Over the last few days, my essay “Why You Can’t Win an Argument With a TERF” has travelled rather further than I expected. It has been shared around, muttered over, objected to, dissected, and, most pleasingly of all, complained about at some length by exactly the sort of people it was describing

There is apparently a whole sprawling thread on Mumsnet about me. Multiple pages. Many opinions. Several amateur biologists. Quite a lot of people very confidently explaining what I am, what I am not, where I may pee, where I may not change, and why civilisation will collapse if I stand too near a locker.

Naturally, I was delighted.

Not because I enjoy being insulted, although at this point I do seem to have developed the emotional hide of a council bollard, but because the replies did exactly what the essay said they would do.

The argument in the essay was simple: a lot of anti-trans debate does not answer the question being asked. It quietly switches to a different, easier question.

So you ask:

“Why should I be excluded from the women’s changing room?”

And back comes:

“Because you’re a man.”

Which is not evidence.

It is not a risk assessment.

It is not a policy argument.

It is not proportionality.

It is not even particularly original.

It is just the switcheroo.

I did reply to a few comments. I really did try. I put on my serious face, sharpened my little argument pencil, and attempted to explain that “because I say so” is not quite the same thing as a coherent public policy framework.

But then I got bored.

There are only so many times a woman can type “that does not answer the question” before she starts to wonder whether there might be a more efficient way to annoy people.

So I built one.

Introducing the Fast Track Femme TERF Annihilation Machine

Yes, that is what it is called.

No, I will not be taking notes on restraint at this time.

The idea is simple. Instead of me patiently answering the same circular arguments over and over again, the machine lets people test their own objections.

You pick a statement you disagree with.

You type your best argument.

Then the machine checks whether you actually answered the statement, or whether you quietly ran away to a slogan cupboard and came back wearing “adult human female” as a hat.

Step one: pick something you disagree with

The app gives you a set of statements, such as:

“Trans women should be allowed to use women’s changing rooms.”

Or:

“Repeating ‘adult human female’ does not answer a policy question.”

Or:

“If evidence cannot change your mind, this is not an evidence argument.”

Pick one. Be brave. Feel the fear and define “woman” anyway.

Step two: give your honest objection

This is the important bit. The app does not ask you to pick from a list of pre-written objections. That would be unfair, and, frankly, a bit boring.

You write what you actually think.

If your concern is specific, proportionate, evidence-based, and connected to the question, the machine can say so. It is not just a giant red button that screams “TERF!” at everything, tempting though that was.

But if your objection is just “you are not a woman” with a slightly different hat on, the machine will notice.

Step three: watch the switcheroo get caught

Once you submit your answer, the machine analyses the structure of the argument.

Did you answer the question?

Did you provide evidence?

Did you explain the risk?

Did you consider proportionality?

Did you address the human being in front of you, or did you sprint back to a dictionary definition and hide under it?

The machine then gives a diagnosis. Sometimes it identifies a full switcheroo. Sometimes it spots safeguarding laundering. Sometimes it finds a lab-coat argument, where something sounds scientific but is really just prejudice wearing a clipboard.

And sometimes, if the argument is actually honest, it gives it a fair hearing.

Because this is the point: the app is funny, but the underlying issue is serious. We cannot have a meaningful debate if one side keeps refusing to answer the actual question.

Why I built it

I built it because the pattern is so predictable.

Ask about bathrooms, and they answer biology.

Ask about evidence, and they answer fear.

Ask about proportionality, and they answer slogans.

Ask about the actual person standing in front of them, and they answer an imaginary predator they have assembled from newspaper headlines and unresolved discomfort.

That is not debate. That is not safeguarding. That is not feminism.

It is attribute substitution.

It is answering the easier question because the real one is harder.

And now there is a little machine that points at it and says, “There. You did it again.”

Have a play

The app is here:

[APP LINK] TERF Annihilation Machine

The original essay is here:

Play with it. Send it to your friends. Send it to your enemies if you are feeling theatrical. Put in the strongest anti-trans argument you can think of and see what happens.

If it is a real argument, it will get a real answer.

If it is just a slogan in sensible shoes, well, the machine is rather good at spotting those.

You have been warned.

With love,

Stevie
Fast Track Femme

My day started, as it often does, at 6am.

Bing. Bing. Bing.

Alarm.

Right, I thought. We are not scrolling Instagram today.

We are getting up. We are making coffee. We are behaving like a proper adult woman with responsibilities, deadlines, emails, a dog, a publication, and a life that occasionally resembles an exploded stationery cupboard.

Thirty seconds later, obviously, I was scrolling Instagram.

This is how civilisation ends. Not with a bang, but with a 57-year-old transsexual woman lying in bed at dawn thinking, I will just watch one more reel and then I will become productive.

The reel was by Robyn Holdaway, who has been appearing in my feed lately and who is, annoyingly, absurdly eloquent. Ridiculously eloquent. The kind of eloquent that makes me slightly furious. If I could speak to camera with half their gravity, rhythm and consistency, you would see much more of me on video and I would have to write considerably fewer of these bloody essays.

Robyn was talking about the history of anti-trans politics, the TERF movement, and the wider machinery behind what now presents itself as “gender critical” feminism.

And I sat there thinking, with some embarrassment:

Oh God. I know almost nothing about this.

That is one of the slightly awkward truths about me as a trans woman. I am not very good at the syllabus.

I know the names I fixated on growing up, because there were so few of them. I know the women who became little secret landmarks in my head. I know the public figures I watched with that peculiar mixture of longing, fear and recognition.

