GLAAD has shown that these sorts of attacks have warped online discourse, turning focus away from discrimination and instead encouraging renewed debate about trans women’s bodies. Anti-trans activists have used social media to call out specific trans women who use women’s bathrooms, for instance, labeling them “predators” and “pedophiles,” and promising to resist them by any means necessary-be it pepper spray or pistol. On these sites and others, they use many of the same trolling tactics as other internet-based fringe political movements to disrupt conversation, skew reality, and make the internet another dangerous place for trans women through doxing and harassment. Anti-trans feminists have a presence in many mainstream online spaces, including Twitter, “radfem” Tumblr, the Black women’s beauty forum Lipstick Alley, and the British parenting forum Mumsnet. Nevertheless, this tiny group has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the past several years, in large part thanks to social-media platforms.
TERFs constitute “a minority of a minority of feminists,” says Grace Lavery, a UC Berkeley literature professor and writer. The name the community has chosen for itself is the somewhat more palatable “gender critical,” though, as other feminists often point out, that name means nothing all feminism is critical of gender. They had experienced the same guilt over breaking with their communities, and now they had one another.Īmong other online feminists, the common name for this group Fain found is “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or TERFs. These women were asking the same questions that she was, going through the same uncomfortable situations with their friends, feeling the same moment of disenchantment. “I first found the community while I was still looking for answers,” Fain said. Though she’d never had much use for social media before, on Reddit she found a forum-or “subreddit”-where tens of thousands of members, predominantly women, were devoted to the insistence that trans women are not women. Like many, Fain’s political transformation was helped along by the internet. Eventually, her beliefs radicalized further: She became convinced that trans women are men and trans-rights activism is just another weapon of the patriarchy. After volunteering at a domestic-violence shelter and experiencing an abusive relationship herself, she committed to some of the radical feminist ideology most often affiliated with the second-wave icon Andrea Dworkin, which is focused on the roots and prevalence of male violence.
In college, however, her ideas about feminism shifted. Growing up, she told me, she had a pretty standard set of progressive values-her primary focus was animal rights, and her feminism was reflexive, mainstream. Mary Kate Fain, a 27-year-old engineer and writer living in Houston, has always considered herself a feminist.
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