Gender Conservatives Fuck Off

I have tried, and I’m not quite sure how to say this prettily while fitting in everything I want to say, or I don’t have the patience to work that out, so I won’t bother. The popular face of what called itself gender criticism is a cult-like right wing movement. They are an embarrassment, a danger to everyone but conservative male supremacy, and I disown them. They have very little genuine understanding or care for women’s issues concerning trans activism, let alone more broadly, and at this point seek only to have a protected class to use as a battering ram, with no regard for its purpose or our wellbeing.

---

Something that troubled me about writing this is how to balance necessary and very strongly felt condemnation for the far right politics and hypocrisy of gender conservatives, with showing some understanding for how a person becomes vulnerable to manipulation. What those who claim to want to “let women speak” advocate is too blatantly right wing for me to believe they don’t know what they’re doing, especially after years now of being warned. To suggest that gender conservatism is entirely self-aware, deliberate far righters attempting to strangle the remains of feminism from the inside would be exactly the kind of conspiratorial, paranoid, black and white thinking that has led trans activists and gender conservatives to where they are. It’s not that either side cancels out the other: both the wilful saboteurs and useful idiots exist at the same time.

Unequivocally, the ones holding or renting out the speakers are right wing on purpose. They have misogynist, racist, homophobic, anti-free speech goals, and they know how to take advantage of people’s fear and confusion. They are not repeatedly associating with, endorsing and being endorsed by groups and individuals who explicitly hate women by accident, not now they’re told by dozens, if not hundreds of people, every single time and have had to take to the internet to justify their “accidents”. Why would you support and financially back someone you believe is actually stupid enough to make the exact same mistake so many times? Here, like most places, the simplest answer is the correct one: people coo over notorious right wing extremists who’ve incited or participated in criminal racist movements, and self-declared “theocratic fascists” who’ve advocated for putting raped children through forced labour, while encouraging anti-intellectualism and misogynist aggression towards actual feminist gender critics, it’s probably a far right anti-woman movement.

One factor that I think drives a lot of those who hear about trans activism to the right wing is that, when it comes down to it, a lot of people seem unable to recognise feminism as a real option. Even within the gender debate, where trans activists have named feminists the enemy and a lot of gender conservatives are playing dress-up in suffragette colours, calling themselves “TERFs”, everyone behaves as though the only political possibilities are two different versions of male supremacy. The left offers workers’ rights and state healthcare, in return for women as disconnected organs for public use. The right requires mass poverty and crushing of intellectual freedom, in return for private abuse by few men. If you’re not having one, you have to have the other. Feminism and women remain people to be talked about, not to be listened to.

A lot of gender conservatives have also been fooled through their own arrogance. The best way to become vulnerable to manipulation is to believe that you can’t be manipulated — that you can spot all lies and subliminal messages, and are invulnerable to the human urges for community and reassurance that affect everyone else. Gender conservatives have misunderstood their recognition of trans activist grooming, for which they were never the intended targets, for being able to spot it all the time, and are encouraged by the people actually manipulating them to only ever be suspicious of and focused on people who will always be visually and ideologically different from them. That gender conservatives clearly share with trans activists a tendency to worship internet celebrities, and be easily conditioned to respond emotionally to buzzwords and slogans, is apparent to neither. It induces headaches to see people who clearly haven’t the first clue what manipulation and indoctrination actually are expect to dictate how to protect children from these things.

Trans activists are undeniably a problem. Underneath the thin veneer of progressiveness, they have a misogyny, homophobia, ableism and racism that’s actually quite conservative — which is exactly why strengthening conservatism will not stop them. You cannot dispel the idea that a woman is by nature pink, fluffy, submissive and weepy by upholding the ideology that comes from. You will not stop lesbian, gay and bisexual children feeling so isolated and misunderstood that they pursue “treatment” that can sterilise and permanently disable them if you agree that they’re perverse and shouldn’t be allowed to become parents. If the principles of trans activism become acceptable to you the second the men running it put on trousers, the best that can be said is you’ve wasted a huge amount of time having a row against yourself. If you think you can rest on decades-old feminist laurels to avoid criticism for endorsing people you know full well want to destroy everything you claim to stand for, t least don’t kid yourself that anyone is falling for it, nor are you owed freedom to be presumed something you no longer are.

Perhaps a change of topic, but the final nail in the coffin for gender conservatives is their support for the genocide in Gaza. You cannot shrug your shoulders at the heavily documented torture and murder of tens of thousands of civilians and expect to be considered an honest or moral person. There is no way for you to explain that you support fathers having to amputate their children’s limbs without anaesthetic because you believe the Palestinian people are by nature terroristic and invasive, that isn’t racist, sadistic and hypocritical. Nobody believes, when you go from “Never forget” to genocide denialism in one breath, that you actually care about the victims you’re trying to hide behind. It was made abundantly clear at the beginning — in 1948, not just last year — that what they want is to drive people out of their homes and kill them, with as much brutalisation and humiliation can be fitted into the process, and there is no way for you to spin your support for this as innocent. If you do not have the empathy, education or fraction of moral backbone necessary to oppose a genocide, you can’t be trusted to be part of any more complex social or moral cause.

If you feel that you’re a misogynist far righter, so be it. Own your politics, and stop trying to claim you’re a (“trans exclusionary”) radical feminist, or a suffragette, or pro-woman at all. A feminist is a woman who respects women as human beings, and advocates for the comprehensive liberation of women from male supremacist society. You do not get to twist and break women’s language and culture to suit your own petty, bigoted interests.