Helen Joyce wrote an excellent article on radical transgender activism/ideology. While the article is long, it is definitely worth the read, as Joyce calmly and intelligently covers several important facets of this issue.
It has become clear to me that trans ideology is about more than an individual’s feeling that they need to be perceived as a member of the opposite sex. That is, if the whole trans issue was about the few people who truly had some type of gender dysphoria, it would not be hard to be accommodating. But trans ideolology extends far beyond this. As Joyce explains:
The motive for such laws was largely compassion. Gender dysphoria was viewed as a rare and distressing condition that could be alleviated by accommodating sufferers as legal exceptions to the rules of biology. But a decade and a half later, a more radical notion is sweeping across the Western world, with English-speaking countries in the vanguard. The brainchild of a few sexologists, trans-activists and academics, it has spread via lobby groups and the internet, and on liberal campuses. It is now becoming consolidated in practice and codified into law, with profound consequences—not just for people who wish they had been born the opposite sex, but for everyone.
Indeed. Trans ideology has profound consequences for us all. It’s a socio-political movement that is far more powerful and influential and intrusive than the New Atheist movement ever was.
Many years ago, I explained my interest in the New Atheist movement in the About section of this blog:
I decided to plug into the debate and remain knowledgeable and up-to-date about the movement and its arguments. That way, if someone I care about does come to me spouting some New Atheist talking point, I will be better informed and prepared. As just one example, if someone comes to me making Dawkins “science shows that God’s existence is really, really unlikely” and “there is no evidence for God” arguments, I’m equipped to help that person understand the context of these arguments.
These days, I find myself in an analogous position with the Trans Movement. For example, Joyce notes:
Over time, an even more audacious line of thinking emerged in some gender-studies and sociology departments, in which everything, including sexed bodies, is discursively constructed and there is no objective reality. Biological sex started to be described as “assigned at birth” rather than observed and recorded, or even recast as a spectrum rather than a binary. Some proponents claimed that binary sex was a Western, colonialist invention, or bolstered their claims with references to intersex conditions.
Because of this anti-science subjectivism, I decided to put together some thoughts and wrote There Are Two Biological Sexes and Why There are Two Biological Sexes
While such essays may seem to be stating the obvious for most of us, I suspect that having something like this written down will come in handy in the future. And while these are mostly mundane postings that explore sex from a scientific perspective, I also have to wonder that if some day in the future, I’ll be asked to delete these postings or WordPress itself will have them deleted.
I wonder about such things because of the disproportionate power that is wielded by the Trans Movement. We’ve already seen their power on the campus with student senator Isabella Chow.
Joyce touches on just a few examples of such power:
“WOMAN; women (noun): adult human female.”
That, and the web address of the British government’s consultation on gender self-ID, is all it said on a poster that Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a feminist campaigner, paid to display in Liverpool during the annual conference of Britain’s opposition Labour Party in September. After a complaint that it was anti-trans “propaganda and hate speech,” the poster company apologized and took it down. An ad agency then refused to put the same message on Edinburgh buses, saying it was “likely to offend” the public. Renée Gerlich, a feminist activist in Wellington, designed posters to celebrate the 125th anniversary of New Zealand granting women the vote. Each consisted of a quote from a feminist, followed by “Suffragists fought for the female sex. Stop rewriting history.” When trans-activist groups complained to the poster company that the posters communicated a “subtle transphobia,” it refused to handle her order.
The main social-media platforms are making it very hard for women to discuss these issues. Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist who runs a website, Feminist Current, has been kicked off Twitter for “hateful conduct”—that is, tweeting that “Men aren’t women” and “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?” Twitter also temporarily locked various women’s accounts for, inter alia, quoting remarks made by British parliamentarians in the debate over the Gender Recognition Act of 2004; for stating the British definition of rape (which can be committed only by a male, since it involves penetration by a penis); and for referring to JY of Brazilian-waxing fame as “he.” It even locked a trans woman’s account for self-describing as “male.”
Women seeking to organize in person are being silenced, too. After trans activists disrupted a discussion in London last year about self-ID, Ms. Green and some other feminists set up Woman’s Place UK (WPUK) to hold more such meetings. “It seemed so extraordinary that we were being stopped from openly having conversations we were all having in private,” she says. WPUK has scheduled nearly 20 meetings around Britain to date, every one of them disrupted. Some venues cancelled bookings after trans activists claimed it was a far-right hate group.
