A vile mix of the fundamentalist hate preacher with a bit of annoying hippy wrapped in the guise of an overbearing suburban mother. The TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) are a sect of anti trans hatemongers and the name isn't even the end of the lies and contradictions. Simply a prelude to a Pandora's box of lies and contradictions that make every trans woman's already fraught existence a living hell.
Of course just as the Nazis no longer call themselves Nazis, a TERF will never call itself a TERF. Instead they prefer to be called "Gender Critical" or more recently "Gender free", the latter often presented with flowery hippy bullshit that betrays the TERFs bourgeois feminist origins. These are the wealthy women who managed to get into university while our mothers and grandmothers were working 9-5. Both these terms claim pretensions to an ideal that they are thoroughly opposed to in reality. A deeper look will reveal that their ideology upholds the social construct of gender to an unnaturally rigid extent and simply through the semantics of calling it "biological sex" have managed to mask their bigotry in a Machiavellian web of deceit.
It all comes down to misogyny which has more to do with how a person is perceived through presentation and less to do with reproductive organs which play such a minor role in public interaction if any at all. TERFs have provided a master class in sugar coating hate that has disseminated among their allies on the political right. Right leaning social media outlets have fallen for the deception hook line and sinker believing the oppressed to be the oppressor and the oppressor to be the oppressed which is easy to buy when the much maligned transgender women being presented as the inhuman monsters we've always been presented as. But there is something more sinister when the bourgeois ideal of womanhood begins to crack under the strain of its own contradictions.
With muscle mass and bone structure proving to have too much crossover between the binaries enforced here, the focus moved to the level of testosterone culminating in a ruling where women who are judged to have high testosterone are barred from competing without hormone treatments. Of course these same treatments will still be denied to vulnerable trans youth who would actually benefit from them. No matter where the arbitrary line is drawn to exclude trans women it will always exclude a number of women who are not trans.
Which leaves only the juvenile method of kindergarten biology and even that falls apart with closer study of intersex conditions relating to external reproductive organs which is sadly obfuscated by non consensual mutilation of intersex children at birth in order to conform with the capitalist notions of gender in relation to reproductive labour upheld by capitalism in order to compartmentalize Labour and mitigate the cost of raising the next generation of workers.
TERFs will often lay claim to Marxist feminist influence and will even back it up with biased commentaries on Engles “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State”. Of course no take from the TERF school can be truly materialist when it’s drowning in the contradictions of “We want to abolish gender but enforce the same thing rigidly under a different name”. The very contradictions of the ideology place it firmly in the bourgeois camp, a borderline reactionary oppressive ideology that seeks to oppress an already vulnerable section (Along with any AFAB women who don’t fit their arbitrary ideas of womanhood). Their claim to any form of Marxism is as weak as their claim to feminism and any so called Marxist who follows the TERF ideology is neither. And any group in Aotearoa pretending to be Marxist while promoting this ideology is a hate group.
Marxists must take a stand against Transphobia. All Marxist organisations should include constitutional mechanisms to protect their trans members and to prevent the spread of the TERF ideology through the Left. Unions and other Left organizations should also do what they can to ensure the safety of their trans members and all cisgender people within should do their bit to promote transgender rights and resist the spread of Transphobia.
Written by Eva Allan
