In one sense, Hay’s story has no moral; it’s a T.S. Eliot-esque tragedy about a lonely man grappling with modernity. In another, it’s a deeply political cautionary tale about what happens when political correctness overtakes common sense. The story can’t help but depict how the illiberal Left eats its own.

According to the feature, Hay got roped into a paternity trap by a feminist lesbian, Maria-Pia Shuman, and a transgender woman, Mischa Haider. Throughout their whole relationship, which saw Hay cheating on his ex-wife, whom he still lived with, Hay repeatedly deferred to both Shuman and Haider, apparently out of insecurity or fear of embodying the patriarchy.

When his ex-wife found out he had supposedly had a child with Shuman, she suggested he take a paternity test. Bolonik writes that Hay felt that wouldn’t have been liberal of him:

Over the years, Shuman has slapped at least four men with paternity claims, also accusing two of them of rape. Both Shuman and Haider appear to have a history of targeted harassment against gullible men. How could they get away with it?

As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat pointed out, an op-ed by Hay shows how he was blinded by his commitment to identity politics. Meanwhile, a piece Haider wrote shows how she exploited her victim status.

In 2016, Hay wrote a Salon article titled, “I thought I could reason with Antonin Scalia: A more naive young fool never drew breath.” An absurd hit piece on the former justice, the article claims to reveal “his less appreciated impact on contemporary physics.” In other words, his rulings made one transgender person quit physics to become an activist. Hay wrote:

After praising the person he didn’t realize was scamming him, he continued:

In short, transphobic bigotry is the late Supreme Court justice’s fault, and Scalia drove poor Haider from academia to activism. Hay champions her cause, crusading against the straight, white man persecuting a trans woman of color.

And yet, the scam she and Shuman played on Hay tells a different story. The New York Magazine feature is powerful, and well worth the read. By the time you get to the bottom, you see how both Hay’s gullibility and his desperation to appear woke led him to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, endanger his family, and drag them through a cycle of manipulation and lies. This was part of the women’s plan all along.

Equally revealing as Hay’s Salon piece is Haider’s article for Slate, “The Next Step in #MeToo Is for Men to Reckon With Their Male Fragility.” In it, she writes that “women’s and queer people’s liberation from patriarchal oppression is inextricably linked to freeing men from the bludgeons of toxic masculinity.”

Published just this January, the piece exhibits not just mistrust of, but also disdain for, men. Haider writes of “the structural power that men wield in society, especially straight white men.”

If Haider wanted to exhibit her point, that men ought to be put in their feminist-proclaimed place, she did so through her treatment of Hay.

“Maria-Pia and Mischa want money,” Hay told Bolonik last summer, “but only for the sake of squeezing it out of people — it’s the exertion of power.”

Haider and Shuman were merely performing some form of what third-wave feminism has encouraged women to do, restoring the supposed power imbalance by turning the oppressor into the oppressed. Bolonik writes:

In the end, Hay’s tragic story shows how he fell victim to a system of oppression: a bastardization of feminism that says men must lose their power for women to rise.