I. Suspicion
A few years ago I was approached by a coworker from another department in my university. We had met before, so he felt comfortable asking me about trans issues. His teen and tween kids were “up in arms” about terfs on the internet and social media. He was worried it was some kind of bot infiltration. Or another hype that was meant to, or at least having the effect of, dividing younger and older feminists.
My response was to explain what terf ideology and to encourage him to trust that his kids know what they are talking about. That they clearly have internet and social media savvy. I also politely suggested that skepticism about whether terfs are a real problem harms trans people.
I’ve seen this skepticism across institutions. It’s especially common when people like gender studies faculty and queer studies faculty or students make statements or take actions that are transphobic. The idea that certain people or places can’t be transphobic makes it harder for us to be believed, to be seen as real.
Many trans authors have written about experiences of having their identities or words treated with suspicion, especially Indigenous, Two-Spirit (2S), Black, and queer and trans of color experiences of disability, neurodivergence, class, diaspora, and genocide survival. These are suspicions about realness. The best response to this suspicion is the carefully intersectional community writing by multiracial queer, trans, and disabled groups. Inspired by intersectional trans writing, I am intentionally using the word “terf” in lowercase and without the periods that indicate the acronym and definition (“Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists”).
I use lowercase to indicate that I mean both terfs who know they are and claim they are terfs, and terfs who might not know they are terfs. The use and meaning of the term has changed, both with the onset of self-identifying terfs and the reactionary accusations against trans people by terfs who don’t know they’re terfs.
In this essay I won’t link to or cite terfs. Instead I link to trans and queer authors and use my own experiential knowledge. I invite readers to look for terf ideologies where they might not expect to find them. Likewise, I don’t define every term that trans communities use to name ourselves and our experiences. I believe readers will find that they understand where they might not expect to.
II. Terfs Who Know and Terfs Who Don’t
Sometimes I identify as neurocrip. Sometimes neuroqueer, sometimes neurotrans. As a transmasculine nonbinary queer, my neurodivergence isn’t separable from my transness, and vice versa. As a white settler faculty member in a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, it’s always my responsibility to understand racism and anti-Indigeneity as best I can.
As a neurocrip and transmasc person working in an institution, it’s not always my responsibility to point out transphobia, neuronormativity, and sanism. But I believe it is my responsibility to educate about transmisogyny, and about ableism that doesn’t directly affect my own bodymind. To fully understand the transmisogyny of terfs, it’s necessary to confront their racism, anti-Indigeneity, and ableism.
Terfs are transphobes who claim to be feminists. “Terf” is not a slur (neither is “cis” (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-cisgender-means-transgender_n_63e13ee0e4b01e9288730415)). And not all terfs know they’re terfs.
When I write: “not all terfs know they’re terfs,” I mean that terfs by definition don’t know themselves or their own biases. This is true of any groups or people who have what Edén Torres calls “internalized dominance,” and who don’t self-reflect on their power. The lack of self-reflection by terfs nullifies their perspective. Their arrogation of “radical” “feminism” should disqualify them from the conversation.
Terfism and transmisogyny are deep-seated and embedded ideologies that we have to root out in dominant culture and in ourselves. Terfs who don’t know they’re terfs identify as feminists. They might think or say it’s cool that trans people exist. Terfs who don’t know they’re terfs don’t understand that they need to do the self-reflection to root out their internalized cis feminist dominance. Self-identifying terfs don’t want us to exist. Terf who don’t know they’re terfs don’t want us to take up too much space.
Self-identifying terfs appropriate trans activism and the power of naming oppression, taking on the term that trans people created to name terf ideology. Self-identifying terfs also appropriate the practice of reclaiming words. Many communities have reclaimed actual slurs like the word “queer,” or the word “crip” as a shortening of the common ableist term. Terfs who name themselves terfs operate as if they are the targets of a slur and have reclaimed it.
Terfs who don’t know they’re terfs antagonize trans people with reproductive rights frames that double down on “women,” and mean cis women only.
Cis women’s bodies are not the only bodies who need access to abortions. Cis women aren’t the only people, nor even the only women, who need the freedom and resources to adopt or conceive, carry, and birth children when they want to and when the medical technology is available, or when it becomes available to transfemmes.
Terf ideology is a suspicious and dismissive interpretation of the gender freedom and creation that trans people make together. It belies a belief that gender is only ever oppressive, defining feminism as resistance to oppression of cis women only. This usually means white or settler or cis or abled women.
The colonial racist imposition and enforcement of gender on enslaved bodies is best understood as processes of “ungendering.” Ungendering reduced bodies to flesh and labor, as Black feminist thinkers like Hortense Spillers have argued. This ungendering includes enslaved childbearing after rape by white cis men slavers. But this oppressive ungendering is not a topic for self-identified terfs.
