I spent several weeks in trans-exclusionary radical feminist online spaces. Here’s what I learned.
Note: This purpose of this series is to highlight the serious nature of radical feminist-aligned transphobia online, so there will inevitably be upsetting transphobic hate speech featured. If this is something that has the potential to upset you, please prioritise your mental health and scroll past, or avoid reading it entirely.
This series was originally published in five parts as part of my newsletter about online culture, End of Ze Internet.
Having quit my job at the end of January, I’ve found myself with a lot of spare time on my hands, and there’s only so many hours you can play The Sims before you start to lose your grip on reality. Which is how I found myself spending the past few weeks lurking in radical feminist and gender critical online spaces across a variety of platforms.
For any radical feminists reading this, I do not pretend to be an impartial witness, much like I’m not impartial when it comes to other forms of bigotry. I do not think journalism (or whatever this it is that I’m doing here) needs to be neutral in the face of oppression and injustice in order to be effective.
It all started after I became inspired by Gothamshitty’s TikTok videos on how she became a radical feminist, and how she realised it was a hateful ideology, as well as the Media Matters report that came out late last year that proved that TikTok’s algorithm was leading users from transphobic content to alt-right content. I wanted to try and replicate their results myself, and it grew from there into a wider examination of online radical feminist spaces.
My hypothesis was that the stuff I was occasionally seeing on Twitter (largely in JK Rowling’s mentions, since I don’t typically seek it out) was only the tip of the iceberg, and not representative of the younger cohort of radical feminists. Many zoomers see Harry Potter and its associated fandom as passé, so the JK Rowling-worshipping radfem crowd seems to skew slightly older. Much has already been written about transphobic feminists on forums like Mumsnet and in the wider media, particularly in the UK, so I knew I wanted to focus on other spaces that hadn’t been as widely discussed.
To get as comprehensive a picture of what radical feminist online spaces were like, I observed them on the following platforms: Twitter, TikTok, Giggle, Spinster, Ovarit, and Discord.
Twitter, TikTok, and Discord you’re probably familiar with. If not, I’m not sure how you know what Substack is, but if you got here by accident, I can only apologise.
The other three are less widely known, for good reason: they’re platforms created by radical feminists specifically to talk about things that would see (and have seen) them expelled from other platforms.
Ovarit was created in 2020 in direct response to Reddit’s crackdown on hateful subs, which saw r/GenderCritical and any associated subs removed from the site.
Giggle, an app that comes with a website that features the URL ‘female spaces are necessary dot com’, was created by Bond University graduate Sall Grover in 2019.
Spinster, billed as a radical feminist-friendly alternative to Twitter, was created by MK Fain, also in 2019. Fain was also involved in the creation of Ovarit, and runs the radical feminist publication 4W.
What I learned after weeks of monitoring the conversations on these platforms was that my hypothesis was largely correct: the quality of discourse taking place in relatively out-of-sight locations was abhorrent. But I also learned that the quality of discourse on mainstream platforms was worse than I’d previously thought — people had just become more adept at getting around filters and censorship, i.e. by simply making new accounts whenever theirs were removed for violating community guidelines, or by replacing letters with asterisks, or by using obscure lingo that moderators with little knowledge of the radical feminist community would have scanthope of parsing.
That brings me to my next point. Before I go any further, I unfortunately need to give you a bit of a vocabulary lesson. There are some terms you may already be familiar with (like radical feminist, gender critical, or TERF) and others that will be completely foreign to you, for good reason. I’m going to briefly define as many relevant terms as possible, assuming that people reading this are not chronically online and plugged into various discourses at all times.
- Radical feminist: refers to practitioners of the second wave of feminism that had its heyday in the 1970s. Key tenets of radical feminism include a focus on the patriarchy as the source of all societal ills, a radical decentering of men in women’s lives (this tenet led some to become ‘political lesbians’, that is, women who weren’t lesbians but were choosing to eschew men as praxis, as well as lesbian separatists), an opposition to sex work and pornography (considering them exploitative and objectifying), a belief in sex being immutable and inherent, and a belief in women’s oppression being the basis of their biological sex, not their gender (thus calling themselves ‘gender critical’ or ‘GC’). Many radical feminists are also gender abolitionists. Popular theorists include Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon (both of whom, despite their popularity among TERFs for their anti-sex work views, have expressed support for trans women, surprisingly enough).
- The term has become synonymous with TERF — trans-exclusionary radical feminist — because of how vocal they are online, but TIRFs — trans inclusionary radical feminists — do also exist. bell hooks and Audre Lorde were also writing around this time, and while their beliefs have some overlap with the radical feminists already mentioned, their more nuanced (and intersectional) approach doesn’t suit the needs of modern day TERFs, and thus their names are not invoked anywhere near as often as Dworkin’s (fun fact: the username I used on TikTok, Twitter and Spinster was a variation on her name, because I knew that was a quick way to make me seem like a radfem) or MacKinnon’s.
- Occasionally, TERFs will argue that they do include trans people, but typically they only mean trans men and non-binary people who are AFAB (assigned female at birth); in their eyes, trans women, being AMAB (assigned male at birth), cannot be women, and thus cannot be feminists.
- TRAs: trans rights activists. While anyone regardless of gender can advocate for trans rights, this term is primarily used against trans people, and more specifically, trans women (because trans men are wayward souls who just need guidance, and thus they’re less willing to alienate or insult them right off the bat).
- TIM and TIF: trans-identified male and trans-identified female. The former refers to trans women, the latter to trans men. Just another way to ignore people’s identities and bring everything back to biological sex.
- Moids: This is one I hadn’t heard until joining radical feminist groups on Discord; it’s a derogatory term for men, which naturally means they use it when talking about trans women as well. Charming!
- Troon: An anti-trans slur, like tr*nny, but one that fewer moderators are aware of, allowing users to use it without fear of getting their account banned for violating community guidelines.
- Gyns: Does not mean gynecologist. Is used the way other people use ‘guys’ to refer to a group, to refer to fellow (female) travellers. Comes from the ancient Greek γυνή, the root for words like gynecologist and gynephilia.
- Gendies: A derogatory term for anyone who ‘identifies as’ a gender instead of accepting that their destiny has been predetermined by their assigned sex at birth.
- Peak (or peak trans): A verb. It refers to the moment you became fed up with trans activists/the movement as a whole. e.g. “I peaked when a trans customer was rude to me in my lingerie store”.
- Detrans: Someone who previously identified as transgender but no longer does.
- Desister: Someone who previously identified as transgender, but never medically transitioned, and no longer does.
- 🚂🦵: train, knee. Tr*nny. I only saw this used on Twitter.
- Febfem: A bisexual woman who has made the choice to only date other women; essentially a 21st century revamp of political lesbianism. There’s a flag and everything.
- Libfem: Liberal feminist. It’s the dominant flavour of feminism in society, so it’s more likely than not the kind of feminism you’re most familiar with.
- GNC: Gender non-conforming. Using radical feminist logic, trans men, for example, are simply gender non-conforming lesbians with internalised misogyny and homophobia they have yet to unpack.
- SW: Sex work.
- SWERF: Sex work-exclusionary radical feminist. By their very nature, most radical feminists are both TERFs and SWERFs.
With that out of the way, let’s dive in to our first case study: Ovarit.
Ovarit
Like I mentioned earlier, Ovarit was created in response to Reddit’s decision to ban the subreddit r/GenderCritical in late June 2020. The Atlantic article I linked to provides you with a pretty comprehensive overview of the site’s origins, but I just wanted to highlight MK Fain’s involvement in establishing the site, since she’ll come up later as the founder of both Spinster and 4W, a radical feminist online publication.
r/GenderCritical was banned on June 29, 2020 for violating Reddit’s rule against promoting hate. Far from prompting self-reflection on the part of its 64,000 users, its biggest devotees and administrators quickly sought out a replacement. Enter: Ovarit. As in, over (Redd)it, and ovary, because females have ovaries. Funny, right? Got the whole squad laughing.
While r/GenderCritical is memorialised on the Wikipedia page for ‘controversial Reddit communities’ alongside r/FatPeopleHate, r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse, Ovarit is thriving. Sort of.
Its header informs us that it’s still in the Beta stage almost two years later, running on an open-source platform called Throat. As Kaitlyn Tiffany explains in The Atlantic, Throat was developed by Ramiro Bou in 2016 as an alternative to Voat, which itself was designed as an alternative to Reddit. You’re confused? I’m fucking confused, bro.
Tiffany asked Bou about the site, to which he said that they’re “nice people” and currently one of the most active communities on Throat.
Meanwhile, its footer contains a quote from Sheila Jeffreys, who my fellow Australian feminists might recognise as a former University of Melbourne professor of political science known for her radical feminism. Dejan, a former student of hers, told me that she was explicit in her views, saying, “she’d speak to the “perversions” at the centre of what she called “transsexuals” and use heaps of really bogus anecdotes (particularly around the bathroom hysteria). She was incredibly transphobic.”
The quote displayed on the site is, “All space becomes male space unless females maintain a concerted effort to mark a space for themselves.”
Ovarit represents that concerted effort, I guess. Per their about page, “Ovarit is run by a team of radical feminist women dedicated to safeguarding women’s ability to have community with other women and speak freely about issues that matter to us as individuals and as a class.”
It’s hard to get an accurate read on how popular the site is; SEMRush says it gets 15k hits a month via search engines, while Similarweb says the site itself received 2.4 million visits in January. Similarweb also categorises it as a website about pet food and supplies though, so.
Of the subforums, o/Announcements has the most subscribers, at 6700, meaning that less than 20% of their membership from Reddit appears to have carried over to the new site. The highest upvoted post on the entire site had just 353 upvotes and 50 comments.
There are 19 subforums, including o/Cancelled, o/GenderCritical, o/SaveWomensSports and o/TERFIsASlur.
On the first day I visited the site, I looked at the top 100 posts under o/all, and noted that 83 were about trans people and issues, and 13 were about JK Rowling specifically. It’s not immediately clear how bra fitters complaining about customers or women complaining about their partners transitioning “uplifts women as a class”, nor how putting a Scottish billionaire famous for writing children’s books two decades ago on a pedestal benefits women as a whole, but maybe that will become clearer in time.
Interestingly, Ovarit’s rules include a ban on the use of transphobic slurs (as well as misogynistic and homophobic ones). Terms like ‘TIM’ and ‘TRA’ are fine though — referring to a trans woman as a man is acceptable as long as you do so politely.
That veneer of respectability slips away with alarming frequency, but a post that received 212 upvotes caught my eye.
On March 31, Trans Day of Visibility, last year — a day created to serve as an “annual international celebration of trans pride and awareness, recognising trans and gender diverse experiences and achievements” — user visits_radio made a post in o/GenderCritical that read,
I just wanted to wish everyone a great Terf Day of Visibility! I know it has been tough supporting women’s rights in this climate so every terf (out and closeted) deserves appreciation.
Hope each one of us has a lovely day today and celebrate the fact we are still fighting and that we will never give up!
