concludes:
“I can’t think of any genuine human-rights activism that demands attacks on the rights and protections of other civil-society groups, or advocates hateful language against them,” says Professor Bhatt. Trans activism is also unusual in that it gives men a chance to claim they are oppressed compared with women, and plenty of opportunity to tell women to shut up, says Ms. Gerlich. “It’s a postmodern patriarchal backlash.”
The code of omertà extends to academia. After lobbying by trans activists, Brown University in Rhode Island withdrew a press release about Prof. Littman’s paper on ROGD, citing concerns that it might be used to “discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.” Last year, Bath Spa University, in southwest England, rejected a proposal by James Caspian, a psychotherapist who specializes in transgender clients, to write a thesis on de-transitioning, explaining that the research might be criticised on social media and it would be “better not to offend people.” Kathleen Stock, a philosopher at Sussex University, wrote a Medium post in May about the lack of discussion of gender self-ID within academic philosophy. Trans-activists called for her to be sacked—and she received dozens of supportive emails from other academics, most saying they dared not speak out publicly.
The aim of all this, says Jane Clare Jones, a British freelance writer and philosopher, is not only to silence dissent, but to make it impossible to state any distinction between trans women and cis ones. Since women are oppressed because they are female, not because of feminine feelings or presentation, this linguistic erasure is “profoundly anti-feminist.” Statements such as “trans women are women” and labels such as TERF are what Robert Jay Lifton, who wrote about indoctrination and mind control in Maoist China, dubbed thought-terminating clichés: “brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases…that become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”
In the United States, criticism of gender self-ID is complicated by partisan politics. Women who elsewhere might sound the alarm do not want to be seen as in alliance with right-wing FOX News hosts and conservative Christians who are also against gay rights and abortion rights. The most organized opposition is in Britain, where government-mandated legislative consultations provided a focal point for campaigning groups such as WPUK. Mumsnet, a parenting website founded in 2000, is less hostile to women’s discussions of trans issues (though it now removes posts that “misgender” people). And the feisty British tabloid press has not shied away from covering rapists self-identifying themselves into women’s jails, boys allowed into Girlguiding and the like. The Daily Mail fought an injunction to be able to report on Jess Bradley, a trans woman suspended in July from the post of trans-rights officer at the National Union of Students because of allegations that she ran a blog named Exhibitionizm, where she posted pictures of her exposed penis, taken in public places and in her office.
The singular focus on gender self-ID, along with the shutting down of academic work on trans issues, harms not only women, but trans people. Although trans activists’ ire is focused on women who object to self-ID, it is overwhelmingly men who commit violence against trans people, a problem that by comparison is ignored. And other causes that are important to trans people, such as more research on the causes and treatment of gender dysphoria and its links with other mental-health issues, not to mention the long-term effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, have become taboo.
Overall, the push for gender self-ID does more harm than good to the interests of gender-dysphoric people whose main concern is to be accepted by members of the sex they wish they had been born into. And as we see more cases of people claiming transgender status in bad faith, we may see a backlash. “We were living quite happily in women’s spaces getting on with our lives before this stuff blew up,” says Melissa, the trans person I quoted at the beginning of this essay. Which is one reason why, far from supporting self-ID, she wants to see the rules for changing legal sex made tougher: “If you want access to women’s spaces, you should have to show you’re no more risk to women than other women are.”
Needless to say, she has been called “transphobic, a cis quisling, and a sell-out.” But women’s worries about their privacy and safety should not be brushed off or shouted down, she says. That is something women had to endure for millennia, under the old-fashioned patriarchal societies of yore. And they shouldn’t have to stand for it now that it has been rekindled under a new progressive guise."
quillette.com/2018/12/04/the-new-patriarchy-how-trans-radicalism-hurts-women-children-and-trans-people-themselves/
really worth a read and sharing