FFS Friday: Magdalen Berns

May 9, 2025

FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable.

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FFS Friday typically honors women and girls who are speaking out today. I’m making an exception this week to honor Magdalen Berns, who would have turned 42 on May 6.

Magdalen died of brain cancer on September 13, 2019. She is known and celebrated by TERFs everywhere for her sharp wit and her refusal to bow to the lie that some men are women. She was an active YouTuber and co-founded For Women Scotland, which recently secured a ruling in the UK Supreme Court clarifying that the word sex is defined biologically under the UK Equality Act.

Her birthday was on May 6, and she would have turned 42 on that day.

Magdalen was born on May 6, 1983. The following tribute was posted by The Attagirls (@TheAttagirls) on X on her birthday this year, as their Woman of the Day post. It provides more detail about her life and some of her pithier quotes:

Woman of the Day Magdalen Berns, born OTD in 1986¹ in London. Prize-winning boxer, vlogger and co-founder of For Women Scotland, she was a lifelong activist and a fierce defender of women’s rights.

Fascination with coding drew her away from boxing (she was a universities boxing champion and won the Haringey Box Cup in 2010), away from her work as a sound engineer and from her physics studies in Edinburgh - but it was her commitment to women’s sex-based rights that became her driving force.

Magdalen began making videos at the University of Edinburgh in 2015 spelling out in the clearest possible terms the threat to women - and especially to lesbians - posed by the deliberate attempts by trans activists to blur sex and gender and to redefine ‘woman’ as anyone who says he is. She didn’t pull her punches.

“There’s no such thing as a lesbian with a penis.”

“Trying to shame lesbians for being lesbians is intrinsically homophobic and misogynistic.”

“It is not hate to speak the truth.”

“I’d rather be rude than a f—- liar.”

Investigated by a Student Union desperate to find her guilty of some sort of offence and thrown out of several students groups, a defiant Magdalen used her videos to reach the widest possible audience and alert everyone to the enormity of what was going on: no less than the barefaced theft of womanhood itself. Her YouTube videos became compulsive viewing and achieved a following of nearly 45k subscribers.

“I am a lesbian (not the political kind); a physics graduate (University of Edinburgh); a FLOSS accessibility hacker (the legal kind); an XX feminist (not the fun kind); ex-amateur boxer (the competitive kind); a blogger; an activist; a cultural libertarian; a Londoner; a critic of religion, capitalism, identity politics, conservatism, neoliberalism and socially imposed gender norms.”

In 2017, Magdalen was invited by her friend Marion Calder to meet with two other women in her living room. Marion, Trina Budge and Susan Smith found each other on Mumsnet, that hotbed of radicalism and motherhood, and realised that a new feminist group was needed. They launched For Women Scotland in June 2018.

Magdalen already knew by then that she’d been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer but she was determined to use the time remaining to her in the cause closest to her heart.

“It’s a difficult thing to be told that you’ve got something that can’t be cured, but I’m not going to let it define me.”

She gained a new follower while she was in a hospice in Edinburgh: Joanne, a writer sometimes known as Robert Galbraith, who got in touch and began her own journey in the defence of women’s hard-won rights. The rest, as they say, is history.

I’ve spoken before of the quite lovely invisible threads of sisterhood connecting women in history to each other.

Olympe de Gouges’ 1791 Declaration of The Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen influenced Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. Mary inspired Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Elizabeth, a vocal supporter, reflected Mary’s views in her verse-novel, Aurora Leigh, which in turn influenced Susan B. Anthony’s thinking about the traditional roles of women. Susan’s fight led in time to the Nineteenth Amendment which finally granted American women the vote in 1920.

One of the invisible threads connecting us today leads directly back to Magdalen. In her sharply intelligent, uncompromisingly honest and wickedly funny manner, she said what so many women were thinking. She made us feel less alone. Her clarity of thought, her determination and spirit, were so integral to the gender critical movement that she is still an inspiration to women everywhere.

When her many friends gathered at Holborn’s Conway Hall on Burns night in 2020 to celebrate Magdalen’s life, which was tragically cut short on 13 September 2019, Marion said, “She wanted everyone to all be together, to chat, to have a glass of wine, to be able to disagree. She was totally against any form of purity politics…What Magdalen wanted was for everyone to have a good time: talk to each other; get to know each other. She, as we all know, was a big fan of a party.”

How proud Magdalen would be today to know of For Women Scotland’s stunning victory on 16 April 2025, when her three friends secured a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court that women means biological women.

The ramifications of that are only just becoming apparent. Forget the WEF; this is *our* Great Reset. It torpedoes fifteen years of deliberate obfuscation and downright lies. We know we are back to square one. We know that we will have to retake the whole field inch by inch. But we also know that we have the law behind us now and we will win.

Magdalen left us too soon but her spirit lives on.

“I love you guys and I love the community that I’ve created here, and I hope it continues…For other people to do the same and stand up for what you believe in. Because, as I’ve always said, there’s a lot more to worry about than being called silly names.”

Her YouTube channel lives, as does Mr. Menno’s outstanding tribute to her (please watch it). If you don’t know her, please check her out. You won’t regret it.

One of the many things she said was, “By acknowledging reproductive sex, feminists are able to challenge the ways in which society is structured to disadvantage female people on the basis of their biology. Women fought hard to get sex-segregated spaces written into law in the West and now they are being taken away. It is our business to defend these rights.”

The last words I heard her say on YouTube were, “Keep fighting.” And so, we shall.

I never met her in person, but we interacted a bit online. On the day she died, I dropped everything in order to do nothing but watch her videos and grieve. She didn’t know me, but I miss her. Magdalen, if, somehow you can hear this, today’s FFS Friday is for you. Happy birthday, queen.

1. I reached out to The Attagirls to clarify whether her birth year was 1983 or 1986. They confirmed that it was 1983, and that their use of 1986 was in error.