When you're on the outside of the fray on gender issues looking in, it's tempting to say: If someone is hounded for her speech, she must have said or done something horrible.

The crime and the punishment must match, working backwards from the severity of the punishment.

For example, if the response to what @jk_rowling said is that intense, she must have said something truly terrible—otherwise, no one would make death threats.

Because that would be insane.

Thus, hugely disproportionate responses ("JK Rowling has blood on her hands") inflate and distort the original offense out of all recognition.

(Never citing her actual 'hateful' remarks helps...)

Then, when people on the outside encounter our actual arguments, it's tempting to think we must be cloaking our hateful beliefs in reasonable speech.

We can't possibly be telling the truth about our own beliefs because what we're saying doesn't merit such a vitriolic reaction.

Trans activists reinforce this by labeling our clear, to-the-point arguments as dogwhistles.

e.g., arguing that rape victims should be able to request a female medical examiner is a "transphobic dogwhistle."

I suspect humans in general have a tendency to overreact, rather than underreact, that's probably hardwired.

Overreact to a potential threat and you'll live to tell the tale (and perhaps feel like a bit of a dupe). Underreact and you might not.

Now we're combining that tendency toward overreaction with a hesitation—hostility, really—to considering the possibility that highly motivated activists may overreact to perceived offenses to push their political agenda and silence legitimate dissent...

Questioning someone's overreaction ("is what she said really that bad? How does it harm you when someone says 'sex matters'?") gets reframed as further victimizing a marginalized person. And nobody wants to do that.

You can hear the response now, right? "Are you saying I'm crazy? That's really stigmatizing! [The wrong kind of] people always do this to people like me, this is why it's so hard for marginalized people to speak out!"

Bottom line: Don't question me. Don't question what I do. Don't question my storyline of what's going on here. You [privileged "cis" person] don't have any grounds to form your own judgment. You can't understand this. You're perpetuating harm, just asking questions.

There's a lot to be written about moral hacking or hijacking here. I think it helps explain why so many people who want to do the right thing end up thrown by disproportionate responses and then manipulated into abandoning their independent judgment as illegitimate and harmful.

A fairly tame example here collected by @Docstockk. If a trans person says something is offensive, it's offensive and should be taken down. No further inquiry necessary.

Worth rehashing some of the other negative feedback loops operating here and working against critics of gender ideology...

Many progressive & mainstream outlets refuse to publish anything critical of gender ideology. Thus, critics of gender ideology must turn to right-leaning outlets (risking guilt by association) or small or niche outlets (unreliable source, whoever heard of this place?) to publish.

Then there's the culture within trans activist circles of not engaging primary sources ("block and stay safe," trigger warnings, do yourself a favor and don't read this...) and then taking distorted secondhand representations of what women wrote as what they actually wrote.

When trans activists and people who've been told repeatedly how evil TERFs are actually read what "TERFs" write, they often think they're not really TERFs because they've been told what TERFs believe is so horrible and what they read seems reasonable.

Or trans activists argue that the writer must be "cloaking" or misrepresenting their real views to trick clueless people into supporting a dangerous cause. TERFs sounding reasonable isn't TERFs being reasonable—it's just a deceptive ploy to win support.

There's also the fact that trans activist claims and demands are *so* unreasonable that casual observers find it difficult to take these claims seriously and literally.

So women stating reasonable facts like "sex exists and matters" seems so obvious it can't *possibly* be the heart of dispute. For women to insist on the reality of sex seems petty at best—rather than central to the conflict tearing apart women’s rights and progressive movements.

This plays into sympathy many feel for trans people and upsets the expectation that women will coddle others' feelings, even at the expense of speaking clearly. Women look mean for reminding trans people of what they are not.

Why mention sex? Could it possibly be that important to insist on "Woman: Adult human female"? Why not be kind?

Then there are severe social and economic sanctions for attaching your name to critiques of gender ideology means lots of people use anonymous accounts (see: mine), which are then discredited as fake accounts or opinions too toxic for anyone to claim...

And then there's orthodox privilege at work: “If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it.” (These are the same people who say cancel culture is just accountability.)

http://paulgraham.com/orth.html