Sometimes I think back to my 15+ years experience of seeing and interacting with TERFism. It used to be much of the hate I saw from them was oriented toward transhet women, and their claim that we become conformist parodies of traditional femininity. - ThreadSky

goddessblade.bsky.social • 1 day ago

Sometimes I think back to my 15+ years experience of seeing and interacting with TERFism. It used to be much of the hate I saw from them was oriented toward transhet women, and their claim that we become conformist parodies of traditional femininity.

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phlegmboy.bsky.social•1 day ago

Yeah the general idea that “we fetishize what oppresses women”, the idea that we’re whoring ourselves out to men, fulfilling their misogynistic fantasies by being sexually available to them, and “debasing ourselves in a feminine way for pleasure”

phlegmboy.bsky.social•1 day ago

Wait you said all that in the thread. I actually remember a time when trans lesbians were not as visible as they are now and their existence was used as a “gotcha” against terfs.

vampwolfdoll.bsky.social•1 day ago

I still remember when @irlkrazzett.bsky.social had to explain to his parents that not only was I trans, but how surprised they were (especially his dad) that I was not only a lesbian, but a very futchy (at the time) lesbian at that

vampwolfdoll.bsky.social•1 day ago

Turns out trans women are a lot like cis women in how we present all over the fucking spectrum. Women are women, and people don't fit into neat little boxes. Whoudathunkit?

lolobean2.bsky.social•1 day ago

Inevitable the parody. Since are men -- to attempt camouflage must display exaggerated forms of femininity.

detrivora.bsky.social•1 day ago

You have no idea how many marginalized women have to overperform femininity in order to be seen as a woman at all.

duchess-van-hoof.bsky.social•21 hours ago

I hear such discourse from black cis women.

How they are considered more resilient to pain & more suited for physical work by a white public, due to not living up to the ideal of the submissive white cis woman.

It is downright dehumanizing.

tesseract.bsky.gay•1 day ago

May, i think this is good critical analysis of the positions expressed, but i question: is it worthwhile to try to decode the positions of people who are obviously bad-faith zealots who hate us first and justify why second?
to me it seems obvious that these people are not meaningfully feminists

ladyaranea.bsky.social•18 hours ago

The point is exactly to display to onlookers this exact thing: that anti-trans positions are internally contradictory and absurd.

tesseract.bsky.gay•1 day ago

on the other hand, i do think the inquiry into how trans women express feminity and how this interacts with our sexual orientations/identities is a good question and i think your characterizations are insightful and make sense to me!

droningg.bsky.social•1 day ago

when the script was written originally, hyper femininity and heterosexual conformity were mandatory to access healthcare. you saw it start to pivot about the time informed consent became available and the demographic of trans women surviving to adulthood changed.

droningg.bsky.social•1 day ago

they used the gate keeping forced on us to condemn us, and when that strict gatekeeping became less common they just moved the goal post, because it was always a post hoc justification for their bias and hatred.

jigglybitch.bsky.social•1 day ago

terfs are so repressed. there's a huge chasm between us in that we have to be wayyy less repressed simply to even come out, let alone thrive as a trans woman.

after a while terf rhetoric just sounds like "you slut! you probably like sex! a-a-and pornography!!"

ellieandthewolfe.bsky.social•1 day ago

I still see the earlier idea in some circles.

goddessblade.bsky.social•1 day ago

You can see these themes in a lot of earlier TERFlike writing and rhetoric. That the problem we represent is, bluntly, being too feminine, too eager to please men, too willing to uphold female stereotypes, thus making a mockery of "real" women's struggle for liberation.

kiragladboy.bsky.social•14 hours ago

Thats insane cause i dont know a single trans woman other than a well known right wing grifter that would agree with them that gives toxic masculine behavior any sort of grace.

goddessblade.bsky.social•1 day ago

Over time I observed a shift that included more and more of a criticism geared toward trans lesbians and other trans women are more ostensibly non-conforming to female gender norms. The complaint here has been that these trans women *aren't feminine enough.*

islastefania.bsky.social•1 day ago

my multi-decade disgusted withdrawal from human society began when I realized that I would always be either too feminine or not feminine enough, and that I was wildly disinterested in anyone's opinion on the topic

raspberrywoof.bsky.social•1 day ago

Part of the reason I think this shift happened, is that, while of course these people always hated trans people, a lot of them really did have at least some cursory background experience in feminism, radical or otherwise.

