As an International Woman of Mystery, today is my lucky day. Apparently, it’s International Women’s Day, and so obviously there is a hashtag and a meaningless gesture, which these days counts for activism. 

The official theme is #breakthebias, which is as innocuous as it is futile. People – not women, because the word ‘women’ is now controversial – are asked to pose, hands crossed upwards, to share as a selfie on social media. This is supposed to be part of imagining a “gender-equal world”, one free of “bias, stereotypes and discrimination”.

Except the Gender Recognition Reform Bill tabled in Scotland last week would mean that a man could identify as a woman and receive a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) within months, and without requiring any medical report, rather than by providing evidence that they have lived in their gender for at least two years.

It renders the term ‘woman’ somewhat pointless, as this is essentially self-ID. That’s a pose.

Still, what is a real woman? I have always been the wrong kind myself: too stroppy, too outspoken, too graceless. But now, though, I am strangely convinced that because I have female biology, I am an actual woman. (The gender rules of femininity that I have considered innately dumb my entire life make me neither a wannabe man, or non-binary, or anything special.)

As a feminist, though, I would indeed like the world to be a better place for women – and by the world, I don’t mean north London or a campus in California; I mean Herat, Tigray, Guatemala. For all the arguments about equality for women amount to nothing if we lose an international perspective. Feminism is global, or it is simply an exercise in consumer power dressed up as politics. That is exactly what happened to Western feminism in the 1990s, when everything from brunching to boob jobs was “empowering”.

If International Women’s Day means anything, it means facing up to what is happening to women everywhere. We have gone backwards, not forwards. The pandemic is part of this, but not the only factor. The UN estimates that women are doing more caring and household chores than ever. Women the world over do this unpaid work in the name of “family”.

Nearly 10 million women are in precarious positions in terms of access to contraception and abortion, according to Marie Stopes. Closer to home, rape convictions are at an all-time low. In the first three weeks of lockdown, 16 women and children were killed in their homes. This is called domestic violence. I just call it male violence.

The pandemic worsened every existing inequality, but before Covid women’s rights were already in reverse. Women are in lower paid jobs often because of trying to juggle kids and work. Childcare costs are prohibitive. Women were more likely to be furloughed and took on the lion’s share of home-schooling. The gender pay gap has increased, from 14.9 per cent in 2020 to 15.4 per cent.

In short, without a continual fight, no headway is made. The biggest surprise to me, though, has been  that the backlash against feminism has come not from the Right, but from the Left. The whole inflated debate around trans issues is so often not about the small number of people who are gender dysphoric, and need care and dignity; it is about the rights of women to keep what we already have. It has produced an avalanche of repulsive misogyny.

The new religion of gender identity (is it a soul, an essence, a made-up concept?) has meant a fundamental denial of women’s experience: menstruation, birth, breastfeeding, menopause. These are not feelings in ladies’ heads, but things that happen to real bodies. As does rape, objectification, FGM, as well as all the societal expectations women deal with on a daily basis.

Nicola Sturgeon, who identifies as a feminist, is pushing through a law that will affect the most vulnerable of women: those in prison and those rape victims who might not want to be around women with intact male genitalia.

In Holyrood, Shona Robison said there was no evidence that predatory and abusive men “have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour”.

Wayne Couzens? Catholic priests? The stepfathers and ‘kind’ uncles who abuse kids? Is this woman serious? Apparently so – and while the conflation of trans people with predatory behaviour is incorrect, so it is also incorrect not to see how abusers use every loophole in the law.

But – hey, girls – this apparently is the way forward! Scotland, remember, has already approved at least 50 under-18s for double mastectomies, euphemistically known as “top surgery”.

Forgive me, then, if I do not celebrate International Women’s Day when so many political parties are kowtowing to this woman-hating religion. Forgive me if I think “non-binary” is just another way of creating a new binary, and saying “I am special” and you are not in my tribe. Forgive me if I think that, in so much of the virtue-signalling we will witness today, it will likely be that there is little “international” about any of this.

Sure, I will strike a pose and do the hand gesture – but it will not be a benign, flappy cross: it will be rude and unfeminine.

And it won’t be a pose. For being a woman means living in the real world, in female bodies.

Time to respect that one day a year, perhaps?