Brendan O’Neill is not a huge fan of Grace Lavery’s book.

I have never liked the term male privilege, but it’s hard to know what other term to use to describe a man writing a book about his ‘bellend’ – he uses that word – while fully expecting that everyone will acknowledge his ‘womanhood’ – he uses that word, too. His womanhood is his most ‘cherished’ thing, he says, which I found shocking because I had assumed it was his knob. If male privilege means anything, surely it is the fact that a dude can publish a book whose front cover features a photo of him with a five o’clock shadow and an iffy wig and still demand that everyone refer to him as ‘Miss Lavery’.

It’s male privilege in a dress.

Lavery is an associate professor of English at Berkeley in California. (Jesus Christ.) This book is about his gender transition. It is one of the most misogynistic books I have ever read. The way it talks about women and their bodies is repellent. Lavery tells his doctor he wants ‘titty skittles’ – that is, progesterone supplements to ‘enlarge one’s breasts’. Hot tip for Mr Lavery: women don’t refer to their breasts as titties.

That’s the whole point though. The whole point is to do it better than we do, to set us straight on how to do it, to let us know how boring and lame we are compared to daring witty say it all him. Women are horrible, it’s only trans women who are any good. New misogyny just like the old but with more taunting.

It is testament to both transgenderism’s and porn culture’s degradation of women as people with ‘front holes’ – as people with titties, people who bleed – that men can now openly fantasise about having a ‘pussy’ and be praised as progressive for doing so. The dehumanisation of women as ‘pussy’ is the prerequisite to their exploitation in pornography and the means through which their biology can be caricatured and appropriated by men who claim to be women. Porn and trans activism, as Mr Lavery perhaps unwittingly demonstrates, are not unrelated.

Very wittingly, I think. Lavery’s whole thing is being more “paradoxical” and “ironic” and “startling” than the next guy.

Of course he has a pop at Mumsnet. The woke set’s loathing of Mumsnet is such a red flag. They just cannot believe that mothers and other ordinary women are allowed to associate freely and have critical conversations. Shouldn’t they be in the kitchen or chestfeeding their kids? Lavery goes on to say that there is ‘something stranger’ underneath ‘the whole phenomenon of British gender-criticals’ – he calls it ‘the problem [of] leaky boobs and the school run, the revenge of feminist grievance against feminist pleasure’. The ‘sourness’ of these harridans who dare to say men aren’t women represents a ‘loathing of the trans woman as a figure of pleasure embodied’, he says.

Nah not a figure of pleasure embodied, a figure of leaving all the cooking and dishwashing and laundry and childcare to that other person in the house, the one who doesn’t matter.

I was tempted to refer to Lavery as the Rachel Dolezal of transgenderism. But actually, he’s far worse than Dolezal. To be like Lavery, Dolezal would need to go on endlessly about the glistening skin of blacks, and how she longs to achieve their full-lipped look, and how she longs to see and grasp those famous full-bodied black cocks. If Dolezal did any of that, we would recognise it instantly as vile racism. So why are so few people willing to call out the sexism of trans activists who believe that blokes can become women simply by announcing that they are women, simply by imagining that they have a pussy, simply by taking some titty skittles so that they can look like those sluts in porn films? Ms Dolezal is white, and Mr Lavery is a man. We just have to start saying this now, out loud.

Been saying it out loud, for years now.