How Trans Activism Became So Radical

[UtopiaPlanitia]

I’m reading this essay and thought it might be something others would find interesting. It’s focused on the USA but American culture exported itself here so it’s still applicable.

I’ve included some sections below to give a flavour of the piece.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-trans-activism-became-so-radical

How Trans Activism Became So Radical
The trans movement won the lottery. Then they lost it all.

As the backlash to transgender activism went mainstream in the United States, so havepostmortems of the movement. A sharp declinein public support now has large majorities of Americans rejecting policies such as trans women in female sports, which a 2025 New York Times/Ipsos survey found 79% of Americans and 67% of Democrats opposed. In 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Skrmetti that states had the right to ban youth gender medicine. And in 2024, President Donald Trump soared to electoral victory on the wings of his “Kamala is for They/Them” ad campaign, which, according to an analysis by the super PAC Future Forward, shifted the race 2.7 points in his favor among voters who saw it. With progressives’ iron grip on the culture loosened, and trans politics definitively revealed as a losing political issue for Democrats, commentators have fallen over themselves to criticize the counterproductive aspects of trans activism, or to suggest alternative policy approaches. But when writers and talking heads assess “what went wrong,” they usually do so through the lens of “what did the trans movement do that caused such a fierce backlash?” The question that often goes unasked is: “How and why did the trans movement become so radical in the first place?”

The answer is layered and multifactorial, but it also boils down to human nature: trans activists tried to bully their way to progress because they believed they could—there was a moment of opportunity where the movement had the wind at its back and there was a tendency (which proved disastrous) to be as ambitious as possible. Any accurate analysis has to start and end there.

…As so often, politics lies downstream from culture. Once we understand the cultural trends of a particular moment in time, the ruinous decisions of a small number of activists—who could have followed the consensus-building, coalition-expanding playbook of the gay rights movement but instead embraced extremism—begin to make sense.

The first thing to recognize is that trans rights was poised to become a major issue almost no matter what happened within a more narrowly political sphere. Trans visibility in popular culture and in online discourse had been steadily increasing throughout the 2000s andearly 2010s.

…Facile theories that pin the blame for the movement’s radicalization on a shift in resource allocation following Obergefell don’t fully explain the illiberal turn—most of the groups in this space had been decidedly liberal up to that point. But at this moment in the 2010s, social media pushed a more radical turn in the discourse all across the society. And dynamics within the trans movement itself broadened the definition of trans in a way that became purely political—and that had a pronounced radicalizing tendency.

…It’s not difficult to see why many found the view of trans as an identity to be affirmed less demeaning and more uplifting than viewing it as a disorder to be treated or a condition to be managed. In practice, however, this rejection of “gatekeeping” opened a Pandora’s box that dramatically expanded the trans community with an influx of people who were, for lack of a better term, politically trans.

…A tragic irony here is that this eschewal of medicalization did not stop activists from making youth gender medicine integral to their policy agenda

This is also good from ArtyMorty's reply:

"Trans really is not a legitimate social movement in the sense of a fight for equality for a fundamental, rightful, material category of people.

And it should never have been framed as that kind of thing.

Your mistake is even comparing it to women's rights and civil rights when it's better off being compared to other categories of things, such as, say, the right for people with anorexia to have access to compassionate, proper medical treatment for their condition (with the optimal outcome for all anorexics being CURING them of it), or the right of Scientologists to believe whatever cockamamie theories they want about themselves, but at the same time recognizing that their religion is cult-like and extreme and not to be taken at face-value in the secular sphere (with, again, the optimal outcome for Sceintologists being for them all to ESCAPE from it).

Humans cannot change sex, and the desire to do so is almost entirely rooted in sexual paraphilia, internalized homophobia ("ego-dystonic" homosexuality, or gays & lesbians who badly want to escape the label "homosexual", usually for cultural reasons), and other maladaptive, socially and psychiatrically un-ideal reasons.

Many (though not all) of the movement's fundamental objectives were illiberal and unethical right from their dubious foundations, which lay in a kind of gray area between fantasy and reality, and between appeasing mental health disorders and holistically treating them."

And Eva Kurilova's piece is excellent and has such great explanations and examples. Just adding the link again here for myself and in case anyone missed it. Thank you Utopia.

www.evakurilova.com/p/trans-is-nothing-new-and-neither

<duplicate deleted>

That's awful - I'm sorry that happened.

The first discussions I remember being involved with on here (FWR) were in 2016/2017, when the Olympics rule change (testosterone < 10) came in, and women were starting to say hang on a minute, WTF!?

I started posting on here at about that time because it was the only place I could find where you could actually have a discussion about this and challenge the line that men were women if they said they were.

I think it might have been different on other parts of mumsnet like AIBU.

I don't think I was aware of the Feminism board on here back them so I can only assume it was AIBU or Chat. But if I recall correctly, the vast majority were not helpful at all.

I can imagine.