But the broader history? Queer culture? The roots of Pride? The factions, schisms, arguments, conferences, newsletters, theories, movements and counter-movements?

No. Not really.

I am, in that sense, a bit of an academic failure as a transsexual.

It is a little like when I was a serious cyclist and people used to ask me about the Tour de France. I would have to admit that I barely watched it. I was out cycling. I was not sitting around memorising stage winners from 1987.

Transition has been a bit like that for me. I have been busy doing the thing. Surviving the thing. Rebuilding the thing. Having the thing surgically altered. Explaining the thing to my children. Losing people over the thing. Writing about the thing. Occasionally dancing in a dress because, frankly, after all that, one should be allowed a bit of a boogie.

But as for the intellectual history around the thing?

Patchy. Let us call it patchy.

So when Robyn described anti-trans politics not simply as a British social-media tantrum, but as something connected to wider anti-gender, religious-right and conservative policy networks, I had the reaction I often have when someone says something that sounds both plausible and slightly too neat.

I thought:

Hang on. Is that true?

Because my rough, lazy version of the story had been much simpler.

I thought the British TERF thing was mostly Graham Linehan, Mumsnet, newspaper columnists, J.K. Rowling, bathrooms, prisons, sport, a few furious comedians, some dreadful podcasts, and a great deal of disguised revulsion wearing a sensible coat.

You know the coat.

The “reasonable concern” coat.

The “women’s safety” coat.

The “we are only asking questions” coat.

The coat worn by people who insist they are not disgusted by trans women at all, absolutely not, heaven forbid, but who somehow manage to speak about us as though we are a Category B biological incident.

That part I understood immediately.

The bait and switch was obvious enough. The surface language was safety, safeguarding, fairness, children, prisons, changing rooms, toilets. But the emotional voltage never seemed to match the evidence. It always felt too hot. Too thrilled with itself. Too eager. Too intimate. Too bodily.

It felt, bluntly, like revulsion that had found a policy department.

But what I had not understood was the larger history.

I had not understood how “gender ideology” became an organising phrase across conservative, religious and anti-LGBT movements.

I had not understood how much of the current anti-trans political architecture sits inside a broader anti-gender movement.

I had not understood the extent to which, after defeats on gay rights and same-sex marriage, trans people became the next available battlefield.

At least, that is the claim.

And because I do not like simply repeating claims, even claims that flatter my existing suspicions, I decided to look.

So what did I find?

The first thing I found was that the cartoon version is too stupid.

There was no single room, no oak table, no Christian billionaire stroking a cat, no secret memo headed Operation Make Everyone Weird About Trans People.

Real life is rarely that kind.

The strongest version of the claim, that American religious conservatives simply invented TERF politics, bought some British feminists, and then marched them around like little wind-up toys, does not survive contact with reality.

But the weaker, more serious version?

That survives very well indeed.

Because what I found was not a conspiracy. It was infrastructure.

That is worse, in a way. Conspiracies require secrecy. Infrastructure just requires money, lawyers, institutions, patience, message discipline and a good supply of frightened politicians.

The anti-trans movement, as it now exists, is not one thing. It is a convergence.

There are old-school trans-exclusionary feminists with roots in second-wave arguments about sex, gender and womanhood. There are British newspaper columnists who appear to have mistaken their own revulsion for a legal principle. There are anxious parents, actual bigots, traumatised women, opportunistic politicians, manosphere-adjacent podcasters, professional contrarians, religious conservatives, think-tank people, litigators, donors, YouTubers, and a whole supply chain of people who discovered that “gender ideology” could be made to carry almost any fear they wanted to load onto it.

That phrase matters.

“Gender ideology.”

It is wonderfully useful because it does not sound like an attack on people. It sounds like an attack on a doctrine. Nobody wants to be pro-ideology, do they? Ideology sounds like something that happens in other countries, in badly lit rooms, while humourless people move pins around a map.

So the trans person becomes “gender ideology”.

The gay teacher becomes “sexualisation”.

The trans child becomes “social contagion”.

The supportive parent becomes “captured”.

The doctor becomes “mutilator”.

The school becomes “indoctrination”.

And the whole thing moves, very smoothly, from disgust to safeguarding.

That, I think, is the genius of it.

Not moral genius, obviously. Strategic genius.

The emotional engine is revulsion, fear and hierarchy. But the public language is children, women, safety, fairness, privacy, parents and biological reality.

This is how you launder disgust into policy.

The early wedge was bathrooms. That was the point at which I started recognising the shape of it, even before I understood the machinery. The argument was never really, “We have evidence that trans women are causing danger in toilets.” The argument was much more primal than that. It was, “Imagine a man in there.”

That was enough.

Once you can make people picture “a man in there”, you no longer need the actual trans woman. She has been replaced by a threat image.

Then came sport, which was even more useful.

Sport gave the movement something bathrooms did not quite give it: a plausible secular fairness argument. You did not have to talk about sin. You did not have to admit disgust. You did not even have to say you disliked trans people. You could say, with a serious face, that you were defending girls.

That is a very hard frame to fight.

Not because every version of the sports debate is automatically illegitimate. It is not. Sport does involve bodies, puberty, competition categories and material differences. Any honest person can see that.

But that is precisely why it was useful. It gave anti-trans politics a point of entry through a real-world complexity. Once inside, the argument could expand. From elite sport to school sport. From school sport to bathrooms. From bathrooms to pronouns. From pronouns to medical care. From medical care to child protection. From child protection to parental rights. From parental rights to the idea that any institution which recognises trans existence is engaged in ideological capture.

Then healthcare became the big one.

