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Follow the anti-trans money
When gender critics accuse trans people of trying to drown out their freedom of speech they pitch themselves as an isolate group of righteous crusaders throwing down the gauntlet before the shambling trans Goliath. What they conveniently leave out is the fact that most gender critical activism is part of a right wing conservative ecosystem that is funded by opaque means, platformed in the mainstream media, and has turned a handful of otherwise forgettable people into household names. This in turn has created the gender critical industrial complex whereby gender critics get paid to advance a cause seeking to exclude trans women and any women they deem not women enough. When your job is to shill hate then others are perfectly justified in calling you a hate monger.
Without knowing who funds them or precisely how that money is spent means there is no transparency and no understanding of who is seeking to roll back trans rights. A core tactic right wing funders have used is funnelling their money through charities and other methods to keep their funding discrete, yet when light is shed on these sources it makes for a complex picture that shows how unknown voices are propelled into the spotlight based on their anti-trans bigotry.
The obvious examples are Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce. Both work for Sex Matters, a charity whose funding is undisclosed at this point, and whose…
