In June, a German under-18 girl’s chess competition made headlines around the world when a biologically male trans teen won the tournament. The news prompted predictable calls to restrict or outright ban trans women from women’s chess among the anti-trans activist crowd — a motley coalition of right-wing culture warriors, religious conservatives, disillusioned progressives, and especially gender-critical or trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). But the pushback created an awkward moment of cognitive dissonance in which supposed feminists openly argued, despite the obvious and unflattering implications, that it was unfair for females to compete against males in a sedentary, purely cerebral activity. The entire episode is emblematic of a wider pattern in the culture wars.
The pendulum has swung back on transgender politics. There was a five-year period from perhaps 2018 to 2023, during which almost everyone whose reputation or livelihood depended on spaces dominated by educated progressives learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. To run afoul of the left-wing activist orthodoxy on anything related to trans was a scarlet letter in many circles. And then it wasn’t. The fever broke, the cultural left peaked, and the vibes shifted. The illusion of authority created by online radicals and their institutional toadies was shattered. The backlash to trans activism went mainstream, and with it, a broader backlash to LGBT rights as a whole. Now the cultural momentum rests squarely with anti-trans activists. Newly ascendant and drunk on power, the movement has abandoned any pretense of principles. Jettisoned are the concerns over fairness, feminism, safety, or the illiberal excesses of trans activist extremism. In their place is a fathomless morass of self-contradiction and naked bigotry.
In the case of the trans chess player, the reactions from gender-critical activists present a peculiar dilemma. When it comes to activities involving running, jumping, kicking, throwing, swinging, or swimming, the argument that biological males’ innate advantages over females make any competition between the two unfair is open and shut. Only a fool would seriously dispute this — and only an unhealthy and authoritarian culture of mob psychology and cancellation ever pressured sane people into pretending otherwise. But chess is not a physical activity; it’s a game of the mind. So do these “feminists” accept that trans chess players should be allowed to compete in the category that corresponds with their gender identity, or do they insist on banning them, citing unfairness — and thereby tacitly reinforce the idea that males are smarter than females? Their choice was to denigrate their own sex rather than let go of their disgust for trans people.1
Over and over, we see a breakdown of principles within the anti-trans coalition in ways that bleed into ugly hate or even work against their own stated goals. They said that the crux of their concern was over trans politics, yet they spent months screeching invective at Imane Khelif, an Algerian Olympic women’s boxer who has never identified as trans but is believed by some to have an intersex condition. They said their problem was with women’s safety, not gender-nonconformity — “people can dress as they please.” Yet when self-described “man in a dress” Phil Ily showed up to a gender-critical conference in his usual attire, TERFdom had a nuclear meltdown that made Ily the “person of the day” on Twitter for nearly a month. One sign you’ve lost the plot is when you’re trying to enforce traditional gender norms and sex-based dress codes in the name of feminism.
The anti-trans crowd said their issue was with the ethics of youth gender medicine, but any trans adult in their orbit instantly becomes the target of vicious attacks. When the center-right Manhattan Institute economist Jessica Riedl (formerly Brian) came out as trans in early 2025, she was dogpiled across social media. In June, when she joined the conservative magazine The Dispatch as a contributing writer, news of her hiring sparked viral outrage and a tsunami of online abuse, including the doxxing of her children.
Activists said they were worried about critical queer theory being taught to young children in school, but they were soon agitating to ban any mention of LGBT issues from classrooms and calling gay and bi people “groomers.” Even Frank McCormick, the conservative former educator who helped popularize the concept of “ideological grooming” in 2021, acknowledges that it quickly achieved escape velocity into blatant bigotry:
“As the term (ideological) ‘groomer’ gained popularity, it was broadened to also include school programs that brought critical queer theory and trans ideology into the classroom. Later, it became the primary word used to describe LGBT educational programming. It became increasingly used — not always fairly — to label any teacher who discussed LGBT topics in the classroom. And before long, the term was being hurled at anyone who was LGBT, or who had left-of-center politics.”
We were told the issue was about fairness in sports, yet anti-trans activists have lashed out at the presence of trans people in any context. As one Twitter user admitted, “You’re right. It isn’t about ‘fairness in sports.’ It’s about maintaining reality. ‘Trans’ is not a thing.” We were told the issue was the illiberal overreaches of trans activism and gender ideology, yet the movement has shamelessly and predictably expanded their agenda to target same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people. Even putting aside the morality of dismantling human rights, going after same-sex marriage is a losing political issue. 68 percent of US adults, including 76 percent of independents, support same-sex marriage. Pursuing its repeal will absolutely hurt the political right, and by extension, all of the other more achievable causes these activists care about, but they simply can’t help themselves.
