What TERFism Looks Like:
Now one of the things I find puzzling about it is that, when I look at the House of Lords debate on this legislation, those I agree with most are the radical right. Particularly the person I find that I agree with most, in here, and I’m not sure he will be pleased to find this, is Norman Tebbitt… Tebbitt also says that the savage mutilation of transgenderism, we would say if it was taking place in other cultures apart from the culture of Britain, was a harmful cultural practice, and how come we’re not recognising that in the British Isles.
– Sheila Jeffreys, Ph.D., TERF author, lecturer & academic, speaking at the Andrea Dworkin Commemorative Conference given at Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of Justice
Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent not only in religious myth, but in its offspring, phallocratic technology. The insane desire for power, the madness of boundary violation, is the mark of necrophiliacs who sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle with themselves and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirit, substituting conglomerates of corpses. This necrophilic invasion/elimination takes a variety of forms. Transsexualism is an example.
– Mary Daly, PhD, TERF author, lecturer & academic from her book, Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism pp 70 – 71
TIP: In the same way anti-gay groups claim to be “Christian” (WBC), TERFs attempt to spread anti-trans animus by passing it off as a brand of feminism, usually “Radical Feminism” or so-called “Gender Critical Feminism.”
What Feminism Looks Like:
So now I want to be unequivocal in my words: I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned. Their health care decisions should be theirs and theirs alone to make. And what I wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of “masculine” or “feminine” and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.
– Gloria Steinem, feminist icon & activist
Work with transsexuals, and studies of formation of gender identity in children provide basic information which challenges the notion that there are two discrete biological sexes. That information threatens to transform the traditional biology of sex difference into the radical biology of sex similarity… Every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.
– Andrea Dworkin, radical feminist pioneer & activist
Male dominant society has defined women as a discrete biological group forever. If this was going to produce liberation, we’d be free.… To me, women is a political group. I never had much occasion to say that, or work with it, until the last few years when there has been a lot of discussion about whether transwomen are women… I always thought I don’t care how someone becomes a woman or a man; it does not matter to me. It is just part of their specificity, their uniqueness, like everyone else’s. Anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.
– Catharine MacKinnon, radical feminist pioneer & activist
The notion that truly revolutionary radical feminism is trans-inclusive is a no brainer. I honestly do not understand how or why a strain of radical feminism has emerged that favors a biology-based/sex-essentialist theory of ‘sex caste’ over the theory of ‘sex class’ as set forth in the work of Witting, Andrea, and MacKinnon. Can radical feminism be ‘reclaimed’ so that its trans-inclusivity—which is inherent—is made apparent? I hope so.
– John Stoltenberg, radical feminist & activist
Transphobia in the feminist community isn’t new and continues to be promoted by radical feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys, Germaine Greer, and Julie Bindel who pathologize transgenderism for a variety of reasons. They characterize being transgender in various ways: as an extremely kinky sexual practice or a mental illness such as body dysmorphic disorder. Sometimes the criticism is paternalistic in claiming that transgender people are merely exploited victims of the medical industry’s drive to make money with various surgical and hormonal procedures. The 1994 book Transexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male by Janice Raymond describes being transsexual as a medical invention manufactured to create profit. Another criticism is that transgender people reinforce gender roles or expression. For example, Germaine Greer once referred to transwomen as “ghastly parodies of women” with “too much eye-shadow.” Sometimes the attacks on transgender people reach conspiracy levels by those who see the phenomenon as an effort by men to turn themselves into women in order to infiltrate “women”-only spaces. Radical feminists Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen blend transphobia with “anti-civilization” environmentalism in Deep Green Resistance (DGR). Julie Labrouste, a contact of Radical Women, was repudiated by DGR, which had been urging her to join until she mentioned she was trans-female.
– Radical Women, 2nd wave feminist organization, formed in 196 7
TIP: Like anti-gay groups, TERFs often assert that they don’t “hate” trans people.
 | TERF Position on Trans HealthcareIn the 1980s, TERFs substantively supported the effort to bring an end to trans health care access. One TERF operative wrote a government report which led the revocation of public and private insurance converge of trans medical care. According to the State of California, such policies lead to the death of trans people. |
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TERF Position on Trans EqualityFor decades, TERFs have sought to legislate trans people out of existence. Moreover, they work to oppose trans equality measures, infiltrate trans-inclusive feminist spaces, work with anti-gay groups to target trans kids and collaborate with anti-trans extremists who advocate bombing US targets. |
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TERF Position on Trans Restroom AccessMuch like their far right-wing counterparts, TERFs do not support trans people using the restroom. In fact, the TERF community was the first to use this as a political issue way back in 1973. |
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TERF Position on Body AutonomyMuch like their extremist counterparts, TERFs generally do not recognize the transitioned status of trans people and instead assert that trans people are the sex they were assigned at birth. |
IRL Violence Motivated by TERF Ideology
Sandy Stone, victim of attempted murder by TERF group:
Sandy Stone recounts the time when Olivia Records (a lesbian separatist, radical feminist women’s music collective) came under attack for being trans-inclusive: “We were getting hate mail about me.… The death threats were directed at me, but there were violent consequences proposed for the Collective if they didn’t get rid of me.”
Olivia and Stone were informed that a TERF group named The Gorgons asserted that they would murder Stone if Olivia’s show came to Seattle. Stone said that the Olivia show was “probably the only women’s music tour that was ever done with serious muscle security.”
Making good on their threats, armed Gorgons came to the show but was disarmed by Olivia security. Stone said, “In fact, Gorgons did come and they did have guns taken away from them. I was terrified. During a break between a musical number someone shouted out ‘GORGONS!’ and I made it from my seat at the console to under the table the console was on at something like superluminal speed. I stayed under there until it was clear that I wasn’t about to be shot.
Cis radical feminist Robin Tyler beaten by TERFs, recounting attempted bashing of Beth Elliott:
“We defended Beth Eliot. Robin Morgan came up with this horrible speech and when Beth went on stage to play her guitar and sing, [TERFs] started threatening her. Patty [Harrison] and I jumped on stage and we got hit, because they came onto the stage to physically beat her.”
Lesbian Avengers mobbed by TERFs, threatened with knife in front of MichFest audience:
“A huge crowd of yelling people formed around us and I started crying at that point. It got so loud that Nomy Lamm, who was performing there as part of Sister Spit, came over and stood up for us… The crowd and me were walked over to a tent area. The way that it worked was that there was a queue of people who were going to get to say whatever they wanted to say. I remember, specifically, one woman looking right at me and telling me that I needed to leave the Land as soon as possible because she had a knife and didn’t know if she would be able to control herself if I was around her.”
Stonewall Riot veteran Sylvia Rivera, victim of beating organized by a TERF opinion leader:
“‘Jean O’Leary, a founder of Radicalesbians, decided that drag queens were insulting to women… I had been told I was going to speak at the rally… She told Vito Russo to kick my ass on stage… but I still got up and spoke my piece.’ Although Rivera was famously quoted as saying in response, ‘Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned,’ this incident precipitated yet another suicide attempt on her part. Jean O’Leary later reversed her position, and she and Sylvia ultimately remained respectful peers, but the events of that day in 1973 ultimately took something out of Sylvia Rivera. In the succeeding years, Sylvia Rivera’s participation in ‘the movement’ waned. Although she attended every Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade (with the exception of two) until her death, Sylvia’s formal participation in organizations like the GLF and the GAA came to a halt.” – Susan Glisson (Ed), The Human Tradition in the Civil Rights Movement, p 325
Cis & trans activists threatened at MichFest, inspiring the Camp Trans movement:
“Some people in the festival began harassing us and then around noon on Wednesday or Thursday, the festival security stopped by and told us that the trans women in our group would have to leave, ‘for their own safety.’
Tensions were definitely rising, we were told. We had scheduled to do some workshops and some folks were definitely hostile. We were told that, for our own safety, the trans women would need to leave the festival as soon as possible. It was a situation.
We decided that I would stay inside the festival to continue educating people and the other folks would set up camp across the street from the festival in protest.”
State of California documents trans deaths attributable to barriers in accessing trans health care:
“In this study, the strongest predictor associated with the risk of suicide was gender-based discrimination that included ‘problems getting health or medical services due to their gender identity or presentation…’ Notably, this gender-based discrimination was a more reliable predictor of suicide than depression, history of alcohol/drug abuse treatment, physical victimization, or sexual assault. These studies provide overwhelming evidence that removing discriminatory barriers to treatment results in significantly lower suicide rates.”
Effective
The TERF movement is particularly effective in their campaign against trans people and trans equality as they consistently couch their actions as political/feminist/lesbian/radical/womanist critiques of gender and are therefore welcomed in spaces that would normally reject the same rhetoric from right wing people and organizations. From consistently targeting trans healthcare to supporting reparative therapy for trans children, the TERF movement – while historically seen as both ridiculous and irrelevant – has managed to inflict more suffering upon the trans community than any other anti-trans equality movement in the history of the United States.
Misrepresentations of Radical Feminism
There’s a reason TERF opinion leaders like Sheila Jeffreys carefully edits out Andrea Dworkin’s thoughts about trans people when she, not infrequently, cites Dworkin in her many condemnations of trans people. We submit to you that she and other TERFs engage in this intellectual turpitude because to do otherwise would call into question their assertion that what they offer is a “Radical Feminist perspective” of the trans experience. TERFs enjoy a media climate that is all too happy to promote the falsehood that “Radical Feminism” has an issue with trans people. In the name of pioneering (trans-inclusive) Radical Feminists like Dworkin and MacKinnon, TERFs propagate their anti-trans animus in national news outlets, academic presses, peer-reviewed journals in addition to all forms of online media. Even so, TERFs can be found in numerous news outlets (ironically) complaining about not having a platform to spread their claims about both radical feminism and trans people.
Promoting Right-Wing Sex Essentialism
The sex essentialism found within TERF ideology is somewhat similar to the sex essentialism found in right-wing ideology. It is therefore not uncommon to find anti-gay propaganda mills and Tea Party politicians quoting TERFs and TERFs quoting anti-gay Tea Party propagandists. Just as anti-gay groups have token gay people, the TERF crew has token trans people. The TERF movement, much like other sex essentialist ideologies, encourages trans people to detransition.
We at TheTERFs.com can’t quietly watch the colonization of “radical feminism” by what amounts to an ideological anti-trans group without – at the very least – attempting to document TERF ideology, animus, and misinformation. Moreover, we are tired of this movement of animus fraudulently wrapping itself in the good work of RadFems like Wittig, Dworkin, MacKinnon, Stoltenberg, and de Beauvoir to gain access to feminist, medical, legal and communal spaces.
But, I heard that “TERF is a slur!”
The “TERF is a slur” meme is a way for TERFs to simultaneously attack and dismiss critiques of their ideology and behavior. Recently, a cisgender feminist used the term TERF and was immediately attacked – not for the observations she actually made – but for daring to distinguish between radical feminists and TERFs. TERF opinion leader Elizabeth Hungerford’s 2013 CounterPunch article is often cited when making the “TERF is a slur” claim without acknowledging the fact that Hungerford herself actually identifies as a “TERF.” Hungerford wrote, “It’s just that I DO want to exclude some trans people from some situations, depending on the context… So yeah, I am a TERF. And I’m not ashamed. At all.”
While it is often asserted that TERF is a term coined by trans people as a slur, the term actually comes from the non-trans feminist community. In 2008 an online feminist community popularized “TERF” as a way of making a distinction between two types of feminism: trans-exclusionary “radical feminism” and radical feminism itself. TheTERFs.com uses this term in a manner consistent with its widely known context, as asserted by the progenitor of the term, cisgender feminist Viv Smythe: “It was not meant to be insulting. It was meant to be a deliberately technically neutral description of an activist grouping. We wanted a way to distinguish TERFs from other RadFems with whom we engaged who were trans*-positive/neutral, because we had several years of history of engaging productively/substantively with non-TERF RadFems.”
Where did you find that great John Stoltenberg quote? I wanted to use it myself, but I haven’t been able to find the original source for it.
It’s from personal correspondence. You’ll see a lot more quotes like this from John (and many other radfems) in 2016 😀
http://radfem.transadvocate.com/pt-6-the-fork-in-the-road-sex-class-consciousness-vs-biologism-essentialism-and-identity_n_936
Transgender hate speech is not freedom of speech, it is a hate crime.
http://www.chrisentiae.com/gendervie/transgender_hate_speech.html
Freedom of speech means any speech just not that which you agree with. Why do you want to silence feminists since most trans people claim to be one??
You’re so wrong in so many levels.
To tolarate intolerance is to risk our right to tolerance. To replicate discourse that it’s used to perpetuate any kind of violence is what makes it dangerous.
For example would you like to hear credible death treats every now and then and everyone be like “hey, it’s their right to speak whatever they want!”.
Who’s “silencing” anyone?
Ever heard of the paradox of tolerance? Philosopher Karl Popper described it like this: “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”
To continue to call TERFs radical completely misrepresents the word. There is nothing radical about they have to say. They are as reactionary as the most staunch bigot and must be oppossed
i’ve been scrolling through these comments for nearly two hours(?) and even there are a lot of ignorant comments on this thread, i can say that i’ve thoroughly enjoyed the discussion and am glad that there hasn’t been (too much) all caps yelling. i just don’t see why acknowledging gender dysphoria as an actual issue/problem is such a difficult concept to grasp. TERFs seem to care way too much about what they THINK transwomen will do rather than what transwomen ACTUALLY want to do, which is to just live their goddamn lives in the way they want to; whether that be having transitioned or not.