Other users in the comments were quick to join in on the joke, including user hatshepsut, who wrote, “thank you! But I will NOT rest until we have a terf day of remembrance, terf awareness month, radical feminism visibility week, terf and terf adjacent mothers day, terf day of undying love and support, crypto terf day, rudefem day, nicefem day, gender critical day of mourning and finally the most esteemed holiday JK Rowling Day >:(((“.
User harripan responded with, “And a Peak Trans Remembrance Day where we reminisce about our peak trans moments”. Transgender Day of Remembrance takes place on November 20 each year and is intended to remember and honour trans people who have lost their lives that year.
Tiffany found a similar post, mentioning it to Fain and in her Atlantic article:
After we spoke, I sent Fain a link to a thread on Ovarit, in which women were discussing their disdain for Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual observance dedicated to the memory of people who were killed directly by anti-trans violence. In 2020, the number of deaths is at least 40 so far. “How many fucking invented holidays do they have at this point?” one asked. “They should change it to Every Day is a Trans Day because they don’t let us stop reading or hearing about them for even a minute,” wrote another.
I asked Fain if this kind of mocking, angry speech was concerning to her at all, and she wrote back to say no. “As I’m not a [moderator] on Ovarit, I don’t feel I’m in the best position to comment on specific content,” she said. “More generally, though, I think humor and anger are both very common ways for people to deal with pain and oppression.”
This response from Fain doesn’t explain how trans people are oppressing the users of Ovarit by dying, which would justify the usage of gallows humour using her logic.
One thread I found particularly illuminating was a recent one titled, “Persuading Normal People: Keep the focus on women and girls, boundaries, and consent” (I like the suggestion that people spending chunks of their days on a message board dedicating to bathroom panics aren’t normal — some slight self-awareness slipping through?)
The poster discusses how they’ve managed to persuade friends of theirs to come around to their way of thinking, and people in the comments also share their tips and tricks, which include focusing on consent or male entitlement, depending on the audience.
This thread, combined with comments I found elsewhere about the way users have struggled to remain friends with people who disagree with their transphobia, or even trans people they know personally who are apolitical and keep to themselves, made it clear to me that despite what they claim, and despite their tendency to accuse trans activists of intolerance, TERFs are not comfortable maintaining relationships with people who disagree with them on this issue. Trading tips and tricks and discussing the best way to convert friends and family to your way of thinking is not something typically done by someone secure in their views.
As you can see, the suggestion that trans people who keep to themselves and aren’t politically active aren’t a threat was quickly shut down. It’s blackface, they’re sexual fetishists, they hate women, they want to expand their dating pool.
Overall, Ovarit seems to be a pretty small fish in the radical feminist internet pond, although many people know of it, even if they don’t use it. Membership numbers are a fraction of what they were on Reddit, which I think is largely due to the fact that people can’t be bothered going to an entirely new site as opposed to sticking to Reddit and having access to thousands of subs whenever they want. This problem of attracting and convincing users to use platforms designed to serve such a niche purpose is one also being played out on Giggle and Spinster.
Giggle is a women’s-only app created by Australian Sall Grover in 2019. 4W is a publication founded by American MK Fain in 2019, and Spinster is the Twitter alternative also founded by Fain in 2019 (no, I don’t know what was in the water in 2019, but if anyone has any ideas, please comment below).
Giggle
The ‘girls only’ app, Giggle, was launched by Sall Grover in 2019, and made headlines in 2020 because of its strange verification process: you’re required to submit a selfie so that the app can determine that you’re female and thus allowed to use it. (ETA: There was also a bit of drama later in 2020 when it was discovered that Giggle had been accidentally revealing user’s phone numbers, photos and locations.)
All submitted selfies are sent to Kairos, which, according to Giggle, is “a leading face recognition AI company with an ethical approach to verification, that reflects our globally diverse communities. Through computer vision and deep learning, they recognise females in videos, photos, and the real world.” In less than a second, the image is analysed, and the AI has determined whether you’re male or female.
Interestingly, their website used to state, “Due to the gender-verification software that giggle uses, trans-girls will experience trouble with being verified”, where it now doesn’t mention trans women at all (meanwhile, Grover’s Twitter feed features many tweets about “men who claim to be women”). Also interestingly, the founder of Kairos, Brian Brackeen, describes himself as an “AI bias expert”, despite his software being used to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender.
All of that aside, let’s look at the app itself. The first thing you notice about it is how visually unappealing it is, and how user friendly it isn’t. The app has multiple sections, including ‘Giggle Talk’ where anyone can post to a universal feed, and a networking space which is kind of like Tinder or Bumble BFF, where you can swipe left or right on people and create groups of up to 6 people to have private conversations with.
There are ads at the top of the landing page that take up half the visible space, and you’re required to create new profiles for every topic you want to meet likeminded members to discuss, both of which add to the user unfriendliness.
Based on my time on the app, both swiping and monitoring the Giggle Talk feed, the user base skews slightly older than TikTok and Discord, with many members appearing to be in their 20s and older, with some edging into Mumsnet’s age range at 50 and up. This might be because the app requires you to be 16 to use it, but I also suspect that younger, more tech savvy people are less likely to use such a clunky app, as well as an entirely separate app, just to discuss radical feminism.
Grover herself posts to the Giggle Talk feed fairly often, but she isn’t the only one; another user, who goes by the name MardiShakti, posts on there several times a day, seemingly using it as her own personal Twitter feed. Users can share anything to this feed, but trans issues tend to dominate, as they do on Ovarit. Detrans Awareness Day was a big topic on there, as is the topic of detransitioning in general, as well as feminism and trans issues more broadly. Most of the posts made to the feed receive a handful of replies; Grover’s post revealing the sex of her unborn child received 26. While it’s not the most perfect way of measuring how popular the app is, it gives us an impression
Don’t let anybody tell you radical feminists don’t have a sense of humour: check out this hilarious meme!
Giggle’s terms do not allow for speech that is “illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, intimidating, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive”, and I didn’t see much out-and-out hate speech beyond misgendering trans people and things like the above meme (so basically, not many slurs). But the repeated emphasis on women’s “sex-based rights”, including by Grover herself, make it obvious who the women on Giggle are interested in fighting for, and the focus on detransitioners and occasional transphobic remark or joke just confirm it.
This post from user Rosa touched on the issue of non-radfem friends disagreeing with the poster, much like the “Normal People” post on Ovarit that I looked at earlier did. It’s certainly interesting to see radfems struggle to maintain a balance between their increasingly zealous radical feminism and their normal friendships and relationships; it feels reminiscent of what you hear from people who’ve been indoctrinated into cults or other extremist groups. If your views are so abhorrent that they start alienating those around you, maybe it’s time for some self-reflection?
Prolific user Mardi (who features in promotional material for the app) came through with my favourite comment, however. Aliens built the pyramids! Also English people are more Egyptian than Egyptians! What.
Remember, these are the people who claim to oppose ‘gender ideology’ because it isn’t rooted in scientific fact.
Update: Patrick Lenton alerted me to the fact that yesterday, news broke that a complaint had been filed against Giggle with the Australian Human Rights Commission by a trans woman. According to the Daily Telegraph, “The AHRC told her [Sall Grover] if she allowed Ms Tickle to join the app and “all other people that identify as female”, and undergo “education” about sex, gender and gender identity the complaint will be dropped. Otherwise the case could be taken to the Federal Court.”
Naturally, as ever concerned with balance, the Telegraph interviewed Grover herself and Liberal Senator Claire Chandler, who just last month introduced a ‘Save Women’s Sports’ bill, that “would clarify that the operation of single-sex sport on the basis of biological sex was not discrimination.” I won’t bother reproducing what either of them had to say on the matter here.
Since we can fairly safely assume that Grover will not allow the complainant, or any trans woman, to join the app, I recommend interested parties keep an eye on this space to see what happens next! Maybe I can make use of my half a law degree.
Spinster
The last case study for today is Spinster, the ‘Twitter alternative’ created by Mary Kate Fain, who you might remember from The Atlantic article mentioned earlier. Spinster was created in 2019 in order to serve as “a woman-centric website created to provide a platform for feminist dialogue.”
Fain created it alongside 4W, an online radical feminist publication. Both were created after Fain was fired from her job as a software engineer for writing an article titled, “Non-Binary Is the New “Not Like Other Girls”. Fain also claims to have experienced colleagues at an animal rights charity telling her, “You can’t say eggs came from female chickens, or milk comes from female cows: that’s transphobic.”
4W is not a huge publication by any means. Donate buttons and links to their Patreon are prominent on the sidebar, and the site’s 251 patrons support 4W to the tune of just under AUD$3000 a month. It has 8000 followers on Twitter and just under 2000 followers on Instagram.
It markets itself as covering “issues affecting women today”, and the site’s verticals are: news, opinion, gender identity, transgender, male violence, feminism and crime. It features a column from Phyllis Chesler, a second wave feminist and professor emerita of psychology and women’s studies at the College of Staten Island, who is known partly for her critiques of Islam, including calling for the burqa to be banned in western countries, and her condemnation of multicultural relativism that allows immigrants to avoid assimilating and ‘westernizing’. One of her weirder pieces, published in the far-right New English Review, compares anti-Zionism to being pro-trans; in it, she writes:
Those who are pro-trans, who believe that identity trumps sex; that a man can be a woman if he says so, and that a woman can be a man — if she says so; who favor the descriptor “queer” over lesbian or homosexual; who are earnestly trying to expand what they see as the limitations of both sex and gender — these are also the kind of people who believe that a country that has never existed — that would be Palestine — is nevertheless the most important, the most persecuted, and the most heroic country in the whole world.
4W also frequently collaborates with Plebity, a platform for “long form critical thinking” co-founded by Sasha White, better known online as @IAmGrushenka, an assistant agent fired by the Tobias Literary Agency in 2020 after it was revealed that she was tweeting anti-trans screeds from her pseudonymous account.
With that context in mind, let’s look at Spinster. Unlike Ovarit, which doesn’t require you to register to read anything shared on there, you have to register to read anything on Spinster, and your registration has to be approved by staff before you can login.
Spinster is part of the ‘Fediverse’, a series of interconnected servers that are independently hosted but can communicate with each other. Mastodon and Gab are other examples of Fediverse servers — as Fain explains, the Fediverse has become a place for “social media refugees on both the right and left”. On Spinster’s own About page, Fain laments, “Most servers are hostile to women/feminism, and will ban people who defend women’s sex-based rights.”
Like 4W, Spinster also asks for donations; a box on the side of my homepage informed me that they’ve raised $716 of their $1000 funding goal for the month. And in case anyone was wondering, they accept crypto donations! Six different kinds, to be exact.
Like Giggle, Spinster is not particularly user friendly. There’s no app, so you have to access the site via mobile web or a computer, which feels incredibly retro. Inevitably, much like Twitter for Web, this means the site is slow to load. You can follow people and only see their posts, but there’s also a universal feed where you can see all posts on Spinster; the latter is what I spent the most time on.