There are, in fact, legitimate concerns within trans issues when it comes to the welfare of gender-nonconforming children, fairness in sports, or women’s safety in female-only spaces. But for the anti-trans coalition, children, fairness, and women’s safety were never the point. It was always about the politics of ick.
In argumentation, there’s a common informal fallacy known as the motte-and-bailey fallacy. It involves the arguer deliberately conflating a defensible position presented to the public or in the face of scrutiny (the “motte”), and the drastically more controversial and harder-to-defend position that they actually believe but sometimes conceal (the “bailey”). The anti-trans movement’s motte is children, fairness, and women’s safety. Their bailey is that trans people are disgusting, corrosive, contagiously perverted degenerates. The right-wing commentator Michael Knowles distilled this bailey in more concrete policy terms when he said, “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”
Should swimmers who went through male puberty compete in women’s swimming races? Should trans-identified biologically male (and genitally intact) sex offenders be incarcerated in women’s prisons? Can minors give informed consent to undergo irreversible, body-altering, elective treatments or surgeries that can leave them permanently infertile or sexually dysfunctional? The answer to all of these is no. And a commanding majority of the public agrees. But the anti-trans movement never actually cared about any of that. Or, more precisely, these kinds of edge cases were only their foot in the door to prosecute a wider crusade that includes bullying people for being different, returning LGBT people to the closet, and rolling back LGBT rights.
As I wrote in the companion essay to this one, trans activists have been their own worst enemy. Their antics have been an embarrassing and mind-boggling cavalcade of unforced errors, obvious falsehoods, bad ideas, ridiculous overreaches, and needless own-goals that would be comical if it weren’t causing such harm. However, the anti-trans coalition is not interested in mere criticism, moderation, or being a liberal corrective. They’re interested in the same thing that always animated the “woke” people they so deride: the indulgence of righteous hatred — what Aldous Huxley called “the most delicious of moral treats.” And this remains true of the coalition even if some of its members are conscientious and well-meaning.
I know many of the thought leaders within the gender-critical world. I’ve worked with and edited them. By and large, they are thoughtful and principled actors with nuanced and well-reasoned critiques. But for every Julie Bindel, Holly Lawford-Smith, or Ben Appel, there are thousands of frothing transphobic foot soldiers in the movement who simply find trans people revolting and want them bullied, legislated, and defined out of society.
The gender-critical and broader anti-trans movement did what virtually all large political movements do in the US (and UK): they swathed themselves in the garb of liberal values when they were culturally marginalized, then embraced illiberal authoritarianism the moment they became culturally powerful. The climate within these spaces is now so deranged and unprincipled that to move through them in possession of consistent liberal values is to be constantly misunderstood and attacked. The writer Helen Pluckrose was recently embroiled in a protracted gender-critical firestorm for offering basic liberal critiques of some of the movement’s inconsistent and knee-jerk behavior. In her excellent essay, “Purity Politics Won’t Help Women”, she asks:
“How did we come to a place where the original gender critical feminist aim to defend the reality of biological sex and the importance of this for protecting the rights of women has been so subverted as to be hateful and authoritarian and advocate for the Taliban-style Morality Policing of sex-specific dress codes?”
Fresh off of victories in the 2024 election, in statehouses across America, and in the United States v. Skrmetti decision, the anti-trans movement is riding the wave of a cultural sea change. However, flush with newfound power and unfettered by the constraints of the “woke” before-times, anti-trans activists and their supporters have overplayed their hand. They are saying the quiet part out loud. They are broadcasting a vision for society every bit as obsessed with burning heretics, crushing individual liberty, and creating a climate of intimidation as anyone on the far left. They are telling us what they would like to do if they could do anything. They are telling us that they are unprincipled and depraved. Believe them.
For transparency: I edited the articles linked and/or referred to in this essay from Phil Ily, Frank McCormick, and Reid Newton. I have also previously worked with Helen Pluckrose.
