Transgender Ideology Shows Its True Colors
Why the dynamics of 2026 are completely different from one year ago
In 2016, the NBA could cancel North Carolina for a ‘bathroom bill’. In 2026, transgender advocacy can barely make it to the men’s room. The decade of cultural and political ascendancy for ‘gender identity’ is over. The decline of what we might call ‘gender imperialism’, the demand for newly-minted rights that collapse existing civil and human rights under the rubric of ‘gender identity’, is now evident. North Carolina Republicans ended 2025 by passing a bill to recognize only two sexes in the state, overriding a veto by Democrat Gov. Josh Stein, and it has barely made a blip on the national news radar.
One year ago I said that the shine had worn off ‘gender identity’ as a civil rights cause because violence has always been intrinsic to the project of ‘gender identity’ medicalization. Examples of violent words and imagery directed at “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) go back over a decade because violence, specifically male violence, has always been an inherent vice of gender imperialism. 2025 did not disappoint me in this regard. Sometimes I hate being right, though. I did not want to lose Charlie Kirk in order to be right.
Transgender advocacy frames its demands as ‘being left alone’, and this rhetorical strategy worked until Lia Thomas appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. We have tracked this shift in opinion polling here at The Distance and I even call it “The Lia Thomas Effect”: the more Americans saw the reality of ‘gender identity’, the less they liked it. Sports Illustrated went broke in 2024, a victim of woke. Putting ‘trans women’ in the swimsuit issue turned out to be a big turn-off for their overwhelmingly-male readership. Name a brand that did better business in 2025 with a woke marketing strategy. Reader, I do not think you can.
During 2025, cultural properties developed during peak woke came splurging out of long content pipelines and died well-deserved deaths. Box office collapse in 2025 has ended the speculative bubble that made Hollywood woke. The money for ‘message movies’ is all gone. Profitability is the new paradigm. However, we will not see the results of this ‘vibe shift’ appear in our shows and films until the end of 2026 because the production pipeline is still long. AI will make production times much shorter in the near future, for example by automating animation processes, but the tech is not quite ready, yet.
In the meantime, transgender characters are disappearing from our content. Audiences did not like the finale of Stranger Things, a generational show that decided to waste its closing act on a coming-out while plot holes were left yawning wide open. Reviews in the last week have not been kind. Everyone is exhausted by presentational politics; Americans have outgrown the LGBTQMOUSE club. They would like their entertainment to be entertaining again, please.
Another measure of the moment is the collapse in funding for the infrastructure of gender imperialism. During the summer of 2025, it was apparent that Pride events on both sides of the Atlantic were entering a spiral of crisis. Decreased donations meant cutbacks, which meant a smaller party, which meant less cultural power to sell the Pride ‘brand’. Manchester Pride announced their own liquidation. As 2026 begins, we have fresh indicators that corporate funding has simply dried up. No one is making it rain in Pride-Land, and it is impossible to have rainbows without rain.
Everyone in the gender critical world knows what happened to Stonewall. They recall the betrayal of Ruth Hunt, who turned the successful rights organization inside-out, deprecating the LGB for the QT+, as well as Nancy Kelley, her successor as CEO, who declared that lesbians who refuse to have sex with a transgender penis are “sexual racists”.
'Through their policy capture scheme, “Diversity Champions” (now re-branded as “Proud Employers”), Stonewall deliberately misinformed and misled government, corporate, and community organizations about British equalities law for a decade. As a direct result of this disinformation campaign, last year’s UK supreme court decision that men are not women has left the government-public policy relationship in chaos. No wonder donations have dried up.
As Maya Forstater explained yesterday on X, Stonewall’s funding has come from four major sources: fees, grants, individuals, and programs. Stonewall no longer reports on the number of Proud Employers. “The biggest fall this year was all other add-on ways that Stonewall takes money from public and private bodies”, Forstater wrote. “Training programmes, corporate sponsorship, sale of rainbow laces to football clubs, events. This was down 50%” year-on-year from 2024 to 2025. We should expect this trend to continue in 2026. Elections have consequences, too, and the US State Department Global Equity Fund also turned off the money spigot.
