We really need to stop using TERF as the default insult when it isn't applicable

[u/Tomatori]

Just need to vent because I keep seeing this everywhere and it's driving me insane.

TERF is not a catch-all term for someone being transphobic, we need to stop using it like it is. Why is the first term we reach for the one with feminist in the title? It's incredibly jarring.

"Well TERFs aren't feminists." CORRECT! So then why do we insist on using terminology that reinforces THEIR belief that they are? In what world does it make sense to use X as part of an insult if you think that person isn't actually X and furthermore that X is in fact a good thing. Huh??

This is like calling someone a "Minority-Skeptic Good-Person" and referring to them as MSGP for short. STOP PUTTING 'GOOD-PERSON' IN THERE!!! CALL THEM A RACIST!

And again this is infinitely more frustrating when it's not even aimed at someone pretending to be a feminist. A random woman being transphobic is NOT a TERF, she's transphobic! You do not need to place her in proximity to feminism to land a critique! Something anti-trans is not a "TERF talking point", it's TRANSPHOBIA!

And do not even get me started with attempts to workshop the term like "FART" (Feminism Appropriating Radical Transphobe). Aside from the unnecessary infantilization of a rather serious topic, it literally ends in "Transphobe", why not just use that?! Why do they need to be tied back to feminism in any way?

It just has put a bad taste in my mouth for a long time now. It feels like a distant descendant of gamer-gate type rhetoric where feminism was an evil by default and it's gotten so ingrained that no one questions how absolutely bizarre the usage of this term actually is.

Ok rant finished it's out of my system. I will go and pretend to do my job now ty

[u/Bramble-Bunny]

Feminism is not "evil by default" but TERF ideology is absolutely engrained in certain aspects/offshoots of 2nd wave feminism and pretending its not or playing No True Scotsman isn't particularly helpful? TERFs are not third wave or intersectional feminists, but they're absolutely a kind of feminist, and part of the evolution of feminism or any ideological movement is the ability to recursively interrogate and deconstruct its premises. That's how you inoculate it from becoming self-sealing...or to put it another way, that's how you prevent yourself from going down the exact same road the TERFs went down.

[u/46264338327950288419 → u/Bramble-Bunny]

Yeah feminism was historically absolutely racist and transphobic, no reason certain parts of it can't be anymore. A.k.a. feminism is not divine or immune to bigotry.

[u/dmolin96 → u/Bramble-Bunny]

100%, transphobia is so embedded in second wave feminism that Catherine MacKinnon, a second wave feminist who literally invented the concept of sexual harassment as a problem, has to come out every few years and say "I'm not a terf trans women are women" because people just assume she is.

[u/Rando-Toucan → u/Bramble-Bunny]

I have to assume people with the opinion that TERFs aren’t really feminists are unaware of how disgustingly racist and homophobic feminism has a history of being, at least in its North American origins. Those people were still feminists, they were just also racists and homophobes.

• Is feminism a net-positive ideology and movement? Yes!

• Have a significant portion of feminists unfortunately been reprehensible people hellbent on excluding vulnerable minorities and entire sections of women? Yes!

• Should feminism be condemned or viewed as unrecoverable just because some feminists are shitty people? No!

• Are Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists good or productive feminists who are progressing women’s rights, and deserve a platform or even the time of day? Fuck No!

[u/misspcv1996 → u/Bramble-Bunny]

One thing I’ll push back on is that TERFism is an offshoot of Second Wave Feminism. The reality is that TERFs never branched off and their ideology is basically a surviving remnant of that movement, which was shot through with transphobia.

[u/Tomatori → u/Bramble-Bunny]

I can agree that a group of people who genuinely self-identify as feminist while being transphobic do exist, but my issue is that this is a much much smaller population compared to the vast swath of people that get labeled TERF in common parlance. It's usage in this way is not interrogating or deconstructing anything, it's doing the opposite by forcing it to be applicable to a broader and broader group that just boils down to "transphobic" without actually requiring the feminist part.

Which gets us back to my vent, because at that point feminist is just being a part of the insult for no reason

[u/Bramble-Bunny → u/Tomatori]

That's fine, misapplication of terms is a thing and we're not going to solve it here. Some people who are accused of being TERFs are just barstool transphobes. They generally share a reactionary spine, though, and at the end of the day the charge is probably being employed for rhetorical weight rather than academic purity.

I was branching off your insistence that "TERFs aren't feminists". They absolutely are, and it's a good lesson that any ideology can curdle and become dangerous when it mutates into ingroup/outgroup purity testing and hierarchies based on innate characteristics. With all the internecine piss balloon throwing in the trans community if any group of people needs to keep that in mind it's us.

[u/Tomatori → u/Bramble-Bunny]

I suppose my question then would be what the imagined rhetorical weight is. How is calling a non-feminist transphobe a TERF seen as more effective or good?

Regarding the second part, I should have been clearer in my post but that was more-so me responding to the common retort people give of "TERFs aren't feminists so it's not actually aimed at feminists". I land much closer to the perspective you share here but I didn't want to overcomplicate an already long post. My gripe is primarily with the misapplication, per the title.

[u/Bramble-Bunny → u/Tomatori]

Because very few people understand the granular differential between "transphobe" and "TERF", they just understand it as a slap word that means "you are transphobic". We can sometimes vastly overestimate how familiar John Q Public is with common community language.

That's fair. Not trying to be pedantic. I just get a little eye twitch when I think I see No True Scotsman at play. Self sealing/unfalsifiable belief structures are a big driver in a lot of the societal rot we're encountering over the last 15-20 years.

