Last week, the bells of cancel culture tolled for J.K. Rowling, the writer whose Harry Potter novels have helped shape the shared culture of two generations of young adults. (Or at least they tried: JKR is too big to cancel even if people are literally burning her books.) Rowling, who generally espouses liberal feminist politics, ran afoul of the progressive community with a tweet deemed “transphobic”:

“Maya” is Maya Forstater, a 45-year-old British tax expert who lost her position as a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development, an anti-poverty think tank, because of social media posts on transgender issues expressing such views as “men cannot change their biological sex.” Forstater sued, claiming that the non-renewal of her contract violated British employment law, which, as of 2010, protects people from being fired on the basis of “philosophical belief.” On Wednesday, employment judge James Tayler ruled against Forstater, rejecting her views as “absolutist” and “incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others.”

Rowling’s comment unleashed a storm of tweets calling her a bigot, blasting her as transphobic and ignorant and accusing her of “harmful and hateful rhetoric.” Many posters lamented that she had ruined their childhood and shattered their memories. Some said things like “die angry TERF” — i.e., “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.”

The professional media piled on as well, with such headlines as “The U.K. Has a Transphobia Problem and J.K. Rowling Is the Latest Offender: The author is supporting a woman’s legal battle for her right to express anti-trans hate speech” (Vice) and “After a Transphobic Tweet, J.K. Rowling Can No Longer Be Considered an LGBTQ Ally” (Slate). Vox chimed in with this classy offering: “J.K. Rowling’s latest tweet seems like transphobic BS. Her fans are heartbroken,” subtitled “JKR just ruined Harry Potter, Merry Christmas.”

The coverage creates the appearance of an overwhelming consensus. Rowling’s long-suspected heresies on gender identity issues have been treated as, at best, a regrettable failing of an aging author who was once progressive but has not kept up with the times.

But the faux consensus masks the fact that many questions about gender identity are still unresolved. What’s more, current “woke” dogma with its absolute taboo on questioning anyone’s self-declared gender identity raises serious issues that should be of concern not only to conservatives but to progressives as well.

It’s not my intent to relitigate the Forstater case or analyze the decision in detail. Some argue that Forstater was asking for sweeping protections that would have allowed her to pursue controversial public activism that created tensions with many of her colleagues while avoiding any repercussions. That may be a fair criticism.

But there is one element of the case that starkly illustrates just how surreal — at least by the standards of five or six years ago — the conversation on transgender issues has become.

Forstater has been specifically accused of “misgendering” two individuals. Both are self-identified “non-binary” biological males, one of whom takes turns presenting as male and female while the other seems to present exclusively as male.

One of Forstater’s offenses was a sarcastic Twitter thread about Financial Times’ absurd decision in 2018 to put Credit Suisse executive Philip “Pips” Bunce on its list of 100 female champions of women in business. Bunce, who self-identifies as “genderfluid,” sometimes comes to work in a blond wig, makeup, and female clothing. (At the time Forstater tweeted about Bunce, the media referred to Bunce as “he”; a more recent article uses “she”). Forstater asked, not unreasonably, whether people who have pledged not to appear on all-male panels — or, in current feminist lingo, “manels” — would be satisfied if the only “non-male” on the panel was Bunce. I personally think that the pledge is counterproductive and the word “manel” is an abomination, but for those who believe in this sort of thing, the question is a valid one.

The accusations against Forstater also included the fact that in some of her tweets, she used “he” to refer to Scottish former local councillor Greg Murray, who self-styles as “they” and identifies as “non-binary.” Forstater’s claim that she simply forgot about the male-presenting Murray’s preference was brushed aside since she also admitted that she regards Murray as a man and reserves the right to use male pronouns accordingly (while generally agreeing to use a person’s preferred pronouns as a courtesy).

Interestingly, while the judge ripped into Forstater for insisting that she has the right to regard transgender women as male even when the law recognizes them as female, he elided the fact that Scottish law does not recognize non-binary identity and in its eyes Greg Murray is indeed a man.

