Trans is big right now, with the cause dominating most LGBT+ groups, covered extensively in left-wing media, and even featuring highly on politician’s agendas, but something that’s not talked about nearly enough is why.

Just why are so many more people claiming transgender identity these days?

Is it just coincidence, or a consequence of greater awareness due to education, or is something more sinister behind the enthusiastic embrace of all things gender?

What is the root cause behind this, and why has Big Trans taken hold?

Harmful gender stereotypes have been with us since the creation of patriarchy but up until the late 20th Century, many of us gender non-conforming types had to put up and shut up, or receive persecution, hatred, and possibly even prison time for our sins against gender, particularly if we were lesbian or gay.

However, all that started to change when the system of gender itself, which serves a particularly pernicious evil Dad, Patriarchy, received some serious pushback, during the Second Wave of feminism in the 70’s. Up til then, there had been some progress, women were now allowed to become doctors, vote, and wear pants, homosexuality was made legal in 1967, in England and Wales, but we lived in a still rigidly blue/ pink binary society.

It was a society where men were expected to be rugged and masculine, and women were meant to be passive, pretty, and pleasing.

The Second Wave sisters ripped up Patriarchy’s rule book, delivering a scathing examination and insightful analysis of patriarchy, waking up millions of women to the gender jig in the process.

This has never been forgiven by too many men, who feel they’ve lost out big time because women aren’t being how they damn well want them to be anymore.

Second Wave feminism didn’t invent disquiet about gender, despite the wild claims of those who have a vested interested in attacking feminist gains. The pain suffered by many women (and Gender Non-conforming men) caused by a gender stereotyped world has always been in effect, even before the Second Wave blew the barn doors off and gave women (and GNC men) an understanding of why they felt so shitty.

Pre-Second Wave Feminism, GNC people, women, and particularly many GNC and Lesbian women, still felt miserable but had no choice but to suffer in silence. Some people (think UKIP Carl Benjamin types) would just love to go back to those days.

The Second Wave deconstruction of gender gave women insight as to why they felt so much shame, pain, sadness, and frustration, about their bodies, sexual violence, relationships, stifled careers, and limitations.

With this information women felt they could see for the first time, and with knowledge and the motivation to change things so they could live fuller, happier lives, more and more began to demand their freedom. The funny thing is, the Second Wave deconstruction of gender didn’t just assist women, it benefited everyone. Initially, Gay liberationists were united with Second Wavers in the belief that gender stereotypes harmed people, which is more than ironic considering our present LGBT+ misogynistic nightmare reality.

Debunking the myth that little girls spring out of the womb innately liking pink (which was a boy’s colour for centuries!), and wanting to pet fluffy kittens, Second Wave theory freed women from shame, kitchen drudgery, and passive servitude to men. It gave them permission to express themselves how they wanted. No matter what those with dishonest motives claim, (I’m looking at you Men’s Rights Activists) it didn’t penalise women if they wanted to wear a dress and lipstick, and have babies, but it did tell them they didn’t have to.

Nor did it tell them to hate the individual men in their lives. Rather it opened women’s eyes to the system of oppression that benefits all men, which is Patriarchy, and it told them about the tool used by patriarchy to get what it wants, from women, gender.

Sadly, now, many women are not enjoying the benefits of Second Wave theory, and are once again primping, preening, and presenting themselves as the perfect passive yet hyper-sexual stereotype. Yet they are not happier, and the stats prove it.

Today’s model of ideal women has moved on from the happy housewife aka domestic drudge, to the hyper-nympho who never says no, no matter how degrading the sexual act.

Apparently, this is the price women must pay for increased access to the workplace, control over their bodies, and freedom in the public sphere.

This is where Gender is causing a clash. Feminism, the legit kind, not the “blow jobs are work” dreck, challenges limiting gender stereotypes that dub boys lesser if they cry or paint their nails. It laughs in the face of the idea that women should be tied to the kitchen sink, or shouldn’t pursue power

Gender ideology, however, positively worships these stereotypes, and it’s now the dominant ideology of the left. It’s defanged real feminism with its lofty embrace of blokes in skirts as true feminist heroes, and presents prostitution as a perfectly okay, nay, recommended form of work, for young, vulnerable females.

This all-consuming embrace of gender, this warped renaissance, is why more girls than ever are currently anorexic, why pornography is becoming increasingly more degrading, why women leaders are regularly trolled on social media, and why men in the West are again beginning to think they should decide if a woman gestates a foetus (in her own body!) to term.

