nolite te TERFs carborundorum
October 23, 2021 12:34 PM Subscribe

Why Margaret Atwood’s defense of the word ‘woman’ is misguided – and why it’s so important to get it right (Independent)

After receiving pushback, Atwood delivered what appeared to be her best attempts at “clapbacks.” Ignoring the higher-profile authors and journalists responding to her, Atwood retweeted responses from accounts with fewer than 300 followers (remember, she has two million followers) to defend the author of the essay against the label “TERF”, cast doubt on whether people read the essay in question, and put the spotlight on the smaller accounts that dared question her.

If you're wondering, yes, she did it again.

posted by fight or flight (108 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite

I guess we can add Atwood to the list (that includes other notables like JK Rowling) of misogynists' useful idiots.
posted by tclark at 12:47 PM on October 23, 2021 [8 favorites]

(Note: I've asked the mods to remove the second link as it isn't as conclusive as I thought and might result in an unhelpful derail.)

As a sci fi fan, a long time Atwood fan and a trans person this is all very disappointing. I had hoped that Margaret would have better people around her to steer her away from these sorts of views, but if anything she seems to be doubling down on it.

It's sad to see someone who has written so eloquently about the power of resistance and courage in adversity so willing to punch down and ignore marginalised voices at a time when the struggle is so important.

And it's another point on the wall for "reasons why Twitter was a bad idea" I guess. Oy.
posted by fight or flight at 12:52 PM on October 23, 2021 [47 favorites]

Got that final sentence and link removed.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:54 PM on October 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is very upsetting to see. She's been flirting with this for a bit, and I was hoping that a friend or two would pull her aside and give her a chat. They may have: the problem is there are also those *other* friends.

Who are the (white, cis) literary feminists of her generation who have not gone all TERF-ey?
posted by feckless at 12:56 PM on October 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

The plot thickens on Atwood: the article that she shared is by “Jessica Triff,” a person who seemingly has no digital footprint whatsoever. Searching her name only brings up this article posted on multiple different sites and a very vague bio with no picture.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:08 PM on October 23, 2021 [14 favorites]

I mean, anyone who starts out by agreeing with Rosie DiManno on anything not having to do directly with sports is already way off in the wrong direction.

(DiManno's sports opinions might *also* be all-encompassingly awful, but I don't know enough about sports to say that for sure.)
posted by jacquilynne at 1:08 PM on October 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

I feel sad.

I don't understand why anyone has to try to assert a TERF narrative at all. Shut up and let people live, it does not affect you.
posted by tiny frying pan at 1:31 PM on October 23, 2021 [100 favorites]

I'm kind of sad this is making this website, but shame on you Margaret Atwood. She should know she's in a position of power at this pt. And she can diffuse this as well. etc etc
posted by kfholy at 1:33 PM on October 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Who are the (white, cis) literary feminists of her generation who have not gone all TERF-ey?

Well, at least some of the queer yet cis ones I’d think, no?
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:39 PM on October 23, 2021

Oh FFS, Margaret. Shut up and sit down. OMG, please please please cis people like me, just be quiet. What tiny frying pan said.
posted by Bella Donna at 1:39 PM on October 23, 2021 [13 favorites]

An article about misguided gatekeeping, that closes with:

"Trans people ... experience joy and freedom beyond the grasp of cisgender people."

Oh ffs.
posted by pH Indicating Socks at 1:41 PM on October 23, 2021 [10 favorites]

You mean the woman who signed this letter is using her platform to punch down on and target marginalized groups? Wow, what a surprise.
posted by simmering octagon at 1:41 PM on October 23, 2021 [13 favorites]

doesn't matter if triff is real or not, pen name or not. her ideas are bad.

rosie dimanno has a long history of posting things with anti-trans sentiment, including op-eds from 2016 where she complains about the existence of non-binary people, 2019 where she uncritically defends noted anti-trans activist meghan murphy, and 2020 where she echoes common british strawmen regarding trans women in prisons.

basically, in every case of this bizarre claim that "woman" can't be said anymore, it's because people have decided to be more inclusive. in the fields of healthcare, almost always to include trans mascs and afab non-binary folk. but it's easy and very typical for a whole set of anti-trans activists to think that it's trans women leading the charge here. or, to paraphrase a common joke:

> trans men: "hey, could you, perhaps, maybe, possibly, if it's not too much of a bother, recommend cervical cancer screenings to all people with cervixes, including trans men?"

> anti-trans folk: "WHY CAN'T WE SAY WOMEN ANYMORE?!?!?! IT'S HIS FAULT!!!!" *points at trans women*

> trans women looks up from playing her nintendo switch: "huh? what?"

in any case, there are a cluster of traits that anti-trans activists seem to all have in common:

poor grasp of and a tendency to overlook racial dynamics; (atwood demonstrates this with her kinda overlooking everything that happened to brown women historically)
dedication to form and intent over function and impact; (her most recent retweet)
conceptualizes free speech as an end in and of itself, rather than a powerful method of discourse; (signed the harper's letter)
unearned confidence speaking to other groups' experiences; (see first cluster)
belief in their own iconoclasm; (become famous enough, you'll start thinking it)

and basically the path for them becomes a shit-covered slip-and-slide down the common misinformation-to-bigotry-conspiracy-and-fascism path seen in other things like qanon, anti-vaccination, climate change denialism, and gamergate/comicsgate.

atwood's already getting lovebombed by anti-trans activists. she'll cross the moral event horizon like jkr has in a few years at the latest.
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:43 PM on October 23, 2021 [76 favorites]

Atwood has turned bad in multiple dimensions, definitely of the "got mine, fuck you" generation. Couldn't visualize the concept of intersectionality if it hit her with a rainbow-painted stick. It's all very sad.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:45 PM on October 23, 2021 [11 favorites]

"Trans people ... experience joy and freedom beyond the grasp of cisgender people."

i mean, i've yet to meet a cis person who truly understands what being trans is like, and given how the media portrays us as not having joy or freedom much of the time, i'm reading it in that light?
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:45 PM on October 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

Life comes at you fast I guess.

Once again I mourn that Ursula K. Le Guin isn't here to deliver the scathing literary putdown this nonsense needs.

Also in meme-y tweets I'm grimly clinging to in order to remain calm:

Margaret Atwood, the author who wrote "a rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze" has firmly come out in favour of the maze, it seems [source]

The Second Shelf, a bookshop in London that only sells books by & about women, has added Atwood to their scheme (originally started in response to JKR) of donating to trans charities every time someone buys one of her novels.
posted by fight or flight at 1:46 PM on October 23, 2021 [51 favorites]

She wrote "The Edible Woman" and somehow ended up here.
posted by Slackermagee at 1:47 PM on October 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

basically, in every case of this bizarre claim that "woman" can't be said anymore, it's because people have decided to be more inclusive. in the fields of healthcare, almost always to include trans mascs and afab non-binary folk. but it's easy and very typical for a whole set of anti-trans activists to think that it's trans women leading the charge here.

Similarly, if Atwood and her ilk get shit like their legally segregated (chromosomal? I don't even know what word to use) bathrooms, what are they going to do when big, burly trans men start wandering into women's bathrooms because it will literally be the law that they have to go in them.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 1:48 PM on October 23, 2021 [34 favorites]

what are they going to do when big, burly trans men start wandering into women's bathrooms

Sadly, in my experience and to my knowledge, it will result in those women either getting loud and argumentative at the guy, calling the police, or in general being awkward and rude to him until he either leaves or feels bad for being somewhere he's been forced to go. This also happens to butch cis women very frequently, so it wouldn't even limit its impact to trans folks.
posted by fight or flight at 1:52 PM on October 23, 2021 [40 favorites]

Has Cixous managed not to go down this road? Or did I miss it?
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:54 PM on October 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

doesn't matter if triff is real or not, pen name or not. her ideas are bad.

The quality of the ideas is shit either way, yes. But it does seem important whether this is a sock puppet. Creating a fake persona claiming to be from a marginalized group to express ideas counter to that group's best interests is a serious aggression.

The author of that Twitter thread didn't come to a definitive conclusion by the way. Some markers it's a real person, others that it's a sock puppet.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:02 PM on October 23, 2021 [9 favorites]

Creating a fake persona claiming to be from a marginalized group to express ideas counter to that group's best interests is a serious aggression.

i mean, yes. but there's intra-community Discourse between transmedicalists, which is the viewpoint triff seems to espouse, and people who realize that transmedicalism is harmful.

transmedicalists tend to be white, middle class, and privileged, often heavily assimilationist and almost always echo rhetoric favored by atavistic anti-trans activists out of internalized self-hate and transphobia. one can always find a candace owens, michelle malkin, blaire white, or a fionne orlander.

whether she's a sock puppet or a useful idiot doesn't worry me as much as seeing as a remake what's happened in the uk w/r/t trans liberation and mainstream feminism, and its effects on breaking opposition to conservatism, happen in north america.
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:19 PM on October 23, 2021 [15 favorites]

Damn it
posted by supermedusa at 2:27 PM on October 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

An article about misguided gatekeeping, that closes with:

"Trans people ... experience joy and freedom beyond the grasp of cisgender people."

Oh ffs.

