Julie Bindel

Bindel in 2015

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Julie Bindel (born 1962) is a British radical feminist writer and bullshit peddler. Although she has done worthwhile campaigning for women, she is known for her more eccentric beliefs such as political lesbianism and particularly for her opposition to trans people.

She is firmly rooted in the second-wave feminism of the 1970s, and believes that more recent feminism has betrayed women by focusing on soft issues like equality in the boardroom. This is certainly a gross misreading, as third and fourth-wave feminism have covered an incredible variety of issues, such as the Everyday Sexism project tackling harassment in the street and on public transport, and acted against media sexism and the racist treatment of immigrants, as well as tackling inequality and harassment in the workplace (which is itself a serious issue). But anyone who disagrees with Bindel on issues like having sex with men, pornography, sex work, surrogacy, or how to dress, is seen as betraying women.

On the other hand, she has defended the right of women to enjoy alcohol and defended British DIY stores as essential to lesbian culture.

Life

Bindel was born in 1962 in Darlington, England.

Bindel is a prolific writer who has written for many publications; she is perhaps still best known for her work for The Guardian but also has contributed to many right-wing publications:

• The Critic
• Daily Mail
• The Spectator
• Daily Telegraph
• UnHerd

Her books include:

• Bindel and Harriet Wistrich, The Map of My Life: The Story of Emma Humphreys, 2003
• Roger Matthews, Helen Easton, Lisa Young, and Bindel, Exiting Prostitution: A Study in Female Desistance, 2014
• Bindel, Straight Expectations, 2014
• Bindel, The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth 2017
• Bindel, Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation, 2021

Campaigning

Bindel's youth was influenced by her time in Leeds in the late 1970s when the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe (known as the Yorkshire Ripper) was active in Northern England. Since then she has campaigned over various issues connected with violence against women. She has campaigned against rape, trafficking, and domestic abuse.

She founded Justice For Women in 1990, "as a feminist campaigning organisation that supports, and advocates on behalf of, women who have fought back against or killed violent men". It campaigned for Emma Humphreys, a Welsh woman convicted of murder for killing her pimp, and Sally Challen who killed her abusive husband.

Female separatism

She has written about the importance of political lesbianism as promoted by Tina Crockett and Alison Garthwaite in their pamphlet Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism in the late 1970s. In 2009 she wrote, "my lesbianism is intrinsically bound up with my feminist politics and my campaigning against sexual violence" and insisted "political lesbianism continues to make intrinsic sense because it reinforces the idea that sexuality is a choice, and we are not destined to a particular fate because of our chromosomes".

She said in 2015: "I would love to see a women’s liberation that results in women turning away from men and saying: 'when you come back as human beings, then we might look again.'"

She has called on women not to wear make-up, describing it as women "colluding in their own oppression", and claiming it is impossible for the wearing of make-up to be a feminist act no matter how you use it to present yourself.

She has also joked about wanting to lock up all men:

I mean, I would actually put them all in some kind of camp where they can all drive around in quad bikes, or bicycles, or white vans. I would give them a choice of vehicles to drive around with, give them no porn, they wouldn't be able to fight – we would have wardens, of course! Women who want to see their sons or male loved ones would be able to go and visit, or take them out like a library book, and then bring them back.

Hence, there is certainly an element of trolling in her work, while much of it is very serious business.

Sexual orientation

She has argued that sexual orientation is at least partly a choice in her book Straight Expectations, based on the fact that scientists aren't yet clear about the causes of homosexuality.

She has also been critical of bisexual women, claiming bisexuality was a "fashionable trend" and asking "What makes some of us uncomfortable with bisexual women?" She linked this with political lesbianism, saying, "I believe now, that if bisexual women had an ounce of sexual politics, they would stop sleeping with men."

She has also been critical of polyamory, equating it with traditional polygamy and condemning it as a fad.

In an interview on GB News in 2023, Bindel discussed her reasons for founding The Lesbian Project, citing the well-worn slander linking LGBT people to predators: "I don't want to be lumped in with minor-attracted persons – MAP – which is the latest addition to this rainbow coalition. Which means child abusers. I don't want to be lumped in with heterosexual kinksters. In other words, men that like strangling women during sex."

TERF

Bindel has repeatedly criticised sex reassignment surgery and opposed the notion of trans people, rejecting the idea that someone could be "trapped in the wrong body" as a patriarchal mistake that assumes innate differences between male and female minds or behaviour. She has stated that this is partly because she fears that as an adolescent girl who did not feel like a conventional girl, she could have been forced into sex-change surgery. Yet it is exceedingly unlikely this would happen, because of both the standards around gender reassignment surgery and the extraordinarily long waiting lists. She also seems to confuse being interested in things relating to the opposite sex with actually feeling you have been assigned the wrong sex, which are different things, and you get trans people with very different combinations of gender conforming and non-conforming behaviour.

In 2004 she received considerable criticism and was censured by the readers' editor of The Guardian for calling a trans woman a "man in a dress" in an article offensively headlined "Gender benders, beware". She later spoke on Radio 4 under the title "Sex change surgery is unnecessary mutilation". She has also referred to trans activists as "Queer Isis".

CL Minou in 2010 accused Bindel of inconsistency for arguing that gender is a social construct and biology is not destiny (when speaking on sexual orientation) but still being opposed to the idea that trans women are women, and hence being a biological essentialist after all. In 2016, Bindel wrote in the Daily Mail that she wanted to be a boy when she was young, which appears to completely contradict a 2007 article she wrote in The Guardian, where she wrote that she didn't want to be a boy when she was young, but rather a lesbian. She also acknowledged in the 2016 article that gender dysphoria can occur before adulthood, and in 2022 she stated that children with gender dysphoria had a "disorder". However, in 2023 she actually denied that there was even any such thing as a transgender child. This implies that transgender adults were somehow not ever also transgender in childhood.

In 2019, Bindel claimed to have been "violently attacked" by a trans women, Cathy Brennan (not to be confused with the infamous TERF), and Bindel then misgendered Brennan. Brennan denied ever touching Bindel, and said she had only pushed past a security officer to confront Bindel.

SWERF

See the main article on this topic: Sex worker-exclusionary radical feminism

She is clear about her opposition to any decriminalisation of sex work.

The English Collective of Prostitutes criticised Bindel for derisively referring to prostitution advocates as the "happy hooker crew", saying that Bindel "salaciously misrepresents" her opponents.

Deplatforming

See the main article on this topic: No platform

In recent years she has faced deplatforming from various feminist and left-wing events, due to her views on trans women.

In 2021, Melbourne bookseller Readings expressed regret for having had her speak at an event.

In 2022 she was banned from speaking at Aspley Library in Nottingham due to her views on trans rights being seen as incompatible with the council's values.