It transpired that the former Breitbart News journalist, 41, had missed an immigration appointment in July; according to a rather gloating tweet by the Department of Homeland Security, he had entered the US legally in 2019 but had outstayed the terms of his visa. A disheveled-looking Yiannopoulos, to whom time has perhaps not been kind, mean-mugged the camera in an accompanying photograph. With barely disguised smugness, the department wrote: “We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] Home App.” Yiannopoulos may have seen himself as above the category of illegal immigrants he’d spent his career despising; in the end, he was treated just as indecorously as the rest of them. To pour further salt in the wound, the post encouraged other would-be immigrants to seek “the right legal way to live the American dream”; for Yiannopoulos, it appeared, that dream was very much over.

How had this happened? The British agitator’s rise and fall from 2014 was the life-cycle of the alt-Right distilled in one man: he went from shouty grub to poisonous rockstar to a husk tangled in the web of the movement which by now had become the establishment. He had made many enemies on his rise from Telegraph journalist to alt-Right superstar, racking up public feuds with, among many, Ben Shapiro (a “less professionally successful version of me”), the comedian Leslie Jones (he called her “spectacularly unappealing” in a rant that saw him booted off Twitter in 2016), and fellow internet outlaw Azealia Banks, who he had once represented at his refuge-of-the-cancelled talent agency Tarantula Management before a spectacular spat which culminated in Banks presciently threatening: “LMAO now shut up before i call ICE on you and get you deported you filthy migrant”. Yet none of these former sparring partners ultimately did him in. No, the final clobber was delivered by Yiannopoulos’s fellow conservative media darling and former pal Laura Loomer, who claimed his scalp by telling X that she’d snitched about his immigration status to the authorities. 

The pair fell out when Yiannopoulos accused her of having sexually harassed a young male aide during her congressional campaign in 2020 (which Loomer denies). Baby Jane-worthy barbs culminated in Loomer claiming he “was a demonic force” who had called for her assassination and threatened to “throw my bulldog off the balcony”. Now that pooch can sleep soundly in the knowledge that its loving pawrent, whom Yiannopoulos also smeared as Trump’s alleged mistress, shopped this very naughty boy to “Daddy” (as Yiannopoulos called the President). In a final blow that was not a grain of pettiness short of a nanny-nanny-boo-boo, Loomer wrote of the increasingly anti-Israel Yiannopoulos: “Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace.” Revenge, served ICE-cold.

The problem with being the Mean Girl of social media — Yiannopoulos has spent years shooting poison darts from the perch of his feared and revered @nero X account — is that the ancient texts have a habit of coming back to haunt you. On Friday the poster AG Hamilton unearthed a gem from the archives: a tweet from last year in which Yiannopoulos joked about the “etiquette” of masturbating at the sight of an ICE raid. It was one of the many approving things he’d said about the agency since it began its crackdown at the start of Trump’s second term; in the end, he looked a wanker indeed. 

It’s tempting to see the saga of Yiannopoulos as that of a juggernaut who ran out of road, an open-and-shut case of poetic justice meted against a hateful gobshite. But in truth his rise and fall is more interesting than that: his flamboyant career ultimately indicates the broader health of the alt-Right. In 2016 Breitbart’s star writer, bylined only as “Milo”, embarked on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour of US college campuses — the ragebaiting debate format which would later be imitated by the Turning Point speaker Charlie Kirk. His boss Steve Bannon had just defected to run the Trump campaign; the tour was a victory lap for the mainstreaming of ironic hard-Right populism, whose many viral moments thrilled crowds like Nero’s Roman candles.

At Rutgers University in New Jersey, student libs smeared fake blood on their faces and chanted “Black lives matter!”; right on cue, the Milo fans responded: “Trump, Trump, Trump!” At DePaul in Chicago, no-platformers stormed the stage and grabbed the mic; hundreds of supporters then marched on the university president’s office. This gave him plenty of set-ups for stylish jabs — when one black student said she’d been “silenced for 200 years”, he quipped that she looked remarkably young. At UC Irvine in California, he arrived on stage in a “stunning burqa thot outfit”; protesters were handed dummies. The Breitbart write-up included a “get the look” postscript: “Combat boots by Diesel, $175. Sunglasses by Gucci, $225. Fishnet stockings: model’s own.”