“Oh ffs” what, exactly?
posted by sock poppet at 2:36 PM on October 23, 2021

I'm in danger of derailing my own post, but as a unicorn chaser to this news I do highly recommend reading this excellent statement [Guardian link, archive.is link] by Judith Butler, which probably deserves its own FPP:

For this reactionary movement, the term “gender” attracts, condenses, and electrifies a diverse set of social and economic anxieties produced by increasing economic precarity under neoliberal regimes, intensifying social inequality, and pandemic shutdown. Stoked by fears of infrastructural collapse, anti-migrant anger and, in Europe, the fear of losing the sanctity of the heteronormative family, national identity and white supremacy, many insist that the destructive forces of gender, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory are to blame. When gender is thus figured as a foreign invasion, these groups clearly reveal that they are in the business of nation-building. The nation for which they are fighting is built upon white supremacy, the heteronormative family, and a resistance to all critical questioning of norms that have clearly restricted the freedoms and imperiled the lives of so many people.

[...]

As a fascist trend, the anti-gender movement supports ever strengthening forms of authoritarianism. Its tactics encourage state powers to intervene in university programs, to censor art and television programming, to forbid trans people their legal rights, to ban LGBTQI people from public spaces, to undermine reproductive freedom and the struggle against violence directed at women, children, and LGBTQI people. It threatens violence against those, including migrants, who have become cast as demonic forces and whose suppression or expulsion promises to restore a national order under duress.

posted by fight or flight at 2:42 PM on October 23, 2021 [54 favorites]

Yeah, there's at least a whole other FPP's worth of links one could post just on the transphobe-to-fascist pipeline.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 2:47 PM on October 23, 2021 [20 favorites]

And probably another few on the rise of transphobia amongst influential liberals and how profitable it can be to jump on that gravy train.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 2:50 PM on October 23, 2021 [12 favorites]

I think what these repeated... disappointments? failures? Dunno the right word, so I'll just call it "all this bigoted shit", from people you'd reasonably expect more from, partly reflect the problem with defining oneself as progressive. Once you've done that, it's so easy to imagine that historical progress means "the development and spread of the ideas I believe in", forgetting that progress as an activity is the necessary antecedent to progress as a historical tendency. It centres progressiveness in the ego, in belief, in ideology; but real progress is all the stuff that actually happens in the world that pushes us to understand and treat each other better. If you've defined progressiveness as a set of positions, rather than a committment to listening to and understanding the positions of others, soon or later, that real activity of progress will throw up a thing that challenges your view of yourself as progressive. I think that feels like a profound threat to one's sense of self (and hence, given the way our brains interpret social status threats, an existential threat), giving rise to these sporadically escalating responses as conflicting impulses of fear and outrage work their way through in waves.
posted by howfar at 2:52 PM on October 23, 2021 [42 favorites]

Someone ask if Atwood has read new Butler's piece, even the first half of it.

My favorite insightful zingers from it:

When gender is thus figured as a foreign invasion, these groups clearly reveal that they are in the business of nation-building.

Thus “gender” becomes a phantom, sometimes specified as the “devil” itself, a pure force of destruction threatening God’s creation (not, I gather, climate change, which would be a much more likely candidate).
posted by polymodus at 2:59 PM on October 23, 2021 [9 favorites]

I don't understand why anyone has to try to assert a TERF narrative at all. Shut up and let people live, it does not affect you.

Seconded. I don't get it, other than the whole "People hate anyone who's different from them" thing yet again.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:02 PM on October 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

They claim to have more than 9 million followers, ready to mobilize at an instant (they mobilized against me in Brazil in 2018 when a furious crowd burned the effigy of my “likeness” outside the venue where I was to speak).

I watched Butler discuss this in a recent interview and she mentioned that inside, someone had suddenly tried to ram her with a supermarket cart. A good guy put himself between her and the cart. She related being very moved by that act, that someone would endanger themselves to protect her. She hasn't found who the guy was and wanted to thank them.
posted by polymodus at 3:06 PM on October 23, 2021 [13 favorites]

whether she's a sock puppet or a useful idiot doesn't worry me as much as seeing as a remake what's happened in the uk w/r/t trans liberation and mainstream feminism, and its effects on breaking opposition to conservatism, happen in north america.

That's a more than fair point.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:10 PM on October 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Vigorously seconding tiny frying pan. Mind your own fucking business. Just think of all the people you could avoid offending or hurting if you were just able to mind your own business.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 3:12 PM on October 23, 2021 [8 favorites]

>> An article about misguided gatekeeping, that closes with:
>> "Trans people ... experience joy and freedom beyond the grasp of cisgender people."
>> Oh ffs.
> “Oh ffs” what, exactly?

In the spirit of charitable debate, the quoted sentence could be read in (at least) two ways:

* "Trans people ... experience more/better joy and freedom than cisgender people possibly can"
* "Trans people ... experience (by transition) a particular type of joy and freedom that cisgender people don't understand"

"Oh ffs" seems like a fair response to the first interpretation but I hope that the second is what was actually intended.
posted by merlynkline at 3:35 PM on October 23, 2021 [13 favorites]

There's definitely a unique sensation of joy and freedom that comes from celebrating one's truth, heritage and identity, having survived others' attempts to literally eradicate you from the face of the earth. I don't think it would be untrue, for example, to say "Jews experience joy and freedom beyond the grasp of Nazis." But as a trans person (and a Jew), I would gladly trade that joy for the ability to just live my life in peace, please.

Pity about Atwood. At least Neil Gaiman and Lynda Carter are on our side.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:56 PM on October 23, 2021 [31 favorites]

"Trans people...experience joy and freedom beyond the grasp of cisgender people."

I mean, I do, in some ways? It's joyous and freeing - for me - not to have to perform my assigned gender. But I have no idea whether it would feel joyous or freeing for someone who doesn't experience their assigned gender as a suffocating prison, or who didn't bristle at their expression of that assigned gender, during the period when they were still trying to do it right, being almost constantly policed by people who thought that was their role or their right or both for whatever reason.

I'm sure there are some cis people who also find their experience of gender joyous and freeing, and some who don't, but prefer to cling to the power and status it offers them in a cisnormative society rather than risk stepping off the diving board into the water beyond cisnormativity (surely at least partly because that's a terrifying to do in a society where TERF ideologies are comparatively mainstream and platformed!). Just as I'm sure there are trans people who don't feel like their experience of being trans involves experiencing joy and freedom beyond the grasp of cismortal ken, or whatever is being implied there. The key thing, and the thing that seems to break the "gender-critical" folks' brains, being that individual people are different and we all have different experiences of existing, operating in and relating to the world. And, it should go without saying (but doesn't), this is fundamentally okay.

I spend a fair amount of time thinking in clumsy analogies about trans experiences, because clumsy analogies are one of the few vehicles we have for understanding and transmitting experiences beyond any one individual's own, and I keep coming back to the idea that we don't expect all people to be the same in basically any other arena of life - preferences, interests, from whether you like one genre of music or another or many to whether you like coffee or tea or both or neither. There aren't all that many rigid boxes we're all expected to slot into, and even when there are there tends to be at least some wiggle room. But the combination of one's chromosomes and genitalia, and the social and cultural roles and behaviours and expressions and performances we've ascribed to the two permitted mainstream categories for those things? You'd better be one or the other, as far as a lot of people are still concerned, and you'd better do it right. From birth.

Which makes as much sense to me as permitting people to like jazz or opera, but only one or the other, with no other genres allowed. We have so many different ways of being human and we're stuck on this one specific classification to the extent that it's one of the defining cultural crusades of the era. And personally I happen not to like jazz or opera enough to want to be a lifelong permafan of either, let alone the one I was supposed to perform enjoyment of from birth because of the shape of the apparatus I pee out of, jeez.

And I'm fortunate enough to live in an era where there's language to describe the concept of being a person who's neither an opera nor a jazz fan, and at least some shared understanding of that concept, and I'm unfortunate enough to live in an era where this is also the subject of an extremely online public war being waged by powerful people I used to look up to I was a teenager; where I get read by default as a jazz fan because of the pitch of my voice and the shape of my face in spite of the opera glasses I wear and the jazz-and-opera programme I carry and my punk mohawk, and more than half the time when I tell people I'm not the one they think I am and I'm not the other one either, they not only clearly don't get it but can't even comprehend the idea. And all I want is for them to let me be the way I am, for their brains not to shut down into two boxes that cannot compute a third or a thousandth or none when I refute their instinctive initial sorting calculation about me, and it's this whole thing.

And I know I know I know (believe me I know) that it's about power and white Christian settler colonialism and whatever the Victorians were tripping on and some seriously weird cultural morality hangover stuff; what I can't grasp is why (except, I know, I know - power, authoritarianism, the deep-seated need some of us animals have to simultaneously classify-and-cast-down others of us animals) they cannot, as stated above, simply mind their own business.

