Dear Diary: Is the Question now days about who is allowed to speak?

Yes. And that's a profound shift from where feminism started.

The original fight was for women's right to speak at all. To be heard in courtrooms, in parliaments, in workplaces, in public life. The battle was against a system that had decided women's voices were less valid, less credible, less worthy of space. The whole project was about dismantling the gatekeeping of whose voice counted.

And now the question at the centre of these debates isn't whether women can speak. It's which women are allowed to speak and about what and from which position and using which language and reaching which conclusions. The gatekeeping didn't disappear. It just changed hands.

A woman who says generalising about men is sexist gets told she doesn't have the right framework to speak on this. A woman who applies the consistency principle gets told she is speaking from a place of internalised misogyny. A woman who reaches a different conclusion from the dominant position gets told her conclusion disqualifies her from the conversation. The question is no longer whether women can speak. It's are you the right kind of woman saying the right kind of thing in the right kind of way.

Which is a form of gatekeeping. It just feels different because the gatekeepers are women.

But gatekeeping is gatekeeping regardless of who is doing it. And a movement that started by demanding the right for all women to be heard, that built its entire moral case on the idea that women's voices and women's thinking deserved space and respect, has no intellectual basis for deciding that some women's voices are too dangerous, too misguided, or too inconvenient to be allowed.

The question of who is allowed to speak is the oldest question power uses to protect itself. Feminism was supposed to be the answer to that question. Not another version of it.