Last week, it emerged that Linda Bellos, veteran feminist of the Old Left, faces legal action for having said the wrong thing about transgender people who hit women. This week’s transgender thought-criminal is Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party. Someone who might well be considered impeccably on-message on gender issues is accused of being that most terrible thing, a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and is being punished accordingly.
Lucas leads a party that is deeply devoted to the orthodoxy of transgenderism and the unquestionable mantra that “transwomen are women”. So keen are Greens to embrace the right of people born male to be considered women if they say they are women that they sometimes seem to want to remove the word “women” from their vocabulary: “non-men” is the term some Greens use.
Yet Lucas is now on the pyre, facing online chastisement for crimes against transgenderism. She’s a Terf! Burn her!
Or rather, Block Her! For this is a story partly about Twitter, where too much of the political conversation around gender takes place.
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