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True though the Rowling case seems indicative that TERFs are more likely to die on that hill/be proactively purged even if generally aligned
In the US, the TERFs lost and you can no longer be a feminist in good standing unless your feminism includes men pretending to be women. In the UK the battle between trans-inclusive and womyn-born-womyn feminisms is ongoing, with the "TERFs" (they are by no means all radical feminists) having the better of it. Rowling's money may be part of it, but I think it is mostly driven by the different class composition of 2nd wave feminism in the two countries - the most prominent trans-exclusive feminists in the UK are all older women from working-class backgrounds.
I don't think there's that much of a difference between the two countries in that regard. Much like in the UK, in the US a significant amount of the pushback against trans in led by feminists. Sure, they're not in good standing, but neither are the UK feminists. They all, including Rowling herself, get blacklisted, smeared, excluded from debates, etc. The actual difference that might exist is that in the US TERFs have chosen to cooperate with conservatives (likely for lack of other options), while in the UK they have enough numbers / institutional positioning to do their own thing.
TERFs in the UK seem to have succeeded because of the legal system - the court victory of Maya Forstater, the recent Supreme Court ruling on sex-segregated spaces being mandated by the law as it stands - at which point the powers that be basically folded and pretended they could do nothing because of how unpopular the issue is. But they offered little help beforehand.
In the US SCOTUS also just finally set the abuse of Title IX to rights but before that this issue was strongly driven by conservatives. Trump rolled back the use of gender identity in Title IX when he came back in. Most of the court cases that have either made it to SCOTUS or are getting there are from conservative states pushing laws banning it (Tennessee for Skrmetti and West Virginia for the recent sport ruling).
Culturally there was internal criticism in the Left but it didn't budge and those people were essentially cancelled and they left an open road for the Matt Walshes of the world to dominate the issue.
I don't think there's been any equivalent to Mumsnet feminists organizing in the US, with or without conservatives, and the Democrats who tried to preemptively drop this issue post-2024 like Seth Moulton found themselves with little support materializing from the left side of the spectrum for whatever reason.
This issue is both overwhelmingly unpopular and the institutional structures of the Democrats and progressives just refuse to fold or help check it
It's a bit more complicated than that. In 2017 North Carolina passed a anti-trans bathroom bill, and the pro-trans side organized a massive boycott against the state. After that conservatives refused to touch the topic with a 10 foot pole. Even on here / back on reddit we used to have pro-trans people use that incident to crow about how popular their issue is. During that time, it was actually the feminists that were trying to keep the conversation on it alive.
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