When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won the Olympic gold medal for her weight category in women’s boxing, rather than being able to celebrate, the cisgender athlete found her gender interrogated by every commentator with a captive audience. The immediate jump to the questioning of Khelif’s gender is disgusting, transphobic rhetoric. The supposed feminists questioning her ability to compete are in fact calling to bar anyone outside of gender norms from participating in sport, or in any form of public life.
TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.
A TERF’s feminism is nothing more than a convenient disguise. You will never hear a TERF talk about any actual issues impacting women. TERFs remain silent on matters of reproductive health and domestic violence while tweeting themselves into a frenzy around a trans person existing in public life, like in the case of Imane Khelif. These accusations are predominantly levelled against women of colour.
Transphobia and racism are tied together. Gender is a socially constructed system, where men engage in wage labour and women perform unpaid domestic labour. This system is critical to the maintenance of capitalism. Colonialism violently exported these gendered systems, and colonial relations remain today to enforce capitalism. In addition, categorisation of race was created to justify the atrocity of chattel slavery. The ideas that TERFs perpetuate are reminiscent of phrenology, the pseudoscientific belief that the size and shape of one’s head can predict their intellect and even personal character. It is a resurgence in now defunct, disproven ideas. Ideas about trans people, race, and feminism.
TERFs have no real feminism.
In sport, for example, TERFs will never be seen talking about how men had more Olympic medals to compete for. You will never hear a TERF discuss the crisis of domestic violence, abortion, or even the gender pay gap, which impacts the autonomy of most women every day. They are fixated on culture wars and controversy.
The logic of protecting bodily autonomy that many used to defend abortion should extend to transgender healthcare as well. TERFs want to restrict autonomy, ignoring women’s issues and banning trans healthcare.
Every couple of years, TERFs come out of the woodwork to express their concern about women’s spaces and how we must protect them. What are these women’s spaces? Nothing more than binary bathrooms are ever talked about. TERFs also go completely crazy around inclusive language that they perceive as erasing cis women: for example, saying ‘people who breastfeed’ rather than ‘mothers’ in medical settings where patients’ genders are unspecified.
The prominence of these ideas has been spread by high-profile freaks such as Posie Parker and the now infamous J. K. Rowling. Of course, some are from this settler colony, such as Katherine Deves, who was kicked out of the transphobic Liberal Party for being too transphobic. These TERFs simply hold no interest in feminism or womens’ rights; their whole goal is to attempt to make transphobia more appealing by pretending they are feminists.
Unfortunately, this is a tactic that works.
People in power fall for the TERFs. They are asked to give panels in Parliament or speak at Universities. Court cases debate if discrimination against trans women fits within the ‘legal’ definition of discrimination. The University of Sydney invited Holly Lawford-Smith, a hateful bigot most known for making a website to deadname trans women, to give a speech on feminism this week. Many women fall victim to believing TERFs concerns about women’s rights and give platforms to these hoaxes.
Academia is an important battleground for TERFs because if their research is published then it will act as a justification for enacting transphobic policies. Despite the research being poorly conducted, with methodologies that involved violating patient confidentiality. In addition, the organisers of the report are also known transphobes. Lawford Smith has used the fact that a prominent University, Oxford, published her book to normalise her views.
The Cass review undertaken by the UK government is currently being used as proof to fearmonger about trans children, including prompting and supporting bans on puberty blockers, despite the fact that gender-affirming care improves patient mental health at a greater rate than any other known treatment. Gender-affirming surgeries have a regret rate similar to that of heart transplants, yet these findings are being exported to other nations and used as a credible source to deny trans people healthcare, deeming it risky on often arbitrary metrics.
TERFs are not feminists — they are anything but. They have nothing on the topic of women’s rights to discuss except for their unfounded hatred of trans people.
They attack cisgender women in their frenzied paranoia, such as Imane Khelif.
It is predominantly women of colour that they attack with these baseless claims. It is an insult to feminism to allow TERFs to call themselves feminists when they are fundamentally against women’s rights.
Real feminists stand with women.