These stunts were bellwethers for the pyrrhic culture wars of Woke 1, in which expressing heterodox opinions bore the same moral penalty as mass murder. Punchlines could be seeded by simply being outrageous enough. You could set your watch to audiences’ objections — the mantras they’d repeat, the pompous debate-society tactics they’d employ. This was something Kirk would come to leverage in his own campus debates, with liberal opponents never seeming to grasp that by engaging with him at all (or trying to no-platform him) they’d already stepped on the booby-trap. This is also the “gotcha” choreography of today’s X, where the nastiest comeback wins; for all this week’s sniping from poasters delighted at Yiannopoulos’s downfall, it bears remembering that this was a format which he created. In many ways his enemies on the Left and Right were doomed to speak in his language. 

But the Regina George of the alt-Right was always going to be burned in the end. The heyday of the Dangerous Faggot tour — in many ways Yiannopoulos’s apogee — was followed only a year later by those pedophilia comments which would see him booted from the line-up at CPAC and dropped from his $250,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster. He also resigned from Breitbart. His career since 2017 has been a shadow of its former glory, as Trumpism’s one-time favorite court jester settled into life as a fringe internet figure, converted to Catholicism, renounced his homosexuality and worked on Kanye West’s turkey of a presidential campaign (it has been suggested that Yiannopoulos was en route to Ye’s New Orleans concert when he was arrested). Being in the wilderness was rough; in 2019 he complained that “microscopic [Telegram] followings like 20k are not going to sustain people like me” and that “I can’t put food on the table”, describing himself as a “social media refugee”. 

Having toured the country as a “faggot”, his new life as a “100% sodomy-free… ex-gay” was a particularly inglorious chapter. He reported that he had come to regret “mainstreaming homosexuality in the Republican Party”, and was seemingly doing penance by hawking statues of the Virgin Mary on a Christian teleshopping channel — and by announcing plans to open a conversion-therapy clinic in Florida. Yet he has never quite managed to convince in his new ultra-trad packaging. In a manner which must infuriate him, his arrest was digested by X as a scrumptious chapter in a classically gay internet saga, with snark from George Santos (“I’m the new Alfa [sic] Gay conservative in town”) and others (“Grindr profile vs IRL” read one caption comparing images of Yiannopoulos in his bleach-blond prime and in last week’s dour mugshot). 

As things stand he’s back in Britain and back on X — and being relatively good-humored about his deportation. But his reputation as a rebellious princeling will be difficult to salvage now that he has, in the words of Musk, “become meme” by being hoisted by his own pro-ICE petard. It seems unlikely that he will fade away entirely. X is behaving like a classroom of children whose naughtiest constituent has been sent outside: they simply cannot wait to see what happens when he comes back. And with Reform and Restore looking to sweep the next election, now is perhaps a favorable time for the prodigal son to return. Yiannopoulos has carved out a distinctly Yank brand — noisy rabble-rousing may prove terribly impolite in the stuffy halls of Westminster — but this may help him at a time when British politics seems to be mutating into something more brash and populist. What happens in America has ripples in Britain, and Tommy Robinson’s recent ascent — the far-Right activist has spoken at the Oxford Union and gained elite international backing from figures including Elon Musk — suggests greater appetite than ever for the previously unsavory fringe. 

What is certain is that this embarrassing chapter will not convince Yiannopoulos himself of his own inadequacy. It is said that when Nero hesitated to knife himself to death, he cried: “What an artist dies in me!”, so convinced was he still of his extraordinary talent. Two millennia later, his X namesake and comparable braggart is surviving the latest of several political suicides, brought low by a system for which he was the greatest cheerleader. Any other flower would wilt in the heat of such crushing irony; this weed looks sure to find a way.

To get a sense for this, consider the fates of Taylor Lorenz, Boots Riley, and Zohran Mamdani: three figures with large footprints on the Left who’ve recently come to realize that hell is other Leftists, to adapt the famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit.

Lorenz, a journalist-influencer hybrid — a kind of reverse Joe Rogan for people who never took their masks off — championed extreme Covid lockdowns; fangirled after Luigi Mangione, the alleged insurance-boss assassin; and left The Washington Post after the paper investigated her for sharing an Instagram post calling then-President Joe Biden a war criminal. Filmmaker and musician Riley’s latest movie, I Love Boosters, is such a work of agitprop that even an outlet called Communist Revolution described as “communist propaganda” — and “weak sauce” at that. Mamdani, of course, is the self-avowed democratic socialist governing America’s largest city. None of the three, in short, could plausibly be mistaken for a centrist.

