Mick Hartley

It's the young, overwhelmingly, who support trans ideology, while us older folk tend to the gender-critical side. So the tide of history is with the gender crowd, and when we gender-criticals have shuffled off, there'll be no stopping them. That's how progress works – right? Well, Susanna Rustin at the Guardian sees it differently:

I think those who characterise this struggle as being between young progressives and ageing reactionaries are mistaken. While I fully support transgender people’s right to be protected from discrimination, I don’t regard the erosion of sex-based entitlements – including single-sex sports and spaces – in favour of an ethos of “inclusion” as either liberal or leftwing.

On the contrary, I think valuing inclusion over bodily privacy (in changing rooms) or fairness (in sports) is sexist – since women are more disadvantaged by these changes than men. And while gender identity campaigners claim autonomy and choice as progressive, even socialist, values, I see their emphasis on the individual’s right to self-definition as congruent with consumer capitalism. Multinational corporations, including banks and retailers, embrace Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index and fly Progress Pride flags from their buildings because the shift away from the class politics of redistribution towards the identity politics of personal expression suits them.

So someone at the Guardian is prepared to stick their hand up and say that it's not really a progressive cause, this gender stuff. Big business wasted no time in jumping aboard, and – in the US at least – there are megabucks to be made by mutilating kids in the name of "gender-affirming care". Not quite the full it's-actually-profoundly-homophobic-and-misogynist gotcha, but it's a start.

"Congruent with consumer capitalism" -  a very Guardianisty take. But fair enough – especially if you buy into the Pritzker saga, as outlined by Jennifer Bilek in 2022. 

And an interesting side note: Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker is widely regarded as being a potential future Democratic presidential candidate.