Gender Panic: fearmongering, fascism and the cost of changing course.

Common cause is not the only way to build an army. Complicty works just as well.

There are worse things in this life than being called a fascist. Fascism, for a start.

I've been trying all week to hit publish on a long piece about the interplay between fascism , the far right and the 'gender critical movement' - and what can be done to drive the fash out of feminism. I've been scraping and slicing away at it for days, and according to a very helpful and slightly invasive podcast I listen to, this sort of procrastination is actually about fear of success, even if success means nothing more than ‘finishing and publishing a piece of writing’. According to the wise and honey-toned people on this podcast, women ought to be less afraid of success.

Not me! I said, out loud, in the supermarket, making exactly nobody look round, because in my local supermarket all sorts of people talk to themselves in the vegetable aisle, and not all of them have headphones. Not me, I said, more quietly, to myself - no, I am exactly the appropriate amount afraid of the consequences of successfully publishing an essay on the topic of gender and the far right. Because I know what will happen.

What will happen is that lot of people will shout at me. Including people whose respect I might otherwise value.

You might be surprised to hear this, given what I’ve chosen to do with my life, but I really don't like it when people shout at me. Of course, I should be grateful that people care enough about my writing to misrepresent it, but I can’t stand it when my work gets described as provocative. I’m not trying to provoke people. I’m not being controversial for the sake of it. I am controversial because it doesn't occur to me not to be.

Somehow, after all this time, it still doesn’t occur to me until after the fact that stating something terribly obvious about, say, women's liberation, or ati-racism, or even saying the word 'fascism', might provoke something of a backlash, especially if the person saying it is female, queer and, for most of my career, relatively young. I don’t set out to be controversial for publicity, or money, or attention. ‘Attention-seeking’ is such a boringly sexist slur, and it’s almost almost aimed at women and queers in a world where good girls are not supposed to draw attention to themselves, which is why it’s disappointing to hear it in the mouths of fellow feminists.

But no, unfortunately, I almost always mean exactly what I say, and say exactly what I think, and despite my relative privilege that still gets me in trouble, because I never got the memo that meaning what you say and saying what you think is not always personally healthy.

For weeks now, on Twitter and elsewhere, I have been the subject of utterly relentless personal attacks- not just from the usual right-wing blowhards, but also from a lot of people claiming to be feminists. No amount of blocking and reporting seems to work against the tide of trolls calling me a pedophile, an apologist for child-rape, an enemy of women and worse, along with a thick slice of everyday sexism, misgendering and queerphobia. The writer of some of my favorite sitcoms threatened to sue me for libel. A famous columnist who I used to hero-worship before she became a horrible warning keeps getting up in my mentions implying I’m somehow complicit with a former employer who has been accused of predation and harassment, and I’ve been back for a week, guys.

It’s not been fun. It's the sort of thing that might have been fun if I actually was a howling narcissistic void of insincerity, but I'm not, so it's just upsetting. And a massive waste of time. When thousands of strangers are saying awful things about you in public, it's hard to look away. There's a paranoid magnetism to it. If I were clever enough to spend years constructing an elaborate persona in order to sell more mid-list political tracts, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to keep engaging.

Somehow, though, I always forget that you can’t actually win round thousands of absolute strangers who have already decided what they think using empathy and reason. This is the sort of stupid mistake that slightly clever people make all the time: the notion that you can fight a feeling with facts, or that a reasonable argument rationally made can compete withthe theatre of a moral panic. I have been trying to explain myself. I have been indulging in the notion that people would behave better if they only knew better.

I should know better than that, by now.

Holding back on what you know you ought to do because you’re worried that someone might shout at you is hardly an uncommon tendency in these fractious times, and the only thing to do is to give up on the idea that there is any way to engage with politics and avoid getting shouted at. Especially when a solid chunk of previously sensible people have been huffing the high-octane fumes of moralpanic, not to mention the chemtrails of conspiracy theory.

No, I'm not just talking about the escalating anti-trans panic in the UK, but I’m not not talking about it, either. I’m use the word ‘escalating’ rather than ‘growing’, because the issue is not so much that the trans-hostile lobby is gaining recruits but that it is becoming ever louder and less hinged as it drowns out and bullies its perceived enemies into silence. This week, the controversy has reached the top of the Labour party. The question of what to do about the scary shadowy ‘trans agenda’ is once again national news- and the saner members of the ‘gender critical' feminist movement appear to be wondering whether the scent of major legislative and cultural victory is worth the sizzle.

