The Cass Review into Britain’s National Health Service’s child-gender care services has recently been published. The review demolishes the entire edifice of gender-affirming care. Everything that transgender activists have stated, in their shape-shifting, violent, deceitful, passive-aggressive, faux-moral way, as fact, was based on poor, activist, anti-scientific research. It’s what critics of the ideology have been saying for years. Even the use of pronouns, that irritating virtue signal of the ‘Be Kind’ crowd, has detrimental effects on vulnerable children and is a psychological pathway that leads to puberty blockers and often to the surgical modification of troubled teenagers who are gay and who will grow out of their gender confusion. To put it bluntly, it’s a reputation-destroying disaster for anyone who advanced this ideology.

I hate to gloat, but in this dreadful, disgraceful case, I shall, because transgender activists have behaved like awful human beings, eschewing all accepted social norms, cancelling people from their jobs and censoring dissident voices to advance their ideology. To put it bluntly, I, and others like me, were right, and the propagandised, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, ideologically parasitised lemmings, were wrong.

One group of people who should be loudly applauded for challenging transgender ideology are the TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) who fought to overturn the institutionally captured establishment consensus. But one crystal-clear idea should be kept in mind and not forgotten. The transgender craze borrowed from the philosophy and activist methods of feminism, and while the trans lunacy has many parents, it is feminist philosophy which is ultimately responsible for the cultural derangement that has fried the brains of a generation. It was feminists, for example, who, following Simone de Beauvoir, introduced the idea that there is a difference, a separation, between sex and gender, and that being a woman is a performance in a patriarchal world, and not, as feminists now insist, clearly defined by biological, sex-based bodies. Gametes and chromosomes did not feature very much in the last sixty years of feminist ‘theory’. Neither did the obvious fact that sex and psychology are intimately linked and that only a small percentage of people, tom girls and effeminate boys, behave decisively outside the general personality preferences of their sex. When given the choice, women and men have stereotypically male and female likes and dislikes. Evolution, to be clear, trumps ideology everyday.

Feminists, though, are being disingenuous when they argue they were against gender ideology, or that they didn’t mean what they repeatedly said in their philosophy. In other words, they’re deluded, are pointing in the opposite direction and hoping you didn’t notice decades of gender woo, or they’re being obtuse. The sex versus gender dichotomy is, along with patriarchy, social construction and essentialism, one of the central pillars of feminist philosophy. And feminism, to put this in context, is the era-defining ideology of the last sixty years. Nothing of modern life has not been ‘reimagined’, usually for the worse, by ‘feminist theory’.

The standard answer by feminists to criticism of this sort is to say, ‘Oh, that’s intersectional feminism.’ The problem, though, is that mainstream feminists were shouting these simply mad ideas from the rooftops for years before intersectional feminism existed. Shulamith Firestone, in 1970, said ‘the end goal of feminist revolution is the elimination… of the sex distinction itself’. Kate Millett, the same year, wrote, ‘research points to the conclusion that sexual stereotypes have no bases in biology’.

To put feminist culpability in perspective, if this grab-bag of ideological lunacy was so anathema to the feminist establishment, why did feminists not form a bloc that publicly, relentlessly, and over decades, made their opposition to gender ideology known in the way that TERFs have engaged with trans ideology? Everybody knows about the TERF attitude to transgenderism. Nobody knows about mainstream feminism’s purported rejection of the same philosophical premises. The answer is, they didn’t, because, until the ideology became a threat to women, feminists grasped the philosophy of a sex/gender divide to their collective bosoms and smothered it in misandrist hugs because it differentiated ‘women’s way of knowing’ from the millennia-long edifice of male intellectual achievement. Subjectivism or, what feminists call ‘social construction’, was a feminist strategy to attack what they viewed as a male-dominated past, which ironically women, with their sex-based perspective, had created with men, simply because human beings, including women and children, need to survive. The division of labour has long preceded its reification by economists. Women are responsible for half the world, including the bits that feminists don’t like.

Another dubious practice used extensively by trans activists, which they borrowed from feminists, is ‘idea laundering’; citing each other’s low-level research, which is largely ideological wish fulfillment rather than truth seeking, to create an impression of legitimacy. Feminists have spun this web for decades. ‘Women’s studies’ in captured universities is rife with hare-brained nonsense masquerading as knowledge. To give one noticeable, real world example. When you’re wandering through your local clothes shop and see advertisements featuring large women, that’s the impact of Fat Studies, a branch of feminism, which is an illustration of feminists desperately trying, and failing miserably, to change people’s perception of beauty. Beauty and its impact on people, is, like everything else, including ‘gender’, according to feminists, entirely socially constructed.

Female self esteem, though, was for feminists, contra to the insights of history, psychology and science, more important than truth. Reason, in general, through this lens, was defined by feminists as ‘essentialism’. In other words, facts, evidence and science were rejected, because they were deemed by feminists as examples of male psychology, and replaced by feelings, ‘care’, or what de Beauvoir called ‘lived experience’. From arguing that a being a woman is a social practice, which is subjective, it is one small step to men identifying as women, and because of the performance, insisting that they are women.

One beautiful irony of the feminist response to gender nonsense is that, in order to refute the ideology of transgenderism, feminists have had to argue against the social construction of gender. You can’t be a ball-busting Amazon and need a women’s refuge; and you can’t ignore biology and the cogency of statistical analysis while advocating for gender woo.