As for how many users the site has, I looked at Similarweb stats, as well as follower counts for Fain’s account and the official Spinster account to try and get an idea. According to Similarweb, the site received 356,000 visits in January, with the majority coming from North America. The site is ranked 58th in the LGBTQ category in the US.
On her personal account, founder @mk has 5700 followers and follows 18,000 people; meanwhile, the official Spinster account has 7800 followers and is following 16,600 people. Both accounts followed me as soon as I joined. This suggests to me that the number of accounts created since the site’s inception in August 2019 is around 18,000, but that the number of active users is far less. Esteemed members of Spinster include Glinner and Meghan Murphy, both of whom have been banned from Twitter; Fain, for all of her posturing about big tech censorship, still has her Twitter account.
One of Spinster’s rules is no hate speech, but it’s noted that “Moderators will use their discretion.” Based on the posts I saw, what I would consider hate speech against trans people does not meet the moderators’ definition of hate speech.
The Ovarit post this person links to is allegedly from a University of Western Australia student who says they were ‘cancelled’ after telling people they had been assaulted in the bathroom by a trans woman and requesting that there be “swipe card toilets where XX women can swipe into their respective bathroom, to ensure security, to prevent this sort of incident happening ever again”.
Nina Paley is an admin on the site, and hosts the Heterodorx podcast. The podcast is hosted by Paley, a cis woman, and Corinna Cohn, a trans woman who has written for esteemed outlets such as Quillette and presumably supports the platform outlined on the page: that sex is immutable, men can wear dresses, trans women are men. The podcast’s site even features a page where you can buy a pin celebrating the ‘TERF-Tr*nny Alliance’ (censorship my own).
Searches bring up innumerable posts using terms like ‘TIM’ and ‘TRA’, as well as more blatant slurs like tr*nny. Searches for these terms also bring up posts from other Fediverse servers, including one for Kiwi Farms, which. was described by Intelligencer in 2016 as the “web’s biggest community of stalkers”.
The discourse on Spinster was so bad that the app was removed from the Google Play Store and F-Droid. You can still read the request calling for Spinster to be removed from F-Droid here — it provides a few examples of transphobic hate speech found on Spinster, as well as posts from co-founder (and Fain’s partner) Alex Gleason praising Gab, the site beloved by neo-Nazis and QAnoners. When the poster reported the offensive posts, they were told that “abuse of the “report” button may be considered spam.” They noted that they didn’t find any personal threats, but still felt the site was a “propaganda machine and echo chamber”.
“Propaganda machine and echo chamber” fairly accurately describes platforms like Ovarit, Giggle, and Spinster: platforms created solely for the purpose of gathering with likeminded feminists away from the prying eyes of polite society.
People often describe social media platforms in general as echo chambers, particularly Twitter, where you can curate your feed and only follow people you agree with. But anyone has the ability to interact with your tweets and tell you when they disagree with you, assuming your account is public. On Ovarit, Giggle, and Spinster, there’s none of that; there’s only people who agree with each other reinforcing their own views and patting each other on the back for successfully fighting the Trans Menace for another day, and moderators who evidently don’t care very deeply about enforcing their own rules against hate speech.
As I mentioned earlier, I was partly inspired to create this series after watching Gothamshitty’s videos on TikTok about her time as a TERF on Tumblr. I appreciated her transparency in how TERFs made their flavour of feminism appeal to her, as well as her transparency around realising she was part of a hate movement and needed to get out.
It’s now 2022, and Tumblr isn’t the epicentre of online teen culture the way it was a decade ago — I didn’t even include Tumblr in this series for that reason, although I did see TERFs talk about it, and there does seem to be remnants of a radical feminist community on there. Instead, it’s all TikTok all the time, so I started by creating an account on there and following a few radical feminists/gender critical feminists/TERFs and seeing where the algorithm would take me.
On my mind throughout this exercise was a Media Matters report from last year which found that transphobic content on TikTok acted as a gateway to far-right content. The report defines transphobic content as videos that “degrade trans people, insist that there are “only two genders,” or mock the trans experience”; while it doesn’t explicitly mention radical feminist content, there is inevitably a lot of overlap considering how much radical feminists focus on trans people.
With that context, let’s crack on.
TikTok
In order to find radical feminist accounts, I searched for videos about radical feminism and gender critical feminism, and from there just followed a few accounts that were recommended to me each time I followed someone new. I ended up following roughly 30 accounts, the most popular being a.swags, who has 5472 followers. Other accounts I followed included hannahberrelli22, tiktokhatesterfs, realitykilledtheradio, and terfcunt. A few things that stood out to me about these accounts was that of the users who posted videos showing their faces, all were relatively young, all were white (or white passing), all were either American, Canadian, British, or Irish, and all identified as lesbians.
As a queer person, I’m very familiar with the discourse surrounding the topic of which LGBTQ+ identities are responsible the most transphobia, so I’m not interested in suggesting lesbians are primarily responsible for online transphobia. JK Rowling, perhaps one of the most well known commentators in this arena, is, after all, a cisgender, heterosexual billionaire. But the unfortunate truth is that lesbians do get used, both by other lesbians and non-lesbians alike, to attack trans people, whether it’s by suggesting trans women are forcing lesbians to have sex with them, or that the ~trans industrial complex~ is turning lesbians into trans men, or suggesting trans people are somehow responsible for the death of lesbian bars. There are TERFs who are not lesbians who are incredibly invested in perpetuating these narratives; on TikTok, I just happened to find a group made up primarily of lesbians who are also invested in perpetuating these narratives.
The majority of these creators post about very little besides trans people/gender, although some also post about sex work, sexuality, and radical feminism more broadly. Many of the comments on their videos are from people who’ve obviously mistakenly stumbled upon their videos and are confused as to why someone who is so brazenly transphobic would appear on their for you pages.
I saw videos talking about women’s sports, women’s bathrooms, women’s change rooms, lesbians being forced to date trans women, and non-binary identities not being real. I saw them praising plans to legislate which bathrooms trans people can and can’t use, and I saw them praising Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to order child welfare officials to investigate parents who were allowing their children to receive gender-affirming care.
Basically, I saw almost all of the standard TERF talking points I’ve seen time and time again. The only real difference on TikTok was the use of slang primarily associated with zoomers and the use of popular TikTok sounds, like “wait, is this fucking play about us?” from Euphoria (which felt ironic considering one of the stars of the show is trans).
Sidenote: of the users who didn’t show their faces, almost all posted things like k-pop fancams with their opinions written on top, or cutesy images from various anime shows accompanied by phrases like ‘drag is sexist’ or ‘lesbians don’t have dicks’, obviously taken from their ~aesthetic Instagrams.
The second video screenshotted above stood out to me because the user seems so close to getting it, and yet so far. Yes, it is strange that despite claiming you’re a feminist, evangelical Christians and reactionary conservatives share many of your views when it comes to sex work and trans people, isn’t it? And their complete failure to see how their own stance on sex work is also an attempt to exert control over women, by imposing their own values and morals on sex workers, is fairly ironic.
To better understand how young feminists in particular might be radicalised by what they see online, I spoke to Gothamshitty, AKA Lauren, who has spoken at length about the TERF pipeline (and how to counter it) and how she become a TERF on Tumblr, as well as how she got out.
We started out by discussing the backlash against sex positivity that I’ve noticed on TikTok, not just from radical feminists, who have their own reasons for disagreeing with sex positivity as it currently exists in mainstream feminism, but other young women as well. On this, Lauren said, “I recently read a good article on how Gen Z seems to be replicating the discourse from the 80s sex wars, on the side of the radfems. I think this has a lot to do with Gen Z’s experience with modern porn and dating apps, and how those have affected them/their peers. And they want to critique those things (rightfully so), but radfem seems to be the only ideology there to hand them the vocabulary they need.”
After liking approximately 50 videos by the creators I was following and giving TikTok an idea of what I was interested in, the algorithm started showing me:
- pro-Russia content
- pro-life content
- conservative content
- pro-anorexia content
- pro-weight loss content
As I continued interacting, the algorithm showed me considerably more left-wing videos, including:
- pro sex work content
- pro kink content
- trans friendly content
- content by survivors of sexual assault
Safe to say, the algorithm evidently wasn’t getting a clear read on what I was interested in. I continued to only engage with radical feminist videos, ignoring videos radical feminists would ignore like those that were pro sex work or pro kink, and the algorithm kept showing me increasingly misogynistic content, as well as more extreme weight loss content. I never saw any of the accounts I was following post this kind of content, except for one pro-Russia TERF account that I had a few mutuals with, so this direction surprised me, particularly the extreme weight loss content.
When I asked Lauren for her thoughts on the algorithm, she said, “It definitely helps radicalization. Seemingly innocuous radfem accounts will post those anti porn/hookup culture takes young feminists are looking for. But those accounts are also following/interacting with other radfems accounts that are posting the more transphobic stuff. So once you end up liking that original anti porn post/following that person, the algorithm will show you who that person is interacting with and push you further into the radfem community, until you’re confronted with TERFism. That’s why I call it a pipeline.”
I came back to her a while later after noticing the change in content I was seeing to include more and more weight loss content, and asked if she’s noticed any overlap between radical feminists and pro-ana communities. She said, “Yes, I have noticed an overlap between radfems and ED. However, this observance came after I left the community; during my time in tumblr TERF spaces, I didn’t see any ED content. I think this is because ED spaces are predominantly occupied by younger teens. Back “in my day”, most radfems/TERFs were 18+. Now, more and more middle/high schoolers are becoming radfems. So I think this reflects how the ideology is now more popular among younger girls. ED spaces operate like fan clubs, and so do young radfem spaces. That’s also why you see a lot of overlap between radfem and Kpop for example.”
Not having much experience with eating disorder communities, I appreciated this insight, and the explanation of them, as well as radfem spaces, operating like fan spaces explained a lot.
I was somewhat disappointed I wasn’t able to replicate the results of the Media Matters survey, but these results were interesting in and of themselves — the fact that the algorithm saw me interacting with anti-trans content and assumed I’d be interested in other kinds of misogyny.
Another phenomenon I found on TikTok and nowhere else was the fairly common requests that “lesbians DNI” with certain videos, DNI meaning “do not interact”. I’m not sure how these kinds of instructions can be enforced on social media where anyone can claim to be anything, but it was interesting to see nonetheless — an attempt to create virtual versions of the lesbian-only spaces many TERFs blame trans women for destroying.
Perhaps most interestingly, four of the accounts I followed were suspended for violating TikTok’s community guidelines during my time on radical feminist TikTok. In addition, terfcunt, one of those who saw their accounts suspended, made no secret of the fact that she has had eight TikTok accounts and counting as a result of repeated bans.
