Think-Tanked: How Progressive Nonprofits Went Over the Waterfall

You're told that you don't need to understand gender identity to support trans people. In fact, you're told that you will never be able to understand it as a "cis" person. I'd have expected more of my colleagues to chafe at such orders. But most submitted. Most were happy to do so. Their self-image as progressives demanded just this form of submission.

When trans activists wrapped their cause in the language of civil rights, they sought to exempt themselves from scrutiny and debate. It’s hard to imagine a more effective way to shut down inquiry among self-identified progressives and progressive organizations. Anyone who resisted or even asked basic questions risked being cast in the background of this image:

Even the most apologetically stated concerns or reservations—about males in women’s prisons, women’s sports, and women’s refuges, about the effects of overwriting sex in the law—were instantly dismissed as the bigoted ravings of a privileged mob. The real conflict between sex-based rights and demands couched in an inner sense of gender identity got buried. Trans activists taunted progressives: who wants to end up on the wrong side of history?

Challenging the trans narrative requires direct confrontation — and that’s hard. At every turn, you're urged to ‘just’ be kind. You're told inclusion doesn't cost you anything. You’re told you just don’t get it. And besides, you don’t want to end up getting the Maya Forstater treatment, do you?

In this climate, I watched my organization radicalize, righteously. Ideas no one would have entertained five years ago were elevated to doctrine. The focus on ‘inclusion’ unseated real-world action. We shifted from carving out small material gains to taking on immense systems of oppression—strictly rhetorically, of course. We went from advocating for victims of domestic violence to be able to break leases and phone contracts to preaching about how domestic violence organizations could be more supportive of LGBTQIA2S+ staff, who might find the gendered nature of their work triggering. In other words: less doing, more talking. And, of course, we could no longer talk straightforwardly about sex.