It is also really important to realise that TERFs feel the same way about you as you feel about them: betrayed.
I see a lot more hatred on my timeline for TERFs than for cishet male transphobes. Like a lot. That accusation you make, “terfs only ever attack trans women and never seem to attack cishet male sexist”? Yeah they say the exact same thing about us. And it’s kind of true. My friends say “kill all TERFs” a LOT more often than they say “kill all cishet male transphobes”.
And I think what’s happening here is, like, we don’t encounter conservative male transphobes. We just… don’t meet them in our social lives. We hang out in Dungeons and Dragons groups, queer Discords, vintage thrift markets, Tumblr, etc. We don’t, mostly, hang out in churches or at gun shows. And if a place or person has a Conservative Christian vibe, we just….. leave. Immediately. Unless we’re forced to stay somehow.
Whereas TERFs look, on the surface, like friends. They are feminists who enjoy lesbian art and vintage thrifting and swing-dancing and communism memes. We hang out with them, maybe we even like them or reblog their posts, and it’s only later - when the topic of trans rights comes up - that we’re like, shit, this person’s a transphobe.
And that feels worse. It doesn’t feel good to walk into an online forum, realise immediately the admins have a “no pro-LGBTQA+ posts, we are a Christian space” and go “oh shit I’m leaving”. But it feels worse to enter an online forum, spend a week hanging out there and enjoying the Marxist analysis, and then realise the mods are removing all pro-trans posts.
You thought you were among friends, but you weren’t. You thought these were allies, but they aren’t. It seems like they should be allies! They’re fellow oppressed people, why aren’t they allies? But they aren’t. And that sucks.
And that kinda makes you hate TERFs more than you hate right-wing Christian Conservative transphobes. Like, you never actually have to speak to Christian Conservative transphobes unless you’re unlucky enough to work in retail and get harassed by them - and even then, you go home at the end of the day and vent about it in safe spaces online with other queer leftists. But sometimes you encounter TERFs socially in those queer leftist spaces, and that makes you feel unsafe in your own home, and that’s worse. So you vocally profess hating them and put “terfs dni” on all your feminist stuff, in the hopes they’ll stay away.
Yeah, that’s how they feel. They don’t hate trans people more than conservative Christians because they think trans people are doing more damage than conservative Christians. Only the more radical right-wing minority think that, and that minority is often co-opting TERF politics to seem more left-wing. The strain of lefty Marxist radical feminists you’ll find on Tumblr? They hate us because we are so close to them. They come into feminist spaces expecting that they’ll be safe spaces, that they’ll be among friends, and then a trans woman says something that doesn’t align with their experiences and they feel betrayed.
They don’t care that conservative Christians exclude them from churches and gun shows. They didn’t want to go to churches and gun shows in the first place. But when we exclude them from our board-gaming clubs and our communist reading groups and our gay support circles? That stings. In their eyes, trans people are the reason they can’t participate in the safe spaces that they want to participate in.
This is why “terfs aren’t really feminists” analysis is so unhelpful. Sure, there’s a small minority of transphobes out there who are right-wing and express the “we have to protect cis women’s rights” argument to basically make themselves sound more acceptable. But the ones who call themselves radical feminists? For the most part they really are, genuinely, feminists. And they are angry because they feel like feminism is their movement, the one thing that stands up for their rights as women, and when they find themselves excluded from mainstream feminism they have nowhere else to go.
TERFs on tumblr have a concept, “peak trans”. It’s basically their term for the moment someone converts. They tell a very specific story about how people typically join their club: a good feminist professes all the views she’s supposed to, like how terfs smell and trans women are women. Then gradually she encounters more and more aggression from trans people, until she eventually ‘breaks’ and decides that she’ll check out what the TERFs have to say - even though she knows she’s supposed to hate TERFs. Once she reads actual TERF writing as opposed to just “kill all TERFs” rhetoric, she obviously converts! She reluctantly begins to believe TERF views, even though she feels guilty about it because she knows she’s supposed to hate TERFs. But then she sees how nice and kind the TERFs are, how they’ll accept her in a way mainstream feminism never will, and she begins to feel at home in their community. That specific story gets told over and over again. It’s part of their self-image. You need to understand this if you want to understand them.
Sometimes these “peak trans” moments are actually trans women being kind of mean or thoughtless. Trans women saying “cis women have it easy, they get to be perceived as women without any effort!” really stings if you’re someone who has been traumatised by the experience of being perceived as a woman. Right-wing trans women exist, and sometimes they say shit like “misogyny isn’t real, I would know because I never experience misogyny!” and if you are like “maybe your experience is not universal” they come back with “are you saying my experience isn’t female? Are you saying I’m not a woman??” and honestly that’s obnoxious as fuck. In the radfem narrative, encountering that is “peak trans” - it’s the moment when someone’s rising suspicions peak, and they ‘break’ through the dogma and decide to check out these stigmatised anti-trans views.
The thing is… trans people are people just like any other group. Some of us are assholes. Some of us are antifeminist and some of us say fucked-up things. It is not fair to tar us all with that brush. It is not fair to encounter a few antifeminist trans women and conclude that the existence of trans women is inherently antifeminist. That’s often what TERFs are doing. And in that regard, it’s not similar to white working-class populism. It’s more similar to the racism of someone who says “an immigrant robbed my dad so I’ve decided to hate all immigrants forever” or “my abusive cheating ex was bi so all bi people are inherently bad”. Sure, some immigrants commit crimes - but the majority don’t. The existence of some shitty bi people doesn’t make biphobia okay. Etc.