TikTok’s terms of service prohibit users from posting:
- any material which is defamatory of any person, obscene, offensive, pornographic, hateful or inflammatory
- any material that is deliberately designed to provoke or antagonise people, especially trolling and bullying, or is intended to harass, harm, hurt, scare, distress, embarrass or upset people
- any material that is racist or discriminatory, including discrimination on the basis of someone’s race, religion, age, gender, disability or sexuality
One account, run by someone who says they’re 17 and as of the time of writing is still up, made repeated references to telling people to kill themselves, in clear violation of the terms of service.
The day before I started writing this post, the user posted about receiving a warning from TikTok for telling people to kill themselves, and posted a video of Zoe Kravitz crying that said “my account is too big to get away with telling people to kts now”.
I primarily used Twitter as a secondary source, following people I’d found on TikTok and Discord on there, as well as popular accounts they interacted with.
Prior to this, I largely associated Twitter TERFs with the women who camp out in JK Rowling’s mentions, waiting for her to tweet so they can breathlessly tell her how perfect and flawless she is. A few years ago, they would have been doing the same with Graham Linehan, but his being permanently suspended meant they had to find a new hero to worship.
Following users from TikTok and Discord on Twitter, however, meant that I was exposed to a younger group of TERFs, which is where I picked up a bunch of slang I hadn’t seen widely used elsewhere.
As for the quality of the discourse on radfem Twitter, it was more of the same.
Individual trans people were held up as evidence that all trans people were “men with paraphilias” or “boundary-less, sex-obsessed cretins”. Using this logic, all TERFs are out of touch billionaires who wrote mediocre children’s fiction about a school for wizards.
During the time I was on radfem Twitter, I also noticed that a few users seemingly had a preoccupation with Hunter Schafer, star of Euphoria, who is a trans woman. These tweets followed the resurfacing of an old Instagram post’s of Schafer’s, made when she was 17 and since deleted, where she shares a mind map full of thoughts about her gender and sexuality, dysphoria, what it means to be trans, and why she wanted to transition.
It is unclear how making fun of an individual trans woman’s appearance advances the cause of women’s sex-based rights.
I was somewhat taken aback by the amount of vitriol publicly visible on radfem TikTok and Twitter, although there were some signs that the social media platforms were attempting to respond to concerns about content that violated community guidelines. Ultimately, even if these users are driven off the more mainstream social media apps, we know that they’ll just be able to join more exclusive forums like Ovarit and Spinster, driving them further into toxic echo chambers where they can learn from more seasoned TERFs and never encounter anyone who disagrees with them ever again. So I’m not entirely sure what the solution is.
Discord
I discovered Discord at the beginning of the pandemic, when a group of friends I originally met on LiveJournal over a decade ago reconnected and created our own Discord server. Since then, I’ve joined servers for Substack newsletters I subscribe to (hi Garbage Day and Today in Tabs friends!), my law school cohort, and special interests (read: The Witcher and Assassin’s Creed, lol). My use of Discord corresponds with what Ryan Broderick wrote in a recent edition of Garbage Day, that “the pandemic accelerated a rise in what’s called “dark social,” or non-public social media use — Discord, group chats, DMs, email — and with that has come an internet made up of millions of smaller internets”.
Because of this increase in ‘dark social’ usage, I decided to include Discord servers in my TERF experiment. I’ve already written about other less public social media platforms such as Giggle and Spinster, but these Discord servers 1. skew way younger and 2. often have an additional layer of privacy (we’ll get to what I mean by this in a minute). So it didn’t seem possible to get a comprehensive picture of what radical feminist discourse was like online without including Discord servers used by younger radical feminists.
I found the servers referred to in this piece by searching for servers tagged with ‘radfem’ on Disboard, an online database where people can list public Discord servers and tag them with relevant interests so that people looking for servers to join can find them.
I joined (or attempted to join) a number of servers, including:
- RadLeft Unity
- Beyond the Veil
- radfem hangout ╰(*´︶`*)╯♡
- medusa’s wrath
Two of those servers, Beyond the Veil and medusa’s wrath, openly describe themselves as being for TERFs. medusa’s wrath has a ‘biological women only’ requirement, whereas radfem hangout has a ‘female only’ requirement but allows trans men to join. All of these servers all require potential members to complete application forms and pass some sort of verification before they can be admitted.
medusa’s wrath
This server’s description on Disboard reads, “A secure space for radical feminists to build community, learn, educate, and grow. Voice verification is required. Biological women only.”
At the time of writing, medusa’s wrath had 205 members, making it one of the bigger servers I looked at. However, 77 of those members are ‘processing’, meaning their applications to join are still being considered. This means that only two channels are visible to them: a newly-spawned channel where they can post, and an awaiting-approval channel with messages from admins, including a link to their verification form.
This verification form was an astonishing sight. In addition to requiring applicants to record themselves speaking (so as to confirm that they’re biologically female, I assume), the form requires applicants to answer nine ideological questions so admins can decide whether you agree sufficiently with their beliefs before permitting you to join. Questions include:
- What do you think is the root/basis of misogyny?
- How do you think gender dysphoria should be treated in young people?
- What’s something that “peaked” you?
- And, naturally, would you consider yourself gender critical?
I’m being 100% serious when I say that applying for university required less effort than this. I genuinely cannot recall encountering anything like this, where people are so determined to keep people who disagree out of their space that they require them to answer a TERF pop quiz. Facebook groups can ask potential members to answer as many as three questions, but they’re usually along the lines of “do you agree to follow the rules”, not “do you agree that trans children should be denied gender affirming care”.
The voice verification also stood out to me, as someone with a less-than-ideally-feminine voice; how does verifying that someone is biologically female based on their voice work if the person simply has a deep voice? I’d imagine there’s a lot of room for error, much like there is with facial recognition software that seeks to identify biological females, knowing all we know about how terrible AI is when it comes to people of colour, particularly Black people.
I never made it into the server itself — perhaps my answers simply weren’t convincing enough. Some users were nice enough to give me a taste of the kind of discourse I was missing out on in the public channel, however.
Illuminating as ever. Onto the next!
RadLeft Unity
This was a relatively small server, having only 88 members when I joined, but it also required potential members to complete an application.
The server’s description on Disboard reads, “Welcome to RadLeft Unity. This is a space for radical and marxist feminists who are leftist and gender critical who wish to explore leftism with a gender critical lens. We take a different stance on gender and feminist issues, but wish to explore this from a leftist angle.
This is a woman focused space, male allies may join but you need to be pro-feminist and not just gender critical — our feminist chats are female exclusive for those who prefer this. No TRAs, liberals or reactionaries allowed. Verification is needed to enter.”
As a result of its ostensibly left-wing views, the application includes questions such as:
- Do you support anti-racism?
- What’s your view on Palestine and Israel?
Alongside more predictable radfem questions, such as:
- In a short sentence, what is your opinion on prostitution?
- Are you gender critical? What’s your opinion on gender identities?
- Do you support the rights of LGB people?
For those not familiar with Discord, you can select ‘roles’ that show up on your profile for each server. Certain roles change the colour of your username, others grant you access to certain role-specific channels, others are just… there. RadLeft Unity had a tonne of roles, including ones for the kind of feminist you are, the kind of leftist you are, your race, your sexuality, your religion, your location, ‘other’, and display name colour.
The most interesting roles for me were the location ones, and the ‘other’ ones.
An overwhelming number of users are based in North America and Europe, which isn’t surprising for an English-language based server.
The ‘other’ roles relate to a user’s relationship to trans identities: if you’ll recall from part 1, ‘detrans’ means someone who used to consider themselves trans and started medically transitioning but no longer considers themselves trans, whereas ‘desisted’ means someone who considered themselves trans but never medically transitioned and now no longer identifies as trans.
This server was a strange one, because the users had fairly standard left-wing views across the board, except for when it came to gender and sexuality. This is different to radical feminists, who (in my experience) focus almost exclusively on gender and sexuality, with very little analysis of class, race or western hegemony (which is reflective of the overwhelming number white middle class people from Anglophone countries who occupy these spaces).
Despite agreeing with them on so many issues, it would never be possible for me to remain in a space like that for long, because the way they talk about trans people is so hateful that it alienates anyone who hasn’t already been conditioned to find it acceptable. As an added bonus, RadLeft Unity makes use of a bot that automatically shares each new article posted by 4W.
Unfortunately, this was far from the worst I’d see on Discord.
Beyond the Veil
This is an even smaller community, with only 57 members at the time of writing, but it also requires verification: you have to verify your voice before your request to join is accepted and you can view all the channels.
The server’s description on Disboard reads, “A discussion and safe-haven for terfs/radfems, and really any woman that is interested in feminism. We have feminist-theory discussion, along with regular chill discussions. Join to view the Manifesto if interested in reading more about us.”
Did that make you want to view the manifesto? I’ve got you covered!
Is it just me or does number 2 basically say “women are stupid because of sexism”? “Less motivated to be sagacious”? “Not have the ability to innately know how to use the mental tools of learning”? It’s giving “women are stupid and I don’t respect them”. The misogyny is coming from inside the house.
Despite the use of highfalutin words like ‘sagacious’ in their manifesto, the quality of discourse in this server did not impress me much.
Case in point: making fun of the mental health of a trans person because mental illness is hilarious if it’s someone you don’t like, I guess.
It’s not TERFs who are murdering trans people or shouting abuse at them, except for when it is.
(Side note: when has a trans person ever said that misgendering someone is on par with murder? I guess it’s harder to make your opponents sound ridiculous if you rely on actual statements made rather than invented strawmen.)
It was in Beyond the Veil that I encountered blatant radfem racism for the first time, with the majority of it aimed at men from majority Muslim countries.
Inger Støjberg is a Danish politician who served as the minister for immigration from 2015 to 2019. Last year, she was given a two-month jail sentence for separating couples seeking asylum where the girl was under 18. She was also impeached and voted out of Danish parliament as a result.
Some of the most disturbing content I saw was a conversation about rape and murder fantasies.
This user shared their fantasies that included raping ‘moids’ (men, which to them includes non-binary AMABs and trans women), adding that women are too empathetic with men and shouldn’t feel bad when women murder men, adding in a reference to Aileen Wuornos, made famous by Charlize Theron in 2003’s Monster.
The founder of the server responds with, “fantasizing about raping a moid may temporarily alleviate some trauma/tension”, but ultimately concedes that it’s about as effective as self-harm or substance abuse.
This kind of talk is… way above my pay grade, and should probably be reserved for sessions with a therapist. But it was incredibly disturbing to see, particularly knowing that trans people are four times more likely than cis people to be victims of violent crime, including rape and sexual assault. Consider the young ages of some of the users of these servers, and then consider the statistic that 12 percent of trans youth have reported being sexually assaulted by peers or staff in K-12 settings. Suddenly, the violence they fantasise about becomes less of a fantasy and more of a reality, just like it is for cis women. Instead of using these shared experiences to build solidarity, however, TERFs just devolve into hateful speech and disturbing pronouncements.
radfem hangout ╰(*´︶`*)╯♡
Don’t be fooled by the cutesy emote — this was the most hateful server I spent time in, by far. The server’s description on Disboard reads, “welcome to radfem hangout ╰(´︶`)╯♡ we’re a server aimed towards younger radical feminists, female only! transmen are welcome to join. see you there! ❤”. The server has 131 members at the time of writing, and requires potential members to answer two questions before they can join:
- Are you female? If no, go ahead and exit stage left, because this is a female-only server, sorry!
