The bullying fringe of the gender-critical movement

A handful of activists are bringing an important cause into disrepute.

As we enter what might be the final phase of the culture war, with gender identity ideology being challenged openly in the highest courts, we are seeing LGBTQIA+ crusaders becoming more ferocious in their rhetoric and more defamatory in their slurs. At the same time, a handful of gender-critical activists and their self-proclaimed “allies” are assuming more extreme positions and lashing out at those they deem guilty of heresy. Purity spirals are not specific to any one cause.

Those of us who have been engulfed in this subject will be familiar with the small contingent of GC figures whose tactics are indistinguishable from the trans rights activists they claim to oppose. Such people are a gift to the gender lobby, because they provide them with proof that there exists within GC circles some who are authentically reactionary, bigoted and willing to smear and lie about anyone who has the temerity to disagree with them. They are, in short, authoritarians. And although they are in no way representative of the movement they ostensibly support, and have been robustly criticised by most sensible women in the fight, they continue to undermine the crucial task of opposing the pernicious effects of genderism.

This was made perfectly clear this week when it was revealed that one of these so-called “allies” – an anonymous account on X called “@FraserDAnderson” – had created an online “Troon Index” (“troon” is a derogatory term for those who identify as transgender). The site included profiles of almost 500 trans-identifying individuals, and had conflated law-abiding citizens with registered sex offenders, drawing no distinction whatsoever between either group. Names and photographs were published, and those listed were referred to as “creatures”, “perverts”, “filth”, “sex deceptionists” and other similarly degrading terms.

This isn’t, as some people have scrabbled to claim, a project intended to safeguard women from predators – if that were the case, the list would be limited to those who have criminal convictions – but rather a clear attempt to intimidate and publicly shame those who are perceived as depraved. Dr Michael Foran, lecturer in law at Glasgow University, has explained how the “Troon Index” is an exercise in dehumanisation, defining it as “the inferential alienation of human rights from a group, usually accompanied by a disgust response based on stereotypes of deviance, most insidious when there is a genuine underlying heightened risk associated with the group that is totalised to all members”. As he points out, the list is “very likely illegal for a whole host of reasons, from defamation to criminal harassment. It’s not activism. It’s abuse”.

Those who know anything about the history of witch hunts will recognise the tactic. It is difficult to think of an authoritarian regime that hasn’t at some point drawn up lists of thought criminals. Consider the proscriptions of the dictator Sulla during the Roman Republic, or Robespierre’s list of “enemies of the revolution” in the Reign of Terror, or the Soviet Union purges of “counter-revolutionaries” under Stalin. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn recalls how “lists of names prepared up above, or an initial suspicion, or a denunciation by an informer, or any anonymous denunciation, were all that was needed to bring about the arrest of the suspect, followed by the inevitable formal charge”. And of course the Red Scare under Senator Joseph McCarthy is still within living memory.

I do not claim that the “Troon Index” ranks among these outrages, but it is indubitably motivated by the same authoritarian impulse that is natural to humankind and which we learn to guard against through the process of socialisation. When I first criticised this activist for such tactics, he or she responded with the expected soft-witted incoherence.

This response is fascinating for what it reveals about the authoritarian mindset, and its tendency to leap to falsehoods as a matter of instinct. I have never shared a blocklist with anyone at all, and there is no such thing as a “UK Gay Men’s Cabal” (although that does sound like fun). This post could not be more self-discrediting if it tried.

Another point of note is the reflex swerve into anti-gay sentiment. A common feature of this extreme minority of the GC movement is that they tend to reserve their most vituperative attacks for gay men. One high-profile GC campaigner recently complained that she was unable to call me a “faggot” directly because I had blocked her on social media. This trend has been noticed by many commentators, and is unlikely to be coincidental. Helen Pluckrose has collated numerous examples and suggested some possible explanations here.

Some defenders of the “Troon Index” have tried to claim that because trans rights activists have made similar lists, this somehow justifies an identical response, a form of tu quoque fallacy that even young children soon learn to avoid. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of GC feminists have recognised this list-making for the authoritarian strategy that it is, and the “Troon Index” has now been taken down. The writer and feminist Dr Jane Clare Jones put it this way on X:

“If you are making lists of evil troons for ‘safeguarding’ purposes – or is that ‘social hygiene’ as one GC said? – can you just do us all a favour and stop pretending to be so very outraged about why people are increasingly horrified by you, and some of us tried to raise the alarm about how your rhetoric could go to bad places really fast.”

That chilling phrase “social hygiene” would be too on-the-nose even for eugenicists, but somehow it has been adopted within this small group of GC campaigners. Dr Jones is referring here to a new libellous strategy, most commonly aimed at other gender-critical individuals who have the audacity to veer even slightly from the approved set of opinions. The trick is to brand such heretics as a “safeguarding risk” in order to smear them and discredit their views. She explains it as follows:

“It’s become like a magic talisman claim to justify any abusiveness. And anyone who resists their abusive authoritarianism is immediately relegated to those who don’t care about safeguarding. Ergo, a danger to children. Ergo, a pedophile apologist, Ergo, check their hard-drive.

