I have been thinking about this thread today and trying to work out the psychology among the cool girl academics (is there a technical term for this viewpoint?), of which there seem to be many in various different specialisms.
I find the intense focus the cool girls have on slating gender critical feminists (or ‘so-called feminists’ or ‘self-described feminists’ or ‘white feminists’ or ‘carceral feminists’ 
.. whatever that even means.. or ‘T*RFs’ or y’know, as they would have it ‘feminists of the past’ or ‘feminists of of a certain age’ ... it’s all really strange.
The cool girls seem to mostly reserve their ire for other women writing academic texts they don’t agree with or other women making public statements that they don’t agree with- activity/speech which is often described as ‘attacks’.
What I mean is that the cool girls seem to really care about what feminists have said or thought.
They’re really not out organising to make any changes to the system it seems. They don’t hardly mention or don’t critique - anti-women governments or judges or MPs or religious leaders or religious followers or whoever it is who actually has a lot of power and who essentially makes or maintains whatever situation: be it political, legal or practical- that the cool girls are objecting to.
It seems so pointless in energy terms, or likelihood of making change terms, to give off a load of vitriol about these bad feminists from academic women who are very anxious to call themselves feminists and be seen as feminists.
I suppose it fits the trend to reserve your energy for critiquing people who call themselves the very thing which you call yourself. Because identity is so very important. so it seems really key to the cool girl project to try to wrestle the feminist term back off those bad, old, not very nice feminists, rather than to criticise and try to tackle the actual power structures that are fucking things up.
I’m not being coherent but I just find it baffling that in a previous era where the apparently lefty academic folk devil would have been religious leaders or the right-wing government, now, it’s the wrong kind of feminist.
I wonder if it’s almost as if there is a teeny part of the cool girls that might have an inkling that their man-pleasing brand is well.. perhaps not very feminist.?
Hence the opprobrium aimed at any feminist women who points the man-pleasing, selling-out-of-other-women, aspects out to them. Is it not nice for the cool girls to have sunlight on their cognitive dissonance? Is that why it seems to important to discredit and silence the bad feminists? Because they make things awkward and off message by using the same term the cool girls use to self-describe and so the baddies fuck up the branding? Or is it something else?