- If yes, do you have a feminist or political centric social media account? If so, leave your handle here so we can check it out. If not, explain why you want to join our server and why you don’t have an account we can look at.
When I joined, you had to provide your name, age, opinions (ie are you a radical feminist, marxist etc), social media accounts, and how you found the server.
I was worried the social media requirement would rule me out, since I only had a sockpuppet TikTok account that had no videos on it, but that appeared to be enough for them, perhaps thanks to the radfems who followed me back once they saw my username and profile picture (both references to Andrea Dworkin).
By ‘younger radical feminists’, the server primarily means teenagers; the owner is 17, based in North America, and a lesbian. Based on the roles, the majority of users are underage, but there were 38 adults in the server, with most underage users being 16 or 17.
46 members identified as lesbian, 16 as straight, and 38 as bisexual.
Again, the vast majority of members were based in North America and Europe.
21 members identified as dysphoric, while 27 identified as desisted.
The first thing that jumped out at me about this server was a ‘rate the moids’ channel where, you guessed it, users rate men, non binary AMABs and trans women based on looks. Some are people they know in real life, others are people they’ve encountered on dating apps. The commentary in this channel is not kind, and to protect the privacy and dignity of those who were ‘rated’, I will not be sharing any identifying images.
As we saw with Beyond the Veil, there is a disturbing normalisation of the kind of violent rhetoric usually associated with men who commit violent crimes, usually against women — speech that was once the sole purview of men in spaces like /pol/ and Kiwi Farms is clearly not entirely uncommon in radical feminist online spaces. (Remember, Spinster and Kiwi Farms are both part of the Fediverse.)
I found violent rhetoric elsewhere on the server, too, including a lengthy rant that starts with “I wish that TRAs would just die”. Take note the date: this same user, who is upset about rape and death threats being sent to TERFs, posted that same day about wanting to bash a trans woman’s skull in.
(‘Allowed’ is doing a lot of work here. You’re describing war crimes, which aren’t typically allowed, at least under the Geneva Conventions.)
See also: this conversation about whether users would snitch if someone they knew killed a man.
There was also a baffling exchange where one user said if they were a guy they would probably want to shoot up a school.
For more insight into the minds of these young radfems, let’s have a look at a conversation about what made them ‘peak’.
(‘Exclus’ and ‘inclus’ refer to one’s position on whether asexual and aromantic people are part of the LGBT community, they’re short for exclusionist/inclusionist.)
I’m including the following screenshot because it’s a fascinating example of cultish language used in these spaces, and that’s something I’m going to come back to in my conclusion. ‘Has TikTok gendie insanity rly made a bunch of gyns peak??’ Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
But actually, what it means is, has TikTok trans-inclusive feminism (‘gendie insanity’) really made a bunch of women (‘gyns’) abandon their support for trans rights (‘peak’)? Consider me your TERF translator.
As in Beyond the Veil, users had some questionable views on race and immigration, particularly towards Muslim refugees in European countries.
’Racism stems from men and their aggressive nature and tribalism’ lets (white) women off the hook completely for their role in upholding and enforcing racism and racist policies, as though white women haven’t been complicit in or active participants in racism for as long as it has existed. See: female slave owners, female Neo Nazis and KKK members, female concentration camp guards, Margaret Thatcher, Marine Le Pen, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin… this list is by no means exhaustive.
This idea that women are all sisters, that women are more enlightened where men are primitive and conservative, is fairly standard radfem rhetoric, but honestly does women the disservice of framing us as mere pawns of men and not human beings with autonomy and our own minds. Nothing that we do wrong is our fault, we’re just feeble-minded babies, I mean women. This is a feminist view, somehow.
Then there was this discussion about immigration, using Sweden as an example:
A quick Google brought me to Wikipedia, which I’m going to reference here since the source it quotes is in Swedish, I do not speak Swedish, and the Swedish Chef was not available to translate at such short notice.
“A 2005 study by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention found that people of foreign background were 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes than people with a Swedish background, including immigrants being four times more likely to be suspected of for lethal violence and robbery, five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes, and three times more likely to be investigated for violent assault.”
While looking for sources of this claim about rapes committed in Moscow, I found the exact statistic in a post made on Stormfront in 2016. You know Stormfront? The neo Nazi website described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as ‘the first major hate site on the internet’?
Putting my law student hat on for a moment, I want to point out that these all refer to immigrants being suspected or investigated by police. The very nature of crime rates (being that they reflect crime reported to and investigated by the police, rather than all crime) means that they only give you a piece of the puzzle: they tell you where police direct resources and officers, and which groups police focus their attention on. Surprisingly, in a country like Sweden (or any European country, or the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand), police are likely to be racist, particularly towards immigrants (of colour — I doubt I would experience any anti-Australian racism if I moved there) and Black people. So it comes as no surprise to me that people born in countries other than Sweden are more likely to be suspected of crimes than locals, but I doubt the server member has thought about crime rates in this way.
“The thing is with ethno crime, that you can’t talk about it freely. like,,, you’d get called racist or anything like that etc.” Being called racist when you’re using the same rhetoric, down to the same statistics, as actual neo Nazis? Unthinkable!
Users adopt a paternalistic approach to talking about women and children from the Middle East seeking asylum in Europe, and denigrate the men who do so. Of course, if the men in question took their families with them when seeking asylum and their journey involved something they consider risky like a boat, they would be criticised for endangering their families, so really, they can’t win. And it’s not as though western countries are particularly kind to refugee families who do seek asylum together.
I asked Lauren (gothamshitty) if she’d encountered anti-Muslim sentiment during her time on radfem Tumblr, and she said, “Yes to the anti-muslim sentiment. Although I’ve seen radfems condemn religion altogether, they seem to view Islam as uniquely oppressive/”backwards”. I remember seeing tumblr TERFs talk about their fears of Syrian refugees entering Europe and promoting the false (alt right) narrative that more refugees meant more violence against European women. I’ve also seen them avoid pro-Palestinian stances because of “the way middle eastern men treat their women.”
Discord was, by far, the most depressing part of my experiment. Seeing so many young women use such hateful and violent rhetoric, egging each other on and coaxing one another further into radicalisation, made me profoundly sad. The naive optimist in me hopes that some of this hatefulness will soften with age, but in the meantime, the trans people in their lives and the trans people they encounter online will experience very real harm at their hands.
Discord gave me a glimpse at what radical feminism looks like outside the Anglosphere; while all of the servers were dominated by users from the US, Canada, and Europe, there were several vocal members from countries like Germany and Russia as well as Morocco and Malaysia.
Many of these young Discord radfems came (or are coming) of age in a time of increased LGBT visibility and acceptance, including for trans people, and accompanying LGBT discourse and discussions on social media. In addition, vaguely sex positive liberal feminism is likely the only kind of feminism they would have been exposed to until discovering radical feminism online; the mainstream centrist girlboss flavour of feminism favoured by corporate America and the Democratic Party.
It’s my opinion that these two things, increasing LGBT visibility and the accessibility of discourse, and exposure to lacklustre mainstream liberal feminism, combined to create a perfect storm of alienation and frustration for these young TERFs. They feel ignored by the LGBT community, which they feel focuses too much on trans people, and they feel ignored by liberal feminism, which fails to address systemic concerns and (to them) emphasises sex positivity without adequately addressing the way male sexuality has been used to harm women.
In steps radical feminism, whether it’s on TikTok, Twitter, Tumblr, or elsewhere, and it feels like a godsend. Here is a feminism that addresses the root of all of my problems as a teenage girl: the patriarchy. Here is a feminism that doesn’t require me to be a Boss or to be Beautiful but one that lets me express my rage as a woman in a sexist society. Here is a feminism that talks about my experiences as a woman who is not interested in dating men. Here is a feminism that doesn’t focus on individual empowerment but on systemic justice for women as a class.
Like other TERFS, those on Discord largely turned to radical feminism after feeling alienated by liberal feminism; unlike other TERFs, they’re incredibly young to have already cycled through various flavours of feminism and landed at the extremist end of radical feminism.
Two of my biggest questions when writing this series were, “How do we intercept these young women before they enter the TERF pipeline?” and “How can we show them that radical feminism, particularly trans exclusionary radical feminism, isn’t the only alternative to liberal feminism?” I asked Lauren for her thoughts, and she said, “It really has to be preventative instead of reactive, because once these young teens make friends with radfems and TERFs, that personal connection and identity will keep them there. I think that showing alternatives to libfeminism helps, and showcasing the connections between radfems/TERFs/conservatives.” Her videos do that, and I hope that in this series, I have managed to highlight how hateful, reactionary, and frankly regressive many TERFs are.
Conclusion
I have spent a lot of time over the past month thinking and writing about gender critical feminists. My initial reason for creating this series was to test my hypothesis — that the rhetoric I was seeing on Twitter was only the tip of the iceberg — but it’s evolved since then, and I’ve inevitably had to start wrestling with the question of how to define these groups: are they cults? How much do they have in common with the cults I’m familiar with? Or are they more like extremist hate groups? Is there a substantial difference between the two? What drives young women in particular to join these groups, and what can prompt them to leave?
And so began several days’ worth of research on cults, extremist and radical groups, cult deprogramming, and deradicalisation, in an attempt to come to some sort of conclusion about how to categorise these groups and how to combat their influence.
The use of language
“The first key element of cultish language? Creating an us-versus-them dichotomy. Totalitarian leaders can’t hope to gain or maintain power without using language to till a psychological schism between their followers and everyone else. “Father Divine said to always establish a ‘we/they’: an ‘us,’ and an enemy on the outside,” explained Laura Johnston Kohl, our Jonestown vet.
The goal is to make your people feel like they have all the answers, while the rest of the world is not just foolish, but inferior. When you convince someone that they’re above everyone else, it helps you both distance them from outsiders and also abuse them, because you can paint anything from physical assault to unpaid labor to verbal attacks as “special treatment” reserved only for them.”
I was reading Amanda Montell’s book on the language used by cults, Cultish, last week, and this paragraph jumped out at me; the establishment of an us-versus-them dichotomy, the use of language to create an other that it’s acceptable for you to view as inferior.
‘Cultish’ is the name Montell gives to the language of fanaticism used by cult leaders and their followers; people like Jim Jones, for example, but she also explores less terrifying examples like SoulCycle instructors.
Am I insinuating that gender critical feminists are totalitarian/have a totalitarian leader heading up their cult of hatred? No, but I don’t think the desire to create this dichotomy needs to only be felt and implemented by a single totalitarian leader in order to exist.
“Whether wicked or well-intentioned, language is a way to get members of a community on the same ideological page. To help them feel like they belong to something big. “Language provides a culture of shared understanding,” said Eileen Barker, a sociologist who studies new religious movements at the London School of Economics.”
