Falling Into Terf Wars
An unapologetic descent into toxicity
TW: TRANSPHOBES. Also, stupidity.
Last week, another Brit announced their unwavering support for targeting a disenfranchised minority by saying they don’t care about trans issues, in which gentle pleas from the weirdos that they have inspired over their decades-long career went unheard.
It was a good time to remind each other that the most virulent and aggressive anti-trans activists are women, cis-women like me, who don’t have much to lose* in the discussion of trans protections.
In general, because I work for companies that are much greater than I am and I try to subsume my social identity into one that is just, “pretty excited about culture” and has “fun thoughts about timely topics”, I try to be relatively muted on my various accounts. I don’t want to become a burden. I don’t want a prospective employer or someone looking to hire me for writing to think, “Oh lawd, she’s a-comin’.” But there is something that cuts so quick to my wick regarding the absolute furor some women have regarding the statement “trans women are women.”
(Spoiler: if this particular claim makes you at all uncomfortable, this is neither the essay nor the newsletter for you.)
I am a natural pugilist. It has served me well in my life to immediately move to a defensive stance on behalf of seeing someone purport something that feels, to me, wrong. (I think of the famous XKCD comic regularly.) It drives my friends batty. It will be the death of me. So when the “discourse” around whether or not calling someone a TERF, or a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, is a slur took off last week, my hackles raised, my quills bristled, my tail floofed.
And I witnessed firsthand what exactly it means to be “gender critical,” and saw that the once stalwart and seemingly “right” feeling tone of feminism has changed into something that is really foreign to me, something that takes a genuine concern for the well-being of women and mixes in a real gender panic, with a fully realized narrative that instills that trans women are men in dresses, men with sexual perversions that fetishize being women, or are men who use transness to further subjugate women. In other words, trans women are something from which women need to be protected.
I am not, and I cannot, tell you how wrong this is, many other people have done so eloquently. But I can outline the types of arguments I faced and the best, most reasonable responses to them. And I can order them from those that were made “in good faith”, or from people who may have actual concerns that conversation about women’s rights, especially in the third world, to the straw man arguments that are from folks who just don’t like trans people. Because, as a pugilist, it’s always know who is throwing the punches…and how.
*this is a hugely contested statement to gender critics
Women need safe spaces
Yes, wow, of course. There is ample evidence that women, especially in developing spaces, thrive when they have protections that allow them not to be raped, harassed, or have access to health care. No one is trying to take safe spaces away from women. But trans women in developing countries suffer such extreme amounts of violence that looks, acts, and smells like gendered violence (involuntary sex work, rape, abuse, etc.) But discussing the protection of women in developing countries is such an intersectional conversation, I do not feel equipped. (If you are interested, check out Kimberly Tower’s assessment.)
But where this veers off the deep end is the bathroom conversation, which presupposes that trans women secretly wear skirts to spy on others in using the terlet—as if that sign on the bathroom of the stick figure in the skirt is some sort of magical shield that would protect anyone “not female” from just entering unannounced. The concern that TERFs have for the “sanctity of the public bathroom” leads me to believe that public restrooms must be the cleanest, most cared for shared spaces in the world. (Narrator: It turns out, however, they are not.) No one has ever made me more aware of genitals and what is going on in someone’s pants like a gender critical woman…and frankly, that makes me scared to use the bathroom.
Protect children
As I started writing this, the UK had a distressing case that made it more difficult for under-16s to get gender confirming care. It is not a case I have been following, so I don’t feel equipped to speak on it, but I do want to point out that transgender care, for children, is vast and, despite what headlines would want you to think, is not handing out hormone-blockers like Skittles.
(Hormones, you say, for teens? How dare they? Okay, ask any cis woman you know what age they started birth control. I was 15, because I had horrible cramps, and everyone was kinda just fine with that.)
They like words like “mutilation” and “sterilization” because they are graphic and emotive words, ones that are medically grotesque and immediately evoke reactions, but in reality, surgeries rarely happen until the subject is over 18—the numbers are in the hundreds, and the facilities that oversee such care do so with strict guidelines. (Of course, you can find unscrupulous doctors, just like you can find a doctor that would give a 15-year-old rhinoplasty.)
There are strict guidelines for trans identifying teens, and suggesting that trans youth don’t know that they are trans is…well, have you ever spoken to a trans person before? It’s easy to say you care about the well-being of children but not listen to children, I guess.
How is this any different than a white person “self-IDing” to be black?
@KatyMontgomerie @twitone @leilaclaire @feminist_RACHEL Men, however, aren’t oppressed they are oppressors. And as such shouldn’t be able to in law identify into the group they oppress. They can be free to do/look like/say they are whatever they want outside the law but gender id is a belief not a biological reality.I recently read someone say something along the lines, in order to point out how harmful self-IDing is that, “I now identify as a man. As a man, I get to have an opinion.” Which makes me believe that, deep down, this person made that jest because they think that women’s opinions are not as loud as men’s?
Trans people are not identifying as cis women. They have privilege, but they also relinquish privilege by being trans. When someone is perceived as trans they lose privilege, unlike a white person pretending to be black. It’s not borrowing from a protected class to the cost of the protected class—it is losing privilege and experiencing a whole host of new, fun ways of oppression!
