Is it time to stop saying “TERF”?

There was a brief period where I chose not to use the word, purely because I wanted to converse with that specific group of people and the word became a barrier to that. Any conversation would devolve into shouting about how TERF is or isn’t a slur and nothing would get said or done or progressed at all. So it just seemed more expedient to use alternative phrases instead.

I started using it again because I mostly gave up on progress with them. They are, for all intents purposes, transphobic and I don’t think any amount of polite discourse will change that. I’m definitely starting to think there is progress to be made with some people who are called TERFs though, and recognising that even hate groups have some nuance to them.

That’s kinda what prompted me to writing this article. For the longest time the biggest and most active transphobes on the internet were the TERFs. Actual people perverting radical feminism to be a weapon of transphobic exclusion therefore ‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists’. The term was even coined and popularised amongst radical feminists who didn’t agree with such ideas. But I’m not so sure that the landscape of transphobes is mostly populated by TERFs any more.

With so much more media focus on trans people’s lives, with thousands of articles a year about us in some way, there’s an expected increase in…