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| Woman, per TRAs |
TERF is an acronym for "trans-exclusionary radical feminist," and was coined in 2008 by feminist blogger Viv Smythe. It's a catch-all term that paints geneder-critical women as being hostile to trans folk and their rights. It is widely regarded as a slur because some people who use it incite violence against us.
I personally loathe it for the same reason. I'm not radical at all, I just want to be treated fairly and not to have my sex-based rights erased by men who want to be validated in their chosen identity. This is a real issue that demands a nuanced debate, not tautologies like "Trans women are women" V "Biology says otherwise." Women's rights are being pushed back in the name of validation in four main areas:The slogan "punch a terf" is on public display, it isn't just nasty kids on Twitter. Look at it on this poster for lesbian visibility day in Bilbao. Violence against women is being promoted in the streets. #VAWG #WarOnWomen pic.twitter.com/OF8pVN9NbC— Dr EM (@PankhurstEM) May 21, 2019
- Sex-exclusive spaces such as toilets and changing rooms
- Academic and achievement recognition
- Sport
- Sexual activity
If we allow this to continue, we'll either end up with persons born female being excluded from the public sphere in the name of inclusivity or multiple formally recognised genders: male, female, transman, transwoman, and genderless. Let's take a look at what is happening in the areas specified above.
Sex-exclusive spaces
There is documented evidence of sexual assaults by transwomen against women and girls in sex-exclusive spaces. Last year the Metro reported two assaults by Katie Dolatowski against girls in public restrooms. She had to sign the sex offenders' register and was ordered to carry out community service.
Are trans sexual predators really just men pretending to be women?
On Twitter, @ripx4nutmeg's September 5, 2019 tweet storm displays a list of similar incidents. Thankfully, there is a significant number of trans folk who support womens' rights and document abuses against us. The wokerati are eager to dismiss violence against women by transwomen as "female violence," thereby absolving masculinity and male pattern violence of culpability. Whether we are willing to accept this or not, male and female pattern criminality continues at pretty much the same rates in trans folk as in the cis community ("Cis" means you identify as the same gender as the one you were born into). This means if you're inclined to violence as a man, changing your gender ID won't make you less violent.
While assaults and abuses committed by trans people are comparatively rare compared to assaults and abuses by cis men, Self ID permits them to pretend to be trans and to access female-only spaces. That the Karen White incidents were a failure by the prison authorities to properly safeguard its female population is not the point; people who are female in the eyes of the law are entitled to use female-only spaces. That, in and of itself, is the problem. While I recognise that women can be brutal and abusive they can't get other women pregnant, can they? And yes, those incidents are rare, but they should never have happened at all. The victims are people, not collateral damage for the trans validation agenda. Let us not forget that, as they will admit themselves, they don't all fully transition to a feminine body. Many of them retain their male genitalia and still want to be called women and treated as such. Note that these people have zero concern for female safety. Validation über alles.
This is a view held by the politically fashionable, who insist that, since transwomen are women, they should serve their sentences in female prisons, if they so desire.
Trans people are vulnerable to abuse
On the flip side, trans people do indeed suffer violence from men, at greater rates per person than women do. In prison, the cruelty meted out to them includes beatings and rape. Blogger Sarah Jane Baker served time as a transwoman in a male prison and was raped and abused for being trans while in there. Social abuse included calling for "it" to be killed.
On the other hand, campaigners worry about the risks of denying trans prisoners the right to live in a prison that corresponds with their lived gender. As with 21-year-old Vikki Thompson, who took her own life in her cell in Leeds back in 2015, and Joanne Latham, 38, who also took her own life in a Milton Keynes jail the same month, this can pose a very serious danger to a trans prisoner’s mental health and safety.
The people who run UK prisons are tasked with the job of reconciling these concerns. In an attempt at diplomacy, Justice Minister Edward Argar said back in March that he hoped the new unit at Downview would: "strike the right balance between ensuring that all female prisoners are kept safe and transgender prisoners have their rights respected". - What it’s like to be trans in the UK prison system, by Amelia Abraham for Dazed 6/11/2019
These people are entitled to protection from abuse; housing them in a male-only environment is not an option. There are prison wings for trans prisoners, which is safer both for them and for women.
While the narrative largely peddled by the right-wing media is concerned with prisoners abusing the system by lying, the Ministry of Justice have found that “people who are transgender are overwhelmingly genuine about living in the gender with which they identify”. - What it’s like to be trans in the UK prison system, by Amelia Abraham for Dazed 6/11/2019
Okay, it's rare, but what of the fakers trying to sneak in to women's prisons by pretending to be trans?
