Andrew Craig

Some of us do speak out against Trump. Loudly and repeatedly. But we are invisible. We are invisible to you. And we are invisible to the bulk of the people who have now been sucked into the tribal culture war framing of this issue, and fed into a machine that is generating support for the populist right. The binary tribal culture war framing of this issue didn't just come out of nowhere. The starting point of the trans right project was that anyone who questioned the ideology or the political impact was, de facto, a bigot and most likely a fascist. When this conflict first really started to kick off in the UK (around 2013/14) most of the people raising questions were *from the left,* many of them feminists, because *we were the people who ran into it earliest.* And it was nonetheless repeatedly insisted that we shouldn't be allowed to speak because we were nazis. Women who objected were bullied out of their communities, out of their political organisations, out of their jobs. Almost no institutions or publications that were left-aligned allowed them to speak, or would defend their right to speak. That is, it was the trans rights project that created this 'us vs them' ideological, tribal structure in the first place. And given the laws of political physics, it isn't hard to see how creating that 'us vs them' ideological structure then led, over time, to the progressive manifestation of that in the political forces at work. The trans rights project effectively manifested its own backlash exactly as it originally projected it. And at this stage, even given the absolute tragedy of that, and the harm it is doing, not only to gender non conforming people of all types, and women, and democracy itself, you are still more interested in pointing at the backlash as evidence of how right you were in the first place, than examining how this could have happened. The materialist feminist women who formed the core of the original pushback against the ideology in the UK repeatedly warned that this would happen. Many of us also tried to stand against it when, in 2022/23, the culture war mechanism really kicked in hard, and the issue became a massive pipeline of right wing radicalisation, and a very effective wedge that the populist/MAGA right used against its opposition. Materialist feminist women were never going to have the money or the power to stand against the populist right once they got their hands on it and decided to milk it for all it was worth. And it was never in their interests, just as it was never in yours, to recognise that we were ever here at all. We never wanted to play your tribal game. We wanted to resolve the material and legal issues before what has happened happened. But it was always the game that you wated to play. And it is also the game the populist right wanted to play, and they thank you very much for your part. #FuckTheCultureWar