Victoria Smith does another one of those Every Damn Sentence Is a Gem articles at The Critic.

She starts with Jon Ronson’s 2015 book about being publicly shamed.

Back then, I’d been classed as a “terf” for over a year, having written a piece very tentatively critiquing the concept of cis-ness (I would not be so tentative now). It was a strange, disorienting period…

2015 is the year I left “Freethought” blogs as “colleagues” tripped over each other in the rush to class me as a terf. A strange period indeed.

You’d have to have been within certain specific circles — in my case, the feminist blogosphere, in which we were suddenly ordered not to write about abortion rights or pregnancy as women’s issues — to suspect something else was happening. You’d also have to have dared to question such orders to come up against the true level of woman-hatred fuelling this supposed civil rights movement. 

I did and I did.

It was a tad disillusioning. Those particular illusions remain dissed to this day.

“Decent, smart people recognize who the villain is when a misogynist attacks a feminist writer,” wrote Ronson. “Hurry up, decent, smart people,” I’d think. “Time to give us feminists a bit of a hand!” Only it never happened. We waited, as it became more and more obvious that no, we hadn’t made anything up. Yet all of these supposed deep thinkers – all of these speakers of truth to power, these brave challengers of online bullies, these people who had already made it clear that they would have found it all insane if only it was real – sat back and said nothing, or even threw their lot in with the mob. The switch from “this would never happen (and thinking it could makes you a bigot)” to “this is happening and it’s great (because only bigots worry about it happening)” was remarkable.

It was. It was and still is. It’s like a tatoo; we’re stuck with it.

Gladwell now admits that when he participated in a 2022 discussion on male people participating in women’s sports, “I heard that and thought, ‘This is nuts,’ and yet I didn’t say anything”. He claims to have been “cowed”. I get that. Everyone has something to fear in a world where you can be torn to pieces for simply saying sex matters. But this world only came into being because people who agreed with feminists spent years refusing to say so. We were scared, too, and we would have had far less to be afraid of had we had some support. 

But we didn’t have that support, because the Gladwells were scared. The Gladwells have had an easier ten years than we have.

While I can empathise with being afraid, all too often the reasons given for “not being able” to speak up rest on the assumption that those of us who do are blessed with some form of inferiority which mitigates the costs.

Oh dang. Those bullseyes she hits.

The final bullseye:

Even if tomorrow every single person were to say “yes, you were right”, it won’t restore the loss of trust. Because we know that you knew we were right all along. You just didn’t think we mattered enough to say so. Instead of telling us how scared you were, why not think about what this has felt like for us?  

Blam!