Understanding The 'Logic' Of TERFs

Why do TERFs think the way they do? The history of TERFs goes way back before JK Rowling. In the 1980s TERF Janice Raymond ran a successful campaign to push Sandy Stone out of Olivia Records.

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Emma: I want to move to other examples just before we run out of time. because some of these are really great including Janice Raymond and sandy stone. on and this is applicable to the current day in discussions of TERFs and JK Rowling is the most obvious example but this is very applicable for modern feminist discourse here. Tell us a little bit about those two feminists and what honestly it says about modern-day feminist discourse around trans women.

Schuller: yeah it was really important to me to show how that the logic of anti-trans feminists. you know who argues that transgender are not women is actually part of white feminism. even though it's less obvious. because we most often think of white feminism in terms of its racism. but there is subliminal racism in the position of TERFs. and so I look at especially the role of a trans musician and sound engineer and activist sandy stone who was part of a really important collective a lesbian recording artist collective that sold hundreds of thousands of records in the 1970s and 80s called Olivia records. and then Janice Raymond who is an academic and author of probably the most important TERF book called the transsexual empire. who supported a campaign to Sandy Stone the trans woman out of Olivia's records in the 70s. It was a successful campaign. and we you know we often talk about and recognize that anti-trans feminists are what we call biological essentialists. right they say sex is real. you're born sex. It's very tidy and clear and it can never change. right biology is destiny is there is that kind of logic. which flies in the face of research that shows that anything up to two percent of births is intersex to some degree. right but it's an insistence that biology is extremely tidy and sex is always straightforward and set in stone. That is that and that it was absolutely true that TERFs are biological essentialists. But Turks have also experienced essentialists. and What I mean by that is that they say a trans woman can't be a woman also because she didn't have the experience of being a woman growing up. she didn't have the universal experience of menstruation or the universal experience of sexual harassment or any of the other elements of being in a female body. The problem is there is no such thing as that universal female experience right? and this is one of the points that Audrey Lord has made over and over again in her lifetime, right? like black women have five times the rate of many breast cancer of sexual assault and abuse right? one of the things that Harriet jacobs was was illuminates versus Harriet Beecher Stowe is that you know in the 1860s what is the position of being a woman. if you're Harriet jacobs you might be hiding in an attic for seven years. if you're an enslaved black woman being abused by your own slaver if you're a white woman you might have a completely different set of experiences.