Trans exclusionary radical feminists relect to us the woundedness of our own community, our desire to be ‘normal’.

TERFS

At the time of London Pride, when a small number of lesbians placed themselves at the front of the parade to object to what they consider the lesbophobic character of contemporary trans activism, had been reading Lillian Faderman’s autobiography Naked in the Promised Land. In the 1960s Faderman’s then girlfriend, Nicky, a butch writer, was arrested. She was broke, and Faderman had advised her to femme up and go look for a job. A police officer mistook her for a trans woman, and took her in.

Looking at the handful of women who protested London Pride, wondered at how women who all their lives have experienced discrimination because of their ‘failed’ status as women – their failure to be straight women – could agitate for state codification and conservation of ‘womanhood’.

Whatever TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) were in their heyday of the 1970s and ’80s, what they are now is a mutated group of hate-mongers, a ring of anti-feminist, anti-LGBT outliers cloistered around a core of deeply misled radical feminists. Radical feminists who have thrown everything away for the promise that the exclusion of their trans sisters will normalise them in the eyes of history, and reveal that all along they have been just as good, and as real, and as unthreatening as their straight counterparts.

What these protestors are symptomatic of is a deep wound in our community. A desire for acceptance that those outside can sense, and which they are trying to exploit by retroactively normalising homosexuality and reprinting the othering of transgender people, as if it were a currency by which to buy entry into nature.

That these women are in the minority does not matter.

They were in the minority in 1973 when they expelled Beth Elliott from the West Coast Lesbian Conference. They have persisted in their anti-trans activism for decades.

They reflect to us the woundedness of our own community, our desire to be ‘normal’. We must take responsibility for them, together. That responsibility means first, refusing to be drawn into the spectacle of debate they want to put on for the straight world, and second, striving for a collective ownership of our history as LBT women.

In respect of the first we say no to the naturalisation or the reification of the category of woman. We refuse definition.

We refuse their natural ‘sex’. In respect of the second we reexamine the power dynamics of a ‘trans-inclusive’ politics that places power in the hands of cis women to include or exclude their sisters, and instead strive for a collective ownership of our history as LBT women: one in which the legacy of the lives of all LBT women is owned by all LBT women. Where we can look at Lillian Faderman’s girlfriend Nicky and see that in the moment of her arrest, she is a transgender woman.