Heather Brunskell-Evans > Quotes

“Transgenderism is the attempt to wrest female biology from women and in that process not only violates women's agency but our collective capacity for resistance. We need the language of sex difference if patriarchy is to be challenged and resisted.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“Adherence to queer theory forbids any discussion about sex and gender that does not restrict itself to 'gender identity', namely the sexist social construct that gives ideological effect to women's oppression. Faith in 'gender identity' is hardened into its own brand of dogma, ideological conformity and coercion.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“The denial of women's sex-specificity repeats in a newly invented format - the historic patriarchal refusal to grant specific recognition and value to women - to our rationality, bodies, and agency. The elimination of sex as a biological, material reality does not facilitate gender fluidity or breakdown gender hierarchy. On the contrary, it sures up the very patriarchal foundations which abuse women and children's human rights to agency and bodily integrity. Rather than transgenderism being about the opening up of gender for men to reject the norms of masculinity, it is the imposition of masculine dominance in a newly-minted form.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“When Stonewall reframes gender dysphoria as an identity badge, it absolves schools of the responsibility to offer individualised support to each child and replaces it with a blanket politicised approach. The child is presented as a member of a political rights group, rather than as a child who may be experiencing distress and confusion and who is in need of careful and thoughtful support.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“The transgender movement shift shapes by wearing a cloak of progressivism, human rights, equality, diversity and inclusion. It is particularly dangerous since it hides its authoritarianism in plain sight. Perhaps one day society will look back and wonder how, a century after women were 'allowed' to get the vote, women and men were prepared to vilify, exclude and gag by any means possible the women who saw through the pomp and stood aside from the baying, frightened crowd to declare: 'the Emperor has no clothes'.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“[...] 'Transwomen' are intensely preoccupied with the ancient patriarchal question: "What is a woman?" Their answer is that a woman is who she says she is, so long as it is not actually a woman who says it!”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“Patriarchy is the cultural power structure in which male people are default humans, and female people are defined by projections - and the acts of domination those projections impel and licence - which flow from male people towards male people.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“Diversity policies, saturated with a monologic view of 'gender identity', execute a masculinist trans rights political programme through the universities, the healthcare system, Gender Identity Development Clinics, the school system, the police and political parties in the UK. Through this politicised programme 'group think', the majority of the population - women - have a 'cis' identity foisted upon us and cries of transphobia are heard whenever a woman rejects the idea that male bodied humans are our 'sisters' (just because they say they are) and who, in the 'victimisation awards', suffer extreme oppression at our hands.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“The touchy feely intersectional feminism which is supposedly so 'inclusive' and 'kind' is more than just toothless in resisting patriarchy: it is another form of misogyny, aggressively helping to obfuscate and drown out, and even in some versions, to actively suppress, the very range of voices that make up feminisms constituency.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics