Every day, transphobes engage in social media pile-ons against individuals and organisations for being trans-inclusive, engaging in abuse that’s rarely if ever reported in the mainstream media. Two days ago it was the Royal Institution, the charity dedicated to promoting science, which received so much abuse for including an image of a trans woman in a Twitter post that it deleted the message.

Today’s one is against Glasgow Women’s Library, which declined to host a meeting of an anti-trans hate group as the library is proudly inclusive of all women. The predictable result was a flood of abusive messages that’s still ongoing. This isn’t the first time the library has been under sustained social media attack for simply being trans-inclusive; previous ones ran on for months.

Glasgow Women’s Library is an important resource and it’s always struggling for money for upkeep and repairs – it’s currently dealing with a leaky roof. It could have raised a bit of cash by hosting the event but chose to value its principles over its finances. You can help support it by donating here.

Many of the people involved in these pile-ons claim to be feminists, although there’s usually a significant cohort of misogynists whose interest in feminism only began when they realised they could use it as an excuse to scream at trans women and any cisgender woman who supports trans women. But there are plenty of women who identify as feminists delighting in the fact that the Library is struggling financially: it’s guilty of the ultimate crime of being trans inclusive. They would rather see an important feminist resource destroyed than have it support trans women; cisgender women who disagree with them are abused.

There’s a word for that kind of feminism, and that word is “white”. White feminism is a subset of feminism that’s exclusive rather than inclusive: it centres the interests of a narrow group of primarily middle- and upper-class white women and ignores or even attacks everybody else: women of colour, poor women, trans women…. you get the idea.

A good example of white feminism in action took place in Ireland in early 2018, at the height of the campaign to repeal the anti-abortion eighth amendment: while cisgender and transgender women took to the streets together to improve women’s rights, a group of English feminists who had previously had no interest in Irish feminism suddenly decided that it was time to talk – not about repealing the 8th, but about the invented evils of trans women. Irish feminists handed them their arses on a plate in an open letter:

The organisers of ‘We Need to Talk’ are making a stop here in Ireland, under the guise of talking about abortion. However, their motives remain clear to us, and we write this letter to show that their exclusionary, discriminatory attitudes to trans people – in particular trans women – are not welcome here in Ireland. We will not sit in silence while the organisers of this meeting peddle ideas and opinions that are actively harmful to the well-being and safety of our comrades.

…What is it that you know of Irish feminism that you feel entitled and authorised to come here and lecture us on?

…We do not need you here. We have not had your support in our fight for #repealthe8th, our fight against the historical and ongoing impact of the Magdalene Laundries, our fight for taking back control of our hospitals from religious orders, our fight for justice for women and babies tortured and entombed in Mother and Baby homes.

Do you know, for example, that in the north of Ireland, legally part of the UK, women still cannot access safe and legal abortion? Have you campaigned on this in any way? If you have, why don’t we know about it? Did you strike in solidarity with us on March 8th last year? Did you even know we were striking and for what? Do you have any kind of concept of what a feminism in a country shaped by struggle against Empire looks like? Did you take even a second to consider that, in assuming you have the right to come here in any kind of position of feminist authority, you’re behaving with the arrogance of just that imperialism? We have had enough of colonialism in Ireland without needing more of it from you.

Cultural critic Mikki Kendall has just written a book on white feminism called Hood Feminism: Notes From The Women White Feminists Forgot. As she explains, all too often the focus is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few.

Here’s part of a larger extract:

The sad reality is that while white women are an oppressed group, they still wield more power than any other group of women — including the power to oppress both men and women of colour. There’s nothing feminist about having so many resources at your fingertips and choosing to be ignorant. Nothing empowering or enlightening in deciding that intent trumps impact. Especially when the consequences aren’t going to be experienced by you, but will instead be experienced by someone from a marginalised community.

We’re having a bit of a moment here in Scotland over that favourite target of the US Christian right, drag queen story time. The current Scots story is a gift to conservatives: a drag performer booked to read to kids delivered a perfectly age-appropriate reading because, hey! Performers can have different personas for different age groups! However, one look at their social media should have suggested that perhaps it would be wise to book someone whose Instagram wasn’t quite so adult. There was no way there wouldn’t be a reaction.

