With a high-profile TERF candidate running (and losing) in the most recent election and debates around whether sections of the Left may be considered SWERFs for their views on sex workers, it seems timely to discuss what these concepts are.
Who are these TERF cookers?
The acronym stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist (sometimes the e stands for exterminatory), and it’s more or less accurate. But it’s the details that matter, so let’s go over them. First, we’ll talk TERFs or, as they like to call themselves, “gender critical feminists.”
TERFism can most clearly be understood as a specific right wing outgrowth from radical feminism. It relies on a radical feminist analysis of men as a class rather than a gender category (i.e patriarchy theory) and suggests that men, as a ruling class in society, have universal interests that are counterposed to that of women everywhere. This led to an early interest in women’s only spaces, women’s run businesses, and an attempt to redefine lesbianism away from being an umbrella term for all women who loved women to a separatist definition that excluded women who today may be called bisexual or pansexual.
The transition to TERFism, if you’ll excuse the pun, is located firstly in defining trans women as men who need to be kept out of women’s spaces, and secondly in scapegoating trans people generally for the sexual and gendered violence perpetrated by men. If you destroy trans people, then you save women from male violence. Simple pitch, right? At least that’s what was imagined by early separatist feminists like Robin Morgan, whose keynote speech at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference is credited with starting the trope of the transexual rapist by arguing that being a trans woman made someone “an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer with the mentality of a rapist.” These ideas would continue to simmer until finding full form through Janice Raymond, former nun and author of Transexual Empire (1979), and her mentor Marie Healy, a theologian and author of Gyn/Ecology (1978).
Raymond’s writings contain conspiratorial ideas about big pharma creating and profiting from trans people, alleging that trans people are colonising and raping women’s bodies, and dedicates a section to obsessing over Sandy Stone, a trans woman who worked at a feminist music business. Her book would inspire a paramilitary group, the Gorgons, who sent consistent hate mail and then armed themselves and shot at (but thankfully missed) Sandy Stone at a concert. Raymond’s policy advice would also see Reagan, Republican President of the US, cut public health funding for gender affirmation surgeries and is often credited with facilitating trans people being entered into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
In the years since, there has been a number of academics – particularly people like Julie Bindel and Sheila Jeffreys from TERF Island (aka the UK) – who have published anti-trans screeds, as well as a number of women managers in community services who have been persuaded on TERF ideas. This reflects their middle class base, which is quite small and is quite distinct from your garden-variety transphobe who may say objectionable shit. These people have clearly been radicalised to the nth degree on this question with their own (stupid) theories and are similar to MRAs and incels in their fanaticism, their terminally online habits, and their pitch to their adherents of a false solution to the world’s problems. They may not be fascists nor have they even come remotely close to wielding that influence, but they’re similarly reactionary.
This radicalisation against trans people is generally paired with a hatred of sex workers (more on this in the next article), obsession with ‘cancel culture’ (“Read my front page news piece on how silenced I am!!!”) and conspiracies about big pharma (“The same people who make hormones also make vaccines!!!”), fear mongering about Muslims (“Liberate Muslim women by criminalising their clothes!!!”), rants about gay parents (“Surrogacy is colonisation!!!”), and a rejection of the left (“Communist women have men in the head!!!”). By embracing these ideas, the TERFs quickly lose any semblance of agitating for women’s liberation. And if that sounds bad, that’s because it is: these ideas don’t hold any common ground with socialist politics. At all. At its core, TERFism is a broadly right wing view of society.
The fact that TERFs are clearly on the right can be confronting, and indeed even invites uncomfortable scrutiny upon comrades identified as part of the left who sympathise with TERFs. However, there is no other way to understand the tendency given its obsession with attacking minorities, its middle class base, its theories of lesbian extinction that are eerily too similar to white extinction theory, its biological determinism, and its conspiracy theories about big pharma that all too often veer to open antisemitism in their references to George Soros.
This is why TERFs constantly find common cause with the right, despite their vaguely left rhetoric around women’s oppression and patriarchy theory. The website of the main TERF group in Sydney is a complete garbage fire of right wing conspiracies if you want to check out the Feminist Legal Clinic – a fake community legal centre set up to propagandise against trans people and other minorities. Other known front groups in Australia include International Women’s Day Brisbane/Meanjin, Victoria Women’s Guild, and single-person front groups like Occupied Victoria, Women’s Guild NSW, Fair Go for Queensland Women, REAL for Women, Women’s Action Group, and LGB Alliance Australia, some of which are run by the same individual.
