Homage to Robert Conquest
"I told you so, you fucking fools"
Procrastinating in the hope that a joke I thought of last night would seem fresh enough to write just now I came on something I wrote in 2021 which still seems relevant. It ended.
Those people claiming that resistance to legal self-ID is all got up by fascists and neofascists for political gain should be on their knees praying that they are not telling the truth. "Trans Rights", in the form promoted by Judith Butler, are a stupendous vote loser, right up there with "defund the police". The claim that trans people should be treated decently, and that there should be legal accommodation for those who have completed their transition is widely accepted in Britain. It’s also the law here.
The Butler claim is different.
She and her followers believe that anyone who declares themselves trans thereby becomes a member of the sex they claim. It’s Christian Science with an added superpower: once they have named themselves and claimed their status, trans people vault over any other disempowered group to the top of the marginalisation rankings.
That won't fly as a political programme. It's ludicrous as a theory and in concrete ways damaging to women and girls. You need power if you are going to force people to pay lip service to something that they don't believe; while that power is available to the Butlerian jihad within American elite culture on the left, there is nowhere near enough to compel acquiescence even on the Guardian. There is certainly not enough to compel the great mass of voters. Once the apolitical masses realise what is proposed, they will rebel against it in decisive numbers. For any British political party to adopt it would be political suicide. I'm afraid this dynamic will work the same way in the US, too. The Guardian may have been responsible for the election of George W Bush 2001 with its cackhanded attempt to persuade the voters of an American swing county in a swing state to vote against him; the American unit is now doing all it can to see a Republican elected in 2024.
What was accepted and the law in the UK, was neither universally accepted nor, in many places, the law in the US. This is, I suppose, why so many USians have been so put off by so many UKers on this subject. To us, the fringe view you're talking about is truly a fringe, a distraction frequently employed in bad faith to arrest the progress for the huge bulk of actually trans people trying to get to the status that is accepted and protected by law in the UK. For you, it's the only point of remaining contention, so it's of course what the controversy is solely about.
Small example. In the last legislative session here, our R majority sought to forbid medical interventions (including non-surgical, which are by far the vast bulk) for consenting teens with consenting parents. The only trans member of the legislature said, correctly, that this was going to lead to increased suicides, among populations already at risk, in a state with a suicide problem. She was hounded out of the legislature -- not expelled, but forced to sit in the hall outside the chamber. This is the actual state of affairs.
We're in the process of forbidding *transitioned* people from using their new gender on their ID, in their passports, in selecting which public washroom to use, etc. The ruling consensus in the US is that the entire enterprise is illegitimate from start to finish. And we see rhetoric of how outliers -- that one swimmer, this one abusive person -- are used to completely discredit the entire concept of transition. It goes quickly from your 'someone might be faking' to 'they're all faking.'
Politically, yes, any support of trans rights, including for transitioned people, a losing proposition in most places. As was opposing slavery. Or overt racial discrimination.