If you’ll recall, earlier in this post, I included a glossary of terms because there were so many that were used in these spaces and almost nowhere else, it felt necessary to define them in order to assist with comprehension. Unlike in other political spaces, these aren’t terms that initially might confuse but that one can then learn from reading readily available theory; to learn what these terms mean, you have to spend a decent amount of time in these spaces.
“Though these special terms didn’t communicate anything that couldn’t be said in plain English, using them in the right way at the right time was like a key unlocking the group’s acceptance.”
Almost all of the terms commonly used by gender critical feminists are insulting terms for people that we already have words for: men, trans women, trans activists. But using them in these spaces serves as a way of proving to the others that you’re like them, ideologically speaking; you’re a fellow traveller.
Social spaces or friend groups having their own ‘language’ isn’t in and of itself cultlike — there’s a lot of language I would use as someone who spends a lot of time online that someone like my mum, for example, wouldn’t immediately understand. So while I found this book compelling in general, and slightly relevant to this series, I wanted to further explore the nature of cults to see if understanding them could help me understand TERFs.
Red flags
This book, written by cult specialist and founder of the Cult Education Institute, Rick Alan Ross, was a good introduction to the issue of ‘deprogramming’ cult members. The term itself is a highly charged one following the use of forced deprogramming on adults without their consent in the 70s and 80s, so practitioners now use terms like ‘exit counselling’, with Ross himself preferring ‘cult intervention specialist’.
In particular, his list of the ten most commonly cited behaviours that lead to suspicion about cult involvement stood out to me.
- Growing obsessiveness regarding a group or leader, resulting in the exclusion of almost every practical consideration
- The blurring of identities. The identity of the group, the leader, or some higher power increasingly ceases to be seen as distinct and separate. Instead identities become blurred and seemingly fused as involvement with the group continues and deepens.
- Whenever critical questions arise about the group or leader, they are often dismissed and characterized as “persecution.”
- Uncharacteristically stilted and seemingly programmed repetitive verbiage and mannerisms that reflect a group mind-set or cloning of preferred group language and behavior
- Growing dependence on the group or leader for problem solving and solutions, coupled with a corresponding decrease in individual analysis and reflection
- Hyperactivity regarding the group or leader, which seems to inhibit or supersede previously held personal goals or individual interests
- A dramatic loss of spontaneity and sense of humour
- Increasing lack of communication and isolation from family and old friends unless they demonstrate an interest in the group or leader
- Anything the group or leader says or does can be justified or rationalized, no matter how harsh or harmful it may appear.
- Former group members are typically considered in a critical or negative light, and they are most often avoided. There seems to be no legitimate reason to leave the group. Those who leave are always wrong.
A lot of these — obsessiveness, the dismissal of critical questions, growing dependence on the group, lack of communication and isolation from family and old friends unless they share an interest in the group, rationalising anything group members or the leader say, former group members being viewed in a negative light — seemed to describe the way many gender critical feminists behave in these closed online spaces.
I saw (and have written about) several examples of people expressing confusion and concern over how to deal with friends who didn’t share their beliefs, and posts from people expressing the desire to try and ‘peak’ their friends into sharing their beliefs about trans activists and trans people.
The dismissal of criticism as persecution was another one; one just has to read the replies to any mildly critical tweet of JK Rowling to see how pervasive the idea is in gender critical circles.
Another warning sign Ross wrote about was that “the group promotes unreasonable fears about the outside world.” The gender critical obsession with trans women assaulting other women in changing rooms, bathrooms, and women’s prisons immediately came to mind; these fears aren’t based on statistical evidence or even anecdotal evidence most of the time; they’re based almost entirely on rhetoric and a select few examples; despite the impression they give, there is no epidemic of trans women committing violence against cis women and children, particularly in public spaces — cis men remain the single biggest threat to cis and trans women, children, and even other men.
In Cultish, Montell interviewed Steven Hassan, a mental health counsellor, cult expert, and author of The Cult of Trump, who said of groups that “tend toward the destructive” that they use three kinds of deception: omission of what you need to know, distortion to make whatever they’re saying more acceptable, and outright lies. I observed all three of these kinds of deception in online gender critical spaces; omission of anything that would make trans people seem like fully-rounded human beings rather than just terrifying spectres, distortion of statistics and information to make trans people seem like a bigger threat than they are, and outright lies about what the intent behind the majority of trans people’s activism is (hint: it’s not to eradicate lesbians or cis women or takeover women’s sports).
Totalist organisations
Another book I looked at was Terror, Love and Brainwashing by academic and former cult member Alexandra Stein. She makes use of the term ‘totalist organisation’ to describe cults, describing them as:
“The way a total eclipse utterly covers the light, so do totalist organizations attempt to block out any alternate relationships or beliefs, locking daylight out of the picture. The word “totalist” gives an appropriately oppressive sense, the suffix “-ist” conveying the active role required in creating this total environment, thus flagging the actions of the leader and the organization as the agent of their wishes. The suffix “-ism” denotes “a belief in or practice of,” and so “totalism” is the practice of a total worldview or a total ideology.”
Differentiating between members of totalist groups and others, she writes:
“Their belief system only forms a part of their life and their views. Their adherence to their perhaps odd belief or their faith and place of worship has an entirely different impact on their life than that experience by someone whose whole existence becomes bound up within one organization. The total ideology, the absolute belief system — whether religious, political, commercial or of any other type — is the reflection of the underlying totalist social structure.”
For me, it doesn’t feel like a particularly long bow to draw to say that someone who is a member of dedicated gender critical online spaces because other online spaces were too hostile to their beliefs has perhaps allowed their existence to become bound up within one organisation/ideology.
“The structure of such a belief system is total: closed and exclusive, allowing no other beliefs, no other truths, no other affiliations and no other interpretations, proposing to be true for all time and under all conditions.”
“Allowing no other beliefs, no other truths, no other affiliations and no other interpretations” made me think of all the surveys I had to complete to prove my beliefs aligned with those in the gender critical Discord servers, because heaven forbid one interact with someone who has a different opinion than you on how dysphoria in young people should be managed.
Relationship with the alt-right
A back-and-forth published by the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right on whether we should be worried about white men or not got me thinking: why just men?
We know that white women perpetuate and enforce white supremacy, including white supremacist ideas about gender. There are countless examples throughout history (one that immediately comes to mind is the role of white women as slave owners in the American South as detailed by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers in They Were Her Property), and after spending so much time observing radical feminist spaces, I came away with a strong impression of TERFs continuing to rely on traditional ideas of womanhood and femininity in order to demonise trans women and occasionally, even other cis women who disagree with them. For example, one of the Discord users I wrote about called me a ‘moid’ (their term for men, which they also use for trans women), as though my being critical of them somehow strips me of my womanhood.
A more common example of this is the way TERFs talk about trans women being ‘obviously male’ by virtue of their broad shoulders or large feet. As a cis woman with both of those things, this kind of rhetoric has the potential to amplify existing feelings of alienation, as well as existing feelings of one’s failure at being a woman (fortunately for me, I stopped caring about what strangers thought of my appearance a long time ago).
TERFs inevitably uphold and appeal to conservative ideas of womanhood that wouldn’t be out of place at the Republican National Convention. Similarly, their rhetoric about needing to protect ‘women and girls’ from trans people and men has echoes of the white supremacist rhetoric around protecting white women from men of colour, particularly Black men.
Their focus on crimes committed by trans women, and their invocation of these as proof trans women aren’t women, because women don’t commit violent crimes, as well as their failure to acknowledge when women do commit violent crimes, enforce white supremacist ideas of (white) women being the weaker and more fragile sex in need of protection. Even their arguments around excluding trans women from women’s sports that rely upon the assumption that women are inherently physically inferior to men play into this idea.
Furthermore, rhetoric around the extinction of lesbians as a result of trans men ‘identifying out’ of lesbianism, or as a result of trans women coercing lesbians to have sex with them, thereby making them no longer lesbians because they have touched a penis, mirrors rhetoric around the extinction of white people as a result of Jewish conspiracies, immigration, mixed race marriages, etc. Both of these play into people’s fears about becoming minorities and inevitably being treated the way they currently treat minorities themselves.
The anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric I observed on Discord, as well as seeing radfems on TikTok celebrate machinations by Republicans to prevent trans people from using the bathroom or trans teenagers from accessing medical care, only confirmed for me the existence of links between gender critical feminism and the alt-right.
These links were actually a point of frustration for the creator of RadLeft Unity, the explicitly left-wing radical feminist Discord server I joined. In her server, Caso wrote:
“I think one of the avenues the right is poaching gender critical feminists is going through the woke propaganda route they do for centrists. After feminists peak, they become disillusioned with the mainstream TRA left, conservatives give them a word ‘woke’ and associate it with stereotypes of annoying middle class liberals and their annoying detached way of doing leftism. They mix in some truths with some bullshit.”
Caso actually messaged me after my earlier post blew up in the radfem Discord servers, and I asked her about the links between gender critical feminism and the right, and whether those links concerned her as a leftist. On right-wing radical feminists, she said, “Usually then right leaning ones co-opt the term and read no theory or have interest in feminism, they use it as a smokescreen because they want to pretend their trans critical views are intellectually founded.”
She continued, echoing the sentiments she expressed on the server:
“The term gender critical has been co opted by conservatives and centrists who are not politically aligned the reason for this is because radical feminism is less mainstream and often rejected from mainstream discourse for not being pro gender or liberal friendly, they seek allies and platforming.
And a lot of gender critical organisers are of the philosophy that the ends justify the means, if they can get exposure they’ll ally with fox news or that conservative network. It’s really an act of desperation. So for exposure, they sacrifice the group’s purity.
The logic around it is that conservatives, at least on a superficial level agree on some things radfems do even if it’s not for the same reason (ie: anti liberalism, anti prostitution, anti gender ideology). So they’re willing to work with an enemy to to take down another. Problem is that conservatives are more organised and influential than radfems so they get more out of the deal.”
This piece by Jude Ellison S. Doyle does a good job of explaining how the far-right is turning feminists into fascists; in it, Doyle argues that the American right is using TERFs to further their agendas. Even in Australia, Liberal Senator Claire Chandler has been celebrated by TERFs for her stance against trans women in women’s sport, despite the Liberal Party being the furthest thing possible from feminist.
Doyle cites a 2020 article from Radix Journal, a far-right publication founded by Richard Spencer (The Man Who Got Punched), which outlines a strategy for attracting TERFs to the alt-right, titled “The TERF to Dissident Right Pipeline”. The author notes that their insistence on biological sex as an immutable binary, in which all “men” depraved and violent, all “women” fragile victims, “may make it easier to convince them of other biological hierarchies. Their insistence on seeing trans women as “violent men,” in particular, can be weaponized against men of colour and turned into overt white supremacy.”
According to the author, “It doesn’t take any thinking woman long to see exactly which men are committing violent crime and the majority of partner violence, and race realism is a natural next step.”