Now tho? TERFs continuously have gotten even more radicalized into trad stuff

raspberrywoof.bsky.social•1 day ago

They allied themselves with far right white Christian nationalists and as such their views have shifted further into tradwife nonsense.

I see way more TERFs nowadays actively being hostile to cis queer people as well, even when hating trans people takes up 90% of their entire lives.

fussybabybit.ch•1 day ago

Extremely strange element of it is that Gender Critical has risen out of and eclipsed it— ironically enough, a ton of the old school TERFs fucking hate the GC movement and identify it as being homophobic and (I’m not kidding) transphobic

fussybabybit.ch•1 day ago

Which I think makes sense of this; TERF arises out of lesbian feminist spaces so of course it has more animosity to people it views as “choosing” to engage with heterocompulsory femininity (and speaks to a trans-[cis]gay tension of politics) but the larger cishet GC is more repulsed by gay AND trans

diamandahagan.bsky.social•1 day ago

Not feminine enough and too feminine, wonder where I've heard echoes of that before.

goddessblade.bsky.social•1 day ago

Consider rhetoric like "trans women claim they are women, but how do they have any of the problems real women deal with, like husbands and kids and household labor?"

anaryalator.bsky.social•1 day ago

Well as a trans femme who was the primary caregiver and household labourer for 20 years, before I even realized I was trans, I certainly feel qualified to comment on these aspects of femininity.

anaryalator.bsky.social•1 day ago

Obviously I've no direct experience with pregnancy/childbirth, but I can actually offer more knowledge on the other subjects than most single/childless cis women can.

goddessblade.bsky.social•1 day ago

This same spirit of complaint is present in ideas like trans women being "male-socialized," as bringing a domineering masculine energy to female spaces, as having benefitted to much from having lived as a man, etc. All carry the theme of "insufficiently feminine to be valid subjects of feminism"

louisathelast.bsky.social•1 day ago

Forever thinking about the person at my wife’s old job who thought they were a trans woman (they are non-binary and AFAB, fwiw) and said they were “abrasive and overbearing” because of their “male socialization”

louisathelast.bsky.social•1 day ago

People will just blame “male socialization” for anything they don’t like about a person, even when it’s completely fictional (they are also not abrasive and overbearing, thanks so much)

goddessblade.bsky.social•1 day ago

Other internally contradictory "ping-pongs" show up in TERF and GC rhetoric like this, such as: the idea that we represent a conversion therapy goal for gay boys, AND that we represent straight men trying to infiltrate lesbian dating scenes.

volition-newlove.itch.io•1 day ago

and it feels like they can end up sorting all trans people along these lines via arbitrary judgement calls over where asexuals and bisexuals fit in

tessafisher.bsky.social•1 day ago

Another ping-pong I've noticed is the allegation that lesbian trans women are just trying to sleep with lesbians, *and* that trans people are also trying to trans all the lesbians into trans men. Which is it? It can't be both!

goddessblade.bsky.social•1 day ago

I still remember the hypothesis that androphilic trans women are basically sexual scabs, offering ourselves up as easier to date and fuck and dominate than cis women, setting the agenda of female liberation back to the 50s.

cuntypatra.bsky.social•22 hours ago

Also a lot of the rhetoric around this just completely erases the fact that a lot of trans lesbians lived a queer life before transitioning, and so therefore, no, not all of us lived the life of a straight man.

For example, I straight up lived as an open gay man before transition, now I like girls.

vampwolfdoll.bsky.social•1 day ago

TERFism has increasingly dropped the mask of feminism and proven itself to just be more patriarchal drivel

zyz79799.bsky.social•1 day ago

My friend, please help me. I swear to you that I desperately need your help. Please, my children are dying of hunger.

harlotprincess.bsky.social•1 day ago

meanwhile every 3rd cishet girl I know thinks feminism is why they can't keep a boyfriend.

mondobizarrro.bsky.social•4 hours ago

doesnt most of this terf shit literally come from a cis woman chaser getting rejected by a trans woman then slandering her feminist work for literal years? forgot names but this is like from the 70s

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