My view of the TERF wars is complicated. I think it’s strikingly presumptuous for either radical feminists or conservatives to assert that transgender identities are pure “delusion,” or that the matter is as simple as “XX = female, XY = male.” While I think claims about male and female brains (ironically, otherwise popular among conservatives) are vastly oversimplified, I also believe it’s entirely possible for a brain/body mismatch to exist — not in the sense that “you have a vagina but like sports and mechanics, so you’re actually a guy” but in the sense that some “wiring” in the brain may cause a person to have a gender identity that doesn’t match their anatomy. There is, of course, a great deal we still don’t know about the human mind. Plenty of transgender women and men lead well-adjusted post-transition lives.

I first met a trans person (that I know of!) circa 1982 as a college student. The instructor in my human sexuality class invited a male-to-female transsexual, also a student, to discuss her experience. She told her story matter-of-factly and engagingly, with both funny and intensely emotional moments — such as telling her now-fiancé she was trans and waiting for him to decide if he could move past that. I could see no reason she should be treated differently than any other woman, and if I had run into her in the ladies’ room after the class I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.

Some 20 years later, on a fandom forum where I posted and moderated at the time, I developed a friendship with a forum member who used a female name (let’s say “Natasha”). After we’d been chatting on instant messenger for a couple of months, Natasha confided that she was, as she put it, a pre-op transsexual; she had just been been kicked out of another online community — a feminist support group — after disclosing her status and was extremely distraught. (Some of the women, she said, had practically called her a rapist for invading their space.) Natasha, who lived in a medium-sized Texas town and was receiving hormone treatments, was smart and likable, if somewhat histrionic and often confrontational on LGBT issues to the point of nearly getting banned over a fight with a Republican, Bush-voting lesbian. I was wholly sympathetic to her desire to live as a woman and shared her dislike of anti-trans feminists like Janice Raymond, who saw transsexuality as the colonization of womanhood by demonic male invaders.

Eventually, Natasha received gender reassignment surgery (still, I believe, generally known as “sex change” at the time). In a forum post announcing her leave of absence, she coyly described it as surgery to correct a minor birth defect.

When she came back weeks later, she seemed much happier and more relaxed, and excitedly shared photos of her new feminine self. But her mellow new persona didn’t last long; soon, she was once again getting into fights over LGBT issues. After Hurricane Katrina, Natasha was enraged by a news story about the arrest of two transgender evacuees for using the women’s shower in a shelter (one, by media accounts, was a very tall, skinny 16-year-old who did not look “convincingly female”). A couple of forum members argued that while it was important to treat the trans evacuees with compassion, it made sense that women who had recently survived a harrowing ordeal — and in quite a few cases, sexual assault — would be scared and traumatized to see a six-foot-tall, male-presenting teen in the women’s showers. To Natasha, all such objections were pure bigotry.

After a few more blow-ups, Natasha rage-quit the forum and stopped talking to me. I felt bad about it, and overall my conversations with Natasha still made me more appreciative of the struggles faced by transgender people. However, I could also see that the push for transgender rights was likely to create thorny situations with regard to single-sex spaces, activities, and services. Obviously, I had no idea how far and wide this push would go in another decade.

I still think Raymond and her ilk are bigots, though I believe their bigotry is primarily against males — and transgender women insofar as they see transgender women as males. Part of their rage, I suspect, has to do with the fact that their hate, socially acceptable and considered “edgy” or even noble in their cultural milieu when directed at “cishet” men, was suddenly treated as actual hate when directed at trans women. I believe radical feminist critics of transgenderism have a lot of very questionable ideas about omnipresent male privilege and misogyny in modern Western culture — including the idea that the pressure on “cis” women to accept trans women is a form of general sexist pressure on women to defer to men.

One such claim in the J.K. Rowling kerfuffle is that the anti-Rowlings’ rage-a-thon was driven by misogyny, especially when compared to the relatively low-key reaction to comedian Ricky Gervais, who’s tweeted far more provocative comments on the issue. But as some people pointed out in response, there are some obvious differences: Gervais is neither a champion of progressive causes nor a childhood idol to millions of “woke” young adults. Buffy creator Joss Whedon, who does have a reputation as a feminist and a progressive, was the target of an extremely nasty backlash in 2014 over a humorous tweet that was attacked as “transphobic” because it suggested that female characters don’t have male anatomy.

