Opposing gender ideology cost me and others massively

I refuse to be quiet about the silencing and harassment campaigns linked to the trans lobby. I’ve been screaming from the mountaintops about them for fully 10 years now.

If you were okay with naked men in girls’ gym locker rooms or violent men raping female inmates in women’s prisons or fetishistic men taking coveted spots in battered women’s shelters… If you said, “What’s the big deal?” when scores of 15-year-old girls started lining up for elective double mastectomies. If you poo pooed the horror when you learned that the gender industry is literally sterilizing children with the very same drugs used to chemically castrate gay men in the 1950s… then maybe I’m still shouting into the void. I’m not sure anything I could say beyond this would matter to you. We are not operating on the same wavelength, let alone the same planet. This is all deeply toxic, male supremacist philosophy that creates billionaires by packaging self-hatred to vulnerable teenage girls and feeding the deviant fetishes of porn-sick boys who discovered Hentai when their parents handed them a phone at age 11.

I have long said that whenever gender identity wins, women always lose. And we do. I maintain that it hits females the hardest. But it’s utterly toxic for men, too. Bad ideas create victims, and the body count of this insidious ideology is skyrocketing.

Early reports from the Charlie Kirk assassination suggested that the weapon recovered contained trans propaganda — a chilling symbol of how this ideology can fuel real-world violence. I don’t know if these reports have merit. What I do know is that the violence that claimed his life is the violence with which most of us on the frontlines of this issue have been repeatedly threatened time and time again. There’s an entire website dedicated to collecting receipts of this violent ideation. It’s called Terfisaslur.com, and people should absolutely know what dissenters from the gender cult endure on the regular. A “TERF,” for those who don’t know, is a trans exclusionary radical feminist, only you don’t actually have to be a feminist to be a TERF; you just have to be a woman with the temerity to resist the gender cult.

I refuse to hate an entire political party or the people within it. I refuse to hate people who get sucked into the gender cult, either. But I will remain unapologetically loud about how deadly this specific ideology remains. For years, some of us have been screaming into the void about its destructive consequences, and yet most people still aren’t listening.

In the 1960s, UC Berkeley became a Mecca for free expression. Students and activists from across the country flocked there, convinced that a truly liberal education meant defending the right to speak unpopular ideas—even those they despised. The very term liberal once carried the connotation of liberality: a wide-open approach to dialogue, debate, and dissent.

But how far we’ve drifted. Today, the same institution that birthed the Free Speech Movement is often associated with shutting down speakers, disinviting those deemed offensive, and corralling expression within “approved zones.” What was once a beacon of intellectual openness is now a cautionary tale about how quickly the guardians of liberalism can become the gatekeepers of orthodoxy.

The cost of dissent today is tangible and extreme. Take Ben Shapiro, for example. When he spoke at UC Berkeley in 2017, the university and city spent an estimated $600,000 on security — police from all nine Bay Area counties, concrete barriers, metal detectors, and bag checks — just to ensure he could speak safely.

The Overton window has shifted radically. What was once considered the liberal defense of freedom is now treated as suspect or even dangerous. Today’s liberals, once the champions of free speech, increasingly adopt the tactics of suppression; today’s conservatives, once dismissed as rigid traditionalists, have become the radicals insisting on the right to dissent.

This isn’t merely philosophical to me. It’s horrific, traumatic lived experience, gleaned from my time spent at the tip of the spear in the great transgender debate. I was once interrupted at 6 am on a family vacation by a rabidly unwell man using a number of different accounts to call me using Facebook Messenger before blowing my phone up with threats of physical harm and graphic images, including pictures of his penis.

In 2017, when we tried to host an event at UW Tacoma defending the legal definition of womanhood, our panel was shouted off stage and swarmed by a mob of protestors. Police told us it was unsafe even to leave the building. One of our unexpected speakers, a lesbian detransitioner, later informed me that she was being required to take her college courses remotely, as her classmates and professors had deemed her an unsafe person due to her transphobic views.

