by Liberty Guillamon
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Initially, writing this essay felt incredibly intimidating and it therefore resulted in hours upon hours whiled away simply staring blankly at my computer screen. This was punctuated only by consuming an inordinate amount of caffeine in the hopes that eventually the neurotransmitters in my brain would fire fast enough to form a cohesive and concrete thought on the topic. The issue of transgender inclusive feminism, or the lack thereof, is one that is very close to my heart; I wanted so badly to be a fierce advocate for the advancement of transgender rights. Passion initiated and fueled my will to write the essay; however, it also made it difficult to stomach the content that was necessary to read in order to understand the fears and concerns of TERFs (self proclaimed or otherwise).
This background information is necessary because I have been asked to reflect upon the most meaningful or valuable element of this writing experience. My answer is simply: I finished it. An affliction that I, along with many others, suffer from in the age of social media is an ability to consume and share an abundance of information in a very short amount of time. This is undoubtedly beneficial for many reasons, as is being demonstrated at this very moment with the vital internet advocacy for the Black Lives Matter movement; the internet can be a fierce tool for change. However, when people post or tweet about complex topics, their opinions are shoehorned into a certain format. While one hopes that users diligently do their own research in order to get the “whole story,” this is not guaranteed. Therefore, writing this essay forced me to quell my outrage and to do the hard work of forming a thoroughly researched opinion. I could not simply dismiss a statement that enraged me as irrational, because my essay’s aim was to understand it.
Therefore, the most valuable and meaningful part of this process was the realisation that debate and discussion is meaningless if we do not allow ourselves to properly consider the opinions of others, if we make snap judgements based on limited sources.
—Liberty Guillamon
It is an elusive feat to remain relevant in an ever-evolving movement such as feminism. In October 2015, Rachael Melhuish, women’s officer at Cardiff University’s student union, started a petition urging the university officials to cancel a lecture by renowned feminist Germaine Greer (Quinn). This was not because of her capabilities as an academic, but because of her trans-exclusionary opinions.1 The petition stated that “trans-exclusionary views should have no place in feminism or society. Such attitudes contribute to the high levels of stigma, hatred and violence towards trans people” (qtd. in Quinn). Greer was scheduled to speak on the topic of “Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century.” Although Greer did not intend to speak on transgender women at this particular lecture, she has regularly spoken disparagingly on the topic of transgender individuals in the past. Speculating about the reasons behind the petition, Greer countered: “What [the petitioners] are saying is that because I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman I should not be allowed to speak anywhere” (qtd. in Quinn). This is perhaps one of Greer’s least incendiary statements on the topic, amongst a steady stream of other controversial comments in which she similarly attempts to delegitimize transgender identity. While such statements may be shocking to a twenty-first-century audience, understanding them is crucial if we are to begin to dissect current tensions within the feminist movement.
The tone that characterizes much of Greer’s self-defensive rhetoric suggests her belief that her views surrounding transgender women should not affect her ability to speak on feminist topics. To Greer, the two viewpoints are not connected, and explained, rather dismissively, “I am not even going to talk about the issue that they are on about” (qtd. in Quinn). Many students at Cardiff University stood definitively in opposition to Greer’s denial of the connection between female rights and transgender rights, believing instead that Greer’s views surrounding transgender individuals negate her place as a feminist in the twenty-first century. Thus, the call for Greer to be ‘no-platformed,’ a British term “most often used to refer to the rescinding of an invitation to speak at an organised event, typically within university” (O’Keefe 86). Melhuish and others argued that no-platforming was necessary in order to acknowledge the gravity of the situation and to send an uncompromising expression of the importance of trans-inclusivity within feminism. It served as recognition of the difference between the students’ view of the need to actively protect female transgender rights and Greer’s dismissive and antagonistic stance.