My role is not to validate men, defending trans women supports the patriarchy.
Ah yes. This one scratches at me because it is often accompanied by claims of being a gender traitor or bowing down submissively for male approval. (Except, trans women aren’t men? Alas, the wonderful ouroboros of TERFs.)
Look, not to get all bell hooks on you, but the patriarchy hurts everyone, even men. I’ve said this before.
I’d like to quote Katy Montgomerie (forgive the British spellings, she’s a new ally via the British invasion.
“(Patriarchy benefits) from preventing marginalised groups from even having the words to discuss their oppression you say (…) A bit like how GC people want to prevent trans women from being able to point out that they face misogynistic sexism and sexual violence for being women? A bit like how GC is desperately trying to even stop trans people from using the word that describes people who aren't trans people? Yes, absolutely, preventing people from even talking about Patriarchal oppression is part of it. Lots of it is based around enforcing the idea of the family unit with the straight cis man in charge and the straight cis woman as a baby machine in the kitchen. It's about enforcing strict roles on everyone and punishing them for breaking them, to keep straight cis men in power It should be pretty clear to anyone that the Patriarchy's response to trans people would be a hard no. Trans people break all of the "rules" and social positions. The Patriarchy does not want people transitioning and has some weird asymmetrical pressure where women need to be controlled and patronised and men need to be violently punished and shamed. The Patriarchy does not want trans people being "out of place", they need to be in the spaces for them defined at birth, no one is allowed to move position. There can only be two roles.”
When Trump, the far right, the Vatican, and religious extremists all agree with you…you might be supporting the patriarchy!
SPORTS and PRISONS!
Oh FFS. In summation, trans women are flocking to women’s sports in order to…do okay but not incredibly well? The incredible Parker Molloy has written loads on this, and the double standard that, if you are a trans athlete you disappear if you are mediocre or if you are great you are criticized. Check her out here.
Regarding prisons: The British offered up a lot of creepy and weird images that show supposed trans people who aren’t very passing being extremely violent, and there is one particularly dangerous person who should have been caught by the criminal justice system who I won’t name here (she’s the TERF boogeyman, and is shared under every single pro-trans post I’ve ever uttered). But in the US, trans women aren’t in women’s prisons, meaning they are almost always subject to being violently assaulted once behind bars.
Also, I truly wish that each and every person who wrung their hands about a trans woman in prison educated themselves on actual prison reform instead of hemming and hawing about a stranger’s genitals.
Being a woman is not a feeling or an “outfit” you can try on
Yeah, no shit, shitlock. This is what trans women have been trying to tell you, and regardless of whether or not you think their experience is a “feeling” they are experimenting with haphazardly, trans women experience very real gender violence and misogyny and sexualization, regardless if whether or not your “worldview” includes them.
Also, bring up trans men in this scenario. Are you saying that being a man isn’t a feeling or an outfit, either? Because reducing gender to having parts is just a) bad science and b) see number four.
This is a male problem because Violent Male Brain
@jaydavidsen @Homely_1_Kenobi @CarolineTart @honestrainbow @IseultWallace @hatpinwoman @muddaub @leilaclaire Transwomen are murdered by men NOT women. It's a problem for men to sort out. Leave women out of it. You could lobby men to become less violent. How about that for starters.Ah yes, pass me the calipers.
Look, trans women are consistently lobbying men to be less violent, in protests, via activism, and by publicizing and discussing hate crimes.
Of course, gender critics will pass some sort of extremely suss “report” that trans women commit violence at the same rate as cis men—this report is coded in hot pink and cerulean blue and if you have ever been a part of a gender critical pile on, it is always bandied about. It is a report that has been criticized by its author.
Violent Male Brain also upholds traditional gender roles, which don’t just hurt trans and cis women, but men who don’t fall under various “masculine” directives, like gay or effeminate men, trans men, men who are extreme introverts, etc.
It’s like, measuring skull circumference to find violent tendencies.
Cis is violence
Honestly. These quotes immediately assume that women are a weaker gender? Cis refers to your gender, not what your gender says about you? These arguments absolutely are predicated on gender essentialism which suggests gender is a binary, despite sex indicators being on a spectrum. That crone woman straight up says that women are weaker?
Honestly, y’all are doing the work of the patriarchy for them. Lordt.
Trans women are sex offenders
A single, resounding yike, and it is so irritating and awful it is even shit to mention it, but guess what! TERFs do!
I don’t know what happened in the UK or if there is something in the water across the way, but there is a bit of a masturbatory coverage of trans women Doing Bad Things. The thing about Bad Things is that Many People do them, and even more importantly, when you track Very Bad Things in prison systems because someone is there longterm, you are going to find Bad People. Trans women are not sex offenders inasmuch as cis women are sex offenders.
This is not a Good Faith Argument as it has no basis in fact. Do not engage with it.
Why can I not have anything for myself you are taking all of the things that are dedicated to women like gendered abuse and protected spaces and also the color pink and ripping them out of my clammy hands and giving them to people who are not me and I find this upsetting and most importantly insulting to everyone, but also mainly: me
This last one is unbearable and should be punted, shrieking, into the sun.