Recently my colleagues discovered that I happen to have a peculiarly niche level of internet notoriety because I used to blog a lot. It was a critique of a strong strand of transphobia in British media referencing a trans-ally piece I wrote a decade ago that clued them in. 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 – I wonder how many Elizabethans already used words now attributed to Shakespeare long before he (or the Jacobean actors whose annotated Folio transcripts are the earliest extant versions) incorporated them in a play?
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, although social media has meant they they could build their own platforms, have their concerns heard, and some at least addressed.
The Guardian’s own Opinion pages on transgender issues outline the divisions regarding trans-inclusion advocacy vs trans-critical hostility, proving once again that feminism is no monolith.
I do find the renewed interest over the last few years in writing of mine from a decade ago disconcerting. The Terf acronym has long since left that particular discussion (and me) behind, and been weaponised at times by both those who advocate trans-inclusion in feminist/female spaces, and those who push for trans-exclusion from female-only spaces. I have no control over how others use a word (as it has now become) that came about simply to save typing a longer phrase out over and over again - a shorthand to describe one cohort of feminists who self-identify as radical and are unwilling to recognise trans women as sisters, unlike those of us who do.
So how did I come to be writing about transphobia and trans-exclusion in the first place? Because I was running a Feminism 101 FAQ blog with a tight focus on factual information.
As that blog gained first an audience and then a community, non-FAQ posts began to appear. Then I was sent a blurb promoting an event associated with the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival [Michfest]. I posted it and then rapidly edited with disclaimers that should have been there from the start as commenters sent me on a rapid learning curve regarding trans-exclusion issues both specific to Michfest and in general. I later posted An Apology And A Promise on that blog, following a post on my primary blog, which seems to include the earliest instance of “Terf” online:
implicitly aligning all radfems with the trans-exclusionary radfem (TERF) activists, which I resent”
I also mentioned another term which didn’t catch on, perhaps at least partly because it was less ambiguous about who exactly was being described:
After a bit more reading, I think the trans-exclusionary set should better be described as TES, with the S standing for separatists. A lot of the positions that are presented seem far too essentialist to be adequately described as feminist, let alone radical feminist.”
For most feminist cis women considering the rights and safety of trans women rarely intrudes upon our feminist practice until somebody wants to exclude trans women from our spaces and expects us to agree. That’s when we realise women we know have very different reactions to the question of whether to include trans women as part of our sisterhood, or deny their womanhood and exclude them.
Much of the factional divide here comes down to yet another gatekeeping argument about purity in feminism, perennial since the women’s suffrage movement, and this one has uncomfortable echoes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s arguments against extending voting rights to black men. Various “waves” of feminism developed as schisms arose regarding which directions were the truest or most effective ways to liberate women from sexist oppression. Those (and new) divisions will always be part of any movement focused on social change, because each step of progress sees further layers of injustice uncovered.
Intersectional feminism, including trans-inclusion, is receiving unsurprising pushback from those who wish to keep the boundaries they’ve fought for as women’s spaces clear. I can understand this stance, but cannot agree that it justifies exclusion, and stand by what I wrote in 2008 when declaring my blog would not share links to any trans-excluding feminist event:
... I am aware that this decision is likely to affront some trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), but it must be said: marginalising trans women at actual risk from regularly documented abuse /violence in favour of protecting hypothetical cis women from purely hypothetical abuse/violence from trans women in women-only safe-spaces strikes me as horribly unethical as well as repellently callous.”
I still believe people retain rights generally to set their own personal boundaries, individually and in groups. I, for example, avoid being in company with proudly public misogynists, but – crucially – I do not assume that every man I meet is in silent sympathy with them either. I would expect to be described as unfairly harsh if I did so, and this is where those holding exclusionary stances sometimes seem to want the impossible – to not be criticised when taking judgmental stances, especially when some of those stances involve not just social exclusion but the denial of civil rights.
Which brings me finally to one of the common Terf arguments: what about social/sexual predators who could pretend to be trans in order to exploit the trust of others by subverting novel gender recognition processes? It would be naive to think it could never be attempted (although the processes are far tighter than many would have others believe), but ultimately arguments based on theoretical machinations of hypothetical predatory individuals don’t strike me as anywhere near good enough reason to exclude every trans woman from the circle of feminist trust.
In particular, so long as organisations have a clearly publicised code of conduct focused on anti-harassment, robustly (rigorously and transparently) enforced, then anyone who breaches the code can be expelled based on reported and investigated actions, not just fears. This is ultimately the standard I believe most of us want – safer spaces for everyone who respects the dignity of others, and any rejections of association being based on documented infractions rather than generalised assumptions about differing bodies.