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What is intersectionality?
What is intersectionality?
Intersectionality is the intersection (get it?) between different marginalized communities, including women, LGBTQ+ people, BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) people, etc. Systems of oppression are interconnected, and cause different sorts of oppression depending on what groups a person is a part of. For example, a white woman and a black woman receive two different types of misogyny because of their differences in race. Intersectionality is so, so important for young feminists to be aware of, especially white, cis, and straight feminists. There is a certain brand of white cis feminism that can feel very separated from the BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+ people (predominantly trans people). Feminism is the theory that will be used to deconstruct the patriarchy, but to do that, we must be able to protect all women, not just white, cis, and straight women.
Content warnings: transphobia, TERFs, talk about rape and sexual assault, racism
Some Definitions Before We Begin
Some Definitions Before We Begin
Cis: A person that identifies with their assigned gender at birth (AGAB)
Trans: A person that identifies with a gender that does not match their sex
Non-binary: A person that does not fully identify with the gender binary
AFAB: Assigned female at birth
AMAB: Assigned male at birth
Transmisogyny: The intersection of misogyny and transphobia
Transfeminism: The intersection of transness and feminism
BIPOC: Black, indigenous, and people of color
What are TERFs?
What are TERFs?
You might have heard this word thrown around a lot on the internet, especially in LGBTQ+ spaces. But what does this actually mean? TERF stands for "Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists," and, to put it simply, TERFs use feminism as a cover to be transphobic. Many say that they are simply "concerned for women's safety," but they fail to recognize that trans women are women. TERFs, as a group, really began with Janice Raymond’s 1979 book The Transexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. It was the first to frame trans women as "appropriating" women's bodies. She explicitly states that she wants trans people to essentially not exist—and that while it's impossible to stop trans people all at once, by gatekeeping medicine and other more subtle practices, trans women will slowly begin to not exist.
This is the TERF rhetoric:
This is the TERF rhetoric:
"All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves...Rape, although it is usually done by force, can also be accomplished by deception. It is significant that in the case of the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist, he [sic] is able to gain entrance and a dominant position in women's spaces because the women involves do not know he [sic] is transsexual" (Raymond, 1994, 104).
Videos talking about transphobia and TERFs:
Videos talking about transphobia and TERFs:
"Bigotry is backlash."
"Bigotry is backlash."
(The Anatomy of Prejudices by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl)
Here is the thing: bigotry is usually defensive. It's usually backlash against evolving social norms and progression, and it's all very reactionary. TERFs feel threatened by the progression of trans rights, especially surrounding trans women. Cis men that are transphobic tend to be very uncomfortable in their masculinity, and they tend to be afraid that by being interested in trans women, their sexuality is in jeopardy. We can see this type of backlash with other social movements, as well. For example, All Lives Matter as a response to Black Lives Matter, or men's rights activists as a response to feminism.
Understanding Bigotry—Anti-Trans Dog Whistles
Understanding Bigotry—Anti-Trans Dog Whistles
Understanding bigotry is, in my opinion, the best way to beat it. There's a lot of obvious bigotry—slurs, open contempt, discrimination, hate crimes, et cetera—but a lot of people overlook more subtle red flags. For most people, it's just that they don't notice these things, but for people in marginalized groups, these red flags, or dog whistles, are pretty apparent. There are two purposes to dog whistles—to scare those they are targeting and to find others like them. The more the larger public knows about these dog whistles, the less power hate groups hold.
[Quoting from this post]
TERFs hide in plain sight. it is not unusual for a TERF to put “TERFs DNI” or “TME” (transmisogyny exempt) in their bios. In fact, some joke that “TME” stands for “transmisogyny enthusiast.” They do this in order to avoid being reported and banned. They also do this in order to trick people into feeling safe and following them. That way, more people will be exposed to transmisogynist rhetoric.
Just because someone has “they/them” in their bio does not mean they are not a TERF. Nonbinary people can be TERFs. Gender non-conforming women can be TERFs. Don’t let pronouns lull you into a false sense of security.