“The press officer for the Prison Officer’s Association’s view is that ‘some trans prisoners are genuinely gender dysphoric, others are looking at it for a soft option for prison life’,” writes Baker in Prison: A Survival Guide. “In some senses I wouldn’t disagree but if constant bullying, comments, sexual harassment and isolation are your idea of a soft option then I’d suggest you haven’t really thought things through.”
That's just prison. In other settings, wherever trans people are vulnerable, they can and will be sexually abused — often by the people who are meant to help them.
In the NCAVP 2009 report on hate violence, 50 percent of people who died in violent hate crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people were transgender women; the other half were male, many of whom were gender non-conforming.7 Sexual assault and/or genital mutilation before or after their murders was a frequent occurrence.
In 2009, 17 percent of all reported violent hate crimes against LGBTQ people were directed against those who identified themselves as transgender, with most (11 percent of all hate crimes) identifying as transgender women.8 The remainder identified as transgender men, genderqueer, gender questioning, or intersex. - Office of Justice Programs/Office for Victims of Crime; Sexual Assault: The Numbers | Responding to Transgender Victims of Sexual Assault
We can't pretend that trans people aren't a vulnerable group. They are. But so are women. That some predators use trans vulnerability as a cloak to shield their nefarious intentions is at issue here. However rare it is, it's always unacceptable. Even one victim is too many. So then, how can we protect women's sex-segregated spaces while allowing trans folk dignity and privacy when they pee, change, or are in custody?
Are trans spaces the answer?
Unisex changing rooms, toilets, and custodial facilities have been mooted as solutions to inclusion but in those places women (and transwomen) are at risk from violence and abuse by men. Okay, what about facilities for the disabled? They don't like it. Apparently, they find it demeaning and humiliating to be compared to disabled folk. As someone who has often used disabled facilities because climbing stairs hurts my knees, I find that discriminatory against our disabled brothers and sisters. The reason the Trans Rights Activists want to access female toilets is for validation. The ones who just want to pee safely will use disabled toilets without making a fuss about it. The activists want to plant their flags in our spaces. That is the difference.
So what can we do, then? Unisex spaces tend to be problematic due to bad behaviour by men. Surely the answer is a single room space for use by trans folk of any gender identity with a door they can lock. There are already trans prison wings. Why not single room unisex toilets and changing rooms? This would cater to their physical needs without impinging on the needs of others. It just wouldn't meet their perceived need for validation.
Policing can target the innocent
Something to bear in mind is that policing this causes problems; there have been reports of lesbians being thrown out of premises for using female toilets. This is not and never will be okay. While we're waiting for a long-term solution let's be careful not to go overboard in the name of protecting womens' safety. Creepy person behaving creepily is very different from someone popping in for a pee.
Academic and achievement recognition
Achievement recognition is important to women, who have been largely written out of history. Rather than have their own category, transwomen have invaded our spaces and claimed recognition for presenting as either men or women, depending on the gender they were born into. This is not women's history, its Trans history and should be presented as such.
International Womens' Day has pushed women aside for Transwomen. Can't they have their own day? Their struggles are different to ours. Seeking acceptance in a world that demands they conform to the gender they were born in is a very different struggle to seeking to be treated equally.
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society wants to recognise outstanding female pharmaceutical professionals, but natal women face being passed over by men who identify as women.
Shaping the discussion
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| Dr. Z Nicolazzo. Source: Colorado State University College News |
Dr. Z Nicolazzo, assistant professor of Trans* Studies in Education at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education, is coming to Colorado State University as part of a collaborative visit to host workshops and listening opportunities with several departments across campus.
...Nicolazzo will share her current research on transgender college students to explore how gender creates tension points for students, faculty and staff on college campuses. She also will discuss what possibilities exist for reimagining gendered futures, including how trans people have already been using the internet to do this sort of world-making and visioning. - VP for Diversity to host talk with trans* studies professor Feb. 6, by Brit Heiring for Colorado State University College News 28/01/2020
The world-making and visioning includes policing attitudes towards inclusivity.
The School of Education at Colorado State University is pleased to announce that Kari Dockendorff has joined the faculty of its Higher Education Leadership doctoral degree specialization.