Yet all three have been hauled before the People’s Court of Posting: a stateless, leaderless online tribunal whose function is to prosecute everyone — no matter how radical — for insufficient radicalism, invariably ruling that lo, the accused comes up short. It’s more proof that whatever Stephen Miller is currently cooking up to do to “radical-Left terrorism” from inside the Trump administration, it isn’t, right now, the most effective force degrading the American Left. The Left is doing that to itself.

In July, Lorenz claimed that “33,000 people are canceling me” after she criticized Minnesota’s AI nudification law, which prohibits the use of technology for faking sexual images of people. This week, she drew more backlash after discussing how she uses generative AI to work more productively. Reasonable people can debate whether journalists should use such tools, but posters in a Left-leaning subreddit called her “deeply unwell mentally” or claimed, “either she’s in a psychosis, or she’s been bought.” Lorenz then complained that the online Left spends its time “dog-piling everyone who doesn’t comport with their extremely narrow social media-driven worldview,” calling the culture “absolutely deranged” and its practitioners guilty of “no moral consistency on any level” and a willingness to “lie all day about anyone they don’t like.”

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Her realization has impeccable comic timing. It was only last year, when Mamdani rode the subway without a mask during his mayoral campaign, that she accused “a lot of DSA leftists” of hating disabled people, women and LGBTQ people — an extraordinary moral indictment to build out of one politician’s naked face, especially years after universal masking had ceased to be a remotely plausible public policy. Now she has discovered the downside of ruthless purity testing: administer it often enough and, eventually, somebody administers it to you.

Just ask Boots Riley, who has been an outspoken communist since before many of his ultra-Left online trolls were born. He fronted the radical hip-hop group The Coup through the Clinton years and spent a memorable evening on Politically Incorrect a quarter-century ago patiently explaining Marxism to a smirking Bill Maher. When a clip of that appearance resurfaced this week, Riley observed that the old Right-wing gotcha — if you make money under capitalism while opposing capitalism, you are a hypocrite — was now being repeated by “supposed Left online people.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. In one discussion of Riley’s films, a critic argued that he “does not have to make a movie that costs 20 million dollars” — a reference to I Love Boosters — if he really opposes capitalism, dismissed his work as a “million-dollar vanity project funded by the billionaires [Riley] claim[s] to hate,” and concluded that anyone who repeatedly makes choices that perpetuate capitalism is, whatever he calls himself, a capitalist.

This is a wonderfully efficient definition of capitalism, because it makes every person currently alive guilty of it. If Riley proves that longevity confers no immunity from such intramural attacks, Mamdani demonstrates that neither does victory. Conservatives regularly roast the New York City mayor, but some of the heaviest fire still comes from socialists for whom gaining power represents less a triumph than a dangerous ideological compromise.

A recent feature essay in The Drift on New York’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is a nuanced account of a socialist organization’s growing pains in power. But it also doubles as a field guide to how the ultra-Left cannibalizes its own successes.

NYC-DSA boasts 15,000 members and genuine victories: a Big Apple mayor elected from among their own ranks, a rent freeze instituted, and a near-sweep by DSA candidates in the June Democratic primaries. Even so, as French documents, much of the chapter’s energy still gets consumed by warfare waged “in Signal chats, in polemics posted on niche websites, and, inevitably, on X.”

A leadership reshuffle got branded, seriously, a “coup.” A dispute over home-health policy occasioned comparisons to slavery. A national leader of the dominant Groundwork caucus dismissed his internal critics with a line that deserves to be engraved somewhere, describing “an antagonism that attracts the cynical, the burnt-out, the oppositionally defiant, and the unsatisfiable” — arguably the most accurate description of Left Twitter ever.

DSA’s own Liberation Caucus, a — sigh — Marxist-Leninist-Maoist faction operating inside the very organization that helped elect him, published one member’s description of Mamdani as “ZIOhran”; another called him “a traitor and an opportunist” over his perceived moderation on policing and Israel. The Trotskyist paper Workers Vanguard ran a piece headlined, with admirable bluntness, “Want Socialism? Fight Mamdani!,” accusing the mayor of backing “scabherder” Gov. Kathy Hochul during a recent nurses’ strike, and closing with: “Expel Mamdani! Socialists stand with the workers and oppressed, not scabherders and pigs!”