I think some radical feminist rhetoric about transgender people is, literally, hate. Magdalen Berns, the late YouTuber who has become a hero to anti-trans feminists — partly due to her tragic passing from cancer in September at the age of 36 — was the author of an infamous tweet in which she blasted trans women as “men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women,” adding “fuck you and your dirty fucking perversions. our oppression isn’t a fetish you pathetic, sick, fuck” (sic). An essay tweeted out by Forstater in June, titled “Pronouns Are Rohypnol,” argued that the use of female pronouns for biologically male persons lulls women into discarding the fear and distrust with which they normally (and rightly) view males.

Of course, people who argue that any man is “Schrödinger’s Rapist” — i.e., maybe a rapist, maybe not — are not exactly in a place to object to this idea. Fortunately, there are those of us who think both ideas are hateful.

For many radical feminists, the objection to recognizing trans women as women also has to do with moral stature. The pronouns-as-rohypnol essay, for example, suggests that a description of an adult sexually assaulting a young girl in a public bathroom will elicit more anger and “sense of injustice” if the pronoun used for the adult is “he” rather than “she.” (It probably will, but whether this difference in reaction should be championed is another matter.) Some feminists take issue with the fact that designating natal women as “cisgender” positions them as “privileged” in relation to transgender women and thus translates into the belief that females can oppress males. This is a non-issue as far as I’m concerned. I think the dynamics of gender-based advantage/disadvantage, bias, and mistreatment in modern Western society are extremely complex, and more appreciation of that complexity is a good thing.

I also think that radically overhauling the meaning of sex/gender and the terms “man/woman” and “male/female” is a spectacularly bad way to go about it.

Can a person “change sex”? Skeptics argue that regardless of surgery and hormone treatments, every cell in the body of someone born male still has XY chromosomes, so such a person remains a man forever no matter how female “he” may look — the feminine body is just a fiction, a particularly elaborate form of disguise. But it’s not that simple. While the use of rare intersex conditions to push the idea that “sex isn’t binary” is deeply misleading — as some have said, it’s a bit like arguing that the existence of people born without legs negates human bipedalism — those conditions do suggest that chromosomes don’t automatically equal sex/gender. Thus, children with Swyer syndrome, who have an XY karyotype, have normal female external genitalia and a female identity but require hormone treatment to experience puberty. Others have XY chromosomes and internal testes but grow up as women due to androgen insensitivity.

There are other cases in which we allow a social construction to override biological fact. For instance: Strictly speaking, a father is a man whose sperm has fertilized an egg, resulting in the gestation and birth of a child, and a mother is someone who contributes the egg and gestates the child in her uterus. But we also recognize many other forms of motherhood and fatherhood, especially in the age of assisted reproduction. An infertile man whose wife conceives with donor sperm is still a father; a woman who conceives with a donor egg, or whose embryo is carried to term by another woman, is still a mother. Adoptive parents are parents. Most now accept that a gay man or woman co-raising a partner’s biological child is a parent.

I see no reason we can’t recognize transgender identity the same way. To insist (as Ben Shapiro did on television in 2015) on calling someone “sir” and “he” when that person lives and presents as female is a bit like pointedly referring to somebody’s children as “the kids you’re raising” because that person is not the kids’ biological parent. You can believe it’s impossible for a person to change sex; you can oppose surrogacy or assisted reproduction. That’s not a license to be a jerk.

On the other hand, imagine a situation in which a small cadre of activists began to push for a radical redefinition of what it means to be a parent. Why shouldn’t you be able to call yourself a mom or a dad if you feel that a friend’s or relative’s child, a student you teach, or even a young employee you mentor is like a son or daughter to you? Why should there be an “either/or” mentality in which you’re either a parent or a non-parent? Why shouldn’t you make up cute new words like “demimom” and “demidad” to use if you regularly babysit or play with a friend’s or neighbor’s kids— and insist that anyone who refuses to introduce you as “Johnny’s demimom” is a bigot? Why shouldn’t you demand public validation of your self-identified parental role, such as a “Father/Mother of the Year” award or a mention of “your” kids in your official bio? And isn’t biological parenthood a fiction anyway because, actually, we all have bits of DNA from a lot of different people?

