Editor’s note: The following text is based on remarks delivered at Fierté Fredericton Pride’s anti-fascism panel discussion on July 16, 2023.
Fascist movements are buttressing anti-trans backlash proliferating globally. By analysing identifiable patterns in the arguments, they use to legitimize their anti-trans positions to a wider audience, we can trace how fascists use transphobia as a radicalizing recruitment tool.
In the case of current trans-exclusionary feminist (or, TERF) rhetoric, we see this mobilized through appeals to specific philosophical understandings of concepts like “human nature” and “biological reality.” The most notable transphobic dog whistle is Kellie-Jay Keen’s (aka Posie Parker) slogan of “adult human female” as the definition of woman. TERFism tries to state their hateful position as a point of fact, leading their audiences to assume them as being incontrovertibly proven truths about the world.
TERFs and their political allies coalesce into a vocally anti-trans movement that defines their hostility towards transgender people through arguments about women’s rights and so-called women’s spaces. Members of this movement often self-identify as “gender critical” and have common dog whistles they use to identify themselves. TERFs have specific policy goals that include limiting trans people’s authentic participation in public life because they’re a danger to society – specifically for women.
TERF movements use invocations of nature and biology to argue that transgender people pose a threat to the very foundations of reality and our current ways of life. You’ve heard someone express their anti-trans sentiment with phrases like “it’s simple biology,” “you’re asking us to deny reality,” and “this isn’t natural.” The idea here – as with most fascist and proto-fascist reactionary arguments against entire identifiable social groups – is to make the issue seem simple and to deny the presence of any nuance or context that could make it less simple.
The goal of this movement is to ensure that trans people are denied authentic participation in public life, and denied access to transition which exists in three broad spheres:
- Legal transition (that is, updating legal documents to reflect their name and gender);
- Medical transition (equal access to gender affirming medication and medical procedures); and
- Social transition (access to social spaces in which their gender identity is recognized rather than policed or stigmatized).
A major arena of contention on this topic is access to shared spaces that are often segregated by gender – like washrooms and change rooms. Here, they discuss “basic biology” to make the argument that simply by nature of having a particular sex organ, men and people assigned male at birth pose a threat. The repetition of the words “biology” and “biologically” is meant to punctuate this idea that the biology itself is the basis for the threat, and so this threat is a truth of nature.
TERFs assume, wrongfully, cisgender men are a class of people are so desperate to prey on women and girls they’ll masquerade as trans to take advantage of them in public washrooms. There’s no evidence to support this claim. Women are disproportionately targeted by sexual violence and harassment, but that violence does not tend to happen in public washrooms. It happens at home and in social spaces, often by people they already know. We do know who tends to be targeted by harassment and violence in washrooms though – and that’s trans people.
We’ve seen examples of people being questioned about their gender and anatomy in washrooms – being humiliated and escorted out by security – simply because a cisgender woman in that washroom suspected the other person was not also a cisgender woman. The discomfort at the prospect that broad shoulders or short hair are actionable harbingers of danger doesn’t stop at simple discomfort. What we see promoted among TERF circles is an appeal to structures of power by either confronting the other person and asserting they need to leave, or by seeking out security or law enforcement to compel them to leave.
This act of laundering cruel policy goals though ideas that many of us consider to be “common sense” or “simple truths” is a key device for many fascist movements. The anti-intellectualism that marks so many of these movements encourages people to put as little empathetic and analytical thought as possible into their ideas about society, paving the way for other so-called “simple truths.” These inevitably appeal to stereotypes, to unproven but “traditional” proverbs, and to general insecurities about the implications social change.
In this way, TERF ideology is a bridge to radicalize people and see they adopt other fascist positions, including antisemitism, opposing abortion rights and several “big tent” conspiracies, such as QAnon and Flat Earth.
We have seen this rhetoric also influence our discussions around inclusion policies and access to health care – and in fact we’ve seen healthcare bans proposed and adopted in other jurisdictions like some US states. We’ve experienced first-hand the backlash to inclusivity policies during the current controversy centered on New Brunswick’s Department of Education Policy 713.