While some of these organisations are initiated by entryists into the Greens or have support from so-called anarchists from Deep Green Resistance, a consistent theme of the websites of the TERF groups in Australia has also been to promote women in the Liberal party, and during birth certificate reform in Victoria and Tasmania they campaigned alongside the more extreme members of the Liberal party. So it entirely makes sense that Katherine Deves, a volunteer of the Feminist Legal Clinic and founder of Save Womens Sports Australasia, would run as Scott Morrison’s star candidate in Warringah for the 2022 elections and even somehow freak out chunks of the Liberal party with how very right wing she is.
As revolutionaries it is important that we reject this kind of rubbish outright as divisive and reactionary. There is no ‘threat’ to women’s rights by advancing the cause of trans liberation, and it is only by workers of all genders fighting shoulder to shoulder against the ruling class that women, trans or cis, can find freedom.
The shibboleth of “free speech” and how revolutionaries should relate to TERFs
Despite TERFs clearly expressing a right wing view of society in general there is at times a confusion amongst radicals on how to deal with them given their veneer of leftist ideas about women’s rights and the patriarchy. This creates an exceptionalism whereby transphobia is understood as a view with a legitimate basis in left wing ideas that needs to be debated in an almost unique manner. We need to acknowledge that this exceptionalism itself is rooted in transphobia and an opportunistic desire to avoid conflict.
Generally TERFs do not hold significant political influence, and so issues are more likely to come from the parliamentary political parties than the TERFs. That said, shit does happen. The two most prominent conflicts with TERFs in recent years have been when the TERF-aligned leadership of McIver’s Ladies Baths in Sydney’s East attempted to ban trans women from the pool and the controversy around Virginia Mansell-Lees at La Trobe and Holly Lawford-Smith at University of Melbourne which has rippled outward into the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). Both conflicts are ultimately about women’s only spaces, and the rights of trans people to self-identify.
In January of 2021, the management of McIver’s updated their website to specify that trans women who had not had bottom surgery (which is the requirement for legal recognition in NSW) would not be able to access the pool. This accompanied increased tensions with volunteers who had long admitted trans women without being expected to implement genital checks, and outrage from local residents. A change.org petition to McIver’s, the council (the baths’ landlord), and the state government was launched by Community Action for Rainbow Rights (CARR) which received almost 17,000 signatures in support. A protest organised by unaligned and Pride in Protest activists soon followed, with several hundred attending a rally and ‘swim-in’ which attracted support from local Greens and even Labor councillors.
The Sydney Feminist Legal Clinic would attempt their own petition to keep trans women excluded from the pool, and solicited signatures mostly from the UK and Spain. The Feminist Legal Clinic would also counter-protest trans rights protestors at the next local council meeting, including physically accosting a Greens parliamentarian, and offer legal support to the management of McIver’s for maintaining their policy. Members of McIver’s would then overthrow the management at their next Annual General Meeting (AGM) and attempt to introduce trans-inclusive policies. However, legal efforts by the TERFs would delay this for another three attempts at an AGM and it would take over a year of organising effort by grassroots members of McIver’s to take back control.
Down in Victoria, Virginia Mansell, a TERF and supporter of the Job Protection Framework that attacked many work conditions at universities, was Convenor of the NTEU Queer Unionists in Tertiary Education (QuTE) network. Mansell was not only an NTEU member, but part of the Victorian Women’s Guild, a TERF front group that campaigned alongside the Liberals against trans rights and chaired a meeting at University of Melbourne for the campaign against birth certificate reform. This saw protests of over 100 students and staff on campus, a letter from students to the university via Equality Australia calling for the event to be cancelled which was dismissed by management on the grounds of freedom of speech, and an open letter calling for her removal from her position in the union, which ultimately was successful.
The greater issue would be around Mansell’s colleague, Holly Lawford-Smith, a tenured academic at the University of Melbourne. Lawford-Smith is also a member of the Victorian Women’s Guild and controversial as an academic, with a fixation on excluding trans people from women’s spaces while herself refusing to join the union. In July 2019 Lawford-Smith would be condemned via an open letter, with threats to protest a talk she was giving at a Philosophy Conference on excluding trans people. The issue would be further inflamed when Lawford-Smith set up a website soliciting anonymous stories of trans women as predators and designed her own course on the matter, which led to 200 staff and students rallying on campus for trans rights and an open letter with over 1000 signatories calling upon management to intervene, though it fell short of calling for Lawford-Smith to be terminated. University management then announced a new gender affirmation policy, criticised by Socialist Alternative in this statement as anti-freedom of speech. Members of the union responded to this Socialist Alternative statement with this open letter.
