The TERF War hotting up again

It seems that the TERF War is hotting up again. What is the TERF War? It is a vicious fight to the death between the old school feminists, now labelled Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), and the trans lobby. What’s interesting about it is that it’s not just a power struggle within the Coalition of the Fringes, the sometimes uneasy coalition of victim groups who comprise the modern Cultural Left and dominate allegedly leftist parties like the Democrats in the US. This is an existential struggle in which neither side will, or can, back down.

The issue is nothing less than the existence of women. The position of the trans lobby is also the position of the LGBT lobby as a whole and is now the official party line of the Cultural Left (and is accepted by a large segment of the Political Right). That position is that biological sex is irrelevant. Sex is infinitely fluid. If you have male genitals but you put on a frock you’re as much a woman as anyone who was born a woman. If you have female genitals and you announce that you are a man then you are as much a man as someone born a man. It is also an essential part of this ideological position there are dozens if not hundreds of genders.

The problem for the TERFs is that they cannot possibly accept this. If your sex is something you can choose and discard at will then feminism collapses entirely. Feminism is based on the premise that there are two distinct sexes, male and female, and that the female sex has been (and still is) oppressed by the male sex. It is a crucial element in old school feminism that sex is something you’re born with. If you’re born a woman then you are part of that half of society that is exploited and oppressed by the Patriarchy. If you’re born a man you’re an oppressor. The TERFs therefore have absolutely no choice. They must take a stand on the reality of biological sex differences. That is the hill on which they must fight and if necessary die. Any retreat means abandoning feminism.

Old school or Second Wave feminism has still not recovered from the bloodletting of the Feminist Sex Wars that raged from the 70s to the 90s, a vicious struggle between the anti-porn anti-prostitution faction and the so-called sex-positive feminists. That war ended in total victory for the sex-positive feminists.

There are several fascinating aspects to the TERF War. One is that the TERFs are largely (although not exclusively) lesbians. They’ve learnt that being a lesbian is no protection from being labelled as a hateful Nazi bigot if you happen to get on the wrong side of the trans lobby. In fact old school lesbians (who are so deluded that they think they’re women) are now increasingly marginalised within the LGBT lobby that they played such a large part in creating. The hatred between the trans activists and the lesbian TERFs is breathtaking in its intensity.

And as was pointed out in the discussion on the recent Terf or Trans post on Oz Conservative it raises questions about the future of the old school feminists within the Coalition of the Fringes. They are in fact actively hated by many of the other members of that coalition. Is there a chance they might jump ship? More interestingly still, is there a chance they might find themselves expelled from the Coalition of the Fringes? What makes this an interesting question is that although the actual political power of the old school feminists is almost zero on the other hand when it comes to raw numbers they’re a very significant slice of that coalition. And they are politically very disciplined. They wouldn’t have to actually jump ship. If they simply decided, en masse, to stay at home on election day the results could be interesting. It’s hard to see the Democrats, or the British Labour Party, surviving such a defection.

Of course there’s also the fact that there are a lot women who are not lesbians or TERFs but are still rather uncomfortable with the militant trans agenda. Women like J.K. Rowling (an ardent SJW) who is currently being vilified as a hateful transphobic bigot for her bizarre belief that the human species is divided into biological men and biological women. These are women who in general have totally supported the SJW agenda but they are not surprisingly less than thrilled about being told that women don’t really exist.

So the TERF War could get kind of interesting.