The extreme activists’ use of language to demean women is a big stumbling block. There’s nothing hateful or phobic or even unreasonable in objecting to clunky and demeaning phraseology such as “people who menstruate,” “uterus-haver,” “vulva owner,” and “chestfeeding.” (As though women are just a collection of reproductive parts.) The NHS in England recently produced a poster promoting screening for cervical cancer without once using the word woman! And then there’s that Scottish asshole, going by the name Jess Bradley I believe, who wrote an op-ed for the Huffington Post claiming that there’s no such thing as a real woman.

Last month, trans activists (one of whose slogans is “no debate”) shut down a lecture at McGill University by a law professor specializing in human rights, screaming at the students who were trying to attend, pushing, shoving, threatening, knocking at least one woman down, until the lecture had to be cancelled—one of the activists claimed that simply attending that lecture constituted a hate crime. Similar behavior has cancelled showings of the documentary “Adult Human Female” at Edinburgh University and other venues. A conference on feminism in academe last weekend did carry on to the end, although some of the attendees were threatened, one had her phone stolen, and the screaming from outside the lecture hall went on and on. And then there were the protesters in Edinburgh holding signs advocating terrorism (“Decapitate all t**fs,” said one) while two female members of the Scottish Parliament smirked and grinned in front of them. That photo is easy to find on the internet. The two politicians said they weren’t aware the signs were there, even though it was a small demonstration.

Changing the words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is, of course disrespectful to her. And it’s flat-out intellectual dishonesty—on a par with the historians and theatre people who insist that Joan of Arc was “non-binary” when that concept was invented about ten minutes ago. And we should refer to Joan as “they.” Queen Elizabeth I got the same treatment from the same bunch of lying incompetents (a powerful, intelligent head of state, you know, must not really have been a woman at all). I don’t know what Elizabeth herself would have to say about that, but I’ll bet it would be worth hearing.