There are times when it seems that violence against women and girls – forever these days being hand-wrung over by useless politicians as their alleged absolute priority – is like a game of Whack-A-Mole; no sooner is the state performatively tackling ‘the Manosphere’ in schools than a sinister new threat to the physical safety of females pops up. Quelle surprise, this time it’s from the trans lobby, via a new organisation called ‘Bash Back’, with an unashamed level of misogynistic violence.
The Times reports this week that the ‘militant transgender activist group’ has issued a ‘direct action guide’ to its members, telling them to tool up and carry out illegal attacks on MPs and organisations. The group warns that participants could face charges including criminal damage, possession of an offensive weapon and aggravated trespass, and includes advice on carrying out attacks and methods for escaping detection afterwards. A promotional image on the new document features a masked figure holding a hammer, and an invitation to ‘choose your weapon’. (Bash Back somehow still describes itself as a ‘nonviolent direct action group’.) The organisation has claimed responsibility for attacks on the constituency of Wes Streeting and on the Free Speech Union, run by The Spectator’s own Toby Young.
You’d think these delicate little blossoms had been forced away from their chosen profession of flower-arranging or sewing a fine seam on satin cushions to fight for basic human rights. But like the ‘Black Pampers’ (young incels, generally students, who dress up their standard sex-starved woman-hatred as something rad, and can always be found wherever Let Women Speak are holding a rally, determined not to let women speak…) before them, this lot are thugs posing as victims. Given that the whole idea of ‘trans’ cannot exist without a big dollop of magical thinking – someone with a penis can be female – it’s no leap at all to wield a hammer and identify as a pacifist.
In its declared intention to attack the property of those in the public eye who dare to engage in discourse on how women’s rights clash with trans demands, Bash Back’s goal is simple; to silence their opponents, as they know that if a debate takes place between the two sides, we ‘Terfs’ will win. This explains the long-term refusal of many trans activists to even appear on panels with feminists. In domestic situations, we often say that violence is the final response of someone without a mastery of the language, and in this latest and nastiest development of the trans lack of logic, we see the bare bones of the conflict; thuggish men (aided by their pandering transmaid groupies, who are in it for their own weird reasons) attempting to silence uppity women and their supporters by threat of violence.
But though we’re right to be alarmed by the emergence of a new group so open in their hatred of free speech and those who practice it, the great comfort is that it’s backed by Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project, which is notorious for bringing defeat to a fair proportion of the causes it gets behind. He’s thrown himself into this new lost cause with the usual grim gusto. ‘The non-violent direct action promoted by Bash Back is the inevitable, and I would say legitimate, response to a society whose institutions, politics and media systematically dehumanise trans people,’ he posted on Bluesky a few days ago. He ends his dumb missive with ‘No pasarán’, the rallying cry of those who fought for liberty and democracy in Spain.
When people are told that their opponents are Nazis and fascists, they will feel justified in doing anything to them
Whatever one’s politics, the fight against fascism in Spain – Hitler’s dry run – was a wonderful thing, not least because of all the volunteers who left the safety of their own countries to defend democracy. To have a semi-literate gang start using their words illustrates perfectly the trans lobby’s lack of proportion and perspective, as well as the entirely predictable lack of respect for what real resistance fighters suffer. Tyler Robinson, the killer of Charlie Kirk, had inscribed the words ‘O Bella Ciao’ on recovered casings found with the rifle after the murder, a song widely associated with the Italian partisans in their fight against the Nazis. And that’s the thing. When people are told that their opponents are Nazis and fascists, they will of course feel justified in doing anything to them.
Considering the frequency with which ‘Death to Terfs’ crops up in various extreme trans groups’ charming communiques, I’m pretty glad none of them have free access to guns here. We clever and logical Terfs will not be taken out by the likes of Bash Back. We will live to fight another day.