I hear “terfs never actually care about women’s issues, they just hate trans women!” so often and it just does not reflect reality. I know it’s tempting to just say anything bad about TERFs because we hate them, but seriously, this does not help. Because what happens when someone goes and reads a TERF blog and it’s 50% discourse about economic issues (like wages for housework or tampon taxes), 30% anti-FGM, 10% lesbian positivity and 10% transphobia? They’re going to go “huh, guess I was lied to about what TERFs think and they’re not as bad as everyone says”. And TERFs use that. The narrative they tell about themselves is: “Mainstream feminism will just tell you TERFs are evil to prevent you reading our actual arguments, because if you actually read about us you’d realise we’re right! We’re the women who were brave enough to check out TERF writings even though we were told not to, because we were driven to it by our ‘peak trans’ moments, and we realised we’d been lied to!”
I am so deadly serious it is fucking vital to understand that a significant number of TERFs very much are feminists and that is part of the problem. We must stop reinforcing their narrative. We have to give people the tools to actually read TERFs critically and understand where they are going wrong and why.
It is absolutely not true that TERFs on tumblr only ever hate on trans women and don’t speak about women’s issues. If you tell people that, they’re only going to be more susceptible to a TERF saying “you’ve been lied to about us”.
Wanna know something else TERFs talk about? Like all the time? FGM. TERFs on tumblr talk a lot about Female Genital Mutilation. For anyone unfamiliar, this is a fairly horrific practice carried out by some people who believe that women need to be “pure” to have value, so they sew girls’ vaginas shut and cut off their clits. This is not comparable to circumcision, which may violate the bodily autonomy of AMAB infants but mostly doesn’t cause them ongoing pain or limit their ability to have sex. FGM is aimed at preventing the woman experiencing sexual pleasure at all, ever. In some cases the vagina is sewn shut so that it’ll heal over and the woman’s future husband can have the pleasure of seeing she’s a virgin, ripping her open, and fucking the wound. Sometimes the victims die. It’s fucking awful. Honestly, we should all talk a little more about FGM. Ending it should be a priority for feminism.
Think for a second about how this works. We tell people that TERFs aren’t really feminists. Someone reads a TERF blog and sees them talking nonstop about issues like FGM, period poverty / tampon taxes, how little girls don’t succeed in math/science classes because their teachers stereotype them and push them away, abortion rights, etc. And the reader goes: “huh, this seems pretty feminist actually”. And then the TERF goes: “Yeah, the reason we’re painted as not being feminists is because these issues don’t affect trans women, so people say they aren’t really feminism.”
TERFs argue that trans women are “socialised male” - eg. they aren’t pushed away from math classes as a kid, because their teachers perceive them as male and therefore encourage them into STEM. According to TERFs, mainstream feminists are no longer allowed to care about FGM because it doesn’t affect trans women. When we say “people who need abortions” instead of “women”, TERFs paint that as sinister. Trans women don’t need tampons, so tampons aren’t a feminist issue any more. They say: trans women are trying to co-opt feminism. Feminism is your safe space as a woman, your movement for your rights, the one place you should be centred - and trans women want to take that away from you.
See how that works? It’s a radicalization process that, if they weren’t recruiting feminists, wouldn’t fucking work. The message is: “you as a cis woman aren’t welcome in liberal feminism any more, but you’ll be welcome here in radical feminism”.
It is vital to affirm that this is not true. Abortions, FGM, period poverty, discrimination against little girls, etc are all unquestionably feminist issues even if they don’t affect all women. Discrimination against women who wear hijab is a real feminist issue, even though it doesn’t affect all women. The issues of women in STEM are feminist issues even if they don’t affect women who work in childcare or marketing. Transmisogyny is a real feminist issue even if it doesn’t affect cis women.
TERFs believe that trans women aren’t the natural allies of women because their issues are different. Cis women need abortions, trans women need gender affirming surgery, and TERFs believe those are two different campaigns. They are not. Those campaigns are one and the same. We are both fighting for the right to bodily autonomy against a cishet male hegemony which believes male politicians should have the right to control what medical procedures people can get. If we establish that everyone has the right to get whatever medical procedures they want with informed consent, this will benefit everyone; cis women, trans women, disabled people, gay couples seeking IVF, etc. If we establish that it isn’t okay to discriminate against people for how they dress, that will benefit gnc women and trans people. Etc.
Many, many TERFs are feminists and that is part of the problem - they are similar to trans-inclusive feminists in many ways, they often share our beliefs or want to be in our spaces, and that is part of why we hate each other so much. We bump into each other. And it’s easy for TERFs to recruit young feminist women who have been traumatised by patriarchy and who are really angry and who see the rest of us talking absolute bullshit about all this.
Radfems, and folks on the fence: Your feminism will be stronger if it includes trans women. Most of them are cool. Honest. The ones you see getting reblogged in your TERF circles are not representative.
Everyone else: please stop talking about shit you don’t fucking understand. If you haven’t spent time with these people, don’t confidently go around asserting that they’re all not really feminists. You will end up indirectly feeding their narrative. You are giving them ammunition. Stop.