I'm speaking very much from a nonbinary trans perspective here, and not from a binary trans perspective, because binary trans people are all different too and I am not one of them. It's an analogy that works for me about my own experience; I'm very much not trying to centre my experiences at the expense of those of trans women in sharing it, just to spin out something that baffles me and rattles around inside my head all the time - and I realise I have a ton more privilege as a nonbinary/transmasc white middle class highly-educated person than trans women (and especially trans women of colour), even though some of that privilege, infuriatingly, stems from almost constantly being read as something I profoundly cannot tolerate being or being read as. This stuff is so infinitely complex (it's that complex to me, about being me, as just one individual person with a non-normative relationship to gender!) that every single variation on the "a woman is someone with two XX chromosomes end of" social media hot take is actively insulting to those of us who possess enough nuance and sensitivity to understand that gender essentialism is fundamentally profoundly misguided, without even getting started on the ways in which it's also a deeply reductive and inaccurate way of attempting to classify human experience.

More than anything, I would like to know what these people are so afraid would happen if everyone had the freedom & permission to explore gender beyond the one they were assigned at birth. Our society burns tremendous effort on keeping that experimentation so hard to access and so narrowly policed and I just can't understand what the supposedly tender, fragile thing they're trying to protect is and why it's so important to protect it that you've got to be trans to the point that you can barely survive your own existence before you're allowed to try tweaking who you are. I've gained a lot from exploring my own gender identity. I'm no longer chronically suicidal. I fail to understand why those gains should be hard won by the few who are permitted to try it when they run out of other options for sustainably staying alive, instead of a joyous and freeing experience of the many that enriches our overall human experience.
posted by terretu at 4:11 PM on October 23, 2021 [86 favorites]

Wow, did the Toronto Star get jealous of all the clicks the Guardian was getting with their own TERF rhetoric?

It's sad that all that 70s feminism mutated into anti-trans activism. All those strides made and fought for and appreciated, and they just piss it all away. It's infuriating.
posted by Kitteh at 4:14 PM on October 23, 2021 [17 favorites]

Er, what terretu said.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:16 PM on October 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

I have spent a fair bit of time this week thinking about how, when someone told me Atwood had said offensive shit, I knew it was TERF shit even though I did not know of anything she had said like that before. I have been thinking about that and how depressingly common that is for feminists from her generation.

I'm not the right person to try and extrapolate a lesson from those correlations, but I have definitely noticed they are there and I have been thinking on it.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:38 PM on October 23, 2021 [9 favorites]

It's sad that all that 70s feminism mutated into anti-trans activism.

This is your regularly scheduled reminder that Second Wave Feminism is not inherently TERFy. I can be, but it's worth remembering that Andrea Dworkin adn Catherine MacKinnon, for all their sins, supported trans women.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:43 PM on October 23, 2021 [27 favorites]

> Just think of all the people you could avoid offending or hurting if you were just able to mind your own business.

Deep down, isn't the cruelty the point, though? And isn't this why we get so hurt in additional ways when these odious beliefs from formerly-beloved artists come to light? It's a betrayal. We thought you got it, we thought you accepted us. Instead they've become seduced by whatever the lizard-tribe hate-brain endorphin is that people get a dose of when deciding "Yes, actually, fuck these other people." This is the core bedrock tenet of what the word "evil" means to me: the willful and joyous increasing of suffering for those others who are Not Me, especially when it would be less effort to just leave them the hell alone and move along.
posted by glonous keming at 4:52 PM on October 23, 2021 [26 favorites]

Honestly, I think that a risk of getting older is getting disconnected from the culture and therefore coming to fear growth and change. Couple this with the way that older people actually are disregarded and treated as boring and pointless, and you have a lot of incentive for people to ossify and fear anything that threatens their position or self-conception.

I see some Gen X people going this way - it's not just seventies feminists or Atwood's generation or Boomers or whatever.

When you're young, it's much easier and more natural to be in the swim of popular culture and of course you don't have any lived memory of how things have changed. As you get older, you have to decide for yourself if you are going to make the effort to keep up, to change if needed, etc. If you don't proactively make the choice to pay attention and let yourself change, you're going to freeze up, and eventually you'll freeze in an unattractive position.

I mean, yes, of course during the seventies, eighties and nineties there were TERFs and trans women feminist activists, but I remember nineties feminism pretty well and transness and the fluidity of gender were not major themes in popular feminism. You could be a big feminist and really never take any position at all on trans women or even really think about trans women. I, a transmasculine person, never met an out trans person of any kind until probably 2005 and never myself considered that I had gender issues (despite viewing womanhood as a prison and being deeply unhappy) until, like, 2010.

Whereas now and for at least the past ~8 years, it feels like taking a position on trans discourses of gender is pretty central in feminism.

I think that Butler is completely right about the historical moment, fascism and gender anxiety, and I felt that their point about care work/withdrawal of social services was incredibly clarifying. But also I feel that on an individual, personal level, part of the work of being a decent person is to try to live in the times you live in and live among the people you live with - you have to respond to the world as it changes.
posted by Frowner at 4:52 PM on October 23, 2021 [111 favorites]

In a conversation with a (much) younger coworker the other day, he asked me about if, growing up in the early 80s, I ever had to deal with people freaking out about role playing games, and I told him, yeah, satanic panic, Mazes and Monsters, and my mom giving me a very worried “talk” about the games I was playing. We talked about how that moved from tabletop games to first person shooter games being blamed for every aspect of moral decline in the 90s.

Because we work in an office where our manager is a Rogan loving “just asking questions” guy who thinks bringing up sports and fairness is somehow the sum total of discussion about trans issues (with a helpful side of whining about wokeness and cancel culture), I honestly don’t have a chance to talk with my coworker about topics like this, and, on our walk into work, we talked a bit more. On his own, he pointed out that, compared to today’s games, the stuff everyone was freaking out about thirty and forty years ago was tame, and the games played now go further than the old games ever did in the same thing that got them condemned. I tried to connect the dots with him, trying to show him that the bigoted rhetoric against trans people is essentially the same thing, an older generation terrified of something they don’t understand, and doing their best to keep their world from changing. The difference here is instead of trying to ban a game, they’re trying to prevent people from living their lives, and causing terrible harm in doing so, but, with any luck (and countless hours of activism and education), the outcome will be the same, and future generations will look back at TERFs with the same disdain we hold for people burning D&D books and ranting about the devil.

I don’t know that he’s ready to make that connection, which saddens me. Even past the moment when that clicks into place for him needs to be the understanding that we can’t just relax and wait for the generational shift to take place and make things all better. That way means condemning this current, living generation to more of the same, of bigotry, of violence, and way down the list, the heartbreak of authors and other artists whose work helped them discover themselves revealing the ugliness inside of them that taints those touchstones.

Goddamn, I hope I learn to shut the fuck up before the day when progress eclipses my own personal comfort zone, and advancements in equality begin to threaten my (unearned) privilege.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:27 PM on October 23, 2021 [41 favorites]

I mean, there are lots of, uh, let's say at-least-my-age people who have strong political and social commitments and are not afraid to learn more about already-existing stuff or grow with changes in the world. I don't think it's an iron law that people age into stodgy anxiety and that we just have to learn to suppress it. I know plenty of people who are old enough to think of me as young and fun* who, while they are not some stereotype of twentysomethings-in-retirement-age-bodies, are interested in and sympathetic to the world as it is. On the left at least, there are far more people like Ursula Le Guin than people like JK Rowling.

*This is the secret to prolonging your youth - when you're forty, hang out with fifty year olds, etc. Eventually you will have to give in and be the Oldest and Wisest, but you can get a good extra twenty years or so.
posted by Frowner at 5:42 PM on October 23, 2021 [27 favorites]

Goddamn, I hope I learn to shut the fuck up before the day when progress eclipses my own personal comfort zone, and advancements in equality begin to threaten my (unearned) privilege.

This so much.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 5:46 PM on October 23, 2021 [19 favorites]

I'm wondering why the need to coin new terminology, instead of giving broader meaning to words like "woman" and "man", with the understanding based on setting. Eg a person born as physically male, who self-identifies as female, so is regarded as a woman, but whose physiology is recognized as male only for purposes of medical treatments, for conditions where it matters.

Yes that still leaves the need to add something to include people who are non-binary, but that's a smaller issue than trying to bash all binary language out of existence.

[If I don't ask, I won't find out. Please be kind.]

I think this is a good question, thank you for asking it, and also thank you for indicating you were actually open to listening and not a troll.

To Jeanne's answer I'd like to add this:

It's not so much bashing out binary language as realizing that binary language is not as helpful or accurate as language that is nonbinary, especially imo within the medical context. If you define a woman as "a person who has a uterus," what are you saying to the person who was raised female and identifies as female, but through a quirk of birth circumstance doesn't have a uterus (or ovaries)? Are you going to tell her, to her face, "because you don't have a uterus, you're not a real woman"? That sucks. What about if she originally had a uterus but it was removed? What if she does have a uterus, but instead of ovaries, she has undescended testicles? That sucks! (To be clear, "that sucks: referring to the gender:reproductive capacity linkage, not the gonads thing.)

It's an aggressive example, because "unable to have a baby means you're not a REAL woman" is a historically real way to put down women (still is tbh). But by decoupling "having a certain biology" from a term that implies gender, you open yourself up to more accuracy and a more honest way of looking at the world, especially medically. Intersex people exist, and we need to include them. I personally am not intersex so I don't want to take up airtime on it, but I think the move towards medical specificity is helpful for accuracy but also for broadening peoples' perceptions of just how much diversity there can be in the human form. Without dehumanizing anyone.

tl;dr language that helps us acknowledge the reality that nature is diverse (and very rarely as binary as we like to think) is good.

Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her attendant jester husband do a really good job discussing this in the Sawbones podcast. I don't have a specific episode to point towards, but they do use "people with x" when referring to issues specific to gonads or genitalia.
posted by snerson at 5:47 PM on October 23, 2021 [31 favorites]

While gender-affirming surgery may be one reason for changing one's body, there are cisgendered women who have removed their ovaries and/or uterus for other medical reasons. There are cis women who have gone through menopause and can't get pregnant. There are infertile cis women. They are still women.

There's an idea explored by C. Jacob Hale (a reasonable summary is available at Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues which I found on MeFi) that woman, in mainstream society, is a family resemblance concept, consisting of a set of characteristics, none of which are individually necessary or sufficient for category membership.

That's not how womanhood or gender generally should be defined, of course. I believe each person should get to decide for themselves their gender identity based on their own internal understanding, and to further express themselves and be seen and referred to as themselves, beyond narrow oppressive assumptions and strictures which can harm both cis and trans folks.

As such, I think the most accurate and helpful way to address folks in terms of medical care is based on the body part or biological aspect, because those are what is relevant when it comes to someone's health, and any other terms are a poor abstraction. That's the clearest cleanest most accurate choice.

I am wary of people's comfort with abstractions, of the need to define categories strictly, such that they are never overlapping or excluding some folks, such that nothing can be liminal, transgressive, complicated, or transcendent.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 6:04 PM on October 23, 2021 [12 favorites]

Deep down, isn't the cruelty the point, though?

I don't think it is, at least not for the majority of people. That's not to deny the reality of the cruelty, or that people find cruelty compelling. But I don't think there is any true "deep down" motivation for human behaviour: people seem to do things, good and bad, for a whole mess of reasons, not in service of a particular inherent need. I also think that by saying "actually, the problem is that some people are just evil", we other those people in a way that cultivates the conditions which allow further cruelty.

All my lived experience suggests that the overwhelming majority people would, placed in Mencius's thought experiment, run to the well to save the child, or indeed an adult, no matter gender, ethnicity, sexual preference or anything else. But equally, I know the history of the Crusades, of the Mongol Empire, of the 20th century, and I know that probably just as many people will willingly allow and participate in sadistic, depraved and brutal subjugation and genocide.

None of that makes the cruelty "alright". The opposite, in fact, really. We all have all kinds of moral potentials, and the things we do and say change those potentials. We are not passive meat propelled by the unstoppable force of cruelty (or kindness or anything else), we are (and are part of) complex systems that are capable of self-regulation, self-reflection, and planned and directed change. I think that it's the failure to do that work (in this case to actually participate in the activity of progress) which makes the difference.

We don't have to be "better than them". We do not have to turn the other cheek or believe that those who hate us are just misguided. I do think, however, that we have to recognise that everything that happens is the product of specific causes, not underlying forces at work in the world.
posted by howfar at 6:11 PM on October 23, 2021 [10 favorites]

Deep down, isn't the cruelty the point, though?

I think this is much of the problem. I don't think much about what people are doing regarding what's going on (or not) between their legs. But it takes special effort to take offense, and make it publicly known.

Sure there are plenty of things people do, or think, or believe, that I don't approve of. But when those things have no consequence on me, that's my problem. Not theirs. Trying to foist that disapproval on the world, with added gravitas of public celebrity, compiles cruelty upon grandiosity for personal satisfaction.
posted by 2N2222 at 6:12 PM on October 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

It is so deeply disappointing to see that no only has she not changed her direction on this, she is doubling down and making it worse.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:21 PM on October 23, 2021

God, just why, Margaret. Spewing ignorant views and then doubling down, just some of my least favourite behaviour. I’m really pissed off at this fuckery.

I read the Jessica Triff piece on the CBC website before I saw this thread, and as I read it I was like, what in the hell is CBC doing publishing this piece of anti trans tripe.

I have never understood why some people are so threatened by opening up more possibilities and including more people. It just seems so bizarre. And when it’s feminists who have fought for inclusion, that just boggles my mind even more. This reactionary crap, I’m so tired of it no matter who it’s coming from.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 7:52 PM on October 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

Trying to foist that disapproval on the world, with added gravitas of public celebrity, compiles cruelty upon grandiosity for personal satisfaction.

It does, although unlike other manifestations it doesn’t feel (to me, on the sidelines) that the cruelty is the point, in the way that it so often is. (At least with Atwood, not with Rawling who I couldn’t care less for)...

But, then, what the hell is the point?

I wish Kathy Acker was still around to talk about all of this. (And everything else.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:53 PM on October 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

conceptualizes free speech as an end in and of itself, rather than a powerful method of discourse

i used to be someone else - that is so perfectly succinct! and i agree, it is applicable to so many extremist takes. i very much plan to steal it for future use!
posted by lapolla at 8:24 PM on October 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Imani Gandy has my fave Twitter response so far, complete w/ sad music.
posted by emjaybee at 8:58 PM on October 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

I wish Kathy Acker was still around

So do I. All the time.
posted by thivaia at 9:52 PM on October 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

This is the outcome of gender essentialism that positions men as irredeemable and bad. The only thing surprising to me about this is that people are surprised by Atwood’s position. She has been incredibly clear throughout her writing career that she views men as necessarily evil. Second wave feminism saw mothers distance themselves from their own sons because of a belief that men are tainted. Once you are there, it’s really quite impossible to not become a TERF unless you confront that your opinion on men was vile. But seriously, anyone who has read Atwood’s work ought to be able to see that she was already fully in the camp of gender essentialism.

Perhaps this is a wake up call that there’s not a separation between gender essentialism and TERFiness.
posted by Bottlecap at 12:14 AM on October 24, 2021 [27 favorites]

It's a human flaw, to love the binary and being a TERF, just like being a racist, is a direct product of that. MA (and other 2-wave feminists) build a career out of embracing the gender binary, it's hardly surprising she doesn't want to give it up.
posted by memetoclast at 1:13 AM on October 24, 2021

One thing that I think is a factor is a cis feminist’s version of the engineer’s disease.

Cis feminists have spent a lot of time thinking about gender, so feel like experts on all aspects of gender. The assumption made is that trans issues can be thought through in the same way as, for instance, gender relations in the workplace.

When I’ve encountered this mode of thinking, I’ve found it useful to point out that the old slogan “nothing about us, without us” is also an epistemological claim. A cis person doesn’t have the same kind of friction between the gender society assigns to them, and the gender they know themselves to be.

The only way a cis person can form any kind of useful thoughts about trans issues is if they listen attentively to trans people. There can be nothing about trans people, without trans people, because the only people who know the experience of being trans is trans people.
posted by Kattullus at 3:48 AM on October 24, 2021 [62 favorites]

YES. And I'd go further and say cis feminists (especially ones of a certain age) have dealt in particular with a lot of cis men arguing they personally can't have male privilege, and a lot of cis women arguing they personally haven't been harmed by the patriarchy and shouldn't need to care about it. They've not just spent time thinking about gender, but spent time thinking about those specific antifeminist dodges and become experts on countering them. If nails have been a persistent problem in your movement for a century, and you've succeeded in spite of them by becoming hammer-building experts, then... yeah, we definitely look to you like nails.

Obviously this is no excuse, and obviously there have always been and will always be cis feminists who don't fall for it. But I'm genuinely sympathetic to how difficult it must be to encounter arguments long used in bad faith by your enemies and recognize that no, this time they're finally valid for once.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:35 AM on October 24, 2021 [20 favorites]

Atwood has come back to address some criticism of her tweets:

Does it have to impact my personal life for me to care about rights?
So I got attacked for a while from "the other side" for Tweeting pro-trans rights... maybe the two sides should consider their common opponents: those who hate all kinds of women? [source]

There's a third "side" [re: the pro- and anti-trans "sides"] and that is fair-minded people who
care about human rights.Also the far-rights would get rid of any kind of feminist.. as Laura Bates has documented in MEN WHO HATE WOMEN. [source]

I would be happy to do that [re: writing more about her concerns]. But Twitter does not seem to be the place. Also some people seem not to wish
to understand..just yell.The language fights have been going on in many areas for at least 400 years...and language is always evolving. Maybe too long a subject for Twitter? [source]

She seems to be attempting to take a centrist approach on this issue, citing feminists who have written about female experiences of male violence without taking time to acknowledge the violence and harm that anti-trans campaigners (and her fellow cis women) are committing.
posted by fight or flight at 4:59 AM on October 24, 2021

There's definitely a unique sensation of joy and freedom that comes from celebrating one's truth, heritage and identity, having survived others' attempts to literally eradicate you from the face of the earth.

Just chiming in to say that I, a trans woman, experience no such thing, as a counterpoint to all the people in the thread saying they do.

