Vaishnavi Sundar finds out what it’s like to be canceled:

I am a filmmaker, writer and a women’s rights activist. I spend my time advocating for equal opportunities, contraceptive rights, education and the empowerment of women and girls. I centre women in all my work. When I started screening my film on workplace sexual harassment across India, I was hoping to raise public consciousness. But What Was She Wearing? was India’s first feature-length documentary on the subject.

However, I encountered strong resistance to the film from liberal feminist gatekeepers. Women who would send me private messages asking for professional favours and contacts, and congratulate me on the film, refused to acknowledge my presence on their public timelines or retweet anything about the film. At first, I thought this was my eternal bad luck or some flaw in my personality.

Then the rejections started, from lefty publications that had snapped up everything she sent in the past.

Last month, I discovered the reason I had become a social outcast in liberal-feminist bastions. I was in the US for an exchange programme, and I wanted to use the opportunity to screen my film at various places while I toured the country. One screening was scheduled in New York, organised by the Polis Project. The proverbial i’s were dotted, posters designed and I was even introduced to a female Indian moderator. But a week before the screening, the organiser (also a woman of Indian origin) sent me an email. She said the event would be cancelled because of my ‘transphobic’ views.

So feminist work on subjects like sexual harassment is worth nothing compared to the outrage of “transphobic” views. In other words the hell with what women are concerned about, are they being accommodating enough to men???? This from left-wing outlets.

Many moons ago I got into a Twitterspat about pre-op trans women in women’s shelters, prisons, bathrooms and women’s sports. And someone had brought the tweets in question to the organisers’ attention. As a result, the Polis Project thought it was only fair to shelve a screening of a film about a pressing topic that affects women across all social strata in society. All because the filmmaker believes biological sex is not a social construct, that women’s sex-based oppression is real, that housing people with male genitalia in spaces with victims of male sexual violence can be harrowing to women inmates, that mental illnesses like autogynephilia and other dysphorias can cause dangerous, irrevocable damage, and that gender theorists are erasing women, much like patriarchy does.

Feminism just doesn’t matter now because men who long to wear fuck-me shoes matter so much more.

I have since confronted the editors of the publications that blacklisted me. It appears that Indian trans-rights activists googled my name and wrote to every outlet I had ever been published in, telling them about my ‘TERFy’ tweets.

That’s the way to win hearts and minds.

How can so many liberal feminists call themselves ‘liberal’ and laud pornography, an industry in which women are brutalised (and often killed)? How can you encourage children to be ‘drag queens’ performing sexual acts for adults, in the name of gender ideology? I wish they wouldn’t call it a movement anymore. It is a cult that extols men, who are often not really ‘queer’ but who want to take advantage of ‘self-identifying’ as a woman in order to gain oppression points and external validation.

Feminism 2020: all about the men now.