So, I had yesterday off because I was really pissed off. I’m not going into details, but basically I went orbital with someone close to me and it was real dumpster fire. It was my fault, I was fell foul to my own preachings and I had backed myself into a fucking corner, my own substack arguing against me and on her side. I looked a right tool.
So I caked myself up in a bucket of cosmo, so much I couldn’t even emote to begin with, I went out last night with mates and got a bit pissed, and it was a right mess. It was a good time (mostly), the girls were great, came back man-free because I always do, it’s just how I roll. There’s a mate asleep in my spare, and I have no idea which one. I’m not into drunken hook-ups. I’ve got a crazy punishing hangover, I keep puking into my own coffee cup, loads of dried snot up my face and I look like tarmac. I somehow have an icke on my neck, which was probably one of the girls to be fair, there is like zero guys out in the clubs any more, and the ones that are out there are, let’s just say, not from round these parts. We were batting them off all night, it was exhausting. Guys! Seriously, where are you?! Why are you not going out?
Back in my early twenties, men used to protect us from other men. Sure, there was probably some position where we had to thank them, and their motives were probably indulgent. But they were there. Now, the first time I’ve been out in such a format in a very long time, predators everywhere, and no protection. The good guys are gone, the locals, they are staying away. I’m all for cultures and differences, but not when they think they can put their hands up my skirt, boob grab and try to throat me uninvited. It was constant, all night. It was horrible.
Birth of the TERF
Before I go into the article, you need to know what terfed me. I used to be fully on board. Properly supportive. Proper full left. I believed people should be able to live however they wanted and that kindness was the baseline. I repeated the slogans and I meant them. Then one night in a club everything shifted and I have not been able to shift it back.
I was standing near the sinks when a man in a dress, completely off his face, pushed in beside me and started pissing straight into the basin. Not in a cubicle. Not trying to be discreet. Just standing there, drunk, using the women’s sink as a urinal while other women were trying to wash their hands. The violence that followed was extreme. Things escalated fast, voices rose, bodies moved, and within minutes the bouncers were on us. Me and the woman I was with got thrown out by the security while the man who had started the whole thing stayed inside. As I was being pushed through the door he looked straight at me and flipped me off. That was the moment. The casual contempt in that gesture while I was the one being removed finished something in me. I walked away that night no longer willing to pretend that biological reality was optional in shared spaces.
I still believe people should be free from harassment and violence. I still believe adults can wear what they like and live as they like. What I no longer accept is the demand that women must surrender material boundaries so that some men can feel affirmed. The two things are not the same and the refusal to separate them has produced this current mess.
The News This Morning
Now several London councils, including Lambeth, Hackney, Haringey, Lewisham, Southwark and Waltham Forest, have signed an open letter saying they want to keep services “inclusive” and do not want staff “policing entry” to single-sex spaces. They present this as kindness. It is not kindness. It is the decision to prioritise the feelings of a small group of men over the safety, privacy and dignity of women. Staff should not have to become bouncers, true. The cleaner solution is to maintain clear sex-based rules so that the conflict does not arise in the first place. Instead these councils are choosing the path that leaves women with fewer places they can reliably expect to be free of male-bodied people.
I keep coming back to the sink. It was not an abstract policy debate. It was a drunk man using female facilities exactly as he pleased and then watching the women who objected get removed. The power dynamic was obvious. The institutional response will always tend to side with the person creating the disruption if the rules have already been blurred. Once you tell organisations that sex is a spectrum of identity rather than a material category, you remove the only clear line staff can enforce without fear of being called bigots. The result is predictable. Women are told to be more tolerant. Men who want access keep pushing. The boundary moves in one direction only.
People call this position hateful. I called it common sense until the night I watched a man piss in a women’s sink and then saw myself ejected while he stayed. The experience was clarifying. It showed me how quickly the language of inclusion becomes a tool for overriding female space. It showed me that some men will take every inch offered and treat any resistance as an attack. It showed me that institutions prefer the quiet life of compliance with activist demands over the harder work of protecting sex-based rights.
I am not interested in policing anyone’s clothing or private life. I am interested in whether a woman can walk into a toilet, a changing room or a refuge and expect the people already inside to be female. That expectation is now treated as extreme. The councils signing letters against “policing entry” are not protecting vulnerable people. They are announcing that they will not defend the category of sex when it becomes inconvenient. Women are expected to absorb the risk and the discomfort so that no one has to feel excluded. The cost is always paid by the same group.
The question I cannot shake is why we are still here. The physical differences between the sexes have not changed. The pattern of male-pattern offending has not changed. The documented cases of men accessing female spaces and causing harm have not disappeared simply because the language around them has been softened. Yet public bodies continue to act as if the only danger lies in upsetting men who identify as women. The danger for women is treated as secondary or imaginary.
I did not arrive at this position through theory. I arrived at it through a specific night, a specific sink, and the specific sight of a man giving me the finger while I was thrown out of the place he had just violated. That moment ended my willingness to prioritise feelings over material reality. The councils currently resisting clear single-sex rules are making the same choice I once made, the choice to look away from the practical consequences for women. I no longer look away. The price of that refusal is being called names. The price of continuing to look away is higher, and women are the ones who keep paying it.