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."
Sometimes trans-exclusive people call themselves TERFs.
"Helen Joyce & Julie Bindel: Should TERFs unite with the Right?" (Dec 8, 2022)
6:00–8:00 Helen Joyce says she's not "left" but is more "liberal" than "small-c conservative" and considers herself a "feminist." At 12:30, she says "drag queen story hour" is an "abomination."
Julie Bindel then says "I am a leftist. I am a soft socialist." She says she doesn't work with men because many are "sexist." She maintains that she doesn't "exclude" people who are living as the opposite sex, and for that reason, she doesn't describe herself as a TERF.
16:30–16:45 Julie Bindel says that TERF "is a slur." She doesn't call herself gender-critical either, because she says "it would be like being critical of cancer or racism." She calls herself a "gender abolitionist."
20:00–23:10 Julie Bindel shares an anecdote of having attended a conference in the US — "probably in 2007, 8, 9" — on "trafficking and international sexual exploitation." She said one of the groups was Concerned Women for America, a right-wing group associated with the Heritage Foundation. That group wants heteronormativity. Personally, she refuses to work with such groups (except to debate them on stage). She noticed that the conference was better funded than similar conferences, and she says the money came from the Religious Right.
23:10–24:30 Joyce says she wouldn't work with the ADF in the US, where the organization is "very Christian, anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage," but she'd work with them "here" (i.e., in the UK) on a "narrow issue" if "their legal arguments were sound".
31:55–33:30 Bindel complains that British far-right activist Tommy Robinson is now getting credit for work that she was doing years ago and that victims and their mothers were doing in the 1990s. She recognizes that Tommy Robinson and people like him would tend to target her (probably as a lesbian or a leftist, I suppose she means). She says that many gender-critical people would tend to share her point of view on this and would not be sympathetic to far-right individuals who take up one particular banner that might seem to be of mutual interest.
The moderator then asks: What about gender-criticals who might be drawn to more "centrist" figures on the right?
34:00–34:30 Joyce responds that she's heard people say: "If we don't tackle um gender identity ideology from a feminist perspective, then it's not worth tackling at all. That's an extraordinary framing to me because these are issues that affect all sorts of people. There are there are right-wing people whose children will transition. You know, anti-abortion people also have a right to a single sex space... Free speech is something that is the right to say the thing that you don't want to hear... we're the people who have the mobs shouting outside when we're trying to speak." She goes on to emphasize that she'll work with right-wing people opportunistically and take what assistance she can get from them.
39:18–40:00 Bindel says that, just as she recalls right-wing people who offered help with anti-porn initiatives but also "wanted to roll back our rights on abortion and compulsory heterosexuality," it's "the same with gender: They [the right-wingers] want pink and blue. They want what Matt Walsh says about — he opens the cookie jar and she's just a nice demure woman. They want to go back to 'who's a real man' and 'a real woman'. And I see women who call themselves gender critical, some women who fight against this ideology, as becoming so, gender is so, so biologically essentialist, it really is like rolling back to the bad old days of 'real women' and 'real men' and our progress as feminists is I think under threat from those people."
40:09–40:30 Joyce: "I also think that there are people who oppose trans ideology, by which I mean that sex is unimportant and gender identity is everything, who oppose it, for not feminist reasons but reasons that I also accept and think are valid, and those would include, for example, very sincere religious beliefs." [I'm unsure why the sincerity of a religious belief makes it a more acceptable and valid reason to endorse the importance of sex and reject trans people as having a contrary ideology.]
41:30–42:05 Joyce, speaking as an atheist raised Catholic, says: "If you oppose this [gender transition] because you think that male and female he created them, I'm willing to accept that. I'm not willing to accept it if you try to roll back other people's rights [i.e., if you accept trans people as their gender], but I'm willing to accept that you're doing this [opposing trans people] from a place that's very sincere, and I'm willing to work with you on the specific issues. I'm not going to join you in some, you know, 'let's set up a Family Foundation to work out,' you know, 'how children should be brought up' thing. But yes, I'd be willing to work on the framework in law for dealing with these issues with somebody who had quite different motivations from me."
43:35–43:50: Bindel recalls the campaign for equal marriage in roughly 2016. "Of course they wanted to tame the lesbians and the gay men...it was a conservative project, marriage, equal marriage." That, Bindel goes on to say, is different from bigoted opposition to same-sex marriage.
