When academics and leftists dismiss women’s concerns about their rights as a “moral panic,” they place themselves among the ranks of anti-feminists and the alt-right.
Women’s rights remain under threat and those who claim to be allies — queer activists, the left, and liberals — have attempted to reframe feminist analysis as hate speech.
Feminists and women’s rights campaigners have been painted as hysterical and had their concerns dismissed as some kind of “moral panic” since the first wave. Feminist advocacy against sexual harassment, domestic abuse, rape, pornography, and prostitution have been labelled as “moral panics” in order to write women’s concerns about their own lives and oppression off as emotion-based and irrational, rather than genuine, rational, and worthy of consideration.
When we question men’s right to buy access to the bodies of women and girls we are called “whorephobic,” for example. When we challenge the efforts of trans activists to destroy women’s spaces and to infringe on women’s sex-based rights, we are labelled “transphobic.”
Within only a few years, policies and legislation supporting the notion of “gender identity” have been proposed and adopted throughout Western nations, with little debate or attention to impacts on women. Simultaneously, those who question, challenge, or simply attempt to discuss the idea of transgenderism, the transing of children, the righteousness of trans activism, and gender identity legislation are bullied, no-platformed, smeared, and subjected to threats.