This is where the machinery becomes easiest to see, because the same phrases, structures and legal ideas begin appearing in different states. Model bills. Similar wording. Similar testimony. Similar “findings”. Similar claims about social contagion, regret, Europe, puberty blockers, parental rights, and doctors supposedly rushing children into irreversible procedures.

That is not an organic village panic.

That is a production line.

A national organisation writes the argument. A state lawmaker introduces it. A local witness gives it a human face. A friendly media ecosystem amplifies it. Lawyers defend it. Another group brings the next case. The bill fails in one state and passes in another. The passed law creates litigation. The litigation creates headlines. The headlines create fear. The fear creates more political demand.

And so the machine feeds itself.

This is where the money matters.

Not because money explains everything. It does not. Lots of ordinary people believe stupid and cruel things for free.

But money buys continuity.

Money buys lawyers who can spend years on cases. Money buys policy papers. Money buys staff. Money buys polling. Money buys media operations. Money buys conferences. Money buys fellowships. Money buys relationships with lawmakers. Money buys state-by-state legislative tracking. Money buys the ability to lose one battle and simply move to the next jurisdiction.

A broke moral panic burns hot and dies.

A funded moral panic becomes a career path.

And that, I think, is what happened.

The anti-trans movement became professionalised.

It learned to stop sounding like “we find these people disgusting” and start sounding like “we have grave concerns about safeguarding.”

It learned to stop saying “we oppose LGBT rights” and start saying “we support parental rights.”

It learned to stop saying “our religion requires sex hierarchy” and start saying “biological reality.”

It learned to stop saying “we do not want trans people in public life” and start saying “women and children deserve protection.”

And crucially, it learned where the liberal mind is weakest.

Children. Sport. Prisons. Bathrooms. Schools.

Pick the place where the public is uncertain, where even sympathetic people feel a little awkward, where the facts are complicated, where nobody wants to sound heartless, where the most extreme example can be made to stand in for the whole group.

Then push there.

Again and again and again.

This is why the UK version interests me so much, because Britain has its own strange pathology. The British gender-critical movement is not simply a branch office of the American Christian right. That would be too easy. It has roots in British feminism, British media, British class politics, British institutional caution, British politeness, British cruelty, and that peculiar national habit of making repression sound reasonable if you say it in the right accent.

But it also does not sit apart from the wider movement.

There are overlaps. Alliances. Shared phrases. Shared enemies. Shared platforms. Shared legal concepts. Shared think-tank worlds. Shared moral panic structures.

The British version may wear a different coat, but it is standing in the same weather.

So, no, I do not think the correct conclusion is:

“TERFs are all secretly funded by American Christians.”

That is not serious enough.

The better conclusion is this:

Anti-trans politics became the place where several different movements found each other.

Radical feminist sex essentialism found Christian-right family politics.

Christian-right family politics found conservative legal strategy.

Conservative legal strategy found Republican statehouses.

Republican statehouses found media outrage.

Media outrage found social media.

Social media found frightened parents.

Frightened parents found campaigners.

Campaigners found donors.

Donors found lawyers.

Lawyers found cases.

Cases found courts.

Courts found policy.

Policy found my life.

And that is the part people forget.

This is not abstract. It does not stay in think-tank PDFs. It does not remain in American statehouses. It does not sit politely inside an Instagram reel.

It travels.

It travels into newspapers, hospitals, schools, families, airports, toilets, changing rooms, courtrooms, dinner tables, comment sections and the eyes of strangers.

It arrives at the front door.

Which is why I wanted to know where it came from.

Source anchors

A few pieces of evidence are worth separating from the general noise.

Bathroom bills as a post-marriage-equality wedge
Type Investigations traces the rise of bathroom bills after Obergefell and describes how bathroom panic became an early post-marriage-equality strategy.
Read: The Secret History of Bathroom Bills

The coalition strategy
Political Research Associates documents Promise to America’s Children, a programme backed by Family Policy Alliance, the Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom and other groups, covering trans healthcare, trans athletes, sex education, conversion therapy, adoption, schools and parental control.
Read: The New Anti-Trans Promise

Copy-and-paste state legislation
The Associated Press analysed more than 130 bills across 40 US state legislatures and found many were identical or similar to model legislation promoted by conservative groups.
Read: Many anti-trans bills came from a handful of far-right interest groups

Model legislation in plain sight
Do No Harm published model legislation covering schools, government funding, medical procedures for minors, private legal action, insurance coverage and enforcement routes.
Read: Do No Harm model legislation, The JUST FACTs Act

Scale of institutional money, Alliance Defending Freedom
ProPublica’s nonprofit records show Alliance Defending Freedom operating at a very large institutional scale. This does not mean every dollar is anti-trans money, but it does show that this is not a fringe operation with a few angry people and a podcast.
Read: ProPublica nonprofit profile, Alliance Defending Freedom

Scale of institutional money, Heritage Foundation
ProPublica’s nonprofit records also show the Heritage Foundation operating at a very large institutional scale, with major revenue, expenses and assets. Again, this is not the same as saying every dollar is spent on anti-trans politics, but it matters when assessing infrastructure.
Read: ProPublica nonprofit profile, Heritage Foundation

Project 2025 in its own words
Project 2025 is not just a name people throw around for dramatic effect. Its own text contains explicit language about “gender ideology”, schools, federal funding, sexual orientation, gender identity, and policy rollback.
Read: Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership

European anti-gender funding
The European Parliamentary Forum reports significant anti-rights and anti-gender funding in Europe between 2019 and 2023. This is broader than anti-trans campaigning alone, but it helps show the wider anti-gender infrastructure.
Read: EPF report on anti-gender funding in Europe

UK gender-critical feminism and right-wing alliances
Sally Hines examines the relationship between UK gender-critical feminism and right-wing, far-right, Christian fundamentalist and conservative media networks, while also recognising the older feminist roots of trans-exclusionary thought.
Read: Hands towards the right? UK gender critical feminism and right-wing coalitions

Campaign advertising and the electoral machine
The Guardian reported on major Republican spending on anti-trans advertising during the 2024 US election cycle, including figures cited from ad-tracking analysis.
Read: Trump and Republicans bet big on anti-trans ads

This essay is part of a four-part series exploring the hardest questions at the centre of my life and my transition.
Each piece examines a different angle: honesty, resentment, myth, and science.

