https://quillette.com/2019/08/01/how-feminism-paved
In the last decade, in many parts of the English-speaking world, transgender advocacy has made substantial, and at times, expansive gains, with trans rights becoming embedded in institutions and enforced by the state. Like any significant historical event, this gender revolution has multiple causes. One is digital technology, providing virtual worlds which transcend physical reality and online networks for spreading activism. Another is academic theory: postmodernism and queer theory. I want to make the less obvious argument that transgenderism has been promoted by feminism.
Not all feminism, of course. From the start of the second wave, some radical feminists opposed the inclusion of male-to-female transsexuals under the general heading of “women.” Their argument culminated in Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire (1979): “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact.” Transsexualism, she observed, was the creation of medical men like John Money and Harry Benjamin. As the current wave of transgenderism was building at the beginning of the 21st century, a handful of radical lesbian feminists warned that it was detrimental to the material interests of women. They included Sheila Jeffreys, an English political scientist then teaching at the University of Melbourne, and Gallus Mag, a pseudonymous American blogger. At the time, their warnings must have seemed hysterical; they now appear remarkably prescient.
These radical feminists argued that “trans activism is misogyny” and “a men’s rights movement.” They were correct about its objective consequences being bad for females, as set out by the philosopher Kathleen Stock and the journalist Helen Joyce. The end of segregation by sex threatens the dignity and safety of women rather than men, because men are more violent and sexually predatory than women. Men in prison, for example, have a huge incentive to claim a female identity. In sports, the physical advantages of men are so great that their entry into women’s competitions automatically takes places from females. Women who enter men’s competitions, by contrast, are destined to lose. In the realm of sexuality, young lesbians are vulnerable to aggressive pursuit by transwomen, which activists celebrate as “breaking the cotton ceiling.” There is no equivalent pressure on men, whether straight or gay.
