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This has already been happening for a while I'm afraid. Anti-trans and LGBT activity here in the UK is being funded remotely by the US Christian Right with 'dark money' looking to export their culture war.

Crowdfunders mysteriously reach their targets in hours/overnight with large individual donations and if you're a high profile/totemic anti-trans/TERF/however you want to define them you won't need to worry about legal fees or how to pay the bills.

Look at Kathleen Stock getting rescued by the University of Austin after she quit Sussex.

We have not met but from our exchanges on this I know you are a good and genuine person. I appreciate you, like me, are trying to approach this topic with respect and openness.

This reply is not a challenge to you personally, but a challenge to the assumption by many on the left that any purportedly left wing opposition to losing women's (female) rights and identity must be secretly funded by the US hard right because no true left wing people could possibly support it.

Yes, the Christian alt-right in the US are anti LBGT+ and undoubtably do fund political and legal challenges in the US, just as they have been for funding the anti-abortion movement.

Yes, increasing numbers of left wing women (in the old fashioned, biological meaning of the word), in the UK and elsewhere, while being entirely supportive of gender-nonconformity, do not accept that we can simply hand-wave away the material consequences that being female-bodied has in a culture shaped by patriarchy. That doesn't make them anti-LGB, or even anti TQIA+, it just means they do not believe the only way, or indeed even the most effective way to support TQIA+ people is simply a wholesale replacement of sex with gender identity.

Yes, the public debate about this has so far been predominantly in the centre right and right wing media. That's because the Left media are ignoring our voices and writing us off as simply transphobic, which we know ourselves not to be.

NO, the first group are not funding the second. The hard right don't give a shit about female rights other than as a way to stir the culture wars. The right may be happy to amplify the conflict for their own purposes but the crowd funding you see genuinely does represent a mass of people making individual donations supporting the women who put their head above the parapet to say "this is not ok, we do not consent to this" and in doing so risk or do lose their jobs, suffer dreadful online and real life abuse, and absolutely do worry about legal fees and how to pay the bill.

The people who are supporting crowdfunders are not doing so because they hate or fear TQIA+ people or because they think ones body should define the type life one is allowed to lead, but because, here and now, female people and female reality do exist and the history of female oppression means we are not treated the same as the male-bodied, so until the day our bodies genuinely make no difference to how society treats us, we will continue to need female-only provision and the right to a female political voice to mitigate and fight that.

Or to put it another way - the Right sure as hell know what type of bodies they want barefoot and pregnant. The mass of Pornhub punters sure as hell know what type of bodies they like to see young, naked and used. Employers sure as hell know which type of bodies might land them with the cost of maternity cover. The Left pretending sex is just a meaningless collection of physical attributes that have no social consequence doesn't change that one little iota, all it does is take away our voice and language to fight it.

It should not be perceived as an act of hate to say "trans women should be able to present and live as they wish, but some things will still be reserved for female people because of our bodies directly or the social consequences thereof, and we can work out together what those things need to be, and this is entirely reasonable and ok and does not take anything from trans women".

The tragedy is that the large LGBTQIA+ and Trans orgs actually are well funded - a good thing, in case there is any doubt about what I mean - and those orgs could do so much to support TQIA+ people in practical ways without taking support away from female people, but instead they have focused on inflaming the culture wars by pushing the hard line that acknowledging sex to be a meaningful differentiator in any context is an act of hate and asserting the only way to support TQIA+ people AMAB is to open up all existing provisions for female people to those AMAB who no longer identify as men.

It is this, not some shadowy right wing conspiracy, that has driven a wedge straight between two groups of people who should be natural allies against right wing patriarchy.

This is real, it is important, and the Left needs to face there is a genuine issue here and stop pretending it's all being stoked by nasty boogeymen on the right.