This isn’t an argument against criticizing politicians, artists, or journalists merely because they belong to the same broad political family. A movement that can’t criticize its leaders soon becomes a fan club. The problem is what happens when every honest disagreement over tactics, language, art, or policy becomes a referendum on personal character. The defendant is never merely mistaken but corrupt; never simply compromised but bought; never insufficiently radical but secretly reactionary. The overriding impulse is the avoidance of contamination.

I have experienced the smaller, less glamorous version of this as someone who writes occasionally for Jacobin, a premier Left outlet. Of course, no journalist is above criticism, but nothing matches the venom my own occasional writing generates from my fellow progressives. I’ve been called fascist, racist, Zionist, reactionary, and, most damningly of all in certain corners of the internet, a Jacobin writer. The abuse rarely engages with anything I have actually written, and it rarely tries to persuade anyone; it’s ambient, repetitive and exhausting. It’s a kind of ideological carbon monoxide that doesn’t kill anyone but saps and smothers energy and genuine critical thought.

It’s the kind of noxious atmosphere that helps explain why Bluesky is dying. Conceived as the progressive rescue boat from Elon Musk’s X, it increasingly resembles a lifeboat whose passengers spend their days deciding whom they will cannibalize first. Slate conceded that “the best Bluesky can replicate is a hellish, inescapable, never-ending version of 2016.” By June, the platform’s mobile application commanded 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide, a 27% tumble from its previous year, even as the total number of active participants has withered by over 50% since the high-water mark following the election.

The platform did not invent the Left’s appetite for schism, but it has distilled it into something close to its purest form: a politics conducted almost entirely through denunciation, in which the easiest way to demonstrate your virtue is to expose someone else’s insufficient supply. That may provide a brief dopamine hit, but it cannot build a durable coalition. Any movement large enough to matter will necessarily contain hypocrites, eccentrics, sell-outs, moderates and people who sometimes say stupid things online. It will also contain people who disagree.

Nor is this an exclusively American disease. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana launched Your Party last year amid hundreds of thousands of expressions of interest from voters desperate for an alternative to Labour. A year later, thanks to vicious infighting, Your Party became No One’s Party. The Greens initially appeared to be the beneficiaries, but they, too, have already demonstrated the Left’s remarkable capacity to turn political momentum into an internal disciplinary hearing.

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To be fair, the far Right suffers from a nearly identical affliction. MAGA’s online fringe hunts RINOs (“Republicans in Name Only”), fantasizes about Maoist-style purges of liberal institutions, and insists that Nazi jokes remain jokes even as the jokers enter Republican politics and win jobs in the administration. Extremely online politics, Left and Right alike, increasingly resembles two rival cults, each certain the other represents the real existential threat, while both spend the overwhelming majority of their energy excommunicating their own. The American far-Right influencer Laura Loomer is now claiming credit for Friday’s ICE deportation of the British far-Right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos — which is taking intra-party cancel culture to a wild new level.

None of which means Stephen Miller’s threats to progressives are empty theater. The White House consigliere really did vow, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” a “vast domestic terror movement.” It is worth remembering, too, as that grim anniversary approaches, that eight Prairieland defendants were sentenced to a combined 450 years in federal prison after an anti-ICE protest turned violent. An actual crackdown is afoot, and it deserves to be taken seriously by anyone who cherishes civil liberties.

But if the Trumpians were smart, they would turn their detention centers into a convention of likeminded radicals with free Wi-Fi. What would ensue would be not unlike Sartre in No Exit, in which three sinners are put in a locked room waiting for the instruments of torture, only to realize none was coming; they themselves were each other’s affliction. So it goes for the likes of Lorenz, Riley, and Mamdani.

Given the politics and personalities involved, it’s tempting to accuse both men of being as deliberately offensive as possible — even to Roman Catholics, who won’t love the performative and irreligious tone of their materials. And as one straight man I know said, Yiannopoulos’s and Yardley’s new trad-bromance “looks pretty gay”. Yet Yardley seems to represent an incipient trend. He is one of a handful of detransitioners I personally know of who have turned toward Catholicism’s restrictive sexual dogmas (still no blowjobs, folks) and teachings on biological sex in order to change their lives.

While not all insights gained from the experience of being trans and back again are reliable — especially when staged for an online public — their voices are worth hearing for what they reveal about the so-called vibe shift, a younger generation’s turn away from sexual-liberationist paradigms, and the role of Christianity in it. This, even as the attention-seeking quality of their discourse recalls nothing so much as the gender trend just a few years ago — only now in the opposite direction.

