“So while on my lunch break, this woke bro doing street fundraising for NARAL asked me if I had time to discuss women's rights,” my friend Isaiah Carter said the other night.

Like me, Isaiah is a liberal at heart and a longtime Democrat. We are disgusted with the state of “progressive” political organizations that were supposed to defend reproductive rights.

They have failed to protect women. They are unable to use the word “woman.” These two data points are clearly connected and we see that.

Both of us have noticed that women who object to this erasure suffer the most extreme hostility from what we used to think of as “our side.”

The struggle session last week for Bette Midler and Macy Gray, both of whom voiced opinions that are completely mainstream, was an object lesson in the consequences of speaking up against the cult of Genderism.

Isaiah was raised in a conservative family but became a Democrat in the 2000s. He is not sure what to call himself now, but he is definitely not that.

Any “movement” that spends all its time and energy trying to black out JK Rowling’s face is not something we want to be part of.

Responding to the NARAL fundraiser, Isaiah voiced the frustrated feelings that he used to keep private. "Your organization doesn't even know what a woman is, so why would I do that?" Isaiah replied.

The man did not seem surprised at all, Isaiah says. “Judging from his reaction when I said that to him, I think he'd been hearing it a lot today.”

Something tells me Isaiah is right. Encounters like this one are becoming more common all the time, even if only as anecdote.

A tiny group of ideological censors has stifled all criticism of “gender identity” politics in recent years. Thousands of Twitter accounts have been purged for blapsheming the gender gods.

What these harridans could not do was stop me from producing a cascade of women who normally vote for Democrats all suddenly questioning their choices this year.

It started with my mother. I showed her Rachel Rooney’s My Body is Me!, a lovely children’s book about body acceptance. It took her three minutes to read. A retired educator — in fact, she taught adults how to teach small children — my mother was quite confused when I informed her that the book has been deemed “transphobic hate speech.”

“Why?” She asked. “All it says is that we live in our bodies.”

“That’s the transphobia,” I said. “Really.”

Since that moment, my mom has devoured Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock, and a shelf full of information on “gender identity” and the issues surrounding it.

She watched only a few seconds of TikTok Genderist parents grooming their four year-old with pronoun choices before she pronounced it, quote, CHILD ABUSE, end quote, and stopped watching.

Since that time, she has “peaked” her entire social circle. In gender critical spaces, “peak trans” is the process by which a person comes to realize the demands of Genderism are unreasonable. She has now “peaked” dozens of women, most of whom are Democrats.

Bear in mind that she did this without any help or encouragement from me. All I did was show her a beautiful children’s book and tell her it is “hate speech.”

The demise of Roe v Wade is not bringing these women back to vote for Democrats in November. On the contrary, they are now quite suddenly aware of their erasure by the very politicians and organizations which propose to champion their rights, and they are mad as hell.

Pandering language about upholding abortion access for “pregnant people” and “womb carriers” and “birthing bodies” has the effect of dampening enthusiasm. Language that is supposed to be “inclusive” actively repels at least half of potential supporters.

These changes were the result of hard lobbying within those organizations, and within Democratic Party politics, by a very narrow interest group that has managed to coerce compliance out of everyone.

Competent political parties and campaigns hold at least a focus-group, or do some sort of market research, before adopting a new motto. But no one polled phrases like “vagina-owners” before people who ought to know better started insisting on their use.

This was political incompetence, like “Latinx,” which has also blown up in Democrats’ faces. Turns out that Hispanic and Latino voters don’t like it very much. In fact, it actually repels them from voting for Democrats.

“Uterus-havers” is going to do the same.

During January in the UK, party canvassers on their seasonal rounds discovered they were talking to “TERFs” — trans-exclusionary radical feminists, otherwise known as “uppity women” — on doorsteps. In the United States, the Democratic Party is just beginning its midterm election cycle amid the gloom of polling despair. It is unclear how many volunteers will even turn out to knock on doors, but any who do are certain to encounter this problem on front porches, too.

In the age of Lia Thomas and Rachel Levine, it is impossible to support Democrats who support a blinkered “trans rights” agenda anymore.

I will not vote for any candidate who pretends to defend women, let alone any who pretends not to know what a woman even is. When I encounter candidates or their representatives in any setting, I am prepared to make this understood immedately.

No walking on eggshells. The era of hurt feelings is over. This is too urgent. I have to be That Guy and ask: What is a woman?

If the answer is anything other than “adult human female,” I will decline to participate and make it entirely clear what I expect of any candidate or cause.

Politely, but firmly, I will follow this script:

If you want to let men cheat women out of their Title IX sports, put rapists in women’s prisons, and keep sterilizing gay and lesbian children, then you will not have my vote, my money, or my support.

Since these insane policy choices have been imposed without any debate at all, I am not going to argue about them, or engage with anyone.

I want any would-be Democratic candidate I meet to come away with a clear understanding, uncomplicated by further discussion, that Genderism is driving away a potential supporter.

The same applies to every “progressive” organization out there. If the ACLU wants to continue championing men who cheat women out of their Title IX sports, helping rapists access new victims in women’s prisons, and sterilizing children for liking the “wrong” toys, they can do all that without me, a former card-carrying ACLU member.

I am following Isaiah’s example, refusing to participate and telling them exactly why.

We decline to take part in Genderism, and we let them know exactly why we are declining, and then we let market forces do the rest. In a time of looming economic recession, the disaffected have increased leverage. Why waste a good crisis?

A grassfire is growing out of control, and more importantly, offline. It is happening in a million random encounters like the one Isaiah had. The most effective gender critical activists are the everyday people having face-to-face conversations, and so the un-wokening of America will also happen in the first person, through a hundred million interactions.

They will never see us coming.