The gender critical movement has become what it claimed to hate

One of the earliest developments within the modern gender critical movement, which I classify as post-2016, was it’s close relation to the cancel culture grievance scene. It’s easy to see why.

Back then, trans people were seemingly emerging from the shadows publicly for the first time, though evidence of what we’d now call trans people have existed for millennia. To understand the landscape for trans rights back then, you have to realize that there have been several high profile British columnists who’d been poking at trans issues here and there for a long time already at that point.

But the increased focus on the trans rights movement in about 2016 offered these columnists a revival of sorts. Whereas before, they’d write their screeds and trans people would get upset, and nobody else much noticed. But with trans rights in rising prominence, these columnists liked to play up the backlash they’d get after shitting on trans people in their weekly column.

All of a sudden trans people “cancelling” them for simple “disagreements,” despite the fact that many of these columnists accused trans women as a collective of being rape threats to cisgender women. But once the cancel culture train left the station, it took on a life of its own and grew precipitously.

A fairly recent British news column compared trans activists to the Taliban, an absurd idea on its face.

But as the gender critical movement has grown, it has morphed into what it claims to have hated. It’s impossible for a mainstream company or organization to say a phrase like “pregnant people” without eliciting international uproar, even from the wealthiest author in the history of the planet.

Even the slightest affirmation of trans identity or any statement that trans people, trans women especially, need to be protected, both from violence and in law, gets shouted down by hordes of Brits and MAGA-types.

It’s affected my own work as well. I was once a very productive journalist in tune with the ins and outs of every day trans discourse. Now I mostly just feel like shit, and I’m afraid to jump into trans-related projects. I’ve started several trans-related non-fiction book proposals and and abandoned them. I can’t imagine devoting years of my life to a project knowing my reward at the end of the rainbow is the internet’s worst people taking apart my life… again.

This is what the cancel culture warriors call a “silencing effect.” It used to be a what gender criticals allegedly stood against. “We just want debate,” they said. Well debate can’t be held in good faith when you have mobs of angry assholes at your beck and call and you’re angling for your next crowdfunder.