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.

It's quite amazing AskBasil isn't it?

They call it bathroom panic and talk about how transwomen are more likely to be attacked or raped than women and therefore women just need to get over it. If that Harmsworth man had been refused access to the shelter, they would have fought for him to get in. After his conviction, they are denying he was trans. Massive amount of wishful thinking and naïveté.

There are parallels with the Islington care home scandal where there was a reaction to the old idea that gay men were paedophiles by effectively saying no gay men were paedophiles. An admirable attempt to end discrimination against gay men but carried out in a wrong-headed manner that led to abuse by paedophiles who realised they could take advantage of liberalising attitudes.

But he specifically says he's not trans.

Oh. I've seen him claim to be trans previously, so maybe he changes his gender identity according to his mood. As is his right as a male

Do all those liberal feminists accept that this man is a woman just because he says he is? How can they?

They swear they do, but of course they don't. I think the reason they are so fanatical about defending transwomen is because they see them as male - males who are the lowest on the rung of the male hierarchy and who therefore need to be protected by females and prioritised over them.

What mental contortions must they have gone through to have abandoned all common sense and integrity? What do they say about these rapists who claim to be women? Are they really prepared to throw real women under the bus for rapists?

These issues rarely come up on libfem sites because most of them run a general blanket censorship around trans politics - any comments questioning any aspect of it go unpublished and the commentator is banned. I left a comment on the F-Word site after they ran an article by a genderqueer male (not even trans!) who said women who associated with gender-critical feminists should be no-platformed like racists.

I questioned whether a male had any right to tell women how to do feminism - this went unpublished due to 'transphobia'. So even calling a male who looks fully male and is treated as such by everyone, erm, male is absolutely taboo among liberal feminists now. You can imagine how far you'd get pointing out that quite a lot of rapists and serial killers are identifying as women these days.

So yes, I think it's clear that many liberal 'feminists' are prepared to throw women under the bus in favour of this utterly anti-feminist and really male supremacist ideology. But I also think that many of them haven't been exposed to either gender-critical thought or the genuinely harmful aspects of the trans agenda and are going along with this because it's seen as the caring and liberal thing to do.

Is this what third wave feminism is?

Sadly, yes. It's really distressing. As a woman who came of age in the thick of the third wave in the 90s and spent many years trying to pretend that stripping and porn were cool, I really don't consider third-wave feminism to be feminism at all. IMO, the third wave represents the gutting of feminism by neoliberalism and post-modernism.

There have been loads of cases of transwomen trying to force their way into female safe spaces. The rape crisis one in Canada was actually in my mind when I wrote the above post. There have been numerous cases in prisons too - notably with men who are in prison for raping/murdering/assaulting women, demanding GRS and hormones be provided by the state and then demanding that they be housed in female prisons. There have also been cases of transwomen with penises intact using female showers and changing areas at sports venues.

Transwomen also managed to get Conway Hall to refuse to be a venue for the RadFem 2012 conference because they protested that the conference and its speakers were transphobic because they do not accept that transwomen are female and therefore they were not welcome at this women only conference.

So yes, there are transwomen who want to get into women's spaces. For lots of transwomen it is about validation, about 'passing', about having biological females accept them as being the same as biological females. Ironically this behavior is so full to bursting of male entitlement and misogyny that it clearly marks such transwomen out as being nothing like biological females. And it smacks of delusion/narcissism/mental health issues.

And due to the Gender Recognition Act, these transwomen have the law behind them. The law agrees with the fantasy that a man who wants to be a woman is the same as a biological female.

I have often in these sorts of discussions been told that such behavior is very rare and in no way representative of transgenderism. But that isn't true. Not only is the behavior not that rare, but in addition there is a pattern to it. And in addition to that, when there is case (like the rape crisis one for example), hundreds of transpeople and liberal/progessives will mount an internet campaign in support of the transperson and attacking those who will not defer to them.

If you want to get a feel for what goes on, start a trans critical blog or tweet on trans politics in a critical way. You will be flooded with threatening, abusive, misogynistic communication - if you are anonymous attempts will be made to out you and make your identity public, you will receive death threats, rape threats and be told that you are driving transpeople to suicide. You will notice a pattern in the behavior, language, etc which will remind you of what commonly gets called narcissistic rage.

I sometimes wonder if it is the hormones - if giving female hormones to males does something to mental health. Having said that, plenty of trans extremists don't actually take hormones and they still exhibit this aggression and delusion.