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Yardley is of the first generation of young people to launch their medical transition during puberty as part of the Tumblr-fueled gender revolution, and believes he will face permanent fertility consequences as a result. He says that he was a feminine-looking boy, who liked female things and had mostly female friends, and who was often misgendered. He didn’t know why he was different, but “other people informed me of it”. Around the time Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” came out, in 2011, he wondered if being transgender might be the answer. He went to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and says he was goaded into transgender care. The therapist recommended by the clinic “immediately bought into it that I was really a girl”.

Today, he is graceful, tall, and girlish in photos, and easily passes as a biological woman. But he has grown to regret his transition for a host of what are becoming the usual reasons: concerns about how cross-sex hormones were affecting his health; physical pain; fatigue with what other detransitioners have called “trans OCD”, an obsessional focus on one’s body; and a dawning realization that the desire for transgenderism spawned from an original mental-health issue that being transgender wasn’t fixing. “I was never comfortable with it,” Yardley tells me.

Like some male-to-female transitioners, he says that at least part of his attempt to become a woman was in order to cope with same-sex feelings of attraction without having to declare himself as gay. He now objects to the characterization of sexual orientation as a fixed and immutable identity. He also rejects the idea that being a feminine boy meant he was actually a girl. “Gay and trans are the same thing”, he tells me. “Both result from an original trauma to your gender that can be healed”.

It’s fairly easy to diagnose a swing from one utopian extreme to another, which comments like that exemplify. But it’s less easy to dismiss the critique of categories of sexual identity and sexual orientation, acknowledged by scholars on both the Left and the Right to be a fairly recent invention. For most of human history, as Michel Foucault pointed out, heterosexuality or homosexuality did not exist as identities; both were invented in the late 19th century as a means of normalizing heterosexual behavior, while treating same-sex-attracted people as “abnormal”. That the invention turned on its makers and ended up providing the grounds for gay liberation is one of history’s delicious ironies. Today’s proliferation of increasingly niche identities and orientations, and the practice of changing them as a person evolves, supports the argument that these identities aren’t as hard-and-fast as they appear.

Some of the excesses of Yardley’s and Yiannopoulos’s publicly performed hard-Right Catholicism seem like they could be trolling. But Yardley’s explanation over the telephone sounds heartfelt. He was raised nominally Catholic, he says, and as early as 2020, when it became clear to him that being trans wasn’t making him happier or more socially comfortable, he began to research dissenting opinions. A Catholic priest was the first person ever, he says, to tell him something most human beings have believed throughout history — “No, you’re a man, and you can’t get out of it.”

Another outspoken detransitioner, Ray Alex Williams, has run a YouTube channel on the subject since 2023, and published an essay on Substack on 24 February headlined, “How Catholicism Solved My Autogynephilia Problem.” Williams’s essay begins with the acknowledgement that people will think he has “gone off the deep end” and has gone “from one extreme cult to another”. During a follow-up phone conversation, he reveals that he isn’t officially Catholic yet; his religious-conversion experience is fewer than two weeks old; and his girlfriend broke up with him over it. The headline, in this case, seems like a deliberate distortion in a bid for clicks. However, as he tells it, his “desperate search for moral clarity” has been years in the making, and he believes he needs such clarity to help him combat the destructive role his sexual desires have played in his life.

Autogynephilia, or AGP, is contested cultural territory. Defined by the eminent Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard as “a man’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman”, it generally involves not just the erotic desire to be a woman, but accompanying fantasies of being used and abused for being female, often these days following the tropes of the “sissy” subgenre of pornography.

When they don’t deny autogynephilia altogether, transgender activists object to the term because it pathologizes the set of sexual desires it describes, and opens the door to the claim that trans people with these desires are not women, but just men with an obsessive paraphilia. (Yardley explicitly disavows AGP as having had any role in his experience.) One thing is certain, though: the set of desires itself is fairly common.

