Vapid, bourgeois feminism

Although I call Edinburgh home now, Glasgow is my native city. I go through frequently and am always struck by fond nostalgia for that indomitable, bolshy Glaswegian spirit, mixed with dismay at the visible decline of the city’s high streets. Every time I visit, there also seems to be some far-left omnicause protest near the steps of Buchanan Galleries, with trans and Palestinian flags billowing grimily in the air and adding to the sense of ugliness.

This week, another rally took place in that precise location. It was organised by women’s organisations that had united to protest rising rates of sexual violence. Before you get too heartened, I regret to inform you that this quite promising-sounding “feminist” rally was yet another masterclass in the virtue-signalling cognitive dissonance that has come to define mainstream progressivism. Speakers paid lip service to the grave issue of male violence against women (reports of rape and attempted rape have increased by almost a third in the last four years in Scotland), but it was a supporting theme to the rally’s real agenda: denouncing the so-called far right and its alleged “weaponisation” of the issue against migrants.

The groups involved included Sisters Uncut, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, Women Against the Far Right and NASUWT Scotland (the teachers’ union). Of course, all these organisations are resolutely trans-inclusive, i.e. they can’t define what a woman is. Always a great start for an alleged women’s rights protest. Indeed, Scottish Green MSP Iris Duane, a trans-identified male, was one of the speakers to take the mic. It’s quite difficult to pinpoint lowlights in a speech with no highlights, but a particularly telling moment came when she said: “[Extremists are] telling us to blame migrants, the refugees, the trans people – anyone who looks different – and blame anything but the structures that have permitted this.”

Ah yes, structures. Structures are to blame for killing and raping us. If I found myself walking alone in Gorgie late at night, I’d be looking over my shoulder to check whether structures were following me. I’d cross the street to avoid walking past a group of structures. The political left has a strange relationship with describing men. Men they call “cis” and, by extension, traditional masculinity are often mocked and demonised as the cause of all society’s problems. Yet when it comes to the uncomfortable nitty-gritty of identifying and actually solving problems, particularly those relating to MVAGW, under no circumstances can groups of males be spoken about in specific terms.

Many of the other speeches then became exercises in disingenuousness. It is not migrants as a whole who are being singled out for being overrepresented in sex-crime statistics, just as it is not trans people as a whole who are being framed as potential threats in female single-sex spaces. It is the males within both groups who are being accurately identified as the source of this particular threat to women’s safety and spaces. Acknowledging this is not to downplay the threat posed by non-migrant men or by men who do not identify as women. All men who harm women and children, regardless of their background, deserve the full force of the law and society’s condemnation.

It is spectacularly patronising when “feminist” rallies like these treat women like me, who are perfectly capable of understanding cultural realities and engaging with evidence, as shills for the far right. We are perfectly aware, thank you, that men like Donald Trump and Tommy Robinson are not radical feminists. We despair that such men have been able to fill the void left by the modern left’s abdication of reason.

Case in point: the rally attracted misogynistic heckling. On Twitter/X, representatives of Stand Up To Racism were at pains to express concern for the survivors of MVAGW affected by it. For Women Scotland showed solidarity with SUTR while pointing out that sex-realist women had been subjected to the same treatment, and worse. SUTR conceded that this was an outrage and that misogyny on the left had not been adequately addressed by organisations such as theirs… I’m just kidding: they blocked For Women Scotland outright.

It’s insanely ironic that, despite the progressive feminist mantra of being for all women (including blokes), rallies such as these go out of their way to exclude women’s groups that want a sensible, honest discussion about the root causes of misogyny in society and how it manifests.

No virtue-signalling protest would be complete without bland chants. The dominant rallying cry at this event was: “We are women, we can fight, we don’t need your fascist shite!” It may have been delivered in a working-class dialect, but the cause it represents is pure, vapid, bourgeois feminism.

Nina Welsch is a freelance writer based in Edinburgh. Her work can be found in The Critic, Unherd, Spiked and The Scotsman. Her Substack Its My Room can be found here . If you enjoyed this article and her other witterings, you can donate to her Buy Me A Coffee account here.