It's been a #NoThankYou kind of week for women - Susan Dalgety

In the end, Laurel Hubbard’s Olympic challenge proved to be a non-event.

Laurel Hubbard is the first transgender woman at the Olympic games but her appearance failed to impress, writes Susan Dalgety. (Picture: Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

The first openly transgender athlete to compete in the Olympic Games in a different sex category to the one into which she was born failed to register a lift in the women’s +87kg weightlifting. But her grin as she left the podium suggests she regarded her appearance as victory enough.

“I know that my participation at these Games has not been entirely without controversy but they have been just so wonderful and I'm so grateful to them,” she told reporters after her disappointing attempt.

Well, that’s all right then, Ms Hubbard is happy. Her fellow weightlifters perhaps less so. When three medal winners, including Emily Campbell of Great Britain, were asked at a press conference how they felt about a transgender competitor, they sat in silence for a few seconds, before America’s Sarah Robles replied, simply, “No thank you.” It was a moment to savour, and within hours the hashtag #NoThankYou was trending on social media.

It’s been a #NoThankYou kind of week for women and girls the world over. That bastion of women’s empowerment, the BBC’s Woman’s Hour, which has been on the air since 1946, posed the question, “should there be age-appropriate porn as has been suggested so they can learn about consent and what’s respectful and what’s not? What do you think?”

“Nonce,” was the pithy response from Scottish comedian Leo Kearse, whose Fringe show Cancel Culture starts today.

Feminist campaigner Marion Millar, who faces trial in ten days’ time for posting allegedly transphobic material on social media, summed up what surely must be most women’s feelings when she wrote: “A teenager is as young as 13…in my opinion there is no age appropriate porn, the word you are searching for is grooming.”

The Woman’s Hour discussion was provoked by a tweet – now deleted – from journalist Flora Gill who suggested, in all seriousness, that someone needs to “create porn for children….they need entry-level porn! A softcore site where everyone asks for consent and no one gets choked.”

There is no doubt that we need to guide our children and young people through the minefield that is online porn. Gone are the days when the raciest thing a teenager will have access to is a tattered copy of their dad’s Hustler magazine. Today, even pre-teens can access the most violent pornography on their smartphone, and study after study suggests it has a harmful effect on adolescents. No kidding? So, Woman’s Hour, I think it is big #NoThankYou to “age-appropriate porn”. I am surprised you even had to ask.

The week just got worse for women when a study published in the Lancet Healthy Longevity journal showed that rich countries like ours have systemic sex-based biases that leave women over 65 worse-off financially and more socially isolated than their male peers.

“Ageing societies reinforce the prevailing gender norms in which men continue to be allocated the majority of opportunities, resources and social support,” the lead author, Dr Cynthia Chen, told the Times newspaper. “There is an urgent need to challenge the structural and policy biases that favour men,” she added. To which I say, “Yes please.”

But the most terrible revelation of the week, and one that gets to the heart of the misogyny that continues to taint humanity, was published in the BMJ Global Health Journal a few days ago. A study reveals that men will outnumber women across the globe in a few years’ time because of selective abortion, the growing trend where healthy female foetuses are aborted because of “cultural preferences”.

China and India already have “skewed sex ratios” at birth, with Pakistan, Nigeria and other sub-Saharan countries expected to catch up in the coming years. The study warns this will create a surplus of young men in more than a third of the world’s population, leading to “elevated levels of antisocial behaviour and violence”.

Little wonder that women the world over are angry. Our very right to exist is under attack. Rich societies, including Scotland it seems, have decided that the simplest way to assuage the feelings of men who want to be women, is to pretend that binary sex is meaningless. That women are simply “non-trans women” or “cis”. We have become a subclass.

Politicians, eager to prove their diversity credentials, have fallen over themselves in the rush to de-sex everything, from data collection to safe spaces. But by falling for the “gender not sex” mythology, they risk perpetuating the biggest myth of all, that women and girls are worthless.

So we end up with a female athlete being denied a place in the Olympics, not because she has been outclassed, but because a rival has adjusted their hormone-levels to be able to compete. Her feelings don’t matter, her achievements do not count. She belongs to the subclass.

Our girls are persuaded by pornography that sexual violence and aggression are the norm. She feels she has to endure, even pretend to enjoy, choking, slapping and humiliation. So what. She belongs to the subclass.

As women age, we become invisible, hidden in our homes, regarded by society not as wise elders, but bitter old crones. And, worst of all, an increasing number of girls the world over are denied even their right to life, and their mothers the joy of nurturing them, because they belong to the subclass.

Is this really our future? One where men continue to dominate, their desires paramount, no matter how violent or unreasonable? Where women are a subclass, subservient to men, from conception to death? I have only three words. No. Thank. You.

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