We are not legion. That's okay.
posted by Dysk at 5:07 AM on October 24, 2021 [16 favorites]

I do not even understand what she is saying. Like, I literally cannot parse what's she's on about at all. Sigh.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:16 AM on October 24, 2021 [7 favorites]

I mean, yes, of course during the seventies, eighties and nineties there were TERFs and trans women feminist activists, but I remember nineties feminism pretty well and transness and the fluidity of gender were not major themes in popular feminism.

I think about this a lot when I hear people salting the earth of second-wave feminism. I can only remember transness being discussed maybe twice in my feminist classes--even in the more radical, queer-oriented ones, it just wasn't really on the radar in the way it is now.

But even those brief mentions involved at least a little analysis and theory, compared to what is now basically...what, a PR campaign? I mean, is there actual theory, in gender-critical feminism? I end up reading more of it than I want to, and it's hard to tell where the analysis is. I don't necessarily want to talk to the people arguing this stuff, but I'd really like to know why they think this is a cogent theory. Clearly a lot of effort is going into it, with lots of footnotes and references to, I don't know, Foucault and Irigaray, but then you find them just repeating things like, "the dictionary defines woman as--" and you're like, the dictionary? Really? Can we spare five seconds to problematize using the literal fucking dictionary to dehumanize a group?

It felt like second-wave feminism was vital and intellectually engaging, in a way that whatever this is, is not. This just feels like...weaponizing both Twitter algorithms and women's vulnerability? I haven't thought through Atwood's issue yet--I kind of can't, I need to put it in a little box and think about her later, because while I love her writing, I recognize that people have been finding her a problem for decades, and I can't sort through that at the moment. And I think there are people doing things so much worse right now (I keep cringing waiting for a FPP on this Kathleen Stock situation for instance...it's so ugly and so illustrative of the mechanism--to say horrible things informally, and polite things formally, so that when you inevitably come in for criticism, your defenders can say how polite you've been--"Point to something in her published work that says these horrible things, you can't!"--that's what I mean about a PR campaign, there's just so much there that has zero to do with feminism, and everything to do with virality and pushing people's reaction-buttons).
posted by mittens at 5:29 AM on October 24, 2021 [15 favorites]

Atwood's started retweeting open white supremacists who claim "pronouns don't exist," in case anyone's wondering what layover of the transphobe-to-fascist journey she is on.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 6:09 AM on October 24, 2021 [19 favorites]

The anti-feminist arguments you hear in response to this, eg. as demonstrated by Bottlecap‘s comment, don’t help, of course. It’s worth noting here that Atwood is hardly “anti-man”, in her actions or in her more recent short story collection “Stone Mattress”, where one of the stories rather parallels her apologism for her fellow Canadian writer who lost his university position over his treatment of women students and colleagues. She’s been increasingly problematic for a while now, in that way that folks who gain cultural power have of (as the link above describes) ossifying and failing to listen to others’ experiences or new ideas. Which is discouraging, since her digression into economics in her Massey Lectures series “On Debt” from not that much longer ago showed that she was capable of taking on new topics with curiosity and without knee jerk defensiveness relatively recently. Anyway, as the link describes, Atwood herself argued that she has become a “bad feminist”, which I agree with except that I think that is sad and unfortunate, unlike her conclusion of rejecting a feminism that has developed beyond her.
posted by eviemath at 6:14 AM on October 24, 2021 [16 favorites]

Since I can't favorite it twice I just want to came back and reaffirm what kattullus said above; you can't understand or speak coherently this issue without actually talking and listening to trans people.

Any gender essentialist confusion I had about trans women melted away fast when I actually started listening to them talk about their lives. Doesn't mean I wasn't still confused occasionally, but as someone else said upthread, I am not being harmed here and I have no reason to attack people peacefully living their lives.

It's distressing that someone who makes her living thinking about gender can't do this.
posted by emjaybee at 6:34 AM on October 24, 2021 [19 favorites]

I remember nineties feminism pretty well and transness and the fluidity of gender were not major themes in popular feminism.

Having entered the 90s as an outspoken "not like other girls" teenager who then, via riot grrrl and women's college and via a lot personal experience and bluster and critical theory became pretty well convinced that I should feel ashamed for every feeling uncertain my own essential womanhood because any misgivings I had about my biological sex was obviously just internalized misogyny (or something ?)talking, I remember feeling slightly betrayed, at the end of the 90s, when my first ftm friends transitioned. I'm sure I said some vaguely Atwoodian stupid shit at the time, and made some cruel, ignorant commentary because I couldn't process my own feelings and it felt like I was being abandoned to do the work of being a woman in the world by other women who had been allies.

And, if I can be honest now, I think there was some part of me that was profoundly, uncomprehendingly envious of their ability to walk away from a thing that had, to me, always felt as much like an injustice as a reward, even as I was beginning to realize how incredibly hard and painful and dangerous that process could be for them. The process since then has been long, fraught, uncertain and (largely) unflattering, and I feel enormously grateful that Twitter wasn't around for the early parts.

For now, I'm still holding on to my cis-ness, because I'm old and slightly cowardly and it's easier to explain my affection for superficial signifiers of gender (evening gowns, statement earrings) when I settle for one end of the binary, than to be like "God, would you please look at this fabulous ballgown, and by the way I'm totally weirded out by my biology and bristle a little whenever someone calls me a woman, because it's never felt right." It doesn't help that so many of my real life friends, Gen X women, radical in their younger days, have of late detoured into, if not TERF, then TERF-adjacent territory, even as some of their own kids come out as trans of non-binary.

Anyway, 90s feminist/Gen X women: land of contrasts, sometimes even inside our (messy, undefined, possibly non-binary) selves.
posted by thivaia at 6:39 AM on October 24, 2021 [37 favorites]

In the same way that MRA people don't realise that dismantling the patriarchy would benefit men as well as women, TERFs don't realise that accepting gender variance would benefit cis women as well as trans people. Creating more room for gender expression and acceptance allows people who are cis-but-maybe-also-a-bit-non-binary room to accept themselves and find ways to define and explore that.

By rigidly enforcing gender essentialist binary norms, TERFs are making things harder not only for binary and non-binary trans people, but also anyone who feels themselves outside of the socially acceptable boundaries for their gender, which I imagine goes for many cis people.

I'm reminded of a letter I got from my grandmother after I came out as trans. She wrote that she had never really felt comfortable as a woman either, but that was "normal", and couldn't I just accept that without "causing a fuss"? I didn't write back to her or acknowledge it at all and sadly she died not long afterwards; it was very difficult for me to deal with, as we had been very close and I loved her very much, so I felt doubly betrayed. But it also struck me at the time that her own discomfort with the rigid rules that had been imposed on her could have been a source of some small jealousy that I was, as thivaia noted, "escaping" it. Which feels unfair, given that trans people aren't responsible for those rules, nor do we really get to escape them.
posted by fight or flight at 6:53 AM on October 24, 2021 [48 favorites]

"TERF" is not equivalent to "Pro-lesbian" no matter how many times transphobes try to position trans people against the rest of the LGBTQIA spectrum on Twitter.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 7:10 AM on October 24, 2021 [30 favorites]

I thought that many TERFs (falsely) accuse the trans community to take gender a bit too seriously, to the point of reiterating it in heteronormative ways

That's correct. TERFism is, in its own words, anti-gender-essentialist. Gender essentialism posits that there are particular qualities that arise as part of being a woman. While that belief may be embraced by a lot of people who find themselves anti-trans, because they haven't really thought through their philosophy, the ideology itself is supposed to be non-essentialist, and so it can use essentialism as a weapon against trans people, for instance in the accusation of "gender identity essentialism," which as far as I know is not an actual thing that exists, but certainly sounds very intellectual.
posted by mittens at 7:14 AM on October 24, 2021 [5 favorites]

I remember nineties feminism pretty well and transness and the fluidity of gender were not major themes in popular feminism.

I recall it somewhat differently (with the major, major caveat that I am a cisgendered man who was observing more from the outside), including the prominence of the controversy around the Michigan Womyn's Festival trans exclusions, for example. I can remember that same argument playing out at the college I attended, mostly over access or lack of access to feminist spaces.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:19 AM on October 24, 2021

I mean, it's really difficult to avoid thinking of TERFs as people who would rather be the highest-ranking ones in a prison than equals in freedom. Their social world is one where they have special status for enduring sexism and being gender-nonconforming [in the right way] - they are living models of correct womanhood since they are willing to suffer for the truth, aren't like all the other [hetero-feminine] girls, etc. Sure, their social world is one in which they are always victims, but they are the best victims.

Political jealousy is probably a factor too - if victimhood is your thing, well, trans women are more victimized so you lose, unless you argue that trans women are not really women and therefore not really victims.

This does all seem to related to the capitalist FOMO/too-late narrative, where youth is fetishized and age is devalued and mocked, especially for women. There are lots of older trans women, for instance, and yet even queer media is usually like "here is this twenty-five year old homonormatively hot person, let's talk about their gender journey" except when we do the elegiac, "queer elders" pieces where they act like you have one foot in the grave at fifty.

For a variety of [content-generating, capitalism] reasons, it seems to me that straight, cis society is far more ready to incorporate homonormative young queer and trans people into celebrity and the arts than it is to incorporate, eg, average women over the age of forty, as long as the young people don't rock the boat too much. So I bet that it's particularly easy to read the present as just more "cool twenty-something trends are easy to incorporate into capitalist patriarchy" stuff. Age segregation in our society probably doesn't help.

