Marie Le Conte decries the “radicalisation” of women over transgender issues in her latest New Stateman column:
It may seem like an inflammatory word to use in this context, but I do sincerely believe “radicalisation” is the term that most closely describes what these women have gone through.
It is a concept often used to describe religious extremists or QAnon believers, but the process remains the same; get interested in a topic, become enveloped in it, become more extreme in your opinions, start engaging solely with people who share both your views and obsessiveness for that topic, spend your time arguing with people who disagree with your in-group. What else would you call it?
What's strange is that women are being forced to insist on something everybody in the world knows—a reality no human being would exist without (human sexual difference)—but that a vanguard of activists find intensely and urgently fashionable to deny.
Thus we appear to be 'obsessives.’ We're accused of inventing new terminology like 'biological sex' or 'sex-based rights' when until five minutes ago everybody knew what "woman" meant. These definitions weren’t nearly so formless and murky back when women couldn't vote, open a bank account, pursue higher education, and so on.
But Le Conte’s right about one thing: this is a story about radicalization. But it's not women who've been radicalized. Believing in the endurance of empirical reality in the face of a bizarre campaign to erase any recognition of that reality is not radicalization.
What does your cause require of the language you use: clarity or obfuscation?
Few issues make this divide over how to use language to further your cause more clear than the clash between women's rights and trans activism:
Women's rights rely on clarity about when and where and how and why sex matters.
Trans activism requires obfuscation: when people understand the trans agenda, they balk. Trans activists know this.
One of the consolations of free speech for your political opponents is that you're free to make a better argument than your opponents. Unless, of course, you can’t make a better argument. If your ideas can't withstand scrutiny and debate, you've got two options: back up your ideas (this might require a rethink) and bone up on your debating skills, or target anyone who wants to scrutinize and debate you. Trans activism demonizes scrutiny and shuns debate and attempts to make monsters out of peaceful political dissidents.
Ideas and claims that can't withstand scrutiny create what Paul Graham refers to as a "dead zone," observing that "every cherished mistaken assumption has a dead zone of unexplored ideas around it. And the more preposterous the assumption, the bigger the dead zone it creates."
The preposterous claim that gender identity should overwrite sex—that “transwomen are women”—creates a vast dead zone of inconvenient facts and unspeakable truths. Everything to do with women’s lives and experiences falls into this dead zone because everything to do with the material reality of sex threatens to unravel that fiction. Out of sheer necessity, holding the line "transwomen are women" severs language, research, activism, and policy from the material reality of the lives of women and girls. By trying to equate sex and gender identity—rather than advocating for protections for trans people as trans people—trans activists have made it impossible for women to speak about sex-based oppression or organize on the basis of sex without casting scrutiny on the wildly dubious claims of gender ideology and thus courting vicious and dishonest censure from trans activists.
Look, it doesn’t get much clearer than this: No one would be here to make stupid arguments about how human sexual difference doesn't exist or matter if human sexual difference didn't exist and matter. If one side hadn’t been radicalized to reject some of the most basic facts of being human, that simple acknowledgement would be the end of this debate.
It’s like if, suddenly, a very vocal, powerful, small group suddenly insisted on the existence of fairies. If we disagree, we’re denying their lived experience as fairy-friends; we’re erasing their very existence.
Loads of people vaguely go along with the fairy thing because they haven’t really thought about it and it’s kind of cute, but a few of us suddenly become radicals because the fairy theory makes no sense and the world has gone bat shit crazy.
There were Nazi resistance movements too; were they radicals?
Razor sharp reasoning once again.