I agree with this take, but saying that depends just on how willing you are to deal with people who clutch their pearls at words like that or "homophobe", and the big brained "bUt I'm NoT aFrAiD oF tRaNs PeOpLe" trolls that will inevitably come out of the woodwork.
terf is a useful word, IMHO, because it denotes a specific subtype of shallowly-liberal, feminism-appropriating transphobe. basically the entire republican party is transphobic, but I'd hazard a guess that many terfs voted for Hillary in '16.
fair enough. But the term gets slung onto people who aren't even shallowly liberal and it's become pretty broad recently, at least in the way I've seen it used.
Yeah, it starts with a fairly specific set of feminist ideological premises that the oppression of women is grounded in the biological reproductive division of labor, and that therefore trans women are in some sense appropriating women's struggles despite not being subject to the oppressive nature of pregnancy, breastfeeding, and so on. In a very narrow sense that point can even be well taken, especially when the ultimate goal is to use advances in reproductive medical technology (including not just obvious big-ticket future gizmos like artificial wombs to replace pregnancy, but also many of the kinds of body mods, hormone therapies, and so on that today are often associated with the trans community) to abolish any conceivable biological basis for the gendered division of labor altogether.
The point when the TERF mindset ends up breaking ranks with anything that could reasonably be called "feminism" is when they get carried away with this impulse to ground their view of women's oppression in biology, which can end up deemphasizing the substantial ways in which ideas like "womanhood" and "femininity" are historically contingent social constructs that use the idea of innate biological difference as a fig leaf, eventually leading TERFs to a kind of consensus with reactionary anti-feminists on the biological inevitability of patriarchy.
> Yeah, it starts with a fairly specific set of feminist ideological premises that the oppression of women is grounded in the biological reproductive division of labor,
No I don’t think so. I think if you asked JK Rowling to write a 5 page outline of the basic premises of feminism, the word “labor” would not appear a single time.
Fair enough, I guess I'm implicitly giving ignorant shitheads like Rowling too much credit by talking more about how an actual respectable second-wave radical feminist would end up making the full heel turn into TERFdom, sort of like how talking about the Trotskyist-to-neocon pipeline shouldn't be taken to imply that every single garden-variety Islamophobic Hitchens-worshiping New Atheist idiot out there has ever actually read Marx and Lenin.
That's still pretty faithful to the word's origins, though
I've seen plenty of self-declared TERFs that can in no way be described as feminist in any capacity
TheMotte, more concerned with the feelings of terfs than the feelings
of trans people.
Now is the time to use all our alts and sockpuppets to
vote in a moderator on TheMotte I already used all my alts and socks
to list my suggestions for a new moderator (n=0).
Do any of the other candidates understand the dialectical truths of Scientific Socialism? Have they *read theory?* Yeah, that's what I thought. Clearly Marxbro is the most rational choice.
>>It is a grey area whether "TERF" is inherently a slur
>Really?? I have honestly never seen it being used in a positive context, even among the right/red/conservative crowd.
I've never see the phrase "little ratdick shithead" used in a positive context, guess it's on par with the n-word now.
TERFs invented the phrase TERF to describe themselves (and, in fact, to keep themselves from being lumped in with transphobes in general), so no to the first question.
No, it was the reverse. A journalist (IIRC) was making up a list of feminist groups and sorted them into trans-inclusive and trans-exclusive ones. It definitely originated from the trans-friendly side.
I've been thinking about this and I think the difference is that an insult is usually about a specific feature that is bad (Your face is ugly) whereas a slur is what happens when insults turn into general statements about a person or groups overall "goodness". Ie it's a general smear of awfulness as opposed to targeted. So by that definition calling someone a TERF because of their specific beliefs in a conversation about trans rights is not a slur, but using it in a generic way to imply that someone sucks is.
Alt-rightists, neoreactionaries, explicit Neo-Nazis and other
edgelords getting behind TERFs for “see, we even support feminist
causes!” brownie points has long been on the 2019 No Shit Sherlock
Awards short list.
Kind of hate the term “terf” just because those I have seen it slung at are invariably people who are in no capacity “radical feminists.”
TheMotte, more concerned with the feelings of terfs than the feelings of trans people.
Now is the time to use all our alts and sockpuppets to vote in a moderator on TheMotte I already used all my alts and socks to list my suggestions for a new moderator (n=0).
☹️
this in a subreddit where SJW is lavishly used to mock anyone to the left of the republicans.
Love the argument that “TERF is a slur because I’ve never seen it used in a positive context.” Because as everybody knows, all insults are slurs.
Alt-rightists, neoreactionaries, explicit Neo-Nazis and other edgelords getting behind TERFs for “see, we even support feminist causes!” brownie points has long been on the 2019 No Shit Sherlock Awards short list.
People who think TERF is a slur = transphobes
mod post:
wat?