Others assert that the term is insulting , hyperbolic, misleading, and ultimately defamatory. Allen actually calls for more people to recognize radical feminists as a hate group and then pointedly adopts the term Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist TERF to refer to them throughout the article. Make no mistake, this is a slur. TERF is not meant to be explanatory, but insulting.
These characterizations are hyperbolic, misleading, and ultimately defamatory. They do nothing but escalate the vitriol and fail to advance the conversation in any way. Within feminist and trans discourse, the term refers to a very specific type of person who wraps anti-trans bigotry in the language of feminism.
A hallmark of TERF discourse is that it tends to sound a lot like the anti-trans rhetoric coming out of extreme right-wing groups. Gender Identity Watch GIW is viewed as a hate group by thousands and has a history of working with a known hate group. Keep the above assertion made by GIW in mind as you read the following interview I did with one of the cisgender feminists who are responsible for popularizing TERF as a feminist concept. Cristan Williams: From what I can see, yours is the earliest use.
The term has become fairly common in trans discourse. TigTog: Lauredhel and I are pretty sure that we started using trans-exclusionary radfem TERF activists as a descriptive term in our own chats a while before I used it in that post. C: TERFs have made some assertions about your lexical contribution to feminist discourse. T: It was not meant to be insulting. It was meant to be a deliberately technically neutral description of an activist grouping. I notice that since TERF has gone out into the wild, many people seem to use trans-exclusive rather than trans-exclusionary or trans-excluding, and I think that leads to some exploitable ambiguity.
C: I find it interesting that this term originates in the feminist community and was popularized by a cisgender woman. I think the assumption has been that a trans person had coined the term in the last year or so. Was there a specific incident — or a culmination of incidents — that lead you to advocate for the use of this term?