And then there's history. If one is talking only to TERF-adjacent people rather than intellectually committed TERFs, it probably does not help to have a thin and unrealistic understanding of second and third wave feminisms and women's history in the eighties and nineties. (I assert this because it is sometimes frustrating for me, a non-woman, to hear really, really inaccurate narratives of the nineties - it's not so much about the criticism as the presentism).

Intellectual health seems a lot like public health. We all have individual responsibilities but there is also an ecosystem which needs to be kept healthy, and I feel like your sort of untheorized, TERF-adjacent people are sometimes just the product of a sick intellectual ecosystem.
posted by Frowner at 7:20 AM on October 24, 2021 [47 favorites]

I mean, it's worth noting that "TERFism" isn't a monolith or even a unified political movement, has no platform and no means to establish one, and in fact is a label that we mostly impose from the outside. It's a useful label, but there's no reason to expect the people bearing it to agree with each other.

In fact, people with lots of different beliefs get tagged as terfs — including some who are disgusted with our supposed gender-deviancy ("Trans women don't even succeed at acting like women! That's how dangerously divorced from social reality they are!") and others who are disgusted with our supposed gender-conformity ("Trans women all act so obsessively hyperfeminine! That's how oppressive and antifeminist they are!")
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:23 AM on October 24, 2021 [32 favorites]

But even those brief mentions involved at least a little analysis and theory, compared to what is now basically...what, a PR campaign? I mean, is there actual theory, in gender-critical feminism?

I really think that this happens as a consequence of feminism that fails to comprehend and adopt true intersectionality. Prior to the articulation and popularization of the concept of intersectionality, you can have reasonable people who adopt a feminism that essentially boils power down to haves and have nots. Afterwards, you have to either acknowledge that feminism exists alongside many axes of marginalization and that two people can simultaneously hold more and less power over one another depending how the situation is framed... or you have to find a way to avoid constructing the contextualization of social power in your work. And finding an external enemy is a great way to do that.

The thing that drives me absolutely nuts about the term "gender critical" is that there should be plenty of room to push at gender theory and constructs of what gender is without deciding that the entire concept is flawed so we have to resort to defining everything in terms of bodily sex. Gender is a social construct! That doesn't make it not real, any more than being a social construct makes money not real. It just means that because gender is a social construct, we as a society can shove its boundaries and collectively decide what it should look like.

My favorite way of trying to explain this is noting that when people are asked to define "male" and "female" traits, they're actually not describing all the traits we associate with male and female gender. Typically, people reach for traits that they associate with a "default" maleness or femaleness, and if you ask them to describe the traits normatively associated with a gender within a marked group of ethnicity or class or even subculture, the definitions you get from the same group of people about the boundaries of those genders change abruptly! For example, the question of whether plucking one's eyebrows is within the bounds of masculine behavior gets answered very differently depending on whether you're talking guys on the Jersey Shore or Silicon Valley codebros.

For that reason, even if you completely ignore non-binary people and gender non conforming people and everyone else actively engaged in a project of exploring and probing the bounds of gender, gender remains a fundamentally permeable and multifaceted social construct that rejects binaristic classification. But you don't get that analysis without considering and paying close attention to other axes of marginalization and the ways that different groups of people decide that gender should be organized.

The stickiness that catches TERFs and "gender critical" feminists and so forth is a stickiness about power and a deep discomfort with reckoning with being was, in some contexts, wielders of social power. It's very comforting to always believe that you are punching up. It's comforting to believe that you are the plucky underdog facing down the evil empire. It's frightening and sobering realizing that you have power over someone else, and for a lot of people it's easier to argue that the other party--especially if they make you uncomfortable or are unfamiliar--is really the party with all the power in this scenario.

Intersectionality pretty much requires you to acknowledge that sometimes you will hold the majority of social power in an interaction and sometimes you won't, and humans are often really bad at sitting with that discomfort and acknowledging it.
posted by sciatrix at 7:25 AM on October 24, 2021 [43 favorites]

I recall it somewhat differently (with the major, major caveat that I am a cisgendered man who was observing more from the outside), including the prominence of the controversy around the Michigan Womyn's Festival trans exclusions, for example.

I think popular feminism is the operator here - I was reading all the widely available feminist books I could find, reading zines, really into riot grrrl, etc, and didn't even hear about Camp Trans until the late nineties. There were so many feminist currents and social circles, but also there was not the internet in any meaningful way, so living in a provincial city and thinking of myself as just a very unhappy cis [had I known the term] woman, there really was not a natural way to find out about any of that stuff.

It felt like unless you were fortunate enough to know people or were yourself gender non-conforming in some way it was pretty easy to engage with feminism and never, ever think about trans people except in a very vague way. In my extended social circle, I would characterize things as, "of course trans women can be feminists, if we ever actually meet any, and trans men are uh probably welcome in women's spaces because they are sort of post-women, right, and of course we would never, ever make anything weird, now we're done talking about it". So not hostile per se, just thoughtless and exhausting for any actual trans people.

Not to go all Great Man Theory, but I also think that a whole social/activist circle was often improved by several vocal, informed and committed people and that this was partly about chance - I distinctly remember the first couple of out trans people in my extended social circle and their particular politics and commitments really, really changed things, very fast actually. This was the early 2000s.
posted by Frowner at 7:31 AM on October 24, 2021 [19 favorites]

The reason why some 2nd gen feminists have gone the route they have is because 2nd gen feminism developed a rigorous history of social construction around gender. That construction was largely on an X/Y basis, with occasional consideration given to a "Z" category of transgender identification. While I in no way will try to make an argument defending that construct, as it'd be counterproductive, the basic difficulty is that in the logic developed and then held as a kind of truth for some can't be fit around a non-exclusionary third category or only makes sense with inclusion of a "Z" category that is neither X nor Y, but something other.

Given the way biological/cultural thesis of much 2nd gen feminism was split around the history of societal response to gender as understood primarily through externalities, you are classified as a woman and expected to perform in certain ways because you appear as a woman, then a challenge to that logic based on intrinsic understanding creates a conflict for that thinking. It's why so many of the Atwood and Rowling types can say they are for trans rights, but only as a separate category than that of women's rights. They can't accept ZY= Y and ZX=X and hold to a X/Y/Z conception of identity for it no longer fitting the logic they've accepted as "true".
posted by gusottertrout at 7:38 AM on October 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

Who are the (white, cis) literary feminists of her generation who have not gone all TERF-ey?

Though sadly she has passed, Ursula LeGuin
posted by Ardnamurchan at 7:52 AM on October 24, 2021 [6 favorites]

All I can feel is sadness that some people are so scarred by the patriarchical nature of our society that it blinds them to the pain of its other victims.
posted by Slothrup at 9:05 AM on October 24, 2021 [5 favorites]

Who are the (white, cis) literary feminists of her generation who have not gone all TERF-ey?

Marge Piercy is one of my favourite second wave feminist, white, cis, literary women. She is contemporaneous with Atwood and the two are often compared, since they’ve written on similar topics at times, and both have worked in the whole range of long form fiction, short stories, and poetry. She has also publicly expressed support for trans people and opposition to transphobia. The link refers to a letter against transphobia that many others have signed as well.

I’m not sure if Jeanette Winterson is cis, or genderqueer or nonbinary or agender, so she might or might not meet the criteria depending. I think it’s also important, while recognizing trends and the weaknesses of some of the strains of feminism from the past, not to erase from this overall discussion the second wave feminists who were themselves trans or nonbinary. Eg. Leslie Feinburg; and Butler has been mentioned above already. I think some of the people who are primarily remembered as trans pioneers (rather than being primarily remembered as feminists) of the same generation considered themselves feminist, as well? Though some also did not feel welcome in the feminist movement, just as cis lesbians weren’t always welcomed by cis straight feminists. There were several variations or sub-categories within second wave feminism, but the white, middle class, not too radical on economic or intersectional social justice issues version got the most media attention then as it has continued to up until the present, and that variation was not especially good at intersectionality at the time even, let alone nowadays.
posted by eviemath at 9:15 AM on October 24, 2021 [8 favorites]

I was also going to mention Marge Piercy as a non-TERF second wave feminist. I think it’s worth noting that her feminism has always been rooted in working-class socialism, and she was involved in both the labor movement and the civil rights movement before the women’s movement. So her feminism has always been more intersectional than many of the most prominent second-wave feminists’.

(Possibly fun fact: she was loosely part of my parents’ leftist social circles in the 70s. I have to say, this particular cohort has been refreshingly immune to the pressures to become more conservative that have acted on many others of this age and I am very happy for that.)
posted by lunasol at 10:32 AM on October 24, 2021 [6 favorites]

I've been avoiding engaging with this story since it first broke because it's just so, so disappointing. It's like the first time you hear your favorite Grandma using the n-word.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:38 PM on October 24, 2021 [12 favorites]

Leslie Feinberg was also part of the labor movement. Hir novel Stone Butch Blues (available free or as an at cost print on demand book on the her website) is about labor unions, being queer and being trans, and the connections she saw between all of those, and she wrote Lavender and Red about LGBTQ history and socialism.

