I decided to make a cheat-sheet for why TERF ideology is just regular old misogyny as well as transmisogyny for those of you who might encounter one of these scumbags and have to shut them down quickly and efficiently.
1. Defining women by their genitalia and reproductive ability is exactly what patriarchy does for the benefit of men.
2. The idea of being “socialized female,” if it excludes trans women, completely excludes the individual’s experience and subjectivity, which is an incredibly paternalistic ideology that robs all women of any control over their identities and lives.
3. It is an indisputable scientific fact that genitalia, hormones, chromosomes, and physical traits coded as “female” all exist on a non-binary spectrum in the human population. TERFs’ fundamentally binaristic ideology ignores and excludes intersex women, in addition to all women who deviate from the physical norms established by patriarchy; norms which TERFs are against only nominally.
4. TERFs’ frequent willingness to welcome self-proclaimed CAFAB men into women’s spaces while excluding CAMAB women demonstrates their disregard for combating toxic masculinity and patriarchal behavior in favor of point #1, defining women by their genitalia.
5. TERFs’ total disavowal of trans identity specifically and consciously excludes all indigenous societies that historically welcomed and accepted (or continue to welcome and accept) trans people before European patriarchal gender ideology was forced on them by genocide and colonialism. This is not only racist and ethnocentric, but also a tacit promotion of the European gender norms feminists are supposed to be fighting.
6. Trans women and other CAMAB trans people are unquestionably one of the groups in our society most at risk for poverty and violence. TERFs’ insistence that trans women are statistically the perpetrators rather than victims of violence is demonstrably untrue and an obvious indication of a disregard for the actual facts about patriarchal violence. If TERFs are unwilling to confront the bare facts of misogynist violence, they can hardly be trusted to advance the feminist movement.
If anybody would like to keep the list going, please do.
I thought of another one, which is actually just a modified but more insidious version of #1.
7. Defining women by having experienced a universal “girlhood” is not only an idea that only gained traction specifically as a tactic to exclude trans feminists, but is also a logically inconsistent and white-western-cis-straight-able supremacist practice. It’s logically inconsistent for a number of reasons- one is that the only way to define “girlhood” to exclude trans girls is to implicitly call on argument #1, so it still shamelessly excludes many intersex women. Another is that it centers girlhood but presupposes who can have one, making it circular. But the main fucked up thing about the “girlhood” argument is that it posits a universal experience for girls, or at least some hidden and conveniently self-serving connection between all girls. This only serves normative interests. How likely is it that the girlhood being considered universal is that of a young, wheelchair-using Khmer woman dealing with the emigration process to leave Cambodia for the EU? Or a black lesbian South African girl coping with rural life on a farm? Or a First Nations girl living in Toronto and growing up navigating trauma, white supremacy, and legalized ethnocide/genocide? I think it’s relatively obvious that any time a “universal” experience is postulated, dominant power structures push that universality towards the normative and privileged positions feminists are supposed to be challenging. That’s privilege 101. We can celebrate connections and commonalities without homogenizing women’s experiences in an illogical way that just happens to exclude one very particular set of women. Trans women have girlhoods too. Ours are just different in some ways than cis girls. Deal with it.
This viewpoint is hugely important.
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