The (renowned) women behind the reign (and return) of transactivism

Unless influential women stop empowering transactivism, ordinary women can’t stop its tyranny.  

Note: an edited version of this piece appeared in The European Conservative in August 2025.

To gender-critical feminists, the social contagion of transactivism (enforced mainstreaming of trans-ideology) is all down to perverted men and their “misogyny.” Men started it, men must stop it. It’s a (white) male supremacist, men’s rights movement, privileging the reality-show of “gender” over the reality of “sex,” while normalizing paedophilia, porn, prostitution or their variants. Women have nothing to do with it. After all, misogyny is what’s done to — not by — women. 

Rightly, these women denounce transactivism. But framing it as “woman-hating,” disingenuously classes women as nothing but victims, men as the only villains. It lets women off the hook, projects them as helpless, without agency in “a man’s world.” It glosses over women’s complicity in co-shaping this contagion, making it harder to undo or prevent harm to billions of ordinary women who wanted nothing to do with the virtue-signalling of influential women. Without so much as an apology from the latter, it's the former who're paying the price: forfeiting friends, family, jobs, censored or cancelled for being “conservative.” 

Unless ordinary women confront transactivists within their ranks they’ll keep losing ground that celebrated women first ceded. 

Not all transgenders are naughty or nefarious, but many are both. What perverts do in private matters less, but transactivism insists that everyone genuflects to gender ideology. 

Transwomen aren’t women. They’re men, pretending, or pining, to be women. Trouble is, too many prominent people who’ve said or implied the opposite, in practice or policy (if not phrasing) are women, not men. It isn’t just perverted men who shouted down women (and men) protesting trans-tyranny; it’s prominent women too. 

Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Liz Truss, Jacinda Ahern, Nicola Sturgeon, Julia Gillard, Theresa May, Angela Rayner. Of late, nearly every woman given power over millions, weaponized it — against women.

Repeatedly, women ministers, MPs, senators, governors, congresswomen endorsed a culture that sought to redefine who a woman is, erase biological definitions, privilege a nebulous, shapeshifting minuscule minority over an established majority. 

Women celebrities: Ketanji Jackson, Angela Davis, Catherine MacKinnon, Gloria Steinem, Malala Yousuf, Meghan Markle, Emma Watson, Zendaya, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Ariana Grande, Jennifer Lopez, Kylie Minogue and others. 

Michelle Obama inspired unprecedented centring of transactivism, at the expense of women.

Hundreds of thousands of women in women-led organisations, meant to protect women, empowered T-lobbies, undermined women. 

It’s convenient to accuse ACLU  of misogyny because it’s led by a “man.” But aren’t women outnumbering men on ACLU’s leadership enablers? 

The nursing union, representing half a million nurses and midwives, that threw one of their own under the bus for protesting transactivism, is led by women.

Ironically, many women became influential because they’re women; championed by ordinary women, who believed they’d be better protected, only to find their idols protecting men instead. Five of six panellists picking USA Today’s Women of the Year 2022 were women; they still picked a man as one winner: Levine. 

Jennifer Klein’s now defunct Biden-Harris Gender Policy Council ran America’s first National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, drawing on ideas from 30+ federal agencies, 250+ community institutions, and 270+ girls, young women and “gender nonconforming youth leaders.” Did women have nothing to do with Executive Order 13988 around Title IX rules? Women were then nearly a third of the US House of Representatives, a fourth of the Senate and a fourth of Congress. 

Women are 80% of the publishing industry, gatekeeping who gets heard (who doesn’t). No longer in the fringes, they’re over half or close to half of almost every tier of decision-making concerning women. Did perversions become policies by, repeatedly, overruling women? Did entire continents like Europe turn anti-woman without feminine fervour? Until recently over half the EU was trans-indulgent. 

Denying or downplaying the multitudes of mighty women behind transactivism, exacerbates rather than eradicates this contagion. It pretends that transactivism will simply disappear if perverted men stopped being perverted. Women? They needn’t do a thing.

But it’s no longer possible for men, perverted or not, to simply mute women. 

Could it be, instead, that women kept muting themselves?

Sure, a handful of men in the 1960s (sexologists, paedophiles) manipulated the mischief on “gender,” muddying the then clear, binary waters of “sex.” But their mischief didn’t become mainstream until women in the 1990s like Judith Butler centred feminism around gender and sexuality, not sex. But Butler was building on Beauvoir; who as far back as the 1940s, started the mischief with her, “One is not born, but becomes a woman.”

Since then, it is women-led feminism that celebrated, mainstreamed all things LGBTQ, relegating women and womanhood to the periphery. Women-led “gender studies” replaced “women’s studies.” And pronoun tyranny took hold. 

Women celebrities like Germaine Greer and J K Rowling critiquing transactivism are still a pitiful minority. Others like Helen Joyce, while gutsy, aren’t exactly celebrities; they lack the millions of offline followers of a Greer (or the digital heft of a Rowling) and remain stymied by their smaller spheres of influence. Sure, they must continue calling out perverted men. But can they also lambaste (and lobby) celebrity women, smuggling their misogyny to the party, so demented men don't have to try too hard? 

No, reprobate men aren’t, exclusively, to blame for transactivism, it’s bloodied as much with the misogyny of renowned women and their self-loathing of womanhood. 

Donald Trump’s return in 2025 dealt body blows to transactivism. Those who believe it’s in retreat, mean well. They’re also mistaken. 

In spirit, if not yet in letter, T-lobbies are fighting the UK Supreme Court’s restoration of the primacy of “sex” and the Cass Review’s protections for children. They’re retaliating across the UK, France, Austria, Spain, and Europe. 

Britain’s powerful (125,000+ members), University and College Union just showed where its loyalties lie, but its bosses since 2007 have been women; nearly half its trustees are women. 

Worldwide, it’s women who could’ve, should’ve defied transactivism (no matter what a handful of men did). Yet, at every level, it is women who, through their shouts (and silences), enabled T-madness for decades. 

Britain’s largely women-led Ofcom recently echoed T-slogans. 

The U.S. Supreme Court just favoured protecting children from transactivism. Who ruled partly/fully against? Three women on the six-judge bench. 

Women lead the primary school that picked a woman as their role model for, yes, masculinity. 

One sportswoman critiqued transactivism in sports. Who attacked her?  Another sportswoman. In 2021, of 24 U.S. women senators, as many as 17 (71%) voted against protecting sportswomen; only 7 in favour. In 2025, of 26 women, as many as 15 (58%) still voted against; only 8 favoured a ban, 3 abstained. Women-led HRC applauded the vote.

If women have their way, it’s transactivists who’ll make a triumphant return. 

All this doesn’t acquit men, but it does indict women. 

Feminist solidarity with transactivism has to do with women, influential or not, believing that LGBTQ-posturing makes them look better — more open, progressive, at one with conformist media — than traditionalists “stuck in the past.” 

Yes, supposedly conservative parties (remember Theresa May) champion transactivism, to appear less “conservative.” But the idea of a woman, and the privileges and protections that should be afforded her, is more than a European or conservative idea. It’s a bedrock of democracy; without it, any civilization, no matter how “modern,” risks being hollowed out. Unless influential women accept (or are forced to admit) their hand in this hollowing out and change tack, billions of ordinary women will keep being harmed in its wake.

Note: an edited version of this piece appeared in The European Conservative in August 2025.

Rudolph Lambert Fernandez is an independent writer who writes on culture and society.