Through the course of their research, Dockendorff created a scale that measures [emphasis mine] the trans inclusivity of staff as they interact with trans students. The scale measures staff attitudes, knowledge, and behavior towards trans students [emphasis mine]. Dockendorff also developed a scale that measures levels of masculinity, femininity and androgyny, to create a better understanding of gender identity.
...Dockendorff hopes to continue their research to ensure that college campuses are not erasing students from the conversation. - New assistant professor impacting gender and sexuality equity in higher education, by Andrea Day for Colorado State University College News 11/09/2019
While I appreciate that trans folk have the right to exist and to be treated fairly, the gender identity free-for-all has become nonsensical. Rejecting biological reality to shore up one's self-esteem is understandable if it helps one to feel better, but to impose it on the rest of us and to demand validation by the rest of us at our expense is unfair. That said, we have to respect their rights.
Trans folk face discrimination when they transition
While I bemoan the women being supplanted by the Self-ID crowd it would be remiss of me to fail to mention the fact that trans folk face discrimination when they transition. The differences between the ways they face discriminiation in tech is fascinating, to say the least. You can understand the transwomen demanding to have equal access to recognition as women in receipt of awards when they have to put up with so much bias in the industry for presenting as women.
Despite her years of experience and accolades, suddenly studios were no longer eager to hire someone with the name "Delaney" on a resume. When presenting as a male, she had sent out about 10 applications, and received eight interviews and seven offers over the course of her career. As a female, she sent out about 10 applications, and received two interviews and two offers, one in a more junior position.
"It's absolutely striking," King said. "It is essentially the same CV. It's simply that the rules are different as an apparent cisgender woman." - Transgender employees in tech: Why this "progressive" industry has more work to do to achieve true gender inclusivity, by Alison DeNisco-Rayome for ZDNet 25/10/2019
Notice that Delaney is being sidelined by people who think she's a cis woman like myself. In other words, the discrimination is not because she's trans, but because they think she's a woman. Anyone who overcomes that surely deserves an award on principle. Funnily enough, the situation is reversed for transmen.
Averill said he noticed a difference in how he is treated in meetings as well.
"I went into meetings in my female form, and essentially the experience was 'Hmm, that might be a great idea. Let's take it apart and investigate it from every possible angle. And if it's found to have no holes we will move forward with that plan,'" he said. "My experience now as a man walking into these meetings is, I give an idea, and there is no investigating. There are maybe a couple of clarifying questions, and then it is enacted and piloted and adopted, without any of that severe scrutiny that I had before." - Transgender employees in tech: Why this "progressive" industry has more work to do to achieve true gender inclusivity, by Alison DeNisco-Rayome for ZDNet 25/10/2019
The article posits that treating transwomen as women and transmen as men mean the biases they face, whether positive or negative, are the same. Would Dr. Z Nicolazzo, pictured above, face the same kind of discrimination, and, if so, would it be positive because he looks like a man or would it be negative because he identifies as a woman? Or does this discrimination only apply to those whose appearance conforms to the norms of the genders they identify with?
Sex-selective prizes only exist due to discrimination against women
While I complain about Self-ID robbing natal women of recognition, those who transition from female to male presentation are also natal females. Should we then give prizes aimed at women to them because this is how they were born? No, I think that trans folk, who have their own distinct history and experiences should have their own recognition categories so that the awards they receive recognise their struggle as trans folk. It's unfair to stick them with a gender they don't conform to or identify with, and it's worth remembering that sex-selective prizes only exist because women tend to be written out of history and our achievements ignored.
Sport
Transgender women are taking part in sports in increasing numbers. This is controversial due to their physical advantages over women, which they claim are negated by the hormones they take. If that were true, we wouldn't be concerned. This article sums my position up neatly:
One can firmly defend a person’s right to live in the gender identity of their choosing yet also look at photos of trans women athletes such as Gabrielle Ludwig, Natalie van Gogh and McKinnon standing alongside their strikingly smaller female team-mates, and think Navratilova’s arguments are worth investigating instead of dismissing with cries of bigotry.
Even some of those who argue that trans women should compete against other women know the latter would be at a disadvantage. But to them, this is the price of equality. One columnist wrote last week that if transgender athletes did dominate women’s sport to the exclusion of biological females “would that be that bad? In a way it would be inspiring.” One can only wonder if this columnist would be quite so blase about an entire sex missing out on sports careers, scholarships and medals if that sex was his own. Strikingly, no one explains why, if biology doesn’t matter, no male athletes are worried about trans men competing against them. Instead, women’s objections were dismissed as “feverish hysteria”, as if bigotry was a natural female trait. [Emphasis mine] - Sport can help to clarify the trans debate, by Hadley Freeman for the Guardian 06/03/2019
Meanwhile, those TRAs who insist on competing against women do what men have always done when women complain: dismiss them as hysterical. See how she misrepresents criticism:
McKinnon says a key component of Navratilova's argument is that she wants to ban "innocent" and "real" transgender athletes from competing in women's sports "because a cis man in theory, but not practice, could commit fraud" by gaming the system.
