Joe Hildebrand: Backlash against trans activists result of their own extremism

The trans issue is a classic culture war but, in an age that is getting increasingly insane, we need now, more than ever, to let sensibility reign, writes Joe Hildebrand.

In a landmark decision that has ricocheted around the world, the UK Supreme Court this week answered the ultimate culture war question: What is a woman?

And the answer the five judges gave could not have been clearer.

“The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms ‘women’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex,” deputy president Patrick Hodge said.

The decision has prompted global rejoicing from both conservatives and erstwhile progressives like JK Rowling, who have found themselves on the “wrong” side of the explosive gender wars.

Meanwhile, trans activists and their so-called allies have had the rug pulled out from under their feet. It is not just that they have failed to make ground but that the ground they had already made has effectively been pushed back to ground zero.

Members of the activist group For Women Scotland celebrate outside the UK Supreme Court in London after it ruled unanimously that “the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex”. Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

There has, of course, been much wailing and railing against the result but the truth is – in the parlance of another English contest that became a worldwide phenomenon – it was a massive own goal.

And it proves, yet again, an iron law that I am constantly shouting from the rooftops – including in this column last week – but that activists and radicals throughout history have always failed to understand. And that is simply this: Extremism begets extremism.

The more you push for and the more you demand a world that is beyond the wants or understanding of ordinary mainstream people, the more backlash and pushback there will be. At best this results in utter disappointment, at worst it leads to utter destruction.

To be clear, I am in no way anti-trans. I have dear friends who are trans women and at least two of them would be considered conservative in every other way.

Conservatives should consider that before their blustery attacks.

And it is they who are the greatest victims of the hyperbole and overreach of activists claiming to act on their behalf.

Too often these campaigns, fuelled more by self-aggrandising outrage than any clear political goal, quickly descend into the realm of the absurd.

The burning of Harry Potter books because of a disagreement with their author, JK Rowling, is almost fascistic stupidity. Pictures: Getty Images/AFP

The burning of Harry Potter books because of a disagreement with their author? Almost fascistic stupidity.

A transgender woman convicted of raping two women before transition being placed in a female prison? That takes stupidity to the realms of insanity.

And yet these things happened, as well as too many more to mention.

In fact, the latter alone is probably more responsible for the UK court judgment than anything else.

Likewise Donald Trump’s edict that there are only two genders would probably never have happened had not cloistered academics and undergrad activists been going around insisting that there were, in fact, 72 – at least at last count.

Now trans people the world over are terrified of even travelling to the United States, lest their gender be reversed on arrival. Nor are they alone, given a drop in tourist visas to the US in the age of Trump 2.0.

US President Donald Trump holds up the No Men in Women's Sports Executive Order after signing it on February 5, one of his moves targeting transgender rights. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP

Meanwhile, even erstwhile Trump sympathisers are concerned about him cutting funding to universities unless they abandon anything with a whiff of DEI – that’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the uninitiated. Such programs are the ultimate indulgent feel-good frolic for the nation’s most elite and elitist institutions, and do nothing for mainstream Americans, let alone the working poor.

But the affluent-activist campus Left demanded them and got them – and is now staring down the barrel of oblivion as a result. It’s hard times at Harvard.

And yet the supposed intelligentsia, for all their education and wisdom, still fail to see the cause of the apocalypse that is unfolding right before their eyes.

The trans issue is a classic culture war, waged more on social media than in the streets, but other culture wars can quickly jump the tracks. The Black Lives Matter movement went from angry tweets to nationwide riots in the blink of an eye, as did Trump’s shameful refusal to accept the 2020 election result. Suddenly predictions of a new Civil War in America did not seem so unthinkable.

Again, it is so simple: The more extreme the demand, the more extreme the response.

And if you think that’s simplistic, remember this: Without Bolshevism there would have been no Nazism. Hitler built his destruction of the Weimar Republic on the fear of Communism.

Or remember that the last US Civil War – the bloodiest in its history – was ultimately born of fanatical tax-dodgers a century earlier and fanatical slave owners a century later.

Or the French Revolution that became the Terror. Or the Arab Spring that became a wasteland. Or the October 7 attack that became – in the words of those who started it – a “genocide”.

Extremism begets extremism. Sometimes it’s a cause that gets cancelled in a civil court. Sometimes it’s a cause that causes a civil war.

In an age that is getting increasingly insane, we need now, more than ever, to let sensibility reign.

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