I'm trans and nonbinary, and if you are cisgendered the best thing you can do to learn about trans people is talk to us and read our works.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 3:24 PM on October 24, 2021 [18 favorites]

I'm disappointed and feel kinda humiliated, as I've been a serious fan of MA's contributions to literature over the decades. I'm also regrettably not really surprised, she's often been an obtuse contrarian on the wrong side of insight on various issues over the years. Can list some more of them here but, sigh.
posted by ovvl at 4:00 PM on October 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

One deleted that I think was well-meaning but was proving very hard to follow and drawing a lot of flags as a result.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 5:21 PM on October 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

Marge Piercy...has also publicly expressed support for trans people and opposition to transphobia. The link refers to a letter against transphobia that many others have signed as well.

I have never heard of Marge Piercy before, but in the link you gave she is a signatory of the transphobic original letter that Feminists Fighting Transphobia was denouncing.
posted by bashing rocks together at 10:17 PM on October 24, 2021 [8 favorites]

Oh no! Serious reading fail on my part, I’m sorry. (And also now very, very disappointed. Sigh.)
posted by eviemath at 4:51 AM on October 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

(Mods: maybe remove my comment then, since that’s a serious inaccuracy?)
posted by eviemath at 4:52 AM on October 25, 2021

Doing my internet reading a bit more carefully this time, here’s a bit of an overview of the history of intersections between feminist and trans activism and theory.
posted by eviemath at 5:28 AM on October 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

You know who is not incredibly young anymore and a cis feminist who is, at least as far as I know from her work, supportive of trans women? Alison Bechdel, who is apparently 61 now (!!!! how old we have all gotten) Admittedly, she's a different generation than Atwood and Piercy but she is technically a boomer. (And Fun Home came out in 2006! How can that be? Where are the snows of yesteryear?)

Obviously Bechdel is both queer and an activist. Her storylines in Dykes To Watch Out For depicted Mo's education and course-correction after her initial unwillingness to include a trans woman writer in a reading series at the women's bookstore, Lois getting angry at Mo for her transphobia and letting Mo believe that Lois was transitioning, Lois's crush on and hook-up with buff trans guy and affordable mechanic Gerry and of course Lois's partner's daughter Janis.

I have to say, Bechdel has always been one of few writers who depicts a world that seems recognizable and normal to me, because that's how it is, you live around a lot of queer people and you are of course living around trans people and that's just normal life - not everyone always says or thinks the perfectly theorized thing, but you certainly don't exclude trans women from the women's potluck, those are women you actually know from parties and projects, it would be weird if they didn't attend.
posted by Frowner at 6:40 AM on October 25, 2021 [29 favorites]

I'm echoing a tweet I can no longer find, but why are the cultural authority figures who feel like they need to loudly broadcast their shitty opinions at every opportunity obsessed with only trans women? Trans men also exist yet somehow the existence of trans men doesn't seem to be threatening anyone's fragile, brittle worldview.
posted by treepour at 10:05 AM on October 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

Because that variety of cis man is not as threatened by what they read as, in so many words, penis envy.

In that mindset, 'a woman would prefer to be a man? Understandable, it's better to be a man. A man wants to be a woman? A traitor and a threat.'

So long as they don't have to compete with trans men for partners (i.e. cis het women) -- or gender inflected jobs. Then the approbation swiftly arises, for both the trans men they find themselves competing with and those who accept them as men.

(sorry if this is a derail)
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:15 AM on October 25, 2021 [4 favorites]

I am very much not a fan of The Dark Knight, but the "'You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" quote comes to mind here.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:28 AM on October 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

It is dangerous to read op-eds.

Each time I hit a key
on my well connected keyboard,
saying they've run amok

I write to make them suffer.
posted by house-goblin at 1:35 PM on October 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

Who are the (white, cis) literary feminists of her generation who have not gone all TERF-ey?

Though sadly she has passed, Ursula LeGuin

I'm not aware that Le Guin made any statements in regard to trans rights, in language that we would recognize? If anyone has a link, I'd be very happy to see it.

Regarding Alison Bechdel, as mentioned above, her most recent work, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, contained a full panel depiction of the Michigan Womyn's Festival with a eulogy for the revelatory power of women-only spaces (and I'm pretty sure the subtext was for trans-exclusive spaces). The comic strip addressed trans issues exactly as described, but she stopped writing it many years ago, and before the most recent developments in queer theory and activism. I point no fingers, but it jumped out at me.

As for Atwood, she really doesn't have a clue what she's talking about, or what she has waded into on Twitter. I'd feel a bit sorry for her if she wasn't so dead certain of the strength of her own uninformed opinions.
posted by jokeefe at 1:42 PM on October 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

Le Guin, to my knowledge, never made any explicit statements about trans rights. She did write positively about the use of nonbinary pronouns, and her novel The Left Hand of Darkness is seen by many as an endorsement of trans/nonbinary identities, (link to her interview with Vice in 2008) but as others have mentioned, it's a thought experiment rather than an amplification of actual trans/nonbinary lives and stories. It's possible that if she were alive today she'd be raking Atwood across the coals on twitter, but that, too, is a thought experiment. Here's a good critique of LHOD as a transgender text, and a teaser quote:

"I worry that describing LHOD as a trans text may continue a trend of scholars and feminists making trans lives and trans cultural production invisible..."

Atwood's TERFyness has been a slowly unfolding trainwreck for several years, and I agree with the above commenters who see it as the result of an unreconstructed, non-intersectional power analysis typical of second-wave white feminism, and a damn shame. I haven't seen good examples of white public intellectuals who have moved from a non-intersectional power lens to an intersectional one and then actually apologized for the preceding years of harmful BS, so I really don't know if being called in by a fellow Grandmother of Literary Genre Fiction would work or not.
posted by All hands bury the dead at 3:21 PM on October 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

If you are one of the several folks commenting here looking for a well-known cis feminist from Atwood's generation who supports trans rights now, I'm not sure how an example of someone who does would inform or enrich this discussion.

I'd really love it if you'd explain to me why you are so intent on that, and what would change for you if you find someone like that?
posted by Chrysopoeia at 10:46 PM on October 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'd really love it if you'd explain to me why you are so intent on that, and what would change for you if you find someone like that?

Finding someone from the older generation with bad opinions is like shooting fish in a barrel. Every seven seconds, there's a new FPP about how someone you loved and respected turns out to be a horrible person (or, best case, simply horribly misled by an onslaught of propaganda). I can totally understand why someone would like some example that this is not an inevitable process, and that the figures we look up to might actually be worthy of our continued respect.

It's like...you know this cultural cut-off from our elders, in the LGBT world? Where there's no history and no timeline, just these little dots, these little islands where Something Happened and they're all disconnected, in a way that hegemonic history simply is not? I feel like this need for someone to have a good opinion is part of that, a symptom of that, trying to find a link between then and now.

What would change? We'd have a narrative of someone maintaining or developing a good and ethical opinion. There aren't a lot of those. So many of our closely-held values turn out to be surprisingly contextual. So yes, I would very much like to hear the story of someone who, confronted with the current conflict, thought their way past the propaganda and the hatred and the "okay but what if" false theorizing, didn't turn out to be a fascist, and just came out on the other side a good person I could still trust?
posted by mittens at 5:31 AM on October 26, 2021 [17 favorites]

Samuel R Delaney is a boomer writer who has only gotten better with time. Not a woman, but Black, and definitely a feminist.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:37 AM on October 26, 2021 [4 favorites]

I'd really love it if you'd explain to me why you are so intent on that, and what would change for you if you find someone like that?

Intellectual history - I'm not very satisfied with the explanations for why this cohort seems to go bad. Admittedly, this isn't serious research, but I think we're allowed to consider serious questions in a non-structured way here. Is second wave feminist theory itself the driver, meaning people are consciously adhering to their beliefs and then choosing to exclude trans women in order to be consistent? Is there some cultural thing? Is it shared experiences? Is it buried psychological stuff around aging in the left?

Like, if we were looking at that list and it turned out that many cis second wave feminists who were involved in the labor movement were not TERFs, that would be interesting. If we were looking at the list and there were some kind of break between people before and after 1960, or if queer women were markedly different, etc etc etc. As is, it looks like almost without exception second wave feminist intellectuals are TERFs or TERF-adjacent, so now we have a slightly narrower question.

And then if this isn't literally about a belief system causing people to exclude trans women in order to be intellectually consistent, what is the takeaway for other people on the left? Should the world still function in twenty years, I don't want to find myself in a group of Gen X anarchists who are all, say, blithely ecofascist because of the same social and mental processes that pushed second wave feminists to TERFdom. So I have some interest in figuring out why some people but not others go TERF.

On a practical level, many of these women are writers and scholars I have admired and whose books I have bought and recommended. I'd like to know who isn't a TERF because the other choice is to blanket not-recommend or buy the work of any cis feminist born between say 1930 and 1970.

