Victoria Smith on Mhairi Black’s contempt for women who are older than she is:

Ageist sexism is central to trans activism. The idea of “womanhood” that it promotes is bound up in the social construction of femininity, whilst utterly dismissive of the material reality of ageing female bodies. Through history, patriarchy has not just sought to define and exploit women as a sex class; it has done so in different ways depending on where women are in the female lifecycle. Trans activism, as an expression of patriarchy, does this, too.

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Ageing female bodies interrupt the pornified fantasies of the likes of Andrea Long Chu, Julia Serano and Grace Lavery. They spoil the self-pitying narrative that depicts “cis women” as eternally youthful mean girls who’ve been handed “femininity” on a plate and, to quote Serano, “sadly take their female identities and anatomies for granted”. When Long Chu writes of transitioning “for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops and, my god, for the breasts”, it’s pretty obvious that the bodies being pictured here haven’t yet seen thirty.

No woman fully conforms to the male fantasy of untroubled “cis womanhood”, in which an ungrateful cohort of sexy ladies walk the world at peace with their bodies, secretly thrilled at objectification, only ever complaining to make those excluded from femininity (that endless Barbie dream house pool party) feel extra bad. It’s older women who offer the most direct challenge to the myth. Why don’t those bitches just, like, not age? I swear they’re only doing it to annoy India Willoughby. It’s bad enough that we carry on existing, but then we go and have opinions as well.

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Trans activism is just a variation on the theme of “if men see no obvious use for women, women don’t have any business existing”.

We have plenty of business. That is what, from one century to the next, misogynists struggle to tolerate. Karens, hags, shrews, mothers-in-law, witches — we’re not going anywhere. For the younger woman, there is a status boost in positioning yourself against us, but it’s all so obvious and so repetitive. If you really wanted to redefine what it means to be a woman, you’d join us. Why cling to borrowed time?