The big issue I see with all these accusations of transphobia is that it seems like everything published about trans issues is accused of being transphobic by some portion of the trans community, even when written or spoken by trans people themselves.
The “cancellation” of Contrapoints (Natalie Wynn) last year is a perfect example. She is a trans YouTube creator who has a very popular channel where she discusses a lot of different topics, with an emphasis on trans viewpoints. I myself found her channel very enlightening in understand trans perspectives. But she apparently said the “wrong” thing about the medical basis for gender dysphoria, and included a quote from the “wrong” trans activist, and was vicously attacked by some sector of the trans community to the point where she had to delete her twitter and put her channel on hiatus for several months. (And Contrapoints is a leftist socialist herself; this doesn’t even touch on more deliberately heterodox trans creators like Blair White.)
Given all of this internal infighting, I can understand why the vast majority of people who are not trans and have little personal interaction with trans people are just left perplexed by what a reasonably enlightened perspective on this should even be.
I think this plays to a larger spectrum of activism, often on the left. You have people that probably mean well and would tend to want to be allies, but are perhaps not completely educated on some particular subject (and with the intersection of all kinds of issues, it’s really difficult to be) that then get dogpiled and likely dissuaded from further support.
To get on a somewhat related tangent: Heaven help me if I were to say that “Bird Names for Birds” is something of a waste of energy. There’s a movement to rename a number of bird species that were named after some rather unsavory characters that just seems like a waste of time/energy when there’s so many birds that are endangered. And honestly, who actually knows what the guy named Barrow (as in Barrow’s Goldeneye) actually did. It’s not like there’s a Hitler’s Warbler or Mao’s Sparrow or something like that. The people these birds are named for aren’t exactly commonly known people, but I’d probably get canceled by bird twitter for saying it’s something of a waste of time. I wouldn’t be against not naming birds after people for new species, but it seems silly to worry about literally every bird named after someone.