As the organizer and coordinator of the event, I urge you to get your facts from the source. Maybe contact Remember Our Sisters Everywhere, WAVAW, BWSS – the organizers of the Dec 6 memorial you baselessly insist that I disrupted.
Alternatively, ask VRR to comment on their invitation to me to participate in their event.
It’s far, far better to get your facts from the source rather than reverting to the comments section in a venimous but mostly unknown TERF hate site like Lisa Shenko’s GenderTrender.
Warmest regards,
Morgane Oger
Seems the TERFs, with their key concern about males accessing all-female spaces, have good grounds for their concerns. I don’t think anyone believes all transitioning people are violent predators, but some definitely are. This comes from “Written evidence submitted by British Association of Gender Identity Specialists to the Transgender Equality Inquiry”, September 2015.
“The criminal justice system merits quite a bit of thinking about. On the one hand, many of us can remember patients who were charged with crimes, convicted and who ended up on the sex offenders register when we thought that the same thing wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t a trans person…
“The converse is the ever-increasing tide of referrals of patients in prison serving long or indeterminate sentences for serious sexual offences. These vastly outnumber the number of prisoners incarcerated for more ordinary, non-sexual, offences. It has been rather naïvely suggested that nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this. These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison through to a desire for a transfer to the female estate (to the same prison as a co-defendant) through to the idea that a parole board will perceive somebody who is female as being less dangerous through to a [false] belief that hormone treatment will actually render one less dangerous through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard. I am sure that the Governor concerned would be happy to talk about this.
In other words, since a warden overheard inmates talking about how great it would be to get sex changes and transfer out of their cell bloc, that means all trans people might be criminal psychopathic rapists who should be excluded, just to be on the safe side. The document goes on to say that trans care in prisons needs to be evidence-based. What you’re doing, in trans discourse, is referred to as the “Klan Fallacy” since the KKK was the one group that enjoyed the most success at politicizing and weaponizing the Oppressed-As-Rapist meme. In the 1915 Klan movie The Birth of a Nation, a “Black” man was stereotyped as a rapist. The Oppressed-As-Rapist meme was used to make all Black men look like potential rapists which meant (in white supremacist culture) that, of course, their racial segregation wasn’t irrational. Following in the Klan’s footsteps, here you’ve politicized and weaponized a letter calling for better trans medical care metrics in prison in an effort to make all trans woman look like potential rapists, making their segregation seem rational. And you’ve performed the Klan Fallacy in the name of feminism.
Darth, is that you?
PS: Here’s the plea from the Klan’s Birth of a Nation. Ask yourself how many times you’ve made similar pleas with regard to trans people. Also, here’s a picture of the Klan marching to “Save Our Children” from teh ghaz. Have you found yourself crying out to save our children from teh tranz yet? If not, you’re well on your way.
Not so easy to brush off this report. The British Association of Gender Identity Specialists numbers over a hundred members and comprises the overwhelming majority of all clinicians working in every Gender Identity Clinic in the British Isles. The membership is drawn from all the involved disciplines and includes Speech Therapists, Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Surgeons, Psychosexual Counsellors, Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Endocrinologists, General Practitioners and Social Workers. Not a “warden overheard.”
The document is not long, but it gives some very disturbing information and is worth reading, if only to be well enough informed to make sensible comments. http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/women-and-equalities-committee/transgender-equality/written/19532.pdf
The lack of concern you display about the safety of women and children is, sadly, typical of so many posters here. Transitioning appears a very narcissistic preocupation. Your claim that my post reflects the politics of the KKK is a pointless Goodwin’s argument which – of itself – highlights the fact that you have not felt able to make any solid response to this disturbing report. You do not seem to perceive that it is the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists with which you have issue rather than me as an individual. I’m simply providing the quote.
It is a fact that cross-dressing is a common fetish among sex offenders and, while I’m sure most trans people do not see themselves as posing any physical threat to others, how are women and girls supposed to know whether a visibly male person in their private space is a trans person or a violent offender? Millennia of experience has taught females to be extremely wary of males in such circumstances.
Yeah, your adjectives don’t make your Klan Fallacy less noticeable. Thanks for posting the link. There’s lots of great info about why trans healthcare is necessary and should continue in that letter. I’m not sure how you get that wanting evidence-based medicine is “disturbing.” What I found “disturbing” about that letter is the documented incompetence within the healthcare system. For instance: “Yesterday, an Association member was contacted about a patient who was discharged from the London gender identity clinic in 2013 and whose General Practitioner requested a local hysterectomy (with a referral letter from the London clinic). At least three gynaecology departments in district hospitals have said that they ‘cannot’ offer this surgery and the patient and his General Practitioner are growing somewhat desperate.” If there’s anything nefarious about that letter, it’s the incompetence and discrimination it documents. The letter closes with:
I support this letter. Honestly, your attempt to make this letter seem as if it’s a report condemning trans care or that it warns that trans people are rapists is as ridiculous as it is sad. The fact that you apparently believe it’s a useful investment of your time and energy to portray trans people as rapists speaks to your personal ideology, and certainly isn’t reflective of any evidence-based research.
http://planettransgender.com/trans-advocate-julianna-fialkowski-charged-child-pornography/
So perhaps not all that unlikely…
And I could give you a list of cis women child rapists a mile long. How appropriate would it be for some anti-cis ideologue to pimp the trauma, pain and suffering of those children to assert that cis women should be viewed as possible rapists? Yes, I’m sure that in all the history of crime in America, you will find a relative handful of trans women who acted like the cis women who are daily featured in news articles for committing violent/sexual crimes.
>So perhaps not all that unlikely…
Actually it’s highly unlikely. You’re doing exactly the same thing the Klan does when they demonize groups they hate. All your posts do is speak to your character, animus and dishonest politic.
Why are you so obsessed with being in our spaces? Why can’t you lobby to create your own spaces? Then you write an article to slander women who have very realistic reasons to be afraid (they have been raped and beaten by men) and you were born a man and you cannot deny that, and cannot FORCE someone to just accept you as a born female no matter how bad you want it. It doesn’t make them bigots. Their concerns are valid and you are literally behaving like men by continuing to invade our spaces and ignore our grievances. You are wrong.
I think it’s probably awful to fear and hate trans and intersex women that much.
I think it also sucks that you seem to hate foundational radical feminist trans-inclusive orgs like Cell 16, Olivia, Lesbian Tide, West Coast Lesbian Conference, etc. I think it sucks that you reject the Radical Feminist tradition of Dworkin, Mackinnon, Wittig, etc.
I can’t believe you think that Tori’s comment shows a “fear and hate (of) trans and intersex women!”
1. She simply disagrees with the fact that a man can become a woman, and vice versa. This is grounded in biological fact; what evidence do *you* have to support your wild claims? And no, just because some psychologists *say* that they believe it, this does not count as substantial evidence. I’ve researched a hell of a lot. Provide us with actual scientific facts and not subjective opinions. It is totally unreasonable to slander someone as “hateful”, “bigoted” or “trans-phobic” just because they do not share your beliefs.
2. It is totally dramatic and false to say that she’s afraid of trans people – she didn’t say that she’d run away screaming if she bumped into someone trans on the street for goodness sake. But you can respect trans people and also recognise that allowing *anybody* the right to enter a bathroom just because they *say* they identify as female will opens up even more opportunities to sick men. Millions of women have had enough of sexual violence and harassment. It is usually not a question of will it affect them, but where and when. Did you see #MeToo?
3. Her point clearly is not that trans-women should go in the men’s, she is just asking why you aren’t lobbying for separate gender neutral bathrooms.
4. Intersex people are clearly an exception because that is the body they are born in. Unfortunately they are born with an extremely rare disorder of sex development. We cannot base our whole ideas of sex and gender on a disorder.
So it sounds like anyone who is not mentally ill is called a terf
No JOE, Cathy Brennan and her group of hate mongers are called TERFs.
Yes, that’s about right, Joe. Look up “cotton ceiling” if you want to see the offensive demands of male “lesbians” — or if you want an example of porn-sickness look up little Stefonknee, a 52 year old who deserted a wife and 7 children to live as a six year old girl with a new “mommy & daddy” who let Stefoknee enjoy age play with their real grandchildren. Stefoknee tells us all how wonderful it was to be sodomized by her daddy. She has a record of violence against members of her original family. Since this went mainstream there’s been widespread concern expressed about this person’s contact with children. Before — not so much.
Stefoknee was prominent in the transgender community; promoted by the Transgender Project, and a speaker at The WorldPride Human Rights Conference 2014. It’s only now that all the revolting details have emerged into the mainstream all of sudden there are posts from transwomen disowning her. Now she’s not a “real transwoman”.
Just like the fetishist supported by transactivists and their allies in the Planet Hollywood gym fiasco, these characters are always innocent victims of wicked transphobia until the repellent details emerge. It’s still definitely a man’s world. Even in women’s facilities.
Sex change is not possible. Transwomen are male, and human females have a need for safe spaces away from male intrusion: refuges, bathrooms, prisons, etc. Try the GenderTrender blog for truth amidst the froth blown up by all those special unicorns.
Why are you peddling a fiction? “In the same way hate groups which claim to be Christian (WBC),”
If a hate group claims to be christian and say they obey jeezus, then they are christians. Lying and denying doesn’t change that fact, no matter how much you want it to.
Comparing christian hate groups to TERFs is a poor analogy. Hate groups claim they *are* something, TERFs claim they *are* *not* something.
TERFs claim they are “radical feminists” and/or “gender critical.” They are neither. They are a hate group formed around reifying a belief in a natural sex binary, phenotype permanence and anti-trans harassment. TERF opinion leader Shelia Jeffreys wrote:
Jeffreys seems oblivious to the reality that when she explicitly appeals to the embedded ad naturam morality within her natural sex binary framework, she is publicly pronouncing her attachment to and support of behavioral norms and taboos predicated upon a coercive binary cultural system. We generally call such systems “ gender”. She, of course, refers to her gender system as preceding from a radical feminist or gender critical perspective.
What? I’ll tell you something, “P”–one’s grammar is indicative of one’s thought processes.
“Instead of all this arguing with women, why don’t you guys organize your own spaces? Seems you just want to invade women’s spaces and cause as much trouble as you can. Oh yeah, thanks for destroying MichFest you arrogant men, typical!”
FIRST OFF TERF, The ONLY people who ruined michfest are the TERFs who were too busy having their head up their a** instead of allowing LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL, but hey, I guess our forefathers were just kidding about that liberty and justice for all nonsense, huh ?.
Second, why don’t you terfs quit harassing trans women and go do something useful with your life…….for once in your existence..
Third, TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN, end of discussion.
Bobbie Jo, you are quite confused in your thinking. The people you so angrily call TERFS are not afraid of trans. It is not a phobia to want to live in reality. I have yet to read an explanation that is relevant to the discussion of this issue. Woman is not a feeling. I don’t think you get that. A non female has no idea at all what it feels like to be a woman. Dresses, lipstick and hormones do not make a woman. I understand that transpeople do not identify with the sex they are. That does not make them the opposite sex. It must be uncomfortable, but it will never be woman. I can’t figure out why the trans community is so hell bent on being something other than trans. What is so bad about being trans? Are you ashamed? Why not just be who you are and stop the pretending that you are female. The women who are your allies know that you aren’t real women. That is, the educated women. We learned about DNA in second or third grade. It is extremely rare to have unclear DNA. We know you are men, and we know men can be wonderful or horrible. Sometimes we want to be only with women. You have no respect for that. Men’s energy changes every space they are in, and sometimes that is good, sometimes bad.
I want you to equal rights, but I will not allow you to bully me into thinking you are entitled to women’s space simply because you say so. If you really believe in women’s rights, you can stop trashing us. Sometimes all I hear from the trans community is whine, whine, whine. Learn how to create things for yourself and stop taking things away from women. You think you’re changing America, but just like Trump you’re destroying what you touch. Trump said if you say something often enough people will start to believe it. And that is exactly what you are doing with your transwomen are women. Even you don’t believe it. If you did, the trans movement would disappear and men and women would continue to carry on. Why are you so afraid to be yourself. No one cares what you wear, what surgeries you get, what hormones you inject, and that so many young trans are sterilized. Be brave. Wear what you want. But stop pretending you’re women.
Transphobia: Within trans discourse, the “phobia” in transphobia usually refers to the strong behavioral tendency to reject (eg, a “hydrophobic” substance) non-cisgender people, issues, causes and/or concerns. However, the term, in very specific instances, may be utilized to indicate a presumed fear-based cause to observed anti-trans behaviors. – TransAdvocate Glossary
Who’s trying to “enter” women’s spaces? Trans women are women. Period.
The argument of women being only women-born-women or that lived-experience of trans women is “male” is 10 years out of date and misrepresents reality. In fact, the tiny bit of truth in it is actually a symptom of the marginalization and discrimination that comes with the “cant you just ask for your own space?” questions.
As part of my advocacy work with TAS, I interact and collaborate with 11-15 year old trans girls who have lived their *entire* life as girls and are legally recognized as “Female” on their birth certificates and citizenship documents.