But this reaction has been extraordinary, both in terms of the volume and the viciousness of the response: a lot of it has been variations on the theme of “queers are paedos, stay away from my kids or I swear I’ll do time”. It has been astonishingly, frighteningly ugly, and pretty much everybody who’s been actively demonising trans people over the last few years has been pouring petrol on the flames.

Christine Burns MBE was one of the architects of the gender recognition act and is the author of Trans Britain, a book detailing the long history of trans people, trans rights and anti-trans abuse in the UK. A few days before this particular story broke, she posted:

After two and a half years of pretty sustained vilification of Britain’s trans people across most of the press and corners of political discourse I worry that we are heading for a watershed event. That is the way things go and I’m worried sick about which of my friends will die.

I hope she’s wrong, but I fear she isn’t.

And so it begins. South Dakota has made the first step towards making evidence-based medicine illegal. Doctors who try to help trans teenagers face a year in prison. Another seven US states are set to follow suit; anti-trans groups in the UK want similar bans here.

As Christine Burns MBE put it:

Can we all agree now that trans people and our allies aren’t “overreacting”, “misunderstanding” or “making stuff up” about the true intentions of those ranged against us? Making laws to prohibit doctors from providing evidence-based treatment is not normal and people will die.

Katelyn Burns reports on the coordinated assault on trans kids’ healthcare by right-wing US lawmakers.

eight state legislatures — including Missouri, Florida, Illinois, Oklahoma, Colorado, South Carolina, Kentucky, and South Dakota — have already introduced bills this year that would criminally punish doctors who follow best practices for treating adolescents with gender dysphoria. In South Dakota, for example, doctors who prescribe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones could face a $2,000 fine and a year in prison under the proposed law. South Dakota’s version of the bill was even prioritized and became the very first bill of the decade to pass out of committee… should any of the bills become law, they would effectively cut off many adolescents from medically necessary and, often, life-saving treatment for gender dysphoria.

…Bills banning trans care for kids are the new bathroom bills, part of conservatives’ larger culture war against trans people. Conservative media and politicians have been fanning the flames for this fight for years in hopes of rallying the base over a non-existent threat — a threat that only puts trans lives in danger.

Whenever the religious right realises a tactic isn’t working, it finds a new one. When it lost its war on equal marriage, it changed tactics and started attacking trans people – it’s no coincidence that the current media obsession with trans people began after 2017, when various evangelical groups agreed and began to implement their new focus on demonising trans women.

At first, they tried to make people scared of trans women in public places, but the public is well aware that you’re more likely to be sexually assaulted by a Republican politician or evangelical rabble-rouser than a trans person. So they refined that one and started to say that predatory men would pretend to be trans so that they could start acting like Republican politicians.

That didn’t fly either, so it’s time to kill some kids.

Puberty blockers are rarely prescribed. When they are, they save lives.

Study after study have shown that affirming trans and gender-diverse kids in their self-exploration improves mental health and lowers suicide risk. The affirming model, which allows children to explore their own gender identities at their own pace and can include puberty blockers, has been recommended by nearly every major American medical association, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and many others.

But of course, bigots don’t really do facts – especially when there are votes to be won.  “Your children are under threat from minority X and only I can protect them” may be one of the oldest and most despicable political tactics in the book, but it works so it’s being rolled out again. Under the pretence of protecting children, these yahoos are quite happy at the prospect of killing quite a few of them. What’s a few more dead trans kids to people who wish trans people didn’t exist at all?

We’re starting to see exactly the same thing shift in strategy happening here in the UK, although not from openly evangelical and/or right-wing groups: from the same anti-trans activists who previously parroted the evangelical right’s previous attack lines and whose suspiciously well funded pressure groups didn’t exist before the evangelicals started their war on trans people in 2017. Many of those groups have overt or covert links to the US evangelical group The Heritage Foundation, which plays a key role in the US bills.

What conservative lawmakers are doing with their legislation is removing parents’ and kids’ choices altogether, forcing their own political ideology on the medical choices of private citizens.

This is a murderous ideology that chants “think of the children!” while trying to ban healthcare that keeps some of them alive.