I used to be a TERF until I educated myself.
I read an article on medium a little while back called something like “I was a terf for a month, this is what I learned” which detailed how the woman writer in question had almost become associated with radically “anti trans” groups but found the light again.
It seemed like a good thing to write my own version of this article, so here goes.
The first time I discovered I was a TERF was shocking to me. I was part of the liberal set. I had the right opinions, I used all the right words and I asked none of the wrong questions about the framework we’ve constructed around gender, using queer theory and a pinch of imagination. Transwomen *were* women. TERFs were bogeymen. They were anomalies and feminist aberrations. They were vicious women whose vitriolic hatred of trans people was spoken of as something harmful and something very real. I never met a TERF, I just knew they were out there somewhere twirling their villainous moustaches and cackling in the night. Sometimes I met a woman who I knew was good, who had the “wrong” opinions but that wasn’t the same thing at all, right? She just needed our help to see that light.
Then, a friend started talking to me about how there was no possible way to define women that includes males without completely erasing the sense of “woman” as a category. She sent me off to listen to Miranda Yardley and Rya Jones among many others. Discovering what was happening to female people as a result of ideas that most people around me simply accepted as fact was awful. It was like a bucket of cool water to the face sometimes, but in a good way, because it woke me up.
Miranda, particularly, took a knife of insight and cut through layer upon layer of nonsense. It was extraordinarily powerful to listen to a transsexual saying unsayable things, and to realise as I heard those things that they were true. It lent a feeling of support to my growing concerns and I was aware of needing that, even though I knew it shouldn’t be necessary to have trans people’s agreement to be able to define myself clearly as a member of a group, or focus on the liberation of that group.
I realised that people, especially women, were being punished and often viciously, for making basic statements. They were the women being pinned, like butterflies to a wall, with the word TERF. They were saying such things as: Women are female. They are not the same as transwomen. We have needs that sometimes overlap, because we share humanity, but sometimes our needs don’t overlap, or they conflict, because we don’t share a sex.
Such a small few sentences in that paragraph but how like a Molotov cocktail they are treated when you say them.
It wasn’t saying any of those statements myself, though, that got me called a TERF first. I met a detransitioner and I heard her story, and all about the medical lack of care she had experienced. It was horrible, and it was galvanising. I worried for her and I worried for the others she told me about who were going through or would go through the same. I started reading about what was going on when it came to the care society was offering to dysphoric children. I read as many extracts and papers from medical journals, clinical opinions and as much information as I could find. Then I read the stories of those who had transitioned and those who had detransitioned and I became certain that the medical profession was doing potentially extraordinary harm to young children, and that our cultural conversation was complicit in that.
In a group of people I cared about, I made the mistake of mentioning my concern, and then I was a TERF. The match was lit, the dye was cast. I was the anomaly. I was the aberration. They fled my friendship like it was radioactive. It was intensely painful. The public nature of the rage they directed at me, the total dismissal of who I was and had always been to them, and the reframing of my concerns as being somehow spiteful or a front for more sinister motives was stunning to me. There was nothing I could say to counter it, my attempts only seemed to make it worse. Reading all those comments back this week, I can see how I keep trying to lay out my exact position, in far too many words, with sources and citations from medical journals, and clinicians, as though if only they saw what I was really saying, they would stop. I didn’t realise, then, that they did see what I was saying, and they still believed it was utterly unconscionable to say it.
It was that happening, more than anything, that made me determined to speak in some way. Not being allowed to have an important conversation made me feel so certain it was imperative to have it.
I took the box of shame they had opened in me, and carried it around, worried to even contact some friends who’d stood back passively. Partly because I didn’t want to be angry with them for that silence, and partly in case they too thought I had been transformed into some kind of monster.
I carried the box, but I still joined twitter, and started following people who were talking about this, mainly women. It was the single best decision I could have made. I met so many brilliant women. I also met the lovely trans people and men who are working with those women, and the astonishing thing was that these people I met did not require my shame or my genuflection to their ideas on this subject, in order to talk to me.
Not only that, but they were fun, and kind and they had a sense of humour. My goodness, what a contrast that was. Of course, I met the odd bad apple in an otherwise gleaming orchard, but the courage and the tenacity I witnessed gave me so much strength.