Of course one must assume that there are also lots of lovely reasonable transwomen who just want to get on with their lives, accept that they are not the same as biological females and have no desire to muscle in on women's spaces, politics and rights. Indeed such a group are trying to organise and speak out - they call themsleves New Narratives

Totally agree with you DonkeySkin. With everything you say in your above post.

The liberal feminist attitude to all this is so hypocritical. And as you say it is about man pleasing and deferring to men. They behave like this because they truly deep down know that transwomen are men (whilst maintaining that penises can be female and lesbians are being transphobic if they don't fancy female cock). The cognitive dissonance is brain melting.

These issues rarely come up on libfem sites because most of them run a general blanket censorship around trans politics - any comments questioning any aspect of it go unpublished and the commentator is banned.

Yes, this is exactly right! They mostly refuse to engage beyond "transwomen are women" and accusations of bigotry and "educate yourself!" Yeah right. I've also seen allies turned upon because they are not sufficiently toeing the line (e.g. expressing some concern about how rape victims might feel in shelters). Generally, once someone has been named a bigot, no amount of apologising or self-debasement is enough. Even Julie Bindel has tried to apologise for whatever it was she said. I don't know why she bothered, they still no-platform her whenever she tries to speak about anything.

Their behaviour is so manifestly unreasonable that I would like them to get more mainstream airtime. Their behaviour does indicate narcissistic rage and huge amounts of male entitlement and violence, as well as being completely nonsensical. I think many people are sympathetic to the "traditional" transwoman - a gay man who wants to live as a woman and is willing to remove his penis and have sex with straight men. I think a lot of people think if someone is so unhappy they are willing to go to those lengths, their lives must be awful and they should be helped, and they're a small number and not much danger to women. I would agree with most of that and I hadn't even heard of "lesbian" transwomen with functioning penis until not that long ago. It's a whole different situation.

The cognitive dissonance is brain melting.

Oy. And it has a knock-on effect on the clarity and boldness of all feminist thought, IMO, because it forces women to deny their own instincts and check themselves at every turn for some imagined 'cis' (i.e., female) privilege.

I think many people are sympathetic to the "traditional" transwoman - a gay man who wants to live as a woman and is willing to remove his penis and have sex with straight men.

Yes. But in the West at least, they now represent a minority of transwomen.

Thank you for the New Narratives link Beach.

Am I right to feel slightly hopeful that some trans people are beginning to speak out about the ridiculousness and harmfulness of the current mainstream trans and libfem position?

Just out of interest, are there cis men as well? Is that a thing? Or is it just cis women?

I don't claim to understand the politics of the whole thing, I'm reading, but it's a bit like trying to believe string theory when you first look at it, it's so counter intuitive.

Even despite my limited reading, I still fail to understand how a trans person who still has male external genitalia can, in good faith, expect to be able to use female only spaces. I am not unsympathetic to trans people, I don't think, but surely gender isn't something you can put on or take off as you feel like it, like and overcoat?

I don't think any of us doubt that transpeople face great difficulties. What we are saying is that we disagree that the solution to some of those difficulties should be an erosion of women's rights.

You say that it is rare for transwomen to behave badly towards FAAB women. I disagree. It isn't rare. The extreme cases of actually entering safe spaces and attacking women are probably rare - but the point is that the Gender Recognition Act aids and abets such behaviour. The law has created a situation where women just have to hope that male bodied persons will not invade our safe space - space that has to exist in order to protect women from male bodied persons. Fingers crossed ladies!

What is not rare is a general level of aggressive and abusive behaviour towards FAABS who are gender critical. What is also not rare is the holding of the delusion that transwomen are female - and that alone is extremely male supremacist and not something all women are happy to indulge. Because you see, we do actually exist and we do actually matter.

Maybe you do none of these things kim147 but I hope you aren't in denial about the number of transwomen who do behave like this. They are all over the internet, they aren't hard to find.

Absolutely no point commenting on here because some people on here won't listen to the reality of transwomen's lives. No point repeating the reality of changing rooms etc.

We know the reality of changing room, because e are also victims of men. Hence being uncomfortable with a person with a penis being in our space. And the point of those stories isn't to show trans people are bad to prove that it is a fallacy that a trans person could never hurt a woman.

I don't disagree that trans people have it bad, I would agree that they have it pretty horrible. But I would disagree is that it is feminism job to make life worse for women to improve the situation for trans people. We have a few hard won rights and they shouldn't be given away.

