#terf tactics
I feel so incredibly isolated from wlw and sapphic culture on this site, much less so than I do to queer women I meet in real life. There are just so many attitudes that I do not share or even find dangerous and abhorant, so many experiences I do not share, and so many assumptions I do not share that I just feel constantly out of place.
I see these weird echoes of old political movements I thought had died out, puritanical patriarchy, and a seductive form of gender essentualism all rolled up into normative wlw discourse on this site, and it makes me a little batty.
For me, the stand out bits are on the mild end the idea that lesbians, or more rarely women dating other women, naturally center their lives around women and that this makes them better feminists, and on the extreme end, the idea that women’s relationships with other women are pure and wonderful and if you say or imply otherwise, you have internalized misogyny or lesphobia or are otherwise self hating.
The former bugs me because there are a lot of terrible assumptions underlying it, and it kicks certain queer women under the bus. Not only of course does it give bi women in relationships with men the shaft (and I see it a lot as a way some lesbian women claim superiority over their bisexual sisters) but what about the lesbian women for whom the most important person in their life is their young son or their disabled brother? Are they less lesbian, less sapphic, less feminist for it?
And then there’s the underlying idea that women either do or should center their lives around their romantic partners. Society of course teaches us this is exactly the way it’s supposed to be, while not expecting the same of men. We never for example say that a straight man’s life is naturally centered about women and their needs, and so is innately more feminist. That idea is rightly viewed as ridiculous. Centering your life around a romantic partner is neither healthy or safe, and certainly not an innate part of being a woman, and there is nothing especially feminist about absorbing this particular piece of gender essentualism into our community attitudes. My life is centered around me. It is after all, my life. And it was my straight grandmother and mother, both of whom are feminists, who raised me to know that I had the right to be the center of my own existence. That remains the same no matter the gender of anyone else I choose to have in my life, and it has no relationship to my sexuality.
On the more extreme end, the idea that women’s relationships with other women are always pure is pretty horrifying to me. I was abused by another girl. As a child, most of the worst bullies I faced were other girls, and most of my adult abusers were women. Women are not pure. Women are human. And there are some women, including queer women and sapphic women, who really suck. Abuse is about power. Abusers pick victims, who for one reason or another, they have power over. Because of the patriarchy, men are much more likely to have power over women than the reverse, but that is not universal. Women abuse men. Men abuse other men, people of all genders abuse people of all genders, and yes, women abuse women, within romantic relationships as well as without. The idea that women are better, that men are naturally more violent and brutal, is downright Victorian, and absolutely sexist and an artifact of the patriarchy. The idea that there is no abuse in women’s queer relationships, or between women more generally, helps and protects abusers. It tells women who were abused by other women that their experiences are not valid. Part of this unwillingness to admit to abuse within the community is the stereotype of the predatory queer woman, and the fears that admitting that yes, there is abuse in this community, just like there is in any community made up of humans, is saying yes, the straights are right about us, we are innately abusive. And undoubtably there will be straight people who see it that way, but those are straight people who were always going to see us as predatory, and I am not willing to silence victims for them. No woman should ever be made to feel as if they are betraying the community for coming forward with their abuse.
Even aside from abuse, women’s relationships with other women can be messy, even toxic. They can be loving, and screwed up, marked by selfishness and jealousy, and comfort and safety. They are relationships between human beings. And no one should be made to feel ashamed, or like they are letting down the community because their relationship isn’t perfect. I know it’s easy when society tells us our relationships are wrong and unnatural, to say “no, they are perfect,” and that it is much less satisfying to say “no, they are just as flawed and messy and potentially wonderful as any other.” But in the long run, allowing ourselves to be honest is vital to keeping ourselves safe and supporting each other. And this is exactly what we are not doing on this site. And I’m tired of it. I’m tired of wlw and sapphic positivity just making me feel isolated and adrift.
Somebody liked this recently, and seeing the like in my notes reminded me of this post, and while I still agree with everything I said here, it struck me rereading this that all of the things I was mentioning as alienating are in fact gateway terf rhetoric, And it’s not at all a coincidence either that I would find it alienating, or that it would be gender essentialist and secretly regressive and reactionary.
It’s also not a coincidence that this particular rhetoric was common in the young sapphic community, especially the lesbian community, not because terfs are more likely to be lesbians, or because lesbians are particularly vulnerable to terfdom or transphobia more broadly, but because this particular set of gateway rhetoric is tailored to target young lesbians in particular, and young wlw more broadly, especially those without an offline queer community.
It’s also not at all surprising that nothing I talked about four years ago had anything explicitly to do with trans people, or had overt bigotry in it of any kind. This is the gateway rhetoric. They don’t want you to see where they’re going with it, until they’ve got you buying into it already.