1. Was Stephen Bennett a Fucking Liar?
A reckoning with silence, shame and self-deception.
https://fasttrackfemme.substack.com/p/was-stephen-bennett-a-fucking-liar

2. Why the “TERFs™ 🤪” Hate Us
An examination of resentment, envy, authenticity and why trans people provoke such concentrated hostility.
(You’re reading this one.)

3. What I Am Not
A clear dismantling of autogynephilia and the junk science that has distorted public understanding.
[To be released shortly]

4. Why Am I Like This?
A deep dive into the psychology and science behind the origins of gender identity and transness.
[To be released shortly]

I don’t blow my own trumpet about much. There is plenty wrong with me, whole continents of flaws, blind spots, self-deception, strange coping mechanisms, and emotional knots I’m only now learning to untangle. But there is one trait I’ve always had in absolute abundance:

I have always been exceptionally good at sticking my middle finger up to social norms.

I have never ever given a shit, not for fifteen seconds, about what I’m supposed to be, how I’m supposed to behave, or what shape my life is meant to take.

Not how I should earn a living.
Not how a “proper adult” should behave

I didn’t care at twenty-five. I didn’t care at forty-five. And I certainly don’t care now. I have seen it all my life as my duty to rebel. It’s just my nature.

It’s probably why my office wall is plastered with Ferris Bueller, Frank Abagnale and Jordan Belfort. I have always admired mavericks and outsiders, not for their chaos but for their refusal to accept the script handed to them. I’ve spent most of my life doing the same. I haven’t been to an office (or people farm, as I call them) in a decade and I haven’t had a permanent job in 28 years.

And the truth is, I don’t think that streak is unique to me. A lot of us have it. In fact, it’s almost predictable. So many trans people carry that same golden triangle of gender dysphoria, ADHD and mild autism, and it produces a particular kind of mind, restless, questioning, pattern-spotting, stubbornly resistant to doing things simply because we’re told to. It makes breaking social rules feel less like rebellion and more like inevitability. Once you’ve spent a lifetime feeling out of step with the world, you stop pretending the choreography was ever meant for you.

And so, ladies and gents, my grand theory. It’s in large part jealousy, but not the way you think.

And as I’ve thought more deeply about why hostility toward trans people has escalated so dramatically, I’ve realised that one of the biggest forces behind it isn’t disgust, or ideology, or fear of biology.

It’s jealousy.

And just to be clear, I’m not pretending jealousy is the only force in play. There have been activists who have made frankly batshit demands of the public, or announced things that are so uncompromising and inflexible that genuinely sane, rational people have ended up furious. You cannot go around shouting “transphobe” at anyone who disagrees with your philosophical position without eventually looking like the boy who cried wolf. That backlash is real and I don’t deny it. But even with all of that acknowledged, I still think there is a deeper current running underneath the noise, something older and more psychological that explains why the reaction is so visceral. And that is where jealousy lives.

Not jealousy of femininity or hormones or clothing.
Not jealousy of surgeries or appearance.
Not jealousy of being trans.

Who in God’s name would be jealous of that curse in life? And it was a curse, a curse that you would not wish on your worst enemy.

It’s jealousy of the audacity.

Trans people do something most people never do: we examine our lives honestly and act on what we find. We confront truths about ourselves that are terrifying, destabilising and often life-altering. We turn towards the thing we fear rather than away from it. We break our own lives open and rebuild them in the light.

Most people don’t do that. Most people will never do that.

Most people stay.

They stay in marriages that hollow them out.

They stay in jobs they despise.

They stay in towns they’ve outgrown.

They stay in identities they inherited rather than chose.

They stay in roles scripted by other people.

They stay because staying is easier.

They stay because confronting the truth is frightening.

They stay because change feels like death.

And then someone like us shows up.

Someone who says, actually, no.

I’m not doing this anymore.

I’m not pretending.

I’m not living a life built on choreography.

I am going to be who I am, even if it requires uprooting everything.

To someone who has never changed anything fundamental about themselves, this is unbearable.

Because what are they supposed to do with the knowledge that a stranger, a trans woman, has done something they have never once found the courage to do?

What exactly is their excuse for living a life they privately resent while someone they regard as “less legitimate” has found the strength to walk into the fire?

It is easier to hate us than to face that question.

It is easier to declare us delusional than to consider that we might be brave.

It is easier to mock us than to admit we represent a freedom they never cultivated.

It is easier to invent pathology than to confront the possibility that we are not the fragile ones in this equation.

We are reminders of choice.

We are not attacking their worldview.

We are exposing their lack of one.

We are not dismantling society.

We are demonstrating that most of the cages people sit in have the doors unlocked.

And this, more than anything, drives the rage.

We are proof that you can choose yourself, even late.

We are proof that you can tell the truth, even after decades.