This is just one of a plethora of examples in which Greer has been accused of being a TERF, though she has not defined herself as one. The creation of the term “TERF” is attributed to blogger Viv Smythe and is an acronym for “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist” (Smythe). It is largely applied to those who believe that transgender women are not ‘real women’ because of their biological differences, and to treat them as such would lead to the erosion of women’s rights.2 In a 1989 article for the Independent, Greer described a transgender woman as “it,” deliberately denying her gender identity altogether. Greer gratuitously details her “enormous, knuckly, hairy, be-ringed paw” as implicit evidence of her ‘real’ (male) identity. The transgender woman described was a fan who wanted to thank Greer for her feminist activism: activism that the woman felt she had benefited from. Greer concludes the article by saying that she should have responded to the fan with, “you’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off” (Greer qtd. in Wynn 00:00:51-00:00:59). It is not an exaggeration to label Greer a TERF, since she does not believe that feminism stands to achieve anything for those who are not born biologically female. Greer and many others remain wedded to the belief that transgender women can only ‘impersonate’ the female sex. This is an inflammatory opinion to those who see transgender women and cisgender women as women.
Conversely, Greer’s opinions rely on gender essentialism, the idea that there is a definitive gender binary and that these two genders can be identified at birth via external characteristics, such as genitalia. Increasingly, feminist activists reject this way of thinking as having irrational and easily refutable premises. As a result, there is an ever-growing desire for a more inclusive future within the feminist movement. Feminist doctrines of the 1960s and ’70s represented a comparatively narrow range of the female experience. It largely emphasized the white, Western, heteronormative female experience, which feminist theorist Patrice Diquinzo argues “implies that these women’s situations, experiences, and perspectives are or should be true of all women” (5). While Diquinzo does not explicitly mention trans women, she does reject “biological determinism,” which is “the claim that anatomical and physiological differences . . . determine both the meaning of masculinity and femininity and the appropriately different positions of men and women in society” (2). This notion of biological determinism provides the basis for gender essentialism.
TERF ideas are essentially a continuation of this element of radical second-wave feminism. A modern-day manifestation of this type of thinking can be seen in groups such as RadFem Collective, whose mission statement emphasizes “analys[ing] the structures of power which oppress the female sex” because “women as a biological class are globally oppressed by men as a biological class” (“What is Radical Feminism?”). Feminism of this affiliation does not allow for the idea that someone who is assigned male at birth, even if they identify as otherwise, can be considered a woman. However, twenty-first-century feminism increasingly focuses on a less gender–essentialist definition of “woman.” Second-wave feminism and today’s (post-feminist, third-wave, fourth-wave?) feminism are, unsurprisingly, different.
Andrea Long Chu describes these historical shifts within feminism in her essay, “The Impossibility of Feminism.” Chu posits that successive histories and narratives within feminism have differed “in content, but not in form.” She suggests that each new prevailing line of thought comes about because “in all cases, Something Went Wrong in feminism then, and in almost every case, it falls to the feminist now to Make Things Right” (Chu 64). A problem is identified and the movement adapts in order to address it: for instance, the expansion of a more gender-inclusive feminism in reaction to gender essentialism. Hence the existence of various ‘waves’ succeeding each other, allowing for the movement to maintain a necessary adaptability and a progressive trajectory. Abandoning old focuses is therefore a normal and healthy part of feminist history, as Chu demonstrates. Why, then, does it often occur alongside tension and disputes between the old and the new?
Where change occurs, anger often follows, riddling whatever positive progress that may be gained with an anxiety about what may be lost. There is a common assumption that for someone or something to prosper then another will suffer. This forces us to consistently question: who will stand to benefit from any given change and who will be hurt? If you have ever placed a vote in an election after serious deliberation, then this feeling will be familiar.
(1) Greer is most famous for her book, The Female Eunuch, which launched the second wave of the feminist movement.
(2) See “Woman billboard removed after transphobia row” from BBC News for an example of this argument: Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s famously controversial billboard featured a Google dictionary definition of “woman”—an “adult human female”—a definition often cited by those that wish for trans women to be excluded from female rights campaigns on the premise that they, by definition, are not entitled to them. The billboard was later removed.