Terfs ignore or minimize any gender oppression that doesn’t give them what Audre Lorde termed “the moral authority of suffering” in her essay/speech “The Uses of Anger.” Lorde exposed the projection of this moral authority in the accusations white “feminists” leveled at her. When she insisted on conversations about racism, white cis women accused her of the “moral authority of suffering.” This deflection by white cis women showed their zero sum racism that can only see its own suffering. Terf transphobias in actuality wield a “moral authority” of suffering cis women. This suffering of cis women is more real to them than the suffering they support and inflict on trans people, especially trans women.
Suffering is not the criterion of who “counts.” It will lead to competition for the most moral authority if it is how we define feminism. Trans feminists aren’t trying to win that moral authority, just as Audre Lorde wasn’t wielding it as a Black feminist.
Suffering matters, but it’s not what makes us feminists. It matters because excluding the intersectionally-marginalized within a group is an immediate threat to their existence. Those of us who are hated by the loudest voices on both the political Right and the political Left are the most institutionally vulnerable. The most institutionally vulnerable are closest to being unhoused or unsheltered, to losing, or never having, employment, to being abused and attacked.
This isn’t about suffering, it’s about justice. It’s about who has the megaphone and the platforms to declare they are suffering the most, need reproductive healthcare the most, or are the only real women. And that to say otherwise is “political correctness.”
III. Whose Business is Trans Business?
At the root of this moral authority of suffering cis women is the hatred or disdain for the “choice” to be a woman. It goes like this: ‘Who would “want to” be a woman in this world if they didn’t “have to”?’ On this logic, transmasculine people betray our suffering and inescapable womanhood to pretend to be men, and trans women and femmes “pathologically” choose womanhood. These are all cis and terf frames of gender and of the decisions trans people make. When terfs who don’t know they’re terfs don’t do the work to root out these frames, they do more harm by making our business theirs.
The questions around choice for trans people are our question to grapple with, usually with entirely different terms.
It is for each of us to process and articulate in community with each other, according to our own experiences of transness. The binary of choice vs. birth destiny is a cis binary that degrades our needs – whether we see them as choices, non-negotiables, life-or-death, something else, or some combination of these.
Within this logic of terf norms is often some room for nonbinary identities, as long as we’re not also transsexuals or want to change our bodies at all. “Transsexual” refers specifically to accessing or wanting medicalized transition, and has been a pathologizing term. Authors and activists like Kai Cheng Thom are reclaiming the term to highlight the tolerance of certain ways of being trans while others are further marginalized. (https://www.genderpodcast.com/s/GR_Ep81_Kai-Cheng_CLEANED2.) There’s no right or wrong way to be trans, and how we each identify (or don’t) is ours to decide.
I’ve felt all of this very personally. In my grad program a cis feminist professor openly rejected trans body modification while teaching us Judith Butler’s social construction of gender. I’ve also experienced shunning for refusing to be the “safe” trans person who the group could feel good about themselves for liking. Having solidarity with other trans people, particularly trans femmes, has made me a target that I hadn’t been before.
As a nonbinary queer who was masculine-presenting long before medicalized transition, I was expected and encouraged to be suspicious of trans women and femmes. And in exactly the ways I’ve outlined here – to double down on suffering cis womanhood or suffering nonbinariness as the definition of womanhood or nonbinariness. Female-assigned-at-birth nonbinariness – exclusively, within this logic. I was encouraged to assume that trans women and femmes had been socialized male in ways that gave them unequivocal privilege. So that any critique they offered was easily dismissed as aggressive covert privilege.
Whether trans women and femmes ever experience assigned-male privilege when they are young is for trans women and femmes to each sort through, in their own way. Whether I experienced masculine privilege as a little female-assigned bruiser is for me to sort through. And, yes, I think I did, simultaneous to other privileges like whiteness, as well as the pain and marginalization of gender nonconformity.
Cis and terf so-called feminisms make our business theirs, without engaging our voices or the realities of our pain, our needs, and our joy. Our childhoods, our gender assignments, and our relationships to them are our business.
There are plenty of cis feminists who can and do engage our stories and our analyses of gender, and a marker of terfs is that they don’t engage. They may virtue signal. They may cherry-pick our quotes. They may arrogate our critiques of gender for their own purposes, like when they talk about drag as transgressive while questioning the realness of trans women. But they do not engage.
There is nothing real about the “feminism” of terfs. Terfs act as if trans people threaten their realness, when that’s in fact what they do to themselves. As Janet Mock showed in Redefining Realness, dominant cis culture needs a radically different understanding of who and what is real, and how. When the Right complains that we don’t even know what a woman or a man is anymore, it wields the white supremacist colonial binary frame of man and woman imposed on Indigenous peoples.
