Gender-critical feminism
[31] Smythe has also been credited with having coined the acronym "TERF", due to a blog post she wrote reacting to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival's policy of denying admittance to trans women.
[33] Mauro Cabral Grinspan, Ilana Eloit, David Paternotte and Mieke Verloo describe "gender-critical feminism" as a "self-definition by some individuals and groups labelled TERFs" and argue that the term is problematic because it serves to rebrand anti-trans activism.
[51] The term has been adopted by Donald Trump and was used in an executive order titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government", which seeks to erase official recognition of transgender people and roll back their protections.
[58] Others argue that expectations of one's assigned sex are something enforced upon them, beginning at early socialization, and transgender youth, especially gender-nonconforming children, often experience different, worse treatment involving reprisals for their deviation therefrom.
[60] In The Transsexual Empire (1979), feminist Janice Raymond denounces the act of transition as "rape", by virtue of "reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves".
[64]: 167 In a response to remarks by Elizabeth Grosz, philosopher Eva Hayward characterized this type of view as telling trans people who have had sex reassignment surgery: "Don't exist.
[83] Gender-critical campaign groups in the United Kingdom such as Sex Matters have described the provision of gender-affirming care for transgender youth as "modern conversion therapy" which erases gay identities and argued it should be criminalized.
[84][85][86] Trans-exclusionary radical feminists in France campaigned against a ban on conversion therapy arguing that most transgender teenagers assigned female at birth aren't really trans.
[97] Jean O'Leary publicly denounced Sylvia Rivera as "parodying womanhood" and Lesbian Feminist Liberation distributed flyers seeking to keep "female impersonators" off the stage.
[100] Raymond maintained that this was based in the "patriarchal myths" of "male mothering", and "making of woman according to man's image", and that transgender identity aimed "to colonize feminist identification, culture, politics and sexuality".
[12] Jinsook Kim has noted that "in Korean contexts, there have been increasing concerns over popular forms of feminism based on a strong female identity rooted in notions of biological sex, the pursuit of female-only and -first politics, and the refusal of solidarity with other social minority groups".
[114] In 2019, the LGB Alliance was founded in opposition to Stonewall, accusing the organization of having "undermined women's sex-based rights and protections" and attempting "to introduce confusion between biological sex and the notion of gender".
[116][117] A 2020 paper in SAGE Open said that "the case against trans inclusion in the United Kingdom has been presented primarily through social media and blog-type or journalistic online platforms lacking the traditional prepublication checks of academic peer review".
The resolution further deplored "the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people that have been occurring for several years in, among other countries, Hungary, Poland, the Russian Federation, Turkey and the United Kingdom".
Earlier that year, Forstater's consulting contract for the Centre for Global Development was not renewed after she made a number of social media posts saying that men cannot change into women.
In May 2021 the case was found by the court to be unarguable, Justice Henshaw stating that "the claimant has shown no arguable reason to believe the Code has misled or will mislead service providers about their responsibilities under the Act".
The tribunal ruled that she had been constructively unfairly dismissed, and that she had suffered victimisation and harassment in the form of an open letter from 386 of her colleagues, as well as individual disparagement for her views, including one professor comparing her to "the racist uncle at the Christmas table".
[146] In August 2024, Cambridgeshire County Council conceded that it had discriminated against Lizzie Pitt, a social worker, by initiating a disciplinary process against her following her gender-critical statements made at an LGBT support group.
[1] Gender studies scholars Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur have noted that TERFism started out as a fringe group among English speaking cultural feminists in the 1970s that grew rapidly due to media exposure.
[33] Mauro Cabral Grinspan, Ilana Eloit, David Paternotte and Mieke Verloo dislike the expression "gender-critical feminism", saying that it allows trans-exclusionary feminists to rebrand transphobic activism.
[34] Abbie E. Goldberg argues that "trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) has contained similar cisnormative arguments to those of social conservatives, promoting vilification of people with a trans lived experience in the guise of so-called gender-critical feminism" and that "this TERF approach has been used to promote exclusionary and discriminatory legislation, such as prohibiting equal access to public toilets and the right to be treated in accordance with one's gender in workplaces, accommodations, and public venues".
[155] Claire Thurlow writes that "despite efforts to obscure the point, gender critical feminism continues to rely on transphobic tropes, moral panics and essentialist understandings of men and women.
[156] Heron Greenesmith of Political Research Associates, an American liberal think tank, has said that the latest iteration of collaboration between conservatives and anti-transgender feminists is in part a reaction to the trans community's "incredible gains" in civil rights and visibility, and that anti-trans feminists and conservatives capitalize on a "scarcity mindset rhetoric" whereby civil rights are portrayed as a limited commodity and must be prioritized to cisgender women over other groups.
[156] Bev Jackson, one of the founders of the LGB Alliance, has argued in contrast that "working with The Heritage Foundation is sometimes the only possible course of action" since "the leftwing silence on gender in the US is even worse than in the UK".
[5] In a 2021 paper in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Hil Malatino of Pennsylvania State University said that "'gender-critical' feminism" in the US has "begun to build coalition with the evangelical Right around the legal codification of sex as a biological binary" and that "popular news media frames transphobia as part of a rational, enlightened, pragmatic response to what is variously called the 'trans lobby' and the 'cult of trans'".
"[13] Cilia Williams et al. noted in an article on gender critical feminist discourse in Spain that "anti-trans narratives online [...] use attacks, misinformation, and self-defence as a communication strategy, rather than debate or dialogue.
[citation needed] Kathleen Lowrey, who had allegedly been fired from her additional position as associate chair of undergraduate programs for the department of anthropology at the University of Alberta after displaying gender-critical posters on her office door, teaching gender-critical material in class, and showing up halfway through a student-run queer anthology event to start arguments about "the existence and validity of trans people with a trans man in the room",[165][166] published a paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior saying that she found it particularly distressing that "almost all of my most enthusiastic public attackers were feminist academic women" and that gender-critical feminists "root their analysis in the materiality of biological sex and take the oppression of women to be linked to the control of reproduction.
Noting that she had interviewed 50 feminist academics in gender studies with a range of views on the subject, Favaro stated "my discussions left me in no doubt that a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold across universities in England, and many countries beyond".
[169] Favaro later began discrimination proceedings against City, University of London, stating she had been "ostracised at her workplace and denied access to her research data" after the publication of her article.
[173] In 2021, the Council of Europe Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination published a report titled Combating rising hate against LGBTI people in Europe, which condemned "the highly prejudicial anti-gender, gender-critical and anti-trans narratives which reduce the fight for the equality of LGBTI people to what these movements deliberately mischaracterise as 'gender ideology' or 'LGBTI ideology'" and which said there was "a direct link between heteronormativity and heterosexism, on the one hand, and the growing anti-gender and gender-critical movements".
