How TERF Island took on the trans juggernaut

The truth is, before they are revered, history‑makers are almost always reviled. From universal suffrage to the abolition of the slave trade, the freedoms we take for granted today began as the unpopular obsessions of the awkward and bloody-minded. Fiona McAnena’s TERF Island: How the UK Resisted Trans Ideology charts how just such a small group of determined women – mocked, maligned and misrepresented – dragged sex‑based rights back from the brink, often at huge personal cost. It’s the story of how they were hated before they became feted.

Part battle manual and part whodunnit, TERF Island is an insider’s chronicle of how a scrappy, unfunded grassroots movement of mostly middle‑aged women outmanoeuvred a lobby bankrolled by billionaires and cheered on by multinational corporations and well-intentioned human-resources departments.

I have been involved in the TERF wars for a decade, and I know McAnena herself is no bystander. Formerly a volunteer at Fair Play for Women and now director of campaigns at Sex Matters, she has done her time in the trenches, too. Each chapter is a vivid, accurate and compelling profile of a key figure in the movement, including Transgender Trend’s Stephanie Davies‑Arai, Fair Play for Women’s Nicola Williams, Let Women Speak founder Kellie‑Jay Keen and Maya Forstater, whose case against her employer established gender-critical beliefs as protected in UK law – all women I’m proud to know.

It’s almost hard to remember how recently it was considered heresy to say, to use the words popularised by Keen, that ‘a woman is an adult human female’. In April, the Supreme Court confirmed this truth in law. The BBC may still choke on it, but the legal precedent stands. Yet only a few years ago, saying this out loud could land you in a police station, on the dole queue or even in hospital.

McAnena captures the febrile atmosphere of those early days, when stating a biological fact was enough to have you smeared as a fascist. She takes us inside the campaigns that exposed the lunacy of housing violent male offenders in women’s prisons, the cruelty of sterilising confused children and the institutional capture of sporting organisations. Now, a decade after Davies‑Arai launched Transgender Trend, barely a week passes without a professional body or council quietly reversing a discriminatory ‘trans inclusive’ policy. That didn’t happen by accident.

What makes TERF Island so readable is that it doesn’t just document the headline moments. McAnena records the unglamorous grind: women lobbying MPs, poring over policy documents and calmly dismantling pseudoscience from stalls in the high streets of British towns. As McAnena puts it, the campaign against gender self-identification, which galvanised the resistance, brought ‘hundreds of women on to the streets and thousands more online to defend their sex-based rights’. ‘It was the catalyst for greater awareness, resistance and campaigning for the rights of women and children in the face of the demands of transgender ideology.’

Of course, it wasn’t just the women wot won it: from conservative Christians to free-speech libertarians, other factions in the broader reality‑based movement played their parts. Sometimes I wonder if each will have their version of this victory memoir. All of these strands mattered – but the loom was built, maintained and worked by women.

McAnena’s meticulous record also serves as a welcome corrective to the revisionist nonsense already creeping into the public imagination – the idea that the great ‘trans debate’ was a genteel exchange of ideas between reasonable people. In reality, the women at the forefront were treated as monsters. All they wanted was an open debate about the changes lobbyists were forcing through behind closed doors. And when they made that debate finally happen, in courtrooms and in parliament, the trans activists couldn’t defend their demands.

Institutions cowered, politicians waffled and much of the media dutifully regurgitated Stonewall press releases. But Stephanie Davies-Arai, Nicola Williams, Kellie-Jay Keen and Maya Forstater held their nerve and persisted.

TERF Island is, at heart, a book about courage – about the power to be found in conviction, and the innate sense of justice we each have. McAnena’s subjects didn’t just win arguments – they also forced institutions to reckon with reality, often at great personal cost, because they knew it was right. If you want to know how they did it, and why Britain has become the envy of women in countries still drowning in gender ideology, then TERF Island is essential reading.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of the upcoming book, Pornocracy. Pre-order it here.

TERF Island: How the UK Resisted Trans Ideology, by Fiona McAnena, is published by Spinifex Press. Order it here.