Sarah Mittermaier interviews Sybilla Claus

Young Alicia is one of the voices in Gender Rebels. She loves kickboxing and teaches girls self-defence.

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This article is by the social scientist Eliza Mondegreen, a well-known figure in gender-critical medicine and therapy. For years she has researched online trans communities (FtM) and detransitioners, focusing on the central question of doubt. (See part two for the conclusions she draws from that research.) Mondegreen contributes her own chapter to Gender Rebels. Afterwards she interviewed Sybilla Claus for her Substack and sent the piece to her 7,000 subscribers.

Eliza: What inspired you to put together the book Gender Rebels?

Sybilla: 'It grew out of my worries about the girls of today. Take, for example, a teenage girl who was born in Brazil and moved to the Netherlands five years ago with her mother, when she was nine; she has become my little sister. She is the first person I interviewed for the book. Every month she struggles with hating her body when her painful period arrives. Ever since primary school, boys in her class have shamed and hurt her because of her body hair; they have scrutinised every part of her lovely body, from her breasts to her behind to her eyebrows, pushing her insecurity and anxiety to the point of panic. The same boys call girls whores, and kech (Arabic for whore). It is pure hatred of girls.

When I look at girls in the Netherlands today, they all tend to look the same: long hair, skinny jeans, make-up. You can barely find a girl with short hair, and the ones who do have it are often ostracised by other girls: "You are not a girl. You are not one of us." Young lesbians are asked if they are really boys and lured into medical transition. It hurts me to see mastectomies celebrated in my own queer community. We have traded female solidarity for the denial and abandonment of womanhood.

I am 65, and sometimes I wonder: whatever happened to all the ways you used to be able to be a young woman? There was far more freedom of expression in my student days than there is now. Why is it still so hard to be a girl and a woman? This little country below sea level is one of the best in the world: we have good healthcare for everyone, we look after the elderly and the homeless, we have equal rights, affordable education for all, the best cycling and mobility policies, we are prosperous, and we were the first country to introduce same-sex marriage in 2001. So why all this unhappiness among women and girls? As a writer and long-time journalist, those questions set me off on a quest to work out what is going on.'

Why did you choose Gender Rebels as a title?

'I was a student in the late seventies and early eighties. I remember being deeply confused about where I fitted in as a non-conforming, liberal girl in a male-oriented world. Looking back, I can say that second-wave feminism saved me. In those days no one questioned biology — that mammals, humans included, are sexed beings. There was no talk of choosing another sex.

There were only a handful of transsexuals: adult men who wanted to live as women and to perform a traditional female role (clothing, make-up, stereotypes) that none of us found appealing. All of our debates were about liberating women — and men — from the stereotypical gender roles that were narrowing our lives.

Gender meant confinement for women. Gender meant abuse, forced marriages, witch-burnings, rape and centuries of being denied an education. My own mother was sacked from her teaching job when she married my father. That was Dutch law at the time. I count myself lucky to have been born when I was.

My generation rebelled against those injustices on a huge scale, and that created enormous enthusiasm and a sense of empowerment. It was genuinely liberating. We took up martial arts to confront everyday violence. We developed self-defence courses for women in the Netherlands. We started women's bookshops, cafes, festivals, campsites, communal houses, bicycle and car repair shops, and we read up on women's history and the lives of women around the world. I myself studied female genital mutilation in African and Arab countries, and later everyday violence against lesbians in the Netherlands.

So for me the words Gender Rebels are tied to those good old feminist days, when we were working hard, in solidarity with oppressed women everywhere, for change — when we wanted to open up the world for women to take on new roles and act in new ways.'

What do you think has changed between your childhood and what girls growing up today have to contend with?

'We had no internet, no radical and unscientific gender ideology, and no orthodox Islam during our adolescence. In higher education we learned to read and to argue, to challenge ourselves and to test our ideas, rather than to feel hurt and to cancel other opinions on the basis of a single word or a false accusation.

These new factors are weaving a complicated web, interacting with older forms of oppression in novel ways and harming girls and young women in ways we have not seen before. The damage can be hard to see and hard to understand. So much of it happens online, or is packaged in an ideology of inclusiveness that comes at the cost of women, or is preached in foreign languages.

