It seems ironic that “empowering” women has ended up shafting women by radicals claiming that some men are in fact women. But in a brilliant column on the subject, journalist Daniel Greenfield argues that was actually a predictable result of leftist feminism.

In an interview, J.K. Rowling, the children’s fantasy author under siege from transgender activists, bemoaned a “backlash” against feminism. “It would never have surprised me that there would be a massive backlash, but I wouldn’t have expected it to come from what I would have broadly seen as ‘my team’.”

Like a lot of “gender critical feminists”, she misinterprets the transgender movement as a backlash against feminism, when it’s actually the culmination of feminism. No western movement hated women as much as feminism. Feminists were ruthlessly critical of women’s habits, their interests, preferences and desires. True feminism required publicly breaking with traditional roles and expressing public hostility for the women who chose to live that way.

When Hillary Clinton wanted to show off her feminist bona fides, she sneered, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” Hillary was just echoing her elders, like Betty Friedan’s slur that being a housewife made it impossible “for a woman of adult intelligence to retain a sense of human identity”.

Hillary Clinton, in her iconic pantsuit, became the model for a late stage feminism that evinced contempt for feminity and adulation for masculine virtues.

Greenfield then moves to the “transgender” movement.

While men joining female teams may be the most public face of the transgender movement, there are ten teenage girls undergoing some form of destructive “gender affirming care” that’s distinguishable from any other method of self-harm only by the fact that it occurs under medical supervision for every one of those men who decides that he was born with a “female” brain.

The real transgender movement is teenage girls getting drastic surgeries to appear masculine, as the culmination of a century of fashion trends that confused masculinity with empowerment.

Greenfield delves into the “suicide rates, depression and general unhappiness” among women that “are off the charts.”

Why do so many girls hate the idea of becoming women?

Feminism spent two generations destroying any sense of joy that girls had about femininity.

He argues that “the transgender movement is the dead end of feminism” before concluding:

Young women are more vulnerable because they’ve been hollowed out by feminism. All the programs that were meant to build up their self-esteem have instead destroyed it. They are told that life offers them nothing except the opportunity to be the best men they can be. Is it any wonder that they spend thousands of dollars destroying the girl looking back at them?

What some used to do with drugs and alcohol is now being performed with exotic surgeries, but the end result is still the same. Feminism has won its ultimate victory over those women.

The transgender movement is not a backlash to feminism, it’s a consequence.

Read the whole thing here.