Take a world where it is finally possible for people to address gender dysphoria, create the medical treatment that allows the gender binary to disappear. Take many trans people, living and working(if they can get work) and trying find a way to settle the way they feel inside with the bodies God gave them. Take a society who won’t accept it, add violence, poverty, difficulty accessing healthcare and slowly but surely watch as these people fight for their right to be accepted as who they are. Add some missteps along the way, because the fight for acceptance is never straightforward and one person gaining rights often means someone else having to give way.

Add inequality, so those people just trying to live their lives, in a landscape most won’t experience, are lost behind the most vocal, the most narcissistic abusive men, who see an opportunity in the gender binary disappearing to attack the progress women have made. Add twitter. A medium where you can form an identity online, attached to nothign, and impact policy in a way never seen before. Add online tribes of narcissists forming to attack women under the guise of rights for the many trans people just trying to get by. Add high profile campaigns which sek to do nothing but silence and erase women, and drive women out of the public sphere. Add a word like TERF which allows you to openly fantasise about killing and beating women, while you call it feminism. Add online swarms who will threaten and abuse women who refuse to change their reality, perception and gender to suit these people. Add a new condition that lesbians must be forced to like cock from now on or its transphobic. Add an Oxbridge left who want violent misogyny rebranded as feminism, and add unstable misogynist narcissists dependent on mood stabilisers to defame doctors on television and fabricate allegations of sexual abuse, while offering fake statistics about child suicide. Add demands that women and girls have all protection from male violence removed, and demands that women are never mentioned. Introduce The Sun newspaper, playing on well founded fears that violent and abusive men will exploit the gender binary disappearing, by suggesting a famous child killer and rapist will have a sex change in order to get into a women’s prison. It doesn’t have to be true.

Hey presto you have a backlash. Feminism is littered with these backlashes. The abusive narcissists who exploited the gender binary disappearing get their moment in the sun and get to vent their hatred of women.

The living rooms who were oblivious to the people just trying to live their lives, access healthcare, be accepted, are told that the activists who want to vent violent misogyny, are those people. They are told that these people getting access to healthcare, protection, and acceptance is actually this misogynist culture and any recognition of violent misogyny is transphobia. They are told to accept violent misogyny which threatens children as equality for transsexuals. They are told that children who are confused about their gender will commit suicide if they are not immediately treated as transsexual, and recognise that this is disturbing abusive emotional blackmail. The people in those living rooms, recognising a dangerous culture when they see one don’t really care that this is just a nasty culture exploiting real inequality. They react. They bridle against this as any reasonable person would when faced with such dangerous and deranged demands. The cause of trans equality is set back decades. Go back to the people who just wantd to address structural inequality, to live their lives in a world where it was finally possible to address gender dysphoria. Take many trans people, living and working(if they can get work) and trying find a way to settle the way they feel inside with the bodies God gave them. Take a society who won’t accept it, add violence, poverty, difficulty accessing healthcare and slowly but surely watch as these people fight for their right to be accepted as who they are. Aware that they were so close, before elite activists, naiive students, and violent misogynists took away the progress they made so they could attack women and erase their existence.

The backlash is nearly here. It will be grim. It will be widespread and the people who will pay for it are not people like Shon Faye, who will go back to being a mentally unstable lawyer with all the privilege of being male, while the trans people who didn’t have an interest in violent misogyny and access to media, suffer the consequences.