That seems to be where we’re currently going with gender identity.

While “gender-critical” (or, if you will, transgender-critical) feminists often embrace a deeply flawed and polarizing ideology, they nonetheless point to some very real problems with current “progressive” gender identity dogma.

For instance:

When is transition appropriate for minors? Are children and adolescents being put at risk by medical interventions whose long-term effects are still unknown? Are some kids who identify as the other sex embracing transgender identity as a fantasy/adventure, a coping mechanism for emotional problems or mental health issues, or a “cool” trend in their peer group or online community? Is it typical for gender-dysphoric children and youth to “desist,” i.e., revert to a “cisgender” identity?

These questions, which require rigorous research free from political pressure, have become a minefield. Science journalist Jesse Singal and bioethicist Alice Dreger are just two of the people who have been denounced as transphobic — and persistently harassed — for exploring the issue. In a particularly revealing episode, Singal was excoriated for admitting he made an error in interpreting the results of a major study on desistance. Daily Dot columnist Ana Valens opined that the lesson to learn from this was that “transgender people should take the lead” in discussions of gender “lest studies end up enabling transphobia in the doctor’s office.” But there was a catch: Singal had actually found that the correct results made a stronger case for widespread desistance. Valens, like Singal’s other detractors, completely misread his explanation and assumed that the error undercut the evidence of desistance on which he had based his earlier coverage. Perhaps the most telling comment (in a later-deleted tweet) came from Libby Watson, then a writer for Splinter News, now with The New Republic:

Perhaps most worryingly, in this climate, reliable research and reporting on transgender issues becomes very difficult. In a high-profile controversy last year, a paper by Brown University behavioral scientist Lisa Littman exploring “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”—cases in which teens, mostly girls, suddenly begin to report dissatisfaction with their gender, often apparently in response to social influences — was removed from Brown’s website and withdrawn from the university’s news distribution after an avalanche of complaints. Brown’s statement paid lip service to academic freedom but acknowledged “concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.” Littman’s study underwent post-publication review at the journal PLOS One and was republished with minor adjustments. While critics have assailed it for alleged shoddy methodology and self-selected samples, similar criticisms have been made (mostly by conservatives) of studies which conclude that people with gender dysphoria are best helped by transitioning.

When does transgender access pose the risk of serious disruption of single-sex spaces and services?

There is no doubt that transgender people have been using single-sex public bathrooms and locker rooms for decades with no problem. What’s new in recent years is the demand that transgender women who not only have male anatomy but do not “pass” as women be accepted in all-female spaces. The issue is not that trans women are particularly likely to be sexual predators; it’s that sexual predators may take advantage of the situation. One needn’t see every man as “Schrödinger’s rapist” to understand that if women are reluctant to raise an alarm, call for help, or run when they see a male in the women’s room, this is likely to put women at risk. Locker rooms and showers where people frequently see each other in a state of undress can pose even thornier problems.

While transgender activists minimize these problems, a lot of transgender-critical rhetoric on this subject tends to vilify males and equate femaleness with victimhood and innocence—for instance, to downplay female violence in prisons or shelters and to show utter unconcern with the safety of male or trans inmates or residents. A safer environment for everyone should be the goal. But in the meantime, we should not be afraid to say that putting a legally male, male-bodied violent sex offender in a women’s prison because that person has taken a female name and wears a wig and lipstick — a thing that actually happened in England — is quite literally political correctness gone mad. (The reasons are many, from disparity in physical strength to the risk of sexual assault resulting in pregnancy.)

Will women and girls lose opportunities in athletics when they have to compete against male-born transgender athletes?

This is the question that got tennis legend and LGBT icon Martina Navratilova “canceled.” Even commentators sympathetic to the rights of trans athletes often acknowledge that the issue is extremely complicated and that the rules governing trans access are inconsistent and confusing. On the Olympic level, at least, trans women are required to demonstrate consistently low blood testosterone levels — though many physical advantages of having developed as a male (larger lungs and heart size, better capacity to build up muscle) remain even post-transition. On the other hand, in this year’s indoor track and field high school championships in Connecticut — where transgender students compete with no restrictions—the top two girls’ spots went to trans athletes, at least one of whom has not undergone any hormone treatments. (In June, three female high school athletes filed a federal Title IX complaint challenging Connecticut’s policy.)

