#and that this language has roots in terfism

[auroramosaic]

im so tired

[boreal-sea]

Hi I'm sorry if I'm bothering you idk where to go with this and i saw you post on anti t*rf cutting to the chase im a nonbinary afab person but during a spiral i got sucked down a t*rf rabbithole and some of the ideas are stuck in my head help me please i don't want to be one I don't know what to do

If you send me an Ask off anon, we can chat and I can message you if you want!

For now: Start reading books and blogs and watching videos by feminists who are explicitly pro-trans. Consume media made by trans feminists. Consume media that specifically counters the arguments made by terfs and radfems. Consume media by trans people in general, especially trans folks who openly state they are inclusive.

An excellent video series that rips apart TERFism from the inside out is here:

There are tons of awesome trans folks to follow on Tumblr.

There's my own transfeminism blog, @graytheory. There's also @transsexual-menace who has an excellent pinned post with resources. @queermasculine is a great blog about transmasculinity. @spacelazarwolf is just super cool and posts a lot about feminism and trans issues. @genderkoolaid is also fucking awesome.

Things to avoid: Any content by self-described "baeddels", "proud misandrists", "truscum", or content by people who call themselves "TIRFS". You want to avoid radical feminism in any form, because it is the root of TERFism and TERF ideology is based on radfem ideology. You also want to avoid any form of trans rhetoric that is exclusionary, claims there's only one right way to "be trans", etc.

I'd also say avoid anyone who claims trans men aren't oppressed, can't experience misogyny, or claims that trans men have "male privilege", because that's just watered down radical feminist with trans language slapped on top of it.

One thing that can help, if you use desktop, is downloading the extension Shinigami Eyes. Yes, it's controversial as hell, but when you're first getting out of radfem and terf circles, it'll help you identify terfs and radfems right away, and you'll be able to block them and unfollow them really quickly. I highly recommend it for anyone who's just learning to identify radfem rhetoric and anyone who is trying to avoid interacting with radfems and terfs entirely.

[proship-bad-takes]

Context: Someone OP was arguing with called themself queer and OP called the word "disgusting" and tagged it as "q slur," and used their own status as an LGBT+ person to deflect responsibility when called on it. They claim to have no issue with people reclaiming the term, but continued to use harmful and stigmatizing language regarding the label

(Admin note: I feel like people have a right to feel however they wish about words that may have been used against them as a slur. However, that does NOT permit someone to refer to the label as disgusting, gross, etc., especially directly to someone who has reclaimed it and has strong feelings about their label. My account is very pro-queer as a queer person myself, so yes, this is a bad take from a proshipper. We do not support anti-queer rhetoric here, especially given its historical roots in radical feminism AKA terfism)

[the-feminist-philosopher]

EDIT: OP... I did not intended for this to get so long, and I am so sorry. Don't feel obligated to read through this. Many, many apologies for the essay. 😅

TL;DR: I agree, except for the premise that TERFs are leftists whose beliefs are rooted in second-wave Marxist feminism.

###

While I agree that this ideology sprung up from leftist, second-wave feminism, and that the right has co-opted leftist language with the purpose of taking legitimate grievances against unfair systems and turning those frustrations against specific minority groups (in this case, trans people), I must disagree that they reflect such a leftist ideology today and that "TERFs are explicitly leftists whose work is rooted in second-wave radical Marxist feminism."

Even UCLA's Women's Liberation Front co-founder, Devra Weber, said, "the radical feminists were opposed to patriarchy, but not necessarily capitalism. In our group at least, they opposed so-called male dominated national liberation struggles."

TERFs certainly believe they are leftists, but I've seldom come across any of them who actually believe in explicitly Marxist principles. The closest thing I've seen is some of them claiming they want to define 'females' as a class, but even then they seem to get that principal wrong as they often define it more so as a social rank or position in society rather than a relationship between groups with competing interests in relation to the mode of production.