New York magazine books critic Andrea Long Chu has been open that such impulses fueled her transition, and discussed how sissy porn shaped her identity in remarks at the New York Public Library in 2018. Chu said that she started watching “a lot” of pornography as a middle-school boy, and described a progression in her tastes from “run-of-the-mill, mainstream pornography” to “JOI” (jerk-off instruction) videos, in which a female performer demeans the male viewer. From there, Chu “went down a humiliation track … until I hit sissy porn…. My porn addiction had all along been waiting for something like sissy porn … because now if I’m reading in retrospect, the whole thing was about trying to access a kind of sexuality that wasn’t about being a man”. Trans actress and Euphoria star Hunter Schaefer wrote along similar lines in a now-deleted Instagram post the same year: “My sexual orientation was not gay. It was not straight. Nor pan. It was an attraction, is an attraction, always, to misogyny. My gender was SO influenced by a need to be used by men.”

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Detransitioner Williams chronicles a lifelong struggle with a similar set of feelings and desires, which led him to transition to female in 2015, at the age of 28. He says he didn’t have “an underlying predisposition to hate my male body”, though that started after he became trans. Williams lived as a woman for eight years, which he says decreased the sexually fetishistic aspects of his behavior (and his libido), but had other negative consequences, such as extreme social anxiety. He also, in 2020, developed a pulmonary embolism and almost died, he says, which he attributes to taking cross-sex hormones. Attempts to detransition and manage his resurgent AGP in a healthy way, along lines suggested by Phil Illy’s book Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, were a failure, despite finding a bisexual, kink-positive partner who accepted his sexuality.

The activist stance on these desires is that they are neutral in themselves and can be considered a sexual orientation, and that any negative consequences come from social stigmatization. Williams’s experience could bear that out. Despite finding willing partners and accepting circles, he continued to feel shame, confusion, and social discomfort from his gender urges and sexual practices. However, he also found that indulging his desires oriented him towards masturbation and away from his partner, and that his desires followed patterns of other addictions in his life, requiring ever-greater stimulus for diminishing rewards, and ultimately bringing unhappiness instead of pleasure.

One day, high on cannabis — another persistent addiction struggle, he writes — and ready to engage in his fetish, Williams had the revelation that both his marijuana smoking and his sexual behavior were self-destructive and pathological in the same way, and had to stop. “Immediately”, he writes, he had the desire to get back into religion, which he had experimented with before on his detransition journey, but this time, he was drawn to Catholicism, specifically for its intensity of pageantry and ritual and its strict sexual doctrine. He understands that his new convictions might seem suspect or “mentally unstable”, he says, but he now believes that the inner voice of shame and disgust that he hasn’t been able to silence has a transcendental cause, and is distinguishing a fundamental right from wrong.

Not all of the new detransitioners are drawn by Christianity’s oldest branch. Sierra Weir, 37, who goes by the name Exulansic on X and Substack, has since 2021 devoted herself since to exposing the ugly side of the gender trend, for simpler but similar reasons of mental and physical health. Weir did a double-major in gender studies and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and says she was once “really into” transgenderism. She transitioned medically to male when she was 23 but began to have ideological disagreements with the trans orthodoxies and experienced harmful and dangerous health outcomes from hormone therapy. She says she now has osteopenia (low bone density, a precursor to osteoporosis) which is a known risk factor with Depo Provera, which she took to suppress menstruation, and she has been recently diagnosed with lumbar degeneration, which she believes is related. She is vituperative against her former doctors, whom she believes misdiagnosed her and exacerbated her problems. “It just ruined my life”, she says.

Weir’s social media channels circulate lurid news items about crimes by transgender women, and frequently discuss suicides by distressed transgender people all genders and ages — material that can legitimately be read as stigmatizing for transgender people seeking public acceptance. She also writes and films disturbing stories on mostly biological female victims of terrible mental and physical health outcomes and botched surgeries. However, she says, “I’m not against individual people who are trans, and I have a great deal of compassion and empathy. I’m speaking out because I don’t want harm to come to them.” (She may or may not now be on the right side of history, but once again, it’s the scare tactics of the original trans movement: if we don’t all believe this right now, people will die.)

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In addition to believing that hormones and surgeries are physically risky and damaging in ways people aren’t told about, she believes that cross-sex hormones can cloud a person’s thinking — making them more likely to opt for risky procedures — and exacerbate previous mental health issues. “The hormones were affecting my ability to think and my ability to remember”, she says. Having detransitioned, she feels like “I don’t have brain fog anymore.” She believes that people suffering from gender dysphoria from any of these conditions “deserve to have optimal health and to understand their predicament”, and that medical providers are “abdicating that responsibility.”

Prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, Weir was “being banned from all platforms of note”, she says. Now she’s free to critique the movement she was once a part of, and with the same zeal. Yardley, for his part, attributes the wave of detransitioners not to the vibe shift or a trend, but merely to the passage of time. It’s been several years since the transgender tipping point, he says, and people have “passed that first sense of euphoria that people get from accomplishing any goal” and begun to have doubts. “So many people are detransitioning because so many people transitioned”, he says. That conclusion, as least, sounds reasonable, and like something we should be open to learning from.

But let’s hope the pendulum doesn’t merely swing from one brand of too-certain conviction to another. The Roman church, in addition to its prohibition of most sexual acts, asks adherents to cultivate lives of silence, contemplation, and prayer. Those who have embraced the Church as a refuge from online ideologies might want to take up these practices — instead of plunging head-long into the next performative mania.

Historically, feminists have done best within the Labour movement. The Equal Pay Act occurred in the 1970s when trades unions were strong. And it was a Labour government that passed the Abortion Act. But, according to Selina Todd, Professor of Modern History at Oxford and proud socialist: “That isn’t to say the organised Left has given women everything we need and want: women have had to self-organise within the left to win our rights. But feminists and socialists have found important points of shared interest since the 18th century.”

Arguing that this is no time for ‘purity politics’, though, there is an increasing number of women activists who are prepared to hold their noses and join sides with whoever it takes in the fight to defeat the demands of extreme transgender ideologues. Well, I’m sorry — and I’m no fan of self-identification for men who wish to identify as women — but it’s a major own goal to decide to work with people who would deny women their bodily autonomy, who are anti-gay, who consider trans people to be freaks, and who are more likely to show bigotry towards marginalised groups.

While I will happily debate men such as pro-porn campaigner Jerry Barnett and Right wing media troll Milo Yiannopoulos in order to expose and challenge their views, joining forces with groups that are virulently opposed to women’s human rights is another thing altogether.

The trouble is, the Left has let women down. Badly. Look at the attitudes of many Lefty blokes when it comes to prostitution and pornography. As I have previously argued here, such men like to condemn those of us who seek to end the sex trade as ‘whorephobic’. And are encouraging young women to believe that porn can be liberating, and even ‘feminist’. Some even argue that violent and abusive sex is an expression of female rights. When such attitudes become commonplace, it’s hard to achieve our goals as feminists.

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Critics of the Left also like to point to the fact that the Tories elected a female leader back in 1975, while Labour has yet to do so. But here’s the rub: Margaret Thatcher disliked women and was no fan of feminism. With her in charge, the sexism inherent to the Conservative party remained in safe hands. She promoted only one woman to a cabinet position in 11 years. She was a female politician promulgating male politics. That’s hardly equality.

As Andrea Dworkin wrote in Right Wing Women (1983): “The political Right in the United States today makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women’s deepest fears.” This is still true today.

Woman’s Place UK, a British feminist organisation, recognises that women fighting for their rights come from across the political spectrum, but its vision of women’s liberation is rooted in a longstanding left-wing progressive tradition which fights for women’s political, economic and sexual autonomy. “We refuse to be pushed out by sexism on the left,” says its co-founder Kiri Tunks, “or to align ourselves with religious or far-right campaigns seeking to stoke racism and homophobia, or who wish to turn back the clock on issues such as abortion rights.”

But in the US, certain celebrity feminists are openly celebrating having moved to the Right. Arielle Scarcella is a lesbian and YouTube sensation who made a very loud journey towards the Right and declared on Twitter that, “The right builds things. The left tears them down, because they aren’t capable of building things themselves.” Until recently, Memoree Joelle was editor of the online magazine After Ellen, which promises to “provide a fun, feminist perspective on the way lesbian and bisexual women are portrayed in pop culture”. But Joelle, who previously defined as a women’s rights activist, has now come out firmly in favour of Trump.

This is particularly hard to stomach given the way the President inflames and normalises misogyny in all its guises. Yet as we approach the US elections, many so-called feminists are rallying for Trump. Trump’s racist, anti-immigration policies affect the most disenfranchised women, it is a betrayal of every one of these women to support him. Yet some have lent him their support for his disgraceful stance on trans issues alone, despite his administration’s hostility to women’s rights in general.

Further reading

No sex please, we're brutish

By Louise Perry

To be clear, I stand firmly against any form of prejudice and discrimination towards marginalised people, which includes trans people. As a lesbian, I know exactly what that prejudice feels like. But I will always fight against the ‘trans-women are women’ mantra and the demands from some extreme trans-activists that any man can self identify as a woman and invade our hard-won women-only spaces and, as a consequence, erase women’s sex-based rights. Trump’s views are repugnant regarding transgender people because those views are indivisible from how he feels about anyone lesbian, gay or gender nonconforming.

