Normally, when I do this column, I focus on men who are the worst. But women can ALSO be the worst, especially when they are TERFs, or "Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists." If you are not familiar, TERFs are ladies who are extremely shitty to trans people and claim that they are doing it in the name of feminism. Nearly every actual feminist on earth would prefer they did not.
This week, a couple British TERFs, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull -- who goes by the pseudonym Posie Parker online (an obvious affront to the glorious and never-in-enough-things Parker Posey) -- and Julia Long swung by the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. to be assholes to Sarah McBride, a prominent trans activist and the press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, while McBride was just trying to do her damn job.
It was absolutely motherfucking ridiculous. Just look at these assholes!
Asking Sarah McBride why HRC hates women.www.youtube.com
The two women went on to misgender McBride and scream a bunch of weird transphobic shit about how the Human Rights Campaign hates lesbians (???) and how The Equality Act -- a bill which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to existing human rights legislation -- which McBride and other HRC staffers were in D.C. advocating for, would somehow result in "women" being unsafe. We can assume she is referring exclusively to cis-women here.
Via NBC:
"Why don't you care about lesbian girls at 14 getting double mastectomies? Why don't you care about that Sarah?" asked Keen-Minshull, who often refers to transgender men as "lesbians."
During the broadcast, which appears to have been deleted from Facebook, Keen-Minshull and her associate, Julia Long, can be heard accusing McBride of "championing the rights of men to access women in women's prison," not caring "about lesbian girls" and hating lesbians.
As the live broadcast finished, Keen-Minshull said, "Everyone, this is Sarah McBride ignoring women and girls' concerns as usual — so typically male!"
McBride responded to the incident with more grace than most of us would have.
The sad truth is that this kind of harassment is the reality for far too many transgender people, particularly tran… https://t.co/2Y2DsouHzs— Sarah McBride (@Sarah McBride) 1548882301.0
This is some shit exactly no one should ever have to put up with. In the end, all these two asswipes accomplished was showing the world that they are basically the Westboro Baptist Church of... well, I don't even want to call them feminists, frankly.
In other news, in England, a bunch of idiot TERFs freaked out over the Manchester Police tweeting out an image that said "No TERFs on Our Turf," complaining that TERF was a "slur" against "feminists."
And, unfortunately, the Manchester Police Department apologized to them.
Police have apologised and launched an internal investigation following the use of alleged 'offensive slur' in a tweet posted from an official GMP account.
A tweet referencing the term 'TERF', which means 'trans-exclusionary radical feminist', was posted by the city centre team's account on Friday.
The posting is now being investigated by the force's Professional Standards Branch.
TERF is, of course, not a slur. The only inaccurate thing about it is that it even includes the word feminist in the first place -- since most of us would argue that if you're not fighting for all women, you're not a feminist. What is it that they want to be called, anyway? Given that their whole deal is that they are shitty to trans women, what else would we possibly call them? Overshoes? End tables? Brandy Alexanders? I got nothing!
Pretty much any term used to describe them, even if it they made it up themselves, would eventually take on "slur"-like connotations because there is simply no appealing way of describing what it is they believe and do. Over on Reddit, they call themselves "Gender Critical," which sounds just as ridiculous as anything else. The r/GenderCritical forum is basically a super-ridiculous sub in which a bunch of assholes scream all day about how cisgender men are definitely going to pretend to be women in order to assault cisgender women, which is pretty fucking gross! I mean, what? Do they think it is not possible for a cisgender woman to assault another cisgender woman? Because that is definitely possible!
There is also a lot of crying about anyone daring to acknowledge trans people as human beings, instead of... whatever it is they would prefer.
These people are just as gross and just as oppressive as any Garbage Man, or MRA, or Nazi, or other manner of organized bigotry. And claiming to speak for women and feminism while openly harassing women and advocating for things that harm women adds an extra layer of, well, ick.
[Manchester Evening News | NBC]
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