The motive force behind transactivism
Young women are the foot soldiers, but men driven by an erotic fixation created this movement
I recently had an exchange that was interesting and somewhat frustrating (on both sides, probably) with someone I have a lot of respect for. He’s someone I chat with now and then about cultural issues and I don’t worry about policing my speech with him because the way we got to know each other was through free-speech activism.
He dropped me a message asking if what he described as the “new wave of extreme trans ideology” and also various other strands of the identitarian left were being “driven by 18-30 white women”. He didn’t mention why he was asking, but it’s an obvious question. Both generally — this is the group that is most likely to support gender self-ID, say it’s going to vote Green and so on — and right now, because a really good article describing the extent of this demographic’s disaffection had just been published in the New Statesman.
That article makes the point, with copious evidence including new polling, that for all the attention paid to angry, politically radicalised young men, young women are at least as angry and radicalised, only they have veered very far to the left rather than the right. I won’t go into why I think this might be, except to say (with considerable foreboding) that living online and communicating largely through social media creates feedback loops that may amplify initially trivial differences into enormous ones.
But to return to my acquaintance’s question, surely it’s obvious that it cannot possibly be teenage girls and young women that drove all this stuff into legislatures and boardrooms — they just don’t have the institutional power. We’re not just talking about consumer tastes, we’re talking about laws, workplace policies and public spending. Even though young women have more power now than they have ever had in any previous society, and even though universities are engaged in a destructive feedback loop between (female) academics and their students on courses mostly taken by young women, the constellation of far-left opinions on race, gender, the climate and Palestine my acquaintance was talking about has been in the ascendant since shortly after the turn of the century.
The radicalisation of young women seems to me to have followed that, not caused it. And that was driven not by young women but by some middle-aged men who went all in on it, and many more who got on the bandwagon because even if they thought it was all dumb they didn’t actually care one way or the other and it was the fashionable thing to do.