The world has moved on and a whole bunch of people are trying to catch up with the facts and doing a miserable job of it.
In the last 24 months of activism, I have not, not even once, seen a TERF argument taken seriously in my community.
In Canada, to help people who are afraid of trans women or trans men still live their lives, we’ve added single-occupancy no-barrier restrooms and changing spaces so the rest of us can be left alone. And it is quietly working very well.
There is no doubt there will always be some crackpot extreme position in any “ism” movement and feminism is not immune to this problem. Luckily, Few of us listens to the tinfoil helmet opinions.
Instead of all this arguing with women, why don’t you guys organize your own spaces? Seems you just want to invade women’s spaces and cause as much trouble as you can. Oh yeah, thanks for destroying MichFest you arrogant men, typical!
Yes, blame trans women for MichFest ending. Performers like the Indigo Girls didn’t have to boycott. You’ve figured us out. Our whole mission in life is to “invade” women’s spaces and cause as much trouble as possible. You’re not scapegoating, are you?
Just to make things interesting, I’ll throw in this lecture by a Stanford University professor of neurology about transsexualism having a real, testable, physical cause:
Well… those are theories. I find it interesting for people who actually need scientific evidences to help them feel better with themselves, but I precisely tend to be very cautious with “scientific” or scientist simplistic explanations of transgender realness.
First of all because “science” has mainly been used nowaday to genocide us or negate our existance (which is pretty much the same) either by killing us, and encouraging to suicide, or by pscyhatrizing us and/or misgendering us.
Also because actually I’m quite sure than many trans people (if not the majority ?) actually don’t have a “special brain” (many studies have shown the “male/female” brain neurologic dichotomy remained really scientifically ,non-consensual) different from cis people, even some of them have “neurologic predispositions”. And vice versa I’m quite sure many cis people who’ll remain more or less happy cis people (about their gender) may have an “intersex” brain. But all those categorization implies to considere that there actually is something like “cis people with cis brains” (or “neurological profile blablabla”) in the first place from wich trans people would differe. All those strange “scientic” divagations sounds very much like classical normalization and categorization processes to me.
As said before again and again, gender binary categories (“male” and “female” / “men” and “women”) are social roles forming social groups and social classes. I encourage you to read Marshall Sahlins about human nature (his theory is that human is a cultural animal, and therefore there isn’t really something like “human nature”) and Alexandra Kollontai about paleontolgy and sexes (she explained that before the domestication process and the developpement of agriculture -and therefore of the patriarchy- individuals of the “two sexes” tended to be very similar if not the same in terms of physical aptitudes, shape and height, because they were assigned randomly to similar tasks.
This totally smash the “natural origin” of gender binary that would “fit to natural sexes”. The social division of sexes is political, historical and cutural. Not natural. Not in “the brain”.
Pretending there’s anything like a “transsexual brain” neurotype, a “female brain” or a “male brain” is just another heritage of pseudosciences like “sociobiology” and “anthropometry”. Those same pseudoscientific bullshit that were used for decades to justify patriarcal division of the sexes, colonialism, genocide, the Shoah (yeah, you know, the measures of brains, noses, etc), or just things like “criminology” (another pseudoscience) and all of its racist horseshit.
Actually, this ridiculous fallacy have a name : it’s called neurosexism.
Trans people don’t need some new biological essentialism to justify their existence, cause such essentialism will always redifine the frontiers of “who is trans” and “who isn’t” according to some spooky book or foggy “studies”, and not by material and social experience, and the gender people reclaim for themselves. Gender is a social construct, and we here we are. Period. Deal with it.
sources :
– why sociobiology, darwinism and “evolutionary psychology” are racist / antisemite. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/culturebox/2000/01/evolutionary_psychologys_antisemite.html
– an academic critique of sociobiology : http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1980.1.192579?journalCode=psaprocbienmeetp
– On the links between “scientific racism”, anthropology, “anthropometry” and similar pseudosciences : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
– A critique of biological determinism (be it “pro” or “anti-trans”) by trans woman and activist Julia Serano : https://medium.com/@juliaserano/transgender-people-and-biological-sex-myths-c2a9bcdb4f4a
Oh the cognitive dissonance of these terfs must be driving them nuts, gender is a social construct but only if you stay in your biologically assigned sex, rofl.
The explanation of this quote above is wholly inaccurate:
“One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.”
First what this quote states is that women are groomed socially to becoming women. This does not mean men can be women–to the contrary! It means that gender is a cultural, social production where the woman is produced by civilization. That the human female is determined by the social does not mean that biology, psychology or economy play no role. De Beauvoir refers specifically to these fates stating that these fates feed into the collectivity of civilization which “produces woman.” De Beauvoir’s book goes on (and do read it) to elucidate the oppression that women live through this grooming. She does not deny, however, the specificity of the female body.
And then the rest of the above quote of Wittig above is misleading and dishonest. Wittig was very critical towards the notion of naturalizing woman. Again this did not mean that women were not socialized from the biological form of the body, to the contrary what this meant for Wittig who was theorizing the lesbian body, was that women are not merely heterosexual (nor men merely homosexual): “The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role « woman. » It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man.” She clearly is discussing sexuality and not the ability to morph like a chameleon through cosmetic surgery into the other.
In fact, on this matter Wittig is clear–one cannot just presto zippo become the opposite sex and acknowledging the heterosexualizaiton of gender is the core of her critique. In no way does either de Beauvoir or Wittig suggest that becoming a woman is the product of identification with. Both are clear that this is a violent socialization and that women need to react against gender:
“To refuse to be a woman, however, does not mean that one has to become a man. Besides, if we take as an example the perfect « butch, » the classic example which provokes the most horror, whom Proust would have called a woman/man, how is her alienation different from that of someone who wants to become a woman ? Tweedledum and Tweedledee. At least for a woman, wanting to become a man proves that she has escaped her initial programming. But even if she would like to, with all her strength, she cannot become a man. For becoming a man would demand from a woman not only a man’s external appearance but his consciousness as well, that is, the consciousness of one who disposes by right of at least two « natural » slaves during his life span. This is impossible, and one feature of lesbian oppression consists precisely of making women out of reach for us, since women belong to men. Thus a lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a notman, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society.”
I am not surprised by the misreadings above as much of transgender theory rests on some really sloppy readings of Judith Butler.
You wrote:
Yes, I totally agree with you take on W and DB. I think where you split with them – me, and most trans people – is that you seem to assume that sex exists ex nihilo. The thoughts you have in your head about what sex is only exist in your head. You don’t say that person X has Y number of male and/or female attributes; instead, your group asserts that the entire body is itself a sexed attribute: male or female. Folks in your camp seem to think that this mental contextualization somehow isn’t gender.
Since you seem to be familiar with W and DB, you should know that the foundation of radical feminism was built upon a materialist existentialism. W referred to this as the “subjective” and was her central complaint of communist materialism. DB referred to this issue more directly: she called it existentialism. The thoughts you have in your head about sex isn’t sex; it’s gender.
The entire body IS a sexed attribute, male or female, because your sex chromosomes are in all your cells. Take any cell from your body and put it under a microscope and you’d see them. Sex IS a physical, material property. Because having babies is a physical, material property. It’s true that our species makes sex into a social interaction as well and takes pleasure from the act whether or not we reproduce but those are all secondary to what physical sex is actually for.
I’m not saying this means that we should only have sex when we mean to make babies, by the way, though maybe we should be more discerning about whom we f?!k and under which circumstances because it’d bring us to far less grief. But that IS what sex is for. Not for wearing dresses. Not for wearing makeup. Not for having laydeefeels.
Yes, I know there are sterile people. Blindness isn’t an eye color. There are people who can’t walk, too, but would you deny that feet and legs are what help us walk?
No, the body is something we humans call meat. You seem to believe that the thoughts you have in your head and the material reality that exists around you are one in the same. Your perception is a construct; specifically, because you exist within culture, it’s a cultural construct. When you perceive through language, you are perceiving through culture. Reproduction is a material reality. Your thoughts, feelings, assumptions and stories you have regarding that material reality doesn’t exist outside your head.
Arguing with TERFs about this reality goes something like this:
TERF: Sex is real, gender is a social construct! Radical feminists know this to be true! NO POMO!
Non-TERF: If your notion of “sex” relies on languaging, pedagogy and praxis, it’s a construct too… And have you ever actually read a good translation of de Beauvoir?
TERF: Humans are sexually dimorphic.
Non-TERF: And intersex people–
TERF: THE EXISTENCE OF INTERSEX PEOPLE DOESN’T MEAN THAT HUMANS AREN’T SEXUALLY DIMORPHIC! Some people are born without legs, does that mean that humans aren’t bipedal? Also, stop appropriating intersex people!!!11!
Non-TERF: Are you saying that humans born without two-legs are bipedal because they are human? Are you saying that intersex people are either male or female because they are human?
TERF: HUMANS ARE SEXUALLY DIMORPHIC!
Non-TERF: Yeah, that looks like a construct to me…
TERF: HUMANS ARE SEXUALLY DIMORPHIC!
Non-TERF: Um, yes I see that you think all humans fit into a binary because they are human and you don’t think that belief is a construct.
TERF: HUMANS ARE SEXUALLY DIMORPHIC! SEX IS REAL! GENDER IS A CONSTRUCT!
Non-TERF: Yes we covered that already–
TERF: You’re a misogynist-MRA-dude-bro-rapist!111
Non-TERF: 0.o
Yeahright, I believe it is. The whole body is not a sex attribute, I hope you understand that. What you said about chromosomes is inaccurate as well. You may find this website interesting but, as it turns out, there are chromosomal variations. Not only the very rare XXY but some people are XX and develop as men, some people are XY and develop as women, some people are half XX and half XY, what are they then? (http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943). Also, these are classified as intersex conditions and over 4% of the population is like that.
Given those tests are sometimes innacurate and the fact that many people don’t get them, let’s go to the next easiest measure of how to measure whethere they are male or female, their junk, wrong again. Some people are born without a uterus, some people are born without testes. Some people have penises and vaginas, some have a mixture of the two. My mother was a teacher at an all boys school and there was one boy who developed double D breasts out of nowhere during puberty. What are they then? (http://health.usnews.com/health-news/health-wellness/articles/2013/05/14/miss-michigans-life-without-a-uterus)
Also, as I am sure you are aware, sex is a whole combination of things and gender is in the head. Well the bit about it being in the head is very accurate, the final link included is a link to a lecture about intersex conditions in the trans brain. That’s the thing that tells you ‘male or female’ when you are developing, it’s a major part of sex, just as important as their junk when people define their sex, what your head is actually telling you. Even if it is not too well known, the fact that the cast majority of trans women actually have a very real part of their body which is specific to those who are born ‘females’ breaks down most gender essentialist arguements. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3C4ZJ7HyuE&feature=youtu.be)
I hope I schooled you in something and didn’t just waste five minutes of my time writing this, but at the very least, can you take some of this onboard?
Sincerely,
Scarlet
I know of not one single radfem, even the demonised Cathy Brennan, who opposes equal rights for trans folk as regards medical treatment, housing, employment, the law, sexual discrimination or bodily safety.
Nor is critique and analysis of behavior, language and psychology in any way a material threat or erasure. One cannot analyse or critique that which does not exist – ergo such CANNOT be denial OR erasure. Try logic, not acting like an emperor insisting on the right to be naked yet demanding execution of anyone who notices said naked ness.
Conflating drawing the line at access to female only space and female only gatherings with a wish to deny human rights speaks not only to delusional entitlement but is also a downright lie , and one can only imagine the rabid promulgation of such lies, both libelous and slanderous , not to mention inciteful in nature , stems from a psychology not disimilar to that of a rapist denied prey.
You’re absolutely correct. However, if this was what TERFs did, I think few would take issue with it. What TERF opinion leaders do is get invited to Oxford to assert that trans women aren’t women because our vaginas don’t smell (as Greer did) or write academic papers asserting that trans women aren’t women because our vaginas smell worse than cis women’s vaginas (as Jeffreys did). When Daly asserted that trans women were necrophiliacs or when Brennan claimed – in the name of Radical Feminism – that trans women are mutilated, they weren’t offering an “analysis of behavior, language and psychology.” They were spreading hate in the name of feminism.
The fact you’re colluding with the hate, attempting to shield it and pretend that it’s something other that what it is, is gross.
“I know of not one single radfem, even the demonised Cathy Brennan, who opposes equal rights for trans folk as regards medical treatment, housing, employment, the law, sexual discrimination or bodily safety.”
“They expect we’ll be shocked to see statistics about them (trans women) being killed, and don’t realize, some of us wish they would ALL be dead.” – Bev Jo Van Dohre
“Transsexualism should be seen as a violation of human rights” – Sheila Jeffreys
“I contend that the problem with transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence” — Janice Raymond
I REALLY LIKE THIS SITE
Ditto
TERFS –. I had a “less then pleasant” experience with them, because I replied on a post on one of their websites which they got their panties in a bunch about. I guess my reply was a little too truthful and they didn’t appreciate that.
Instead of just saying, we disagree with your opinion, they then went and attacked me online, and also had the nerve to start making prank calls to a crisis center line I was working. Attacking me means nothing since I don’t care what idiots think, but when you start harassing a crisis center call line, that’s when you are stepping over the line.
If the terfs aren’t labeled as a hate group, they certainly should be.