44:55–45:24 She says there are some "agreements" and "alliances" that a feminist can make, but "you have to look at the motivation, and you have to look at the end result and what that would mean for women."
45:25–47:40 Joyce: "One of the things that strikes me as odd about some of the contagion type arguments (which you're not making) is the way the contagion is only expected to work one way." She's not talking about gender identity as contagion; she's talking about the fear of associating with people of different beliefs, worried that you might catch their beliefs as a contagion. "I have sat on a panel [about 'lawfare'] with somebody from the ADF ... why is he not meant to turn into, you know, somebody who's pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, feminist, by sitting on a panel with me and saying 'Why don't we go and get a Guinness together sometime after I move to the UK?' but I'm suddenly meant to abandon my feminist principles and turn into some, you know, fundamentalist person who works for a U.S.-based Christian right organization? And I come back to this thing of, you know, the left are by definition good and the right are by definition bad (to some people) ... If you just for a moment think about the world from the point of view of somebody who sincerely believes what the ADF do — and by the way they sincerely believe it. They're not doing this just to put women back in the kitchen. They really believe that somebody like me will go to Hell [for my support for abortion rights]. ... They think that I am genocidal...it's incredible that they're willing to sit on a panel with me actually. And so why do they? ... I think in the US...maybe they are trying to co-opt people, but you wonder why they're trying to co-opt the few sort of radical feminists that are left in the U.S because they don't need them. I think in the UK it's because they're in a very weak position. If you work for the ADF, if that's your viewpoint, you're quite marginalized. And if you want to speak you do it on other people's terms. And I know what that looks like. (This is one of the rare places that I get to speak on terms that aren't quite unpleasant to me.) So I just try to take seriously the viewpoint of the people who are there [namely, ADF people on a panel with me]."
48:15–48:30 She adds, turning to Bindel: "I just want to say, I'm one of those conservative supporters of gay marriage...I'm not a wet conservative; I've never been a Tory. But you know I have a gay son, I dream of this lovely gay marriage and he does too."
48:39–49:09 The moderator then asks: "Let's talk strategy for a moment... I suppose one of the one of the biggest weaknesses of the trans activist movement...is that they have constant internal schisms. There are these perpetual arguments about whether the right words are being used... Is there a risk here that the gender critical movement is falling into the same trap of — rather than having a broad church — infighting, effectively?"
49:09–49:40 Joyce says: "I don't think they're anything at all like each other [i.e., trans people's discourses and anti-trans people's discourses]. I do think the [anti-trans] infighting is a bit of a risk, but I don't see how to stop it because I think it's very sincere. I don't think people are doing this for fun. I don't think people are doing this from nowhere. ... They're genuinely afraid that people like me are fucking it up for them." She adds: "We don't have any attention...There's so much to do, so few people to do it, and no money." [No 'attention,' says someone who is all over YouTube. I don't know what she earns or what her organization's budget is, but there is anti-trans money.]
49:40–50:30 Joyce contrasts this with her opinion of "the trans activist side": "When you've got an ideology that's entirely unmoored from reality as theirs is, it spirals off into the stratosphere. Like if you're going to call men 'women', you can do what the hell you like. ... It's a tribal mark of allegiance. ... You've got to be up to date with the latest way of signaling your, um, you know, you're that you're okay with like 'the memo that went around last Friday' type thing." Her side (the anti-trans side) is different, she says because there "I see people who are working from principles. Those principles aren't always the same as mine. And sometimes those principles collide. And that's painful. But I don't think it's [her own 'gender-critical' anti-trans side is] a sort of a rapidly mutating movement the way the trans activists are." [It's unclear how she has formed this opinion about 'trans activists' and how she believes she has acquired relevant facts. It seems contradictory for her to say that trans people have an 'ideology' and then also say it's just a rapidly mutating memo being passed around.]
50:35–51:12 Bindel: "I'm in the women's liberation movement. I'm a feminist. ... I'm not part of a gender critical movement at all."
52:46–53:10 Bindel: "Don't start telling me and my sisters that have been doing this work [multi-issue feminist work, not solely anti-trans work] for decades that the house is suddenly on fire. Because this only came about — this gender fuckery — because of misogyny. It didn't just grow out of neoliberalism, out of nowhere, fell from Planet Zog. It's a men's rights movement." [Essentially, she connects the existence of trans people to everything abusive men have ever done.]