Later that year, at a community gathering in western Washington, a trans-identified man with a history of violent rhetoric interrupted my speech, locked eyes with me, and announced his plan to personally arm trans veterans to equip them to fight people like me. For a moment, I genuinely wondered if that day would be my last. Two years later, at a rally in Vancouver, the hostility of the crowd was so severe that five men had to form a human shield around me just to keep the mob at bay.

And I’m not alone. I’ve watched my friends and co-laborers in this fight be abused, fired, blacklisted, slandered, and silenced too many times to count. Just a few examples:

• Maya Forstater, a UK researcher and tax expert, lost her job in 2019 for stating that sex is immutable, faced harassment, and only years later won a tribunal affirming that her beliefs were legally protected.

• Riley Gaines, a former U.S. swimmer, was mobbed, barricaded, and threatened after speaking out against male inclusion in women’s sports, and continues to face harassment for demanding fairness in competition.

• Kelly-Jay Keen, the British activist known as Posie Parker, has been investigated by police, physically assaulted by mobs, and targeted with death threats for insisting that women’s rights are sex-based.

• Graham Linehan, the Irish comedy writer behind Father Ted and The IT Crowd, saw his career collapse, his musical canceled, and his marriage end after he spoke out against gender ideology. Earlier this month, he was arrested for the content of his tweets, which were alleged to “incite violence” against trans identified people by publicly opposing them..

• J.K. Rowling, one of the world’s most famous authors, has endured relentless death and rape threats, boycotts, and campaigns of vilification simply for affirming that biological sex matters.

• Kara Dansky, a U.S. attorney and feminist, has been assaulted during protests, vilified online, and excluded from progressive spaces for criticizing transgender policies.

• Natasha Chart, a longtime feminist activist, was fired from her job and ostracized from feminist circles for refusing to affirm gender ideology.

• Amy Sousa, a U.S. activist, has endured harassment, smear campaigns, and online threats simply for reporting on women’s sports and defending female athletes’ rights. She continues to speak publicly despite repeated intimidation, showing extraordinary courage in a world where standing up for women is increasingly criminalized in the court of public opinion.

• Miriam Ben-Shalom, a U.S. veteran, was stripped of her role as Grand Marshal of a Pride parade for her refusal to endorse transgender ideology.

• Kathleen Stock, a UK philosophy professor, was hounded off her campus, received death threats, and resigned her post after students and colleagues protested her gender-critical views.

• Lierre Keith has sacrificed her personal privacy, professional credibility, and endured sustained public attacks for decades because of her refusal to remain silent on how gender ideology and broader systems of oppression harm women and girls. She has risked reputation, social ostracization, and repeated harassment in order to expose uncomfortable truths.

• Julie Bindel, the British journalist and activist, has faced death threats, physical assault, and relentless online abuse for defending women’s rights and criticizing policies she sees as erasing female spaces. She has endured threats to her safety and her career while continuing to speak out unapologetically.

• Jennifer Bilek, a feminist journalist and researcher, has similarly risked harassment and sustained attacks for investigating and documenting abuses within the gender ideology movement. Her work has made her a target of smear campaigns, yet she persists, showing extraordinary courage in the face of coordinated efforts to silence dissent.

These are not isolated stories but part of a pattern: the silencing, harassment, and destruction of those who dare to dissent from the new orthodoxy.

One of the reasons I take the Charlie Kirk situation personally is because I see in him what I have seen so few defend: someone working tirelessly to make it safe for others to speak, even when you don’t agree with every position they hold. And yet, I also feel a profound sense of betrayal at the silence and apathy of Christian friends who know damn well how important this is — and say nothing when they see us harassed, shamed, or attacked on their threads.

These are not abstract debates. They are my life, and the lives of everyone I care about who refuses to bow to coercion. I have faced threats that made me fear for my life, and I continue to speak because the cost of silence is far greater. The fight for the freedom to speak, think, and dissent is urgent, immediate, and deeply personal. If we do not stand for it now, we risk letting the defenders of liberty be replaced by enforcers of conformity — and the world we once believed in will be lost.