The false, dangerous kindness of Nora Mulready

By Victoria Smith

Picture the scene: your sister – let’s call her Susie – has brought home her new boyfriend (we’ll call him Bob). From the start you get the feeling something isn’t right. Is it the sexist jokes? The way he keeps mocking Susie’s appearance? That look that he gives which stops her speaking mid-sentence?

You’re worried and take her to one side. Isn’t Bob a bit, well, controlling? 

“Don’t be stupid,” she laughs, “it’s just his way.”

So you leave it, telling yourself the relationship probably won’t last, only it does. Two years later and they’re engaged. The jokes haven’t stopped but the looks have. He doesn’t need to give them any more. Susie knows when to shut up. 

By now you’ve researched coercive control. You’re going to intervene. Only this time Susie doesn’t laugh. She gets angry and won’t speak to you for weeks. When you try to call, Bob answers her phone. You worry you’ve made it all worse. By the time you’re speaking again, you’re so relieved you resolve never to try that again. 

Fast-forward another few years. Bob is now definitely one of the family. As for Susie, she hasn’t been well for some time but when you think about it, she’s always had mental health issues. You just never admitted it before and given her current condition, Bob has surprised you. He’s been a saint, dealing with all her finances and friendships. Sure, he still mocks her in front of the rest of you, but that’s black humour, isn’t it? It’s his way of coping. To be honest, you feel quite ashamed of your earlier views.

All that coercive control stuff? The thing is, it’s very judgemental. It’s so easy for feminists to sit there listing so-called “warning signs”. What takes real strength is staying quiet, listening and learning, and being humble enough to know that other people’s relationships might be beyond your comprehension. Indeed, you’re thinking of pitching an article on what you’ve learned. “I sympathised with domestic abuse campaigners – until my ‘controlling’ brother-in-law taught me the meaning of love.”

Processes such as the one outlined above take place in families, friendship groups and religious communities all the time. Whatever our principles, it’s incredibly hard to intervene when a person loves something – be it a person or an ideology – which could be doing them harm. Not only do you risk hurting their feelings, but you risk making their attachment even more intense. If they’ve been told that outsiders are plotting sabotage, your choice to speak out will only confirm it. Yet staying silent is hardly acceptable, either. I thought about this when reading Nora Mulready’s Independent piece, “I sympathised with gender-critical campaigners – until my nephew came out as trans”.

I hesitated before voicing any objection to the piece. If someone pitches love and compassion against critical thought, opting for the latter can make you feel as though you’re kicking a puppy. Boundaries become blurred. If you attack Susie and Bob’s relationship, aren’t you just hurting Susie? And if you criticise the sharp rise in female-to-male transitions amongst teenagers, aren’t you just wilfully invalidating trans kids? It’s a framing that allows for no middle ground. Either you accept things that are “far beyond [your] understanding and [your] experience of life” (Bob’s inner goodness, the idea of being born in the wrong body) or you’re the enemy. 

Mulready’s piece falls into two clear halves: 1, why I didn’t say anything about my feminist convictions in order not to offend my sister and her trans child, and 2, the arguments I now use in order not to be bothered by said convictions any longer. The arguments themselves are weak (skimming over the gross disparity in female to male vs male to female transition rates, feigning incomprehension at the idea female children might have different motivations to transition compared to male ones, before finally resorting to the racist argument that excluding males from female-only spaces is akin to excluding Black people from white ones). But none of this really matters, because the point isn’t constructing a coherent argument, but abandoning argument altogether. 

Mulready claims to have learned “a profound lesson: the importance of humility in the face of something you do not understand”. She reiterates the virtues of incomprehension in response to a twitter comment on there being no such thing as “born in the wrong body”:

“I used to think this, but now I think it is just so wrong to dismiss a person's innermost thoughts about their own self. The mind, the soul, the human: infinitely complex concepts, & no-one knows us like we know ourselves, so I choose to trust what people know about themselves.”

It sounds so nice, doesn’t it? And also so meaningless, since what is in doubt is not how someone feels about themselves – which is, of course, a matter for them alone – but what this should mean for our shared agreement on reality itself.

The response to Mulready’s piece has been largely positive. Indeed, you can feel the relief emanating from people who’ve been worried about finding themselves on the same side as those who send dick pics to JK Rowling or promote experimentation on growing bodies. It’s okay! You’re not turning a blind eye to abuse! You’ve being nuanced, thoughtful and compassionate! Nigella Lawson describes Mulready’s as “a small still quiet voice of calm”. It is as though being willing to change one’s mind is, in and of itself, a heroic yet humble act. Only it isn’t. Plenty of people abandon their principles for reasons of convenience, in order to avoid conflict or because they can’t deal with the guilt of knowing something while doing nothing about it. You decide Bob isn’t hurting Susie after all, or that binders and blockers aren’t a big deal anyway. It’s a coping mechanism, not the mark of maturity.

I don’t judge Mulready for not going in all guns blazing with gender critical arguments. I have several female friends who’ve had to tread carefully around teenagers wanting binders, knowing that an outright refusal would only increase the attraction (and confirm their own status as bigoted, uncomprehending Karens). Unlike me, these women don’t openly criticise the practice of crushing your chest until you can barely breathe in order to be one’s “true self”. They don’t dare and in their position, I wouldn’t, either. What I find objectionable is Mulready positioning silence as a virtuous learning process. “I stayed quiet, I watched and I waited.” And what did you find out? That inner lives are  “infinitely complex”. Well, yes. We knew that. But what about bodies in the here and now? 

You don’t have to agree with others – decide their partners aren’t abusive, or their politics aren’t self-harming – in order to love and support them. This is the real tragedy of pieces such as Mulready’s: that she makes the world seem an even more hostile place to her nephew by misrepresenting those who hold different views. There are plenty of gender critical feminists who embrace difference and do not see gender non-conformity as a passing phase, but as something to be celebrated. Their politics are not fuelled by “the same deep-rooted conservatism that has made human beings resistant to change throughout so much of our history”. It’s something more basic: fear of the long-term impact of medical experimentation, and an awareness that a sharp rise in the rejection of female bodies may have roots in misogyny that need exploring. 

This isn’t doubting how anyone feels; it’s taking a more cautious approach in how we respond to it. There are no easy answers. Nonetheless, having a change of heart and deciding there’s nothing to see here isn’t novel or thoughtful. Sometimes a strategic retreat is all that can be done in the face of unsafe relationships or beliefs, but let’s not make a virtue of it.