An Auckland Mob Shut Down a Women’s Rights Activist—And Proved Her Point

The campaign to protect the recognition of biological sex differences, like many political movements, breaks down between—let us call them—polite and impolite factions. Members of the polite group, well-represented by the “gender-critical” professors and established journalists who’ve written on this subject for Quillette, tend to advance their cause in the form of lengthy essays, avoid the rhetoric associated with angry street protests, and defer to the preferred pronouns of self-described trans women who demand access to protected female spaces. Members of the impolite faction, on the other hand, have no time for (as they see it) ivory-tower tracts and hypocritical social courtesies, and so proceed straight to blunt slogans that pay little heed to the feelings of trans women.