The children and young people of today have grown up with smartphones, fast internet and social-media platforms designed to ensnare youngsters, and girls in particular. In the book we have an interview with a psychologist who stepped down from an advisory board at Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) because these firms simply do not care about the wellbeing of vulnerable girls. They care about making money, full stop.

A large part of the book is devoted to the ways these online spaces harm girls, turn them against one another, or unite them in rejecting their bodies. Fanfiction communities are where millions of girls gather. Online is where they have developed all these theories about who is the biggest victim, who deserves the most victimhood points, who sits at the top of the victimhood and identity hierarchy.

Several brilliant young women writers explain how they came to identify as boys and men online, or how they found themselves writing only ever about boys and men, and how that reinforced the idea that you can escape womanhood.

You wrote a chapter yourself about your thesis on how trans communities deal with doubt, and how doubt is taken as proof of being trans. That section of the book is an eye-opener for any adult who has no idea what these girls are doing online.

The other important difference between growing up in my day and growing up now is that, back then, we were fighting together for a better world. Now we live in the age of the individual, who uses cosmetic surgery or mood- and mind-altering drugs to adjust personally to the world as it is. The very idea of women's liberation seems to have vanished, replaced by private dreams of success and perfection on the narrowest of terms.

Worldwide, breast augmentation is the most common form of cosmetic surgery — poor countries included. The more young women have cosmetic surgery, the harder it becomes for others to resist the pressure. We have a psychologist who explains how that mechanism works and how it shapes teenage girls. Girls feel a deep sense of not belonging and a profound disconnection from their own bodies, fuelled by unrealistic ideals: skinny limbs combined with big breasts.

From psychologists such as Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt we know that girls who are heavy users of social media feel worse. Every extra hour spent on your smartphone is an hour less for seeing friends, playing sport or sleeping. The numbers of young people who feel isolated and depressed, and who self-harm, have risen sharply over the past decade or so. Girls top all of these tables. Especially progressive girls, and especially girls who identify as LGBTQ+. It is a classic chicken-and-egg question: which came first? In north-western Europe, acceptance of this minority group is very high. In the Netherlands, almost every town now has a rainbow crossing painted on the street to show solidarity with LGBTQ+ people. So perhaps their misery has more to do with confusion about their identity and online addiction than with real oppression.

So I want to say: girls, no matter whether you currently identify as straight, bi, lesbian, non-binary or trans, listen up. You do not have to choose a permanent identity when you are young. Identity changes over time, particularly in women. I went from feeling lost, to calling myself Charlie for a year, to being 100 per cent lesbian for fifteen years, and back to living with men. I tried almost everything on the sexual spectrum, and I had a great deal of fun with many people. You never know what the future holds.

One thing I will tell you. I still suffer from what some people might call gender dysphoria. I am still learning to love my female body as it grows older and changes. After all those years of unnecessary bleeding (I never wanted to be pregnant) comes the menopause. It is hard to accept when your body ages and changes and you can no longer do all the things you used to do. What I feel dysphoric about is the role of women in society, not our wonderful bodies. That is why I wrote a chapter on sexuality for girls and young women. The key is to accept your body and love it. Otherwise you cannot develop a positive sexuality. And positive sexuality is such a gift from nature; its force can be empowering and make you feel invincible.

The last difference for girls today is the arrival of millions of Muslim migrants in north-western Europe. My generation witnessed and welcomed the retreat of the women-oppressing Christian churches, with all the abuse by priests and nuns. But now a new religious threat is on the scene.

Refugees warn us that the Islamist cultures they have fled hate women. Sharia is the most patriarchal of legal systems. We can see that clearly in Iran and Afghanistan. I see the rise of Islam in the streets of my own neighbourhood, where girls as young as ten — and in some cases as young as three — are made to cover themselves with the hijab. So we included a chapter by my heroine, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on the outbreak of sexual violence in north-western Europe that is a consequence of the millions of male migrants and refugees now living here, who see women as property rather than as independent human beings.