I think some of us venture into AIBU threads when we see them. Five years ago, it would feel like you were needing a shield of extreme confidence to enter though because there were a lot of posters who would complain about another thread about trans people or would be very happy to declare people bigoted and hateful. There has been a change though. As more discussion has been had, and situations such as Isla Bryson etc have occurred.

I hope your daughter and her friends got good support from you and in the end, from those who had the role to protect her at school from what had happened.

Which is of course the most classic male pattern behaviour. "trans" is mostly just another aspect of patriarchy, men getting their revenge on women for us daring to expect equality and fairness. Another way men show us how much they hate us and how much more power they have than women - like "black face" and "minstrel" shows when Black power was fighting for equality. Men will fight to the death to hang on to their privilege.

Yes. It would appear there are 2 golden idols in this world that cannot be criticised. "trans" and "islam" both operate on the level of blasphemy laws, they have been granted sacred status by men. And are oddly similar, both of these ideologies are hugely male privileging, disparaging and downgrading women and girls. Both demand that everyone agree with them on pain of severe violent punishment and that the law must support their every demand, no matter how extreme. Both treat women as a servant class, only needed for procreation.

As far back as 2012, threads on FRW were warning against TRA. Trans threads were 'contentious' even then. I'm sorry that your thread was missed Holdmecloser, if it were picked up by FRW at the time, you'd have recieved lots of support and practical advice.

The success of TRA has been its ability to have lots of, often conflicting, rationale. So, it could be actual sex change; gender not sex; people trying to get at close to their desired sex through surgery and hormones; expanding the definition of women and men; dsd of the brain; intersex; this man looks so much like a woman, why wouldn't you treat him as one; stop imposing beauty standards on trans people, he's no less of a women for having a beard, and one that seems to work in court, he believes he's female.

So in any given situation, with any given man, it could be argued that he is a woman. What will happen is the rationale will change - so hormones and being marginalised become important for sport, not gender. Gender is important in book groups, not surgery.

That and the idea that, to maintain a private life, a man's sex should not be declared. He can be obviously male, but no one is allowed to acknowledge it.

Yes - and this speaks to the dizzying reversals and denials of previously stated "trans facts". I know that recently we've been told that it's not sex change but is gender change so there's no no need to worry about the fact that nobody can change sex as that's not what trans people are saying.... 🙄🙄

Agree. The activists had to demand No debate' and 'Acceptance without exception' because any debate or scrutiny showed their men's rights and fetish movement for what it was.
Any ideology which starts from that position is doomed. It was only the bullying and intimidation of women that allowed transgenderism to take the hold it did. It was bound to crumble as soon as people started to see the mission creep and get past the smears that anyone who questioned it was a right-wing nut-job or 'transphobe'.
Also agree with @GallantKumquat that Helen Joyce's book Trans is still the best takedown of the ideology.
Thank heavens for groups like Sex Matters and Women's Rights Network who are now doing the hard graft of weeding out the woo-woo!

I often have to remind myself: this is a mind set that is starting from the foundation of 'reality is what I feel/want it to be' with all facts and evidence that detracts from this being suppressed, including anger and punishment for those who will not enable and mention those things pushed under the rug.

The incoherence and rapid switching of what is said one minute being wholly contradicted in the next moment is something a psychologist would explain best as a need not specific to any one group but to emotional (dys)function. The belief of someone using this is that their feelings create the reality and not the facts: therefore as long as what is said serves the feelings (of the moment), they can have said both wholly contradicting things and because both were true to their feelings in that moment, not see the problem. It's not really an indicator of someone doing well socially or emotionally, and their relationships tend not to be happy ones.

It then makes it very difficult to engage with rationally, because obviously it's not rational and won't be. The relationships board gives lots and lots of practical examples of trying to live with someone who functions like this. Women are dealing with this on an entire societal scale with this particular political movement.

It's highly instructive of this particular mindset when we get visitors from reddit - none of them can agree with each other, never mind agreeing with their own previous posts as to what the 'rules of proper trans' are.

I think they mostly just state the complete opposite of whatever information is posted in FWR that they feel might undermine their behaviour - there's no consistency other than that 🙄

I often think of scolding fetishes etc. Intentionally coming to a women's rights forum to say things guaranteed to get plain speaking back must be meeting needs somehow.

🤔
It certainly meets the particularly male need of telling women what to do and then ignoring their subsequent objections 😠

Yes. Once you've wandered around FWR for a while and see how the scolders perform, their incoherence and lack of credible narratives / rationale are so evident amidst their word salads.
It's also good to see the majority of those who post on the Times, Telegraph etc are also very clear eyed about all the nonsense. They name it accurately and most give zero fucks about pandering to any of it.

We've still a mountain to climb given how deeply this ideology is embedded in organisations but as every single tribunal case demonstrates, behind all this is a tsunami of misogyny, anti child safeguarding and a disdain for the rights of others.