My feeling is that similar to MRAs wondering why women and doing more for their cause, these are things trans activist need to be fighting for.

roygbiv.jezebel.com/trans-women-assaulted-on-train-one-stripped-passenger-1582963179?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow Horrifying stories but it's not women doing this. It certainly isn't feminist doing it. So why hate us?

Kim has it occurred to you that you aren't listening to why any of the women on this thread don't want people with penises in their space? Or s it just us not listening to you?

Because tbh, it feels a bit like NATWALT

So what are the "lies and misinformation" Kim?

Seriously, what has anyone said that is an outright lie or just misinformation?

I honestly am trying to understand what a reasonable trans person (which you generally come across as) would think is a lie or misinformation on this thread. I never engage with transactivists in any internet environment because I simply can't be bothered and I assume they're not particularly representative of most trans people, so I don't really know what counts as "lies" and "misinformation".

What has anyone said that is actually untrue?

And it has a knock-on effect on the clarity and boldness of all feminist thought, IMO, because it forces women to deny their own instincts and check themselves at every turn for some imagined 'cis' (i.e., female) privilege.

Yes to this DonkeySkin. Absolutely.

The whole notion of women having sex based privilege in male supremacist society is laughable and shows a total lack of understanding of what structuralized oppression actually is.

It is just an insulting and narcissistic appropriation of feminist analysis and language. It is purely to shore up delusional gender fetishization and to co-opt women's oppression for the purpose of obfuscating what is perfectly obvious to radical feminists - that the concept of "cis privilege" when applied to women is designed to invisibleize the glaring male entitlement that transpolitics are founded on.

It works though and it wrong foots so many women - especially liberals who are desperate to never be called a bigot, ever, by anyone, including men who are trampling all over women's rights.

I'm trying to think of this from a trans person's point of view. I do get that you may want to live your life as a woman but not want to have very invasive surgery. But here are my "but how could that possibly work?" points:

1. If you haven't actually got the physical female things like a cervix - then you can't possibly need to have them looked after, can you? You cant screen thin air. Also, if you haven't actually got a vagina, then you can't have lesbian sex, can you? It would be like me trying to have gay sex with a man - it just wouldn't be physically possible, my vagina would get in the way - I couldn't just pretend it wasn't there.

1. The locker room thing. I get that if you are permanently dressing as/acting as a woman then it would look a bit odd if you walked into the male locker-room. BUT - when you get into the female locker room and start undressing, then it's going to be a huge shock for all the women in there. And most women, like me before this thread, would have no knowledge of this sort of thing at all. You'd need a huge public awareness campaign - which would open up debate on the issue - but you would have to accept that a lot of women might come down on the side of, "no thankyou." Or, perhaps, another option could be found. Maybe public debate could make men aware that some trans people would be in their locker rooms so not to be too shocked when they see a woman walking in - just accept that it is a transwoman who has to be in there because of the physical side of things.

1. As for being a woman but not having the physical surgery necessary - I think it has to be really obvious. The man in that video who was claiming that lesbians don't like him had a beard! He is clearly a man and would not look at all out of place in the male locker room, so on the days when he needs to go swimming etc, he could just wear a t-shirt and jeans and he would be fine using the men's.

I do think that there has to be some degree of realizing that this a very unusual thing and that some compromises will have to be made. For example, if you don't have a cervix then it might make you feel very sad to hear other women talking about theirs but it would be silly to say that women can't now discuss cervical health or to pretend that you have a cervix.

You cant screen thin air. Also, if you haven't actually got a vagina, then you can't have lesbian sex, can you?

factcheckme.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/the-cotton-ceiling-really/

I m a heterosexual woman. if lesbians suddenly decided that I should have to have sex with them because they determined themselves to be male despite having a vagina no feminist on earth would think I should feel obligated to have sex with them.

It's only people with penises that get to demand sex. And it's offensive as fuck that some people act like gay women are a privileged group.

The changing room problem is a problem of male violence.

Because men are likely to be aggressive and perhaps violent towards male bodied persons who present as female via the accoutrements of femininity.

But that is not women's responsibility. We are being asked to compensate for male violence.

I feel a great deal of sympathy for anyone who suffers due to their lack of gender conformity. And I also feel deep sympathy for anyone who has experienced such trauma at the hands of their own sex that they reject that sex and therefore themselves. I really do.