We are proof that you can burn down an old life and build a better one.

We are proof that the scripts can be rejected.

We represent the life they didn’t dare to have.

We represent the courage they never acted on.

So yes, they hate us.

And you cannot reason someone out of a position they arrived at to avoid looking in the mirror.

But you can recognise it for what it is.

And you can walk on, free.

This week: the Nobel-winning psychology of why you've never once won an argument about trans people, and never will. Featuring Daniel Kahneman, Richard Dawkins, and the man down the flat-roof pub

For fifty years I said nothing. You learn a particular silence in the closet. Not just not speaking, but not letting yourself form the sentence in case it showed on your face.

So when I finally came out, I came out of that silence like a greyhound out of a trap.

I went straight onto X, and for the first time in my life I could say the thing. Every argument I’d swallowed for half a century, suddenly out under my own name. I argued with everyone. The gender-critical names with the blue ticks and the book deals, their followers, the trolls who’d wandered in for sport. Daily, for hours, with the manic energy of someone who’d just discovered the gag was off.

I wasn’t naive. I had a strategy. I knew I couldn’t change the minds of the people I was arguing with, so the point was the audience. The silent onlookers, the undecided, the people scrolling past. You don’t win by converting your opponent; you win in the minds of the people watching.

What I hadn’t costed in was what it would do to me. It is a specific kind of exhausting, building a careful, evidence-based argument while a thousand voices shout you’re a fucking man in a dress. Not because the insult stings, though sometimes it does, but because of the asymmetry. The insult is free: five words, no thought, fired and forgotten. My argument was expensive: evidence, structure, patience, nuance. I was running an engine that drank fuel by the gallon against people running one that ran on air. They could keep it up forever. I couldn’t. One day I understood that, and walked away from the spectacle.

But I didn’t leave empty-handed. Across all those bruising months, and in the harder encounters, with real people in real rooms, family among them, I’d started to see the machinery behind the faces. I’d gone in to persuade, failed, got hurt, and come out with something better than a win. I’d worked out how the thinking actually works.

And here is what it is.

The whole thing runs on one move, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.

Attribute Substitution

There’s a thing the psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls attribute substitution. When the mind meets a hard question, it quietly swaps it for an easier one and answers that instead, without noticing the swap. Ask someone “how satisfied are you with your life?”, a genuinely hard question, and what they actually answer, without knowing it, is “what mood am I in right now?” The substitution is invisible from the inside. They’re certain they answered the hard question.

Here’s how it runs with people like me.

The hard question is this: what is the actual risk of allowing trans women into women’s spaces, weighed against the actual cost of excluding them, in light of the actual evidence? That needs base rates, proportion, some moral seriousness. What harm has actually occurred, how often, compared against the harm exclusion causes.

Think about how we drive. Two cars approach each other on an ordinary road at sixty miles an hour, a combined hundred and twenty, with nothing between them but a painted line and a shared agreement not to cross it. Any driver could swerve across and kill everyone. We know this. We accept it. We don’t ban driving, because we weigh the real risk against the real cost and make our peace with the painted line. That’s what grown-up risk reasoning looks like. It’s never “could harm ever occur?” It’s always “how much, how likely, against what cost?”

So you make that argument. You bring the base rates, the proportion, the painted line. And the answer comes back:

But you’re not a woman.

There it is. The switcheroo. You asked about risk; they answered about definitions. And this is the maddening part, the part that took me a thousand arguments to see: they experience it as having answered you. They’ve swapped the hard question for an easy one, knocked the easy one over, felt the satisfying crunch of something falling, and assumed it was your point. You hand them an actuarial table; they think the conversation was about the meaning of a word.

The switcheroo

Now, I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of me that wastes the rest of her life disputing whether a man can become a woman, and I’m not her.

In one narrow biological sense, the sentence is true. I wasn’t born female. I don’t produce ova. I can’t become the kind of woman my mother is. Fine. Granted. I don’t need metaphysical perfection from the universe before I’m allowed to exist with dignity.

The problem isn’t the sentence. The problem is what they make the sentence do.

The whole model is just three rungs:

1. A man cannot become a woman.

2. Therefore a trans woman is a man.

3. Therefore a trans woman must be kept out of women’s spaces. And out of the sport, the prison, the changing room, the documents, the pronouns, the basic kindness.

Only the first rung does any work. The rest is supposed to cascade out of it automatically. And that’s the fraud. Not the biological claim, but the pretence that every social, legal and moral conclusion falls out of it for free. A person can be male-born without that single fact settling what risks she poses, what exclusion costs, or how a decent society should weigh competing needs. But the model doesn’t want to do that work. It wants the clean cascade. Grant the root and everything else is meant to follow.

I understand the pull of this better than most, because building abstractions is my day job. I write software. My whole craft is climbing to the clean rule at the top of the tree and letting everything follow from it. I feel the seduction of the parsimonious model in my bones. There is something that feels rigorous about a world you can capture in three statements; the fewer the axioms, the more serious it feels. But any engineer who’s been at it long enough knows the discipline that makes abstraction honest: the model has to answer to reality. When the runtime behaviour contradicts your beautiful invariant, the invariant is wrong, and you climb back up and fix it. Evidence flows upward. The day you stop letting the world revise your model is the day you stop being an engineer and start being a priest.

That’s what this is. The root axiom was never derived; it was asserted, then sealed. No fact is permitted to climb back up and touch it. So when you argue rung three, the risk and the evidence, and they answer with rung one, the slogan, that’s the switcheroo in its native habitat. They retreat to the top of the tree because it’s the only rung that feels safe. The lower rungs wobble the instant you ask them to justify themselves.

