Transgender feminist @papierhache reacted to yesterday’s notice exactly as predicted, by claiming victimhood, denouncing me as a bully “with sycophant minions” (that would be you, dear readers), and generally lecturing that I am the pluperfect example of how “people … use social media to orchestrate abusive behavior.”

Remember: @papierhache jumped into my timeline in response to incitement by a troll trying to stir up trouble because I’d used the common slang “shemale” in promoting a post about conflicts between transgender activists and radical lesbian feminists. And after sending me multiple messages condemning me as a terrible hater — because slang is the New Fascism — @papierhache evidently thought she would evade further criticism for her moralistic posturing.

Think again, sweetheart.

Criticism is “abuse,” disagreement is “harassment,” and contradictory facts are “hate” in the Orwellian lexicon of the Left.

Should we ignore these phony victimhood claims or laugh them off as trivial? No, because the Left is attempting to silence their critics by categorizing dissent as hate speech — exactly the point that originally called my attention to this bizarre conflict:

RadFem 2013 was a conference in London, which resulted in a gigantic controversy because radical feminists insisted on excluding the “transgendered” from their female-only event, and one of the featured speakers, Australian lesbian feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys, was about to publish a new book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, that was deeply offensive to the “T” people represented in the LGBT acronym. . . .

At one point in April, the venue tried to cancel the event after discovering that “certain language was used and some statements were made about transgender people that would go against our equalities and diversity policy.”

That was a blue-on-blue conflict between two competing tribes of far-left fringe extremists, but as such it was a classic example of the tactics of thought control the Left finds acceptable. Strange as it is to say, in this example, I agree with the radical feminists. If they wish to restrict their gathering to “cis females” (genetic women), the “trans women” have no right to demand inclusion.

For transgender activists to seek to shut down a radical feminist conference because it violates a “diversity policy” is a profound irony. The Competitive Victimhood Derby, as I have called it, is ultimately a zero-sum game, and you can scarcely blame lesbian feminists for complaining when they find people who were born male trying to co-opt the feminist brand. But this is what transgender feminism is, and one of Kat Hache’s transcomrades has a column at Feministing that includes this:

When I wrote a rebuttal to the flagrant transmisogyny evinced by Julie Burchill in her now-infamous Observer editorial, I was careful to keep the focus on what she said while also ensuring that her fundamental humanity remained in the frame of my criticism. I spared her no critique, but I targeted what was fair game: the written record of her words and ideas, the very things she had submitted to a public forum. To tell her to kill herself or worse, as some did, was unaccountably out of bounds.

“Flagrant transmisogyny”? Julie Burchill? That rang a bell:

Transsexual Bullies Successfully Censor

Feminist Writers Who Criticized Them

Have you forgotten? Suzanne Moore, a columnist for the British New Statesman, complained about beauty standards which present “the ideal body shape” for women as “that of a Brazilian transsexual.” Moore was inundated with criticism, and one of her feminist allies, Julie Burchill, derided Moore’s antagonists as “a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing” and “bed-wetters in bad wigs.”

Strange as it may seem, the feminists were completely routed by the transgender community in that conflict, demonstrating who now possesses the superior claim of victimhood, so that feminists are now riding in the back of their own bus, so to speak.

The transgender activists who silenced their feminist critics — the Guardian actually unpublished one of Burchill’s columns — nevertheless claim they are the ones at risk of being silenced:

I shall continue to write in spite of having been threatened with rape, in spite of having been told that I’m a “shemale feminazi with too much sand in her fake vagina,” in spite of having been called every misogynist, transmisogynist, and transphobic slur in the book many times over, and in spite of having been accused of “man-hating, race-baiting, white-hating,” and the utterly unreal crime of “misandry.” In spite of being called too loud, too shrill, too whiny, too sexist (against men, of course), and “heterophobic.” In spite of being told I should avoid graduate school unless I had a “rich boyfriend.” In spite of all that, I speak.

Katherine Cross, formerly a man, is now a better feminist than you, Julie Burchill, and she expects to be celebrated for her courage. Meanwhile, “bullying the marginalized” . . .

Yes, of course! The courageous Kat Heche, barely 12 hours after taunting me as “emasculated” (!) now decides that her critics are engaged in “textbook psychological projection.”

Oh, what delicious layers and layers of irony . . .

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