I hope it's acceptable to say that I know of many
inclusive, cis and trans, radical feminists that have reputations as wonderful people so I think it's important to realise that it isn't the entirety of radical feminism that is a threat to our rights.
With regard to the topic, I expect the vast majority of us are all too familiar with the damage trans-exclusionary feminists have done in the past by creating dehumanising caricatures of trans people or leveraging any social advantages they have to gain support from the patriarchy they claim to loathe.
In the present, I still regard them as a threat, though greatly diminished, because many trans-exclusionary feminists retain advantages that existed in the past. I believe there are quite a few respected academics or journalists that are linked to figures in governments, equality organisations, charities, and left-wing media. Some seem to be part of the type of elite social networks that most trans people are excluded from. Of course, that's largely based on me speculating and probably entirely depends on locale.
For instance, in the UK it seems likely to me that exclusionary thinking from civil servants and politicians greatly impacted the then government doing the absolute minimum deemed necessary by the ECHR when creating the Gender Recognition Act 2004. Similarly, the influence of their thinking seems to have caused the insertion of specific trans exclusion from rape shelters or counselling provision in the Equality Act 2010.
Nonetheless, I think significant progress has been made despite their best attempts to stifle it by aligning their own ideology with mass bigotry. I hope I'm never proven wrong when I say that I think they're losing and will continue to lose.
Ultimately, I think their own dogma dooms them to failure since it attempts to police or eradicate too many groups. Weirdly, it often seems authoritarian in nature to me rather than liberating. They often target trans people, sex workers that don't comply with them, women that aren't political lesbians, femme women, and innumerable other groups that they seemingly see as intellectually inferior to their clarity of vision. When they patronise and alienate so many of their own natural allies as well as their oppressors, I doubt they'll succeed in fighting back against the present political tide any more than social conservatives have succeeded in fighting against the acceptance of sexual diversity in many places.
In my view, their ideas stagnated decades ago and have been mainly on repeat ever since. Their ideology isn't evolving to accommodate changing environment so it's being selected for. They'll repackage ideas, generate facades of reason by citing nonsense theories like ->-bleeped-<- to substantiate their predetermined conclusions, and even make concessions to oh so kindly include True Transsexuals while shifting all their accusations of being deviants, perverts, sex offenders, etc to all other trans people but I don't think they're adapting fast enough to survive as a group. I really truly hope it stays that way.
Personally, my real concern isn't with harm from ardent exclusionary radical feminists but those I characterised
elsewhere as the 'public relations agents' of radical feminism. I fear the power of those in the political class that are skilled enough to knowingly or unknowingly use respectability, appeals to false moderation, appropriation of liberation language, cherry-picking, misrepresentation, false claims of persecution, and innumerable other things to gain sympathy from large groups of people. They're insightful enough to present their case against our rights as being about protection of other oppressed groups and not about attacking oppressed groups. On top of that, they can point at the
real exclusionary feminists to prove they're moderate and reasonable. Hopefully I'm just a wee bit unreasonably fearful in this area!