With this development, the separation of state and religion is under strain. We see the liberal mayor of Amsterdam — a woman — arguing that public-security officials should be allowed to wear the hijab on duty. How does that advance women's rights? Covering up the female body for men is plainly patriarchal thinking. We see a rise in honour killings of young women and girls in the Netherlands. We know that thousands of young Muslim girls in this country are oppressed at home.

This is a serious emancipation struggle and a major step backwards for the rights of women and girls in the Netherlands. And it is being completely ignored by liberal parties, which embrace Islam and overlook its harms, even as their inaction pushes voters towards far-right parties across Europe. Liberal parties today defend Islam's anti-women beliefs, calling the hijab, for instance, a matter of personal choice for women and ignoring the pressure women are placed under by their own communities. By the same token, those parties refuse to see the connection between the rise of gender ideology and the loss of women's rights.'

Tell me about some of the girls and women you met while putting this book together.

'Putting this book together was a wonderful time, working one-on-one with an ever-expanding group of women across the generations, finding our feminist strength and writing our way towards the best possible version of every chapter. It reminded me so much of the old days. Working as a group on a project to help young women and girls gave me wings. It made me feel so strong. Nothing beats working together with intelligent women towards the same goal: defending the rights of girls and women.

Eliza, I met you. How wonderful is that? I admired your work and I was delighted that you said yes straight away. You were the first person to do scientific research into online trans communities. I did a small experiment of my own, setting up push notifications from Reddit FtM groups for a couple of months, and it made me feel awful. So thank you for sticking with it and analysing those worlds for us.

Helen Joyce's newsletter, Joyce Activated, led me to dive into fanfiction. And after trying in vain for months to make contact with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I suspect that an email from Helen finally did the trick. (Helen, if you are reading this: I love you.)

When I invited another young woman by email to stay at my place if she ever happened to be in Amsterdam, she replied: "That won't happen any time soon, because I live in Russia." It was sad to hear we couldn't meet in person, but a joy to connect online with women all over the world.

I asked this young woman how fanfiction shapes the world of women in Russia. She analysed that world, in which she had been a participant for fifteen years, and told us about the difference between Western fanfiction and the Russian version.

I also felt a strong connection with a lesbian couple in the United States — Kitty Robinson and Max Robinson — even before I was in touch with them, because of their work. They have been collecting and sharing stories about violence by men who identify as trans against young women. So young, so sharp and so brave.

Another brilliant mind working with us is an American homemaker who calls herself Autist. Every time I came up with a new question, she would send me long replies that went into great depth and left me even more confused, because I already had to google every fourth word — partly because American online jargon is so different, partly because of the age gap, and partly because of my different, Dutch way of thinking. (Thank God for Hans, the translator, who helped wherever he could.) She writes about her fellow "weird nerd women", whom she loves deeply. She spent fifteen years inside the world of online fanfiction, and she explains how mostly young women with mental-health problems come together to support and bully each other by turns. It is in those worlds that ideas like cancelling, victim hierarchies, sharing your pronouns, labelling yourself with your mental and physical-health diagnoses (and self-diagnoses) and identifying as (gay) men first took shape. She shows how strong the group pressure is and how any criticism can lead to expulsion from the online communities that isolated girls and young women have come to depend on.

I wish I could visit all of these women in their faraway places. Online connection is wonderful, but for me, spending time together in real life, looking each other in the eye and embracing, beats everything.

Can I mention a really special man as well? He is a pathologist and a Christian, who was having to slice up more and more young, healthy female breasts on his research table. The unbearable sadness of that work made him start to question what is going on with transition surgery. His doctor's oath — first, do no harm — left him wondering and worrying about what is happening in the Netherlands. He is one of the very few critical doctors in this country, and I was delighted to be able to interview him for the book. Incidentally, Trouw, the Christian daily where I worked for almost thirty years, turned down an interview with him, denying its readers access to new information and to a different view from a fellow Christian. Do subscribers realise how liberal newspapers keep them in the dark?'

How did your ideas about the book change from start to finish?

