TERF

[ReallyFuckingFedUp]

So I have seen this expression a lot lately... and TERF gets thown out a lot when feminists are discussing things that are only capable of affecting biologically female women.

And I just can't get my head around it tbh. I don't think feminism should exclude people I think it helps everyone. I get really upset when white feminists forget about WOC or Lesbians, or other minority groups because the point of feminism is to make women's lives better. SO if there an issue that is unique to black women (for example) it is still all of our issue and should be dealt with by all feminist.

So if trans women want in on feminism why do they think can exclude the majority of women by saying we can't discuss our issues? And if trans people want to be accepted and have their rights championed by feminism is that fair since the majority of feminists aren't also suffering those same problems? Is it not a huge double standard?

Abortion rights and prenatal care and contraceptive health, vaginal rape. Are these things off the table now for feminism?

Am I getting it wrong, missing something? It feels to me like male privilege, telling women what they can and can't talk about..and doing so in a way where they actually feel guilty as though they have done something wrong.

SWERF I assume sex worker exclusionary radical feminist.

storify.com/LeStewpot/nounexpectedpenises

which is why an awful lot of women don't want unexpected penises

This is key - Now a significant number of those who are "identifying" as women, don't just want to get on with their lives, they also want everyone else including strangers, to recognise they are women. - You could say the same about gay people. Married same sex couples want everybody including strangers to recognise they are married and equal to heterosexual couples.

We all have to join in whether we think it is a fantasy or not and when we try to cling to reality for the sake of our own sanity, safety and rights we are bigoted, transphobic, etc. - But if a christian owner of a B&B refuse to let a same sex couple share a room because they say they don't recognise them as being married they get called bigots too. Are they?

Black people asked to be recognised as equal to white people, including strangers, a few years ago too. Many people considered that to be a fantasy as well. And still do in some places, and that does make them bigots.

Oppressors don't like to knowledge that the people they're oppressing have the right not to be oppressed. It's the only way to keep oppressing people without having to view yourself as a bigot. Which they are of course.

Tiggy, but therein lies the issue.

Black people are equal to white people.
Married same sex couples are equal to Het married couples.

MtoF are not the same as women.

Incidentally the Christian BandB owner is an irrelevancy. If someone is running a Band B they rightly have to give a double room to a couple where one or both of them is Trans. And that is as it should be. Running a business is different to our own private views.

You could say the same about gay people. Married same sex couples want everybody including strangers to recognise they are married and equal to heterosexual couples.

Asking people to respect your union and wanting the same rights that come about through that union are not the same as as wanting to invade someone else union. That's the difference. Gay people are not inserting themselves in to hetero marriages.

Trans individuals are inserting themselves in to women' safe spaces.

And the race comparison doesn't work because black people are the oppressed not the oppressors.

It would make more sense to say black people should be allowed to have organizations that are white free and safe for them to discuss their specific issues. Which I agree with.

It feels very unkind not to be hospitable to people who are so vulnerable to abuse and violence etc. That is my big emotional problem with this. I feel guilty, essentially.

queenmab, I understand this and it used to be my attitude too, but it's important to understand that women's sympathy is being used against us on this issue, to ensure that we feel too guilty to stand up for ourselves and for women's interests.

Women are socialised to think of men before ourselves and other women, so it's natural that women's first response to seeing males in distress - over being a man, no less - is one of sympathy and a desire to protect them (largely from other men, who are the actual perpetrators of almost all violence and abuse against gender-non-conforming males).

Notice, however, that that sympathy and concern, let alone a desire to understand and compromise, is rarely returned in kind by MtFs.

Overwhelmingly, they could give less than a shit about women's valid concerns about some of the repercussions of trans demands, whether that is safety in sex-segregated spaces, the reification of harmful sex roles, the pathologising of sex-role non-conforming children, the importance of not erasing biological sex in the context of women's oppression, or even just the right of lesbians to have sexual boundaries.

They are demanding total capitulation from women on every aspect of their agenda, and that agenda happens to gut feminism from the inside out.

