I think the campaign has been very carefully curated behind closed doors. If you look back a few years to the discussions about placing men in women’s prisons and giving more general access to women’s spaces, the entire discussion and action was usually carried out with the focus only on men who claimed they were women. If you ask for impact assessments, particularly with reference to women, not only do they not exist, but sometimes there is almost a dawning realization that everyone had literally forgotten about the potential impact on women.
So the background, in my opinion, is that until now we have had a series of waves, where groups were recognized to be oppressed or unequal, and moves were made to put legal processes in place to improve the situation. The earliest in the UK was probably women’s voting rights, gradually followed by other rights. Amongst other things, there were also changes made to improve equality for those with disabilities and homosexual people.
To me, and presumably many others, when the campaigning started for “trans rights” it was very much assumed that this was the latest in a line of groups that had been identified that needed their countries to put solutions in place for “problems” that were put forward. Those determined to do good (and politicians who wanted to be seen to do good) seized upon what appeared to be the next wave of equality campaigning. And having invested in it privately and publically, it becomes very difficult to back down.
It’s been very cleverly done. I don’t think we should underestimate the subtlety with which plausible people have been manoeuvred into positions of relative power. Men have inserted themselves into many leadership or influential positions within women’s groups and, having been sold the line that they were a terribly vulnerable group, who should be welcomed wherever possible, they generally were and it was only afterwards, when women who were not happy with the dynamic they brought, then found they were ostracized, rather than the male interloper.
So there is a background, not just of obvious misogyny, but of the expectation that women would be kind and accepting. They already had their rights, so they should be generous to others worse off than themselves. The sexism in our society and the expectations of greater tolerance from one sex, made this something of a slam dunk, I think. The fertile ground was that many of those groups you described were filled with those who wanted to do good and be fair to everyone. Unfortunately, they failed to see that the demands being made were not fair at all, and the power of the lobby, who established early that anyone objecting must be a bigot, meant that those who did object, were often pushed to the margins. That the capture goes so deep is, indeed astonishing, but I don’t find it so hard to see how we got here.