1
This raises the question of why chess should even be segregated by sex to begin with. Some contend that these categories help compensate for the fact that chess has historically been male-dominated, or exist to safeguard women against inappropriate comments in male chess circles. Neither of these defenses make women sound particularly capable or resilient. Cultural conservatives, never ones for subtlety, have taken to happily biting the bullet by openly saying that women need their own chess tournaments because they are less intelligent.
The pendulum has swung back on transgender politics. There was a five-year period from perhaps 2018 to 2023, during which almost everyone whose reputation or livelihood depended on spaces dominated by educated progressives learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. To run afoul of the left-wing activist orthodoxy on anything related to trans was a scarlet letter in many circles. And then it wasn’t. The fever broke, the cultural left peaked, and the vibes shifted. The illusion of authority created by online radicals and their institutional toadies was shattered. The backlash to trans activism went mainstream, and with it, a broader backlash to LGBT rights as a whole. Now the cultural momentum rests squarely with anti-trans activists. Newly ascendant and drunk on power, the movement has abandoned any pretense of principles. Jettisoned are the concerns over fairness, feminism, safety, or the illiberal excesses of trans activist extremism. In their place is a fathomless morass of self-contradiction and naked bigotry.
In the case of the trans chess player, the reactions from gender-critical activists present a peculiar dilemma. When it comes to activities involving running, jumping, kicking, throwing, swinging, or swimming, the argument that biological males’ innate advantages over females make any competition between the two unfair is open and shut. Only a fool would seriously dispute this — and only an unhealthy and authoritarian culture of mob psychology and cancellation ever pressured sane people into pretending otherwise. But chess is not a physical activity; it’s a game of the mind. So do these “feminists” accept that trans chess players should be allowed to compete in the category that corresponds with their gender identity, or do they insist on banning them, citing unfairness — and thereby tacitly reinforce the idea that males are smarter than females? Their choice was to denigrate their own sex rather than let go of their disgust for trans people.1
Over and over, we see a breakdown of principles within the anti-trans coalition in ways that bleed into ugly hate or even work against their own stated goals. They said that the crux of their concern was over trans politics, yet they spent months screeching invective at Imane Khelif, an Algerian Olympic women’s boxer who has never identified as trans but is believed by some to have an intersex condition. They said their problem was with women’s safety, not gender-nonconformity — “people can dress as they please.” Yet when self-described “man in a dress” Phil Ily showed up to a gender-critical conference in his usual attire, TERFdom had a nuclear meltdown that made Ily the “person of the day” on Twitter for nearly a month. One sign you’ve lost the plot is when you’re trying to enforce traditional gender norms and sex-based dress codes in the name of feminism.
The anti-trans crowd said their issue was with the ethics of youth gender medicine, but any trans adult in their orbit instantly becomes the target of vicious attacks. When the center-right Manhattan Institute economist Jessica Riedl (formerly Brian) came out as trans in early 2025, she was dogpiled across social media. In June, when she joined the conservative magazine The Dispatch as a contributing writer, news of her hiring sparked viral outrage and a tsunami of online abuse, including the doxxing of her children.
Activists said they were worried about critical queer theory being taught to young children in school, but they were soon agitating to ban any mention of LGBT issues from classrooms and calling gay and bi people “groomers.” Even Frank McCormick, the conservative former educator who helped popularize the concept of “ideological grooming” in 2021, acknowledges that it quickly achieved escape velocity into blatant bigotry:
“As the term (ideological) ‘groomer’ gained popularity, it was broadened to also include school programs that brought critical queer theory and trans ideology into the classroom. Later, it became the primary word used to describe LGBT educational programming. It became increasingly used — not always fairly — to label any teacher who discussed LGBT topics in the classroom. And before long, the term was being hurled at anyone who was LGBT, or who had left-of-center politics.”
We were told the issue was about fairness in sports, yet anti-trans activists have lashed out at the presence of trans people in any context. As one Twitter user admitted, “You’re right. It isn’t about ‘fairness in sports.’ It’s about maintaining reality. ‘Trans’ is not a thing.” We were told the issue was the illiberal overreaches of trans activism and gender ideology, yet the movement has shamelessly and predictably expanded their agenda to target same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people. Even putting aside the morality of dismantling human rights, going after same-sex marriage is a losing political issue. 68 percent of US adults, including 76 percent of independents, support same-sex marriage. Pursuing its repeal will absolutely hurt the political right, and by extension, all of the other more achievable causes these activists care about, but they simply can’t help themselves.