'The shift from close to home to international is the biggest change. Originally, our think tank — a small group of feminists my age — had planned a book for a Dutch readership, featuring Dutch girls and women. But I was open to anything, looking for all kinds of feminist opportunities, perspectives, personal stories and research to include. It soon became clear that, because the Netherlands is so small and the gender-critical movement here is lagging so far behind, the knowledge I was looking for was to be found in the United States, Finland, Belgium, Denmark and the United Kingdom.

So we kept growing as a group. In the end it became a genuinely international project, telling the stories of women from across the Western world, and even Hong Kong. My first request to a printer was for a book of 232 pages. It has ended up at 368.'

What surprised you most in all the research, interviews and editing you did for the book?

'The fear that surrounds free feminist speech and writing in the West. It is astonishing how many ways there are in which women are not free to speak their minds. More than a third of the contributors to this book did so under a different name in order to protect their careers, their education and their safety. Is that some sort of world record?

Whatever happened to free speech and democracy? Other women chose not to take part out of fear of the consequences of appearing in a book that is critical of both gender and Islam. Others never even replied to my repeated requests.

One story has stayed with me. I had an interview with a wonderful seventeen-year-old. At nine, she had decided to get her hair cut very short, and afterwards she was bullied every single day at primary school by her classmates. I was shocked to hear it, but so pleased to be talking to her: she was one of the very few girls with short hair I could find. She looks brilliant, and she told me she is a lesbian.

This kid was good at football and was taking part in the regional training programme for talented girls. But on the first day of secondary school it was decided that the first-years would play mixed rugby in order to get to know one another. Within five minutes, a boy in her group tackled her so badly that a year later she was still struggling with a serious knee injury. Soon after our interview she had to go in for surgery on the knee. I didn't have the heart to tell her that this rugby tackle had probably put an end to her sporting dreams. The school never apologised; on the contrary, the PE teacher was on her back because she had missed so many physical-education lessons.

In her story I saw so many different forms of oppression coming together. The importance of safe and separate women's sport is so obvious. The freedom to be non-conforming without being bullied, or told that the way you wear your hair or the people you love mean you must really be a boy. She looks like the young lesbians who are queuing up at gender clinics, seeking transition, sometimes without even acknowledging that they are lesbians, because their gender therapists are too ignorant to ask.

She and her father liked the written interview, but her mother then stepped in and withdrew permission to include her story in the book. That was understandable, really, after the three years of abuse this girl had endured as a child. Even my efforts to protect all the girls and young women I interviewed by leaving out their surnames and the names of their towns were no guarantee. In the current climate, no one can predict what will happen if you appear in a gender-critical book with your life story and your photographs.

And you know what surprised me too, in a very positive way? The trust complete strangers placed in me. I have a good name as a journalist in the Netherlands, but what did people from other countries know? Could I deliver on what I had promised? And yet all of these individuals set out on a journey with me that often took several months to bring a piece for the book to completion. Thank you, ladies. I hope we will succeed in finding an English-language publisher so that you can read the other great chapters as well. The book brings together the voices of so many young women from every kind of background.'

How do you hope Gender Rebels will help girls?

'One psychologist told me that, after reading my introduction, she felt she had a better grasp of all the stressful things girls have to deal with today. I hope parents, teachers and professionals who work with girls and young women will take away even a little knowledge of how to help girls find their own path and their own happiness.

I hope that girls themselves will gain more confidence, learn to believe that their own bodies are beautiful and fight alongside us for the rights of women and girls around the world, rather than looking for new ways to opt out of their sex. I was sexually assaulted for the first time at thirteen. No one had prepared me for that. Young girls need to learn how to defend themselves physically, and to talk about how to ask for help in a threatening situation. An assault is never your fault.

Get away from that screen. Go and see a friend instead, play a sport, read, laugh, fall in love, hold someone's hand, experiment — within your own limits — with sex and relationships. Do things that make you happy. Girls in the West can be and do anything they like. Enjoy that extraordinary freedom. Accept yourself, build a dream and go for it. And never let yourself be pushed aside or stopped by silly gender rules.'

Read more from Sarah Mittermaier, formerly known as Eliza Mondegreen, at https://substack.com/@sarahmittermaier.