The saga would continue to escalate as the QuTE network, now under rank and file control after the ousting of Mansell, would propose to the National Conference that transphobia, like Islamophobia, not be welcome in union publications, and that so-called “gender-critical feminism”/TERFism be defined as transphobic. The Secretary of the NTEU would then delete emails by QuTE explaining the motion and move a hostile amendment to remove any criticism of TERFism on the basis of “academic freedom.” This would result in a narrow loss with delegates from QuTE and Casualised, Unemployed and Precarious University Workers (CUPUW) on one side, and the officials, their supporters, and Socialist Alternative delegates on the other. The narrow loss led to a severe backlash, with resignations from trans members and an emergency meeting of 200 rank and file unionists condemning the leadership.
What lessons can we take from these conflicts that will build the fight for trans liberation, and liberation generally? The incidents demonstrate that, in practice, TERFs campaign in a way that is almost indistinguishable from right wingers like Israel Folau, even mimicking the fixation on the “defence of freedom,” be it academic or religious. The McIver situation in particular shows that they need to be opposed publicly with protests and petitions, and not debated civilly as if they were simply another co-worker – the moment the issue dropped out of the spotlight and became a matter of administrative meetings, the TERFs were able to delay their loss of power for over a year.
There is a second question around how to defend freedom of speech, while rejecting the weasel words of academic (or religious) freedoms as code for hate speech. Obviously, it is important that the left does not pander to authoritarian methods to deal with the right, whether they are TERFs, MRAs, or fascists, and this means not privately begging management to fire co-workers who are TERFs, when instead we should be protesting them ourselves. This begging would only give the state and management further legitimacy to attack the left, as we’ve seen recently with the deportation of anti-coal activists from Fireproof under the same laws that sections of the left cheered on when used against Novak Djokovic. But it is vital that we do not only fall into the same trap as the NTEU officialdom and Socialist Alternative who gave them left cover. We must draw a clear line in rejecting and refusing a platform to TERFs as we would the rest of the hard right, otherwise we accept a kind of exceptionalism to trans rights which is indefensible.
Katherine Deves and the shift by TERFs into the Liberal party
TERFs may have a generally right wing view of society and their groups maintain links with the Liberal party, but in the past they have generally sought left cover through entryist projects inside left wing groups. The head of the Feminist Legal Clinic in Sydney, Anna Kerr, is a member of the NSW Greens, as are a number of her colleagues who have attempted to intervene to shape party policy. Nina Vallins, a leading activist from the Victorian Women’s Guild, was once elected to the Victorian Green’s central committee before her suspension. Recently, Linda Gale, an associate of Vallins, narrowly won the Convenor position in the Victorian Greens, and her supporters on the central committee of the Vic Greens and Melbourne Council. In Tasmania, TERFs who have been expelled have set up their own Greens party, the ‘United Tasmania Group’. It is past time the Greens expelled them everywhere.
Having hit a brick wall in meaningfully influencing the Greens outside of Victoria, TERFs have begun to shift to explicitly supporting the Liberal party and have published essays to this effect about “reaching across the aisle” to bolster women as a class. Katherine Deves is one of these women – an activist with the Feminist Legal Clinic and co-founder of Save Women’s Sports Australasia – she joined the Liberal party in February of this year and swiftly became Scott Morrison’s “captain’s pick” for the seat of Warringah, despite resistance in court from party members. Her campaign was then run directly out of the Prime Minister’s office for the purpose of further inflaming a culture war to pull Labor to the right and drive the so called moderates out of the Liberals.
It is important to shatter the pathways of influence that TERFs develop, and the fact that Scott Morrison is so interwoven with the TERF campaign is concerning as is the adoption by both Albanese and Morrison of transphobic rhetoric around “adult human females.” Katherine Deves must not be allowed to become the next Israel Folau. Socialists, whether anarchist or otherwise, should be clearly supportive of the calls to disendorse and sack her as a candidate without boosting the so-called moderates inside the Liberal party. We also should be critical of the huge platform she has been given by the media, whether it’s her columns in Crikey or her front page articles in the Murdoch press.
Deves is an extremist. Campaigning against her with clear no-platform demands exposed the Liberal party for what it is and was an organisational set back for the TERFs and their ambitions to recruit from people who on some level identify with feminist concerns. Deves recorded the lowest vote for the Liberal party in Warringah’s history. The blows to her campaign will also severely undermine the credibility of the so-called Save Women’s Sports Bill. These no-platform demands are the most clearly expressed by protest, whether it’s at the ballot draw, candidate forums, or elsewhere. There is no place for transphobic extremists and no free passes for TERFs wherever they are.