Never Trust a TERF
TERFs at London Pride
TW: mentions of transphobia
Maybe you’ve heard or read about TERFs after the recent London Pride fiasco. Maybe it just seems like a bunch of random letters thrown together, and you’re wondering what that acronym could stand for. Either way, today we’re going to talk about Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (there’s the acronym spelled out for you), and why we can’t just trust anybody who claims the term feminist to deserve the label.
TERF ideology is an internet-based backlash to rising trans visibility within the feminist movement at large. The fundamental reasoning behind the movement is that trans women are not “real” women. In a TERF’s eyes, genitals define a person’s gender identity. This logic does not hold––which we will get to in a minute––but TERFS believe that gender is marked solely by physical characteristics. As a result, TERFs will deadname trans people, call trans women men, and reduce other human beings to their genitals. Much like Republican Congressmen from Kansas, they see trans women as perverted men who want to use women’s bathrooms.
Classic TERF arguments hyperfocus on personal decisions of individual trans women, like the decision to not get bottom surgery, and extrapolate these extremely personal choices to attempt to dismiss the existence of trans people as a whole.
TERFs use the phrase “gender critical” to describe their ideology. Being gender critical, however, doesn’t go both ways in their book: it is a criticism reserved exclusively for trans people. In theory, being gender critical should be a good thing. However, the way TERFS machinize the term––in other words, choosing to criticize gender expression without criticizing the underlying existence of gender in the first place––isn’t revolutionary. It’s reductive, and it leans upon strict definitions of gender and binaries in order to function, which (when you think about it) isn’t actually very critical at all.
TERF logic depends upon a deeply restrictive understanding of gender and sex, as well as ignoring many scientific advancements of the last century. Intersex people do not fit into TERF logic. Cis women who have hysterectomies do not fit into TERF logic. If genitals and/or reproductive organs dictate gender, then a trans man with bottom surgery who’s had a hysterectomy should be a “real man”––however, TERFS turn upon their own logic at this junction, because their movement is based in bias rather than reason.
It should go without saying that the fundamental logic of “gender critical” or TERF feminism is flawed and outdated. Nobody has ever claimed that the lived experiences of cis women and trans women are identical. Moreover, trans women are fundamental to the roots of feminism in a way that only serves to expand our cultural definition of womanhood and understanding of gender. So, a hardline effort to separate trans women from “real” (read: cis) women does no good whatsoever.
Dismantling the patriarchy depends upon including trans people in the feminist movement. For one thing, trans people have been foundational to the feminism we know today. Moreover, the patriarchy actively affects trans women to the same extent or more than cis women, as they experience discrimination both for being a woman and for being trans. To quote Judith Butler, TERF ideology “sets up the feminist as the prosecutor of trans people. If there is any mutilation going on in this scene, it is being done by the feminist police force who rejects the lived embodiment of transwomen.”