This week, progressive British activist Jo Maugham warned his 300,000-plus Twitter followers of “yet another vast, and vastly expensive, piece of anti-trans infrastructure” that had been erected “virtually overnight, with zero transparency.” The tweet went viral, even though, as many commenters noted, it was unclear what supposed anti-trans leviathan Maugham was describing. A day later, the otherwise prolix Maugham still wouldn’t provide that information, but instead directed followers to (unspecified) “UN and EU reports” that supposedly detail “billions being channeled [to anti-trans activists], often from the U.S. Christian right.”

One reason why it’s difficult to decode this kind of conspiracism is that terms such as “anti-trans” have effectively become meaningless. You can now be accused of transphobia, for instance, if you decline to date a trans person whose biology doesn’t match your sexual orientation, if you object to your child being exposed to a naked adult male (including a sex offender) in a spa, or if you complain publicly about an alleged rape perpetrated in a school bathroom by someone who self-describes as “gender-fluid.”

Even mainstream feminism is apparently now transphobic: As it turns out, the likely subject of the tweet that Maugham put out on October 16th was a conference being run that same day by FiLiA, a grassroots feminist organization which supports the right of women to maintain safe, sex-segregated spaces. While these women met in Portsmouth, protestors demanding “trans inclusivity” held up signs with slogans such as “Suck My Dick, You Transphobic Cunts.” And as Julie Bindel reports, it is these misogynists—not the female campaigners at FiLiA who have spent their careers protecting women from rape, domestic assault, and female genital mutilation—who have the ear of progressive politicians and activists such as Maugham. One Portsmouth-area MP, Bindel notes, has shunned representatives of FiLiA, even while meeting with a local artist who seems to believe that ideologically non-compliant “TERFs” (a slur indicating “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists”) should be threatened with baseball bats. Given how difficult it is to justify the full-on misogynistic hate that now animates the extreme fringes of the trans-rights movement, it’s easy to see why Maugham would prefer to distract critics with the fiction that FiLiA’s gender-critical feminism is just a smokescreen for a sinister Christian conspiracy hatched overseas.