They focus less on the collectivism that Marxists often stress as necessary to liberation to instead focus more on choices that empower individuals (like separatism). Marxist feminism is intended to analyze the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property, much of which many TERFs (or self-proclaimed TERFs) fail to analyze. TERFs often gloss over such principles as "domestic slavery," the "double burden," women's unwaged labor, a woman's requirement to fill the role of emotional laborer, and the invisible nature of women in the labor market and "women's work." (Many of the "invisible women" today are black and brown women and also often immigrant women in care industries, social work, child care, beauty industries, and cleaning and sanitation industries.)

I think this is a result of the fact that, anymore, their ideology centers being anti-male (as you mentioned) rather than dismantling systems. That's how we get self-proclaimed TERFs who think it's empowering to report a man's GoFundMe that seeks to help pay his medical bills. Rather than tackling a system that leaves people in medical debt, many of whom are women for uniquely "female" things like childbirth, their ideology has turned more into a sort-of reactionary thing. That is how I get messages from self-proclaimed TERFs stating, "I don't care if the random man in my dormitory will rape me in my sleep or not, I don't want him there because I fucking hate males." (Quote from @/ingilead.) Although, yes, I do also agree with you that "this [ ] is often a hatred born out of trauma and fear."

It was, in part, learning about Marxist principles and theories in Uni that helped me challenge many of the TERF ideas I had been exposed to as a teenager on the internet (and in real life, too). And it was how I found that post-colonial intersectional feminism tended to be closer to the leftist principals that I believed I had been supporting than "TERFism" was.

Today's "radical feminism" does not focus on how women's experiences are affected by other social divisions like race, class, and sexual orientation in the same way that radical feminism of the 1960s did. Even then, that was still a major critique of the radical feminism of the mid-century. Many black or brown women were founders of the radical feminist Women's Liberation Movement, but would eventually leave the movement after finding that it was not addressing the issues that black women predominately face.

Today, many TERFs seem to write off what we now call "intersectionality" in the interest of defining the patriarchy as a unique system of oppression tied mostly to gender relations and social roles rather than legal systems (as liberal feminists hold) or capitalism (as Marxist feminists hold). It's the idea that "all women are oppressed by the patriarchy, but not all are oppressed by [racism, classism, ableism, etc...]." They'll claim that this is centering the collective, but it amounts to nothing more than erasing the experiences of other women. So, they're using leftist language to write off leftist principles.

This belief has lead many of them to thus advocate for something like separatism despite it not actually challenging the patriarchy. They believe that if you can separate yourself from the society that enforces social roles, you can dismantle those social roles, ignoring how such a choice is not available to working-class and working-poor sisters fighting classism and capitalism, black and brown sisters fighting racism, or disabled and neurodivergent sisters fighting ableism. These sisters do not have the privilege to remove themselves from society or eschew necessary alliances with "males" to fight other systems of oppression. Meanwhile, Marxism recognizes that separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they may be on opposing terms with each other. TERFs infrequently seem to recognize this.

Modern TERFs/radfems descend from two different thought groups, at least in the US. Those are the "Redstockings" and "The Feminists." That may make their origins related to leftism, but much of their rhetoric and actions today have swung in the opposite direction. The Feminists, for example, believed that marriage, family, sex-work, and sex all existed to perpetuate a "sex-role system." Today, the TERF focuses primarily on sex-work and sex being a part of "male fantasy," to the point of infantilizing sex workers and denying the existence of female sexuality, desire, or sexual autonomy. Some of this is because of something you already pointed out: they believe sexuality is a behavior/choice as well as an identity. However, today, these ideas have also evolved into something moralistic and censorious.

I find more TERFs take the "Redstockings" approach as they hold that the oppression of women is ongoing and deliberate. They hold that individual men are responsible for and are deliberately reproducing this system (a claim I've found to be a mixed bag as all men have varying degrees of consciousness), and that systems like marriage and the family are "vehicles of conscious male intent."

