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Why attacking trans people is bad for women (and all minorities)

The anti-trans lobby will not stop at trans: we are just their first target

jane fae
12 min readJul 28, 2020
Domino Effect by Aussiegall (2008): available under Creative Commons 2.0 license

In an effort to “own the trans”, gender crits and their allies have been waging war on the UK legal system. The effect of this litigating would, if successful, undermine many hard-fought rights and protections gained by women, LGBT and other minorities over the past decades.

Is there anything worse than finding your name appended, without your say-so, to a campaign of bullying and hate? You’d think not. Until you discover that the campaign you have been co-opted to is actively designed to take away many of your own rights too. That is why, in recent weeks #WhyImaTransAlly and #NotInMyName have been trending, as women have been standing up and saying no, enough, to fringe groups claiming to speak for “all women”.

The last few years of social media, and especially any social media tinged with feminist pretensions, has seen the rise of the “gender crits”. Despite the fancy name, this is a ragbag group combining elements of old-fashioned trans exclusionary radical feminism (aka “terfery”) with a motley crew of privileged middle-classers, mumsnet discontents, and a barrel-load of “don’t-call-me-Karen” reactionaries: conservatives and fundamentalist Christian…

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jane fae
jane fae

Written by jane fae

Feminist, writer, campaigner on political and sexual liberty who also knows a bit about IT, the law and policing. Not entirely serious…

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