I admit to being a ‘Terf’: Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools - Suzanne Moore

[IwantToRetire]

One of the things that makes me feel most patriotic – and such feelings do not come easily, trust me – is that I live on Terf Island.

Baffled Americans who have swallowed the Kool Aid and recite things like “Trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary people are valid”, while living in a country that chops the breasts off disturbed young women, look at the likes of me and my friends, who want kids left alone, and think it is us who have the problem.

For them we are some kind of monsters. We, the Terfs of Terf Island (a misguidedly derogatory nickname that reflects the UK’s important role as the centre of gender-critical feminism), want to protect the rights of women and children. And with support we are slowly turning the pernicious gender juggernaut round in just about every area.

Full article at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/21/i-admit-to-being-a-terf/ and at https://archive.is/VxPPU

What did you do in the gender wars grandma? Say it out loud: I stood with the women of Terf Island.

Great article, thanks for sharing. Now is indeed the time for us all to 'say it loud' and contribute to the 'preference cascade' (as taught to me by the never-ending Fife thread) of changing opinion. There has never been a better time!

One of the problems in the US is that the gender debate was dominated by right-wing males and the intellectual caliber was very low. TRA ran circles around them with an admixture of basic scientific literacy and GI academic sophistry. What we're now seeing however is that the basic research and intellectual justification that Stock and Joyce put into the GC movement is now being imported into the US.

I find much of the language that the Trump admin uses in regards to rolling back GI is unpleasant, but the underlying arguments are taken directly from UK terfs and shows a deep understanding. The result of this can be seen in the difference in outcomes between Bostock v. Clayton County which was a TRA victory and U.S. v. Skrmetti. Bostock which was a loss - in the former the admin basically tried to argue from the perspective of traditional social norms; this was easy for TRAs to frame as equivalent to the objections made against gay rights. In Skrmetti, the basic coherence of GI was attacked as well as the extremely faulty research that was used to buttress its arguments; all of those arguments came from the UK and thus, not only did the Trump administration win the case, but they did so on the grounds that GI is self-contradictory, obfuscating, rooted in bad science and fundamentally in tension with other civil liberties, and thus the case will serve as a precedent for deciding a wide range of other trans issues.