A man can’t be a woman. Yes, in one sense. Fine. Now explain why that settles whether a harmless, transitioned, middle-aged woman buying a lipstick in Boots is a threat to public order. They rarely do, because explaining was never the point. Returning to the slogan is the point.

Three intellectual levels of TERF, same swictheroo.

You meet three kinds of person doing this, and they’re worth telling apart.

At the bottom of the tree is the flat-roof-pub patriot. “England till I die”, knows what a woman is, said it down the boozer and got a laugh. He doesn’t argue the axiom, he shouts it. There’s no machinery and no disguise. You say anything at all and back comes the slogan like a football chant. He’s at rung one before you’ve finished your sentence, because rung one is the only rung he owns.

In the middle is the podcast graduate. He’s done the reading, by which I mean he’s consumed four hundred hours of Jordan Peterson, Helen Joyce and the rest of the brigade, and he has mistaken agreeing with a confident presenter for having thought something through. This is the one who flatters himself on his intellect. He can cascade the model down with real fluency: man can’t be a woman, therefore men, therefore no spaces, therefore no pronouns. Because it has the shape of reasoning, he believes it is reasoning. But he didn’t derive the root; he absorbed it, pre-loaded, from someone with a microphone, and he’s never once let a fact climb back up and revise it. He has cut the feedback wire and called the silence rigour.

And at the top is ‘the scientist’, or real thinker. For our example, we will cite Richard Dawkins. The man who taught a generation to think in fine gradients about evolution, to distrust the easy story, to follow the evidence into the mess, reaches, on this one subject, for the hardest binary he can find. Sex is binary. Gametes. Chromosomes. True enough, in the context he means them. And deployed, with enormous authority, as an answer to the top of the tree dressed up as a verdict on the bottom of it. I have seen him do this on endless podcasts with Helen Joyce and the gang. The erudition isn’t the reasoning. The erudition is the disguise. And it’s worse from him than from the man down the pub, not better, because the credentials lend the swap a borrowed authority. The onlookers I was trying to reach see a famous scientist and assume the science has spoken. It hasn’t. He’s done exactly what the pub did. He’s just done it in a lab coat.

A chant, a cascade, a lab coat. Underneath all three, the same climb back to the top of the tree.

The deeper failure isn’t stupidity. It’s a kind of corrupted cleverness. The clever ones fall for it precisely because they’ve been trained to admire elegance: the clean model, the hard line, the feeling of stripping away fashionable nonsense to reveal the underlying truth. They mistake the satisfaction of a simple model for the validity of it.

But a model’s only job is to fit the territory. And the territory here is people.

A model of sex and gender that resolves to three rules got that clean the only way it could: by throwing away the data that didn’t fit. And the data it threw away has a face, and a name. It’s me, and the others like me. The elegance was bought with amputation. The model compressed the world by deleting the inconvenient parts, and the inconvenient parts were human beings.

Real life is the messy model. It always was, because real life is made of people, and people have never once resolved to three clean statements. Anyone selling you a tidier map has tidied it by leaving people off it.

I don’t argue on X anymore. I’d taken everything the arena had to give, and what it gave me was this: you cannot feed evidence into a mind that has swapped your question for a different one. So I stopped offering, and I spend my breath where the wire is still connected. There are such people. The ones for whom this is a real person, and she’s harmless, and she’s happy is allowed to edit the model. I’ve found them. Some of them surprised me.

The switcheroo is the tell. Make an argument about anything in the real and messy world, and if the answer comes back as a statement about what a word means, they didn’t answer you. They climbed back to the top of the tree, and they probably don’t even know they did it.

Once you can see the climb, you’re free. Not because you can win. Because you finally understand why you never could, and you can stop setting yourself on fire to keep a severed wire warm.

Another day, another germination of an uncomfortable thought.

It is almost Pride month again.

Pre-transition Steve used to look at Pride month and roll his eyes so hard they nearly detached from his skull.

I remember looking at Regent Street covered in Pride flags and thinking the Third Reich had moved back in, only this time in glorious Technicolor.

“The whole bloody month? Are you serious?”

That really was my attitude.

And if I am being completely honest, part of the reason I resisted transition for so long was because I had a profoundly uneasy relationship with the idea of being “in the LGBT”.

I still remember the day, in front of the mirror in my office, and I started repeating the words over and over to myself.

“I am transgender.”

Again.

“I am transgender.”

Again.

“I am transgender.”

Acceptance was hard.

Discovery was not hard. I had known for decades in the strange submerged way trans people often know things long before they admit them. But acceptance was another matter entirely.

The words felt radioactive.

Then, later, sat in front of my computer, something else hit me and I burst out laughing.

“Oh my God.”

“I’m in the LGBT.”

“What the actual fuck?”

I, Stephen Bennett, was in the LGBT.

This came as a considerable shock to Stephen Bennett.

You see, I had spent most of my life psychologically standing outside all of that.

I would see Pride marches and sometimes recoil from them. I would see leather outfits, gimp masks, fetish aesthetics, public sexuality, rainbow hair, shouting, slogans, and what looked to me like social chaos. And my reaction, if I am honest, was often something between discomfort and embarrassment.

Part of that was probably straightforward prejudice. Some of it was social conditioning. Some of it was class instinct. Some of it was fear.

But a large part of it, I now realise, was that I did not want any of it to have anything to do with me.

Because if those people belonged to the same category as me, then suddenly my problem stopped being abstract.

It became personal.