But then some rad fems began to argue that "male supremacy" is a result of an ego satisfaction that is supposedly intrinsic in domination and that "submission" is neither a coping mechanism or a survival strategy, but a result of a socialization that teaches female-people that submission is morally right and natural. Dominance is a result of intrinsic satisfaction in a "male's" conscious personality, but submission is socialized. And this is where we see rad fems take a nose dive into biological determinism.

I know TERFs most certainly think they're leftists if their critiques of "liberal feminism" are anything to go by, but their critiques are less to do with mainstream feminism's focus on "gradual" progress and "pragmatism," and are born more-so out of liberal feminism's lack of philosophical materialism (the idea that "female" is a physical class). In the mid-century, this materialism started as a from of philosophical monism, where they believe there is no dichotomy of body and mind and the fundamental nature of reality is "neutral." Some may still repeat these buzzwords that hearken back to these ideas (I hear many of them report that "female" is a physical reality and "physical reality" is neutral, ignoring how even sex is socially ascribed and imbued). These such beliefs include the idea that all which exists is physical (nothing exists beyond the physical), leading them to write off the idea of an "identity" even existing (not even "gender identity" here, all identity). But it's also the belief that mental states and consciousness are a consequence of of material processes, like the nervous system or biochemistry. And, yah... consciousness cannot exist without our synapses firing, but this idea often denies the subjectiveness of our conscious thought. This materialistic idea has led some of them to talk themselves in circles. For example, I recently read a post by a TERF that argued that "male sexuality" is a result of a socialization that prioritizes penetrative sex as the marker of a "real man," but that it is also a result of simply having a dick: a "male" necessarily centers sexual dominance in their sexuality as a consequence of having a dick. Which leads the rest of us to scratch our heads and think, "So... is it socialized or is it some feature that is mentally intrinsic to having a dick?" This part of their ideology is what has lead many of them to embrace biological determinism.

In my experience, TERFs believe they are leftists, but only really co-opt leftist language. They are open collaborators with the christian right and their ideology has evolved far from it's leftists origins. Their ideology has evolved into biological determinism, individualism, the denial of female-people's mental and sexual autonomy (despite and because of socialization), moralism, and something often quite disparaging of an individual's most singular choices as a mental "handmaidenship," something I detail below:

"[Such scrutinizing] opens up every last choice a woman makes to fault-finding and chastisement. It opens up every last choice to be constantly inspected for signs of gender-conformity and singular impact where the only way to stay safe from their life's choices being undervalued or inspected is to, ironically, conform to the standards of singular [ ] action that [TERFs believe] are inherently feminist in nature. It creates this inescapable panopticon where every woman is expected to conform to a different set of standards on the grounds that there is are 'correct' singular actions that make a feminist. It reinforces and entrenches the exact forces of socialization of which radical feminists claim to be critical."

(The ironic thing about the above ^^^ is that they will often support transphobic policies on the grounds of 'protecting women,' something rooted in benevolent sexism. They do this by attempting to classify physical commonalities among women and the idea that "real women" look a certain way, thus reinforcing current patriarchal and white supremacist standards of femininity, constantly inspecting women for signs of nonconfromity as well and putting all women into a double bind.)

Been trying to write a long post on terfs and how people fuck up in identifying/characterizing/managing them but it feels like every time i start to get somewhere, a terf shows up on my dash and throws me for a loop

[twentydollarpeanut]

DID... DID YOU REALLY JUST COMPARE LESBIANS TO MEN AND WHITES IM HFSGSJDGJJDGDGJDY... PLEASE GROW A BRAIN CELL

i'm not claiming lesbophobia for "any criticism of lesbians" lmao. i'm pointing out how the deep-seated mistrust, hatred, and quickness to attack lesbians y'all have is rooted in lesbophobia. claiming that i'm using terf ideology for simply pointing out lesbophobia really just proves that you think lesbians and terfs are one in the same. you really think lesbians speaking out about lesbophobia is a "terf tactic" because you automatically associate lesbians with terfs. you think lesbians speaking out about their oppression is them "overreacting" and "being aggressive".