Marge Piercy, for instance, is a kind of a big deal in feminist science fiction. I have led discussion groups about her work, since the history of feminist science fiction is a big interest of mine. Knowing whether she is or is not a TERF is going to change how and whether I use her work, what I tell participants, how I describe the course, etc. It also changes my understanding of feminist science fiction if the majority of second wave writers are TERFs or TERF-adjacent - it really problematizes not just specific works, writers or themes but the whole subject.

I also think that it's normal for people to want to have older role models with shared values and experiences - I, not actually that old, have been this person for young, young people a couple of times.

On one hand, yes, a white cis middle class woman can say, "here is this incredible radical trans woman of color from a working class background, her words and actions are thought-provoking and inspiring to me". But on the other, hey, a white cis middle class woman is not a working class trans woman of color and IMO it's a bit complicated to just say "well, my role model is Marsha P. Johnson" when your life and struggles have been nothing at all like hers - like, it's good to be able to look to people who have had to struggle with their own privileges, whiteness, potential for simply assimilating into white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, etc, because those are the hazards that you face.

Like, for instance, I love queer writer Kai Ashante Wilson's work; his books are incredibly satisfying as science fiction and politically really beautiful and brilliant. But I, as a white transmasculine person, would feel really weird saying, "I want to model myself on Kai Ashante Wilson, he's a guy, he's a writer of science fiction, he's politically awesome", because it seems pretty bold to just overlook my own whiteness and privilege as if I could make them go away by "modeling" myself on a radical Black writer. I feel like I need to look for transmasculine white people who, minimally, are not terrible, so that I can better understand how someone like me specifically can not be terrible.

So yeah, it would be nice to establish that there were more cis second wave feminist writers and intellectuals who were not TERFs or TERF-adjacent. However, because we've all been looking eagerly for good examples and not finding them, we know that's not the case and that raises a bunch of different questions.

(Also, I'm a little suspicious about that letter because it is signed by Nina Power, an ex-marxist UK writer who has gone full-on fascist and TERFy and writes for the Telegraph now. I don't know why she signed it but it could not have been out of desire to be an ally to trans women. This was particularly disappointing to me because I used to read her blog and I own her first book.)
posted by Frowner at 6:46 AM on October 26, 2021 [28 favorites]

Honestly, I don't think a lot of people have "become terfs" at all. I think they've watched the demands of the trans women's movement changed, and maybe they've always been on board with the old ones, but they definitely would have been opposed to the new ones.

For a lot of trans activists of the 20th century, the big demands were "Let us try our hardest to transition, and don't treat us unnaturally if you find out our secret." Meaning, you know, if you were naturally inclined to call me "she" and you found out I was trans, don't override that inclination out of spite, disgust, or outrage. Within the last few decades that's changed, and within the last decade mainstream Americans became aware of the change: now it's "Treat us in these ways even if you find them unnatural." Call me "she" if I ask for it, even if it requires constant low-grade effort, even if I have a full beard, even if I still introduce myself as $DEADNAME.

WHICH YOU SHOULD DO. It is a reasonable demand. People following that demand now are a big part of why I'm still alive.

But it doesn't shock me that most radical feminists of the 70s and 80s are opposed to it even though they would have been fine with the older demand. It is completely internally consistent to be like "I won't let my bias override my honest impression of someone — but don't tell me I can't believe my honest impression!" or "Nobody in the mainstream can force me to follow any script — not the old 'call trans women him' one and not the new 'call trans women her' one!" And I think both of those are wiiiidespread positions in the second wave.
posted by nebulawindphone at 11:52 AM on October 26, 2021 [8 favorites]

Gah I want to go back and put a big I'M TRANS I'M TRANS label on that comment. I hope it doesn't sound like an apologetic, or like I'm parroting talking points. I just... like, from a know your enemies point of view, I think it's useful to see the ways in which those fuckers have kept a consistent position that made the old trans movement an easier ally than the new one.
posted by nebulawindphone at 11:55 AM on October 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

I do also think that some of their pigheaded assholery is a reaction to hm... increased visibility of those demands. One of the things I have watched happen even just in my lifetime is that people who are not threatened by things they perceive as "just one weirdo who can be written off" sometimes have much more strongly aggressive and threatened reactions to groups of people who seem like they have some organization and some momentum happening. Visibility and marginal gains seem to be quickly followed by aggressive pushback.

As you say, this is not what should happen, nor frankly is it a reason to stop making stronger demands or try to take up less space. I don't necessarily think those are good general-scale tactics for responding to that kind of intensely aggressive response, because I don't think there's necessarily a way to avoid that aggression without taking on an awful lot of shame--which will kill you just as surely, in the long run. But there is something about being approached as an equal, rather than a (questionably) benevolent superior, that just fucking pisses some people off and seems to make them reflexively try to smash people back into the place they "should" stay in. And... well, once pissed off, those people are way easier to manipulate, so there are certainly other TERFy groups with a vested interest in fanning the flames of that kind of anger and shaping it into something a lot longer lasting. Especially for people with status in feminist communities, I think that their social status makes them very attractive for "grooming" by other transphobic feminists in this way, because their status and history gives them disproportionate influence among other feminist women and so forth.
posted by sciatrix at 12:45 PM on October 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

I also think that it's normal for people to want to have older role models with shared values and experiences - I, not actually that old, have been this person for young, young people a couple of times.

I can tell you, the first time that happened to me I was in my early twenties? and it wasn't so much about me at the time, even then, as it was that this was the ace community about ten years ago and that community was just very young on average, and there were not a lot of people to look at who seemed to have much of anything figured out, and I was willing to fairly publicly talk about taking a shot at figuring out what worked for me. It's a strange fucking feeling, having people tell you that when you know you are still very young and still figuring things out.

Particularly depending on your community, the sheer hunger for elders to love you, especially in queer and trans circles when so many of our actual literal parents did not love us as we were... I think that does drive a certain amount of that searching for intellectual elders who allow us to see ourselves reflected in history or allow us to see an elder who really might have loved us, if they had known us. We want to see ourselves reflected in the world, and by and large finding yourself trying to make a whole world out of nothing is absolutely fucking terrifying. We look for elders to show us how we might live, to give us patterns to experimentally base our lives off of. We look for elders to show us paths that we might be able to follow in our own lives. We look for stories to guide us.

I also think, by the way, that this is the motivation for a lot of the infighting you will see between various communities about who "gets" to claim historical queer figures, like the fighting about was Eleanor Roosevelt bi or a lesbian and so forth. We're hungry, and for some people I think there is a sense that if you don't claim the portrait as a mirror for yourself and only compatible with your own self (or at least with your narrower community), you might not get to find any portraits that do serve as a mirror for yourself at all.

We are hungry, and we are afraid, and we are looking for security and guidance, and many of us have quite a lot of trauma about being unwanted and not being worth trying to understand. In that light, the desire to find intellectual elders who allow us to feel seen and accepted--perhaps especially elder cis feminists who do not hate us. After all, if you're publicly identifying as trans yourself, those echoes with one's parents finally being willing to put in the effort to know us and love us don't resonate quite as strongly--the emotional chord is less "someone cares about me enough to put in the effort to love me despite not understanding" and more "oh, an older person who is like me and therefore understands."

I think it's maybe not coincidental that the cis feminist authors of that age who seem to have taken very fiercely pro-trans-inclusivity stances that I can think of offhand are YA writers, particularly Tamora Pierce and K. A. Applegate (who herself has a trans daughter), rather than academic feminists (with the exception of Butler). I'm not quite sure what to make of that, though, except that perhaps a career focused on listening and appealing to younger people might make one more keenly aware of that yawning hunger than one focused on listening and appealing to one's peers.
posted by sciatrix at 12:55 PM on October 26, 2021 [14 favorites]

One of the things I have watched happen even just in my lifetime is that people who are not threatened by things they perceive as "just one weirdo who can be written off" sometimes have much more strongly aggressive and threatened reactions to groups of people who seem like they have some organization and some momentum happening. Visibility and marginal gains seem to be quickly followed by aggressive pushback.

The most baffling response I ever got was when I responded to someone (IRL) who had an ongoing case of British anti-trans feminism, on and on about trans prisoners causing danger in women's prisons and safe women-only swimming times, etc. I asked them how to treat intersex people, or how they thought Caster Semenya or Beau Bradley would fit into their ideas - and they asked why I had to keep bringing up edge cases. Self-admitted that they had not (to their knowledge) ever seen a trans person in real life, but still had some ludicrous perception of "trans women everywhere" being some kind of mainstream social issue that should have rules...but that didn't need to take into account "edge cases" of actual trans people.
posted by bashing rocks together at 1:00 PM on October 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

Just a friendly reminder that Caster Semenya is intersex, and does not identify as trans (unless there have been some recent changes I've missed). Intersex erasure is a real thing, and I can't imagine getting caught in a crossfire and used as a prop or shield by either or both sides is much fun, or very affirming.
posted by Dysk at 1:50 PM on October 26, 2021 [7 favorites]

There are times when I wish really hard that we hadn't lost so many to AIDS, and wonder what kinds of advice and lived experience they could have offered to us now. I think the modern community might be quite different had those voices not been stilled forever.

And to echo the above: Intersex is not trans, and twitter offers a number of intersex people who are very tired of being used as a point of debate.
posted by jokeefe at 6:54 PM on October 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

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