Sympathy for the Devils

Part 2: Terfs

As we begin to react in depth to the social life and problems of our global village, we become reactionaries. —Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

Picking up from where we left off…

EXHIBIT B: Terfs

If the word “terf” draws your stomach acid into your throat—I get it. Nobody likes terfs. They’re bigoted. They’re mean. They’re obsessive. They’re severely deficient in the quality of empathy.

But since we value empathy so highly, let’s try to appreciate what might have possessed them to make themselves into everyone’s least-favorite people. And they really are everyone’s least favorite people. Liberals don’t like them because they’re trans-critical at best and transphobic at worst, and are also anti-porn, anti-sex work (but not anti-sex worker per se), and have in general positioned themselves (or been shunted into) the anti-woke camp.¹ Despite aligning with them on the trans issue, social conservatives don’t like terfs because they’re pro-abortion rights, pro-gay rights, skeptical of traditional gender roles, and have a pretty low opinion of the male sex.

For our purposes here I want to especially focus on the trans-exclusionary radical feminists who also happen to be lesbians. After all, they were the original progenitors of the online terf phenomenon—which is what we’re usually talking about when we talk about terfs. Except when a bunch of them work up the nerve to stage the occasional public demonstration, they’re otherwise invisible out in the real world, and exceedingly cautious about outing themselves to friends, classmates, and colleagues. Terfs exist to most of us as a digital apparition.

Women have been sexually attracted to other women since prehistory, but “lesbian” only became an acknowledged social identity in the twentieth century. Up until the end of the aughts, the word “lesbian” implied that the person so identified and the object of her amours were both cisgender.

It had to be implied because the word “cisgender” hadn’t yet been coined. The concept was so normative as to be completely transparent to all but a vanishingly tiny portion of the population. Even when the post-AIDS gay rights movement gained steam, trans people were still so far out into the margins to be much of anything but an afterthought. Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill didn’t mention them even once in “The Overhauling of Straight America,” the very blueprint for the strategy that would bring about the movement’s eventual success. Trans was a blind spot. An anomaly.

“Lesbian” was understood by pretty much everybody to denote something along the lines of “if you’ve got anything but a vulva between your thighs, she isn’t interested”—and “she” was understood to be a cis woman. This wasn’t controversial. Someone who didn’t fit the description of “[cis] woman interested in [cis] women” and called herself (or himself) a lesbian might expect a harsh response from the people who did fit it, and maybe a quietly raised eyebrow from everyone else. Irrespective of how any of us feel now about it now, that’s how it was.²

And then something happened. In an interview I’ve cited once before, Andrea Chu throws out 2013 as a possible inflection point, and attributes it to the internet:

It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

Trans people required personal homepages, chat rooms, blogs, message boards, social media, etc. to attain an awareness of themselves as an imagined community—because in many cases these things were necessary for the individual to attain an awareness of themselves as a trans person. It’s hard to situate oneself in the understanding of being a particular kind of person when there are no examples of that kind of person in one’s history of experience (or when their rare appearance in popular media usually makes them the caricatured butt of a joke); it’s just as difficult for one to imagine that they belong to a multitude of people like themselves when those other people are either nowhere to be found or exist mostly in isolated pockets that can’t do very much in the way of mass communication across long distances.

At any rate, the coalesced transgender community knew itself, uplifted itself, spoke for itself, garnered popular support from social progressives, and finally received the attention and backing of a gay (rechristened LGBT) advocacy apparatus that had grown more muscular than anyone in the 1970s or 1980s could have ever dared to hope. The movement made very long strides in a very short amount of time.

Transgender women attracted to cis- and/or transgender women identify as lesbians. Cisgender women attracted to transgender women identify as lesbians. Compared to a few decades ago, considerably fewer people find this strange or inappropriate. From what I can tell, a sizable portion (maybe a majority?) of cis-female-attracted-to-cis-female persons who identify as lesbians have no problem whatsoever with a more inclusive redefinition of the term.

But there are holdouts.

The terf: I am a lesbian, and lesbian is a word with a definite meaning. Lesbian means X. It does not mean Y and/or Z. It has always meant X and only X. If not X, then not lesbian. That includes Y and Z.

Terf spaces abound with complaints about “lesbian erasure”—which on the face of it may strike one as odd. They don’t blink out of reality whenever a trans woman types “lesbian” or “WLW” into her Instagram bio. They’re not being raptured. They’re not being taken off to any gulags. Nobody forgets that there are women in the world who are attracted to other women. It’s just that now there are enough people who call themselves “lesbian” and don’t fit the twentieth-century standard that the consensus around the old cisnormative definition is no longer nearly so absolute.³

Who gets to decide what “lesbian” means? It’s the same as asking who gets to decide who can be a lesbian. Culture war is, after all, about defining social realities and establishing the bounds of acceptable behavior—which often pertain to practices of exclusion.