Now “Stonewall has run out of money”, author Robert Jessel states bluntly. The charity is reporting a £906,000 deficit for the financial year that ended in March 2025. The Times reports that Stonewall has less than £92,000 left in cash reserves. “Stonewall’s plummeting income from fees reflects the haemorrhaging of confidence in its advice,” Forstater tells the Daily Mail. “Being misinformed about the law is worse than useless — it puts businesses at risk of being sued by customers or employees.”
As another astute observer noted, there are no longer any lesbians on the board of Stonewall at all. Dunni Alao resigned in 2025, but the organization has not removed her from their webpage of trustees. The trustees currently include seven men and one woman in a heterosexual marriage who identifies as a man. No wonder the organization has never listened to women. Instead, Kelley compared the women who were correct about the law to anti-Semites and proceeded to advise everyone that public accommodations do not require female changing rooms, leading to expensive mistakes. The hits keep coming: Mermaids had a £286,000 deficit last year. The air is going out of the ‘trans kids’ balloon.
As the money bleeds away, violence points to the doom of transgender ‘rights’ advocacy. In late December, the militant group Bash Back was exposed planning “a series of attacks on senior politicians’ offices, including the Prime Minister’s”, to achieve “total transgender liberation”. Bash Back exhorted members “to form ‘cells’ and plot criminal damage offences against high-profile targets”, including the gender critical organization Sex Matters and the Free Speech Union.
FSU founder Lord Young “commissioned an independent security briefing about the group”, according to the Daily Mail, which discovered and reported the plot. That report, which they have read, “suggests British intelligence is monitoring the trans activist cells.” This is earned attention, the kind of attention that gender identity demands now regularly receive.
Social media allowed these controversies to circumvent ideological censorship in 2024. All of 2025 has been required to shake the legacy media out of its stupor. In 2026, we can expect a new media landscape to emerge in which critical voices are neither silenced nor drowned out by genderwoo magicians. The unspeakable shall become spoken, and then transform into common wisdom.
While the culture goes one way, gender imperialism marches resolutely in the opposite direction. Josh Tabor, a Maine school board member in Berwick, “confronted the board after he learned students could be suspended for referring to their classmates by their biological sex rather than their chosen gender identity” in a viral video last week. The scene was typical of the gaslighting tyranny that transgender ‘rights’ imperialism always transforms into whenever it runs up against someone else’s First Amendment freedom.
Tabor: So if I raise my daughters to, if the person is a female, appears to be a female, to use she pronouns, and that student says, “no, I want to be something else” will my child be suspended for that?
School board member: Oh, yeah. That would be harassment.
Tabor: When I heard that students are being suspended because they are using the wrong pronoun, I was aghast. I didn’t realize that. … One is biological facts, it’s actually XX chromosome, XY chromosomes. Those are facts. We can’t change those. It doesn’t matter what our opinion is. We can’t change those things. Those are immutable facts. And I’m wondering…my question is, are we suspending students for immutable facts? That’s what I’m asking.
School board member: Not for making a genuine mistake. If someone is doing sort of what you’re sort of doing here, and sort of trying to attack somebody because you don’t agree with it, that’s very different and I think that’s what they’re talking about is, I’m going to keep saying it, because I know it bothers you, then yes, this policy should apply.
Tabor: I think that you are out of line by assuming that I am attacking anybody.
School board member: Then I don’t know what you mean.
If you don’t use the pronouns because you disagree that boys become girls when they apply magic lipstick, then you are “trying to attack” the special, coddled child-god of transwoowoo. In the real world, a “genuine mistake” is punished as severely as an intentional ‘misgendering’ because the feelings of the Chosen One always matter more than safety or sanity. The excesses of gender imperialism continue even as the power of the ideology is waning fast. This year, a series of trials, Supreme Court decisions, legislative fights, and plebiscites will further undermine the ‘trans rights’ project, and these events will be a key focus of my reporting. Thanks to all my premium subscribers for supporting this work.
The Summer Of Gender Love Is Over
Multiple fights broke out at Washington Square Park during a celebration at the end of Pride Month in 2024. Confusion reigned as New York City police tried to close the park and excited bystanders jumped the police barricades to get in. ABC 7 in New York