Are people going to be branded bigots if they refuse to have sex with a male-bodied trans woman or female-bodied trans man because they’re not into male/female bodies?

Yes, this is a real issue, especially in the lesbian community, where the sexual exclusion of transgender women with male genitalia has been dubbed “the cotton ceiling.” (“Lesbians who don’t like penis are bigots” is certainly an interesting twist on intersectionality.) British feminist Sarah Ditum argues that this pressure is directed exclusively at women in another manifestation of misogyny, pointing to such things as a 2012 Planned Parenthood Toronto workshop called “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women.” But the shaming of gay men for not liking vaginas and straight men for preferring partners without penises is catching up. Just recently, Slate’s two sex advice columnists chided a male letter-writer who was open to dating trans women, but not “pre-op” ones, for being “hung up on genitals.” (Pun, presumably, not intended.)

Trans activists who push this issue angrily deny trying to “force” anyone to sleep with people whose anatomy goes against their sexual preference. But the coercive undertones are there: in the next breath, the same activists will demand that people “try to work through” those issues or critically examine “their sexual preferences and the beliefs that inform them.”

There is another complicated issue that has not received much attention: the potentially far-reaching consequences of the trans activist community’s strict taboo on any mention of a person’s pre-transition identity (“deadnaming”). For many, the prohibition applies even when that identity is widely known. Rebecca Tuvel, the philosophy scholar who was subjected to a vicious witch-hunt for a paper comparing transgender and “transracial” identities, was accused, among other things, of “deadnaming a trans woman.” Tuvel’s offense was that, while discussing Caitlyn Jenner’s transition, she referred to Jenner’s former name, Bruce — which Jenner herself has freely mentioned.

At times, this taboo has led to bizarre and fraught situations. Thus, in 2015, The Daily Dot published a feature by Aja Romano (currently at Vox, and the author of the essay lambasting J.K. Rowling’s “transphobic B.S.”) profiling one Andy Blake, a manipulative sociopath, serial liar, and con artist who had started cults in several fandoms, scammed numerous people out of their money, sexually abused women, and almost certainly ruined many lives. (Blake’s manipulations likely contributed to three deaths in a murder-suicide.) The story was titled “The Strange Lives of Andrew Blake.” But it omitted a key detail well known to the many people who had followed this story before: Blake was a transgender man who had had several female “lives” before transitioning.

The effect of this omission, as many of Blake’s victims complained, was not only to distort the story but to greatly minimize Blake’s trail of lies (and possibly enabling further scams by concealing some of his identities). In response, Romano wrote that Blake did not want his transgender identity mentioned — even though it was a matter of public record and common knowledge — and she felt she could not “make life less safe for the broader trans community by outing someone who doesn’t want to be outed.”

And then there’s the story of the person I’ll call “Georgette Gilmer,” who penned a much-praised response to J.K. Rowling’s “transphobic” tweet the other day.

Several years ago, “Georgette” was “George Gilmer,” a male feminist and social justice activist who eventually ran afoul of feminist Twitter. “George” was charged with a variety of vague sins like “mansplaining” and “gaslighting,” which basically boiled down to not knowing his place as a white male ally in the feminist community. Apparently, he had been too aggressive in arguments with women and had banned some women from his Facebook page. Once, he had the temerity to tell a woman that having a vagina did not automatically give her superior insights into social issues, just as his possession of a penis did not make him any less perceptive about the world. The monster.

A #Stop[Gilmer’s-real-name] hashtag sprung up. Every single word “Gilmer” had ever said on Twitter or Facebook was scoured for evidence of misogyny, white supremacism, and other horrors. He was accused of being a predator because he once effusively complimented a teenage fan on her writing and added that he wanted to make it clear he wasn’t hitting on her. (Hardcore grooming, commented one member of the mob.) When “Gilmer” announced that he was taking a Twitter break because the mobbing had triggered his PTSD, his persecutors crowed in triumph and vowed to be ready when he returned.

