I’m reading this just after learning about a report by the leading human rights organization Council of Europe, which names the UK — alongside Russia, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey — as a leading center of anti-transgender hate speech and hate crime.

I’m sure this surprises few who follow trans issues, least of all supporters of the UK’s liberal-leaning Labour Party, who have been shocked this year to watch party leadership increasingly embrace an anti-transgender hardline.

It seems the UK has reached a sort of tipping point of anti-trans consensus, which is particularly worrying because anti-LGBTQ forces in the United States are far more influenced by UK thinkers than by anyone in Hungary or Russia.

The fact that many leftist thinkers in the UK have become irrationally transphobic (I mean, many of the ideas they push are false to the point of absurdity) adds a gloss of respectability to transphobic narratives pushed in the United States.

We have not reached the point where transphobia has become widely acceptable on the left, but is the UK leading us in that direction? Quite possibly.

In the UK, anti-trans forces present a sort of moving target. They whip up false safety concerns about trans people harming cis women in women’s spaces, push dystopian fantasies about cis lesbians being somehow “forced” to date trans women, and leverage emotional rants about teenagers being reproductively “mutilated” despite that the National Health Service has never provided HRT or gender-affirming surgery to minors.

These false ideas are increasingly accepted as items of faith, with anyone pointing out they are not factual labeled a misogynistic woman hater.

The depth of emotion is hard to understate. Many of these anti-trans diehards in the UK are fiercely angry. Furious. Screaming mad.

It’s irrational to the point of being frightening and impossible to understand. Many of these people seem consumed with hatred of transgender people despite having nothing personal at stake.

And we see the results in the streets. Trans people in the UK (some of whom I know personally through editing their writing) are being attacked openly. One trans woman I know was roughed up by a gang of six young men in Liverpool screaming anti-trans insults at her. And that was just one incident of several violent incidents she experienced or witnessed this summer.

I mean, we certainly have our violence problems in the United States, but it feels different here somehow. Less socially acceptable. More on the margins. It’s hard to believe that hatred of transgender people has become acceptable in the UK, and it hasn’t in all circles obviously, but it is becoming increasingly so. And the sentiment threatens to spread like a cancer to other parts of the world.

I don’t know anything about theories of social consensus, but what do you suggest? Pushing back against factually incorrect narratives? That seems to be what everybody already does. And it isn’t working.