I think this page is a little unfair to Transsexual Empire. While I didn’t agree with the book either when I read it, it was the first time I’d ever read a dissenting voice about what it meant to be trans, by an author who identifies as trans. I have my own thoughts about it but there definitely IS truth to the notion that surgeons were speaking for trans people in a way that was highly problematic, just as it’s problematic when advocates for the blind, the deaf, or autistic drown out the voices of people who are blind, deaf, or autistic. Just look at what has happened to intersex folk in the 20th century at the hands of surgeons and the ways they continue to be discriminated against in palpable ways today.
I personally think that transmen and transwomen have different attitudes towards medical interventions because our society treats gender non-conformity differently depending on presentation, putting entirely different pressures on each. I came to a personal decision that surgery was bullshit–did the berdache get surgery? ah, no–but if hormone therapy had been available to me as a young person you’d better believe I would have been all over that! I think life looks a lot brighter for trans teens who are able to transition during puberty instead of being faced with expensive, dangerous, fraught choices as adults once your bones are already set.
Janice Raymond, the author of the Transsexual Empire, does not identify as trans, has stated that trans people suffer from insanity and that trans medical care should be mandated out of existence.
Some trans folks have always opted for surgical interventions when such interventions were available. Asia has 1000s of years of history with crude surgical interventions. Trans men have been having surgical interventions in the US since at least the 1800s and Western scientific literature began discussing the trans experience in the 1800s.
Yes, any type of surgery is dangerous. That’s a given. However, let’s not pretend that the inherent danger of trans surgery is on the level of bypass surgeries. I too am happy that trans kids have options that were not available to me. So much suffering could have been avoided had I been able to get the help I needed when I was very young.
Janice Raymond is controversial figure, but your allegations against her false. Either read the book or check out the rebuttals here: http://janiceraymond.com/fictions-and-facts-about-the-transsexual-empire/.
I have strong reservations about medicalising kids who report gender dysphoria. A paper in J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry, “Psychosexual outcome of gender-dysphoric children,” concluded that: “Most children with gender dysphoria will not remain gender dysphoric after puberty.” There’s another Scandanavian paper saying much the same, but with a wider age group, but I couldn’t find it and, tbh, haven’t the time. Must rush…
I wonder if the regret felt by many mature trans gender women that with treatment they could have had a smaller, more traditionally feminine frame is leading them to feel that any trans inclinations in children should be medicalised so that boys don’t go through puberty? As a parent, I think you should let well alone. I would not take any action to encourage or discourage adult sexuality or reproductive health in a child.
Yeah, she flat out lied. Here’s the evidence-based review of her “Fictions and Facts” claims:
http://www.transadvocate.com/fact-checking-janice-raymond-the-nchct-report_n_14554.htm
oracle133
the thing is a lot of commentary assume that there is a single pathway to being transfemale
but if you look at the range of difference between those who consider themselves transfemale it is clear that it is not a single pathway to this, but a multiple one. the end result of ‘transness’ may be the same but it is likley to have many different origins / causes so that any cause which might be true for some is not going to be true for all
It seems the biggest threat to transgenders isn’t the radical Christian right, but members of your own insane political party. Good job guys.
No, Ricky, it’s more like very extreme elements of the left wing joining forces with very extreme elements of the right wing. Kind of like the Nazis and the Bolsheviks early in the second world war. Both groups *should* have been completely been ideologically opposed but they put their hatred aside momentarily even though on paper it made no sense and they had a lot of reasons to hate each other.
Like wise, radical TERF feminists wouldn’t have been able to do it without support from equally bigoted Republicans. Neither radical second wave feminists OR hardcore extremist evangelical right wingers are our friends. It doesn’t particularly matter what rationale they use, any more than it mattered to African Americans during Jim Crow and the civil rights struggles, they suffered either way and so do we.
Hi! I’m writing a paper on TERF ideology. I’m looking for academic sources on their shit, basically. If you have anything, at all, shoot it my way? This site has been SO HELPFUL for my initial research, but alas. Academia.
There’s a very real difference between RadFems and TERFs. Check out http://www.transadvocate.com/sex-essentialism-terfs-and-smelly-vaginas_n_14924.htm
The problem is: Many people, especially in societies with strong stereotypical gender-roles that there’s also a strong regulation for how a body has to look like. And the US are one of these regions on earth where these rules are very strong. If a girl is born with masculinized body-parts (transsexual), there are some guys (doctors, priests and politicians) who define that those girls/women do not exist. And cause they wanted to be the ones who want to pull the strings they invented something like “gender identity” (John Money) to have a tool that they can use for that. The “body-rule” of thes guys is: a girl has to have a body that is sexy (in the eyes of those men), she’s able to bear children, a.s.o. …a girl with masculinzed body-parts (transsexual) so must be defined from them either as “intersexual” (a group that is pathologised for that reason) or a “guy, who identifies as women” (transgender).
Some “transgender”-activists – escepecially in countries where the definitions of “women” are strongly made by men – till today do not understand that “gender” is a social construct and a harmful tool for regulating bodies and to define the boundary between what fit’s to the male definitions of being “women enough” and what doesn’t fit to that definitions and had to be defined as “ill”.
Your observations are both valid and flawed. You’ve made some assertions informed by historical narratives. Moreover, you’re equivocating about what “gender identity” means to trans people and what gender is IRL. At the same time, you’re totally right to call out the patriarchal perspective early docs oppereded from.
To be clear, I think trans and cis people often talked past each other where “gender identity” is concerned because for many cis people, they are constitutionally incapable of grasping the trans experience of gender. In 1964, Dr. Stoller wrote:
In 1967, on the cover of Christine Jorgensen’s book, Harry Benjamin wrote:
These cis male doctors, along with many critics of the trans experience (both past and present), often project their cis experience of gender upon the trans experience. For cis people, gender indoctrination begins with subjectively experiencing their sexed attributes as being part of them from their earliest memories. Such a state primes one to take on gender roles culturally associated with those physical attributes to the point that gender indoctrination feels natural. That isn’t how trans people experience gender.
Because cis people’s perspective defined the medical gatekeepers, early on trans people had to modulate their narratives to comport with the presumptions of cis therapists and docs who presented the problem exactly backwards. Early docs/therapists asserted that trans women were cultural women and thus, the best thing to do was to reconstruct the flesh to comport with that cultural gender role. In fact, for transsexuals, from our earliest memories, we subjectively experience our sex attributes as being wrong. Trans people grow up very consciously acting out gender roles precisely because gender indoctrination wasn’t primed to start with. For instance, by 5 years old I was praying for god to either kill me in my sleep or fix my body. I wasn’t praying to wear a dress or for a dolly. My issue, from my earliest of memories wasn’t a role; it was, in fact, my body.
Christine was clear that her issue was her subjective experience of her sex attributes from her earliest memories. While Christine talked about needing to be comfortable in her own body, Benjamin and Stoller talked about roles and social identities and so her narrative was modulated to focus on her discomfort with traditionally male roles precisely because it reflected the cis experience of gender. Her trans gender narrative was devalued and her cis gender narrative was embraced by a cis audience who believed that gender roles were natural and was somehow naturally defined by one’s sexed attributes.
“I was a woman masquerading in a seemingly male body,” said Jorgensen to her early endocrinologist, Dr. Christian Hamburger. It was only after Jorgensen popularized this dysphoric experience of gender as a reaction to one’s physical sexed attributes that Dr. Stoller wrote of “gender identity” in a way that recognized Jorgensen’s subjective experience, but only as seen through a cis person’s gender perspective. So, please help stop this long and painful history of redefining the trans experience to comport with the cis experience of gender.
To be clear, within the trans community, “Gender Identity” can mean any 1 of 3 things:
1.) One’s subjective experience of one’s own sex attributes;
2.) One’s culturally influenced sexed identification within the context of a social grouping; or,
3.) Both A and B
So, let’s be very careful in the theories you construct situated around your interpretation of what “Gender Identity” means to trans people. It was incredibly patriarchal of cis male doc to interpret the trans experience as fundamentally being an issue with Category 2. Please don’t perpetuate such stereotypes about the trans experience. Also, please do not assume that “social construct” means unreal or inauthentic. Who you think you are is in no small part a “social construct.” Ethics, culture, history and just about everything meaningful in life is a “social construct.” Saying that something is a “social construct” isn’t necessarily a critical statement. Noting that gender is a “social construct” is usually only relevant when trying to debunk the cis narrative of gender perpetuated by early cis docs who acted as gatekeepers to trans care.
Also, please don’t equivocate about what “gender” is. Gender and Patriarchy aren’t the same. It’s important to recognize that there is a distinction between a physical phenomena and our mental contextualization of that physical phenomena. In other words, “sex” attributes are aspects of human development as it relates to the ability to produce size-differentiated gametes. These can include (but are not limited to), genitals, genetics, epigenetics, neurology, endocrinology, etc. However, all our thoughts about what our “sex” attributes mean is “gender.”
Socially, gender is the mental contextualization of a human body as a sex attribute which, consequently, must fit into a binary mold. Socially, we don’t simply note that each body has X number of male and/or female sex attributes; instead, we contextualize the entire body itself as a sex attribute. We might say that he was born a man because he was born with an acceptably long phallus. In our culture, an acceptably long phallus equates to male and thus, we culturally regard the entire body as itself “male.” That cultural regard is gender and it is patriarchal.
Subjectively, gender is the sex labels we utilize, the emotional states and contextual memories associated with those labels, our mental embodiment of self as being related to those labels, the way we subjectively experience our body, the way we communicate – express – these understandings, our understanding of the way our society responds to these expressions and our awareness of the normative sex-designated cultural structures that are collectively reinforced. ALL of this (and more) is how we mentally contextualize sex attributes, which is to say, how we do or perform gender. Note that not everything about the subjective experience of gender is necessarily patriarchal.
Hi, I’m really interested in this comment and was wondering if you would be able to clarify a few things that I’m confused about regarding trans theory and gender.
Specifically I’m interested in the ‘problem of gender real-ness’ as I’ve seen it termed in other articles and books, that you discuss here. I am aware that I am approaching the issue from a cis male perspective and for that reason can’t grasp the experience of what it is like to grow up feeling deeply uncomfortable with one’s body in the way you describe.
What I am confused about is the exact kind of distinction you are drawing between, as you put, one’s subjective experience of one’s own sex attributes and one’s culturally influenced sexed identification within the context of a social grouping. You write that for transsexuals, ‘from our earliest memories, we subjectively experience our sex attributes as being wrong’. My problem is that I can’t see how to conceive of this notion except through the idea that we each have an ‘inner core’ of our being which is already gendered pre-socialisation, and for you and other trans folk your ‘inner cores’ were born into the wrong bodies. It does seem as though if we grant the ‘inner core’ idea, we then have to leave behind some of what you say later in your post about gender as the ‘mental contextualisation of the human body, which, consequently, must fit into a binary mold’.
The problem I am having comes from my reading of the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy article on the intersection of trans and feminist theory, summarising Talie Mae Bettcher’s work. The article goes: ‘Talie Mae Bettcher argues against both the traditional wrong-body account of transsexuality (in which gender identity is taken as innate, allegedly determining one’s ‘real’ sex) and the newer, beyond-the-binary vision that emerged with the new transgender politics of the nineteen-nineties. Both accounts invalidate trans identities, she argues – the first, by invalidating the self-identities of trans people who do not regard their genitals as wrong; the second, by representing all trans people as problematically positioned with regard to the binary’.
My interpretation is that when you distinguish between 1) and 2) (from your comment), you are asserting that there exists an ‘inner core’ gender identity of a person before any socialisation occurs. And this theory falls into the category of an account which invalidates the self-identities of trans people who do not regard their genitals as wrong. I am thinking, for example, of a trans man who regards menstruation as a male phenomenon (eg http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/11/trans-guys-guide-menstruation/). It seems like we are caught in a double bind if we want to assert both that 1) a person can experience that their body is wrong, i.e. their inner core gender is different to their sexed features, and 2) we recognise that menstruation is a male phenomenon for trans men who menstruate. If physical features of maleness are entirely culturally determined (i.e. cultural identification of maleness through having a long enough phallus, or, in this example, through not menstruating), and there are people who are born with sexed features that society sees as designating the person female (e.g. menstruation) but whose inner core identity is male, we have to sort of insist that this person MUST be uncomfortable with his genitals, and cannot ‘really’ identify as man who menstruates.
Here is the problem as I see it. If we want to say that a person’s subjective experience of their body (and it’s potential wrongness) is prior and independent of a person’s socialisation socially and culturally determined gender roles, and we accept both that gender is arbitrary (i.e. socially determined, i.e. >= x length of phallus = man) but also ‘real’ (in the sense that you put in your comment, i.e. just because something is an arbitrary ‘social construct’ doesn’t mean it isn’t real or authentic), then I don’t see how we can respect the personal identity of a trans man who menstruates (I’m not saying we shouldn’t, I’m saying I don’t see how it can be made consistent with the above theory). An account where someone’s subjective experience of their body (and it’s potential wrongness, i.e. their sexed features are not in line with their core identity) is distinct from their socialisation into gender roles seems to erase the identity of, for example, a trans man who doesn’t see his sexed features as ‘wrong’, but rather sees himself as paradigming an instance of male-ness.
I am still trying to think about these issues and am sure I have got many things wrong here, but was interested if you have any thoughts – do you think this problem as I have construed it is a problem at all, or have I misunderstood something?
