The recent outcry about M&S letting some people put their pronouns on their name badges felt uncomfortably close to clamouring to have M&S "cancelled".
I wasn’t particularly interested in that thread. I definitely don’t feel strongly enough to e-mail M&S so after reading the first few posts, I stopped reading. I think it’s obvious some women prioritize different things and are angry over different scenarios, and that’s their business.
But as you singled it out, I went and looked further (five pages in, I haven’t read the full thread) and I saw many different views being stated. Some posters were saying it’s useful, others were agreeing with your proposition, that e-mailing and calling for boycotts is an overreaction. “Looking for a fight” was one of the phrases used.
There certainly wasn’t an echo chamber or a blanket of uniform views. The OP had stronger opinions on this than I do, but there was no consensus of agreement, even among the posters who I think would consider themselves to be gender critical.
Compare that to the wall of out and out hate faced recently by Margaret Atwood for posting something about the word women being eroded. It’s not remotely similar and if you see it as such, then I think you are judging the two sides with a very skewed view.
You use the word “clamouring” but the reality in that thread is that the OP expressed quite a strident view, which very few people actively agreed with. A few felt strongly enough to e-mail, presumably politely objecting against the fact that introducing pronoun badges is a long way from being neutral, and probably also relating to the truth: that this is very often cynical virtue signaling on the part of these big companies, and really doesn’t indicate any real shift in values.
There were a couple of people saying they “made GC people (feel) unsafe. And that is very much a transactivist point of view, in my opinion. I really hope gender critical women do not go down that line as it’s very annoying to me. I can understand it would make people uncomfortable and perhaps feel less welcome, but the “unsafe” rhetoric is generally not backed up with any real evidence of risk.
One thing I can see is that introducing pronoun badges is far from being a neutral act. For me, it’s not worth fighting for, but I understand others feel differently and perhaps simply have more energy for calling out transactivism wherever they see it, whereas I tend to concentrate on supporting more major initiatives, where there are legal challenges, or government consultations that might sway the outcome of significant changes. But I don’t see those women, personally boycotting businesses and perhaps e-mailing their objections as anything like those posting death threats on Twitter and encouraging businesses to boycott women who express the wrong views.
A few women e-mailing M&S about pronoun badges is not the same as a few transactivists contacting an art gallery to complain they are selling the work of an artist who said something they don’t agree with on Twitter. The power and impact in each case is hugely different.
In the unlikely event M&S listen, then all that happens is a badge company makes different types of badges. Perhaps a few transactivists will be disappointed, but nobody is really losing out. Whereas if the art gallery listens and stops promoting that artist’s work, then their entire career can go down the pan.
Do you see that these things really are not the same? It’s not about the tone of the argument? It’s about relative power and how it is being used.