Doyle also examines the work of Jennifer Bilek, a well-known TERF who, according to her LinkedIn, is an “Investigative Journalist covering the gender identity industry, portrait painter and owner of premium haircut house-call business serving the Manhattan and Daytona Beach Florida areas.”
Bilek is known for her use of antisemitic tropes and language to further her transphobic agenda; she has argued that rich white men, many of whom are Jewish, are “institutionalizing transgender ideology”, whatever that means. Yes, George Soros was on the list. He’s a busy guy!
In blog posts, Bilek builds on this conspiracy, claiming Martine Rothblatt and Jennifer Pritzker (two rich trans women who are also Jewish) are behind a “transhumanist” movement that:
“…has infiltrated the gay community and taken over the “medical industrial complex,” creating a predatory gender industry that convinces cis people they need to transition, with the ultimate goal of normalizing “body dissociation” and extreme body modifications, putting Google chips in our heads and (I swear to God) enslaving the human race by merging man with machine.”
Doyle spoke to Talia Lavin, hate researcher and author of Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy (which is a very good book, btw). Lavin outlines the historical connection between Nazi conspiracy theories and trans people, explaining, “One thing that it’s crucial to understand about the far right, the extreme right, the Nazi guys, is the way that they obsessively see absolutely fucking everything as a Jewish plot. And the existence of trans people is a huge one.”
“Lavin cites the 1933 burning of Magnus Hirschfeld’s archives: Hirschfeld, a German Jewish doctor, was a groundbreaking and remarkably sympathetic researcher of transgender identity; his was the first clinic in the world to provide gender-affirming surgery. Then the Nazis burned his work, leaving a hole in history. To trans people, this looks like proof of erasure. But to a Nazi, Lavin says, it means something different: the presence of a Jewish doctor indicates that “[the] existence of trans people was invented by people like Hirschfeld in order to undermine white masculinity and destroy the white family.””
Ultimately, Doyle concludes,
“The longer I look at this, the more I concur with gender theorist Judith Butler that trans people might not be the point of anti-trans fascism at all; we are simply the most popular means by which fascists “concoct a world of multiple imminent threats to make the case for authoritarian rule and censorship.””
Whether or not they’re the point of it, trans people are obviously feeling the repercussions of it, and time and time again, gender critical feminists can be found celebrating that fact.
So… are TERFs part of a cult or not?
A Google search for TERFs and cults led me to the Blood and TERF podcast, a podcast about the “ideology of TERFs and fascism, cults, pseudoscience, and other reactionary political phenomena”, and the hosts were kind enough to humour my 101-level questions about TERFs and cults.
I asked if my description of gender critical feminist groups as hate groups with cult-like attributes (at this point, I was hesitant to use the ‘cult’ label without qualifiers) aligned with their view, and they said yes, with one caveat:
“It depends on *which bit of the movement you mean* when one makes the link to cultic behaviour. Some bits are much worse than others in short. There’s certainly broad trends but it’s not homogenous: some political transphobes are fully delusional in their beliefs, and in-group toxic as a full devotee of the Qanon cult or similar, whilst others are more akin to a UKIP voting casual racist circa 2014.
I would say that the “true” terf contingent tend to trend more in the direction of being a coherent cultic grouping than other bots of the transphobic movement, and are also one of the more conspiracy theory minded bits of the wider movement, but not the *most* conspiracy theory minded bit: I would say the most tinfoil hatted bit is the full blown blood-purity fascists and the committed antivaxxer and Qanon crossover bits rather than the classic radfems, but as ever, the line blurs quite a lot.”
Around the same time, a kind soul linked me to Caelan Conrad’s series called Inside A Cult: Gender Critical. It’s an incredibly comprehensive three-part YouTube series based on months of research they conducted while undercover in several gender critical Facebook groups aimed at parents.
When I first spoke to Conrad, I wasn’t convinced that ‘cult’ was the right label — I kept getting hung up on the lack of a defined and charismatic leader, someone like Jim Jones who could issue instructions to group members as they saw fit.
For Conrad, the parent groups served to convince them that gender critical people were part of a cult. They told me, “The coerced isolation of them from everyone who disagreed, the sheer terror of everyone outside the group, the indoctrination of their children, cutting off access to non group information…”
This belief is reflected in their series, and as it goes on, it becomes more and more obvious why they came to that conclusion.
For example, Conrad observed of the parents in these groups that, “as long as what they were reading confirmed their beliefs, it went undisputed nearly 100% of the time”. I found this to be the case in the spaces I observed as well; rarely did people ask for additional sources or information before reacting to deliberately provocative statements or posts.
One of the most compelling arguments Conrad makes in their video can be found about half an hour in:
“In the past, people expected personal access to cult leaders, which by necessity limited the size of most cults… Social media, however, has given the layperson with an internet connection previously impossible access: the ability to reach out across the world and share their message, their teachings, and gain true notoriety from it. And in the modern age of parasocial attachment, stans and politics, communities frequently form around their idols rather than being formed by their idols. A world where idols have immeasurable influence and absolutely no accountability for the actions of their followers.”
I have absolutely seen stans engage in cultlike behaviour without needing to be instructed or led by the celebrities they worship, so it didn’t feel like a leap to suggest that gender critical feminists be doing the same thing.
Recruitment through fear
Conrad also highlighted the recruitment tactics used by parents in these groups, and how they mirrored those used by cults: they relied on fear and preyed on people’s concerns in order to draw them in.
Members of these groups paint trans adults as predators and trans youth as mentally ill and coerced into identifying as trans; Conrad explains how both techniques are intended to elicit feelings of fear and disgust.
In her book, Stein argues that totalist groups form relationships rooted in the creation of trauma, writing:
“This is a relationship that is rooted in the creation of, and experience of, trauma. A helpful way to understand this relationship is by using attachment theory and trauma theory. Attachment researchers who study both child and adult relationships call this type of relationship one of “disorganized attachment.”
Similarly, Ross writes:
“Former cult members I have spoken with frequently recount a particularly vulnerable time in their lives when someone first approached and recruited them. It may have been a coworker, a family member, or an old friend; it was someone they trusted. In that moment they didn’t recognize what was happening, and they were in distress. What they initially felt was a sense of relief; that is, they had found someone to address their needs.”
In the case of gender critical parenting groups, parents are already feeling vulnerable and stressed, potentially after their child has come out to them and trans, and this enables TERFs to step in and attempt to ‘address their needs’ by explaining how it’s not their fault their child is trans, society is brainwashing children, Big Pharma is trying to make money by selling hormones to teens, the LGBTs are conspiring against normal families, etc.
In the case of younger gender critical feminists in spaces like TikTok and Discord, many of them have dealt with feelings of gender dysphoria or have dealt with misogyny or homophobia, and ended up finding gender critical spaces that appeared to be supportive of their concerns and fears. Others have felt alienated or disgusted by mainstream feminism and turned to alternatives to address their concerns around issues like male violence or homophobia or women’s rights, only to find gender critical feminists waiting in the wings.
These negative feelings of fear, disgust and alienation are only heightened once they’ve joined these groups, to the point that members become convinced of conspiracies to invade bathrooms, eradicate lesbians or turn every teenager trans. Ross writes of the “us vs them” mindset present in cults that, “This mind-set can produce seemingly arrogant feelings of superiority or spiritual elitism along with unreasonable fears, which often include exaggerated fears about “persecution” or annihilation or both.” Groups like the UK’s LGB Alliance exist almost entirely because of feelings of persecution felt by gender critical lesbian, gay and bisexual people at the hands of larger organisations like Stonewall.
Of the conspiracy theories often peddled by cults, former cult member turned deprogrammer Diane Benscoter told NPR:
It establishes this camaraderie and this feeling of righteousness and this cause for your life, and that feels very invigorating and almost addictive. You feel like you are fighting the battle for goodness, and all of a sudden, you feel like you are the hero.
Online echo chambers
According to former cult member Daniella Mestyanek Young, in traditional (read: offline) cults, “the walls keep the world out, keep you in because isolation is such a big part of programming. Now we have isolation on the internet. “A.I. is the new commune wall. It keeps you in with your like-minded people.”
For our purposes, we can see this AI at work in the case of the TikTok algorithm, but other virtual commune walls exist too: application forms to join servers, Ovarit requiring an invite code to join, or Spinster manually approving every member request. Applications serve as a way to vet potential members and filter out ones who don’t agree with server leaders ideologically; invite codes ensure that only those who already know existing members can join.
People often joke about social media platforms like Twitter serving as echo chambers, but comparatively speaking, Twitter is an open forum: if you have a public account, anyone can see your tweets and reply to you. Closed spaces with these commune walls do not have that same capability; they are only open to those in ideological agreement with the gatekeepers.
Part of Conrad’s conclusion about the closed spaces of gender critical parenting Facebook groups is that:
“This is why echo chambers are dangerous; not just because they don’t hear other people’s opinions from the source, but because the constant propaganda reinforces bias so strongly that cult opinion becomes common sense, which allows every belief outside of cult opinion to be entirely disregarded.”
In these online spaces, much like in traditional cult settings, information that does not agree with the prevailing orthodoxy is downvoted or dismissed, while information that confirms their existing beliefs is circulated widely.
Is that a yes?
Ultimately, my conclusion is that my initial description was an accurate one; these groups can most accurately be described as hate groups with cult-like attributes. Having said that, I’m not convinced that assigning a label is the most important thing here.
I asked Lauren for her thoughts, and had some useful insights as someone with experience in these spaces. Like Conrad, she references the recruitment tactics of gender critical feminists, and the way they operate online in a similar fashion to stans:
“I wouldn’t describe it as a cult because there is no central object or figure that these people are concerned with. Although JK Rowling is very much celebrated by UK GCs, this only started recently; the ideology existed long before. The term I use to describe GC/TERFism is “hate group”, which I think is more accurate. It highlights the hatred that is central to their politics; everything they believe comes back to hating, or at least maintaining willful ignorance towards, trans women.
I would definitely say GC/TERFism uses “cult-like” tactics, though. Online circles prep you for backlash against your beliefs by creating bonds and friendships mean to substitute those you will lose with non-TERF friends who don’t want to tolerate your hate. This happened to me — once my online friends found out I was “trans critical”, they dumped me. TERFism made me feel better because it told me that these people were just ignorant, unwilling to face “the truth” that is “trans ideology”. On a related note, GC/TERFism also encourages members to recruit others via “peaking” and “going crypto”, which I’m sure you’ve heard of.
And finally, GC/TERFism operates online much like a fandom or clique. This way, members of the ideology have stronger ties to the group and an incentive to maintain their views/ignore opposing views. Keeping those friendships/bonds with other TERFs encourages members to stay in the group.”
Instead of getting bogged down in labels, I think that focusing on how best to combat the influence of these groups, as well as potentially assisting members who want to leave them, is a better approach. Whether they are cults in the traditional sense or not, they evidently have cult-like characteristics, and so I still believe that studying how deprogrammers and counsellors have worked with former cult members could serve as a guide for those looking to help someone out of gender critical feminism.