“Gilmer’s” comeback attempts were ruthlessly squashed. When a women’s political group gave him a male-ally award a few months after the #Stop[“Gilmer”] fiasco, his foes promptly assailed the group for honoring a known “abuser.” The award was rescinded. Later that year, a tech company invited “Gilmer” to headline a live chat. The backlash was swift, and “Gilmer” was indeed stopped.

The following year, “Gilmer” made a largely unnoticed post on his site saying that he no longer identified a man because he did not fit into masculine roles. Then a couple more years went by, and “Gilmer” resurfaced as a transgender woman, with an unchanged appearance except for lipstick and earrings, talking about having spent years in denial about being female on the inside.

A few radical feminists tried to make noises. All for naught. Today, “Gilmer” (sporting a more feminine look) is a respected LGBT activist on Twitter and a staff member for a major progressive organization. “Gilmer’s” past life as “George” has been thoroughly memory-holed, even from Wikipedia.

In a way, the “George”-to-“Georgette” journey highlights one thing that no doubt infuriates many anti-trans radical feminists: Transition allows a onetime straight white male to jump from the bottom to the top of the intersectional hierarchy. As a “cishet” man, you’d be ripped to shreds for telling a woman that her vagina doesn’t make her a better feminist than your own penised self. As a trans woman, you can get progressive applause for saying the exact same thing, even in far cruder and nastier terms.

Aside from not wanting to get embroiled in a “deadnaming” controversy, I genuinely have no interest in outing or sabotaging “Gilmer.” For the record, I think “Gilmer” was and is a noxious sanctimonious jerk in both incarnations, but as far as I’m concerned the #Stop[“Gilmer”] crowd was far worse.

Nonetheless, “Gilmer’s” ability to completely erase a controversial past points to some troubling issues. In this instance, the charges of sexual misconduct were unfounded insinuations. But suppose for a moment that a trans person with a prominent public persona did have a pre-transition history as a sexual predator. Would that part of the past be buried with the rest? Would women with stories of being victimized by that person have felt free to come forward during the #MeToo moment?

All of which raises a provocative but, I think, entirely legitimate question. Let’s say that tomorrow, Harvey Weinstein came out as a transgender woman named Holly Weinstein and showed up in lipstick and a wig. Would good progressives be obliged to play along and let “Holly” start over with a clean slate? Would all mention of Harvey Weinstein be scrubbed from Wikipedia? Would lesbians who refused to touch Holly’s penis be considered transphobic? And would it be verboten to suggest that maybe Holly was not really a trans woman but a man using a trans identity for opportunistic purposes — just as it currently seems verboten to suggest it about Jessica Yaniv, the alleged sex pest and vexatious litigant who, not long ago, was still using the name “Jonathan” when calling beauticians with a female clientele to demand intimate waxing services?

Weinstein is obviously an extreme example — but that’s the point. Even if not mentioning a transitioned person’s past should be the norm, virtually no one is really an absolutist about it. The question is where to draw the line.

There are vast numbers of transgender women and men who want nothing more than to live their lives in peace and be treated with dignity. More power to them.

There is also a radical transgender movement whose goals are less about personal identity than about revolutionizing cultural beliefs about gender. Its views have been mainstreamed to a remarkable degree: today, respectable publications talk about people being “assigned female/male at birth” rather than “born female/male” and refer to “gender affirmation” rather than “gender reassignment” procedures. More and more publications use “they” to refer to individuals who profess a nonbinary identity, no matter how painful the results may sound and look. Six of the 20 Democrats running for President in October were using pronouns in their Twitter bios, a ritual genuflection to the idea that gender shouldn’t be assumed from appearance or name; Kamala Harris also announced hers on CNN. Even Goldman Sachs now encourages employees to proactively announce their pronouns and defer to the wishes of people wishing to be called “ze/zir.”

The ideology behind all this is a morass of contradictions that quickly falls apart if you poke at it. If being a woman or a man has nothing to do with biological sex, where do male and female gender identities come from? What are you transitioning from and to? If gender is a “spectrum,” what is this spectrum based on? You can see the entire structure collapse upon itself when a video produced by Mermaids U.K., a British advocacy organization, suggests that gender is really about personal experience, so there are arguably as many genders as there are people. (Then maybe just talk about individuality instead?)

