I still can't understand why she continues to cling to her bigotry at this point. Did some transgender individual hurt her deeply in the past and now she wants petty revenge?
Trans exclusionary or gender critical feminists are a particularly dogmatic group of political ideologues its quite uncommon for people who publicly ascribe to the ideology to later publicly denounce it. Metros digital editor Tess Nichol talked to someone who did.
How did you become engaged with TERF ideology and ideas? About a year ago I had to write something brief on the self-ID issue and read a little bit about [Wellington activist] Renee Gerlichs campaign and then more from people in the UK like Julie Bindel, Helen Lewis, [Australian author] Germaine Greer and Jane Clare Jones. I cant remember what tipped me towards it exactly but there was something persuasive, I thought then, in the gender essentialist idea. Which I now disagree with.
What felt right or persuasive about what you read? Im struggling to remember the exact thing, but it was something about male and female being clear biological realities and the concept of a man who felt he was in the wrong body was a logical impossibility (I now understand thats a metaphor which approximates the way people feel). The other terrible thing to admit is that theres something exciting and stimulating about being at the centre of a big drama on Twitter. I said the other day that TERFs were cult-like and I think thats true. Its the us against the world mentality.
Why do you think one persuasive argument was enough for you to really run with the whole ideology? One theory I have relates to gender being quite a complicated concept to get your head around, and interrogating what it means to be a woman or a man can make people really uncomfortable, because it takes something integral to their sense of self and upends it. The discomfort that creates can lead to some people defensively adopting extreme views based on visceral and emotional reactions. TERFdom is about the flimsiest cloak of feminist platitudes draped over disgust and hate. The word disgust is at the heart of it for a lot of people, even if they are unaware of it or refuse to admit it. A disgust that is prompted by what they see as a rejection of biological norms and the confusion of male and female categories. Im not saying it was that for me.
Another part of buying into it was the underdog aspect, as I saw it then. The TERFs have been good at portraying themselves as a marginalised, silenced minority with intellectual links back into more respectable feminism. My interest in it happened around the same time that Rachel Stewart was copping a lot of flak for her Herald column, and I saw that as a classic Twitter pile-on or mass shaming and bullying.
When did you start having misgivings and what were they? How did they mount and ultimately what was the final straw? I had been in Twitter stoushes and pile ons before, so that was nothing new, but this was much more intense. I didnt like the tenor of the argument, the way that TERFs seemed to hound and victimise critics; or the single mindedness of their world view, the obsessiveness of it. I started to doubt the alarmist claims about men in womens changing rooms and prisons, and started to see them promote conspiracy theories about pedophiles. Im old enough to remember homosexual law reform in the 1980s when there were similar threats about where all this would lead or that gay marriage would lead to people marrying their pets.
A friend of mine said if you want to assess the quality of a new (as it was to me) argument or belief, see who else it attracts. Besides the legit feminists, there were mens rights activists, Jordan Peterson fans, free speech nuts, Quillette readers. The stories these supposedly left-wing activists were sharing were coming from the Spectator and the Daily Mail. It started to look like a convenient cause for misogynists who never had strong feelings about, say, womens participation in sport before.
Im also a big David Lynch fan. There is a great moment in Twin Peaks: The Return where Gordon Cole, played by Lynch, is talking to David Duchovnys trans character. He says something like when you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die. There was a lack of compassion amongst those in the movement.
That lack of compassion is whats so galling. TERFs seem to forget there are real people at the heart of their arguments. Theyre often extremely cruel in the way they talk about trans people, even when they claim not to be transphobic. The lack of compassion, again to blame Twitter, is a lot to do with being online, conversing with others who often use pseudonyms and discussing people who are abstractions to you. Theyre not treated as people who are trying to live full lives and mind their own business. If they were in the room with you, would you say what you said? Probably not.
When were you inclined to listen to people who disagreed with you while being on board with TERFy ideas either real life friends or people online who were asking you to pull your head in? If someone is reading this and wants to confront someone in their life who is currently down the TERF rabbit hole, how would you suggest approaching them, based on your experience? If someones deep in the TERF rabbit hole, I dont know. Maybe that Natalie Wynn video helps? Im an outlier. Most TERFs are women, I assume, mostly lesbians. Their perspective is utterly different to mine.
The cruelty was real, though. When I saw all the stuff flare up the other week about Massey and Stand Up for Women, I felt like I wanted to say something. It was a bit self-indulgent, and I didnt expect many people to really care, but I wanted to say I changed my mind and apologise to those who felt genuinely hurt. I know some did. We can think Twitter arguments are just a game, or fun, especially if we are relatively privileged, but they can be genuinely hurtful for others reading it.
What would you suggest or say to people grappling with how they feel about gender identity issues I dont mean grappling with their gender identity, but who perhaps feel convinced or at least not unconvinced by TERF arguments? They should maybe read more and talk less. We dont have to have opinions on everything. Listen to or read about the actual lived experience of people.
*Many TERFs now reject this label and prefer to use the term gender critical feminists. It has been alleged the term TERF is a slur, and abusive. However the acronym was used for a long time by those who agreed with the political philosophy to self-identify. Although it is often used by critics of the movement, often in highly critical or even aggressive contexts, Metro does not agree it is a slur, and is a more accurate description of the groups politics than Gender Critical feminism.
---
[click here] pronouns incoming SHE HAS PRONOUNS!>(She/Her)<CHECK OUT my PRONOUNS