Thanks!
You wrote:
I think that’s your interpretation based upon narratives we are primed to project upon trans discourse. At no point did I appeal to an essence/irreducible causality. I only described a range of subjective trans experiences. Noting that these various experiences exist shouldn’t be conflated with an essence-based appeal to authentication.
You wrote:
I couldn’t disagree more. ALL that exists, as we perceive it, is a social construction. You can respect ethnicities, gods, legal identities, decorum, compassion, love, etc. None of these things can truly claim any independent existence outside the brain. Nothing that you experience on a day-to-day basis exists ex nihilo. That in no way means that these things can’t be authentic, meaningful, beautiful or life-sustaining. “Social construction” does not mean non-real. While TERFs misuse the term “social construction” as a euphemism for fake, all it means is that there are aspects of our social structure that helps sustain it experientially. The “you” you know yourself to be is in no small way a social construction. The love you might experience for parental figures is in no small way a social construction. While we might experience these constructions as innate, their status as a construction in no way means that we don’t authentically experience these things as being innate.
The trouble comes when we pretend that these experiences have an independent self-evident existence, as ordained by a god or by nature. When we presume that there exists an ordered role to aspects of the human condition – as self-evidently preordained by nature – we begin the process of objectification. The objectification of women is rooted in the belief that there really is a natural sex binary. There is no natural essence that authenticates one as a “real” man or a “real” woman.
If you’re unclear on this theory, Radical Feminism provides a good theoretical structure. Read Monique Wittig, Andrea Dworkin or John Stoltenberg. TERFs are an offshoot of Radical Feminism that borrows from it to assert a natural sex binary and the belief in sexed essences – concepts that are largely foreign to Radical Feminism.
Consider this from Wittig:
As pioneering trans-feminist and academic Suzan Striker noted over 20 years ago:
Thank you for this site. I was shaking with anger upon reading some of the terf bigotry. A few things struck me: 1. They especially hate lesbian trans women, which is so irrational, as the trans dykes I know are all incredible feminists. These evil terfs claim that queer trans women are misogynists and rapists. 2. They regard straight trans women as poor deluded gay men whose transness was based on homophobia. In other words, they conflate gender identity with sexuality, which is the same thing ‘phobe psychologists did ages ago when they called gay folks “inverts”. 3. They do the same thing in their assumption that all trans men were butch dykes prior to transition and were “forced” into transitioning by a butch hating society. As a gay trans man who never identified as a lesbian, I don’t even exist in their deluded world view. 4. They are promoting a fear campaign against testosterone use in trans men, saying we are all going to die of cancer. I’m sorry to say that as someone with hypochondria and anxiety, their case studies, though perhaps fabricated, gave me an anxiety attack. Sadly I’m still afraid, which is probably their point. 5. They cannot grasp the notion of physical dysphoria, and believe that trans women transition merely so they can wear makeup, and trans men so we can look masculine. They are also not awAre of the existence of butch trans women and fem trans men. 6. They don’t mention non binary identities at all. 7. They are science impaired. The notion of the brain map and expected sexed parts for instance. 8. They are brutally abusive and hateful. How is this feminism?
I’m a gay trans man too, and I’m guiltily relieved that we don’t even exist according to TERFs, because their vile spewings haven’t yet directly attacked who I am. I’m still empathetically horrified at the way they attack other trans people. As you rightly say, this isn’t feminism, it’s an embodiment of a straw-man feminism, wherein all feminists are supposed to be man-haters. Do they not realise how much of a caricature they are? Unfortunately, they are also influential and have helped bigots from other demographics to make it much more difficult for all of us to be who we are.
I am really grateful that someone linked to this site on Facebook. I have a LOT of reading to do!
I once tried to talk to a TERF on the internet, and it was one of the most bizarre experience ever in my life. Then I read this essay by a TERF about why trans women are bad, and that person didn’t know shit about what being trans actually means.
It’s like they’re not able to even consider the possibility that maybe they’re actually talking Patriarchy, and maybe they are fighting the very people who are the best living breathing proof that there is no difference whatsoever between ‘men’ and ‘women’, and since trans also includes non-binary people like me, they’re also bolstering the binary-dogma that put men in the field and women in the kitchen.
It’s been a while since I spent time learing about TERFs but finding this site reminded me that I still have to read up on TERF’s positions on trans men. What I hear TERFs talk most about are trans women and I’m kind of betting that they have no problem with having people who they still consider to be women ‘invade’ male spaces or take over male roles.
anonkneemouse states
‘Whether your brain is male or female and your “feelings” about your “identity” are irrelevant to the basic fact that you are what you are.
really
so basically what you are saying is that the brain, mind and thinking are totally irrelevant and people are solely determined by their genitalia,
cis women are merely wombs with limbs and cis men merely walking penises
glad I dont have a mind like you
http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/oh-dear-lawd/#comment-42684
“cherryblossomlife Says:
October 7, 2014 at 2:16 am
I’ m ready to support invoking conservative men’s property rights in order to get rid of this trans scourge.”
How are they not right-wing populists?
[…] of the You Tube comments were so bad they were most likely posted by TERFs who true to their cowardly modus operandi wouldn’t miss an opportunity like that to […]
Hi – a message from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. (And by the way we do spell some words slightly different – but then again I celebrate difference)
To all the TERF’S (Bigots) in this world – and we do have them here – I would like to point out one or two tiny little things.
You’re hatred and need for dominance over others is no different to that of the historically dominant power hungry oppressive bigoted sexist male you claim to despise. By taking on board the worst aspects of the oppressor you demean not only your ‘alleged’ cause, but also become a mirror image of your historical enemy. Far from advancing feminism via your inane and irrational hate filled tirades you set the cause of equality for all back centuries. In short you are the gender equivalent of the KKK – the personification of all that deems itself superior – and the true oppressor – indeed so pre – feminist male in form in every way. Never mind having no understanding of the trans female / male, you have no understanding of gender born females or males either. Yours is but a dictate that says ‘be like me, think like me, live like me or be inferior.’ It is extreme fascism at its most abhorrent and repulsive. And it shames you.
If you fail to embrace peaceful humanity in all its hues you offend all humanity. It is clear that you (TERF’s) do not want freedom for all – you want a North Koreanwesque world where all simply bow to your own vision of what makes a human being; whether that be male or female.What next? All have must have haircuts like the glorious leader or die?
It’s time you (the TERF’ movement) stopped seeing themselves as the all knowing deity were their word is the only word, their way is the only way, their beliefs and lifestyles are the only way. Society and the world is constantly evolving – as is the human soul. Put down your club and step out of the cave honeys – the rests of us have.
Historical gender barriers are being torn down every day – maybe ever so slowly – too slowly I would argue – but the times are a changing. It seems only you (TERF’s), and the the worst example of males, with vested interest, want the status quo to continue. It suits your angst and weaknesses in exactly the same way as the divisions of religions do for some. For without ‘the war’ what do you do? Simply fade away and have nothing to shout about or anyone to oppress. You become meaningless – your worst fear – but the majorities hope.
I find it amazing that so many TERF’s are privileged academics with no grasps of the real world or the daily lives of non privileged citizens. Theirs is but a fantasy of a totalitarian vision of existence where no difference can be tolerated or celebrated; Stalinism / fascism – call it what you want – there is little difference. Indeed their battle cry ‘of do as I say or be the enemy’ shows all to well that they not only hate transgender individuals, but also males and females of all hues accept themselves. Indeed I suspect they hate themselves more than others.
Like the mad preacher on meths on the hill the espouse a gospel no one is listening to – so they shout and rant louder. They try to inspire hatred instead of love and acceptance. But thankfully most see through them. They see them for what they are; bigots and self centred and blind supremacist – nothing more- nothing less.
Now before I end I would like to ask any TERF’s what am I? It must be obvious. Go on make your prejudiced assumptions. As you will.
Well for all I can say I am a genetically born female – and a committed feminists – as well as being a committed and active campaigner for all human rights. (Probably a traitor to TERF’s – but they are wrong) But the one thing I am not is a TERF. I could never be so. Why – I respect humanity – I see oppression and irrational hatred for what it is whatever shape or form it may take. I believe in freedom. I believe in the human spirit. But most of all I believe respect. Something the TERF movement could try learning.
To all in the good old USA may your God – if you have one – (or conscience) bless you and give you strength. As we say here in Sheffield, ‘consilio et animis’ (show wisdom and courage) And as we also say in the ‘steel city ‘they only shout because they’ve got nowt (nothing) intelligent to say.’ Be you – be proud – and stay focused.
Sally Kate Taylor.
A woman, a true feminist and lover of the greatest association football team (soccer) in the world (well nearly) Sheffield Wednesday FC. I just had to get that in.Sorry – but where I come from that is our ‘other religion’. Bless you all. And seriously ‘don’t let the bigots destroy your freedom to be you.’
*standing ovation
When I first heard about TERFS, I thought they were something created by anti-feminists as a way of discrediting the women’s rights movement. I soon discovered they are real. TERFS are every negative stereotype personified, and the reason more young women today are reluctant to call themselves feminists. Those of you who dismiss our brothers and sisters in the LGBTQ community & regard all men as evil aren’t feminists. You only use that term b/c you’re opportunists with an agenda. You’re misandristic and misogynistic female supremacists. The majority of us who make up today’s feminist movement reject your hate. We love all men and women, whether cisgendered, transgender, or intersex. Feminism is about equality, not supremacy. Feminism is about empowering women, not shaming them for working in the sex industry or being stay at home moms. Your insistence in using the word feminist as a platform to spout your bigoted rhetoric has set all women back, and I’ve had enough. As a feminist, I renounce the beliefs and behavior of all TERFS. I reject your misandristic views of all men and your hostile and misogynistic views of transgender women. You are a hate group, nothing more, and deserve to be treated as such!
yep. well said.
i reject your view that anti-feminists are against womens rights, anti feminists support womens rights around the world but feminists do no support mens rights anywhere
So I found this website on a google search and I have to say I am confused.
How are you feminist if you’re going against the idea of equality ?
You single out people and suggest that you leave them for death.
Also what do you think trans people do in the bathrooms…because you must have a totally different idea.
Explain why you would rather have people die then lend a helping hand.
Right now all I see is a pathetic group of people of whom share equal as horrid views as those men’s rights people.
Why does it bother you so much that another person wants to be happy?
Are you truly disgusting that you enjoy the sorrow of others, because that’s all this comes across as.
A sadistic group of people who just spew hate and have no concept of equality.
TERFs and SWERFs are horrible. Their transmisogyny and shaming tactics make me sick. I’m glad this site exists so that others who aren’t familiar with feminism can begin to understand who these women are and why they are so horrible.
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCKING GAD DAMNNED SINFUL FUCKS YOUR ALL A REPRESENTATION OF FUCKED UP PEOPLE THAT ARE DEFECTIVE AMERICA IS BEING DESTROYED BY FUCKS AND DEMOCRATS LIKE YOU I HOPE YOU ALL ARE MISREBLE AND HATE LIFE BECAUSE THATS WHAT GOD INTENDED FOR PEOPLE LIKE YOU!!!
Thank you for your thoughtful, evidence-based remarks.
lol… wow. Love your reply.
Dear Admin, I just found this site after spending days trying to frame a response to a website with TERF views. I can’t. I know the author doesn’t have a space for considering she might be wrong. I don’t like labels, so I’m not comfortable with the acronym, TERF. But, I felt significant healing reading this site, even though the first quotes were gut-wrenchingly painful. Could you remove that F… you rant above? I’d like to come back to this site. I am usually not so traumatized by words, but somehow john doe’s words really scare me. I am reading in a vulnerable state, I suppose. Nevertheless, I can’t appreciate how leaving his remarks on the site could prove helpful. Thank you…
Admin,
Sorry I didn’t read the warning. I see the reason now for leaving all remarks as written.
Anyway, thanks for making this site. I really can’t engage with too much more of it, though. The statements can be too painful.
I have a response I’m preparing slowly to their arguments. In the end, I don’t think it’ll ever serve to change the mind of someone who has decided at a fundamental level they can’t be wrong, whatever doubts they may begin to have.
I began the period of my life we might term, transition, by playing the devil’s advocate. I like that way of working because it means I don’t have to justify myself. I began my process without hormones, accepting that perhaps I just didn’t have enough gendered freedom as a child to express myself. In the end, that way of living didn’t prove efficacious. Even in weekly therapy, I couldn’t shake my suicidal thoughts. I was not a healthy body. I was a body deteriorating through lack of self-care. So yeah, the “TERF” position just didn’t work out the way they said it would. I woke up from a coma, literally, before I allowed myself the option to be healthy, which, at that time, merely shaking off the essentialist position.
Ok, listen, I’m not going to go on, but all of this is to say I think you’re fabulous and providing a healing site for those of us who wade into the essentialist position blindly, somehow predisposed to accept opposite opinions until they hurt. Crazy, but it was a way of thinking and living I learned from my spirituality. “Love your enemies…”
Off your meds again?
ahem. *You’re. I will just leave that right there for you.
I had no idea that TERFS were so widespread. I’ve had quite enough difficulty getting my head around the way that ordinary people who are not TERFS get these weird ideas about people who are different.
It’s a pity that I don’t get surprised any more at those people who want to be left alone to make their own way in the world but who so easily and readily condemn us, who want to be left alone to make our own way in the world just because we want to be left alone to make our own way in the world.
