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September 26, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – One of the most fascinating aspects of the transgender movement’s meteoric rise over the past half-dozen years is the increasingly overt hostility between old guard feminists and transgender activists. Veteran sexual revolutionaries like Germaine Greer have been “de-platformed” and protested for stating that biological males identifying as female cannot understand the female experience, and trans activists claim that feminists who do not accept their version of gender ideology (or gender fluidity, for that matter) are TERFs—“trans-exclusionary radical feminists.” One trans activist—a biological male named Tara Wolf—actually physically assaulted a female feminist earlier this year for being “exclusionary.” 

Watching the feminists who began the deconstruction of femininity do battle with the activists who want to take the next big step is almost surreal—especially considering the fact that they genuinely loathe each other. Some of the angriest columns and essays denouncing the transgender movement have not come from social conservatives, but have instead come from feminists—many of whom seem to realize that their movement is rendered entirely irrelevant by many of the transgender movement’s ideological premises. The hatred is hot and mutual.

Things are only getting worse as the totalitarian instincts of the transgender movement come into full view—with one irony being that it is so often biological males claiming to be female going up against biological females, with the men playing the victim. Watching biological males bully women by claiming that they are women and that they are being bullied has been bizarre to watch. One particularly insane story this week highlighted the lengths trans activists will go to in order to destroy the “trans-exclusionary” feminist movement—and their war on language itself.

Feminist blogger and mother of four Kellie-Jay Minshull, who writes under the name Posie Parker, raised 700 pounds to have a poster put up in Liverpool during the Labour Party’s conference this month. The poster simply featured the definition of “woman” according to the Google dictionary: “Woman, women, noun, adult human female.” Within a week, a transgender activist and doctor, Adrian Harrop (who is not himself transgender), complained to the company that owned the billboard that this anodyne poster made transgender people feel unsafe. The company promptly took it down and apologized.

It is ludicrous to suggest that someone could actually feel “unsafe” after reading a dictionary definition, but Harrop went all in, haranguing executives of the billboard company on social media and accusing them of assisting “the spread of transphobic hate speech.” The company, probably terrified that they were about to become the trans movement’s next target, actually offered an apology that noted that the “copy did not raise a red flag the way it should have done.” They did not say why the dictionary definition of “woman” should have raised a red flag in the first place.

Harrop was pleased with being able to harass and frighten a company into complying with his demands so swiftly, and when asked why he found the dictionary definition so offensive, he launched into a mansplaining ramble on why the poster, with the apparently sinister motivation behind it, was very scary to “trans women” (biological males.)  He then referred to the feminist blogger as a “transphobic hate group” guilty of creating “a state of heightened vulnerability,” and concluded by hilariously stating his support for free speech. 

Keen-Minshull, for her part, was stunned. “I find it far more sinister and pernicious than the old-fashioned sexism where the guy at the garage is surprised I know anything about engines,” she noted. “I’d take that guy any day over the Twitter troll who thinks I don’t know what a woman is. If the word ‘woman’ can mean anything, then women lose their sex-based protections and nobody is protected. Women are getting really, really fed up. Every single organisation that capitulates, paves the way for the next one to do the same. This is what trans activists do. This is how they silence women. I hope this will help people wake up to what’s going on.”

And that’s the insanity of it all: The war between the feminists and the trans activists often constitutes biological men telling women that they do not know what being a woman is all about, and thus need to have it explained to them by biological men who cannot, by very definition, understand the physical experience of being female. And yet, the trans activists wield enough power to bully many politicians, media figures, and businesses into accepting their ideological premises, if not openly voicing support for them. We can only hope that this cultural insanity is recognized for what it is sooner rather than later. 

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.