There can be a hallucinatory quality to the progressive mind, a tendency to see enemies in allies and demons in opponents, to imagine a public consensus for niche propositions and to experience even mild-mannered political disagreements as near-physical attacks. One or more of these behaviours can be found across the spectrum — lefties hate other lefties, righties hate other righties, centrists hate everyone — but it is in progressivism that they most vividly concentrate. Rosie Duffield is experiencing this phenomenon rather roughly after expressing the wrong view about that deathless fixation of a disastrously overeducated generation: gender identity. The Labour MP took issue with one of the few tweets from CNN that isn’t an update from Trump’s Amerikkka:
Duffield was one of many to object to how this kind of sex-neutral wordplay erases women. So much of this tedious culture war is about trivia but complicating the language around cervical cancer is pernicious.
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