In Canada, even complaining can get a woman into trouble. In July, Kristi Hanna, a former resident at Palmerston House, a women’s shelter in Ontario, left after being assigned a transgender room-mate, who stomped around in combat boots, had facial and chest hair, and talked about a pregnant fiancée. All the residents found the situation intimidating, she says, and after two sleepless nights she complained and was told to “deal with it or leave.” But when she phoned Ontario’s human-rights legal helpline, she referred to the individual as a “man,” at which point the adviser said that her words and behaviour were potentially discriminatory and ended the call.
The example with Kristi Hanna illustrates just how serious the problem is. Transgender ideology is an expression of pure subjectivism. According to this post-Christian ideology, all it takes for a male to be a woman is for the male to declare he is a woman. That’s all it takes. And to question this declaration, to be skeptical of this declaration, is considered hateful transphobia. Thus, there is nothing to stop a pervert or a predator or just a creep from exploiting this situation.
Anyway, if you want to be informed about the implications of trans ideology, I again encourage you to read the article by Helen Joyce.
Shadow To Light 
Can’t say I’m sympathetic to Feminist groups being silenced and de-platformed. They did the same to men for decades. The irony is that it is (mostly) white males who are beating them at their own game (by becoming an even more persecuted group).
Only when women are negatively impacted do they notice anything.
Just like the A- Gnus
Freaking scary.
For once I was cheering for the Feminists! Ha!
Men insisting that they are women — and using the power of the state to compel the rest of us to pretend as much — is just the other side of the coin of feminism, which teaches women to insist that they are men — and to use the power of the state to compel the rest of us to pretend as much.
This
and this
is just the other side of this
Folks, if you want some insight into how Transgenderism suddenly became a thing that had to be affirmed medically everywhere, despite no supporting scientific evidence, watch this presentation. Don’t watch it if you need to be positive and up-beat for the rest of the day, though.
In her 16 January Friendly Atheist post entitled “A Christian Homeless Shelter is Suing Over the Right to Reject Trans People” Sarabeth Caplin disapproves of a …:
“Well, that’s their problem, isn’t it?” says Caplin – “their” being highly traumatised survivors of domestic violence. If the shelter allows a trans woman (biological man) to sleep or disrobe in the same room as them, some of these traumatised women survivors say they would rather sleep outdoors in the woods in around-zero temperatures. But for Caplin “that’s their problem, isn’t it?”
(There’s a question-mark at the end of that, but from the context it looks to me that it’s a rhetorical question, an “isn’t it!” rather than an “is it?” Poor writing?)
Let’s quote the article Michael linked to in his OP:
Reading on, for a moment it looks like Caplin does sympathise with the highly traumatised survivors of domestic violence:
But no, the next two sentences are:
“Their” being highly traumatised survivors of domestic violence. Caplin evidently thinks it’s perfectly OK, possibly Caplin thinks it’s desirable, to traumatise these highly traumatised survivors some more, for these nasty traumatised survivors of domestic violence are but using their traumatised fragility as an excuse to discriminate against trans people; and when they decamp to the woods in freezing weather, that’s them discriminating against trans women. Caplin’s attitude is to blame the victims.
Oh, and Caplin’s message to the Friendly Atheist fanbase is that they, too, should blame the victims.
*
It doesn’t escape me – though it apparently escapes Caplin – that people turning up at a women’s shelter are unvetted, uninvestigated; they just turn up and say they are a woman who needs shelter; someone claiming to be a trans woman (a biological man) could be an abusive violent partner in drag, could be a man seeking easily intimidated women to start a relationship with or simply to rape, or could even be an Elliott Rodger type incel woman-hater.
I’m not sure what case law, if any, there is in Britain, but I consider it very likely that any shelter provider which did not take reasonable and adequate steps to ensure the health, safety and welfare of its users would fall foul of the Health and Safety at Work (Etc) Act.
*
Although she writes for the often virulently anti-Christian Friendly Atheist blog Caplin postures as a Christian, and she uses that as a launchpad for righteous “Christian” anger; here she says:
“A man from a despised tribe was found injured” – really! That’s a howler which any and every Christian should spot immediately; let’s look at the text:
The Gospel of Luke’s “a man” is not identified as a despised foreigner – presumably Caplin is claiming he was a Samaritan, someone despised by the priest and Levite, a fellow Samaritan like his rescuer – which if he were would greatly weaken the force of each part of the story, which relies upon Jews and Samaritans being like Serbs and Croats; anyone travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho, Jewish city to Jewish town, is by implication Jewish; had the man not been a fellow Jew to the priest and Levite and a despised foreigner to most Samaritans, the force of the story would be greatly weakened.
Every Christian learns the Good Samaritan story in Sunday School; and even if Caplin somehow escaped that basic education that very famous and familiar story is regularly read in church and regularly referred to. Yet Caplin shows clueless ignorance of both the text and meaning.