Margaret Atwood tries to defend 'women' and is pilloried by trans activists

Canada's grand dame of letters, Margaret Atwood, was subjected to a torrent of online sexualized abuse and doxxing of her home address by enraged trans activists after she shared an article written by a biological trans-identifying biological male.

The reason for the reaction was that the article was critical of trans activists, whose criminality and threatening behavior is steadily becoming more visible to bystanders.

Atwood is the author of numerous bestselling, critically-acclaimed novels dealing with the oppression of women, the most well-known being The Handmaid's Tale. Conspicuously, none of the handmaids exploited for their ability to have babies were autogynephilic men.

The author tweeted a CBC News piece by Jessica Triff, which argued that trans activists' "toxic" tactics are counter-productive, and referred to previous accusations of transphobia levied at Atwood when she shared an article entitled "Why can't we say woman anymore?"

In the offending opinion piece, The Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno humorously objected to the erasure of women to appease the autogynephile lobby.

"You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Person with a Vagina."

"Man! I Feel Like a Person who Menstruates"

"Oh, Pretty Person with a Cervix"

"Apologies to Aretha Franklin, Shania Twain and Roy Orbison, but this appears to be where we're heading if language radicals get their way."

Gender ideologues advocated for the pseudoscientific belief that everybody has a "gender identity" by deploying sexist slurs, and threats of violence.

Perhaps piqued by the intensity of the negative responses to raising the question of the erasure of 'woman' from our language—and protesting that DiManno's piece was worth reading because she is "not a TERF"—Atwood returned to the issue a few days later, tweeting Triff's piece.

"Any trans person, like myself, who doesn't agree with this type of activism and doesn't jump to the defamatory labelling of anyone who disagrees as a bigot or TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) is usually called a "bootlicker." That's because, of course, women or feminists who campaign for women's rights are "fascists," from the point of view of these trans activists," Triff wrote.

The author attempted to divert accusations of "transphobia" onto the highest-profile gender atheist, JK Rowling who—notably—also began to voice her reservations about trans activism by sharing an article about the erasure of the word "woman."

The efforts of autogynephiliac men to erase sex from language and law is provoking increasing pushback from women, and they do not like it at all when women hold onto the words we use to describe our kind—woman, mother, she/her—and reject the chilling, dehumanising gender ideologue neologisms such as "uterus-haver," "menstruator" and "gestational carrier."  

Remarkably, Atwood appeared not to have explored the "gender critical" arguments against the gender identity takeover of language and law that result in a woman being labelled a TERF, as articulated in an essay by Rowling, tweeting:

Despite her best efforts to distance herself from so-called TERFs—women who defend their rights, and who can discern what is real and what is fantasy—Atwood now occupies the same cultural space as JK Rowling, who was subject to a cancellation campaign for tweeting about, and publishing an essay on the subject of, the impact of gender identity ideology on women's language and rights.

"All I'm asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse," she wrote.

Her plea fell on deaf ears.

The reason gender ideologues treated Atwood with the same misogynistic contempt as Rowling is that transgender ideology is a totalitarian creed. One cannot question any aspect of this pseudoscientific belief system without being viciously expelled from the cult.

Either you believe that the entire society should reorganise itself around the denial of sex, so as to give autogynephile men everything they fantasize about, or you don't. The moment you take issue with the modus operandi of this extremist movement, you are persona non grata forever more.

Women, such as Maya Forstater, have lost their livelihoods for asking questions about the implications of gender ideology in law & language. They have been advised by police not to go to work at their university, like Kathleen Stock.

Little wonder, then, that members of the same intolerant cult published the home address of a woman in her eighties, with the intention of inciting people to "protest" her free speech.

This writer is not surprised that Atwood's well-meaning but ill-informed attempts to find common ground between trans activists and women's rights campaigners resulted only in the usual abuse by members of the gender creed.

There is no sustainable middle ground between the deranged fantasy of "gender identity" and the material reality of sex. And you don't feed a crocodile cookies in the vain hope that it will eat you last.