Apparently it’s actually more like 8 billion genders, according to this presenter.

University of Warwick political philosopher and “gender-critical feminist” Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, with whom I undoubtedly have many disagreements, wrote a fine article three years ago arguing that the idea of a vast number of genders puts people in boxes rather than free them from boxes.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that when gender is completely divorced from sex, definitions of “male” and “female” almost inevitably drift toward rigid gender stereotypes. A 2016 Vox article featuring short personal accounts from 12 people “across the gender spectrum” illustrates this point: the subjects’ statements of what their gender means almost invariably comes down either to an elusive personal feeling or to stereotypical ideas of masculine and feminine. “There are times where I drive a pickup truck, I work with power equipment all the time. And I like being able to do that without having that take away from my femininity or my womanhood,” says one self-identified “genderqueer” transgender woman who feels “excluded” by binary language. An 18-year-old from Virginia who identifies as “agender” with “they/them” pronouns talks about growing up as a girl who hung out with boys in a milieu where it was assumed that boys play sports and girls like pink: “And then there was me — I went out and played sports, and I wore a dress, and that’s just who I was.”

Along the same lines, one of the responses to J.K. Rowling came from sex and culture critic Ella Dawson, who asserted that Rowling’s own Harry Potter books are filled with queer characters: For instance, “Tonks is all kinds of genderfluid” — presumably because she’s not conventionally feminine.

This is where I sympathize with the “gender-critical” feminists. The whole point of feminism was that being a boy or a girl shouldn’t dictate whether you play sports or like pink. Without getting into the question of whether feminists have downplayed innate sex differences and the biological basis of sex roles too much, one can believe that differences exist and still support flexibility that allows individuals to be themselves. The idea that you’re something other than a girl if you play sports or something other than a boy if you like sparkly face paint seems hideously regressive.

There are many other reasons to have serious misgivings about the new “gender revolution.” Instead of freeing us from gender-based expectations, it requires us to think about gender identity — our own and other people’s — all the time. (This is one reason many “old-fashioned” transgender people dislike the pronoun craze — the issue that made trans YouTuber Contrapoints, a.k.a. Natalie Wynn, an Enemy of the People earlier this year.) It enshrines the far-reaching and potentially dangerous idea that people have the right to demand societal validation of their preferred identity based on either ideological beliefs or subjective and shifting internal feelings. If respecting someone’s chosen identity is non-negotiable, shouldn’t people be able to choose their own race (hello, Rachel Dolezal) or age? And why shouldn’t “otherkin” — people who identify as nonhuman species, from supernatural beings to space aliens to animals — have their identities validated?

This brings us back to the Forstater case. As mentioned before, Forstater got in trouble partly for disrespecting Pips Bunce, who sometimes cross-dresses as Pippa at the office, and Philip Murray, a biological male who presents as male but insists on gender-neutral pronouns. I’m sure Forstater has some opinions and prejudices I don’t like. But I also think that honoring Bunce as a female leader is like giving a Veteran of the Year Award to a Civil War reenactor and that referring to Murray as Scotland’s first trans politician is not only absurd but insulting to actual trans people (many of whom would likely scorn him as an attention-seeking “transtrender”).

J.K. Rowling’s public rebellion against transgender dogma, like Navratilova’s, is a sign of growing dissension in liberal ranks. Hopefully, this is the start of a debate that was short-circuited when the progressive establishment began to treat the beliefs of a small cadre of radical activists as unassailable moral standards — a conversation that should include gender-critical feminists, scientists, transgender people who don’t subscribe to radical gender ideology, and detransitioners.

There is no reason we can’t accommodate the specific needs of transgender women and men without pretending that the norm isn’t the norm or that sexual dimorphism doesn’t exist. (For instance, the concern about inclusive language in public service messages promoting PAP smears or prostate exams can be resolved by addressing the message to “women/men” and then adding references to “anyone else with a cervix/a prostate.”) Other issues, such as gender transition for minors, access to single-sex spaces, and gender-segregated sports, will remain complicated. But the best way to preempt a genuinely ugly backlash is to recognize that problems exist and that respect should not override reality.