I read that and felt certain he was misrepresenting the position of those who self describe as “ultras” on Twitter, but it has taken me some thought to define what I think he gets wrong. I get the impression he doesn’t have much time for them and therefore dismisses what they say without really listening.
My understanding is not that those women object to anyone using preferred pronouns ever. I think the objection is more to do with those who claim they are campaigning for women’s rights. I think the feeling is that, on a “gender critical” platform, so to speak, those speaking on women’s behalf ought to consistently put women’s rights first. In order to do that, it isn’t possible to include males like Debbie Hayton in your campaigning, because of the strong suspicion that he is outwardly supporting women in order to retain some of the privileges transactivism has given him.
So calling those men “she” and “her” weakens every argument we make that men are not women. At least, that is where I think the “ultra” label stems from.
It also cropped up when there were a group of medics who (like Dr Cass) use a lot of the language of gender identity ideology and took a kind of soft approach to the medicalisation issue. The argument is between those who openly state that they consider all medical transitioning is inappropriate and those who want a more softly, softly approach. The problem here, again, is blurred lines.
Maybe I have it wrong, but the women I know that call themselves ultras don’t want there to be any blurred lines about which men can safely be allowed to cross dress and enter women’s spaces. They reject the claim that any man should be in there.
They also see a risk in blurred lines around the idea that there are patients who would benefit from medical transition, if we can just find which they are, and that maybe we should still be taking it seriously enough to propose experimenting on more children. If you believe the whole experiment has been based on untruths and fetishism, from the beginning, then the straightforward answer is to stop medically transitioning and find a better path. Taking a middle path might easily slow or stop progress at that middle point, and then it might take much longer to reach the point when realization dawns that all medical transition is politically driven and not medically beneficial and therefore ought to stop..
A large part of the problem is, that there are indeed a large group of men who are now cross dressing in public, partly because it’s sexually arousing and that it used to be fully understood that part of the arousal was in watching women’s reactions. Men like him are unaffected, so it’s easy to dismiss.
It’s a form of sexual behaviour that used to be governed by societal norms, but has been normalised. I would ask, if men are allowed to wear anything they like, as long as there’s no public indecency, should it be argued they should also be allowed to wear gimp suits, as long as they are fully covered?
It is obviously a difficult line to draw, but blatant public displays of sexuality should be unacceptable, including some men who wear women’s clothing. If fashions become normalised, so that men’s clothing becomes more feminine, then of course men can wear dresses. But while a large majority of the men in dresses are performing their sexual fetish in public, they are only going to normalise it for other men who want to do the same.
I think the author is missing the nuance because he is male and men and women are not equal. There is still a big difference between women in men’s clothes and men in women’s clothes and it’s the sexual element, which is much more common among men, which is the complicating factor.
It strikes me that, in saying women can’t possibly have blurred lines around which males in women’s clothes leave women feeling safe and which don’t, all we end up with is different blurred lines.