Mick Hartley

Allan Stratton at Quillette, with the third and last part of his series on the new gender activists  – The Progressive Case for Renouncing Gender Extremism. It's a longish piece, but here's his conclusion:

If you follow the pronouncements of the most militant gender supremacists on social media, it is hard to escape the lack of caring they exhibit for anyone—women, prisoners, athletes, rape victims—who expresses even the mildest protest at their sweeping claims about the need to utterly eliminate biological sex as a recognized category in any area of policymaking. This aggressive approach has intimidated many lawmakers, and has won allies among those academics who’ve sensed (correctly) the arrival of new grievances to be studied and nourished, new orthodoxies to be promulgated, and new navels to be gazed at. But it also has squandered decades of hard-won grass-roots public support for traditional forms of trans rights that did not presuppose the destruction of sex as an organizing concept—i.e., the right of trans people not to be fired, evicted, brutalized, or otherwise discriminated against because they happen to be trans.

While branding their activism as part of the epic struggle against patriarchy, heteronormativity, and even capitalism, gender supremacists have actually produced an effectively colonialist doctrine that demands universal obeisance to the pronouncements of privileged professors at elite universities and leaders of well-connected western NGOs. Indigenous prisoners, beaten women, marginalized female athletes, immigrants, Jews, Muslims—all are treated as transphobic saboteurs who stand in the way of that great moral project for our time: recognizing that biological males can be literal women.

The project won’t succeed. People aren’t stupid. We know how babies are born. History moves in cycles of reaction and counter-reaction, and this field is overdue for the latter. The problem is that when the backlash arrives, it won’t just be the Twitter activists and media darlings who get the brunt of it. It will be everyone on the progressive side—the LGBT rank-and-file in particular. Before that happens, everyone who believes in equality and justice must stand up and call out this extremism for what it is.

I posted on the first part of Stratton's trilogy back in June. My thoughts at the time: 

We used to snigger at the absurdities of post-modernism, and all the obscure sub-divisions that proliferated from the teachings of (mostly) French post-war philosophers that came to be known as Theory, and successfully came to dominate, in particular, English departments in American universities. Remember the Sokal hoax, where the full glorious fatuity of it all was made clear for everyone to see and laugh at? Or the bad writing contest, where the wilfully obscure pretensions of writers like Judith Butler were exposed? I wonder if this is the first real case of the effects of this nonsense – in this case Queer Theory and its ramifications – finally escaping the confines of the academy and making itself felt in the real world?

Well, we're not laughing now.