Feminists need to stand up for women in the face of this assault on our hard-fought-for movement for liberation, our safety and our right to speak about reality and name the root of our oppression. We need to put aside our instinct to protect and sympathise with males, and realise that it is the 3.5 billion women and girls in the world who are most in need of our sympathy and support. If feminists will not put them first, no one will.

I naively believed that transgender was the same as transsexual. It really isn't though, is it? Gender isn't the same as sex, and it it dangerous to conflate the two.

That's what most people believe. And so when they hear radical feminists speaking out against transgenderism they think we are harassing classic transsexuals who are mostly just deeply troubled gay men who wish to live their lives as quietly as possible. Hence the cry of 'transphobic' from so many quarters.

You see lots of people acting very surprised that feminism bothers so much with transgenderism - and most people don't know that transsexualism never really came under the feminist radar. It was a relatively harmless practice with regards to women, we therefore had a 'live and let live' attitude to it. Transgenderism, however, is altogether different, but a lot of people think that it is just a more politically correct/fashionable term for transsexualism.

One of the damaging things, is how so many MtoF's are in a position of status and power in women's organisations.

YY to this. 100% agree.

I once heard someone say, and I agree, that if you wanted to destroy the feminist movement, you couldn't create a better bomb to do it, than the idea of trans women are women.

And this.

At the risk of being what about the menz... I do think the patriarchy hurts men who don't conform to the gender binary more than it hurts women who don't.. I can go out in dh's clothes (and basically do) but if dh were to dare wear a dress everyone would look. Although I do think that's only because being a woman is looked down upon

ReallyFuckingFedUp have you read 'Beauty and Misogyny'? If not I really urge you to read it, I recommend it to all women! Here is a PDF for anyone interested ressourcesfeministes.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/jeffreys_beauty_and_misogyny_harmful_cultural_practices_in_the_west__women_and_psychology_.pdf

In the book, Jeffreys lays out with phenomenal clarity what the point of 'beauty' is. Beauty, beauty practices and the trappings of femininity exist in order to differentiate women from men - in order to 'other' women. Beauty and feminine trappings are to women what the yellow star was to Jews. They brand us as 'other', as inferior, as subjugated, as unfree. They are our shackles, our barcode. They have additional advantages such as being time consuming, money consuming and being able to make women feel like shit about their natural selves. Think what an act of resistance it is for a woman to go about her business with her legs in their natural hairy state.

It is verboten for men to take on the trappings of femininity (such as your DH wearing a dress) because to do so undermines the power of the masculinity/femininity hierarchy. Women wearing masculine clothes does not undermine the power of masculinity because masculine clothes do not carry the significance of feminine clothes. It isn't so much that men are more punished than women for being non conforming but that the trappings of femininity are immensely powerful tools for oppressing women and they must not be subverted/neutralized by men wearing them as though they had no political significance.

That video (about the six year old) has been all over my facebook last week with a 100% commentary of 'aren't these wonderful parents'.

I found it rather disturbing, but couldn't find the words to say so without appearing like a bigot. After all, the child kept saying he was a boy, and it appeared that the parents had gone to many specialists etc. before 'allowing' him to transition.

As I spent my primary school years in the 1970's dressed exclusively in my brother's hand me downs with a very short haircut (a combination of having no money and practicality on my mother's part) and was constantly mistaken for a boy - I enjoyed being 'allowed' to do boys' things and hated dolls and tea party type toys (someone elsewhere has described the fetishisation of treeclimbing and it was a bit like that) - but I was in no doubt myself that I was a girl (in fact it probably informed my feminism - the minute other boys realised I wasn't a boy they tried to exclude me), so I'm conflicted again, as it appears this child was strongly of the opinion and belief that he was a boy. Based on the video it's very difficult to know the extent of that belief from within him, or from parents/others saying 'that's just for boys' when he wanted to do that stuff.

It does bother me that if I'd been that way at that age today I may have been identified as transgender. Even now people tell me I 'drive like a man' (WTF?) and am 'not like girly girls' and it boils my piss, tbh.