53:37–54:00 Joyce: "I think I don't agree on the description of how we got to the gender fuckery, but I think that's a conversation for another day...But something I've really noticed in the gender fuckery is that people who had a really strong, really clear principle (and those principles can be different), they're the people who didn't get knocked off course by it." ["it" = apparently, by awareness that trans people exist]
54:34–55:15 Joyce then adds something. I'll paraphrase it, since she didn't phrase it clearly. She says she came to her anti-trans ("gender critical") work, not through feminist work or a feminist consciousness, which of course (she adds) doesn't mean she's anti-woman or doesn't care at all about women's well-being. "I just have a different through-line" to anti-trans work, she says. Everyone may have their own entry point, and for some people it'll be a religious value. Her perspective, she says, is that "you can't say who you are and have that land on other people as a thing they just must accept. And of course it's men who are doing the saying and women who are doing the accepting." She describes her "through-line" as: "Principles are universalizable."
55:38–55:50 Joyce: "You can work together because they're not liars, they're not doing this as a front, they're not trying to co-opt you, they're not using you as as camouflage for their real agenda or whatever."
55:50–56:12 The moderator then describes "the inclusion of children in this conversation about trans" as "relatively fresh" and among "new innovations." She asks: "Is there an argument there for saying the house is might have been on fire for a long time but there's an extra fire now" — she says, casually holding a drink in her hand — "and we need to take emergency measures to put it out?" [We had almost gotten through an hour-long conversation about trans people without describing trans children as an emergency "extra fire" that should be "put out" according to "emergency measures" rather than regular behavior. It is worth noting, then, that everything said up to this point can apply solely to anti-trans discourse against trans adults, even were trans children not specifically mentioned.]
56:25–56:33, 56:45–58:08 Bindel says: "Removing healthy breasts from teenage girls that want to opt out of their own bodies is an abomination of the highest order." She compares it to a six-year-old undergoing FGM or a woman who has been sex trafficked "being treated unspeakably." She continues that a teenager having male chest reconstruction is "yet another abomination, and if we separate it from male dominance, supremacy, violence, we'll lose. We will lose. We will end up talking about weirdos and freaks and trannies. And we will be desensitized to that small group — but vocal group of extremists — who I think are anti-trans and that's their motivation on the so-called gender critical side who say quite cruel things. And I'm not talking about 'Be kind.' I'm not talking about accepting men as women, of course not." [i.e., she doesn't want the audience to hear her as berating gender-critical women as needing to be kinder to trans people, which is not only a pet peeve of the gender-critical people but is their fundamental positioning. Joyce had brought up be-kind-ism only a minute earlier as "it's men who are doing the saying and women who are doing the accepting". a core complaint. Nor does Bindel want to be understood as accepting trans people as members of our genders.] She says she's concerned about anti-trans people "who are motivated I think by something else other than human rights. ... I don't think you have to sign up to be a feminist ... but I do think we need to be very aware of our enemies that are also saying they don't like gender woo-woo either."
58:18–1:00:11 Joyce says: "What I think is different about this [the social acceptance of trans people] is the reality-denying aspect of it. I think that somebody who infibulates a little girl knows very well what she is and why they're doing it they're doing it because they know what a woman's body is and they want to control it. I think what's happening now [with trans people existing, or the social acceptance of trans people] is of a different type. It's a almost transhumanism sort of stepping away from the fact that we have a biology, that we are a sexed species, that we come in two types, that we're born, that we die, that every one of us comes out of a woman's body. And a pretense that we just come in one type and that's the meat suit that, that the robots sit in, you know, and those meat suits are basically male except some of them are a bit female and they pop out the babies and that might be a surrogate or that you know let's not talk about that bit it's too awkward. And that's something that people can gather around and think like: That's all of civilization, actually. This is the Enlightenment we're talking about here we're talking about evidence, we're talking about meaning, we're talking about words having stable meanings, we're talking about how you do medicine, how you do science. We're not just talking about the patriarchy, actually. We're talking about an attack on the whole institution of civilization. And when you do something like that it lands of course on the weakest people. That's the way that power works. The weakest people suffer it, so of course children suffer, it women suffer it, women prisoners suffer it, gay kids suffer it. But it's because it's an attack on reality and that I think is is something that's new, I don't want to necessarily use 'the house is on fire' [as a metaphor], but ... I think that that is a profound assault on the — on everything. On the values that everybody feels. Rather than being just the operation of the patriarchy, another one."