Fraud, in this case, could occur if a cis man managed to convince a gender clinician to diagnose him with gender dysphoria, live as a woman for the specified time period, and then compete in women's sports categories at events like the Olympics, only to detransition and return to living as a cis man. - The biggest thing critics continually get wrong about transgender athletes competing in women's sports, by Alan Dawson for Business Insider 17/04/2019
Navratilova is wrong about fraudulent M2F transitioning
While it's true that Navratilova did say a man could transition for a while, then detransition, it's not the core argument against transwomen competing against women. The core argument is that natal men have musculoskeletal and lung capacity advantages over natal women. That's how and why a transwoman would beat natal women in sports. The issue is the unfair advantage, not fraudulently identifying as a woman. McKinnon, by re-framing the argument as transphobic, paints herself and her colleagues as victims of bigoted women. In any case, she continues, hormone therapy has real and lasting effects. As detransitioners confirm, any sex-based changes that occurred as a result of the treatment do not fully reverse. So, then, Navratilova is wrong that a man might pretend to have dysphoria, take hormones, compete as a woman, then revert to being a man. So, then, transwomen who have had the hormones and have met the testosterone level requirements to compete against women are the real deal. They can't compete on Self ID alone. But the musculo-skeletal and lung capacity advantages remain.
International Olympic Committee Guidelines
This really doesn't help to smooth out the wrinkles in the debate. If anything, it makes it worse.
New IOC guidelines came out in 2016. Female-to-male athletes can now compete without any restrictions. Male-to-female athletes no longer need to have reassignment surgery, but they do need to demonstrate lowered testosterone levels.
Controversially, the current guideline states that a male-to-female transgender athlete must show that her testosterone levels have been below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to her first competition.
That concentration – 10 nmol/L – is around the bottom of the range that clinicians consider normal for adult males, but is more than three times higher than the upper limit of the normal range for adult females [Emphasis mine] – around 3 nmol/L. - What is the row about transgender athletes all about? by Patrick Worrall for Channel 4 News FactCheck 12/03/2019
Male-bodied people can compete against women, but only if they lower their testosterone levels to three times that of women's upper levels. On what planet is that fair?
Nuanced Categories or separate ones?
I agree it's not fair to cut trans folk out of sport. It's only right and fair to let them compete up to international levels, but how can we do this without giving anyone an unfair advantage? Lest we forget, Billie Jean King beat a man at tennis in 1973. Women can successfully compete against men. But all the time?
We evaluate solutions offered by others to resolve the tension between fairness and inclusion. We show that all approaches have shortcomings, and therefore suggest that the gender binary in sport is abandoned in favour of a much more nuanced and innovative approach that allows for a solution that is both inclusive and fair to all. - When ideology and physiology don’t align: transwomen in elite women’s sport, by Lynley C. Anderson, Alison Heather, and Taryn Knox for the Journal of Medical Ethics 19/06/2019
The idea here is that male and female categories be abandoned in favour of pitting people against each other based on size and weight instead. A read through the comments shows that some trans athletes don't like this approach, mostly due to their desire to be validated. Due to transwomens' desire to compete against women, the idea of pitting them against their peers in a trans category would also upset them. So, do we adopt the size/weight or trans categories, or continue to give people who were born male an advantage over people who were born female, even though there is no record of a transwoman winning gold in the Olympics? The advantages are real. The solutions are not cut and dried, mostly due to their insistence that women validate them. To whom should we be unfair?
Sexual activity
The area of sexual activity is turning potential and former allies away from the "Trans Women Are Women" mantra. Since the same thing applies to trans men, gay men are also joining women to express their dismay. Stories keep coming out about how some trans folk insist that gay people ignore their sexuality to validate them.
While some lesbians deny that they have ever been targeted by transwomen, others have taken note of complaints by those who have.
