Dawn Hunt

Words are not violence. When you pretend that views that oppose your own are violence, you are justifying the use of actual violence towards the speaker. Gender ideology’s reliance on tropes and slogans like ‘words are violence’, its constant rationalisation and justification of using force against opponents and its preference for enforcing compliance through fear rather than permitting debate, are straight out of fascism’s playbook. ‘The function of propaganda is . . . not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.’ The words are Hitler’s, but I must have seen trans activists say the same thing, barely rephrased, a thousand times. Your movement seeks to remove rights from others. It is anti-truth and critical thinking, pro-violence, pro-dehumanisation of those who disagree with you, and you are so lacking in self-awareness you cannot see that you are precisely what you pretend to hate.