As trans activists accrue cultural power and consolidate their territorial gains, their movement has begun the process of doing what all revolutionaries inevitably do: hunt down and punish dissenters. They aren’t being subtle about it, either.
But for breathtaking brazenness it is hard to beat a new pamphlet from the Cambridge Student Union’s Women’s Campaign, which advises students on how to identify heretics who still doubt that a man can become a woman simply by saying so. It is titled — subtly — “How to Spot TERF Ideology.” (TERF, for those of you who are new around here, means Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.)
The pamphlet opens by announcing that there are some women who are not welcome in the women’s movement because those women oppose men in the women’s movement: “Trans liberation is part of feminism. Fighting for autonomy and freedom must be a fight for everyone, and there should be no room for transphobia or TERFs in feminist organising.”
The 8-page pamphlet is full of tips for transgender allies such as “How to spot a TERF in the field” — one suspects they thought “in the wild” might be a bit too obvious. TERFs, the pamphlet says disapprovingly, often “self-refer … as ‘adult human female.’” (The nerve of those broads, amirite?) They also note that TERFs may refer to incidents of sexual assault by biological males on women in female bathrooms, which is apparently a transphobic thing to do (although I’m not sure that makes the point they think it makes).