I'm just rambling now and may be putting 2 and 2 together and making 5 but that child was born deaf and they gave him cochlear (sp?) ear implants - I know that there's controversy over them within the Deaf community and while I don't know how that plays out in America it does give the impression that the parents are of a 'Problem? Child not 'normal'? Let's fix that!' kind of mindset, and that this is how they've approached his 'transgender' issues.

And the fact they're getting so much praise for what they've done is going to reassure them that they've done the right thing and bolster them when it comes to puberty and the need for hormones/surgery for their child. It worries me that he's going to be railroaded into something that's just not necessary.

OTOH, if you truly believe you're a boy and you start having periods/growing breasts I can see that that would be incredibly traumatic. So I'm on the fence.

I'm rather conflicted about this at the moment anyway because I'm involved in an enterprise at present with a trans woman and she is coming out with the most appalling bs about 'boys things' and 'girls things' - not constantly and not in a particularly militant way, just through normal conversation - a bit like talking to a 'traditional' woman in the 50's, I suppose. She has fully transitioned and is what I suppose would be classed an 'old school' transsexual as described in previous posts. I don't think she's accrued much benefit career wise from being classed as a man in the past, as she lost her job, home and family over it and struggled to find work afterwards - something I can believe is pretty common.

I also know a transVESTITE who quite openly uses his female persona as a sexual thrill - he likes making people uncomfortable and gets a kick out of being looked at. He's not a very nice person and I have had a go at him before now about using female toilets (he basically gets off on invading female space and relies on no-one wanting to look like a bigot to get away with it) and had someone else tell me 'you can't say that to her!' Yes I bloody well can. He is a heterosexual man who gets a kick out of fetishising femininity and he should not be allowed in female only spaces. The trouble is that well-meaning people seem to conflate all trans-whatevers into one group and act like their rights trump everyone else's.

I suppose I hate all labels (particularly the cis one) and want to know what's so wrong with just being who/what you are and being comfortable with that without having to identify as something - but while we live in a society where the gender binary is becoming even more entrenched, I can understand why people might feel that they're the 'wrong' sex and want to do something to change that. Which is a terrible shame, but it's so difficult to say anything without being labelled a transphobe and addressed in quite hateful language.

When that video was linked on Huffpost, some commentators did point out that perhaps the parents should have just let Ryland get on with it and not wholly identify him as a boy - not in any insulting or abusive way - the abuse directed at them was breathtakingly vile. I feel like a discussion that really needs to be had is being closed down before it can draw breath because no-one wants to be seen as a bigot or exclusionary.

Interestingly, a lot of my (male) gay friends who have been through the whole Gay Rights movement are really pissed off that LGBT has been 'hi-jacked' by transactivists. I know that gay men have not traditionally been feminist allies and again I'm wondering how much that informs their dislike...

That was a right ramble - I'm not really much further forward in how I think about the whole thing :(

the race comparison doesn't work because black people are the oppressed not the oppressors.

Exactly, RFFU. The correct formulation of TiggyD's analogy would be if a bunch of white people decided to identify as black, and used their self-proclaimed 'racial identity' to try to force their way into black organisations and spaces. All the while claiming that black people held cis-racial privilege over them.

Totally agree with DonkeySkin.

It is being demanded that we (women) capitulate (to the fetishisation of gender) and if we don't we are mean and nasty and horrid and really really hurting people (men) who are already really really sad (that their penises aren't female).

For feminists to capitulate, means that we have to accept gender - and to accept gender is to accept female subjugation/oppression. It is to accept females as inferior and say goodbye to equality, never mind liberation.

Game over feminism.

Hence why patriarchy is so accommodating of transgenderism. Not because patriarchy is compassionate and understanding of struggles over 'inner gender identity' but because patriarchy is misogynistic and ruthlessly anti-feminist.

yes Beachcomber

what happens when little boys wear pink?
rigid gender enforcement

TiggyD knew that DonkeySkin and RFFU.

Funny how he chose to put it that way round, eh?

TiggyD wrote - "Black people asked to be recognised as equal to white people, including strangers, a few years ago too. Many people considered that to be a fantasy as well. And still do in some places, and that does make them bigots."