I also think I had a very specific discomfort with overt sexuality in public. I am actually quite prudy. I always joked about this in my early transition videos. Somewhere inside me there lives a slightly horrified 1970s school prefect and a small amount of Mary Whitehouse.

I do not like public sexual theatrics, regardless of who is doing them.

But here is the interesting contradiction.

At the exact same time as I was rolling my eyes at parts of queer culture, I secretly envied the living hell out of some of it.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970s and 80s, I absolutely loved those funny, cheeky, camp public figures who everyone knew were gay but nobody officially said were gay. Men like Kenneth Williams. Later people like Graham Norton and Alan Carr.

I loved the freedom of it.

The wit.

The looseness.

The theatricality.

The escape from rigid masculinity.

I wanted to sit at that table.

Not because I wanted public sex or fetish parades or slogans.

I wanted the release valve.

I noticed something throughout my life. Whenever I spent time around very camp gay men, if I trusted them, something in me relaxed. My guard dropped. I became softer. More honest. Less frightened.

Back in the 1990s, one of the very few people I ever came out to was a gay couple I knew in Nottingham. They gave me some dresses. I was eternally grateful for that.

That sounds like such a small thing, but it mattered enormously.

Around straight men, especially in the world I grew up in, there were invisible walls around masculinity. You did not admit softness. You did not admit femininity. You certainly did not admit wanting to be a woman.

But with certain gay men, the walls briefly disappeared.

They disarmed me.

I could breathe.

And then something else happened recently.

I was in Boots buying yet more hair nonsense, because transition appears to involve spending the GDP of a small nation on hair products, and there was another trans person in the shop.

Very visibly trans.

Rainbow-coloured hair.

Receding hairline.

Masculine face.

Standing out enormously.

Six months ago, maybe even less, part of me would have looked at that and thought:

“Why would you draw more attention to yourself?”

“If you are already visibly trans, why add rainbow hair on top of it?”

But this time I saw something completely different.

They were not making it worse.

They were taking it back.

And suddenly I understood something I had not properly understood before.

Not everyone survives this by blending in quietly and trying to look as socially acceptable as possible.

Some people survive by becoming louder.

More visible.

More deliberate.

By refusing shame.

And I realised something else too.

My experience of being trans has been easier than some people’s.

I pass reasonably well.

I live a fairly normal life.

I walk around Cork buying makeup and hair products and coffees and nobody really bothers me very much.

And the uncomfortable truth is this:

Part of the reason I get to do that is because other people absorbed the social punishment first.

The flamboyant gay man in 1987.

The activist I rolled my eyes at twenty years ago.

The visibly trans woman walking into Boots anyway.

The people who were prepared to look ridiculous, threatening, embarrassing, political, weird, too loud, too feminine, too obvious, too much.

People suffered so that other people could quietly exist later with less suffering.

That does not mean I suddenly agree with every part of LGBT culture.

I still roll my eyes sometimes.

I still do not naturally think in group identities.

I still dislike ideological conformity.

I still do not trust groups not to colonise individual thought.

I still have a strong instinct toward independence.

And I do not believe being trans automatically makes somebody wise, moral, or correct any more than being straight does.

But I understand something now that I did not understand before.

You do not have to become identical to people to recognise what they carried for you.

And that, I think, is why I now find Pride month oddly moving.

Not because I have suddenly become a perfect Pride person.

God no.

But because I finally understand that I am not standing outside the glass anymore.

I am on the inside now.

Which means when I see irritated middle-aged men rolling their eyes at the flags, I sometimes laugh quietly to myself.

Because I know exactly where they are psychologically.

I used to live there too.

And despite all my instincts toward being a solitary creature, despite all my resistance to group identity, despite all my hesitation around slogans and collective language, I have finally arrived at the conclusion:

We are all in this together, aren’t we?

Since Bridget Phillipson gave her statement in Parliament following the Supreme Court ruling, I have avoided reading about it like the plague.

And I’ll tell you why.

Before I transitioned, I spent most of my life avoiding myself.

I did it with extraordinary sophistication. I looked outward instead. Economics. Politics. Federal Reserve policy. UK news. Interest rate probabilities. Endless YouTube videos about systems, governments, markets, civilisation, decline, progress, collapse. Anything, absolutely anything, except the thing sitting quietly inside me waiting to be looked at.

Then I transitioned, and one of the promises I made to myself was this:

Stop staring endlessly at the whole world and start paying attention to your own immediate one.

How am I feeling?

What is happening in my life?

How are the people around me?

What is actually in front of me?

So when this ruling came, and my YouTube feed filled itself to the gills with Helen Joyce’s grinning face and another forty-seven thumbnails explaining that civilisation itself now depended upon who pees where, I avoided it.

Not because I did not care.

Because I cared too much.

And because I have finally learned that not every public fire requires my private nervous system to be thrown directly into it.

But last night I sat down and thought about it properly.

And I think I am duty bound to speak.

Not because I want to join the screaming. Not because I want to perform outrage for a side. Not because I think every trans woman must become a full-time political combatant.

But because I think I have something useful to add here.

And yes, I am angry.

The Supreme Court ruling itself was actually narrower and more legally coherent than many people on either side pretend. The court essentially decided that for the Equality Act to function consistently, the definitions of “sex”, “man” and “woman” had to refer to biological sex. The government and EHRC guidance now flowing from that position claims to be doing two things simultaneously:

Protect trans people from discrimination.

And exclude trans women from female legal classification in certain contexts.

That is the actual terrain now, whether people like it or not.

And the thing that interests me is not the slogan war that immediately follows all of this.

