Thread by @SiobhanFTB

On the heels of Twitter's indulgence in the TERF campaign to silence trans people using the term, we get several well networked Philosophy gatekeepers calling for the retraction of a paper that describes the term's utility as propaganda.

Let me tell you about Brenda.

In the fallout of the protest against uniformed police participation in #YEGPride the Pride festival attempted to host a town hall on how to collect feedback through their community engagement committee on what to do next.

If you followed along the #YEGPride protest you might be confused, as the pride festival accepted the protest's demands. Well, the festival "taking feedback" now, make of that what you will. Anyway, so, the town hall.

The moderator makes a mistake and invites the conversation to drift away from how to structure a feedback collection process and towards airing people's grievances about the protest instead.

Brenda--not her real name--uses her speaking opportunity to argue that the reason the festival's leadership is whiter than wonderbread is because "no qualified black people have applied."

She said this in a room with at least 3 black people who I KNOW have applied.

Brenda would swear up and down that she's "not racist"--indeed, she was given the microphone on the condition that she would check her prejudice at the door--yet she used her speaking time to say that all the black people in the room were too stupid for leadership.

I know Brenda's type. If I had broken the rules of the space to point out that she had broken the rules of the space, she would have been absolutely apoplectic at being called racist. Oh the caterwauling and gnashing of teeth we would have endured.

What does Brenda have to do with the word TERF? I mean, aside from the fact that being a racist asshole correlates very highly with being a transphobic asshole? I'm glad you asked.

See, Brenda's objection to *being called* racist is exactly the same objection TERFs have to being called TERFs. Brenda obviously doesn't care about not *being* racist, given what she thought was important to say. She cares about her opinion being labelled for the bigotry it is.

The constituent elements of TERF, that is, "trans exclusionary radical feminist," are not slurs.

It is descriptive of an ideological position that starts with widely accepted feminist premises, that are sent through a funhouse mirror radicalization process, to conclude that the exclusion of trans people (from public life, employment, and legality) is the key to liberation.

The ideology described is plainly nasty on its face, supporting *at its most charitable* the Jim Crow-esque segregation of trans people, and at its worst the withholding of life-saving medicine from people who need it, a sort of genocide by inaction.

Obviously someone subjected to the subscribers of this ideology may struggle from time to time to use the term in a strictly emotionless term. After all, TERF intentions range from segregationist to murderous. It's rational and normal to be upset by this.

And yet.

And yet...

That trans people might be emotional about a radicalized stalker cult who threaten us through a myriad of strategies is cited as the primary argument for deeming this descriptive term a "slur."

Let me be clear: White supremacists similarly invoke words like "liberal" and "Muslim" with enough contempt to curdle milk. That doesn't mean these terms are per se slurs. It wouldn't be reasonable to start censoring them, because white supremacists are shitheads about them.

This is about control and domination, as is all TERFism. This is about making it onerous to name and describe an organized effort to marginalize trans people in a way that lots of people outside of the issue wouldn't recognise.

The exact same talking points out of an evangelical could be seen as suspicious by ignorant moderates, yet accepted when they come from TERFs, because the TERFs are cloaking their authority in the trappings of (most often) academia and women's liberation.

If trans people can't document these specific strategies, we lose a critical means of organizing against it.

They call themselves radical feminists. They believe the exclusion of trans people, trans women especially, from public accommodations, from legal recognition, and from life-saving healthcare, is necessary for women's liberation.

They're trans exclusionary radical feminists.

They're TERFs. And their complaint about the term being a slur is ripped straight from evangelical Christians for the exact same reasons, the ones I listed above.

transadvocate.com/are-misogynist…

Philosophers would do well to resist the ideological colonization of this moral and intellectual bankruptcy into their practice.

The paper they've tried to have retracted is here, and the author has also done a youtube video for those that prefer watching/listening

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1034601963994992640

Sorry, the counter-campaign "TERF is a slur" as propaganda. Alas, no edit button.