The word 'terf' was reclaimed. Should it now be dropped?

By one of our Seen in Journalism members

I can’t remember when I first heard the acronym terf, or learned what it meant.

But I vividly recall how unnerved I felt when, scrolling down the replies to a social media post by Helen Lewis a few years ago, I saw a meme featuring a Japanese anime character pointing a gun at me, with the caption “Shut the fuck up terf”. (This was in 2019, and because Joanna Cherry raised it in parliament, various accounts of the episode can be found on the internet.) 

I subsequently got used to the threatening language that often accompanied the word “terf” when it was used as an insult by trans rights activists. Recent examples include the placard reading ‘Decapitate terfs’, with a picture of a guillotine, that was displayed at a rally in Glasgow in January 2023; and a speech given in Trafalgar Square six months later, when Sarah Jane Baker, a convicted violent criminal, said to demonstrators: “If you see a terf, punch them in the fucking face.” Baker was acquitted of incitement.

But by this time I had started to use the word myself. Like other pejorative terms used to put down minorities, ‘terf’ – which stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist – has been reclaimed. In 2022 it was the pun in the title of Jane Clare Jones’s book The Annals of the Terf Wars.

Thanks to the vigorous campaign for women’s sex-based rights being waged here, Britain gained the nickname “terf island”. 

It hasn’t stopped being alarming when trans rights activists call for terfs to be harmed. But the sting of the name-calling has been removed – as the stings attached to other words designed to shame and stigmatise have been. Women once bullied and intimidated by accusations that they are not sufficiently inclusive are no longer cowed.

Particularly given the way in which radical feminists have been vilified in the past (think of the older stereotypes of bitter man-haters), there is something satisfying in the fact that, in the fight to preserve women’s single-sex spaces, the label has become a badge of pride. 

There is, however, an issue of accuracy. It is males – not trans people – that sex-based rights activists want to exclude from women’s single-sex spaces. Trans men – women with a masculine gender identity – are readily included, for example in sports (the Philippine boxer Hergie Bacyadan competed in the women’s category in the Paris Olympics without complaints, as did the non-binary Canadian footballer Quinn).

The whole point, for gender-critical and radical feminists, is that sex matters more than gender identity in these situations. They are male exclusionary - not terfs but merfs. 

In fact, the label terf says nothing at all about gender-critical attitudes towards female people with transgender identities. This is a demographic about whom many feminists, and particularly lesbians, are very concerned, due to the huge rise in the number of girls seeking to transition.

Referrals to the NHS’s children's gender service rose from 97 in 2009 to 2,500 in 2020 and some experts, along with gender-critical campaigners, believe that gender non-conforming young women are being unnecessarily medicalised rather than supported to grow into lesbian adults. Given all this, a term that ignores their existence and centres biologically male trans people seems less than ideal.

Like other gender-critical feminists, I don’t regard inclusion as the values trump card that trans rights activists think it is. Other considerations when deciding how to organise social spaces and activities include safety, dignity, privacy, fairness and comfort. Some exclusions are justified. 

Those who have been following this debate for years know that there is no intention on the part of gender-critical feminists to exclude all trans people from women’s spaces. The whole point of these is that they are for females – however they identify.

But plenty of people who are less familiar with the "terf wars" do not know this. To avoid giving a misleading impression about gender-critical feminists, I have started to wonder if the words “trans exclusionary” and the acronym terf would be better avoided.