And sexuality is by its nature exclusionary. No liberal-minded person with an iota of intellectual seriousness has ever argued that nobody has a right to draw a hard line between the categories of persons with whom they are willing to be sexually involved and the categories of persons with whom they are not willing to be sexually involved. The question isn’t whether lines should be drawn, but where it’s socially acceptable to draw them.

This is a fraught topic, even when we’re not talking about gender identity. A white guy who just plain isn’t attracted to black women—well, he’s a racist, isn’t he? An East Asian woman who’s not interested in dating East Asian men—shall we call her a racist, too?⁴ How do we feel about a woman who wouldn’t consider dating a man who earns less than such-and-such a year, or a man who wouldn’t consider dating a woman with a waist size over so-and-so?

How fortunate for them that nobody’s forcing any of them to advertise where they draw their lines and place themselves in the position of having to defend their legitimacy. Nothing’s stopping them from quietly swiping left, politely smiling through a blind date and then never returning the other person’s texts, or from developing a track record that delineates their no-go zone by way of contrast.

And maybe it’s fair to ask why a trans-exclusionary lesbian on the dating scene can’t just take shit in stride like the rest of us. If she receives DMs from someone with trans flag emoji in their dating app profile, she can ignore them. If she’s sitting across the table from a trans woman at a lesbian speed dating event, surely she can be pleasant and make small talk for a couple of minutes. And why can’t she coast through dinner and find an excuse to call it an early night when she goes on a first date with a trans woman whom she didn’t clock from her profile pics? I mean, “they weren’t what I expected from their photo” is the ur-complaint of the matchmaking service client. Everyone who’s ever used OkCupid or Tinder has at least once experienced buyer’s remorse within thirty seconds of meeting the person they matched with.

But the lesbian-identified [exclusively attracted to cis women] cis woman might say no, fuck that, I’ve earned the right to specify my boundaries in such a way that should preclude these interactions, or otherwise bring them to a halt as soon as they begin.

I didn’t say “lesbian-identified” just for the sake of inflating my prose—what I meant is someone for whom “lesbian” is personal and political identity that admits her into an imagined community with firmly established criteria for membership and a history of putting in work so that its members could be upfront about where their fundamental line is drawn. One of the central tenets of the gay rights movement, after all, was that a same-sex attracted person should be allowed to say “no, never, absolutely not” to a heterosexual relationship and expect their wishes to be respected.

…But that’s just the thing. She’s called a terf precisely because she sees no practical distinction between the advances of a cis straight man and a trans gay woman, and so she’s a transphobe and we should like to punch her.

Screencaps like these move through the internet’s terf nodes like corn through a colon.⁵ So did the public statement from the lesbian dating app HER which declared “the future of lesbians is trans.” So did that article from the Daily Mail claiming that the former chief executive of Stonewall wrote an email to the BBC in which she compared talk of self-identified lesbians categorically refusing to date trans women to “sexual racism.”⁶ So did any number of YouTube and TikTok videos, tweets, Reddit threads, and essays about the intrinsic transphobia of “genital preferences/fetishes.” So did the video in which Contrapoints brought up “mouthfeel.” So does the march of articles from LGBT-interest publications and statements from LGBT advocacy groups disavowing and vilifying them. So did all the content about the “cotton ceiling” whose circulation accelerated in the early-to-mid 2010s (going by the dates of the search results).

You don’t even have to lurk for very long in the terfosphere before you find someone referencing this stuff. It’s become part of their lingo, their shared language of grievance. They have a siege mentality and a very long memory. The trans-exclusionary strain of lesbian who frequents these spaces feels powerfully that she and people like her have been thrown under the bus by the other letters in the LGBTQ acronym (and also by the L’s who don’t see things her way), and believes she has the archived receipts that prove she’s being told, either directly or by insinuation, that she’d be stupid and despicable to draw her line where she’d like to draw it.

And, to repeat: if she’s of the belief that a cornerstone of her personal and social identity as a lesbian consists of publicly drawing that line and pointing to it—and that she belongs to an imagined community whose raison d'être is securing the right of its members to do so—well, what did Professor McLuhan say about identity again?

Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. It is only the threat to people’s identity that makes them violent.

Quite so. Even if terfs are less often violent than they are strident and mean.

I have no desire to make anyone else’s arguments for them—and it’s true that the trans-exclusionary [cis] lesbian core of terf culture is probably outweighed by the participants and boosters whose antipathy for trans people has nothing whatsoever to do with any perceived threat to their sexual autonomy. What I’m saying is that terf culture originally grew from a fugitive rhizome of the gay rights and feminist movements and involved something very much like a religious schism over a crucial theological question of ontology. It can only really be understood in that context.

