You might imagine that rampant transphobia is primarily animated by a conservative movement, as seen in the U.S. in various states’ bathroom bills, or the entire Trump administration. The truth is, while the British conservative right would almost certainly be more than happy to whip up a frenzy of transphobia, they simply haven’t needed to, because some sections of the left over here are doing their hate-peddling for them. The most vocal source of this hatred has emerged, sadly, from within circles of radical feminists. British feminism has an increasingly notorious TERF problem

What is a TERF, exactly? Quite simply: exactly what the term stands for, which is trans-exclusionary radical feminist (or, more simply still, anyone who calls themselves a feminist but does not care to include trans people in their political considerations). Viv Smythe, the cis woman who is credited with popularizing the term through her posts on in the early 2000s radical feminist blogosphere has explained that she intended it as a neutral descriptor meant to distinguish radical feminists who believe feminism pertains only to biological women from radical feminists in general: “Grammatically, the “trans-exclusionary” placed before “radical feminist in the TERF acronym means that it modifies “radical feminist,” describing a subset. Just the way that the term Italian-American doesn’t mean that all Americans are ethnically Italian, it’s just describing a subset of Americans.” The application of the term has shifted somewhat over time to encompass most people espousing trans-exclusionary politics that follow a particular “TERF logic,” regardless of their involvement with radical feminism.

That logic boils down to a very basic refusal to accept that trans people are the gender that they say they are rather than the one that they were assigned at birth. For the self-styled “feminists” who follow it, this manifests in a refusal to accept that trans women are women, and thus that their presence in “women’s spaces” such as changing rooms, rape crisis shelters, and gender segregated hospital wards, is not a threat. Read more via The Outline