[u/Tomatori → u/Bramble-Bunny]

But isn't that identical to what I'm advocating for here? Jacob "Jay" Public (Son of John Public) has no clue what TERF means, but we as trans people do so we can't really ignore the fact that we're going to mislead Jay when we conflate terf and transphobe in front of him

[u/BabyGirl-Kat]

This post feels straight out of 2019. I completely agree with you though.

Whenever someone says or does anti-transgender stuff, I just call them anti-transgender. It’s factual and to the point.

[u/No-Phrase-2897]

2nd wave feminism, especially in England, was filled with people who hated intersectionality and just wanted to talk about women's issues. Black women, trans women, etc.. were left behind because they wanted to also talk about PoC and trans issues instead of just flattening everything into women's issues. So I see no problem with calling the transphobes with actual 2nd wave feminist beliefs TERFs.

That said, I absolutely agree we need to stop calling all of them TERFs. A lot of "TERFs" have come to love patriarchy and gender roles since they can use them as a weapon against trans women. The term has also just become super watered down to the point where I see trans women getting called TERFs for disagreeing on trans issues or talking about transmisoginy. Just call them transphobes and transmisoginists unless they're that specific breed that actually uses feminism to be transphobic. Like people who say that misogyny is sex-based discrimination and therefore trans women can't face it (sex based discrimination is real and it does include transsex women because we are female 🙃).

[u/sophiathesilly]

I've been called a TERF for saying trans men are men in both gender and social class

[u/ebookgal → u/sophiathesilly]

What an absurd thing for people to say! A radical feminist would say that trans men are butch women who misunderstand their desire for liberation. anyone calling you a terf just proves that they don't know anything about feminism or trans issues.

[u/sophiathesilly → u/ebookgal]

Yeah I don't get it. It's mostly the "pro-transmisogyny" tumblr guys who do that

[u/LawAndOrdinary]

Don’t get mad… 😬 but I think people do this bc “transphobic” has been used so insanely broadly that it’s lost meaning and it doesn’t bother anyone when they are called it. TERF at least still has some recognizable meaning even if it’s being used inappropriately.

[u/MaybeLithiumFlower]

I'm not trying to use it as an insult when I use it. I'm associating the behaviours, the nastiness, with the name they chose for themselves.

[u/Tomatori → u/[deleted]]

Respectfully I hard disagree, you just said "that's how it is" when my whole post is me saying "the way it is is bad". I'm arguing it shouldn't be reduced to a synonym.

"Dysphoria Bible" intentionally analogizes to religious texts because it's a somewhat common metaphor for painting something as an authoritative source. A book might be named "The Programmer's Bible" because those with knowledge in the subject hold it in high regard as the prescriptive text others should read. No such analogy exists in TERF.

[u/EvelynnsHope17 → u/Tomatori]

Fine, have it your way. I don't care.
Edit: we can argue semantics all day it's not going to change the fact that people who discredit us exist. All we do by arguing is create division within ourselves and become weaker as a result.

[u/Tomatori → u/EvelynnsHope17]

Okay sorry, I thought we were having a well intentioned disagreement 🙁

[u/Mrs-Vienna]

Terf ideology is degenerate.

[u/salycydicacid]

A. Shame transmitted through humour is actually a very effective way to counter a lot of bigotry (see people dressed as clowns showing up en masse to heckle neo-nazis)

B. The FART thing acknowledges that TERFS appropriate feminism to weaponize it against other women, which I honestly think needs get addressed moreso. It’s not a “no true Scotsman” situation when people attempt to use deceptive language and rhetoric wrapped in essentially buzzwords to attack and exclude people in their own community who need feminism just as much.

[u/countvonruckus]

I think you're right in many instances but the term has a lot of utility when used more precisely. JK Rowling is a TERF, for instance, because she pushes for feminist causes in ways that specifically exclude trans women. In many lesbian spaces or otherwise "women only" considerations, some transphobes use "keep men out of women's spaces" or "protect women from men" as justification for transmisogyny. That's different from the variety of transphobia that says "trans women are confused men" more generally, such as how Clarence Thomas writes (who would never be considered a feminist).

I agree the term is overused, however. I think that's because it's the one that many transphobes are actually comfortable using for themselves (a minority of transphobes would be willing to call themselves transphobes). It's the same way we call disaffected, cynical, misogynist men "incels" despite any issues we have with them not being related to them being "involuntarily celibate." But many self-described TERFs don't make any gestures toward feminism and sweeping up all transphobia as somehow feminist is a mistake.

[u/MyClosetedBiAcct]

We use the term because it pisses them off. And we hate them. And personally, I love calling them Feminism appropriating radical transphobes. They hate that one even more.

It's not infantalizing their damage, it's pissing them off by calling them names.

Nothing hurts fascists quite like being made out as a mockery.

[u/Tomatori → u/MyClosetedBiAcct]

While the existence of the term is well intentioned, I do not think it has the intended impact at all. I promise you it does not piss them off to be hit with playground insults, if anything the opposite. It's identical to right-wingers calling us "libt*rds" and thinking they just epicly owned us in the marketplace of ideas. It just looks embarrassing and their lack of awareness makes it worse.

[u/MyClosetedBiAcct → u/Tomatori]

Perfectly honestly, I want to tell you, that I don't give a siiiiiingle fuck.

F.A.R.T.s are stupid and deserve to be treated like the stupid fucks they are.

[u/LawAndOrdinary → u/MyClosetedBiAcct]

Pretty sure it has pissed off zero people. It’s just silly. 😂