Crypto-TERFs are a thing. These are people who TERFs, but avoid sharing posts containing direct rhetoric so as to not be detected as transmisogynists. Someone might have a page full of pretty pictures and art, but when you look at who they’re sharing that art from, it becomes very clear that they endorse those beliefs. They also serve as a bridge between the TERF community and social media at large. You may follow someone because they share poems or art, and then feel inclined to check out the pages they got that content from. This is deliberate recruitment tactic.
TERFs will sometimes have an about page or a pinned post insisting that they “aren’t a TERF” and “support trans people” but then proceed to write THE most transphobic garbage after it. The idea is to have someone skim the text, read the “not a TERF” part, and move on, while the rest of the text is intended to signal to other TERFs that they are, in fact, a TERF.
Here is a short list of common TERF dog whistles prevalent in social media:
“Gender critical”
“Biological women” or “adult human females”
Biological and anatomical signifiers such as “XX” (denoting chromosomes) and parts of reproductive anatomy are highlighted or given excessive attention
“RadFem” or “radical feminism” after its origins in parts of the feminist ‘second wave’ and its opposition to what it sees as “liberal feminist” positions of trans inclusion, although in reality there’s nothing “radical” about biological essentialism.
TERFs are radfems. Radfems are anti-sex work, lesbian separatists, bioessentialists, and misogynists. They spend a lot of time attacking other women for shaving or wearing makeup, for doing sex work, for dating men, and doing other things they personally disagree with. They also believe that men are inherently predatory.
Some TERFs attempt to take trans people out of the LGBTQ+ community, so phrases like the "LBG community" and "Drop the T" are common among TERFs
Calling transness “transgender lobby” or “cult of transgenderism”; sometimes, they will describe transness as a "social contagion" or any other type of disease metaphor
They often dislike the term “cis” (non-trans), and argue that the term ‘terf’ itself is “hate speech”, or a “misogynistic/lesbophobic slur”
TERF discourse tends to put a focus on not trans people as people, but as force
They use the common propaganda argument that most people do—"What about the children?"
They put a lot of focus and make a lot of misinformation about trans children specifically
Another TERF favorite is talking about how trans women are just pretending to be trans in order to invade cis women's spaces
Use of this emoji 🏁 ("only two genders")
Salem witch trial references ("we’re the daughters you didn’t burn")
Ex/former TRA (trans rights activists)
Febfem ("female exclusive bisexual” - TERFs who consider all trans men and transmascs to be women/female)
“Genderists” referring to transgender people
Womyn - may seem obvious, but almost the only people who spell “woman” or “women” as “womyn” (or variants such as “wombyn”) are radical feminists
Females and males - if the person is a TERF and they don’t call women ‘womyn,’ it’s likely that they refer to people as ‘females’ and ‘males’ instead of as women and men.
Natal woman / woman born woman - “woman born woman” means “a woman who was born as a woman (for the people who say this, that means someone who was born with ‘female parts’), not a nasty male invader who thinks he’s a woman”
TIM and TIF - means “transgender identified male” (referring to trans women) and “transgender identified female” (referring to trans men)
There are many more, but these are the most prevalent and most used ones.
Examples of these dog whistles in action
Examples of these dog whistles in action
So, that's a lot of dog whistles. But let's take a look at how people have used them online. These are all taken from known TERF J.K. Rowling (yes, that J.K. Rowling) in her essay titled "TERF Wars".
She admits to liking both Maya Forstater's tweet and following Magdalen Berns, both of whom have said extremely transphobic things. In Forstater's case, I do not believe in persecution by proxy, but Rowling also describes Berns as "an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumor" and "a great believer in the importance of biological sex."
Here are a few of Magdalen Bern's tweets:
"Speaking as a biological woman..." and "Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women." Both of these quotes are red flags, as they attempt to separate "biological women" from trans women and indirectly misgender trans men.
"Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up. Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children." This is an example of the "What about the children?" argument.
"The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both." Again, the "What about the children?" argument. Also, not the use of the word "concern." This is a form of indirect bigotry that slips under the radar for most people, and it's applied a lot of the times in other forms, such as "concern" about black people and drugs or "concern" about Jewish people and money.
"Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers." This sounds like a dramatic change, but to quote Natalie Wynn, a transgender woman that runs the channel ContraPoints, "You have to keep in mind that 10 years ago only 32 assigned female patients under 18 were referred, and by last year that number was 1,740 with the biggest increase happening five years ago—you know, the "transgender tipping point" year. So that is a big increase, but it corresponds to the biggest ever increase in trans visibility, so it does make sense, and there's 11 million children in the UK, so let's say 5.5 million girls, and 1,740 is 0.03% of that, and considering that around 1% of adults are some kind of transgender, 0.03% of kids is not really an alarming number to me."
"The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said: ‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’" Here, we can see the terminology of transness as a disease or a contagion.
"The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred." Here, she talks about trans men in a strange sort of way that equates a list of mental illnesses and traits to being trans. She also projects a lot of herself on trans men, talking about her sexist and abusive father. The nuance to this situation is that most TERFs have been hurt a lot by cis men, but it is never an excuse to be part of a hate group that targets minorities.
"But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning." While I will admit that perhaps "menstruators" is not the best description, that only points to an absence in our terminology, not the faults of trans people.
"So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe." Two red flags here—the "at the same time" is very much the big but people will use when they pretend to take one factor into account but really only care about their point; and the use of the term "natal girls and women."
"When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside." Claiming that trans women are lying about their identities, repeats the TERF rhetoric of trans women as predators.
She also tweeted this picture, which is in referral to the Salem witch trials, one of the TERF dog whistles listed to the left:
*Note the promotion of a store that uses the term "womyn" as well.
One last thing about her: her newest book, Troubled Blood, depicts a cis man dressing up as a woman in order to invade women's spaces to rape and kill them, something that she has repeated rhetoric about trans women. Also, she writes it under the pen name Robert Galbraith, who was an anti-LGBTQ+ conversion therapist. She does deny that he is who she took the name from, but the resemblance is a red flag.
The Red Pill
The Red Pill
The red pill is a term often used to describe the journey into becoming a Nazi, how one is sucked in, and how one is surrounded by the rhetoric that keeps them in. The fact of the matter is that all the things that TERFs assign to trans women that make them "not women"—thick or "excessive" body hair, broader muscles, “masculine” facial features like angular jaws and deep voices, being taller than “average”, having receding hairlines, et cetera—are all features that fit many women of color, particularly black women. This is why they are accused of having more testosterone or not being "real women". TERF ideologies are the gateway to white supremacy.
Emily Gorcenski [Source], an activist that studies the progression of white nationalism says,
“A TERF is a white supremacist whose gateway to white supremacy is anti-trans bigotry, instead of anti-Semitism or anti-Blackness or anti-migration or misogyny. As with any gateway, many people engaging in this ideology may not be aware of their proximity to white supremacy. This is the standard radicalization pathway that we have seen over and over and over with, for example, anti-Islamic sentiment. Personally, [I] find it is most comparable to how anti-Semitism gateways are used. Often, we see white supremacists exploiting legitimate grievances with the financial systems by turning into an anti-Semitic issue. White supremacists take legitimately frustrated and class-oppressed people’s anger at banks, and carefully plant the seeds of anti-Semitism. They’ll point out the irrefutable fact that there exist Jewish people in executive positions in banking and vilely twist this. TERFs take a legitimate grievance: patriarchal oppression of women and homophobia and turn it into a movement based on systematic exclusion of a specific class of people. This is the redpill. [We] need to stop the good-faith engagements with their ideology and start treating it like the gateway to white supremacy that it is.”
The Harm of White Feminism
The Harm of White Feminism
The truth of the matter is that while white women are oppressed by misogyny, black, indigenous, and other women of color face a much different type of misogyny. BIPOC women face the intersection between white supremacy and misogyny. White women sit in a very strange place when it comes to politics. They are oppressed by misogyny, yes, but too often, white women will tap into their whiteness in order to maintain the picture of innocence. White women are perceived as innocent, and throughout history, they have learned that by trading someone else's bodily autonomy (most notably, black women's), their proximity to power is allowed to remain theirs. But really, what does that do? It isolates white women, and it places them in an echo chamber where they can never be held accountable for their place in white supremacy. Historically, even when white women were fighting for equal rights, it was not equal rights for everyone. The 19th Amendment didn't allow all women to vote, just white ones.
