TERF Island - Lux Magazine

All of this paints a disturbing picture insofar as it tells us that feminist radicals have to fight other feminists and capitalism at the same time. But the recognition of what I propose we call “enemy feminism” is also liberating, because it means we can skip the stage of “calling in” people who are plainly more interested in upholding a version o... See more

In 2024, the anti-feminist right prefers to at least claim to have women’s equality at heart. By allying with transphobic feminists, they can have their cake and eat it too: avow support for women and still police them

writer Asa Seresin has put it, “the commitment to misery, to being a ‘bloody difficult woman’” (notably by mocking and blocking others’ attempts at self-actualization) supports stubborn anti-trans prejudice. To reinvent one’s gender identity is, for TERFs, a form of greedy individualism that holds so-called ordinary women in contempt

general decline of left-revolutionary feminism and corresponding growth of “female cultural nationalism” accompanied a gradual rise, by certain former radicals, to echelons of institutional and media privilege with seemingly endless column inches to spare for these women’s newfound anti-utopian cynicism and bitterness

I had already noticed, circa 2013, the gradual rise of a “völkisch environmentalism,” in which care for nature is tied to nativism, sexual traditionalism, and the muscular defense of territory

For the twenty-first-century feminist who has never heard of this schismatic moment and has perhaps swallowed the narrative that transphobia and biological essentialism were intrinsic to feminism’s Second Wave, reading the movement magazine the Lesbian Tide is an education

As feminist scholar Emma Heaney theorizes today, “Cisness is feminism’s counterrevolution.” The radical feminists who became TERFs chose a restrictive pessimism about what it is to be female, excluding trans women with the argument that only a “natal” female could understand the pain that lay at the heart of being a woman — anyone else was an infil... See more