 One of the things that I've been really concerned by is that there seems to be a real rebirth and renewal of the platforming of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, and I feel that while we have been quite effectively demolishing their arguments about how trans women aren't women and how trans women present a danger to cisgender women everywhere, and I think that there's been a lot of really great and useful work done demolishing it, there's not been that much time spent on thinking about how and why this kind of revived platforming of these figures like Jermaine Greer or Julie Bindle is happening. And this was bigger over the weekend, right? And this was really bigger over the weekend. It was all over the papers. Because he had Janice Turner's heinous article saying children sacrificed to appease the trans lobby, which is just classic scare mongering. Front page of the sun as well, no? Yeah, front page of the sun today, which was the skirt and the drag queen go swish, swish, swish. Terrible scanning, doesn't even go that well with the wheels and the bus, but I digress. And I think that we can see a lot of parallels between this kind of confected moral panic about trans people corrupting our children and taking over our schools. We can see a lot of parallels with the kind of Section 28 hysteria of the 1980s, where we can see a lot of parallels with a kind of homophobic authoritarian populism, which came to power, I think, with Thatcher. And I think because we can see those parallels, weirdly, this should give us a little bit of hope because that was a really effective political strategy when it was able to present itself as a counter hegemony. So the Thatcherite narrative went that I'm going to come and make schools teach common sense curriculum values again, like the three R's and no more hippie teachers promoting homosexuality. And people were able to look at it and go, yeah, that sounds about right. Whereas actually that kind of orthodoxy is no longer a counter hegemony. It's just hegemony. And what's more, that is completely at odds with the general movement of pop culture. Now, I'm not saying that life is not made often intensely unbearable for in particular trans youth and trans people of color in this country. Almost half of all trans youth in this country have attempted suicide. Eighty-four percent have self-harmed and those are deeply alarming statistics. However, the Kardashians are trans inclusive now. Can you Western trans inclusive now? Pop culture is going in one direction and it is in a more inclusive and pathetic and accepting one. And that's not the mood of our popular press. So that should lead us on to our second question, which is how can these figures like Julie Bindo, like what's her name, Bert Chil, right? Like Jermaine Greer, how can they find friends in the right wing tabloid press? Because let's be real, these were the feminists who were getting smeared as lesbians separatists, as bad mothers and all the rest of it in these very rags not that long ago. And I was giving it some thought and I was thinking about the fact that trans exclusionary radical feminists aren't radical at all because what they've done is they've looked at the foundational feminist premise, which is that gender is a set of social norms constructed to dominate women as a class and that women's emancipation is based on the deconstruction and the dismantling of these norms and gone, well, we can't take that too far. We will at some point rely on a biological ascensionism. And what they've done is essentially respond to the death of modernity and the kind of utopian potentials of, you know, modernist meta narratives and kind of accept the conditions of post-modernity that real change isn't really possible and it's not desirable, which is the exact position of these right wing tabloid rags. They don't want change. They don't want political participation. The reason why you're able to see this kind of dovetailing of ideologically divergent political interests is because they both want the same thing, which is stasis. So when people say that identity politics are splitting the left and it's going to interrupt a program of social and economic transformation, I kind of present this counterpoint, which is no, these things are deeply connected. Trans rights are human rights. They are our rights. They are political rights. And us as cis people need to ride or die for our trans siblings. And I think we need to get a lot better at rejecting the framing of mainstream debate and push it onto politically useful territory.