But the solution is not to reinforce gender and it is very unjust to expect women to shift over a bit in order to compensate for the inhumanity of rigid patriarchal gender rules. Particularly because women are already hugely disadvantaged as a result of strict gender rules that are not of our making. We have few hard won rights and we being asked to compromise them in order to make things more comfortable for men and to maintain a status quo which damages us. Quite a big ask! But of course that's what women are for - making sure the men are ok.

We are being asked to efface our very identity and deny the very thing that allows us to identify and challenge our oppression; what it is to be female and what it means to be a women in male supremacy.

basil there aren't any lies or misinformation so kim won't answer you. This is a typical trans activist response. Rather than listen to women's concerns and try to understand them and talk them through, kim simply calls them lies and misinformation with a few insults thrown in. It's because there are no answers other than that they want women to make accommodations of women's rights while at the same time not discussing it because they also want validation of their womanhood and they can't get that if we discuss the difference between transwomen and women. It's also why they insist on calling us cis women.

Thankyou for the link, Really, I feel that I am learning a lot about this. I don't think I can carry on with it, though, because on reading the bit about "Trans womens bodies are female bodies, whether or not we have penises," I am in danger of muttering the words "political correctness gone mad" which I have never had to utter before in my life and the next step would be to purchas a copy of the Daily Mail and I'd rather shoot myself. To test the waters, to see if I've just become an old fogey, I ran all this past my 17 year old daughter. Her response was that she would embrace the whole male-bodied-person-who-is-a-woman in her locker-room concept as accepatable on the grounds of "Hey, Mum, it's the 21st century, let's go with equality and anti-bigotry" and feels it wouldn't be a safety risk - well, it might, but it would be miniscule so let it go. She would be less OK with expecting a lesbian to have sex with a male-bodied-woman ("that's just getting too confusing"). She would, thankfully, draw the line at male-bodied-women saying that feminists can't discuss female-bodied-women's female bodiedness issues, such as maternity and cervical screening, on the grounds that "no-one tells me what I can or cannot discuss as a feminist" and, interestingly, "men can be feminists too so it doesn't matter whether you call yourself male or female or whether you have children or penises or cervixes or not, you can still join in with feminists and campaign for what they think is important," which sounds like a more common sense approach to me.

Nobody should be bigoted. So of course verbal harassment and vioence towards MtoF is always wrong.

But neither should we deny biological realities.

It reminds me of a very good article I read during the 80's about HIV. At the time there was a lot of anti gay speech and a lot of that was focussed around HIV. Lots of left wing people were rightly challenging that, but they were also saying that Het people much at risk of HIV as gay men as a group. That simply wasn't true, and thsi article explained how we can reject and argue against homophobic speech, without denying the realities that gay men as a group, are at greater risk of HIV.

So the reality is that Trans people still have the female or male bodies they were born into. Any surgery, is cosmetic surgery. If you are a MtoF and go to your GP, the GP will use male averages to check if things like your lung function is good enough.

One of the challengs in Trans healthcare, is getting Trans people to attend check ups for health issues for their sexed bodies. For example, getting FtoM to attend for cervical smears. One of the ways some Trans people deal with that cognitive dissonance, is to say that both both men and women can need cervical smears.

There are a whole bunch of health issues that shouldn't be hushed up in order to protect transpeople's feelings - it isn't helping people to ignore physical risks and complications of taking synthetic sex hormones and having invasive surgery. And IMO it also isn't helping people's mental well being to indulge the fantasy that transwomen are biological females (and vice versa for transmen and biological males).

And this is without even going near the subject of children being diagnosed as trans and given puberty blockers and the failure to openly discuss how people of all age groups are being diagnosed as trans or encouraged to think they are trans when in fact they are gender nonconforming homosexuals or lesbians. This is a very real problem for lesbians in particular because transwomen dominate transpolitics when the issues for lesbians/transmen are very different to those of gay man/transwomen. (This domination alone is highly worthy of discussion...)

It is considered by many liberals to be highly transphobic to even mention this issue - it is one of the subjects that Sheila Jeffreys is concerned about and she is no platformed because she dares consider the issues of non gender conforming lesbians and separates transgenderism into the different concerns of two different sexes.

The info on this thread is really, really disturbing. Like most others I wasn't aware that the majority of MTF's are the no-surgery "male lesbian" type. Really?!
Talk about male entitlement.

Briar, I think a lot of people assume that the transgender people of today are the same population as that which used to be called transsexual. But things have changed as queer theory, post-modernism and third wave liberals have stuck their oar in.