Mick Hartley

After the election a few Democrats, aware of the part that a disastrous support for gender ideology played in their defeat, have indicated a willingness to do some rethinking. Congressman Seth Moulton, for instance, has proposed that a more nuanced approach was required: "I do know that women’s rights are important and transwomen’s rights are important, so we have to find a balance that makes sense". Meghan Murphy begs to differ – "the entire concept of gender identity must be scrapped":

There is no surgery that can turn a male female. There is no child that must be mutilated and sterilised in order to ‘really be themselves’. There is no circumstance where it is reasonable to allow a male to compete as a female in sport. So long as gender identity exists as a concept under law – that is to say, the idea that one can ‘identify’ as the opposite sex – men will be able to claim they are female and access women’s spaces….

We are already seeing the rewriting of history – or at least the whitewashing of history. The same progressives and Democrats who called those of us who spoke out against trans activism loathsome bigots now play at reasonable discourse, pretending things were never really as bad as they were.

An article in the New York Times this week described the threats, censorship and persecution experienced by dissidents as ‘unsparing criticism’. I guess if that’s what you want to call my having to hire private bodyguards in order to speak about women’s rights in public, or having to outrun a masked gang of trans activists desiring to ‘kill all TERFs’, or having been banned from social media for four years for calling a man ‘he’, that’s your prerogative. But it’s a lie.

The response to those of us who spoke out against gender-identity ideology was not simply criticism. It was years of violent threats, blacklisting, loss of income and jobs, stalking, censorship, No Platforming, harassment, ostracisation, loss of friends and endless public libel….

Now, the very same activists who pushed all this on us are apparently ‘rethink[ing] and recalibrat[ing] their confrontational ways, and are pushing back against the more all-or-nothing voices in their coalition’. I call bullshit.

The trans reign of terror is over in America. We won. Any related ‘soul-searching’ happening is in response to that reality. It is an attempt to convince us to roll back this massive triumph. But we mustn’t allow a softer approach to cloud our commitment to women, kids and reality.