Not “trans women are literally women.”

Not “common sense has prevailed.”

Not “this is genocide.”

Not “this is just biology.”

Honestly, most of the discourse surrounding this subject now resembles two cults screaming through a hedge at one another while normal people quietly back away carrying Tesco bags.

What interests me is something else entirely.

Trust.

Because society fundamentally runs on trust.

I walk into a supermarket and it would not exactly require Ocean’s Eleven levels of criminal genius for me to pick up a Mars bar and walk out with it. Society functions because almost everyone decides not to.

We stand in queues trusting they will not turn into riots.

We walk down streets trusting strangers will not attack us.

We drive at high speed towards one another separated by painted lines and mutual social agreement.

Civilisation is essentially an enormous distributed trust network.

And there are exceptions to this.

Airports do not run on trust. Anti-money laundering systems do not run on trust. Child safeguarding does not run entirely on trust. Certain edge cases carry such catastrophic downside risk that suspicion becomes systematised.

Fair enough.

But trans women were not historically treated as a catastrophic risk category.

For decades, most trans women simply existed quietly inside society’s ordinary trust model.

Then suddenly we were moved outside it.

And I think it is worth asking why.

Because I do not believe the answer is aggregate evidence.

I do not believe British society woke up one morning drowning in statistically overwhelming evidence that trans women as a population had violated the social contract to such an extent that we uniquely required permanent suspicion.

I think something else happened.

Firstly, the internet happened.

Or more specifically, algorithms happened.

The public did not meet ordinary trans women quietly trying to get on with their lives. They met the loudest, strangest, most performative, most narcissistic, most inflammatory examples imaginable because those were the examples the algorithm selected for maximum emotional engagement.

The internet rewarded outrage, spectacle and category confusion.

And some of the people elevated by that machine were, frankly, ridiculous.

Not representative.

Not typical.

Not even particularly sane in some cases.

But human beings are pattern-matching creatures. If you show people the same extreme examples repeatedly enough, eventually they start believing the edge case is the category itself.

And then, if I am being honest, activists made this worse.

There was a version of this conversation the public was broadly willing to have.

“Please treat trans people kindly.”

Most people could handle that.

“Please allow people dignity.”

Most people could handle that too.

But somewhere along the line, parts of trans activism stopped asking for social tolerance and started demanding epistemological surrender.

People were suddenly expected to affirm things that many ordinary people simply experienced as obviously untrue.

That trans women are literally biologically female.

That sex itself is essentially meaningless.

That there are no meaningful physical distinctions whatsoever.

That anyone questioning any aspect of this framework was motivated entirely by hatred.

And this was catastrophic politics.

Because moderate people who might otherwise have extended ordinary social trust and compassion suddenly felt they were being asked to deny observable reality itself.

Once that happened, the entire debate became poisoned.

And then came what I privately think of as the Holy Trinity.

Women’s spaces.

Sport.

Children.

Every conversation eventually returned to one of these three things.

Now, on sport, if I am honest, I think some activists massively overplayed their hand. Human beings understand physical asymmetry intuitively. Pretending otherwise was never going to survive contact with reality.

But even here, I do not think these issues entirely explain what happened.

I think underneath all of this lies something older, more primitive and much less flattering.

Revulsion.

Or perhaps discomfort is the kinder word.

The discomfort people experience when confronted with category ambiguity.

A trans woman interrupts a deeply embedded social heuristic. Human beings are constantly sorting one another into categories unconsciously and at speed. Male. Female. Familiar. Safe. Threatening. Normal. Unusual.

And when those heuristics become unstable, some people experience genuine psychological discomfort.

I honestly think this resembles, in some ways, the reaction visibly camp gay men once triggered in previous generations.

Not because they were dangerous.

Because they disrupted expected social patterns.

And I think a huge amount of modern “risk language” surrounding trans people is, at least partially, a socially respectable wrapper placed around that discomfort.

Because here is the thing that keeps bothering me.

Liberal societies are supposed to individualise guilt.

We are not supposed to generalise entire populations based upon symbolic edge cases amplified through media systems.

At least, not if we wish to remain liberal.

And yet trans women increasingly became a category for whom ordinary civic trust was suspended.

Not because most people had personally encountered dangerous trans women.

Not because statistical reality dramatically shifted.

But because visibility shifted.

Algorithms shifted.

Activism shifted.

Institutional rhetoric shifted.

And the entire emotional equilibrium around the issue collapsed.

No population is risk-free.

No human category is entirely harmless.

There are manipulative trans people. Violent trans people. Predatory trans people.

There are also manipulative accountants, violent yoga instructors and predatory men called Keith who own jet skis.

That is not the point.

The point is proportionality.

The point is whether trans women, as a class, genuinely forfeited the ordinary trust upon which civil society normally operates.

And I do not believe we did.

The tragedy of this entire debate is that most trans women did not set out to become symbols in a civilisation-scale argument about sex, language and metaphysics.

Most of us just wanted to disappear quietly into ordinary life.

This morning, my Chihuahua puppy, Colonel Chesterton, was standing proudly on top of a stuffed sheep chewing a bone like a tiny Victorian landlord defending inherited territory from peasant revolt.

And I looked at him and burst out laughing.

Because while the internet increasingly demands that every trans person become a full-time combatant in an endless symbolic war, my actual life is here.

It a dog.

Coffee.

Music.

Hair appointments.

Ordinary mornings.

And perhaps that is the thing trans people must remember most carefully now.

Our inner lives matter more than the argument.

Because if we surrender those completely to politics, then the culture war has already taken everything worth protecting.