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Terf wars: an introduction
- Race and Gender
- TERF / Gender-Critical
- Terminology
- ‘Gender critical’ feminism in the post-truth era
- Appeals to science
Race and Gender
These discourses have racist undertones, as the implicit whiteness of the women who are the subject of protection means that racialised and especially Black women and nonbinary people are more likely to be considered dangerously masculine (Patel, 2017). This is due to the enduring colonial legacies that have long defined racialised women as the unfeminine or ‘masculine’ contrast to white women’s presumed ‘natural’ femininity (see e.g. McClintock, 2013). Racialised women (cis and trans alike), non-binary and intersex people are especially likely to be rendered ‘gender suspect’ due to discourses that position bodies of colour as gender deviant in relation to white body norms (Gill-Peterson,2018; Snorton, 2017).
It is disproportionately cis people (both women and men) who are dangerous to, and perpetrators of violence against, trans women, not the other way around (Bachman & Gooch, 2018; Hasenbush et al., 2019). In this way, trans-exclusionary feminist politics can work to erase forms of gendered and racialised violence.
TERF / Gender-Critical
Notably, while many (but not all) trans people and allies describe trans-exclusionary feminist campaigners as ‘TERFs’, the campaigners themselves generally object to this acronym. In recent years, many have preferred to call themselves ‘gender critical’ – a term that denotes, less a critical approach to gender, and more an emphasis on claiming ‘biologically defined’ notions of femaleness and womanhood over gender identity and social concepts of gender. In addition to attacking trans people’s right to access public toilets in line with their sex/gender presentation, ‘gender critical’ feminists have criticised social developments such as LGBTIQ-inclusive school education and positive media representations of trans people. Increasingly, they argue that such developments result from what they call ‘gender ideology’ (see e.g. 4thWaveNow, 2019).
Terminology
In understanding the current landscape of trans-exclusionary feminist politics, the terminology used by different parties in the debates is central, and constitutes a challenge for analysing trans-exclusionary discourses. This is because language is being deliberately used to include, exclude, and/or denote power relations: for example, trans-inclusive feminist writers tend to prefer the term ‘trans women’, because this implies that a trans woman is a kind of woman (like ‘gay woman’). ‘Gender critical’ writers, however, generally use ‘transwomen’ and avoid using ‘cis’, which can (implicitly or explicitly) exclude trans women from the general category ‘women’, by conflating ‘women’ with ‘cis women’.
Cisgender (or cis) is a descriptive term indicating people who are not trans and/or whose experience of gender corresponds with their assignment at birth. In use since as early as 1992, the term has come to replace terms such as ‘not-trans’, ‘born-women/men’, ‘biological women/men’ or ‘natural women/men’, ultimately serving a neutralising function. In resistance to this, many ‘gender critical’ activists claim that cis (like TERF) is a slur. Recognition of the limitations of a trans/cis binary have been academically articulated (e.g. Enke, 2013).
Certainly, TERF (like ‘cis’) is often used in angry commentaries online by both cis and trans feminists, either as an accusation (e.g. ‘you’re a TERF’) or an insult (e.g. ‘fuck off TERF’). Yet, it is important to understand and account for the power dynamic at play here. In examples such as those above, members of a marginalised group and their allies seek to identify, and express anger or frustration at, a harmful ideology that is promoted primarily by and in the interests of those who are systemically privileged as cis (men as well as women.)
‘Gender critical’ feminism in the post-truth era
It is increasingly argued that we are living in a ‘post-truth’ era, where conventional notions of expertise and the epistemic status of facts are fragmenting, exemplified by the proliferation of so-called fake news especially in digital spaces (Marres, 2018). As an unprecedented number of people have access to the internet and social media where they can read and circulate information of all kinds, numerous differently positioned knowledge claims now coexist digitally. Indeed, it has been argued that many people are abandoning conventional criteria of evidence in favour of alternative knowledges and beliefs (Lewandowsky et al., 2017).
Appeals to science
By appealing to ‘biology’, authorities lay claim to the ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ of science – a claim that has public appeal even if it has been contested in social scientific and humanities scholarship for decades (e.g. Haraway, 1988; Spanier, 1995). Yet, the authority of ‘science’ allows ‘biological truths’ about sex difference to be presented as incontestable realities trumping (merely ‘social’) gender.
‘Gender critical’ feminists are constructing and mobilising very particular, contested versions of biological ‘facts’ that are also lending support to the politics of anti-feminist organisations.