Can’t help but think that the trans stuff is going down differently in the UK because like, it’s being done in public.

Like, I hear complaining that the BBC (a public body, duty-bound to serve and represent the polity) is balancing trans and “Gender Critical” guests on shows, which is to say “how society will parse the expansion of transgender claims since the 2000s” is something being hashed out on broadcast shows, and in newspapers, albeit maybe the educated-class ones

Like in college in the 2000s we’d all be talking Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and watching Paris is Burning at the campus theater but… I’m not saying we weren’t aware trans people still walked among us but they were like shiny Pokémon, and I was pretty unique among my American History classmates for knowing there had been an earlier transgender “moment” in the 70s.

And then around the turn of the 10s I saw some blogs from the kinda people who might well have been going to MichFest saying “this is about to be a thing again” and then [tumblr], (and I remember there was in the history of that a pretty genital approach, first leveraging off of intersex legitimacy, and then the move away from bottom surgery as end goal [decrying any expectation as “mandatory sterilization”])

And then it was like “Oh, hey, meet Caitlyn Jenner and also all your public medical, cultural, and psychotherapeutic-in-place-of-spiritual authorities suddenly flip to this understanding and feel like they have a mandate to keep you in line”

I mean past upstream of that might be the different ways 2nd wave feminism interacted with the conservative reestablishment politics of the time, under the Iron Lady it was given some degree of cooption as middle class women entering the fray; under Reagan there were alliances of convenience with the rising Christian conservatism over porn, not funding transgender stuff, eventually Bill Clinton being a skeeze, that gained them nothing, foreclosed other alliances, and was ultimately rewarded with Rush Limbaugh denouncing “feminazis”.

So they never settled into American society (from an academic standpoint the issue with Andrea Dworkin isn’t that she largely is the caricature of the man-hating feminist, it’s that no one else ever really built anything off her work). So without them around who would you go to for pushback? Media middlemen could only imagine some caricature of a bigot they thought they just finally defeated over gay marriage and didn’t have to face again, so they didn’t bother.