Weird question of the day: so what is terfs’ actual endgame?

Like I know the middle game is “everyone identifies with their assigned sex and no one modifies their body in ways that alter secondary sex characteristics.” But then what?

They say they’re feminists, so that would imply the actual endgame isn’t just “the destruction of the transcult” but the end of patriarchy.

But how is everyone identifying with their asab and not modifying their body supposed to do that?

It’s very Underpants Gnomes.

Recruit trans people who doubt.
Destroy the transcult!
…..
End patriarchy!

?????

mindthelspace

Steel-man-y answer, from what I can glean as someone who intuitively ‘gets’ some radfem talking points that seem to really confuse others.

1) They view trans women the same way black activists view Rachel Dolezal. Someone who is ‘playing’ at being a member of an oppressed class they aren’t actually a member of, and directly mocking or profiting off that class by extension. Being a trans woman, under this view, is sexist in and of itself.

(Of course, this ignores the fact that many axes of oppression can be moved into and out of. There is zero reason why misogyny can only exist as an oppression axis if it has fixed, lifelong ‘membership’. By that logic, ableism wouldn’t exist, as not everyone affected by it was born disabled. Also, you have to ignore trans women’s actual reports of their experiences, how little trans women profit socially from transition on average etc.)

2) A lot of them believe trans-ness is just a result of misogyny, and gender norms being forced on people. Trans men, in their view, are created when young girls get told they can’t do/like a certain thing unless they’re a boy, and therefore decide they need to try and become a boy in order to continue being themselves. They aren’t really boys, and in a world with true gender equality, would happily identify with their ASAB. Therefore, trans-ness is nothing but a symptom of sexism and homophobia, and preventing it is also preventing those things.

(The fact that gender dysphoria has never been shown to be treated using purely therapeutic methods gets kind of hand waved away here.)

(Also, this belief is clearly untrue if you’ve like… ever spoken to a trans person outside an online shouting match. But if you haven’t, or are a detransitioned person for whom “I internalised a fuckton of misogyny” actually was your experience, it can look reasonable. I have seen a lot of people in the latter group basically fall into a typical-minding trap where, because they weren’t really a man, no trans men are really men.)

3) They see sex and gender solely as externally-opposed forces designed to hurt and restrict women, and feel they won’t be able to end the harm if the ‘man’ and ‘woman’ classes are muddied, blurred or concealed in any way. See: the way they cherry-pick stories about trans woman sex offenders, and use them to argue that they’re skewing statistics and making sex crimes look non-gendered.

Less steel manny answer (mostly suspicions and theories):

I think Terfs, broadly, have a lot in common with white working class right populists. They have genuine grievances, and they have genuinely been kind of forgotten by the mainstream left, but rather than fighting the true source of their problems they’ve picked an easier-to-attack scapegoat, and convinced themselves that slaying the straw man will fix everything. A Terf saying “Trans Women are a danger to women and the trans cult has to end” is basically the same as a white retired coal miner saying the immigrants are stealing the jobs and need to be kicked out. The Terf is suffering from systemic misogny, and the coal miner is suffering from classism, but the true causes of those problems go all the way to the top and are difficult to challenge.

Trans women- and economic migrants- however, are disenfranchised enough to be punched down at easily and with little consequence. This punching-down makes the Terf/Miner feel like they’re Smashing The System when they’re in fact doing nothing of the sort, and are in fact maintaining the system by falling for divide-and-conquer tactics, hurting people who would be more naturally placed as their allies.

I’ve noticed that a lot of Terfs, for all their professed feminism, seem hyper-fixated on trans women and never have a word to say about sexist cishet men, or women’s issues that have nothing to do with trans people. I’d bet this is largely why: They’ve built trans women up into the One True Threat, because they’re a much smaller and easier target than, like, wealthy conservative traditionalists, and forgotten how systemic misogyny really operates in the process.

… There also seems to be a subclass of Terfs who aren’t feminists at all: They’re bog-standard social conservatives adopting feminism as a justification for their bigotry. If they didn’t need that justification, they’d drop the feminist label like a hot potato. See: Any ‘Terf’ in a right-wing political party.

canadianwheatpirates

Part of my job is working on social polarisation theory and I think another part of it is that the core goal of a polarised ideology is to sustain the polarisation through total social and cultural segregation of the two poles. Terfs view men and women as inherently and irreconcilably different, and their ideology’s endgame is the total segregation of the people they class as “men” and “women”. This is why things like Michfest and the various attempts at women-only communes were a thing, and it’s why writers like Adrienne Rich framed “lesbianism” as [paraphrasing] “women being focussed entirely on being in community with other women and no men, even if they are not romantically and sexually attracted to women” (from section III of Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience).

Like, their goal isn’t to end patriarchy; in many ways they don’t believe that patriarchy can be ended, because men are inherently oppressive and therefore patriarchy is inextricable from womens’ interactions with them. So their goal is to “protect” women from this by segregating them from men, and to reinforce the idea that men and women are irreconcilably different; anything that tries to depolarise these two genders is seen as a threat to women because it’s trying to blur the difference between men and women in order to allow men to “invade women’s spaces”.