But I still reject their strange ideas. And although they might claim to be the most important part of the America I live in, they are the tiniest.
Wow, angry much?
They say that “hurt people hurt people”, so I’m sorry for the pain you experience and the pain you cause. You must be a very unhappy person.
give them their own bathrooms and what ever else needs to be etched out for them. i ain’t hatin but they are born male. thus like it or not that’s what they are. and no i don’t ever want to share a bathroom with them. if that’s the case all restrooms should be unisex, kids included. give them equal rights as they are still human. years later they’ll be wanting to flip back into a man. can we get some sensible ppl everywhere please? dang.
Oh, essentialism. You’re so cute.
“thus like it or not that’s what they are”
in other words! ” I have no idea what this struggle is like but let me tell you how you need to be because after all just deal with it.
Gipsyrose? more like American white trash, nothing gipsy about you (don’t understand why anglo-american garbage like you impersonates the Roma) I live in Europe and work with the Roma on social issues
Roma = Gipsies.
I just wanted to say you’re repulsive, disgusting, ugly on the outside and the inside and in serious need of mental help…. As a proud woman I am here to support my transgender sisters!
Unless your family actually speaks rumneychel too, your opinion doesn’t get to count.
Wow, why so much hate? To quote the Dalai Lama, “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.”
i know im splitting hairs here but the Roma are not the only gypsies lol , many people with a hebrew background have also been called ‘gypsies’ :p
Yeah girls, it’s all about men, women can’t possibly have a unique experiencing and our genitals are just holes, nothing more complex, nothing special, they can be re created with ease.
Susie,
Did you know that many transgender persons choose not to have surgery? They live and identify as a gender different from the one society associates with their genitals, because gender identity is not about what equipment one has between the legs. That’s why it’s so ironic that TERFs claim to be feminists while at the same time essentially saying that women are nothing more than walking vaginas. If you woke up one day without your vagina, would you cease to be a woman?
No, I’d guess your inner sense of your own gender wouldn’t change one bit. Gender identity is a complex issue that science has yet to fully explain, but it’s certainly not as simplistic as penis=male or vagina=female. Not that the female organ correlating with the penis would be the vagina, anyway–another example of how the gender binary and is culturally produced.
Exactly! I am a trans man, and my junk, made bigger with testosterone, is just a smaller version of what a trans woman who hasn’t had (or doesn’t want) bottom surgery has. Society uses this erroneous “penis is equivalent to vagina” shit to enforce transphobia, biological essentialism, and give ammunition to both terfs and right wingers. Sadly, all too many cis gays and lesbians subscribe to the same bullshit.
Radfems are female supremacy groups. This is why they have no regret when oppressing trans groups.
Whenever I see TERFS arguing with anyone knowledgeable about Gender Dysphoria, I often find it funny that they use the same arguments that MRAs use against feminism
I know! I’m pretty sure they’re the other side of the same coin.
Funny thing, too – MRAs frequently use TERFs and TERF-like people as “evidence” of “the problem” and claim that they represent *all* feminists.
TERFs do not represent Feminism, but they are REPRESENTING feminism, and that’s the problem. They are a thankfully small minority of the movement, and do not reflect all feminist beliefs, but they and other crazy radicals are loud and obnoxious enough to drown out actual progressive sections of the movement. The movement needs to drown them out, kick them out, ostracize them. They are co-opting the label for their own defense, because they aren’t fighting for the same causes, and feminists need to fight back and protect what feminism means in the eyes of the public.
At risk of oversimplifying, it’s birth-assigned man-hating cobbled together into an ideology.
There is positive feminism, that which seeks equality through unity, unification, and building bridges between birth-assigned men, birth-assigned men, and every other combination of gender and sex. Generally sex-positive, it strives toward equality for women by securing women’s rights in such a way as to secure rights for all.
Then, there is negative feminism, among which TERFs stand out, that is built and predicated upon an unshakable adversarial relationship with others — seeing “equality” as something akin to keeping up with Cold War USSR in nuclear armaments and the space race. It seeks “equality” by treating others as adversaries to be beaten. Like much of the Religious Right, it seeks to take away from their perceived adversaries as much as it seeks to improve its own lot. And, like the Religious Right, it is generally sex-negative.
Dealing with TERFs and those like them is tiring, wearying, and it takes a person of strong principle to resist being pushed toward “the other side” by their caustic exclusionary hostility.
I know! Totally! I was so dismayed to find a friend spouting this transphobic BS on Facebook that I wanted to call her a “feminazi”. (I didn’t, I only implied it.) I never in a million years thought I’d find a use for this favorite epithet of the MRA’s. To be fair, my friend has endured horrible abuse at the hands of men in her life, so I can see where she might come to have hateful feelings…but WHY target the trans* community when MRAs are the ones who are actively and SUCCESSFULLY excluding women from online places where they have every right to be. The anger and effort is so misplaced it beggars belief. I’m mystified.
mimi6000 says a “baby born with perfectly shaped sexual organs, who choose willingly to declare later in their life that the sex they were assigned at birth is not the right one, and decide to undergo surgical procedure to change what he or she had at birth. If you don’t see the difference, you should really checked your privileges.”
The ignorance in this is outstanding. The realization that “the sex they were assigned at birth is not the right one” comes very early in life and they express this as soon as possible. They may not have the opportunity to change anything until much later in life depending on the circumstances they live in. Many of these individuals are so dispondent with the conflict they have to live with may attempt suicide so this is not a laughing matter.
Teresa
he realization that “the sex they were assigned at birth is not the right one” comes very early in life and they express this as soon as possible.
this is not accurate friend
“You should focus your effort on these guys, instead of demonizing a bunch of lesbians who will never actually kill, rape and murder a trans-person.”
Oh the irony of someone trying to demonize one group while hysterically pleading not to demonize the group that puts them put them in danger of violence. How do we know they aren’t violent lesbians?!
“And why do you always confuse intersex people with transpeople ?”
We though that was your job.
“you should really checked your privileges.”
Says the cisgender white woman.
Being a woman is never and has never been a privilege in any society, no matter how you try to spin it. Are trans women harassed/beaten/killed for wearing “feminine” things when they don’t pass? Yes. BUT WOMEN DEAL WITH THAT SIMPLY FOR BEING WOMEN. Women are literally hated for just existing. White Trans women don’t experience that kind of hatred until they put on something “*feminine*” (femininity is hated because women are hated).
And yet, Trans extremists have the nerve to call females privileged.
You could even argue that trans-women who hate themselves as males because of the way males are portrayed in patriarchy, as violent, disgusting monsters, means that females are privileged over them. OH WAIT! YOU CAN’T! BECAUSE FEMALES ARE TAUGHT TO DEVALUE AND HATE THEMSELVES FROM BIRTH BECAUSE OF THEIR SEX!
I’ve often asserted that the TERF movement isn’t based in any specific theory, but is instead rooted in equivocation and strawman arguments passing itself off as criticisms. This comment is a shining example of the intellectual turpitude defining the “gender theory” proffered by the TERF community.
This site doesn’t make the claim that “[b]eing a woman is… a privilege in any society.” That’s the argument you created to rail against because claiming that being a woman is a privilege in our society is a fucking idiotic claim to make. Let me make this clear: you are LYING when you assert that the trans community is saying that “females [are] privileged.” That isn’t what we’re saying at all.
What we are saying is that in a society that hates trans people, non-trans men and women are privileged in that they are not treated like a trans people. That is “cis privilege.” Cis privilege has nothing to do with having privilege as a man or woman. The term only names a privilege non-trans people experience by virtue of not being trans in our anti-trans culture.
You say there are “other” bathrooms. Yes? Where might those be? I certainly can’t safely use the men’s room and shouldn’t have to.
Should I have to leave my friends at lunch to drive around looking for a family restroom? I shouldn’t have to suffer because of your paranoia. My I.D. is the same as yours – female. You describe medically necessary life-saving surgery as genital mutilation that is artificial and non health related. You are sadly dangerously ignorant here. The suicide rate for Transgender people is around 40%. Post op, it is less than the national average of about 1.5%. This surgery CURES an often fatal disorder. To try and tell me who I know myself to be is wrong is once again steeped in ignorance and agenda pushing. You are wrong. You lack compassion and that is decidedly UN feminine.
Thank you so much for telling people about the growing pushback against transgenderism. Do you know how I found the community of women who are organizing against your appropriation, your perversion, and your misogyny? Why, you. Googled TERF and found a whole community of women who aren’t going to stand for it anymore. I so appreciate you pointing me in the right direction! Keep up the good work.
Glad to hear that this feminist term has caught on so well!
Really? So called terra want to stop transgendered from housing and using the bathroom and from having access to medical care? No.
Wanting a person of the male sex out of the women’s bathroom or women’s dorm is a legitimate concern. There are other bathrooms.
Not wanting to give a person free government sponsored healthcare, or private health insurance, to perform genital mutilation, plastic surgery, or any other non-health related procedure isn’t attempting to prevent access to healthcare.
Not catering to the whims of every childish person that sees extreme body modification as a “right” when it involves changing your gender…
If you are not a true intersex person, you are just a male or female. Whether your brain is male or female and your “feelings” about your “identity” are irrelevant to the basic fact that you are what you are.
This P.C. and sensitivity training in America is also a promotion of genital mutilation, and of plastic surgery, and of artificial medical procedures.
GarDens aren’t spewing hatred about Transgendered people, we are merely failing to cater to their every childish whim and claim of entitlement, and refusing to give them “special rights” or “women’s rights”. They still have basic human rights. No one is promoting violence against them.
Spoken like a true TERF.
[GarDens aren’t spewing hatred about Transgendered people, we are merely failing to cater to their every childish whim and claim of entitlement, and refusing to give them “special rights” or “women’s rights”. They still have basic human rights. No one is promoting violence against them.]
I don’t think that you understand what hate is. Hate is the strong dislike of something or someone:
I would like to know if people on this site actually met a “TERF” in person = where? when?
My belief and experience has been that most lesbian feminists (incl radfems) I have met are VERY PRO-TRANS (FTM & MTF) and have fought for trans identity to be inclusive within the LGBT community. Additionally, many lesbian feminists have fought for transgender medical / legal rights…so what I’m trying to understand is if every person has had first hand experience to base your opinion?
Yes we have and you’re totally correct; most feminists, lesbian feminists and RadFems are pro trans. That’s why non-trans feminists came up with “TERF” or “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist” so that this hate group passing itself off as the RadFem position could be identified as only speaking for itself and not any other feminist group.
I may have met quite a few TERFs. I’ll assume that I have while I write this.
I came here after searching for “abused by feminism trans” looking for anybody else I could find who’d had such negative experiences with feminism as I have. This is all still new to me, both the idea that TERFs are a minority and the idea that feminism in any way embraces trans experiences. I’ll admit, I have at least not been physically attacked by a TERF before.
I first heard about TERFs on some message boards I tend to visit that are known for trolling. I was never certain whether to take it seriously or not. Perhaps my comment will be regarded as trolling here as well. I don’t know what to do. What happened to me, as far as I can tell, is something that simply doesn’t happen to people, cis or trans, not to anybody, at all, ever.
I came from a small conservative community, so perhaps I’ve never had a proper introduction to feminism. My experiences of feminism are mostly the hatred certain individuals (teachers back then, since I moved away after my parents threw me out) would spew on a near daily basis about men being nothing but rapists and “incomplete beings.”
(I do think that’s hate, even if feminists don’t… but I don’t know what I know about feminism.) I expressed my feelings about the gender I’d been forced into against my will at one point (at that point, the physical dysphoria was so painful it would have overwhelmed me if I hadn’t tried my best to be numb to it, which never entirely worked, and trying to describe the feeling of my body just being wrong to a psychologist had taught me that no language existed that would allow me to properly express what I felt… the problems cisgendered people have with having any kind of frame of reference for it as mentioned in comments above seemed in my limited understanding to ring true), and I learned that if I were a “transsexual,” that would make me even more of a monster than just being a “man.” Back then, I simply had no frame of reference to even think about myself as anything but a man. Maybe I still don’t, despite the ease I have at “passing.” (I don’t know how else to say it, and I know that “passing” is a four letter word on most trans support forums I’ve visited over the years.)
I once read the first two parts of “She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders” by Jennifer Finney Boylan. That book gave me some language to at least use to talk about how I felt. However, when I got to the third part that book about transgender-ism (is that a word?) and feminism, I sort of just laughed and never read it. I had no idea how the author intended to present any kind of argument that could convince “feminism,” as I knew it, to be accepting of trans experiences, and the notion was so preposterous to me that I just never got around to reading it. The comments left here by TERFs are the only kind of thing I’d experienced from feminism.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I’m not entirely fluent in a lot of the language I read here. I think I understand it although I’m not certain and probably getting things wrong, and I certainly wouldn’t trust myself to engage it. The only thing I’m certain of is that it seems that there is a group called TERFs who apparently do not represent current thought in feminism, and current thought in feminism is utterly unlike what I believe it to be.
A friend re-read Stanislaw Lem’s “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub” for his second time recently. I tried reading that book once, but I found it too disorienting. I sort of feel like a character in that story.
