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Upon publication of the book, Bailey was savaged by infuriated transgender activists. One highly prominent activist downloaded to her website photos of Bailey’s young children with the caption: “There are two types of children in the Bailey household … those who have been sodomized by their father (and those) who have not.”

This month, we saw a similar mobbing of Daniel Harris, cross-dressing author of Diary of a Drag Queen, for an article he wrote in the Antioch Review, “The Sacred Androgen: The Transgender Debate.” It’s a remarkable text that pulls no punches in terms of the contempt the author feels for the transgender bullying that marks its public activism. In the push to normalize and airbrush transgender as one healthy choice amongst others, advocates are, Harris charges, suppressing unpleasant, but pertinent facts, such as the elevated unemployment and homelessness among the transgender population and, most worryingly, a transgender-related attempted suicide rate of 41 per cent. “It would be disingenuous,” he writes, “to say that the cruelty of stigmatization is the reason for all of it.”

Harris pours particular scorn on the unkindness transgender activists direct to cross-dressers and transvestites, “whom they view as dilettantes and epigones, failed women, as daffy gay men, whereas they (consider themselves) genuine heterosexuals.”

The blowback to Harris’s article was so fierce that it was briefly withdrawn, then reposted with the editor’s statement its “views and values … are not those held by the editor, the Antioch Review or Antioch College,” and “I sincerely regret any pain and hurt that the publishing of this piece has caused to … transgender people.”