I’m sorry Eddie, but it isn’t an “honour” to be a woman

Eddie Izzard recently spoke of her joy at being “promoted to she”, but in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder, womanhood doesn’t seem much worth celebrating

On 11th March 2021, Labour Party MP Jess Phillips stood up in the House of Commons and read out the names of all the women murdered by men in the UK in the previous year, something she has done every year since 2015.

Around the same time, British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard, who came out as trans in 2017, gave an interview to the Guardian in which she said “I’ve been promoted to she, and it’s a great honour.”

Sadly, the coalescing of these two events led to this rather unfortunate front page:

The words “I’ve been promoted to she. It’s an honour” above the faces of just 16 of the 118 women murdered by men in the last year. Yeah. It’s not hard to see why people were highly critical of the page.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the Guardian are guilty of anything more than making a completely tone deaf editorial decision, but it exposes a deeper problem: society’s lionisation of womanhood, which is completely at odds with the actual experience of being a woman.

I don’t mean this as an attack on Eddie — she couldn’t have know when she gave that interview how her words…