TERF

i don't know what terf stands for.

Everyone else , including teens seems to claim the right to define themselves.

I'll go for:
BITCH

Standing for

Being in Total Control Honey.

I'm staying with that one.

People expect you to be a mother and deal with the shxt that is thrown at you,

economically,
socially
and everything else.

Well,
guess what,
we have a right to a life too.
And a sexuality.

And a holiday.

End of.

Zombie alert. Nice to see LangCleg on a post for a bright moment which quickly became a sad moment when the date was spotted

My oh my! The level of polite discourse has not improved then!

I note that the young women radfem community on Tumblr (which they call radblr) are pretty good at reclaiming the "terf" slur, and I'm heartened that there's some pushback on this in youth social media.

Like MN, Tumblr is an anonymous/username based platform so there are some very young women who feel more emboldened to push back against the gender stuff precisely because it's anonymous, and they risk fewer social consequences for not toeing the orthodox line. They are a funny, sharp and angry bunch, and I think they'd get on very well with the mum dinosaurs on this forum!

I don't really care if someone calls me a TERF but, as pp have pointed out, it's really not a very accurate label. I exclude male people from the category of 'women', whether or not those male people are still in possession of a penis. I don't exclude transmen from that category, because they are biologically female. So... I guess I'm a MERF?

These girls / children are the casualties of this - it grieves me that they are alienated from the community of women who have their best interests at heart. The awful posts on Mumsnet from parents frantic to support their daughters claiming to be "trans"- little girls in primary schools, young Key Stage 3 children - all caught up in this ideology before they've experienced adult life. Never been kissed, fallen in love, many pre puberty yet allegedly old enough to hand over their future fertility, sexual function and lifelong good health.

Somehow we need to keep these girls at the centre of what we do - even though (just like in Rotherham) these girls dismiss adult help and those with responsibility to protect them fail to break though that in any way.

Call me a terf or any other slur - I'll not stop challenging the adults weaponising children in all this - ever.

My sisters sister-in-law has been proudly telling everyone of her t-ness for a while now (definitely pre lockdown). She’s a midwife thank god.

Oh dear, somebody's got their underpants in a twist.....
Never saw myself as radical up until lately, but now a proud TERF....

Thank you for that demonstration of civil in the spirit debate and non-dehumanisation.

I wouldn't define myself necessarily as a radical feminist either, but PERF probably covers it. Females have rights too.

I dont feel I need to 'reclaim' a word that was never mine to begin with. Its not a word that feminists invented and was stolen from us.

'reclaim terf' just supports the trans rights narrative that is not a slur and was invented by radfems. That is a lie, and I'm not about to enable yet another trans activist lie.

I had to google the meaning when I first encountered it. I didn’t feel it was an insult, just a very accurate representation of my stance. If anyone called me a TERF I’d say they were spot on.

The problem I see with ‘reclaiming’ terf is that girls like the one I was speaking to won’t see that reclamation as a way to overcome a slur, they’ll see it as women saying “yeah, I’m a nazi - so what?” I hadn’t realised how ~scared~ some adolescents are of the terf bogey-women. These girls desperately need help, and tactics that work to counter (and piss off) the TRAs will unfortunately be likely to just convince the girls that the TRAs are right.

There's something to be said, I guess, for reclaiming the word, much as "queer" has been reclaimed by gay people and "cripple" by some disabled activists.

And in a way, who cares? I've recently come to the conclusion that people who bandy about the term TERF are just morons, utterly incapable of formulating a single thought for themselves.

It talks about Trans Exterminationist Radical Feminists - absolutely designed to put fear into people that don't know any better.

I can't help feeling they are going to massively over reach with this nonsense. Couple that acronym with the claim we promote genocide, and it looks like the mad ramblings of a loon.

You have to remember that we are seeing the extreme end before everyone else.

The general public are still at wait, what? most transwomen still have a penis??

Datun & *Three
*
On the thread about the GRA meeting in Glasgow there's a pic of the leaflet that the anti capitalist queer antifa?! demonstrators were handing out.

It talks about Trans Exterminationist Radical Feminists - absolutely designed to put fear into people that don't know any better.

I'm also in two minds about Terf.

On the one hand I personally don't give a shiny but ultimately I think it is used as a slur designed to dehumanise and that can't go unchallenged.

It then makes it much much easier to dismiss & ignore what GC feminists have to say which is a huge problem if we want people to listen to our arguments.

It would make a pretty good t-shirt.

I don't like getting called a TERF. To quote Luke Skywalker: "Impressive... Every word in that sentence was wrong." I don't exclude trans men, they are entirely welcome in my feminism, which is for females. I'm also not a radical feminist as the Marxist underpinnings kind of put me off. I'm just a regular feminist who wants to support the wims.

I keep pointing out that mother nature is the ultimate TERF. Don't like the fact that human sexual dimorphism exists? Not my fault, mate.

It's an odd one.

Calling someone a terf is a conversation ender. And it's loaded. Massively.

I'm loathe to play into anyone's hand by embracing a term that is designed to dehumanise.

Because it is very definitely used to strip the receiver of any humanity. Replace it with almost any other word like woman, Jew, and it's shocking.

On the other hand, saying yeah, I'm a terf, so what? Has a certain intractable assertion to it that is very satisfying.

You stop being someone who has just been insulted and stripped of humanity and become an upfront challenger, out and proud.

But until more people are willing to reclaim the word terf and tip the balance between it being an insult and it being a recognised bit of desperate rhetoric, it feels as though we should take a middle ground that might work better.

So not deny it and get defensive, laugh at it and say that's a meaningless term. Or assert that if you're a terf, so is everyone on the planet, including Mother Nature.

In other words, don't give it a hard landing that it can bounce off, give it a soft landing so it fails ricochet off its own momentum.

I'm not sure that makes sense. I had in mind and the way you play tennis. When you get a softball it's a lot harder to return it, than when you get a hardball, the impetus of which can be used against your opponent, despite it being generated by your opponent in the first place.

I think the meaning is not the point, it's the fact that the word is used to dehumanise and promote violence against women.
Any word only used as an insult is an insult.
www.terfisaslur.com

If being a terf means i support the rights of trans people to live without persecution and yet still believe in the value of sex segregation in certain circumstances then hell yeah im a terf. Proud to be one.