"You're so exotic."
"You're so exotic."
This is what so many BIPOC women hear from white men, and at every turn, from entertainment to social media to art, we are sexualized and fetishized, and that has real life consequences. Although I'm going to focus on Asian women, the fetishization of people of color extends far beyond just Asian women. Indigenous women are "tribal," black women are "aggressive and hypersexual," Asian women are "mysterious and exotic," and anyone that you can't tell the race of at first is similarly "exotic."
But as an Asian person, and as a person who saw the news of the Atlanta shooting several weeks ago, I saw the fetishization of people with my features and people that could have been me being shot and killed because of that fetishization. Robert Aaron Long claimed that he killed eight people, six of which were Asian women, because of his "sex addiction" and because he had to "eliminate a temptation," because he was having a "bad day." And this directly relates to how people view Asian women. As soon as the news broke, some people already linked the beauty parlors and massage parlors with prostitution, showing just how far these preconceived notions go in America's subconscious.
With Asian women, “there’s this construction of a being for others, and a being for the white man, usually, that were in these drawings and films and other cultural materials, that really extends to the way that we are capable of giving voice to this gunman who says that he was ‘sexually addicted to the temptations’ that [these Asian workers] offered,” Parreñas Shimizu told Vox. Meanwhile, “the Asian women who were killed were essentially silenced.”
Throughout entertainment, Asian women have been temptresses, prostitutes, and otherwise inherently sexual. Think of the plays The Good Woman of Szechuan in the 1880s or Madame Butterfly in 1904. This makes us be something other than human. These movies and plays and entertainment—they dehumanize us to the point that we can be called "temptations" or part of a man's "addiction." This extends further than just one hate crime, though. Think of the amount of white men that brought back Asian "prizes" from World War II or the Vietnam War. Think of the fox eye trend. Think of the way we are seen as "submissive" or "docile".
Here is the thing: the picture of who Asians are has always been what America wants us to be. When black people are protesting for their rights, were the race that has successfully assimilated into white America. When the United States was at war with Japan, or when they talk about China these days, we're the yellow fever, we're dangerous, we're sexual, we're spies and tricksters and prostitutes. We're the dragon ladies and exotic flowers one moment and the model minority the next. Asians have always been seen as what the United States promoted us as.
A Country Built on the Backs of Black Women
A Country Built on the Backs of Black Women
The United States was built on the backs and bodies of black women. Black people were the slaves of white colonies, and as the slaves, they did all the labor that made the economy run. Black women were raped and forced to have children to keep building the new world, and so they were the ones that built this country. This article and Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers' book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South talk more about white women's role in slavery and the slave trade.
And when have black women ever been included in feminism? Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the founders of the feminist movement was a liberal racist that abandoned helping the Civil Rights movement in favor of white feminism and made vitriolic attacks against immigrants, the working class, and Black people in her writing and speeches. Faye Dudden, a historian wrote that Stanton, "dipped her pen into a tincture of white racism and sketched a reference to a nightmarish figure, the black rapist," and lashed out from the pages of the suffragist paper that she and Anthony published. Even the 19th Amendment didn't give all women the right to vote, not with segregation and Jim Crow laws not letting black people vote. White women in the suffrage scene were racist and classist, and so the movement took on similar hues. From marches to music scenes to politics, black women were not included in feminism, and while they created new movements like womanism to accommodate, feminism is still the most prevalent social movement for women, and it still carries the hues of its history.
The Pride movement was similarly brought about by Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender gay drag queen that began Stonewall, the event that really kicked off the Pride movement in the public eye. It was other black trans people that brought about the Pride movement as well, from drag to camp to marches and riots like Stonewall.
And yet. And yet it is black people, specifically black trans people, that are not included in feminism, not represented or honored in Pride (whether in entertainment or on the news), and they are still the ones disproportionately targeted by the police. The life expectancy for black trans people is still from 30-35 years. The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) says, "Transgender people who have done sex work or participated in underground economies often report elevated levels of police violence—this includes 16% of all trans people, 34% of Latino/a trans people, and 53% of Black trans people. Trans people who have done street economy work are more than twice as likely to report physical assaults by police officers and four times as likely to report sexual assault by police." In 2020 alone, there have been 44 fatal shootings of trans or gender non-conforming people, the majority of them being black or Latina women. Read their names and their stories here.