My mother is a child protection specialist. You don’t use claims about safeguarding as a weapon like this if you genuinely care about children’s well being. Just like you don’t use accusations of rape or rape apologia as a weapon if you care about rape, or challenging rape.”

Many feminists and gay men have been targeted in this way. It is no coincidence that gay people are particularly vulnerable to the accusation; the conflation of homosexuality and child abuse is the most long-established of all homophobic tropes.

But even Dr Jones herself has been on the receiving end of this kind of invective, with one prominent GC figure wilfully misrepresenting her dissertation “Sovereign Invulnerability: Sexual Politics and the Ontology of Rape”. As Dr Jones points out, Dr Maja Bowen, an author and retired doctor, “maliciously misread” the argument to “frame it as rape apologia”. Helen Pluckrose has outlined the full extent of Bowen’s grim deception, and how she has taken quotations from Dr Jones’s work out of context to imply that the text is “saying precisely the opposite of what it does say”. Helen’s thread on the subject can be read here.

The more vicious activists in GC circles tend to be collectivists. They believe that it is justifiable to vilify all gay men due to the bad behaviour of a few, or to assume that any criticism of individual women is evidence of “misogyny”, or that women are saintly creatures who are incapable of dehumanising or authoritarian behaviour (even when their own conduct disproves the point). Personally, I judge each individual on his or her own merits and actions, irrespective of sex, race, or any other immutable characteristic. How old-fashioned of me.

This is why so many who have complained about my criticism of the “Troon Index” are flummoxed when the identical points are made by women. To give one example, a GC extremist took to X to berate me for daring to oppose authoritarianism. This is what she wrote:

All the tropes were present and correct: the intimation that I am a safeguarding risk, the identitarian obsession, the conviction that only women and parents are permitted to hold an opinion on these subjects. Soon after, barrister Sarah Phillimore weighed in and asked: “I have a child. Am I allowed to say I think you are dangerous?” The GC troll was, of course, stumped. She had earlier declared that any woman who disagreed with her was a “dick panderer”, but she lacked the courage to repeat the slur when directly challenged. Like most trans rights activists, these extreme outliers in the GC movement are so immersed in the politics of identity that they are impervious to reason. This assumption - that women who take a different view cannot think for themselves and are merely seeking to flatter men - is about as misogynistic as it gets.

The writer and psychotherapist Stella O’Malley has also been on the receiving end of intense vitriol from this small unrepresentative faction. She has recently decried the “lunatic fringe of the GC movement” who “have become what they first sought to fight against”. As she writes:

“There have been way too many people who had important perspectives to offer and who were mercilessly bullied - and sometimes shamed into silence. I think of Jane Clare Jones, Jenny Watson, Laura Becker, Shannon Thrace, Ali Ceesay, Janice Turner, Sarah Phillimore, Exulansic, Helen Pluckrose, Christina Buttons, Colin Wright, Andrew Gold, Fionne Orlander, Debbie Hayton, Miranda Yardley, Kristina Harrison, Buck Angel, Claire Graham, Graham Linehan, James Esses, Benjamin Boyce, Clive Simpson, Mike Bailey, Phil Illy, James Cantor, Ken Zucker, Ray Blanchard, Billboard Chris, Genspect, LGB Alliance, Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel, Women’s Place UK, Judith Green, Labour Women’s Declaration, Fair Play for Women, Aaron Tyrrell, Aaron Kimberly, GD Alliance, Corinna Cohn, and, of course, myself and hundreds more that I’ve missed or forgotten about.”

She notes that while she doesn’t agree with all these individuals on every point, “bullying is always wrong”. It should, of course, be possible to disagree without hurling abuse or defaming one’s opponents. Just as it should be possible to resist gender identity ideology without compiling sinister lists.

Authoritarianism is always reprehensible, no matter where it originates or what form it takes. It is incumbent upon us to challenge this kind of intolerance even when it emerges from those who share our views. To make excuses for their behaviour is mindless tribalism and cannot be justified. Worst still, their dishonest and underhand tactics simply bring the cause into disrepute, needlessly providing ammunition to the gender ideologues just at the point at which they seem to be losing their culture war.

No doubt that members of the extreme GC fringe will claim that I have no right to criticise them in this way because I am male. Unfortunately for them, I’m not constrained by the rules of their collectivist cult, I have no intention of kowtowing to their increasingly unhinged demands, and I have little patience for those who attempt to intimidate dissenters into silence. These infantile cry-bullies are free to rant away in their insular little bubbles; the rest of us would be far better off ignoring their cacophonous howls.

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