Black people seek equality with white people, but do they insist that black people are white, and only bigots refuse to agree? I am not aware of any examples.

Female feminists seek equality with men, but do they insist that female feminists are men, and only bigots refuse to agree? I am not aware of any examples.

Homosexual people seek equality with heterosexuals, but do they insist that homosexuals are heterosexuals, and only bigots refuse to agree? I am not aware of any examples.

Many transgender activists who seek equality for transwomen with female-assigned-at-birth (FAAB) women insist that MtF transsexuals and other MtF transgender people are women, and they often insist that they are biologically female too, whether or not the trans person has surgery or hormones. These activists tell society that only bigots refuse to agree. Examples of transgender activists doing this are all over the internet.

The race analogy would only stand up if white people were now demanding to "identify" as black, with varying degrees of makeup or tattoos,order to be considered for protected, affirmative action positions. And those affirmative action positions were ones set up in the first place to protect black people from the worst excesses of.white oppression.

Obviously I had managed to miss that others made the same point more eloquently up thread.

Some really great posts on this thread.

The standard transactivist follow up from tiggy's point is that transwomen are women not men and they are the most oppressed and women have "cis privilege" so, in fact, it is analogous to the situation of black people.

Of course this ignores the point vesuvia makes about what people really are but that's the conceit on which this whole ideology rests, that there is no real materiality of being a woman.

Did you all know that the Gender Reassignment Act came into being partly because the government of the day didn't want to open the same sex marriage can of worms?

Sorry, recognition.

crotch that's interesting, I didn't know that. I think there is a huge misunderstanding on the intentions behind the GRA and legal protections for trans. These were clearly designed to address the classic transsexual discussed above - a small number of people living in acute pain because of their dysphoria. There has been a stealth take over by the post-modern transgender activists who have pushed this to claim that there is an official recognition of transgenderism when there has been no debate or discussion. It's incredible.

There is a twitter war going on with Sarah Ditum vs many transactivists. This touched on the issue of TERF and I was very disappointed that Sarah Ditum said she could understand the use of TERF towards people like Janice Raymond. It's frustrating when feminists try to toady along and be seen as the nice ones, less mean than those other nasty ones. It makes no difference whether it's MRAs or transactivists. Nothing less than complete capitulation will be acceptable.

This is the link to the relevant case (hope it works, am on phone).

hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search.aspx?i=001-60596#{"itemid":["001-60596"]}

It didn't. It's CASE OF CHRISTINE GOODWIN v. THE UNITED KINGDOM

Crotch - that link doesn't work either i'm afraid, it takes me to a 0 result page.

This is a good blog post explaining why the word cis is so problematic.

liberationcollective.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/a-feminist-critique-of-cisgender/

Really and Calm....
Thanks for your answers. Essentially could you please define any term which you feel would not be known by an eight year old??
OK, so that is a huge assumption. However I am shockingly ignorant, due in most part to the patriarchy in which I live - my experience is so limited, as is my access to information.
I need to be super careful in case I out myself; I know my description of how I am trying to change attitudes and ultimately the system is peculiar but I suppose the best way of describing it is basically through influencing people in my orbit.
Hope that makes sense now.
Please help me!

It's frustrating when feminists try to toady along and be seen as the nice ones, less mean than those other nasty ones. It makes no difference whether it's MRAs or transactivists. Nothing less than complete capitulation will be acceptable.

Yes, Flora, I've seen feminists say they accept transwomen as women but they don't believe women have cis privilege, and those who say they accept transwomen as women but still think female-only spaces might sometimes be necessary, or feminists who accept transwomen as women but think that being born and raised female constitutes a meaningfully different experience... they are always attacked relentlessly, and in exactly the same terms (TERF!) as women who say point blank that transwomen are men.

What is happening is not a dialogue between feminists and trans activists, nor is it a negotiation or an attempt to balance competing concerns. It is a demand that women put aside their silly and bigoted cis female perspectives and submit to this new version of womanhood and sexual politics, as defined by males.