On the history of the word 'TERF'

Susan Strkyer observed an "attribution of monstrosity" even in "most lesbian and gay representations of transsexuality" and referred to "the anxious, fearful underside of the current cultural fascination with transgenderism" [emphasis mine] — in 1994.
(“My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ, Vol. 1 (1994): 237–254.)

Transphobia is not new.

Where does the word 'TERF' come from?

See "TERF: What It Means And Where It Came From" by Cristan Williams, published on The Trans Advocate at least six years ago.

A cisgender (non-transgender) feminist woman says she and someone else "started using trans-exclusionary radfem (TERF) activists as a descriptive term in our own chats" and then she used it in a 2008 internet post. "It was not meant to be insulting. It was meant to be a deliberately technically neutral description of an activist grouping." In a follow-up three days later, she'd added: "Many many radical feminists are trans* accepting and often are active allies. It's just a small minority who are very vocally trans-exclusionary, particularly online. Grammatically, the 'trans-exclusionary' placed before 'radical feminist' in the TERF acronym means that it modifies 'radical feminist', describing a subset."

Of this article:

---

Also, Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir (Owl):

They refer to this article in the Gay Times: "'Lesbians being anti-trans is a lesbophobic trope': Amy Ashenden, Interim CEO of Just Like Us, is dispelling the harmful trope that lesbians are against the trans community." Amy Ashenden, 31 March 2023

"TERF is an acronym for “trans exclusionary radical feminism.” It applies to individuals who don’t see transgender women as real women or transgender men as real men. ... The Oxford English Dictionary added TERF as a noun in its June 2022 update, noting that the term is 'now typically regarded as derogatory.' ... However, linguists Christopher Davis and Elin McCready have argued that TERF doesn’t fit the second of their three-point criteria for slurs: They say slurs must 1) disrespect a particular group 2) based on an intrinsic, inborn property (like gender or race) 3) in order to lower them within a power structure. Since transphobic politics aren’t inborn, Davis and McCready argue that TERF isn’t really a slur." The article continues: "Many TERFs prefer to be called 'gender critical,' and some identify as 'second-wave feminists' who see cis womanhood as an inborn 'essentialist' identity determined by one’s biological sex, including the physical and psychological differences between cis women and cis men."
What is a TERF? Unpacking Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism: Curious about what a TERF is? Learn who trans-exclusionary radical feminists are and their troubling views on trans people. Daniel Villarreal, LGBTQ Nation, May 18, 2023

Villarreal describes other common traits of TERFism. I'll paraphrase them:

• Hormones and surgery don't change your "biological sex"
• Hormones and surgery are dangerous, irreversible, and mutilating
• Stereotypically gendered mannerisms don't change your gender either
• Men performing feminine mannerisms are making a 'mockery,' 'parody,' or 'caricature'
• Trans women are actually men
• Trans women have "rise[n]" (in numbers? in power? in visibility?)
• Large numbers of trans people change their minds and detransition
• Trans women "can't relate" to how cis women experience patriarchal oppression
• Trans women are erasing cis women
• Trans women are claiming women's spaces as their own
• Being trans is a mental illness
• Being trans is a young people's fad
• Children are being forced into hormones and surgery
• Cis people are pressured to accept trans people
• Trans women's existence causes "tension" in cis lesbian communities

Villareal continues:

"The right wing has made minor celebrities of TERFs who misgender trans people and oppose trans civil rights. Rightwingers claim that anti-trans legislation seeks to 'protect' girls, women, women’s sports, and female spaces from a leftist 'gender confusion' (or mental illness) that seeks to “erase” women and deny them hard-won opportunities for social advancement."

In 2024, Simón(e) Sun tells OpenMind:

"Essentialism is the idea that you can take any phenomenon that is complex and distill it down to a particular set of traits. In the case of sex essentialism, the idea is that you can sufficiently describe sex by a few particular characteristics. In this debate, it used to be chromosomes, now it’s gametes (egg and sperm cells). The target is always moving, because if you want to make something binary, then you need to find the most binary characteristic. Today, sex essentialism boils all of sex down to the gametes that a person produces. Then you draw a line from gametes to all of these other characteristics—to sex roles, even to the personality of an entire individual. But biology is just not that simple. The sex essentialist perspective is completely wrong about the biology of how sex characteristics arise."

The interviewer, Corey S. Powell, asks: "What is the error at the center of sex essentialism and this attempt at a simple, binary definition of sex?" Sun responds:

"The error is simply that the gametes are a determining factor of sex—that once you know what gametes a person produces, that’s their sex and nothing about it can change. But biology is a dynamic system where an organism starts in a particular state and grows through life and through development with multiple systems interacting. That is, more precisely, how sex works. Sex essentialism boils all that down to one, immutable characteristic to preclude transness as a biological phenomenon. If you start with a model of sex that is binary, you'll always produce a binary result. And if you insist that it is true, then it is the only answer that you get."

To which Florence Ashley, who was also part of this interview, adds:

"There's something to be said about the rhetorical tricks here. The people who use ideas about biological sex against trans people are first appealing to the idea of biology as a description of difference, but then they do a jump and use that conception of biology as a form of meaning. The thing is, we organize society around meaning, not difference. Biology at its core can't tell you what matters to human organizations. So there is a fallacy here of looking at the human difference at the biological level, oversimplifying it, and then saying, “That's what we should organize people around.” We should really be asking what we care about, and then look to see if biology has anything to say about it. If you go through that exercise, then you realize that biology really has very little, if not virtually nothing, to say about things like trans rights."

On June 14, 2023, AP Stylebook announced on Twitter: "On our updated Transgender Topical Guide: trans-exclusionary radical feminist. We recommend avoiding the vague and politicized term to describe cisgender women or others who object to the inclusion of transgender women in women's spaces." True: I mean, I guess you could just say "bigot" or "transphobe"?

The philosophical concern about privacy may be culturally specific to a certain class experience. After the mid-18th century,

“[artistic] representation of the [female] nude has increasingly taken on characteristics of an invasion of privacy, as women are seen in moments of intimacy, at the bath or toilette, or exposed on a bed. Foucault argues that the rise of the bourgeoisie promoted the idea of sex—of genitality—over the aristocratic belief in blood: aristocrats measure their power through illustrious ancestors, but bourgeois place their faith in the future, in their family and posterity. Thus modern notions of privacy, hiding, decency are linked to a new valuing of what has, as a result, been hidden, ultimately the genitals themselves.”
— Peter Brooks. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. p. 18.