Conservative Magazine Wonders Why Women Don’t Accept Transphobia as the New Feminism

Nina Welsch thinks feminism ought to be based in evolutionary psychology.

by Evan Urquhart

In the USA, the rebranding of reactionary hatred of trans people as “feminist” has never really gotten off the ground. Sure, Nikki Haley will winkingly refer to excluding trans women from sports as “the women’s issue of our time” while on the stump, but everyone in America knows the women’s issue of the 2020s is the overturning of Roe vs Wade by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court. No one seriously thinks it’s “feminist” to be obsessively focusing on what bathrooms trans women use while, in red states in the US, pregnant women are being taken to the brink of death due to draconian abortion bans. In the UK, however, the branding of reactionary prejudice as feminism gained significant cultural purchase, aided by the wealthiest woman author in the world.

Enter Critic Magazine, a conservative magazine in the UK that focuses on culture war grievance, but in a highbrow way. (Like the Daily Mail, but for the rich. The Atlantic, in other words.) In an essay headlined “Feminism has a women problem” Nina Welsch (who self-identifies as a “young millennial”) describes an glaring inconsistency that anyone who’s done more than dip a toe into the current trans debates will recognize: While “gender critical feminism” claims to speak for women, cis women are more likely to vigorously stand up for the rights of their trans sisters, while reactionary transphobia is much more attractive to cis men. For example, in 2021 a Gallup poll found that women supported trans rights much more than men. Women were much more supportive of trans people serving in the military and of trans people playing on sports teams aligned with their gender rather than their birth sex. Similar results have been found in the UK.

If transphobia is mainly popular with men, this presents a clear problem for people who want to brand it as feminist and about protecting women. This is what our young millennial Welsch attempts to do in the piece, starting with an extensive riff on the topic of how mean women who don’t agree with her are, and how unfair it is when they call her side mean after receiving hundreds of harassing messages for posting in support of the trans community online.

screenshot from the Critic

Apparently, a couple UK women got into a beef online. The one who supported trans people was the victim of harassment, and Welsch thinks it’s unfair of her to have held the other woman partially responsible for the viciousness of her hangers on response to anyone who stands up for trans rights. It’s classic internet beef stuff, but Welsch is clearly feeling some kind of discomfort over the fact that the women being harassed online for supporting trans women are often cis. In response, after a lot more re-litigating internet drama, she attempts to define what’s feminist about her anti-trans views, and why the many, many cis women who disagree with her are wrong. It’s an illuminating look into the intellectual influences on the gender critical worldview (spoiler alert: one of the major influences is evo psych).

First, Welsch considers the view of “old school radical feminists” that women who support trans rights are suffering from internalized misogyny. She dismisses this, instead deciding that women support trans rights because it’s popular and helps their careers. “Feminism is the radical belief that women are people. People are selfish and pragmatic — and women are nothing if not pragmatic,” she says.

Leaving aside the fact that the opening anecdote was of a cis woman receiving harassment for espousing these supposedly pragmatically adopted views, the phrase women are nothing if not pragmatic hints at the direction Welsch is taking this, and that direction is evolutionary psychology. “To scratch the surface of female (anti)social behaviour leads to the squeamish territory of evolutionary psychology, hence why it is downplayed or evaded,” she explains, after a paragraph break.

Evolutionary psychology, for the unfamiliar, is a branch of psychology that tells stories about what early human experiences would have been like in hunter-gatherer times, and uses this framework to explain why social differences, such as the differences between men and women, are innate. It has been criticized for not being falsifiable, relying on storytelling and supposition rather than testable hypotheses and facts. Because it explains the current social order as based in nature and fundamentally unchangeable it is beloved by conservatives, whose political motivation is to resist attempts at positive social change.

The heart of the disagreement among feminist women who either support or oppose trans rights, according to Welsch, is whether it is “in women’s interests to acknowledge innate psychological differences in males and females.” There’s a bit of throat clearing where Welsch makes clear she understands that conservatives have used evo psych claims to support conservative agendas to roll back women’s equality in public life (selling this as beneficial to women because they will be much happier in their natural, subordinate roles), then launches in to two full paragraphs of credulous, poorly written, evo psych twaddle.

Here, have a screenshot:

screenshot from the Critic

This is, finally, gender-critical feminism laid bare. Gender-critical feminism (or “reality based feminism” as Welsch calls it) is a politically conservative attempt to sell women on the idea that they’d be happier if they simply accepted they were different from (and naturally subordinate to) men.

Did you catch the full absurdity of this move? Welsch above explained that she believes cis women support trans women, not because they believe it is right, but pragmatically, to get ahead in their careers. Doing or saying something amoral to get ahead in your career, commonly called ambition, is more stereotypically associated with men. However, Welsch’s conservative worldview, which is based in innate sex differences as imagined by evolutionary psych, cannot allow women to be motivated by ambition for themselves. And, of course, Welsch’s anti-trans views cannot allow women to be motivated by their genuine beliefs about what’s right and wrong. So she turns back to evolutionary psych and comes up with women’s “comparatively greater preoccupation with survival and protecting our kin” as the reason why women are acting in ways she believes are pragmatic for the advancement of their careers.

This is one of those times when the tension of conservatives pretending that attacking trans women is the new feminism comes apart at the seams. In order to explain what gender-critical feminism is, Welsch is forced to rely on sexist notions that women are fundamentally inferior to men from birth. It’s the entire ballgame of gender-critical feminism, laid bare. It’s unpopular with women because the bargain it offers is the very bargain feminism developed to oppose: The patriarchy declares that it will keep women safe if only they accept a segregated and subordinate place. The vast weight of human history has shown this isn’t so: Treating men and women as having fundamentally different intelligences, motivations, and drives has always been part of attempts to exclude, segregate, and diminish women as equals. Welsch’s flimsy attempt to explain women’s career ambition as somehow evolutionarily different from men’s ambition doesn’t alter this in any way. It’s just a sad reiteration of the commitment of gender-critical women to the slow erosion of equal rights in favor of “sex based” rights whose real aim is to relegate women back to a separated and subordinated place in public life.