I’ve never completely transitioned because I’ve been threatened by people claiming to be feminists with charges for attempted rape for entering the female restroom. So, even though most people perceive me to be female, I still use the male restroom at all times, which can make men in there feel uncomfortable. At any rate, I’ve assumed this entire time that going deep stealth and doing what I could to completely erase my male identity would be the only way I could transition. That’s been unattainable to me because I don’t have the money to quit my job, where at least 1 person I’m certain is a TERF works. I might attempt to transition at work anyway, but I know that the TERF will make things very difficult for me, and I will lose my job. I can’t go without a job because I need my meds. Without my meds, I would kill myself, because there is no way to for me to endure this body when it’s being influenced by the testosterone it makes without my meds. I don’t have a way out of this problem.
How can I find out more about this trans-affirming feminism? I wonder if it’s real or just wishful thinking. Everybody here seems quite serious so I hope it’s real.
I am so lost. I’m certain this is not the correct place to post this. But that’s based on things I’m not certain I actually know any more. Has anyone had similar negative experiences with “feminists” or TERFs, and where could I go to get help if I am incorrect about feminism holding values that are described as TERF here? If feminist values are not TERF values, then my thinking has been mistaken, and I don’t know how I could ever shake my impression that TERFs are representative of feminism. I would need help doing that if TERFs don’t speak for feminists, what kind of help I don’t know. Bristling at what I’d believed was “feminism” has become a reflex to me. Maybe I’m just too damaged. I’m seeing a psychologist, but I can’t get around my mental roadblock of believing feminists believe that trans women are bathroom rapists.
I’m sorry that I offended if I did not come off as sincere. I will go away quietly and won’t post again in case that happened. What I know is that somebody assigned the male gender at birth posting in a “feminist” space, especially somebody who is a trans woman, is a major trespass. It won’t happen again, and I’m sorry for intruding. I don’t know that I know that, though. I’m sorry, I’ll post this and go away. My intention in this communication is not harassment, and this will be my only post.
Thanks
Posting a picture of a definition doesn’t make your nonsense valid. Male-born and boy-socialized people don’t get to appropriate their idea of what they think being a woman is, reinforcing oppressive gender roles and demanding to force their way into safe spaces for females only, and they don’t get to use up already thinly spread money that go towards things poor women need, like ABORTION, for their VIAGRA.
Yes. Trans women can get VIAGRA from programs DESIGNED TO HELP POOR WOMEN. In what skewed view of the world is this right?
Radfems don’t ACTUALLY dissuade people from getting sra. Radfems wouldn’t MIND if trans women identified themselves differently, as trans women specifically or as something else altogether, instead of trying to selfishly appropriate one of the the few things females have in their identities as women. They do it callously, and with a disregard for what it means to be raised female, what it means to see the oppression from the time you’re born, to be valued as lesser because of your BIOLOGICAL SEX, to grow up reading the histories of male-bodied people and to be hated simply because of the sex you were BORN WITH.
Radfems fight patriarchy and ask for female-exclusive space in a society that hates female-bodied people, because they care about the SAFETY of those female-bodied people. It doesn’t mean they don’t hate the gender binary. It doesn’t mean they don’t hate patriarchy for imposing RESTRICTIVE gender roles on all people.
And yet radfems are hated more than any other group, because they dare advocate for female-born-females.
Believe it or not, female-born-women have different needs, and shouldn’t be told how to deal with them by male-born-women any more than feminine-appearing people should be told how to deal with oppression by masculine-appearing people.
Trans extremists always put a spin on it. Talk about how they’re being excluded. About how they’re being excluded, for example, from women’s shelters. SHOULDN’T THEY INSTEAD PUSH FOR SHELTERS FOR TRANS WOMEN??? WHY MUST THEY INVADE AN ALREADY SMALL SPACE FROM THE MOST OPPRESSED GROUP???
Here, I think it appropriate to cite some Radical Feminist writing from Wittig, since you’ve apparently haven’t read it:
How is it that you don’t seem to know that Dworkin and MacKinnon wrote trans women into their women-centered ordinances? How is it that you don’t seem to know that the very sound of the Women’s music movement was made possible by an out trans women who lived in a RadFem collective called Olivia Records. RadFems have a long history of accepting and even protecting trans women as women.
It was YOUR movement – the TERF movement – that sent death threats to all the women of Olivia. It was the TERF movement who showed up armed to an Olivia event after making it known that they planned to murder the trans women associated with Olivia. It was the TERF movement that tried to rush the stage and beat a trans women at the West Coast Women’s Conference and it was Radical Feminists who stood in their way, protecting the trans woman.
So, please do not privilege yourself to speak for my allies – the Radical Feminist women who’ve always been there – standing by trans women. RadFems are my sisters; they’ve stood by the trans community and have been willing, more than once, to stand up to your TERF community. BTW, you should know that it was a Radical Lesbian who started the movement to include trans women at the MWMF. You should also know that it was the Lesbian Avengers who ran Camp Trans for many years. So, again… You don’t speak for my allies. Don’t pretend that you do.
What about trans men? What’s your excuse for hating them?
In my experience trans men are seen by TERFs as either hapless victims of misogyny, or traitors to women.
Trans rhetoric promotes the concept of brain sex–completely outdated thinking. Trans rhetoric doesn’t eliminate gender roles–it reinforces them. If your daughter likes trucks instead of dolls, it’s because they’re really a boy. Boys like boy things and girls like girl things. This is an extremely dangerous path and its eventual conclusion is the eradication of homosexuality, which is why families are more likely to embrace the concept of ‘trans kids’ than having a gay daughter or son. It’s because trans rhetoric is status quo thinking, and does nothing to challenge masculinity or femininity.
Trans activist rhetoric is as simple as it gets—a bunch of memorized buzzwords and phrases. “Gender and sex are DIFFERENT!” they shout, not understanding that gender is a concept taken directly from societal expectations of sex and not merely a synonym for one’s personality. Misogyny is real, and it is sex-based oppression. Anatomy is obviously not the be-all and end-all of what makes a woman or what makes a man—but anatomy determines how we’re treated since birth—it informs conditioning, socialization, attitudes, perspectives, behaviors, etc. This is not because one’s anatomy is inherently female or male but because society reads it as such. This is reality. How do we get rid of gender stereotypes? By conforming to them? By telling a boy who likes to wear dresses that he is really a girl? By telling a girl who likes ‘boy toys’ she is a boy after all? Certainly not—we tell our children to not give a fuck what they like or how they act—that they are themselves and are just fine the way they are. They don’t need to change for anyone.
Just think for a moment. Use critical thinking to explore the attitudes found within the trans activist movement and see that it doesn’t follow–doesn’t make any sense. Stop swallowing everything you’re told and think for yourself.
Radical feminists aren’t transphobic, nor are they hateful–just critical of gender as a concept and apply this criticism to all humans, not just trans individuals. Many radical feminists understand that gender is an oppressive system and understand that body dysphoria is real and exists. This does not mean we cater to gender–it means we must fight harder to crush oppressive systems.
Yes, I see you can strawman.
I wish that every cis person who doesn’t “get” trans dysphoria, whether social or physical, would wake up one day in a body that causes them gender angst. Let’s see the six foot tall macho straight man with five percent body fat wake up as a four ten vagina possessor with huge breasts and fat hips. Watch him walk down the street and be catcalled. Let’s see a cisgender lesbian wake up with back hair, male pattern baldness and a two o clock shadow. Let’s see a masculine gay guy top wake up five feet tall with his penis and testes converted into the part he called an “axe wound” with his buddies last night at the gay bar with the upstairs “male only” (dickie check) hot tub. Until that happens, no cis person should ever weigh in on how we trans people feel.
Just to add to the discussion, for the last 3 years I’ve been looking at the effects of an artificial estrogen called diethylstilbestrol (or DES). Based on what I’ve seen, I think many if not most cases of MTF transsexuality are likely to be an unintended consequence of medical treatment aimed at preventing miscarriages.
As a result of these treatments, there are now literally millions of biologically male people alive who spent part of their prenatal development being exposed to artificial female hormones (estrogens and progestins), in doses that would shut down testosterone production in an adult man. Testosterone plays a crucial role in driving male development, and when you expose a male fetus to these testosterone-blocking drugs, in theory at least, the result should be a period of female development for as long as the hormone exposure continues. Based on what I’ve seen over the last 3 years, that’s what appears to have happened with DES.
With DES (and with the treatments that replaced it), most of the exposure occurs during the second half of the pregnancy, after genital development has already completed and when the main thing going on is brain development. The result, at least as far as DES is concerned, is that it seems to have created people who look male (albeit often with intersex-related genital abnormalities), but whose brain development has predominantly gone down the female pathway instead of the male one. Not surprisingly, these people are at high risk of identifying as women rather than men later in life. The one study that’s ever been conducted of gender identity in DES sons found that 150 out of 500 identified as women, a rate of transsexuality hundreds of times higher than in the unexposed population.
DES a treatment for preventing miscarriages was phased out 40 years ago, however I think it’s highly likely that some of the hormone treatments that replaced it are capable of producing similar effects as far as male development is concerned, and this is probably why rates of transsexuality have increased so much in recent years.
Here’s a couple of discussions about DES as a cause of transsexuality:
http://www.lauras-playground.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=20727
http://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,84224.0.html
i’ve read about this before. i’m a transwoman who may well have been exposed to DES in my own wombtime (mid-1950s). there is also other indicators of exposure (cluster), which are lack of interest in sports/low athletic ability, and scores low on spatial relations tests (ability to visualize how a building will look by looking at the blueprints, for example). my experience is that, so far, female hormones, castration and at least some amount of transitioning is the best and most effective way to treat gender dysphoria so one can then get on with one’s life.
thank you for mentioning this information, Hugh Easton. there really should be more awareness that most gender dysphorics have a biological/developmental component to deal with in life. gender dysphoria really is more of a medical issue than a social one, imho.
Interesting. I’m about your age, may also have been exposed, and have those traits, but it never occurred to me that I was anything but male. Therefore, the traits were male behaviors and (in)capabilities, because I was male and I had them. I never understood gender dysphoria until I met “out” transpeople, but I never had any prejudice against them either.
As an analogy, the writer Samuel R. Delany tends to get ignored by people who study black literature, because he writes science fiction and fantasy, as few black writers do. His attitude is that since he’s black (he’s a relative of the Delany sisters), what he writes is by definition black literature.
“TERF’s have forgotten the battles fought for so-called women’s liberation. Now they are trying to suppress equality for a specific group of women.”
Nope…just trying to point out the obvious: that males aren’t women. The admin of this blog is a male…a male a male a male. HE is a male. A biological MAN.
“Nope…just trying to point out the obvious: that males aren’t women. The admin of this blog is a male…a male a male a male. HE is a male. A biological MAN.”
So Jen, are you simply unaware of all the studies of transgendered people’s brains indicating that they match those of the gender they self-identify as, as opposed to the gender they were assigned at birth, or are you deliberately ignoring them? The idea of deliberately excluding women from a movement designed to empower women based simply on physical defects is ridiculous and sets a dangerous precedent. Should we exclude women that have gotten hysterectomies? Women that have gotten masectomies? Women in wheelchairs? Women with neurological disorders? Women with congenital birth defects? The problem with this sort of feminism is that it alienates and diminishes people, something that proves counterproductive within a movement aimed at achieving universal equality.
Err… I’m not trans but I don’t think it’s fair to characterize being trans as a birth defect. That’s rather condescending, it would be like saying homosexuality is a defect because it is less common. It’s likely that some trans people feel their bodies are “defective” but I doubt all do.
However, it is fair to point out that what a lot of TERFs fail to acknowledge is that physical sex, like gender, is infinitely more complex than we give it credit for. There are various types of intersexuality which result in people with both male and female characteristics: e.g., XY chromosomes and “female” external anatomy. Even just among cis women, there is NO one physical characteristic which could be said to be exclusively present in females/women and present in all females/women.
I also don’t feel super comfortable pointing to science to legitimize what should be completely unquestioned and uncontroversial: respect and non-discrimination for a person’s identity. Appealing to science to justify that trans women are “real” women only implicitly furthers the TERF notion that there are groups of “real men” and “real women” that we (outsiders, no less) can objectively sort people into or exclude people from.
there is no such thing as cis. it’s a term used to degrade and separate women born women.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cisgender
@kaur
See that’s the thing. As a transsexual, when I was growing up I felt broken specifically because THERE WAS A WAY TO FIX ME.
What I needed was medical treatment. The medical treatment existed. It seemed very likely to make me much happier, like happy enough to probably not want to kill myself anymore. Thus it made perfect sense to me that I had a birth defect.
Abstractly, it was the birth defect of having a mismatched brain and my nether parts, but ultimately my brain IS ME. If you “fixed” the brain it would involve erasing me and letting someone else (some new person constructed by brain surgery or something) to have my nether parts. Even if reparative therapy worked, it would be bad. And when bigoted parents try to get their children “mentally repaired” it has never worked. Thus, morally and pragmatically, my female brain was me and the birth defect was my nether parts.
And that could be fixed! So it should have been simple right?
The problem was that I had eyes and ears just like you. I could see what people said about obvious gender transitioners and I could see that no public institutions would provide medical care because most voters thought that “people like me” were basically human garbage.
The now deceased Senator Jesse Helms (may he burn in hell) put a spike into the Americans With Disabilities Act to specifically exclude transsexuals, because he could see as well as I can that the text describing who “the disabled” are, as it was written and any reasonable person would interpret it, applied to transsexuals like me. So he proposed an amendment to that act, and specifically excluded transsexuals. Like a right wing hate monger. Like a TERF.
