I TOO WAS TROLLED JUST FOR DARING TO SPEAK MY MIND

JK ROWLING has landed in hot water, and it’s nothing to do with a Harry Potter plot. When the worldfamous author, who has more than 14million Twitter followers, dared to tweet her support for Maya Forstater, a hitherto anonymous tax expert, she found herself scalded in seconds.

As I know all too well, the temperature on trans issues has a habit of reaching boiling point almost immediately, and is one in which very few people are brave enough to dip their toe.

I say brave because what JK has now discovered is that no amount of money or fame can protect you from the vitriol that comes with this debate.

She was immediately labelled a TERF (a slur, meaning a trans exclusionary radical feminist) and worse.

Welcome to my world. I was one of the very first feminists to speak out against extreme transgender ideology, in an opinion piece back in 2004.

It was written in response to a story in Canada, where a male to female transsexual had demanded to be trained as a rape crisis counsellor at a charity.

When this person was told, respectfully, that would not be appropriate, because the women seeking support after sexual assault would feel uncomfortable being counselled by a biological male, the charity was forced to endure a lengthy legal battle – which they eventually won. I wonder if they’d be so fortunate today.

I faced horrendous abuse from trans activists. I had death and rape threats. I was harassed and hounded in public, labelled a Nazi, a bigot, and accused of causing the suicide of young transgender people.

The ‘trans Taliban’, as I came to call them, would try to get events shut down at which I had been invited to speak about topics such as rape, child abuse or trafficking of women.

Angry crowds would turn up, waving their placards, demanding that I be thrown out because I, like Maya, believe that being born male or female is what makes someone a man or a woman.

It was hell and until five or six years ago, in the UK at least, I was almost completely alone. Whilst I would receive countless private messages from people telling me ‘I agree with you completely, but I dare not speak out because of what would happen to me’, I had to weather the storm in isolation. I began to get angry at those people that would tell me they were too scared to speak out, because they were perfectly happy for me to do it on their behalf.

I knew that what was behind the extreme transgender ideology was pure sexism and misogyny. So-called progressive men had been waiting a long time to be able to hurl insults at feminists such as myself and still be seen as on ‘the right side of history’.

BUT gradually, brave women such as Maya Forstater began to see that, despite the capitulation from the majority of liberals, this issue was only going to get worse.

It culminated in the male-bodied transsexual prisoner Karen White, being transferred to a female jail, where fellow prisoners were sexually assaulted. Feminists began to realise that if we did not join forces and resist this ideology, women would lose every single sex right we had fought for. Our refuges, changing rooms, hospital wards, and other single- sex services would be lost, because biological men only had to claim to be women for them to be able to use them.

We had to join forces to protect the female gender, which was seriously under threat.

What many people don’t appreciate is that one of the deeply tragic consequences of such widespread fear and capitulation to the extreme transgender ideology is that it has left those trans people who simply wish to live their lives, out in the cold.

The bullies do not speak for the majority of transgender people. They do not want to be held up as human shields by extremists. Of course they should be protected from prejudice, bullying and harm, but they don’t want to be tarred with the same dictatorial, rabble-rousing brush.

But this is what we will come to if we do not speak out against outrageous decisions such as the Maya Forstater case. Women should have the right to voice their opinions without fear of losing their jobs, their livelihood, or their sanity. That is what we fought for, as women, and what we must continue to fight for. Julie Bindel is a feminist writer and author of Straight Expectations: What Does it Mean To Be Gay Today?