At some point in the last fifteen years or so, the evolving gay rights movement began proactively correcting its blind spot regarding trans people. To suppose the implications of “trans women are women” weren’t going to be absorbed without a trace of apprehension or angst by the kind of same-sex attracted cis woman whom we might characterize as having a buzzcut, a Bryn Mawr Class of 200X hoodie, yoni and double-Venus tattoos, and a poetry chapbook with “pussy” in the title is, frankly, wishful thinking.⁷ It was just as naïve not to expect she might gravitate towards peers of hers who angrily claim they’ve been made to accept a new social reality as a fait accompli, or that the lot of them might be impelled to go their own way after being rebuffed by their erstwhile allies under the old gay rights organizational umbrella.⁸ And there’s no conceivable possibility of reconciliation when they define their identity in terms contradictory to and totally incompatible with those with which trans women define their identity—and vice versa.⁹ Against accusations of transphobia, trans-exclusionary lesbians lob counter-accusations of homophobia and betrayal—none of which are intelligible to their opponents because each camp’s polemic is grounded in a universe of discourse whose terms the other cannot countenance, because doing so would negate their own position.

Schismatic partisans have a tendency to be severe, doctrinaire, and paranoid. They close ranks and regroup. They get mean. They array themselves such that every every occasion for reaction entrenches them more deeply and binds them more tightly in their convictions—and the situation of the global village is one of perpetual reaction, of holograms leaping up against holograms in a feedback loop of mutual surveillance and antagonism. Until their nerves are altogether deadened or they’re deprived of events to react against (and I don’t think either is going to happen anytime soon), terfs aren’t going anywhere, and they’re not going to get any nicer.

1. There is a distinction to be made between “-critical” and “-phobic,” though it usually amounts to academic hair-splitting in the view of the party being criticized. (Examples: the social conservatives who blast critical race theory as an “anti-white ideology,” and the Israeli right-winger’s equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.) And it is likely that in many cases the softer and more mitigated “critical” stance is a more socially palatable expression of a “phobic” attitude.

2. (1) Back in the LiveJournal days, a bisexual friend of mine who has since been involved in pro-trans activism once responded with incredulity to a trans woman on the platform referring to herself as a lesbian. My friend’s views have evolved, but there was a time when the trans-inclusive definition of the term didn’t quite compute with her.

(2) By “himself” I’m of course referring to those straight and decidedly cis dudes who used to quip that they were lesbians trapped in men’s bodies. Ho ho! We all had a good laugh the first eight or nine times we heard that one. (For all I know there are Zoomer frat guys out there still making this joke.)

3. It has ever been the case that the meaning of a word prescribes its usage, but the usage ultimately determines the meaning.

4. The subreddit AznIdentity is chock full of words for her.

5. (1) Found them in a two-minute image search. One is hosted on a radfem blog, the other was posted to a terfy Facebook group. I blacked out the usernames.

(2) I feel like I’ve been noticing fewer occurrences of the “punch a terf” slogan than I did a few years ago. If it’s true that fewer people are saying (typing?) it than before, and if that’s because savvy activists and community members are discouraging it (as I’ve seen a few times on trans subreddits)—well, that’s just good tactics. (See (4).)

(3) If anyone’s inclined to believe that the second tweet in the second screencap was fabricated in order spread ill will, there’s no way of proving it definitely wasn’t. (There is currently no Twitter user with the handle seen in the original image.) Welcome to the epistemological crisis.

(4) One of the marvels of mass media, and lately of the internet in particular, is the tendency of any yahoo claiming to speak on behalf of their imagined community to be viewed by outsiders as an avatar of that community. This is to say that when a person—any person—flying the flag of a particular group says some controversial, strange, or even completely unhinged shit in the course of making a statement concerning that group’s interests and views, the antagonistic outgroupers who sedulously share it with their peers seldom pause to consider that the speaker’s attitudes and opinions may not be an accurate gauge of what the majority of that group actually thinks. “But it got five thousand Likes on Twitter!” Sure, but how many members of that group saw the tweet and didn’t hit the Like button? How many of them saw it, didn’t Like and in fact disagreed with it, and felt like they had better things to do with their time than engage? How many members of that group aren’t on Twitter at all?

Relying on the internet to take the temperature and understand the thoughts of a demographic bloc is like conducting a scientific investigation into the habits of racoons and drawing conclusions from a sample population full of rabies—because those are the ones most likely to be seen during the daytime. And yet we’re all doing it lately.

6. The Daily Mail claimed to have a leaked email whose contents it described by way of paraphrase. The full text was never made public. Its existence may be open to question, depending on how much one trusts a rag like the Mail. Welcome to the epistemological crisis.

7. (1) Stereotyping is fun! Let’s add that for several years she habitually typed “womyn” instead of “women” when posting on message boards.

(2) I lent my copy of just such a poetry volume to a friend’s wife, and gave it up for lost after the divorce. I haven’t seen the author since 2008, and now I find myself wondering which ledge she landed on when the rift opened up.

(3) It’s worth remembering that the enduring “genital fetishism” of radical feminists was to an extent a corrective against the old chauvinistic notion that a woman was a creature negatively defined by her lack of a penis.

8. Terfs also required blogs, message boards, social media, etc. to attain an awareness of themselves as an imagined community. Even now, first-time posters often express some variation of “I’m so glad this exists, I thought I was the only one who felt this way and I was going crazy.”

9. Terf spaces don’t denounce trans men as they do trans women—for reasons which trans men must find incredibly offensive.