This is not how the people who built our country should be treated. This is why intersectionality is something we all must be aware of. Because this is not equality.
Dismantling Bigotry
Dismantling Bigotry
Dismantling bigotry will take more than just this article. It will take more than just learning about these things, and it may take more work than I can conceivably do. But every form of bigotry intersects. From transphobia to white supremacy to misogyny, every from of oppression compliments each other in a web we have all been working to untangle for decades.
But this can be a start.
Here is a link to resources to help abolish anti trans bills. Here is a donation center to the Marsha P. Johnson institute, which protects black trans people. Here is a donation center to the Okra Project, which donates food to black trans people. Here is a card full of information and resources to help trans people. Here is an AAPI donation fund, and here is a carrd full of resources to help the AAPI community. Here is another GoFundMe to protect Asian lives. Here is a carrd with resources to help and donate to BIPOC sex workers.
I know that even that amount of links can feel overwhelming, but if you have the money, please do donate to a few of them. We begin to dismantle bigotry when we can see it in from of us and start eliminating it.
This page on disabilities was done by our Resources Officer, Aris Pastor. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, etc. you can reach them at apastor2@nastudents.org.
Bibliography
Bibliography
"Blueprint for Equality: A Transgender Federal Agenda for the Next Presidential Administration and Congress." National Center for Transgender Equality, Oct. 2016, www.transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/resources/NCTE%20Federal%20Blueprint%202016%20web_0.pdf. Accessed 26 Apr. 2021.
"Fatal Violence against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2020." Human Rights Campaign, 2020, www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-trans-and-gender-non-conforming-community-in-2020. Accessed 26 Apr. 2021.
Gender Critical | ContraPoints. Produced by Natalie Wynn, 2019.
Gorcenski, Emily (@EmilyGorcenski). "A TERF is a white supremacist whose gateway to white supremacy is anti-trans bigotry..." Jan 23, 2019. Tweet.
J.K. Rowling | ContraPoints. Produced by Natalie Wynn, 2021.
North, Anna. "How White Women's 'investment' in Slavery Has Shaped America Today." Vox, 19 Aug. 2019, www.vox.com/2019/8/19/20807633/slavery-white-women-stephanie-jones-rogers-1619. Accessed 26 Apr. 2021.
Ramirez, Rachel. "The History of Fetishizing Asian Women." Vox, 19 Mar. 2021, www.vox.com/22338807/asian-fetish-racism-atlanta-shooting. Accessed 26 Apr. 2021.
Rowling, J. K. "TERF Wars." J.K.Rowling.com, 10 June 2020, www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/. Accessed 26 Apr. 2021.
Sosienski-Smith, Claire. "How to Spot TERF Ideology." Cambridge SU, 2019, www.cambridgesu.co.uk/pageassets/resources/guides/spottingterfideology/How-to-spot-TERF-ideology.pdf. Accessed 26 Apr. 2021.
Staples, Brent. "How the Suffrage Movement Betrayed Black Women." The New York Times, 28 July 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/opinion/sunday/suffrage-movement-racism-black-women.html. Accessed 26 Apr. 2021.
"TERF (and Other RadFem) Dogwhistles and Warning Signs." Tumblr, 2019, wedontcareaboutyourbinary.tumblr.com/post/175722556043/terf-and-other-radfem-dogwhistles-warning. Accessed 26 Apr. 2021.
Tracing the Roots of Pop Culture Transphobia. Produced by Lindsay Ellis, 2021.
Tumblr. eluvion.tumblr.com/post/647735111577714688/lacefuneral-i-was-doing-my-usual-jump-down-the. Accessed 26 Apr. 2021. Though this is a social media post, it provides good information about a topic that exists primarily on social media (dog-whistles).
Wang Yuen, Nancy. Interview. Conducted by Alisa Chang, 19 Mar. 2021.
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