There are, in fact, legitimate concerns within trans issues when it comes to the welfare of gender-nonconforming children, fairness in sports, or women’s safety in female-only spaces. But for the anti-trans coalition, children, fairness, and women’s safety were never the point. It was always about the politics of ick.
In argumentation, there’s a common informal fallacy known as the motte-and-bailey fallacy. It involves the arguer deliberately conflating a defensible position presented to the public or in the face of scrutiny (the “motte”), and the drastically more controversial and harder-to-defend position that they actually believe but sometimes conceal (the “bailey”). The anti-trans movement’s motte is children, fairness, and women’s safety. Their bailey is that trans people are disgusting, corrosive, contagiously perverted degenerates. The right-wing commentator Michael Knowles distilled this bailey in more concrete policy terms when he said, “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”
Should swimmers who went through male puberty compete in women’s swimming races? Should trans-identified biologically male (and genitally intact) sex offenders be incarcerated in women’s prisons? Can minors give informed consent to undergo irreversible, body-altering, elective treatments or surgeries that can leave them permanently infertile or sexually dysfunctional? The answer to all of these is no. And a commanding majority of the public agrees. But the anti-trans movement never actually cared about any of that. Or, more precisely, these kinds of edge cases were only their foot in the door to prosecute a wider crusade that includes bullying people for being different, returning LGBT people to the closet, and rolling back LGBT rights.
As I wrote in the companion essay to this one, trans activists have been their own worst enemy. Their antics have been an embarrassing and mind-boggling cavalcade of unforced errors, obvious falsehoods, bad ideas, ridiculous overreaches, and needless own-goals that would be comical if it weren’t causing such harm. However, the anti-trans coalition is not interested in mere criticism, moderation, or being a liberal corrective. They’re interested in the same thing that always animated the “woke” people they so deride: the indulgence of righteous hatred — what Aldous Huxley called “the most delicious of moral treats.” And this remains true of the coalition even if some of its members are conscientious and well-meaning.
I know many of the thought leaders within the gender-critical world. I’ve worked with and edited them. By and large, they are thoughtful and principled actors with nuanced and well-reasoned critiques. But for every Julie Bindel, Holly Lawford-Smith, or Ben Appel, there are thousands of frothing transphobic foot soldiers in the movement who simply find trans people revolting and want them bullied, legislated, and defined out of society.
The gender-critical and broader anti-trans movement did what virtually all large political movements do in the US (and UK): they swathed themselves in the garb of liberal values when they were culturally marginalized, then embraced illiberal authoritarianism the moment they became culturally powerful. The climate within these spaces is now so deranged and unprincipled that to move through them in possession of consistent liberal values is to be constantly misunderstood and attacked. The writer Helen Pluckrose was recently embroiled in a protracted gender-critical firestorm for offering basic liberal critiques of some of the movement’s inconsistent and knee-jerk behavior. In her excellent essay, “Purity Politics Won’t Help Women”, she asks:
“How did we come to a place where the original gender critical feminist aim to defend the reality of biological sex and the importance of this for protecting the rights of women has been so subverted as to be hateful and authoritarian and advocate for the Taliban-style Morality Policing of sex-specific dress codes?”
Fresh off of victories in the 2024 election, in statehouses across America, and in the United States v. Skrmetti decision, the anti-trans movement is riding the wave of a cultural sea change. However, flush with newfound power and unfettered by the constraints of the “woke” before-times, anti-trans activists and their supporters have overplayed their hand. They are saying the quiet part out loud. They are broadcasting a vision for society every bit as obsessed with burning heretics, crushing individual liberty, and creating a climate of intimidation as anyone on the far left. They are telling us what they would like to do if they could do anything. They are telling us that they are unprincipled and depraved. Believe them.
For transparency: I edited the articles linked and/or referred to in this essay from Phil Ily, Frank McCormick, and Reid Newton. I have also previously worked with Helen Pluckrose.
1
This raises the question of why chess should even be segregated by sex to begin with. Some contend that these categories help compensate for the fact that chess has historically been male-dominated, or exist to safeguard women against inappropriate comments in male chess circles. Neither of these defenses make women sound particularly capable or resilient. Cultural conservatives, never ones for subtlety, have taken to happily biting the bullet by openly saying that women need their own chess tournaments because they are less intelligent.