& i genuinely cannot believe you just compared lesbians to men and racists. lesbians are not oppressors. lesbians are not fucking privileged oh my god. this shit is exactly what i'm talking about when i say y'all have a deeply lesbophobic view of lesbians, because you equate them to people who systematically abuse, oppress, and murder other people. if you see lesbians in the same vein as oppressive groups, you're really just a lesbophobic piece of shit.

i'm not surprised you haven't noticed lesbophobia and the notion that lesbians=terfs, because you're actively contributing to it. you're the one saying that bi and straight terfs only exist because lesbians coaxed them into it. you're the one who thinks terfs are an offshoot of lesbianism.

terfs are not a problem in the lesbian community, they're a problem in the cis woman community. trans lesbians exist and bi and straight terfs are everywhere, but you only want to point out terfism in cis lesbians because you're lesbophobic and think that lesbians are inherently more transphobic than bi or straight women and equate lesbians to oppressors.

it's rly scary to see how you've gotten sucked in to lesbophobic ideologies & don't even realize it. you genuinely believe that inherently lesbophobic statements are just "criticism" and think that lesbians are being aggressive, childish, overreactive, or terf-ish when they point out the inherently lesbophobic connotations in the things you say and do. you think lesbian activism=terf rhetoric and that lesbians are a group of oppressors and abusers whom you equate to men and whites. you think lesbianism was the foundation of terf ideology (it's not, transphobia is) and actively remove blame from bi and straight terfs by claiming lesbianism is the main and driving force of terfism and that lesbians are the ones who persuaded bi and straight women into becoming terfs.

i'm a nonbinary lesbian. i know transphobic/terf ideologies and statements when i see them. i'm not fucking spreading terf ideology. i've seen so many people talking about their inherent distrust of lesbians because they think they're aphobes, biphobes, and terfs. i've seen countless examples of people equating lesbians to terfs, comparing them to men and oppressors, using lesbophobic language, or interpreting their bad experiences with one (1) shitty lesbian as representative of all lesbians. lesbophobia is everywhere and just because you choose not to see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

lmao but with that aside, butch and femme are very widely accepted and known as terms for wlw. even if used occasionally by gay men 30+ years ago, their usage has changed to be wlw-exclusive in current day. not to mention the fact that they still were created by the wlw community so they will always have wlw connotations. thats why gay men don't use butch & femme (and instead use masc and fem), at least not anymore lmao. b/c they're widely accepted to be terms for gay women. besides even when used by gay men in the past, they were still used in a gay context and did not apply to m/f love or relationships which was my point in the first place.

some shit i need to say, apparently

butch/femme aren't lesbian exclusive terms. any wlw can use them as long as they are used solely in a wlw context (as in please don't call yourself butch/femme in relation to you dating a man/loving men if you are bi or pan)

i'm not a terf and do not support terfs or any of their ideologies. i'm nonbinary ffs. you're gonna sound like a real dumbass if you call me a terf.

saying terf=lesbian and lesbian=terf is lesbophobic. if you think it's ok to say that because "a majority of terfs are lesbians" (they aren't) i'd like you to grow a pair of eyes.

if you inherently distrust and hate lesbians because you think they're terfs (or you think it's ok to do so), you're lesbophobic.

the term "gold star lesbian" is lesbophobic & disgusting.

i am absolutely supporting of bi, pan, & trans women. (& obviously also bi, pan, & trans people in general)

if you think lesbians are inherently biphobic or transphobic, you're a lesbophobe.

if you think a majority of/all terfs and radfems are lesbians, you've fallen into the lesbophobic notion that "radfems are man-hating lesbians!!!"

if a lesbian gives an opinion that you don't like and you immediately resort to calling them a terf or biphobic, you're a lesbophobe.

terfs can eat shit.