India Willoughby And The Double Standards

Jan 13th, 2024. India Willoughby, a reality TV level celebrity who happens to be a trans woman, writes a (now deleted) tweet about abducting three women: Scottish MP Joanna Cherry, gender critical campaigner Maya Forstater, and JK Rowling. Willoughby refers to Forstater as Mayo Potato and Rowling as “the witchfinder woman.”

This is fine. 

Jan 22nd, 2023 - Mar 1st, 2024. Willoughby writes a series of tweets attacking women and their appearance including, but not limited to, describing a female athlete as “a parody of a woman, definitely trans,” claiming to be “more of a woman than JK Rowling will ever be,” and calling several other women, “men.” 

This is also fine. 

Sep 27th, 2020 - Nov 28th, 2022. In several other tweets, India asks a gay man “what went wrong” with him because his body was “designed for sex with a vagina,” describes ”a black TV presenter as a “blackwoman” who wouldn’t be anywhere without “wokeness,” and, topically enough, says that “the sooner [fellow trans woman] Debbie Hayton pops his clogs the better.” (Emphasis mine.) 

All perfectly fine. But then…

March 3rd, 2024. A Twitter user called Socialist Stanley asks JK Rowling if she thinks “this woman” (referring to a gif of Willoughby dancing), should be using the ladies' bathroom. To which Rowling replies:

You’ve sent me the wrong video. There isn’t a lady in this one, just a man revelling in his misogynistic performance of what he thinks ‘woman’ means: narcissistic, shallow and exhibitionist.

And this was most definitely not fine. 

The presses at Sky News, The Independent, and several others, roared into action to condemn Rowling’s “vile transphobia.” Celebrities and journalists across Twitter expressed their horror, and Willoughby, who was “genuinely disgusted,” by Rowling’s comments, confirmed that the police had been notified. 

And look, I understand that the world would be a better place if we were a little kinder to each other. I know it’s politically correct to pretend there’s no difference between Willoughby and Rowling. 

But let's be honest; the only reason these people are attacking Rowling for the kind of comments Willoughby has been making for years, the only reason none of the women Willoughby called “men” even thought to call the police, is that they’re all fully aware of the difference. 

A few days later, in another corner of Twitter, two women had a surprisingly similar disagreement about femininity. 

A “nature influencer” named Hannah Barron had recently shared a video tour of a house she was building with her shamelessly unmanicured hands. Her makeup-free face bared for all the world to see. 

And Sameera Khan, a Kardashian-esque “anti-woke journalist,” was outraged:

This accent needs to be illegal and women should be banned from doing manual labour like this.

There is NOTHING feminine about American women.

American women are literally men.

Khan’s tweet received 63 million views (compared to Rowling’s 181,000), but instead of calling the police or “joking” about abducting anyone, Barron offered some advice for anyone struggling with the difference between womanhood and the performance of femininity:

…I grew up as the weird kid in high school who hunted and fished too much. Because back then it wasn’t cool for women to hunt or fish or [do] the whole country lifestyle. And I’m so proud of all the women in the outdoors now who are making that more “cool” or popular. So proud of us. I think we’re doing great […]

So don’t be scared to build your own box and don’t try to fit in anybody else’s. Be your own person and you’ll be happier in the long run because of that.

Defining womanhood (or manhood) with gendered stereotypes is nothing new. And as Willoughby demonstrates, calling women who defy those stereotypes "men" is nothing new. What’s new is the idea that any of this nonsense is kind or progressive. 

It's not kind for so-called LGBT organisations to shame lesbians for being attracted to females or to pressure them into having sex with males.

It's not fair to tell female athletes to “reeducate themselves” because they don’t want long-haired males getting naked in their locker rooms or beating them in competitions.

It's not progressive to demand that rape victims gaslight themselves to protect the feelings of their rapists or “reframe their trauma” instead of working through that trauma in a single-sex space.

It’s not hateful to recognise that women have rights related to their sex. Except, maybe, for people who want to take them away.

As the radical notion that women are people clashes with the ridiculous notion that women are a “vibe,” it’s become common to see gender apologists using women’s age and fertility issues and, of course, their breasts, to argue that women are men with extra steps.

That all that separates men from women is a hysterectomy or a change in testosterone levels or a sudden preference for manual labour.

But a woman is still a woman if she has her breasts or her womb removed. She’s a woman regardless of her age or her dress sense. She remains a woman even if she’s been brainwashed into feeling “uncomfortable with the term, 'woman.'” 

And in exactly the same way, a man is still a man even if he preferred dolls and ponies to trucks and robots as a child. He remains a man if he straps a set of Z-cup breasts to his chest or has his penis removed. He’s a man, even if he calls the police when a world-famous author refuses to call him a woman.

But despite all this, there also comes a point when it stops making sense to call a trans woman a man. When even the TERFiest of TERFs would struggle to recognise him as one. When claiming that sex should always take precedence over gender expression creates more problems than it solves.

The problem, as Barron eloquently put it, is that people like Willoughby insist on appropriating womanhood instead of building their own box. Even though every society that embraced gender diversity before us has understood that this is a mistake.

The Muxe in Mexico, the kha’-nun-tha’ of the Arabian peninsula, the Kathoey in Thailand, the Hijra in India, the various “two-spirit” identities of indigenous cultures, none of these groups tried to overwrite women. None of these countries lost track of what women are. None of them claimed it was “hateful” to acknowledge that these identities are distinct from “men” and “women.” 

Because you can’t build an identity out of something you aren’t. All you build is fear and insecurity and spite. You build a life where you’re constantly trying to prove yourself. Where you try to force other people to validate you. Where you think everyone who doesn’t lie to you hates you.

Trans women are trans women. It’s unbelievable that this statement is even remotely controversial. Because even though some people are determined to conflate truth and hate, I think we’re all fully aware of the difference.

---