Like the suffragettes, JK Rowling and the sisterhood are ignoring the hatred and ridicule to focus on organising resistance

The cartoonists who lampooned the suffragettes only had two jokes. Either they drew a female head in some cruel device which trapped her tongue — if only! — or women were depicted at rallies, while back home husbands burnt supper and babies wept.

“At the suffragette meetings,” reads a caption of a cartoon where attendees are wrinkled, cross-eyed and blotchy, “you can hear some plain things and see them too.” Another shows an imaginary pub populated only by women, drinking, smoking, talking together, with, outrageously, not a man in sight.

Loose-tongued, unnatural women, too old to please the male eye, carousing, plotting. A witches’ coven, a monstrous regiment. Even today, women-only gatherings are treated as suspicious and self-indulgent. What are these bitches up to?

When JK Rowling hosted a River Café lunch last week she invited women who’d fought lonely battles for their gender-critical beliefs. Some were ostracised at work, even fired: academic Kathleen Stock, tax expert Maya Forstater, journalist Suzanne Moore, barrister Allison Bailey, Labour MP Rosie Duffield. Others were lesbian heretics who won’t bow to the gender transubstantiation that women can have penises.

Rowling chose them because great wealth brings privilege but also isolation. Who could understand how it feels to be trashed at the Oscars, erased from your billion-dollar franchise, receive constant death threats? Women who on a smaller scale had suffered the same.

So she gathered the sisterhood, fed them posh pasta and fizz, then posed in their drunken embrace. Not as JK but Jo. The photos went viral and so inevitably did criticism: that the butch lesbians looked manly; that they were dining “in chic spaces quaffing expensive wines”, as ex-ambassador Craig Murray complained; that their bodies were old.

Never, ever underestimate women’s power to organise. This is the political lesson since Maria Miller’s 2017 inquiry recommended that anyone should be allowed to change legal sex via self-declaration. Although this had significant implications for women’s services, sports, prisons, safety, privacy, Miller didn’t consult a single women’s organisation. How could that be?

Back then concerned women turned to their trade unions, progressive political parties, human rights organisations such as Liberty, Amnesty or PEN, to sporting bodies, think tanks, even women’s charities like the Fawcett Society. And every one turned its back. When women spoke out, then were bullied or lost work, civic society let them hang.

Women have since relearnt an ancient lesson: if we don’t defend our rights, no one else will. A policy analyst told me she’d read that trans prisoners including rapists were housed in Scottish women’s jails and wondered idly if an impact assessment had been conducted into the effect on female inmates. She checked. There had not. Puzzlement turned to concern and anger. Then she got organised, helping form the feminist policy analysis collective MurrayBlackburnMackenzie.

Gradually women realised they’d been looking the other way while lobby groups, especially Stonewall, were secretly urging government bodies, charities or businesses to redefine womanhood and strip our rights. They were easy to persuade: the default expectation is we must consider others’ feelings even at our own cost. Women were astonished that, for example, Girl Guides allowed male teenagers to self-identify into female overnight accommodation. Who signed that off?

Yet women had nowhere to debate these extraordinary changes. Many flooded Mumsnet, where left-wing men delving into the forums emerged, like anti-suffragette cartoonists, aghast that mothers weren’t talking about nappy rash or recipes, but their own rights. Imagine!

Then Woman’s Place was founded by left-wing trade unionists with the central pledge “nothing about us without us”, followed by Fair Play for Women, which aims to protect female sports, and latterly Sex Matters, a feminist think tank run by formidably clever women including Maya Forstater.

These organisations began at kitchen tables, staffed by volunteers via £20 personal donations. Yet they are defamed as far-right-funded, Christian fundamentalist, anti-abortion, bigoted, hateful. Woman’s Place meetings on issues such as childbirth or male violence are still aggressively picketed, so their venues are only revealed on the night. The first ones felt electrifying, samizdat. You had to remind yourself they were doing nothing more radical than upholding the 2010 Equality Act.

Middle-aged women’s bodies may sag, but their will is of granite. Tenacious, with high boredom thresholds and a talent for cutting through bull, if they lose one battle, they reconfigure, crowdfund and start again. This is an accidental movement of women who’d rather devote their lives to progress but find themselves fighting to stop a backwards slide of rights.

They have vowed never to be caught napping again, so nothing will get past them, and as a political force gender-critical organisations are here to stay. Already the “if you don’t respect my sex you won’t get my X” local election campaign has made Labour leaders tone down their biology-denial, sensing they have lost women’s trust and thus can’t rely on their votes.

Nothing about us without us. No kidding. Just this week Camden council, which spent £10,000 painting trans flag road crossings (despite warnings they endanger the visually impaired), is refusing to repair gents’ public lavatories so women must now share theirs with men. Meanwhile a non-binary male has cancelled his £15,000 sponsorship for the Women’s CiCLE Classic because British Cycling won’t permit a trans rider, Emily Bridges to participate. Do you really think women will simply let their loos and cycle race be lost without a fight? Deeds not words, as the suffragettes used to say.

Excellent piece.