Deprogramming and deradicalisation
Naturally, Ross’ book proved useful once more. He cites authors Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, who wrote Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change in 1978 about religious conversion. In Snapping, they described the deprogramming process as:
“… a genuinely broadening, expanding personal change, it would seem to bear closer resemblance to a true moment of enlightenment, to the natural process of personal growth and newfound awareness and understanding, than to the narrowing changes brought about by cult rituals and artificially induced group ordeals.”
Ross also cited psychologist Margaret Singer, who has interviewed many former cult members and observed cult intervention work since its inception. To her, deprogramming means “providing members with information about the cult and showing them how their own decision-making power had been taken away from them.”
As for Ross himself, he described the ‘essential building blocks’ of deprogramming as:
- Learning about the inherent dynamics and authoritarian structure of destructive cults
- Reviewing the systematic persuasion, influence, and control techniques evident in such groups
- Sharing historical information about the particular group or leader
- Understanding the family concerns that led to the intervention.
While this background information on deprogramming is useful, I was more convinced by the argument made in this piece that for deprogramming to stick, it has to primarily be self-directed. In that sense, I was reminded of Lauren, who has been very open about the two years she spent as a TERF.
Speaking about what led to her abandoning gender critical feminism, Lauren explained that the suicide of a young trans girl whose final note went viral on Tumblr served as a wake up call. I wasn’t on Tumblr that often by that time (late 2014), but I remember the post, as I’m sure many of you do — her name was Leelah Alcorn, and she was 17 at the time of her death, the same age as many of the young radical feminists found on Tumblr, TikTok, Twitter, and Discord.
While the majority of site users were mourning the preventable death of a trans girl their own age, users in Lauren’s radical feminist circles complained about the amount of attention she was receiving, arguing that as a “male oppressor, she didn’t deserve to be mourned”.
These comments caused Lauren, who was around Leelah’s age at the time, to realise she was part of a hate group, and to begin looking for alternatives, initially looking for trans inclusive radical feminism and when that failed, learning more about marxist feminism.
I also found this Reddit post from someone who used to be a TERF, and their openness about what led to them realising they were part of a hate group was illuminating.
The user wrote about what led to them changing their mind that:
“I just started noticing how bitter everyone was and I started noticing similarities to the way the Islamic community was stereotyped in 9/11. I was in the Army for six years and when I joined I was pretty anti-Islam myself, but in service I fought alongside many Muslim soldiers and realized what the people back home had to say about them was so backwards.
When I got back from deployment I started correcting anti-Islam sentiment everywhere I saw it. It took me personally befriending someone on the other side to get past my narrow prejudices.
Same with my experience as a TERF. Every trans person I know in real life is nothing like the picture TERFS paint them as. My niece came out as trans a few years ago (mtf) and I asked her about a month ago if she was certain that she wasn’t just a gay man since it would be easier on her to be that. She said that she has pretended to be something she’s not her whole life and she doesn’t have the strength to do that anymore. She said she doesn’t want what is easy she wants what is true to herself. That really started my journey into self reflection.”
She explained that as someone who had experienced male violence, the emphasis in radical feminist spaces on addressing that appealed to her. She eventually realised, however, that the focus on trans people did not reflect her reality, writing, “As a terf my biggest concern was sexual assault, because terf communities paint MTF Trans people as predators. You know what is funny though is every single person who ever abused me was a straight cis male, not trans. So why be afraid of a community that has never victimized me once? It’s thought exercises like this that helped me exit the dark.”
Christian Picciolini, a former Neo Nazi and founder of the group Life After Hate, had a similar experience. While beating up a young Black man, he locked eyes with his victim, and felt a surprising empathy. This served as a turning point that caused him to leave the Neo Nazi movement and found the group, through which he’s now helped over 100 people disengage from the Neo Nazi movement.
That isn’t to say that everyone should just sit around and wait for someone to come to their senses (particularly while inflicting violence on another person), however. A Nantes University study found that 58 percent of former cult members reported some social intervention (a conversation with a friend or loved one) that helped set them on the path to leaving.
The Inverse article I referred to previously contains useful advice for how to approach these conversations.
“It’s more productive to soft-pedal your concerns and take an open, exploratory stance. “The single most powerful technique is asking a question,” Hassan says. Some great questions to ask include: Where was the person in life when they first heard about the group? Did they always think the leader was supreme, or were they initially skeptical?
Social encounters with people who’ve left cults can be equally transformative since they show wavering cult devotees that it’s possible to lead a productive, moral life after leaving the group. A day or a weekend outside the bubble — say, a camping trip to somewhere that has no cell or Internet access — can also help people get back in touch with aspects of their pre-cult selves.”
Lauren herself also believes that deradicalisation needs to be performed by friends and loved ones — in her words, you’re “not going to convince a TERF to change their mind if they’re a stranger on the internet”. Similarly with holding people accountable for causing harm, it’s most effective when done by people the person has an existing relationship with, and presumably some degree of respect for.
The University of Cambridge’s Women’s Campaign has published some useful advice specifically on how to deal with TERFs:
“Because of the veiled nature of terf ideology, well-intentioned feminists can be tricked into buying into terf arguments. If you notice terf beliefs arising among people in your communities, try and help them understand the contradictions inherent in these beliefs and the harm that they do (and forward them our reading list!).
Terf ideology can be defeated in a fair debate — but committed terfs don’t fight fair. Very often (especially online) the best thing to do is disengage. Explain to your aunt why trans women should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms, but don’t debate SuperRadFemXX on Twitter about the colonial nature of the sex binary — save that energy and put it towards building stronger positive, trans-inclusive feminist and activist communities.”
For Picciolini, founder of Life After Hate, “what it came down to was receiving compassion from the people that I least deserved it [from], when I least deserved it.”
“In fact, I had never in my life engaged in a meaningful dialogue with the people that I thought I hated, and it was these folks who showed me empathy when I least deserved it, and they were the ones that I least deserved it from. I started to recognize that I had more in common with them than the people I had surrounded myself for eight years with — that these people, that I thought I hated, took it upon themselves to see something inside of me that I didn’t even see myself, and it was because of that connection that I was able to humanize them and that destroyed the demonization and the prejudice that was happening inside of me.”
Similarly, Lauren had had minimal exposure to trans people before becoming a TERF.
The former TERF who posted on Reddit was asked for her thoughts on how to help people come back from gender critical ideology, and she wrote:
“This is actually really important. When ever you go to a suffering minority and ask to hear their side (at least on Twitter, and a few instances in this thread) you get hostility. “It’s not our job to educate you.” “You need to do your own research.” “You are asking for emotional labor”.
BUT when you go to the OTHER side people will happily tell you all the things they think are wrong and give detailed anecdotes and share articles, everything.
For example, if I go to Ovarit (which is a TERF Reddit copycat) and say “Tell me why you think transgenderism is a fetish”, I will get hundreds of replies and people will offer up all the “education” one could ask for.
If I go on here and ask the same question it’s likely I’ll get a few genuinely helpful answers but also be met with a great deal of hostility and be told it’s not their job to educate me.
I’m not victim blaming, I understand where that hostility comes from. But it does create a sort of imbalance in the information and (needed) friendships required for growth. So you end up in an echo chamber because naturally you want to be around the people nicer to you. That’s just human.”
She concludes:
“I think two things need to happen to change minds. People like me need to speak up in TERF spaces and explain why we changed. And trans people need to be more welcoming to those who are questioning trans identity. Is that fair to trans people? Fuck no. But it has to be done. The quickest and easiest way to change someone’s heart is through friendship. It’s not right, but I do believe it is necessary.”
This echoes the tactics used by all of the deradicalisation groups I looked at, including Life After Hate and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which has a program that focuses on using peer-to-peer messaging to engage potential recruits of radical groups in conversation in an attempt to dissuade them.
What to do
In my opinion, deradicalisation of gender critical feminists should borrow techniques used by deradicalisation and deprogramming experts, and rely on the insights of former TERFs like Lauren and Ky Schevers, who inevitably have unique insights into these spaces, as well as trans people themselves.
I think the bulk of this work should be done by allies and former TERFs, although if trans people feel up to it they should feel free to do so. Considering this is a largely cis-created problem, however, it feels like work that should be done by other cis people — plus, the unfortunate reality is that TERFs are less likely to engage in genuine conversations with trans people.
“It’s not my job to educate you” is an incredibly common refrain in online political spaces, and I think this pessimistic attitude is one that needs to be abandoned. Dismissing people who are genuinely seeking more information (as opposed to sealioning), in addition to being unnecessarily combative and hostile, will lead them to friendlier sources like radical feminists, as described by the former TERF on Reddit. Of course gender critical feminists are friendlier to those asking questions — they are actively trying to recruit. Instead of dismissing people, have resources ready, open your DMs, and be willing to listen and field questions.
Allies should try to engage with TERFs — ones they know in real life, not strangers online, but people they have an existing and genuine connection with — but if the person shuts down, don’t push. Instead, continue doing your own thing on social media (posting things in support of trans people, for example) and wait for them to approach you with concerns or doubts; keep lines of communication or the option for reconciliation open; show them what life outside these groups is like, what activism can be like, that feminism doesn’t have to be based in fear, and that womanhood doesn’t have to be solely defined by misery and oppression.
Many people are drawn to radical feminism because of fear — particularly a fear of men and of male violence that they extend to a fear of trans people, particularly trans women. Discussions with radical feminists should seek to allay these fears; highlight how violence against women is being dealt with in your community, or highlight how few trans women are proponents of violence, but are instead victims of it.
In addition, preemptive strategies are also needed, such as improved visibility of alternatives to liberal feminism — those with platforms highlighting leftist feminist voices and discussing material critiques of the patriarchy that don’t devolve into transphobia is one technique, as demonstrated by Lauren’s own videos.
It’s messy, unpleasant, and time-consuming work, and I’m not saying you should do this for every gender critical person on your friends list. But for people you genuinely care about, people you think have a chance to abandon the hateful ideology they’ve adopted? I think it can be worth it. Particularly for young women who are (hopefully) less set in their views and more likely to grow and mature with time, I think that these techniques can prove beneficial.
I realise that to some, these suggestions might be unpopular; please understand that I’m coming at this from an abolitionist perspective, so I don’t believe in locking people up and throwing away the key, either literally or figuratively. I’m aware that this is at odds with prevailing orthodoxy around how to deal with those who have committed crimes or serious harms, but I’m not at all convinced that our current approach to dealing with harm caused is doing anything to prevent future harm or assist those who’ve been hurt. For more on this topic, I recommend reading about transformative justice.
Fin
And that’s the end of the series. Thank you immensely to everyone who read it and shared it, and particularly those who chatted with me or provided resources or feedback. While this series is done, I expect this won’t be the last thing I’ll write about gender critical online spaces, so please subscribe if that’s something that interests you.
As always, if the content in this post has left you feeling outraged, consider donating to a trans person’s GoFundMe, or to an organisation that advocates for trans people in your area.