Hate movements, cults, and abusive relationships all work in similar ways. And yes, it is both ironic and incredibly predictable that part of drawing young sapphic, especially lesbian women into an abusive dynamic, would be convincing them that that the people doing this to them, as women, as feminists, as other wlw, could never abuse them. There is nothing an abuser likes more.
But anyway, hate groups, cults, and abusive relationships all work in similar ways. They never start out with the pain. They start out with “love bombing”. Typically when we talk about love bombing, we’re talking about cults, But hate groups and abusers do the same thing. The goal is to get you to see the group/abuser as a source for affirmation and comfort. Then, they isolate you, so they are your only source for affirmation and comfort. It’s only after they’ve gotten you both hooked and trapped that they start hurting you. And since they’re your only source for comfort and affirmation, when they hurt you, you go back to them for comfort for the hurt they caused. This is part of what makes it so very hard to leave.
This is a lot easier for an in person abuser or cult leader to pull off, than it is for an amorphous online hate movement like terfs (or not coincidentally, the alt-right), because when there is no formal structure, offline monitoring of members, or group you can be kicked out of, the movement has to rely on you, prospective member, to isolate yourself. But lucky for them, there is a handy mechanism for just that: increasingly nasty rhetoric that if you start using, will drive others away from you, leaving you with no one but the hate group and the other people on the road to hate.
The fact that this rhetoric at first has no overt bigotry in it serves several useful purposes. Firstly, it makes it easy to swallow for people who don’t want to see themselves as bigots. Two, it means that it’s really easy for anyone who finds the rhetoric appealing to dismiss the people who see it and smell a rat. Thirdly, and this is the most insidious, it means that the gateway rhetoric may just catch some members of the group that the hate group targets, who can be deployed as useful shields. How many times have you seen someone point out online that a post is kinda terfy, only for the poster to respond, “how dare you, I am a trans woman, how dare you call me a terf?” This is why that happens. That trans woman is swimming at the surface of the sea of terf rhetoric, unaware of just how deep it goes, and though she’s unlikely to sink deeper, while she is there, she is a useful sheild for the very people who hate her.
So how does this gateway rhetoric draw in future terfs? How does this pipeline work? Very simply, it serves the cause of all hate groups, that when a hate group starts doing that affirmation and comfort thing, they affirm their potential recruit for what they are, not who they are, In this case as women (by which they mean cis women, though they won’t say so this early), and in this specific pathway, as lesbians, and to a lesser degree, wlw more generally. This is of course why I was seeing this particular rhetoric so commonly in positivity posts, Because of course it’s love bombing, but it’s specifically love bombing you for how you fit into a category. And as part of this category, you are better than other people.
Once you have swallowed the sweet sugared pill, the “group I am part of is better than other groups,” pill, It’s not hard to accept the corollary, other groups are worse than my group. That’s why the next step in this pipeline is to talk about why men suck, about how the patriarchy and the systems of oppression that exploit and/or persecute everybody who doesn’t belong to an arbitrary and socialy constructed category of maleness, didn’t come about because of historical and societal factors, but instead because men innately oppress women, That this is natural to men, inherent to them, as opposed to like every other system of oppression, a social construct.
This is where a lot more people start actually recognizing the terf rhetoric when they see it and calling it out, which can do one of two things, depending on the person hearing it, and how emotionally invested they have become in this narrative. Either it can snap them out of it, and keep them from going any deeper as they say to themselves, “wait these people are right holy crap,” or it can make that person go deeper, to respond to the criticism with reintrenchment, and to view the person doing the criticizing as an enemy, not to be trusted, isolating themselves further.
And once they’ve gotten you to accept that men innately oppress women, because men as men are naturally bad and cruel, It’s easy to say that men are not only naturally bad and cruel, but biologically programmed to be bad and cruel, and that by men, we mean assigned male at birth. And then it’s easy to say that trans women are men, they are bad and cruel, and the only reason they would “pretend” to be women is to appropriate female oppression, infiltrate women’s spaces, to do what all men want to do, which is victimize “real” women and girls. And now you’re at full blown terfdom.
There are many gateways into terfdom, just as there are many gateways into white supremacy. This particular gateway is tailored to appeal to young lesbians, but there are other gateways, targetted to appeal to many other groups of women. It’s not a coincidence that this rhetoric has embedded in it retrogressive and reactionary gender essentialist views about womanhood and manhood, and frankly disregards any genders outside of those two completely. Terf ideology is retrogressive, reactionary, and gender essentialist, and getting a potential recruit to adopt that framework, is the first step in turning that potential recruit into an actual recruit.
Four years later, I look back on this post about about common ideas that I found troubling, that left me feeling alienated from my community, and now I see something much more insidious and dangerous even than I realized back then, the signs of a concerted effort by a hate group to recruit in my community.
