The trans community has more things to worry about than the possibility that, if Julie Burchill gets really angry, she might find even nastier things to say about us. Her Observer piece filled the bingo card of transphobic insults, short of accusing us of baby-eating and black magic. Nonetheless, when a minority is accused of intolerant bullying, it is always important that the slur not be allowed to stand, especially when the accusation becomes a pretext for hate speech.

Burchill's intervention came at the end of a long week, and new readers will need context. There was coverage of the charges being brought against Dr Richard Curtis before the General Medical Council for his practice in the trans community. It raised the issue of the appalling ignorance of many GPs and other doctors not only on specifically trans-related healthcare issues, but the general healthcare of trans people.

At this point Suzanne Moore reprinted in the New Statesman a piece about female anger that complained, among other things, that women were expected to look "like Brazilian transsexuals". A lot of people seem not to get why this upset most of the trans community.

In the first place there's the implied dichotomy between women on the one hand and Brazilian trans women on the other – as if Brazilian trans women are somehow not women. But far more important is the fact well over a hundred Brazilian trans women were murdered in the last year alone. The failure of the mainstream press to cover the worldwide war on trans people is a significant failure – one of the major trans community events for the last few years has been the International Trans Day of Remembrance.

Even though Moore has some trans friends, I don't expect her automatically to think of that point. In an ideal world, she would have recognised the problem with what she had said, and we could all have moved on.

Moore's subsequent reactions were mostly of the kind "how dare you bother me with your petty concerns when I am writing about important stuff?". She had to back down from the claim that no trans activists tweet about the attack on welfare, but then started in on the whole "cut their dicks off and think they're better feminists" trope, which Burchill also gets into.

Not all trans people are trans women; not all trans people can access surgery; and genital surgery is about remodelling, recycling and repurposing rather than amputation. I haven't read all the tweets Moore got, and for all I know some of them were horrible and offensive garbage. Nonetheless, there were real and substantive issues that she needed to deal with. A while ago Jonathan Ross messed up in a similar way, and when people called him on it, he apologised – it's possible to do that.

Moore and Burchill seem to have a weird objection to anything they think of as intellectualising. Intersectionality is not hard to understand – it's the simple observation that most people having a bad time in this society are getting it in the neck for several things at once, and the way we write about oppression needs to address that. This is not weird PhD fodder discourse; just a new vocabulary of tact.

It's hard to know where to begin with Burchill's defence of Moore – with "Black and White Minstrel Show", "bed-wetting", or her odd assumption that all trans people are middle-class and overeducated.

The basic point behind everything she says is that trans people lead essentially inauthentic existences and that hers, as a working-class novelist with a taste for lobster and champagne, is real life. The idea that some sorts of human life are true and others fake has a worrying history; you find it in many sorts of religious belief and various sorts of totalitarian philosophy.

If I weren't worried that Burchill would accuse me of having the PhD I dropped out of, I'd suggest she think of the German philosopher Heidegger's infatuation with such ideas.

Once you decide that some people's lives are not real, it becomes OK to abuse them; for people without the outlet of writing for a national newspaper, it becomes OK to shout things in the street, or worse. The trouble with Burchill's list of negative epithets for trans people is that she legitimises the basic currency of hate speech. Trans people are one of the very few minorities who some progressives feel entitled to mock and misrepresent – but then Burchill parted company with the left a long time ago. By now, she has parted company with common decency.

What I would ask Moore and Burchill is this: do you think that what you've written makes it more or less likely that an elderly trans woman living on a housing estate will get jostled on the stairs by her neighbours? Or that a teen trans man will be punched in the street? It's not anger-fuelled tweets, but that provocation, done with malice by people who should know better, that is the real bullying.