Mick Hartley

Mind you, those "not in our name" feminists have nothing on the righteous fury about the Supreme Court ruling over at The Nation:

Try as they might to wrap themselves in the antifascist flag, though, these activists are hailing a decision that represents a ghoulish culmination of fascistic “family values” agitation in women’s name—something it achieves by stomping on a tiny, ultra-vulnerable minority.

This is nothing new, either; for over two decades, at the highest levels of Britain’s state and cultural establishment, the articulation of cissexist policy has flowed not only from antifeminist politicians’ lips but also from trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who have used every conceivable queerphobic and fascist trope against trans women—pervert, groomer, pedophile, fetishist, rapist, barbarian, deceiver, interloper, parasite—to achieve their end….

The decades-long coordinated attack on trans rights paves the way for the unraveling of the Equality Act as a whole, and the dismantling of every (limited but important) legislative gain for social justice achieved since 1998’s explosive “Lawrence Inquiry” into institutional and police racism in the UK. The playbook is now all set to merge with the American one “defending women against gender ideology extremism” (per the White House’s executive order of January, which seeks to make human sexuation, as it were, great again).

Hitherto, to suggest as much has typically incurred incandescent indignation on the part of feminism’s Brexiteers—the self-styled anti-woke left-liberal single-issue cissexists whose reactionary brand has long been hegemonic in the UK. This camp has long promoted itself as profoundly un-American. But, increasingly, its hatred of the Black, abolitionist, gender-abundant, utopian international left supersedes its patriotism, leading it to align itself with MAGA (unlikely inheritor of the “true” feminism the left abandoned) without shame….

Preferring the term “gender-critical,” 21st-century TERFs have protested for years that TERF is a misogynistic slur; still, the more of British society they’ve captured, the more they’ve grown content with the moniker. “Welcome to Team TERF,” gloats UnHerd every time an A-lister turns transphobe. “2023 is the year of the TERF,” declares the far-right rally Let Women Speak. “We will fight,” jokes Rowling in another revealing effort to claim Churchillian glory for her cause, “on the beaches of TERF Island.” The copious “strong borders” imagery readily reveals TERFism to be a female cultural nationalism or sexual nationalism, premised—Brexit-style—on the securitization of the tacitly white and innocent body politic against dysgenic gender “refugees.”

The pogrom-inciting tenor of what has been called “the trans debate” was normalized from the get-go by feminism’s moral alibi and the nepotism of Britain’s commentariat class. The hyper-respectability of many of its ringleaders surely didn’t hurt, either. Helen Joyce, one of the most influential trans-annihilationists currently heralding the Supreme Court decision as a personal win, is a former editor at The Economist. Her buddy the celebrity anti-trans philosopher Kathleen Stock is a royally honored academic. Rowling, of course, is a national treasure. Meanwhile, the publishing industry has glutted itself on trans-“skeptic” books just asking questions—not just by Joyce and Stock—and these all receive rave reviews in the UK Guardian. (Back in 2018, the US office of that newspaper was even moved to denounce its British counterpart over its participation in the self-styled “feminist” moral panic.)

The riddle of “TERF Island” continues to intrigue those international onlookers who intuit feminism and transphobia to be opposites. Unlike the supposedly very different—crassly “polarized” and “partisan”—makeup of the American fight for trans rights, in Britain it’s a point of pride that genteelly genocidal anti-gender-ism cuts across Conservative, Labour, and feminist milieus.

Phew. "A ghoulish culmination of fascistic “family values” agitation"; "trans-annihilationists"; "pogrom-inducing"; "genteelly genocidal". I think we get the point.