2 days ago
I admit to being a ‘Terf': Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools
One of the things that makes me feel most patriotic – and such feelings do not come easily, trust me – is that I live on Terf Island.
Baffled Americans who have swallowed the Kool Aid and recite things like 'Trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary people are valid', while living in a country that chops the breasts off disturbed young women, look at the likes of me and my friends, who want kids left alone, and think it is us who have the problem.
For them we are some kind of monsters. We, the Terfs of Terf Island (a misguidedly derogatory nickname that reflects the UK's important role as the centre of gender-critical feminism), want to protect the rights of women and children. And with support we are slowly turning the pernicious gender juggernaut round in just about every area.
I can't remember the first time I was called a Terf. It was meant as an insult (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). Originally, the only bit that I felt applied to me was 'feminist'. I did not want to exclude trans people. I am not that radical. But I am tired. It's been a long old battle trying to explain that biology should not trump ideology. TERF: Tired of Explaining Reality to F---wits.
To be labelled a Terf was an attempt to shut bolshy women down.
Now, a new book, Terf Island, by Sex Matters campaigner Fiona McAnena, reflects the struggle by looking at the social history of the resistance to gender ideology. It's out on August 1, and is well worth a read.
As the book highlights, our basic objections were (and still are) to men in women's spaces, men in women's sports, the medicalisation and sterilisation of children, and the erasure of the word women from language so that we became 'people with cervixes' or 'gestational carriers'. The idea that sex itself was changeable and just an undefined feeling in your head? We didn't buy any of this and we were seen as old, redundant, out of touch.
Why wouldn't a bunch of awkward, often middle-aged women (which included lesbians) just go along with the shiny new creed where no one was born male or female anymore and everyone could be everything on a whim, the trans activists must have wondered. How mega exciting! (And how profitable for big pharma, big medicine, big shrinkery.)
Who would not want to be modern and sexually ambiguous? As for stuff like rights and spaces and protections for women and safeguarding for children… who cares? That was from the dark days, before rainbow lanyards and flags.
Yet Terfs just would not get with the programme. We committed the biggest sin of all. We simply did not believe that a man in a wig and stockings could be a woman. What's more, we organised – and held gatherings supported by the advocacy group Woman's Place. Networks were created. The Lesbian and Gay Alliance was formed. Court cases where women had been discriminated against for their 'gender-critical beliefs' were won.
Bit by bit, Terf Island was countering the ultra-effective lobbying of Stonewall, which had wormed its way into many public sector bodies.
In Scotland, Sturgeon's push to allow gender self-ID fell apart after we saw where that could lead – Isla Bryson, a rapist in a female prison. Since then, Labour, having idiotically signed up to the SNP's self-ID cause, has been coming round. We have had the Sullivan Review, the Cass Review and the Supreme Court ruling, all seeking to improve data collection, policy-making and definitions around sex and gender, rooted in biological fact.
I've been maligned for years as a Terf, so excuse me while I celebrate the victories of grassroots groups of busy women against much of the establishment. Other European countries, Australia and, whisper it, some Americans are now paying attention to our push-back, particularly on puberty blockers and 'gender medicine'. Trump's slogan at the election ' Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you ' tapped into the unease many were already feeling.
But cult thinking is hard to give up. Tim Roca, the Labour MP for Macclesfield, does not appear to have got the memo that his party has accepted that the word woman means biological woman.
He found the Supreme Court judgment 'very depressing', even though it simply clarified the law. He described 'transphobes' as 'swivel-eyed' and 'not very well people'. It's going to be very hard for these people to row back.
One-hit wonder Kate Nash has recorded a song that rambles on and then addresses people like me as germs. ('Exclusionary, regressive, misogynist (germ, germ)/Yeah, you're not rad at all.')
A young posh duo called the Lambrini Girls perform a muddled ditty with the chorus 'Shut your stupid f---ing mouth you stupid f---ing Terf / There's a reason your kids aren't returning your calls, Carol'.
I am afraid these people may think they are rad and out-there but they are missing what is going on. You know, in the world?
The slow-motion car-crash of the tribunal of Sandie Peggie, who was cleared of misconduct after NHS Fife suspended her when she complained about having to share a changing room with Dr Beth Upton, a transgender medic, is revealing what happens when an organisation panders to the whims of a trans-identifying male. We end up with a nurse suspended for wanting to change in private.
The Peggie case is covering NHS Fife in gender woo-woo that it can't shake it off. It has beclowned itself by putting gender ideology above common sense. This is the level of insanity that Terfs have stood against for years now. But it's changing.
