Episode #16: Guarding Their TERF

Full show notes, kind of long, but I think it's important. Notes from Transgender History (Susan Stryker, 2008, revised 2017) Beth Elliot was a trans woman who transitioned in the 60s while in college She became an activist and singer She was thrown out of her group when her former college friend accused her of sexual harassment an emerging discourse in feminism that held all male-to-female transsexuals to be, by definition, violators of women, because they represented an “unwanted penetration” into women’s space. (Quote from Susan Stryker's Transgender History) Whatever the circumstances might have been, the public accusation of sexual misconduct served as a lightning rod for discharging years of gathering unease about the participation of transgender women in lesbian and feminist spaces. (Ibid) TERFs originated mostly in the US in the 70s, but really took hold in UK feminism, which is overwhelmingly "gender critical" at present (there are certainly TERFs in the US but they are more of a vocal minority). TERFs tend to hate the term TERF (even though it's merely an acronym for their stated position) and now use the term "gender critical" (which is misleading in the same sense as "pro-life") The idea is supposed to be that "men" (i.e. trans women) are trying to "infiltrate" women's spaces, and this hurts women who are largely traumatized by rape in all it's forms But the idea that women are fragile and have to be protected is itself a tool of white patriarchy, which makes TERFs themselves such a tool, regardless of whether they are themselves white or not. “All hell broke loose that very first night, caused by the gate-crashing presence of a male transvestite who insisted that he was 1) an invited participant, 2) really a woman, and 3) at heart a lesbian,” Morgan wrote in her introductory notes to the keynote speech in Going Too Far. “It was incredible that so many strong angry women should be divided by one smug male in granny glasses and an earth-mother gown.” This from Robin Morgan, a noted feminist, about Beth Elliot, pretty much initiated the TERF movement in the US in 1973. “No,” she continued, “I will not call a male ‘she’; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman’; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.” She's still alive and still a TERF. Fortunately so is Beth and she's still a singer and lesbian feminist activist. There’s some very real pain there, in that 1 in 4 women AT LEAST are sexually assaulted, and so blaming men and not wanting men in women’s spaces is a valid way to feel The problem comes when AFAB women feel that transgender women “can’t possibly” understand what it means to feel the suffering of a woman, and any suffering they’ve experienced isn’t a valid example of “women’s suffering” But at the same time, TERFdom really supports a white patriarchy where white women are more fragile (TERFs are OVERWHELMINGLY white), ergo, TERFs are really supporting the patriarchy they claim to hate Transgender saints: https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2020/12/12/little-known-history-transgender-saints