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1 " Most people are in the dark about what is being demanded by transactivists. They understand the call for ‘trans rights’ to mean compassionate concessions that enable a suffering minority to live full lives, in safety and dignity. I, alongside every critic of gender-identity ideology I have spoken to for this book, am right behind this. Most, including me, also favour bodily autonomy for adults. A liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else. "
― , Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
2 " Defining women as the people whose bodies developed along the female reproductive pathway is limiting only if you regard female embodiment as limiting. "
3 " It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that trans-inclusive language is inclusive in one direction only. It aims at removing all obstacles to using the words 'woman' and 'female' for any male who wants them, without requiring any special accommodation for females who wish to identify into maleness or manhood. "
4 " I am often asked why I took the risk of writing this book, and occasionally why I felt I had the right. The issue does not touch me closely. I’m not trans. I don’t have a trans-identified child. I’m not a detransitioner, or an athlete forced to compete against transwomen, or a lesbian seeking a partner on dating sites that are now filled with males. The answer to both questions is simple: I wrote this book because, unlike many other people, I could. Parents of children caught up in the gender-identity social contagion stay silent to protect their relationships. The detransitioners I know are traumatised. Many critics of this ideology can say nothing without risking their jobs. All these people need someone else to articulate what is happening. "
5 " One consequence of opening women's spaces to males is to recast two common male sex crimes as rights. Exhibitionism - non-consensually displaying one's genitals - is so common that many women will tell you that the first time they saw a penis was when a stranger flashed them. Voyeurism - non-consensually viewing someone in a state of undress - is known to be a precursor to contact sex crimes. Entering a changing room constitutes consent to see and be seen by the other occupants while undressed. Women grant that consent on the basis that those occupants will be female; gender self-identification removes that basis while denying that it does so. It therefore turns facilities intended for women into places where males can commit exhibitionism and voyeurism with impunity. "
6 " The girls are often misrepresented as seeking to get transgender athletes banned, whereas in fact all they want is that everyone competes in their own sex class. ‘In sports it’s your body that’s competing, not your mind,’ says Soule. "
7 " Rarely acknowledged in discussions about single-sex spaces is that, until recently, most were for men. The best schools and all universities; well-paid jobs; sporting competitions; political institutions: all were male-only. Some of women's anger at the recent pretence that it is impossible to distinguish between males and females stems from knowing that, when it was women who were excluded, there was no uncertainty. When you are of the sex barred from identifying into the other's privileges, you may not feel accommodating when self-identification in the other direction is cast as a human right. "
8 " The two elements of a binary, in other words, can continue to describe the same distinct groups as they always did, while being stripped of the associations and interpretations that situate one group as dominant and the other as subordinate. Such work is essential to imagining a better future, for women and every other group on the wrong side of a binary. But queer theory does none of it. Instead, because of gender-identity ideology, the quest for the liberation of people with female bodies has arrived at an extraordinary position: that they do not even constitute a group that merits a name. "
9 " The final indication of a crony belief is that nothing important is allowed to ride on it. To show this is true of gender-identity ideology, I offer the following thought experiment. Picture a person who insists transwomen are women in every circumstance. If transwomen commit crimes, they belong in women's prisons; if they play sports, they belong on women's teams. If they are attracted to women, lesbians must regard them as potential sexual partners. Such a person will accept no distinction between sex and gender. Transwomen differ from 'cis women' only in having been mistakenly 'assigned male at birth'. Now, what will our true believer do if they need a gestational surrogate? "
10 " transactivism can be exploited by those who would harm children – not that trans people, or transactivists, want to harm children, or do not care if others do. "
11 " The worry is not, I repeat, that trans people are unusually likely to be child-abusers. Gay people aren’t, either, and yet their movement was infiltrated by those who were – with two baleful consequences. Children were harmed who could have been kept safe and, even today, homophobes conflate homosexuality and paedophilia. Anyone who cares for the welfare of either children or trans people should want to avoid history repeating itself. "
12 " The magnitude of the male advantage is obvious in sports statistics. The website boysvswomen.com compare the 2016 women's Olympic finalists with the same year's finalists in American boys' high-school competitions. In running, where the male advantage is relatively small, at every distance up to 800 meters the woman who won Olympic gold ran slower than the boys' qualifying time. "
13 " regarding transwomen’s safety in men’s spaces, they have none for female people who can no longer keep men out of theirs. Such a man is the most profound type of misogynist: the type that, perhaps unconsciously, sees women as supporting actresses in men’s lives. "
14 " According to the ancient 'one-sex model', men and women were essentially similar, except that women's reproductive anatomy was inverted and inferior. Women have 'exactly the same organs but in exactly the wrong places', wrote Galen, a Greek physician of the second century. "
15 " A definition of biological sex as reproductive capacity is, inherently, a communal one. It is about the role the individual plays within its species - whether that role is conceived of as shaped by evolution, ordained by God or something else. John Money's gender roles, too, concerned how individuals fitted into society - which stereotypes their upbringing had fitted them to adhere to. Now the focus had narrowed. What mattered was whether an individual could provide the sexual, not reproductive, services that a man expected of his wife - an individual rather than societal contract - and how she felt about herself. Though it was not yet consistently named, 'gender identity' had arrived. "
16 " Moreover, autogynephiles often eroticise aspects of womanhood that most women dislike, such as menstruation, undergoing intimate medical examinations, experiencing sexism or wearing uncomfortable clothes. 'Forced feminisation' - someone making a man cross-dress or undergo sex-reassignment surgery - is a staple of transgender erotica. Quite a few of Lawrence's informants say they would find it shameful to be a woman, and that this turns them on. "
17 " Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant. "
18 " Fausto-Sterling later said she was writing ‘with tongue firmly in cheek’. And yet anyone who has taken gender studies in the past two decades will almost certainly have been assigned her essay, and it is taken inexplicably seriously. So entrenched is the ‘five sexes’ claim that Googling ‘how many sexes are there’ turned up ‘five’ as the top answer until the search algorithm was tweaked in response to complaints. "
19 " These books never make the connection between homophobic bullying and identifying out of one’s sex. A generation ago, progressives campaigned for schools to crack down on taunts about gay boys being girls; now, the bullies are presented as right. "
20 " Males are easier to include in a movement centred on personal choice than in a movement centred on an analysis of male oppression and exploitation of females. "