I’ve had the misfortune to read bits of The Transsexual Empire and that last part is actually directly in the text. TERFs believe that one of the things trans women do, socially, is damage womens’ ability to tell the difference between men and women, which will leave them so bamboozled that they allow men into women’s spaces and lives. Trans people (trans women especially) are seen as this walking embodiment of depolarisation, and TERFs view that as the biggest threat to their ideology, because in many ways it is the biggest threat to their ideology. Trans people refute the claim that men and women are irreconcilably different just by existing, so for TERFs to maintain their polarisation they have to make us not exist.

Edit to add: I forgot the first time but yes, this is why they’re similar to the populist white working class! White populism and white supremacy are both polarised (e.g. the history of racial segregation in the USA), and polarised ideologies are easy to fold into each other due to their intolerance of intesections. From the terf side, examples of this include terfs turning up to BLM marches in the UK and hollering at the participants that they “didn’t even know what a woman was”. From the white supremacist side, examples include framing trans people as degenerate and damaging to the integrity of the white race, for the same reasons as terfs think we’re a threat.

(bonus fact: in the works I have a background in, the main term for polarisation is “populist antagonism”, so it’s fun when populism comes up in these discussions. There’s also “democratic antagonism” which is functionally an intersectional approach.)

fierceawakening

That makes sense. As does, paradoxically, the idea that they’re not really trying to end patriarchy.

random-thought-depository

Great discussion! Another thing that comes to mind here, and this ties into the TERFism/right-populism parallel, is that it seems to me that a lot of radfeminism is kind of like blood and soil Romantic nationalism but for a gender instead of an ethnicity.

I suspect what happened is middle twentieth century feminists took a look at movements like black nationalism and decolonial nationalism and went “we want something like that, but for women,” and radfeminism is the legacy of that.

What I mean is, I suspect a lot of radfemmy people have something like the following view of how gender works:

Women are a folk (as in volk), a people. Membership in this folk is defined partly by biology (blood), and partly by a culture, a network of social connections, and a historical experience that profoundly shapes members of the folk (soil, which in original Romantic nationalism meant homeland - think of that thing in Dune where the Fremen are the way they are because that’s what Arrakis has shaped them into).

There’s a Joseph de'Maistre “no such thing as man” thing going. Women and men are assumed to be profoundly different kinds of people, with profoundly different traits and interests. The great tragedy of the folk’s history is that they have spent much of it divided and weak and thus oppressed and exploited by others, and the way to fix this, and thus the point of feminism, is to build connection and solidarity among women as a folk and advance the interests of women as members of the folk, kind of like how the point of German and Italian nationalism was to create Germany and Italy as nation-states and advance the interests of German people and Italian people as Germans and Italians. Solidarity with people outside the folk along other axis (class, ethnicity, religion, neurotype, etc.) is at best a “that’s cool too, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your solidarity with the folk” thing and at worst treason.

An important part of strengthening the solidarity of the folk is building up a culture and identity that members of the folk have connection to and take pride in. Thus mother goddess spiritual feminism and the like. An important part of this is building pride in group traits that the enemy/oppressors/hegemonic culture has made low-status, which for women means things like periods, female genitalia, etc.. That “why does every third TERF have ‘vagina’ or ‘vulva’ or ‘uterus’ or a reference to menstruation in their username” thing is isomorphic to “black is beautiful,” self-consciously political celebration of things like “natural” black hair, etc..

It is very difficult, if not impossible, for an outsider to truly become part of or very deeply sympathize with the folk. Folkishness is at least a product of a from the cradle onward social and cultural experience (soil), and may even be to some extent literally in the blood. This makes more comprehensible how TERFs seem to combine radically social constructionist views of gender (all that talk about socialization) with what looks a lot like misandristic gender essentialism; in blood and soil thinking, the soil part (culture, experiences, experience of belonging, learning the old songs from your grandmother as a child) and the blood part aren’t contradictory but complimentary and mutually reinforcing.

The folkishness of the folk is something beautiful and valuable, and thus while outsiders cannot truly understand if they often desire to possess it, steal it, make it their own. But because they can’t truly understand it or share it, they can only produce grotesque parodies of it that fundamentally miss the point. Their attempts to copy or partake in things of the folk are not a desire to share but actually a kind of attack; they want to get access to things that are important to the folk and exert power over them, claim ownership of them, appropriate them, turn around to the folk and say “this is ours now!” If allowed to have their way with the precious things of the folk, they would degrade and defile them. There’s a purity axis psychology involved here: the foreigners lust to defile our sacred things with their filthy gaijin barbarian hands! Thus there’s a perceived need to police access to the folk and the things of the folk, and there is an anxiety that the space of the folk may be invaded and degraded by outsiders. TERF transphobia is more than little like Trumpist “build a wall!” sentiment.

I don’t endorse the above (for nationality or gender), but I suspect that’s how the psychology works.

winged-light

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.

This Memorial Day remember... Police have killed more Americans in the last 10 years than all the troops who have died in wars since 9/11.