Terfs righteously agree and reinforce these binaries, undermining trans feminisms, as well as 2S ways of living Indigenous “genders,” in the terminology of colonizer languages. When the binary is the only thing that makes gender real, when skin tone or first language or where someone grew up is the only thing that makes their mix-race experience real, when abled bodyminds are consistently represented as the only real bodyminds, the “most” real becomes, maybe, the most fake. What I mean is, what’s more narrow in scope, more inaccurate, more disingenuous, than the idea that there’s only one way to be real?
And doesn’t it lead to a politics of fake feminism, fake anti-racism, fake access? Questioning the realness of anyone’s marginalized identities that we fight every day to claim and reclaim and live in, and exist as, puts all “suspicious” identities further at risk.
Ableism thrives in pop culture and culture war panics about people faking disability. Or not being disabled enough to be deserving of care and access. Suspicion of Indigenous and mixed race identities is trending, with the full support of the altright’s most nasty trolls. Trans women and femmes are not counted as women or the genders they identify as, especially if they don’t “pass” or try to for cis people. It is ableist and transmisogynistic to question mixed race identities. It’s racist and ableist to question trans women’s and femmes’ identities. It’s racist and transmisogynistic to question disabled identities.
To put it another way, it’s not my place to question someone’s marginalized identities. If a person has a disability that is not apparent to me, it’s not my business if they don’t disclose or name it. It’s not my place to question or minimize it, because if I’m wrong, I’m reinforcing and acting out ableism, adding to every ableist thing that person has experienced, and causing more harm and pain. The stakes are too high.
Given everything I’ve written here, everything I believe about the history and present of oppression, how could I question this realness of experience? How could I question the Indigenous identities of mixed race 2S people whose genocide and gendercide survivance is only through escaping and resisting complete annihilation? The term “gendercide” was coined by Deborah Miranda to name the difference between homophobia and the extermination of Chumash targets through what in Eurowestern English we call transmisogyny and transphobia.
Who would question the identities of those whose ancestors survived however they could, including passing as white, including navigating the projection of whiteness every time their Indigeneity was erased by a census taker or marriage license? If we question someone’s Indigeneity and we’re wrong, it’s not a stretch to say we are participating in genocide and gendercide. The stakes are too high.
IV.
Transnational Terfism
Terfs appropriate transnational feminist frames to claim that cis women from non-Eurowestern countries are being bullied here on Turtle Island by trans people, accusing us of gender ideology or transgender imperialism. In doing so, they expose their own Eurowestern commitments to a colonial, violently imposed, cisgender essentialism, and they show their transmisogyny.
Do terfs know how many trans and queer refugees are in the U.S. because they have to flee transphobiic violence?
There are women and femmes all over the world who identify outside of binaries, or in other ways that don’t fit into any colonial terminology, even of “trans.” Some 2S and transnational/Global South folks do identify as trans and/or nonbinary and/or intersex, often also along with the terms in their Indigenous languages or survivance inventions of language. There are 2S folks who aren’t counted as transnational, as colonized and gendercided survivors. Somehow, instead, 2S people are perceived as…US American? Eurowestern? Especially if they also identify as queer or trans? Colonizers of transnational “cis” women?
Not only is transness and its intersectionality erased when 2S folks are accused of trans imperialism; the ancestral practices and sacred roles of colonized ←→ sex assigned Indigenous people are further dismissed in this ongoing gendercide. Their survivance of genocide and gendercide, their reclamation, their gender creation and proliferation, their existence is under attack.
Do terfs who appropriate transnational feminisms know, when they invoke genital cutting, rape, and murder of cis women, that intersex infants are mutilated all over the world, including in the US? Do they know that folks with similar bodymind experiences may have sacred roles in their cultures?
Do terfs know that trans adults all over the world are accused of mutilating our bodies if we choose to change them? And that in some countries there are more rights on paper and more resources than there are in Global North countries for those who want medical transition or inhabit genders counter to assignment at birth?
Do they know the “life expectancy’ and necropolitical death expectancy of trans women in the US, especially Black and Indigenous / trans women of color? Do they know how ableism and the medical industrial complex impact and distort so many BIPOC trans women’s and femmes’ lives?
Do they know that rape is both a tool of war and colonization and an ongoing tool of queerphobic and transphobic gender “correction” and punishment that is also traced through histories of colonialism?
Do they know that rape is historically intertwined with mixed-race and Indigenous passing?
Do they know that trans adults are being called “groomers” for existing in the presence of children and young adults, for making art or performances that celebrate our existence, and if we educate about our identities?
Transphobes can call themselves feminists, but that doesn’t mean they are.
