Really.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/29/im-credited-with-having-coined-the-acronym-terf-heres-how-it-happened
This is like peak Guardian.
"Due to a short series of blogposts from 2008, I have retrospectively been credited as the coiner of the acronym “Terf” (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists). I suspect I’m merely the first person who wrote it on a website that still exists"
"It was passionate trans women activists online whose strong advocacy of their right to exist as women in the world showed me just how dehumanising the trans-hostile rhetoric is from some radfems about them. Yet as a cis-het woman with a mainly digital activism history, I have been credited while contributions of dedicated trans inclusion advocates such as Lisa Harney to those discussions have been overlooked. The pseudonyms common back then do complicate attributions, but it’s also an ongoing problem in this feminist discussion – it’s rarely been trans women who are handed the microphone to voice their own experiences, "
So to summarise:
- men starting shouting 'TERF' at women, and accompanying this with male violence directed at said women
- people started noticing and looking for the original source of the word, as you do.
They found an article here, from 2008 hoydenabouttown.com/2008/08/17/carnivalia-transgenderism-and-the-gender-binary/ with 'TERF' in it.
And hence in etymological terms that's the source. (If someone else could be found who used the term first then they would be credited, etymology/word history doesn't care about your feelings)
And the response of that author is some utter bollocks about 'transwomen not being handed the microphone', as if it was that hard to post something on the internet or transwomen are somehow absent from the internet, like some sort of tropical island uncontacted tribe with no-one to record their folklore.
Incidentally there is a point here, aside from the 'cishet' nonsense that libfems (such as Ruth Hunt) do deserve a great deal of the 'credit' for the current state of trans rights.