I believe there will be a time when the women denounced as terfs sit down with the people, trans and otherwise, who aren’t dehumanising them, and fix much of what is happening. Maybe some of those who have dehumanised us will decide to join us, too. It is so hard that that time is Not Yet though.
It doesn’t feel possible to me that if most basically decent people start paying attention and they see what is happening to women right now, they won’t share at least some of our concerns. Where our concerns overlap is the place we can begin to talk things out.
In my life away from twitter I’ve lost other friends and I am sure I will lose more given time. I’ve lost them when I’ve advocated for female rape victims to have female only rape shelters, and when I’ve talked about how gender identity superseding sex in law is a concern because it leaves women with no protections on the basis of sex. I’ve been threatened with violence and I’ve been banned from groups on arrival, as though my very presence is a scandal. Yet, I believe I have never been unkind about sharing my views. I have, at least, never been deliberately so and I’m always willing to listen. It still feels unexpected to be treated like I carry overripe eye of newt in my back pocket, but I try to mind it less.
I’ve been gorgeously surprised by old friends who have come to me for long conversations, sometimes. They have heard me accused of being a bigot and have rejected it outright because they know me better. That is such a gift, you know, the moment when you stand where you are and speak the truth as you see it, and you find someone you love will stand beside you, even as people you still care about are racing for the smelling salts and the vicious insults.
I’ve made new friends, too, who have enriched my life with their honesty and their perspective, whether they’ve agreed with me on everything, or not.
Here’s one thing, particularly, the baying mob don’t want anyone to know: a lot of trans people don’t agree with them, and participating in this conversation means you get to meet the trans people who don’t. They are a whole and lovely antidote to the idea that trans people and women can’t figure out a way to co-exist without women having to subjugate and deny their own needs.
I get to fight for women everyday, as well, even in the little ways that can be done by a small account on twitter. Since the first time I saw the mother in Mary Poppins wearing a votes for women sash, that’s something I’ve very much wanted to do. I want to be a woman’s woman. I want to stand up and be counted, for us, even when it isn’t easy. Seeing other women do just that makes me fiercely proud of standing with them.
I began my great terf twitter foray, by joining forces with trans people to try and find a rational ground. It petered out because of the behaviour of one person, but I still stand in the same place. I don’t want women to have to compromise on anything they need for their safety, their dignity or their wellbeing, and I want society to be decent to trans people and make space for them, too.
Most TERFs want that as well, actually, because TERFs aren’t the big bad wolf. They aren’t the bright, frightening eyes peering out from the shadows underneath your bed. They are mothers, daughters, sisters and the women you speak to everyday. They are not usually hateful and for the most part they are not remotely anti trans. They are simply ordinary and extraordinary in the measure of all people you might cross paths with.
I used to be a TERF when I was named one. I carried the weight of being considered something so dark. Now, though, I am no such thing. I refuse to believe that it is hateful to care for the wellbeing of half the human race. I am just here, and determined that I won’t be silent in the face of women being raped by males in women’s prisons, and dead rats nailed to the door of rape shelters. I won’t be silent about the harm being done to children or about misogyny wearing its newest pair of shoes to walk all over young girls. I feel a human obligation to speak up about how my gay friends are now called bigots for calling themselves homosexual, and how my lesbian friends are accused of transphobia if they won’t consider having a penis inside them.
So much of what is going on is regressive and it is hurting people.
If you are a woman, and you’re reading this, I hope you come and talk to the women you aren’t allowed to talk to, if you haven’t already.
Regardless of whether or not you do though, you should at least know that nobody worth being around will ever try to make you feel ashamed for centring female people in your advocacy or your priorities, if you choose to. It is no more bigoted to fight to uphold women’s sex based rights than it is to fight for the fundamental rights of any marginalised group.
There has been no day so far, when the sun has set on a world that is fair to women.
We won’t get there by mounting witch hunts against the women who do not only say the words we want them to.
I used to be a TERF, but then I educated myself, and I learnt that TERF is merely the new word society has found to throw at women, and to use to justify hurting them.
Of course…you can still call me one, if you must, but you will be wrong.