In other words, gender is deeply, deeply regressive. It’s stuffing everyone back in little pink and blue boxes all over again.

But there’s more.

If you’re a gender-non-conforming woman, or a lesbian woman (the kind with XX chromosomes!), things are shitty, at least socially speaking, and very often things can get violent physically speaking too.

The bloody aftermath of a misogynistic, homophobic attack upon two lesbians on a London Bus, who were beaten after they refuse to kiss each other in front of a group of men.

Feminism and the Lesbian community were once there to say, hey, it’s okay sister, you can love women, you can wear your hair short, you can ditch the make-up bag. But now real feminism is in hiding, and the only kind of feminism is the kind centring “women” with suspiciously deep voices and rather chiselled chins. Meanwhile the Lesbian community appears to have lost its collective soul to the same said “women”.

The trans explosion has happened because gender non-conforming women, (and men) and lesbian women particularly, still live shitty lives, but unlike the 50’s don’t have to live “stealth” anymore for fear of prison time. But they still face hassle, stress, social pressure and ostracization, and since feminism is virtually toothless, and the Gay lobby has been overrun by Big Trans, of course, they all still want an out.

And they’ll bloody take one given the opportunity. What’s the alternative? Get beaten on a bus by porn addled, lesbian obsessed males? Attacked at a speaking conference as happened to lesbian feminist Julie Bindel by trans “woman” Cathy Brennan? Get trolled on Twitter, told that “tomboy is the grossest aesthetic”?

Women, unsurprisingly, are aware their status is still zero, and having frantically looked around and seen there is now no one and nothing to help them, no movement advocating for their enfranchisement, are settling on the wrong solution. Gender non-conforming men face a different problem, they receive much more social love, since we are a cock-worshipping society, but carry the shame of not being “man” enough if they don’t tick the characteristics that come with the blue box.

Enter Big Trans.

The explosion of trans is happening because it can and because people are dissatisfied with the persecution and shame they experience because they don’t fit neatly into pink or blue. People are now able to swap the boxes that limit them, for the first time in history, and so they do, instead of tearing them apart, like they should.

One of the top goals of those who advocate for Big Trans, is to halt feminism’s progress.

The reality is, for as long as Gender Ideology is promoted it will stymy the progress of any critical deconstruction of gender, and therefore any real kind of feminism. And it will make a whole lot of people, male and female unhappy along the way.

I’m prepared to accept the idea that some, a tiny percentage, of trans people might be happier transitioning, that transition may be the right choice for them. That they may have genuine body dysphoria that couldn’t be resolved any other way but through surgery and hormones.

I don’t though, accept, that blokes who wear dresses, don’t have any surgery, but claim transgender identity, have genuine body dysphoria, i.e. the classic “trans diagnosis”. What they do have is gender discomfort, men get shade if they like “girly stuff” and so, voila, problem solved, they become “gurls”.

Women adopt trans identity for different reasons, less fetishist, more survival. For women, it’s about power or protection, your status, goes up if you’re a “man”, though it won’t if you don’t put your body through the brutality of transition.

If you do actually go through with transition, you become “invisible” to sexual predators but even if you don’t transition, you can wear masculine clothing, because you’re a “boy” now. Just try wearing it without that precious trans identity though, or around people who don’t know you’re “trans” and watch the criticism and disgust roll in.

If we lived in a healthy world, a world free of gender stereotypes, where we could all be treated with equal respect, regardless of our sexed bodies, would so many people be trans, or would they be happy and perfectly comfortable, whether they were a bloke in a dress or a woman sporting a buzzcut?

Regardless, that would be a much healthier world to live in, don’t you think, and we can’t currently make it because of regressive gender ideology.

If you want that world, please speak out, write something, join a gender critical action group like Women’s Place UK, Fair Play for Women , Standing For Women, or a group campaigning to keep males out of our Lesbian spaces like Get the L Out.

Or just do something, anything, to help spread awareness. There’s a massive pushback against anyone who talks about the link between limiting gender stereotypes and the trans explosion happening right now, so we need as many as possible to get on board.

We really do need to talk about the harm these restricting limitations place on all of us, male, and female, because, because Gender, as feminist legend Sheila Jeffries so aptly wrote, Hurts.