1:00:33–1:03:35 Bindel's closing remark: "We need to see the state that the labor party is in and the state of the institutional left are separate from left-wing individuals and activists. Women's Place UK is left. There are individuals, men and women, and union members and leaders and parties, that are have socialist principles... as someone that whose Focus was completely on men's violence and ending that through a feminist lens, I stood a little bit aside from the Socialist feminists who I think then and I'll be corrected and also no doubt roundly attacked afterwards by my socialist feminist friends, because I saw that they they focused too much on women's dependence and oppression in relation to men through the economy, through pay gaps and the like, and also you know spoke of 'ordinary women' which always got my goat. So I I'm really not uh hard leftists ... I think, you know, we should follow our instincts in terms of where this comes from who it's affecting who the victims of this is, and who the stakeholders are. Who's benefiting. And it all comes back to men. Every single bit of it comes back to those that want to wield power over women either by naming what a woman is, what a woman isn't, or coaxing and encouraging girls to opt out of girlhood and puberty because of the prevalence of misogyny and men's violence towards them, and the threat of men's violence, pornography and the like. And so I think that we can only really fight something that comes — in my view directly — from misogyny, by feminism. And by feminism I mean that that has to situate itself on the left because we're an anti-oppressive movement we're against institutionalized oppression and that in my view is how it has to go forward."
1:03:41–1:06:23 Joyce's closing remark, when asked by the moderator to defend her "broad church" view: "I think Julie and I will just not agree on what the definitions of right and left are. I don't think the definition of the right is pro-oppression. And so I don't think that, you know, we have anti-oppression here and pro-oppression there." She says: "there's a great deal of misogyny in trans activism" and "this is a men's rights activism movement...in large part." However: "It's a fact that it's women who are buying into it," collaborating in their own oppression. Joyce sees the "hollowing out of institutions and the corruption of institutions and I would include within that political parties but also all the people who were meant to stop this happening you know all the people who are in EDI equality diversity and inclusion all the people who are meant to be doing safeguarding the institutions ... the watchdogs of the various sorts that are meant to make sure that this sort of thing doesn't happen, that we don't end up with rapists in women's jails, that we do end up with sports being fair, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people maybe millions in this country who are paid to make sure that life is fair to the extent that it can be institutionally, and those people work against us. I am waiting to see if the Labor Party can rescue itself from being one of those institutions. So, yeah, so that is the question for me it's not a question of right or left it's a question of Institutions which institutions manage to stand against this. The Guardian has fallen. The Economist hasn't. The Guardian is left-wing. The Economist is right-wing. That's not why I think they have had these different paths. I think you could give a path-dependent [sic] explanation of which both had happened so I would be I would I would want that anyone who has not fallen finds institutions that have not fallen. There are people within them who have not fallen. And that's the coalition to me: People who have this through-line, this clear vision, the thing they're trying to do. For Julie, it's violence against women. You know for me I think it's universalizable human rights — in particular freedom of speech. But there's different ones and we can work together whether we're right or left I think and sometimes on specific issues but because we're in good faith and because we have not been captured and turned around to do the opposite of what we were meant to do."
Possibly related, to be watched:
Helen Joyce: Feminism Between the Right and the Left
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xLuEVLwun0
Here's an example of JK Rowling hawking someone's "TERF is the New Punk" merch (June 19, 2024):
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." Surely "trans-exclusionary" is an accurate descriptor for those who "object to the inclusion" of trans people? I suppose the "radical feminist" part may indeed be inaccurate and could be unfairly "politicized," in which case, I'm happy not to refer to trans-exclusionary people as "feminist." Anyway, if "TERF" is no good, can we 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.
Other popular TERF indicators: • "GC" = "gender critical" (another TERF term) • "Adult Human Female" or "Adult Human Male" • Purple/White/Green hearts or squares (appropriates genderqueer flag) • "Super" prefix (super straight, super fem) Oodles more at this wiki: rationalwiki.org/wiki/TERF_gl...
— Mx. Tiffany Leigh (@tiffanyleigh.bsky.social) Aug 23, 2024 at 3:26 PM
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