Medications and procedures we would call “gender affirming” are procedures that cisgender people access as well – from breast removal/reduction to labiaplasty to hormone replacement. But they are only brought up in terms of danger and “mutilation” in the transgender context. For those medical procedures that are unique to trans folks, there’s no evidence that the recovery or satisfaction rate is disproportionate when compared to other medical procedures. Such as:
- Breast reduction for cisgender people is not labeled as mutilation the same way as breast reduction or masculinization for transgender people.
- Facial feminization surgery for transgender people is treated as deceptive while rhinoplasty for cisgender people isn’t.
- Taking estrogen as a transgender person is evidence of a subversion of nature, while taking estrogen as a menopausal person isn’t.
The anti-trans bias comes first, and the appeal to nature and biology comes second. Ultimately, the goal is to maintain and enforce current binary gender structures, not to live more “biologically authentic” lives.
The fearmongering is also transparently present any time the topic of transgender children comes up. Then, there is a lightning-quick insistence from anti-trans folks that the discussion move from uncomplicated topics like privacy and respecting names and pronouns instead to sensationalized ideas about surgery and “mutilation” performed on elementary-aged kids – which we know is not happening. Though, some intersex children do receive care that aligns with current structural assumptions that babies and children must fit within a restrained sex binary, as if gender doesn’t exist.
We also cannot ignore the ableism that is running parallel to so many of these reactionary anti-trans talking points. Attacking and policing people’s healthcare as illegitimate is an overstep into the medical sphere that has dangerous implications. As is attacking the legitimacy of transgender liberation by, for example, arguing it’s an issue mental illness. These are both examples of deeply rooted ableism which informs the transphobia. Even if we were to agree that being transgender were truly based solely in mental illness, the assertion is only relevant if one also believes that mentally ill people are incapable of true self-determination. It further supposes trans people have no ability to responsibly navigate their own medical care and should therefore be forcibly limited from pursuing that self-determination regardless of how materially harmless their choices are.
In the event you run into a TERF in the wild, or a friend or family member repeating those talking points, you can try countering them by showing the contradiction in those arguments:
- The TERF or gender critical movement is one hand a “progressive” movement in that it is a feminist one aimed at protecting women’s rights, while also being staunchly against major changes to social and legal definitions of gender they pose a threat to traditional (and, frankly, patriarchal) assumptions about what a woman is and what she can do.
- Trans-exclusionists can at once be “fine with” transgender people identifying however they may, while at the same time making aggressive policy arguments against allowing trans people to participate in public life as they are.
- Transgender women engage in misogyny when they engage in feminine hygiene rituals, patterns of speech, and manners of dress because it’s a mockery; but transgender women will also never actually be women because they do not trans-exclusionists’ standards for womanhood such as body language, attractiveness, or reproduction.
- “We can always tell” who is and is not trans, but the moment a cisgender woman expresses support for trans liberation, a go-to is to accuse her of being trans.
- Transgender people should relinquish so-called “gender ideology” and just accept being, for example, tomboys or effeminate men. At the same time, trans and nonbinary people who don’t ascribe to traditional gender performance are examples of the dishonest excess of “gender ideology” which warrants the ridicule and policing of gender nonconformity anywhere on the spectrum.
- The drive to erase trans inclusion from language by arguing that doing so would erase women.
- TERFs believe in women’s rights to self-determination, self-expression, and our ability to embody any number of complex places in society, but that never includes the position of “rapist” or “abuser” and will always include the position of potential victim.
- The gender binary is a fundamental truth of nature but also, exposing children to the mere knowledge of transgender and nonbinary identities will confuse them to the point where they will wrongly misidentify themselves haphazardly.
- Trans people are confused and mentally ill people who represent a tiny subset of the population we shouldn’t care about, but we also require stricter laws in place to prevent them from free gender expression because this could lead to the downfall of society.
Amber Chisholm is a queer lawyer working in Fredericton New Brunswick as the Associate Director of Public Legal Education and Information Service of New Brunswick (PLEIS-NB), a non-profit organization that informs New Brunswickers about the law, their legal rights, and obligations. Amber is a founding board member of Imprint Youth Association for 2SLGBTQIA+ Youth and Young Adults. She also acts as an organization partner and supervisor for the Imprint Trans ID Clinic organized through the UNB chapter of Probono students Canada. Amber’s hobbies include community theatre, painting, and complaining about Twitter culture to her many pets.