A reporter with The Guardian called anyone who disagrees with transgenderism a “fascist” in comments complaining about how U.S. and U.K. media covers transgender issues.
Julia Carrie Wong, a technology reporter for Guardian US who is based in San Francisco, on Sunday said it is “deeply disturbing” that “the UK media status quo of transphobia” is entering U.S. news media in what she called a “bigotry creep.”
“I think that we’re entering a period when the most meaningful political distinction will be fascist and anti-fascist,” Wong tweeted. “It’s really important to understand that transphobia is one of the most potent entry points to fascism today – and act accordingly.”
Wong’s comments were made after the New York Times published an opinion article Sunday that stirred controversy on the left.
The article by Pamela Paul, entitled “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count,” argued that the far-left is alienating women by erasing womanhood to be accepting of transgender people. Paul is the editor of the New York Times Book Review.
“Those on the right who are threatened by women’s equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place. What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming and other scare tactics when women try to reassert that right,” Paul wrote.
“Tolerance for one group need not mean intolerance for another. We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own — with their own specific needs and prerogatives,” she argued.
Her opinion was trashed by Wong, who accused her of harboring bigotry towards gender dysphoric males who identify as female.
“One thing about the policy of legacy publications to ban their employees from being honest about their political opinions in public is that a person can rise to an incredibly powerful position in an industry without anyone being the wiser about their biases and bigotries,” Wong tweeted.
“[T]ruly wild how full on she is now tho. like every damn week it’s anti-woke on blast,” she added in apparent reference to Paul.
“She’s a Bari Weiss cover band!” replied standup comic Josh Gondelman, comparing Paul to Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion writer who resigned from the paper after alleging her coworkers harassed her not being sufficiently far-left.
Other progressive reporters bashed Paul’s column on Sunday.
“That NYT op-ed equating inclusive language to widespread legislative oppression is a reminder that many white, cis women would rather gatekeep and maintain privilege than work in solidarity with other groups. Patriarchy is crushing us, but y’all wanna play both-sides pattycake,” Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said.
She added, “I’m a cis woman who is clearly able to see that we are under a system-wide assault on bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.
“We will need a politics of solidarity and community building to resist this, which is not something that white women have historically had to do.”
Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s “conservative” columnist who isn’t a political conservative under any definition of the term, replied to Attiah’s tweet and called Paul’s op-ed “appalling.”
Edward Ongweso Jr., a staff writer at Motherboard, called Paul’s op-ed “a deeply stupid grafting of UK TERF arguments onto the U.S.,” agreeing with Wong.
TERF is an acronym for “transgender exclusionary reactionary feminist,” a derogatory epithet thrown at any woman who disagrees with the left’s transgender dogma.
The slur was used against Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who is an outspoken critic of transgender political activists’ demands to let men into women’s restrooms and other spaces if they identify as female. Leftists accused Rowling of bigotry and transphobia because she disagreed with their politics.
But as Wong’s comments demonstrate, name-calling to delegitimize political opponents is standard operating procedure for the left. Anyone who disagrees is a “fascist.”