Though precise statistics are unavailable, many transwomen are exclusively female-attracted. Prior to transition, they’re what we would ordinarily call heterosexual, or straight: males stably attracted to the opposite biological sex. When transition occurs, this pattern of attraction usually persists. But, for some, it’s unacceptable to now think of themselves as straight – for this carries with it a lingering connotation of manhood, now rejected. Hence some transwomen self-identify as lesbians. They do so even where their transition is only social, and not medical – which is most of the time. The rest of us are now urged to accept the phenomenon of a ‘lesbian with a penis’, or even a ‘girldick’. - Can biological males be lesbians? by Kathleen Stock for The Article
The strident insistence with which transwomen pursue natal women is terrifying. They get into everything in search of validation, even to the point of coining the most odious terms to define resistance to their unwanted advances.
The Cotton Ceiling
The term "Cotton ceiling" was coined by transgender porn actor, Drew DeVeaux in 2012 on Tumblr. If you don't have an account, you can't see the comment. Miranda Yardley reproduced it in her blog.
“Cotton Ceiling” is about TRANS women & OUR sexual exclusion b/c cis ppl believe we are not “real”! via @TransActivisty http://t.co/HHWlNVfm
Notice that it's all about putting the onus on natal women to validate their sexual identity.
The “cotton” refers to underwear. The idea being here that no matter how much basic, nominal acceptance a trans woman can receive in feminist or queer or women’s spaces, we’re still always ultimately rejected when it comes to breaking the sexual barrier, and being accepted as women to such a full extent that we are accepted sexually as women. - Caught up in cotton, by Natalie Reed for Free Thought Blogs
Chelsea Poe demanded to be cast in a lesbian porn film by Lily Cade. When she refused, he declared her a bigot for refusing to let him display his male genitalia to her audience.
The Femonade blog has some ridiculous takes on this, the most egregious of this being:
There is nothing inherently male about a woman’s body, unless she identified things about it as male herself. So, no, I do not consider trans women with penises to be male-bodied, unless that is how they identify. - The Cotton Ceiling? Really? by FCM for Femonade 13/03/2012
It gets worse.
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 2:23 PM, [redacted trans] wrote:
Trans women’s bodies are female bodies, whether or not we have penises.
And I’m done engaging in this conversation. You are clearly attempting to bait me in order to find some way of slandering me and my work online, and, frankly, I have better things to do with my time.
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 2:27 PM, [redacted lesbian] wrote:
I am not trying to bait you. I was trying to get you to make this statement: Trans women’s bodies are female bodies, whether or not we have penises.
That’s bullshit. And that bullshit means lesbians are expected to be sexually accessible to trans women with penises or face being labeled a bigot. [Emphasis mine]
Trans writer Savannah berates lesbians for letting his genitals come between them.
I have written previously about some of the alienation I have experienced as a trans woman dating in the queer women’s community. Now, I want to emphasize here again that no one is obligated to touch a woman’s penis if they aren’t into that. However it’s also important to emphasize:
1) Not every trans woman has a penis.
2) No general means exist to distinguish trans women from cis women. [Emphasis mine]
The implications of these two points together are that statements such as “I am attracted to cis women but not trans women” simply do not make sense and are rooted in social prejudice. - Getting With Girls Like Us: A Radical Guide to Dating Trans* Women for Cis Women, by Savannah for Autostraddle
Honestly, I struggled to find a gay male equivalent for this. Only women seem to be challenged to sexually validate transwomen. This doesn't seem to happen to gay men with regard to trans men. They mention trans mens' struggle for sexual acceptance, but don't try to bully them into sexually accepting them into their dating pools.
Conclusion
I've been thinking about this a lot ever since my first encounter with aggressive TERFs on Twitter, the discovery of a Hindu Tranny Cyborg, and Graham Linehan's advocacy for womens' right to privacy and dignity. I've blogged about this topic but rarely and to be honest, it's not something I'm comfortable about discussing. Unfortunately, standing up for womens' sex-based rights often makes us bedfellows with the Right because Political Correctness demands that, for the sake of being kind to one protected group, another must be thrown under the bus.
The conclusion I have come to is that I'm happy to be kind to trans folk, to use their pronouns and to accept their gender identity, but only if they make an effort to conform to the gender identity they claim. Put it this way, it's easier to welcome a post-op trans woman into the sisterhood than one with a beard and male body parts. I don't want to be horrible to anyone, but I don't want to be taken for a ride either. It is not my job to validate anyone. Trans people who want to be equals are welcome. Those who seek to supplant me and demand that I validate them by accepting being sidelined for their sakes can sod off.
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