For all the howling and scoffing about Judith Butler's suggestion that the movement against 'gender ideology' has worrying far-right associations, for all the frantic counter-arguments and excuses, the suggestion that people still notionally on the left might want to clean their own house of bad actors seems to have been taken on board. The usually hardline group Womens Place UK just passed a motion undertaking never to stand with the far right, even if their short-term aims seem temptingly aligned.

That’s admirable. I mean that. It’s hard to admit that you might even need to think about drawing that sort of line in the stand, because -

Alright, stay with me here, because this is important.

I know that talking about political philosophy or theory makes me a craven and suspicious intellectual definitionally out of touch with everything pure and holy, but I’m going to do it anyway. Because there’s an idea called Affect Theory, and it’s useful here.

At its root, unless I’ve read it all wrong, Affect Theory is staggeringly simple: it’s the basic idea that people’s feelings matter in politics. That people decide how to behave, how to vote, how to build movements and take action, not solely solely on the basis of sober fact but, rather, on the basis of emotions and instincts they may not even fully comprehend, because if all of us were entirely aware and in control of why do the things we do, therapists would be far less busy. Affect Theory. The radical notion that politics is about feelings, even if we insist on experiencing those feelings as fact.

So what does that mean for the many, many millions of people currently looking around at the frothing conspiracy cults and frenzied moral panics they’ve somehow gotten themselves involved with and starting to regret their choices?

It's important to remember that when people invest, emotionally and politically, in movements like this - movements fuelled by fearmongering, movements that recruit people with real concerns and prey on their tenderest and most private pain and shovel them towards shady ideologies - when people invest in movements like this, walking away, or walking it back, comes at a cost.

Firstly, there's the personal cost of relinquishing causes that have been and probably still are emotionally essential. I have spoken to many, many 'gender critical' women who have told me that they came to the movement as survivors of sexual and gender-based trauma, and they stay in it because they are convinced that they’re taking a stand on behalf of the girls they once were, the women they are, and everyone like them who deserves the dignity and safety they were cruelly denied.

This is not a bad way to come to politics, especially not feminist politics. Far from it. Part of the point of justice movements is to give people permission to understand injustice they have experienced and tools to overcome it.

The trouble is that when that impulse is pointed in the wrong direction, away from a common enemy and against vulnerable minorities, it becomes personally painful to change course. Because the trouble is that far-right movements also recruit this way, explpoting the twisted inverse of that same, achingly human instinct: to speak honestly about unfairness and loss, to reclaim the pride this bad world stripped from you. If you’re thinking of escaping MAGAstan or Brexit island, you might well worry that your pride will get confiscated at the border.

That’s the first problem. The second is the understandable fear of losing a community that has probably only become more important to you as its affect has alienated you from former friends, loved ones and colleagues. Solidarity in adversity is intoxicating. Sadly, that feeling is not exclusive to those on the 'right side' of history. If you change course, might lose your new friends, and you can’t count on getting the old ones back.

Which brings us to the third problem: if you walk back or walk away from a political tendency that’s gone toxic, not only are you a traitor to everyone still in it, but you risk losing face in public. And that’s not nothing. In times like these, when most people are alienated and isolated and few of us live in well-organized societies with a strong sense of the common good, your reputation and respect are very important, even if you’ve built them in fringe groups. And it’s hard to admit to being wrong in a political climate where all conflict is constructed as war, where growth and change and just going away and thinking about how to be a reasonable and pro-social human being are not rewarded. Where even if you prostrate yourself in the public sphere and beg forgiveness, you’ll never get it, not from everyone.

As it happens, yes, I do know what I’m talking about there.

The power of shame and the horror of stigma mean that many of us, in our weakest moments of self-doubt, would rather allow great harm to be done than acknowledge our part in it. That's one thing the far right knows that the left, in its scattered basic goodness, has yet to discover: common cause is not the only way to build an army. Complicty works just as well. Complicity, and chosen ignorance, and shame.

Course correcting is hard. Losing face, losing friends, finding new fulcrums for your self-worth, better sources of meaning, healthier ways to heal - that’s a big, big ask. Being wrong in public is not for the faint-hearted. Not when you can’t be sure of walking away with anything but your integrity, and the knowledge that you decided, at a critical moment, at a moment of moral reckoning, not to be part of the problem.

Nobody likes to be shouted at. I hate it. And I know that the second I hit publish on this, let alone the other pieces I’m working on about gender and neo-fascism and politics and power…. it’ll happen again. I’ll get shouted at. A lot.

But like I said, there are worse things.

And there comes a time when you’ve got to decide how much your pride is worth. If you are more outraged by the idea that someone might call you a fascist than you are about actual fascism, then it might be time to have a quiet word with your moral conscience. Or, failing that, a mirror.