On a morning where the Prime Minister of Great Britain is caught on video making shit jokes about trans women to chortling MPs, and the government publishes guidance for schools urging teachers to out trans kids to their parents, something that can’t possibly have any negative results, it’s important to take your wins where you can. So this piece in The Observer is a welcome corrective to that paper’s near-constant transphobia, not least because it’s been promoted online by some senior Guardian/Observer writers who haven’t drank the bigoted kool-aid.

The piece itself, by Kathryn Bromwich, is perfectly sensible and reasonable. So naturally her name was soon trending on UK Twitter as the usual avalanche of abusive arseholes descended on her, as they do to any woman who dares to say publicly that trans women are not the enemy of cisgender women.

Here’s a quick extract from the piece.

Excluding anyone on the basis of biological difference demonstrates a spectacular failure of empathy; worse, it reduces women to their reproductive systems, which is surely something we should be trying to move on from.

If women are united by anything – and there are 3.8 billion of us, so there is going to be little common ground – it is the risk of sexual violence, from which no woman is safe, especially not trans women. No rapist is going to stop to check whether you have fallopian tubes. The fact that we are all targets of this particular kind of violence should only increase cis women’s solidarity towards our trans sisters.