. I ask them all what topics and causes they are interested in discussing at the society, and they speak earnestly about issues they call ‘real’ when it comes to women and our sex-based concerns – women in war zones, female genital mutilation, prostitution, porn. Often, they say they are ‘bored’ of the trans debate.

When student journalists ask us about why we won’t include ‘transwomen’ as members, I clarify what they mean by that word. At the reluctant acknowledgement that these people are biologically male, people with XY chromosomes, assigned male at birth – men – the question answers itself.

The CUSW has been dubbed ‘vaginist’ and ‘bio-essentialist’, deemed to be an embodiment of a cruel type of womanhood. This reaction to the society’s launch is a symptom of a far larger problem that is rotting universities in the UK and beyond from inside. A vitriolic desire to suppress freedom of thought, speech and association speaks to deep-rooted ideological capture that champions feeling ‘safe’ over being honest. To be disagreed with, let alone to be offended or even uncomfortable, has now somehow come to mean that a student is no longer safe.

My generation of women seem more eager than ever to mock and reject our predecessors, writing off first- and second-wave feminism as old hat and boring. If you don’t like today’s ‘progressive’ feminism, it’s because you need to ‘get with the times’.

Gender ideology, though, is the opposite of progressive. It is steeped in regressive, sexist stereotypes, and is functionally homophobic in how it necessarily denies same-sex attraction by denying sex itself.

Acknowledgment of biological sex is not and should never have been seen as a left- or right-wing belief. The support we are receiving from all across the political spectrum is testament to this. The Cambridge University Society of Women can truthfully call itself non-partisan on that basis. We seek to promote women’s right to associate and speak freely and we are eager to address and discuss a whole range of sex-based issues pertaining to women.

If we ruffle feathers and attract the usual loud-mouthed, hand-wringing gender ideologues, so be it. We’re not going anywhere. The women among them, I should add, are more than welcome to join.

Maeve Halligan is president of the Cambridge University Society of Women