Is it neo-religious fervour that inspired CMK to act so badly and to see her 'sin' solely in terms of its effect on her fellow activists? To my mind, there is something like a call and response about the way that the argument has flowed over the years.
Take your pick of any call...
(Our)Call:
Sex matters and is immutable/there are 6500 differences between male and female people/sex is not a spectrum as people with DSDs are still male or female/male bodies which have been through male puberty retain male advantage/show me the third gamete/ a woman who has a double mastectomy or a hysterectomy is still female whether the removal is due to cancer or dysphoria etc etc
(Transactivist) Response:
'Look at this one Nature opinion piece article - GCs are ignorant bigots who need to educate themselves beyond high school science'
Call:
'Should an adult male-born person with a penis be able to undress in a communal changing room where teenage girls are undressing?
Is it still accurate that 95% of TW retain their male genitals or has that percentage actually gone up due to the explosion in numbers?
If 98% of sex crime perpetrators are male (and we are starting to have doubts about the actual sex of some of the remaining 2%) why on earth are any male prisoners being placed in women’s prisons?
What about 4th spaces to ensure the safety, privacy and dignity of women and girls?
Response:
'OMG, GCs are obsessed with genitals - you're disgusting'
Call:
'Can't you see that gender ideology is illogical/incoherent/misogynistic/ homophobic/particularly harmful to lesbians who shouldn't have to accept males in their dating pool?'
Response:
'TWAW. GCs are not pro women but all anti-trans transphobic bigots who are trying to take away our rights. And your views - < misstate GC views here>
make no sense.
Call:
'There is no such thing as a 'trans' child - just children with dysphoria/ it's impossible to be born in the 'wrong' body/ puberty is a tough but vital maturational stage and dysphoric children need talking therapy not drugs/this looks like eugenics for gay and autistic kids/we want to protect kids from making harmful decisions with powerful lifelong consequences for their future health, fertility and sexual pleasure which they may later regret
Response:
'GCs want trans people to not exist/genocide/kill themselves'
Call:
We are concerned about how potent (particularly for vulnerable people) the love bombing/TWAW mantras/no debate/encouragement of detachment from family/shunning of apostates/grooming of teenagers on the internet prior to a sudden declaration of gender dysphoria/magical thinking/group think etc might be.
Response:
'GC is a cult'.
Call:
We have had to raise many hundreds of thousands of pounds for court cases to protect the existing sex based rights of UK women and girls.
Response:
'GCs are funded by the American Christian Right . And btw 'sex-based rights' is a transphobic dog whistle.'
Call:
Many of us find ourselves 'politically homeless', we have cut up our Labour party memberships, we are apparently 'wrong' to say that only women have a cervix, we are dinosaurs hoarding our rights. After decades we have stopped buying The Guardian, we are told by the Lib Dems not to vote for them, the Greens use terf-blocker. We see that groups with similar views to ours are not even allowed a stand at conference. Although the GRA was a Labour Act, most of our current woes have been embedded in our institutions under a Tory government. We are Maria Miller's 'so-called feminists'. Right wing women are women. Things have got so bad that a politician who simply "knows what a woman is"
(and in the UK in 2022 it seems that only Tory politicians are currently free to express this) has become a measure of positive judgment.
Response:
"Serves you right, you right wing bigot."
And now (because someone apparently filmed a public event in a public place) 'GCs are alt-right/ literal Nazis'
Call:
We can see the authoritarianism of 'TWAW:no debate', the threatening black-bloc masked individuals at Manchester, Bristol and Brighton, the closing down of free speech, the questioning of Stickerwoman, the police visits for thought crimes and hateful haberdashery, the smoke bombs, the banging on windows to disrupt a wpuk meeting, the vilification of a left wing philanthropist like JKR, the secret recording of non crime hate incidents, the threats of sexual violence at Filia, the sacred caste, the capture of institutions, the expensive recourse to the law to uphold our legal rights, the women losing their jobs over tweets, the pile ons, the shaming, the substitution of gender in place of sex, the census debacle, the policing of language, the pronoun rounds, the 'die in a grease fire', the 'we've been using it for years so we're coming in anyway', the suspect training in schools, the safeguarding frameworks under threat...
Response:
"GCs are Nazis and fascists." 🤔
Call
'Look at all these creepy blokes using a trans identity as cover for their crimes' and 'look at the criminal record of these men who tried to remove single sex spaces'
Response:
< crickets >