Until the 1990s, the loudest voices in feminism belonged to those who wanted to ban pornography and prostitution, and believed that a biological gulf separated men and women. Today they are being shouted down by rival feminists who believe that to deny sex workers the right to work is to display “whorephobic” prejudice, and to set limits to womanhood is to display “transphobic” bigotry
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Before they will allow a feminist a hearing, she must answer a question that was barely asked 30 years ago: how do you define a woman? If she gets that wrong, she’s finished.

The old feminists did not accept that men who have undergone sex reassignment treatment were women. Their point wasn’t just theoretical. They asked whether a transwoman should deal with women who have been raped, or be allowed into women’s prisons or changing-rooms. What if she had just had hormone replacement therapy and not full sex reassignment surgery? What, to put it bluntly, if she still had a penis?

As with pornography, the hurt caused was real. Feminists were questioning transwomen’s identities and hopes. The pain was hardly insufferable, however. It is not as if there is an organised feminist campaign against transsexual women. In a sign of an age when identity politics has gone haywire, censorship is not provoked by a comprehensive attack but by an offending passage in an article or book written years ago.

One of the banned, Julie Bindel, has done more to help rape victims than any British activist I know. Her work counts for nothing. Every time she tries to speak on any subject, trans campaigners and their supporters try to stop her. For years, they had her on a National Union of Students blacklist. All because she wrote a piece in 2004 that disparaged a transsexual who had gone to the courts to demand the right to counsel raped women, even though she had recently been a man herself.

Neither Bindel nor anyone else I know on the British Left excuses attacks on transsexuals. No matter. Feminists are now denounced as the equivalent of racist bigots: the Ku Klux Klan in sensible shoes.

A writer in the left-wing New Statesman described the frenzy thus:

A US women’s college recently announced it would be discontinuing its annual performance of The Vagina Monologues: it’s exclusionary to talk about vaginas when some women do not have one. Last year a trans activist on Twitter denounced feminist campaigns against FGM as “cissexist”. Discussions of menstruation, pregnancy and abortion rights are all regularly interrupted by the same complaint.

The journalist did not dare publish under her own name. She hid behind a pseudonym to spare her from having to spend the next decade dodging demands that she be “no-platformed”.

Proponents of banning feminists justify their censorship with a notion that so infantilises adults it should be laughed to scorn. In America and Britain, universities say they must keep students “safe” from ideas that might upset them. The University of Bristol says every student should be free “from intimidation or judgment . . . free from having one’s culture and beliefs questioned”. Index on Censorship cites the example of Bolton University, which says that there are subjects so unsafe they cannot be discussed: animal experimentation, the sexual abuse of children and paedophilia, and, inevitably, any topic “where the subject matter might be considered to be of a blasphemous nature”.