It takes a certain sort of distorted logic for feminists to support him on the trans issue because Trump has no desire to protect women’s sex-based rights — he’s bigoted against all minorities. But there are several such organisations who do.

Hands Across the Aisle Coalition (HATAC), for example, is a collection of US radical feminists and the Christian right. It was set up, “to challenge the notion that gender is the same as sex”. Yet its co-founders are Kaeley Triller Harver, who advocates for the criminalisation of abortion, and Emily Zinos, who campaigns to repeal gay rights. They aren’t everyday conservative women and mothers: they are highly skilled female operatives of the theocratic Right.

The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), meanwhile, is a US radical feminist organisation “dedicated to the total liberation of women and girls”. But it has extensive ties to the religious Right in the states. WoLF filed a joint Amicus brief (legal documents filed in appellate court cases by non-litigants with a strong interest in the subject matter) with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in an attempt to curb trans rights, which would also lead to the dismantling of lesbian and gay anti-discrimination laws. (ADF is largest right-wing evangelical Christian non-profit law firm in the US.)

These organisations are now gaining a purchase on feminist movements in the UK. In 2019, a joint UK/US week of ‘gender critical’ action entitled, Women Stand Up! was organised by women’s rights activists in the UK, and by WoLF and HATAC in the US. It included an event at the Heritage Foundation (HF), an influential public policy research institute that promotes Christian Right policies and is opposed to women’s, lesbian and gay rights. The HF event included feminist speakers from WoLF.

Further reading

Britain is not a transphobic country

By Debbie Hayton

In 2017, HATAC member Meg Kilgannon spoke at the Values Voter Summit (VVS), an annual gathering of the Christian Right which, earlier this year, compared the Black Lives Matter movement to Nazis. Only one US president has ever addressed it: Trump. At the Summit, Kilgannon outlined a strategy in relation to working with feminists that included avoiding religious terminology in favour of science: “If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.” In other words, this strategy would disguise the general attack on the rights of all LGBT people.

Even those women who have been most harmed by transgender ideology are alarmed by this new feminist/right-wing alliance. A number of de-transitioned women published a blog in which the authors appealed to others to reject any offer of support from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) because of its support for gay conversion therapy based on Christian fundamentalism. “We ask you to think critically about this,” they wrote, “and reject any ‘support’ that would allow the ADF to treat our painful histories and financial vulnerability as an opportunity to promote their anti-LGBT and anti-woman agenda.”

The women counter by saying they are not complicit in bolstering regressive values; they are, they say, forming “strategic alliances” in order to prevent legislation or policy to be adopted that could harm women, such as transgender self-identification.

I approached WoLF to ask about their work and was told: “We’ve brought feminist arguments to federal court, for the audience of the people who determine the implementation of our civil rights laws. This is an important venue from which we cannot be de-platformed by vigilante social media mobs, and in which the women we represent have a right to have their views represented.”

I understand only too well the effects of being silenced and de-platformed, but joining forces with those who wish to repeal the majority of women’s hard-won rights is a betrayal of the highest order. That’s why I think these alliances are strategically disastrous. Yes, it is a disgrace that Liberal and Left organisations have failed to support sex-based rights, but I do believe women lose out in the long term if we do not fight from a progressive base.

Beatrix Campbell, left-wing journalist, political activist and author of The Iron Ladies: Why Do Women Vote Tory? (1987), knew that in order to be an effective feminist campaigner it is necessary to have a critique of the wider social structures that sustain male power and women’s oppression or we are vulnerable to “odd alliances”. She tells me, “Issues of sexual oppression can arise in the right or the left, and if you don’t locate your women’s activism then you might find allies that are no friends to women at all and want to use us for their own agenda.”

While feminists may find limited common ground with right-wing groups over single issues, they are likely to have very different ideas about how their shared objectives should be achieved and their ultimate goals will be irreconcilable. “The global Right is not and never has been committed to equality,” says Selina Todd, “let alone liberation.”

I believe feminists must look to the movement’s success in the UK and understand that we can win this battle using strong feminist arguments rooted in experience, struggle and female solidarity. As the African American feminist writer Audrey Lorde said: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”