It is a pretty clear smoking gun: “We want to help the disabled so let’s make a law saying they will get help, except transsexuals are technically disabled, and we hate them, so let’s make it so we help all the disabled except for the icky ones.”
And so at this point my ENTIRE adult life has been organized around earning money and paying for medical care on my own. First in my late teens to pay for basic transition stuff. Then I socially transitioned and borrowed all that I could “for college” and spent it on medical care. I finally had bottom surgery, out of pocket, when I as 25 and spent my entire 20s paying off medical debts. Now I’ve spent the first half of my 30s struggling to save enough for IVF/surrogacy/adoption/whatever with my husband so we can have a baby.
I understand that transsexuals are an untouchable caste. I understand that people with compromised fertility are considered subhuman and mostly feel shame about their brokenness. I stopped expecting “reproductively functional cis people in large groups thinking casually about my life from a distance and then voting on how I should be treated” to care about me long long long ago. I’m crying as I write this because my life has been disfigured by biological failures and the casual hate of strangers and there’s nothing I can do to change it.
Cue the “I will survive!” theme song and imagine 20 years spent working 60 hour weeks to pay for medical bills. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been more courageous to become a prostitute for the cash :-/
But I haven’t killed myself, and I pass well enough that my male bosses have felt comfortable making transphobic jokes in my presence – so I can hold down reasonably high paying jobs to actually have a hope of paying for these medical bills. But it leaves me with a measure of survivors guilt because other trans women aren’t as lucky.
And I don’t hate individual cis people face-to-face because I understand that you only come together in groups BY ACCIDENT to casually and thoughtlessly vote to create the social and medical hellscape I’ve been navigating my entire life. It isn’t like you thin much about it. It isn’t like you especially want to hurt disabled people. It isn’t like most of you hate me specifically, its just that there are so many of you, and there’s a background culture of transphobia, and cultural inertia is what it is. So it goes, you know?
So I guess that relative to the baseline normal outcomes for a member of a untouchable caste I’m doing pretty good?
But honestly, I gave up on a desire to be simultaneously understood and respected long long long ago. Me, and people like me (who admittedly are not all trans women — trans women like me are a minority within the minority of transgender people in general) just wish that our birth defects could have been treated like the birth defects… instead of treating our birth defects as a reason to throw us in the garbage and leave us to survive on our own.
Seriously. I hate identity politics SO MUCH because it makes political discussions like this turn into “respect” and “feeling natural” and “understanding” instead of about dollars and medical care and formal “de jure” institutional discrimination.
Like imagine if people with cleft palates were considered cursed by God, were abandoned by their parents, and formed homeless encampments with distinctive subcultures. And only then did medical science advance enough to understand that cleft palates are caused by folic acid deficiencies during pregnancy and that reparative surgeries could fix them. Insurance companies didn’t want to pay for it and so they held onto the “cursed by God” theory for a while and claimed reparative surgeries were “experimental”. Slow progress is made against this. Some people with cleft palates argue that they deserve respect as is and refuse the surgery.
And then some well meaning liberals showed up and said that people with cleft palates shouldn’t want surgery and shouldn’t think of themselves as having a disabling birth defect, because their “unique culture” was “worthy of respect” and their body shapes were “natural”. And the politicians would love to get votes by handing out “respect” rather than “medical coverage” because respect is CHEAP and politicians have a lot of people asking for various kinds of help. And so folic acid never becomes part of the standard of peri-natal care and cleft palate kids mostly don’t get surgery, and end up in a subculture.
For me, it stopped being about respect when I was 17 years old. It is about medical care. If respect is a pre-condition for medical care, I want respect. If disrespect is a pre-condition for medical care, I want dis-respect.
Now I, and trans women like me, just want actual physical help. Because I had a birth defect. And I’m still kind of disabled.
And if you’re an infertile woman, and reading this, please notice how your medical insurance probably doesn’t cover the medical care that would help you have a baby. If that makes you sad: you and me are now in the same boat. The explicitly transsexual stuff is in my past. If explicitly transsexual medical care is covered or not, that helps this generation of trans kids, not me.
But fertility treatment expenses are something my husband and I are facing right now, and from where I’m sitting, the way that infertile women are treated by insurance companies and the government looks pretty similar to the way teenaged trans girls were and sometimes still are treated. And that should make you think, I think.
And I think the way insurance for fertility treatments work won’t change until infertile women start thinking about what they really want, and think about shame, and silence, and how silent shame makes it feasible for people to ignore people who are actually really in trouble. Medical care exists. Thus, the thing that medical care ameliorates is a defect.
And you shouldn’t be ashamed to call yourself defective if admitting that you’re defective is the first step to fixing something that is actually broken and can be fixed.
Blah blah blah “YOU DONT EXIST” Blah blah blah “YOU’RE NOT REAL”.
Come on, really? TERFs are focused on the wrong thing, and its time that this philosophy saw the bright light of reality. Society has moved on, and we are more complex than the 2nd wave TERFy feminists were fighting for their right to self-determination (which I am grateful they and their predecessors won for us, hard as it was).
Now, we have moved on…
Here is where current thinking is going – from reasonable cis feminists. The current, relevant ones that do not yell into an echo chamber of their sisters…
http://settlerimmigrant.wordpress.com/
“Nothing about us without us”
Awoman sister
The damage done by the TERF radicals is more far reaching than just the denial of healthcare, housing and basic human rights to a group of people already marginalized by much of society…there is a very real body count that can be laid at the feet of these hateful people. How do they sleep at night?
It’s quite simple. They don’t view intersexed and transpeople as people. They view them as monsters to be destroyed. So when they read about trans people being tortured, raped, or murdered. They laugh it off and pat each other on the back. Because they are monsters. They are the west boro baptist church of feminism.
Oh please. This is Bullshit. Someone can disagree with your stance without being accused of denying your “Humanity” as people. So when someone disagrees with you, it makes him or her a “monster”, denying your right of existence? Why can’t you suggest some counter-arguments, instead of demonizing your opponent ? No radical feminist I know ever “laugh it off” when they read about trans people being tortured or murdered, you must confuse them with some MRAs : because they are men, and some men tend to find torture of trans quite amusing. You should focus your effort on these guys, instead of demonizing a bunch of lesbians who will never actually kill, rape and murder a trans-person. The only thing you can accuse them of being guilty, is that they criticize some of your claims, it is a political debates, and if you think they’re wrong, fine, but then, come with some actual arguments.
And why do you always confuse intersex people with transpeople ? they’re a difference between someone born with an undefined sex, thus who must battle in their life to find their place as a gendered person, and a baby born with perfectly shaped sexual organs, who choose willingly to declare later in their life that the sex they were assigned at birth is not the right one, and decide to undergo surgical procedure to change what he or she had at birth. If you don’t see the difference, you should really checked your privileges.
Transgenderism *is* an intersex condition; just because our external genitalia happen to be well-formed enough for our doctors to toss us into one of the two bins they naively think humanity should neatly sort into doesn’t mean there are no biological differences between us and our assigned sexes.
As for your assertions about my right to exist? Sorry, but that’s not up for discussion, “political” or otherwise, and if you think it is, that’s it’s okay to even consider stripping someone of their rights outside of the most extreme of circumstances, if you want to marginalize us and deny us access to public spaces by shutting us out of basic infrastructure, you are, by definition, a monster.
Probably due to a lack of empathy or not thinking that people who are transgender are actually people. It sucks and it’s horrifying.
A LOT of the “feminists” mentioned above are firm anti sexwork advocates, which, as a feminist sex worker, I believe makes you UNfeminist, and not at all radical.
Let’s try to remember intersectionality, mm k?
Thank you for the really interesting summary of TERF philosophy.
Here is an example of applied TERF tactics as they were employed against me in response to a campaign I was involved with in late 2013 to highlight TERF exclusion of trans persons and sex workers in Vancouver:
In the span of two weeks, I became sufficiently interesting to the TERFs to attract the attention of GallusMag at GenderTrender, a hate speech site dedicated to attacking trans women. The radical message I was involved in broadcasting was simple and clear:
Sexual violence affects us all and state-funded sexual assault victim services should not be subject to purity tests by the organizations entrusted to provide them.
This and the fact that I am a transgender woman warranted a deep data mining of my life, a 1000-word highly inaccurate character assassination complete with outing on the internet and implied threats against my family… all mixed in with a pseudo-journalism based entirely on fallacy, error, and false biases.
My conclusion from the article, its predecessor, and the comments to them is that the intended use of the articles was to shame me into silence by outing me, painting me in a deeply flawed light, and discredit the action I was part of as those of a deranged freak.
Luckily for me, the slant of the article is so extreme that it is unlikely to be taken seriously by anyone other than the most radical of trans excluding feminist.
The tactics employed against me were used because of my gender identity and had little to do with the message we offered. Not even once was the message itself addressed in spite of the fact that I was a mere volunteer in a group of three feminists and that the other two who happened to be cis women were neither shamed or threatened or even named by the TERFs.
The TERFS see only their own bias… And haters gotta hate.
The GenderTrender article:
http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/tag/morgane-oger/
A balanced article of what was really happening:
http://rabble.ca/news/2013/11/memorial-draws-controversy-over-invitation-speaker-janice-raymond
The video message on exclusion that our coalition of concerned groups and persons published:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_orpyF5bzAg
Morgane Oger
Secretary, Trans Alliance of BC
What the coverage shows, Morgane, is that you were part of a small group which planned eagerly and with malice to disrupt and harass participants at a solemn Day of Remembrance for the women maimed and 14 who were murdered at L’Ecole Polytechnique in Vancouver in 1989 by a man who hated feminists.
Having planned to wreck this event you complain that the articles which drew attention to your actions were “to shame me into silence by outing me, painting me in a deeply flawed light, and discredit the action I was part of…”
Were you planning to organise a flashmob and lead a protest while concealing your identity? How did you plan to do that? If you were proud of what you were doing and felt justified in your action, surely your real name would be reported in any coverage? Were you not going to issue a press release? I find myself wondering why it matters if your name and easily checked biographical details were revealed on a blog? This could be of no importance whatsoever unless you were indeed so ashamed of your part in this that you intended to keep your participation secret.
Gendertrender described you thus: “[DEADNAME] – now calling [MISGENDER] “Morgane”- a middle-aged married [HOMOPHOBIC SLUR] and the [MISGENDER] of small children who works (like many [MISGENDER] transgenders) as an IT professional.”
From other sources, including ones you have contributed, it appears that this brief description is accurate. I saw none of the “implied threats” against your family you claim were part of the coverage on Gendertrender. All I see is factual description plus attention drawn to a course of conduct you clearly came to realise showed you in a poor light – and you are not mistaken. It does show you in a very poor light. It reveals you as not only a nasty misogynist but a gutless one too.
Article says: “She adds . . . this response will probably be a recorded flashmob display, held some distance away from or at a different time from VRR’s memorial. This is out of a desire not to interfere with the respect being paid to the women who were massacred at L’École Polytechnique.”
But Sophie Jameson still asserts: ” . . . you were part of a small group which planned eagerly and with malice to disrupt and harass participants at a solemn Day of Remembrance. . .Having planned to wreck this event you complain that the articles, etc.”
I don’t care what you believe, if you can’t express your views without resorting to outright slander and fabrication, you don’t deserve to have a voice.
Hi to all at The Terfs,
I do apologize – this is my second attempt to comment.
My name is Alex and I am a Communications Manager at Barnard College. I am reaching out to you today with an idea for your blog. Being perfect and powerful, being a feminist: these are among the most popular topics of conversation among today’s young women. Barnard College’s new podcast series, Dare to Use the F-Word, tells the story of today’s feminists through the ideas, art, and activism that define them. Barnard President Debora Spar, in her new book Wonder Women: Sex, Power & the Quest for Perfection, explains that while most women today struggle with the idea of perfection, they also struggle with the concept of feminism itself. Are the two connected? Read President Spar’s thoughts in this exclusive post : https://barnard.edu/news/web-exclusive-president-spar
As a communications manager at Barnard, I want to continue these important conversations among feminist thought-leaders like you. I ask you to republish and share this post on your blog. Pose these questions to your audience; they may dare others to join us and use the f-word.
Kindly,
Alex
I clicked the link to fox news and read some of the comments. some people are so mean! Yea, I know what else to expect from the people who brought us bill o’reily, right? but still. inciting violence? really? Shame on them!
Feminism need more people like you, people who are willing to recognize and point at the crap that attempts to attach to a movement of liberation.
Congrats GipsyRose!
Interesting article. TERF’s have forgotten the battles fought for so-called women’s liberation. Now they are trying to suppress equality for a specific group of women. Shame on them.
Bless.
Have you written a book on the history of TERFs and strategies for counteracting the damage in Political, Medical, and Social spheres? Because I want to give you my money!!!!
Ha! I should totally do that 🙂
I just wanted to thank you for this page, I’d hadn’t really identified as any gender throughout my life (I’m 15) until last year when I was able to learn a lot about my self and I realised I was female. I haven’t been subject to any discrimination or bullying because of being trans but I have been reading about what some of my sisters face. Thank you so much for this beautiful page and for taking a stand against discrimination.
Much love and support to you, Scarlet!