When I saw that Liberal candidate for Warringah and anti-trans women in sport campaigner Katherine Deves had a history of extreme, online transphobic comments, I wasn’t surprised. That’s because I recently spent several weeks observing multiple online spaces for women who don’t believe trans women are women.
These women fit into a branch of feminism called trans exclusionary, or “gender critical”, radical feminism (also referred to online as TERFs).
Born out of radical feminism in the 1970s, the movement persists online, where it has developed into a movement preoccupied with transgender people — to the exclusion of almost any other subject or area of concern.
Before I began researching, I suspected that the radical feminist rhetoric I was occasionally seeing on Twitter was only the tip of the iceberg, and not representative of the younger cohort of radical feminists who preferred other platforms like TikTok and Discord.
Once I started looking, I found young women talking about women’s sports, women’s bathrooms, women’s changing rooms, lesbians being forced to date trans women, and non-binary identities not being real. I saw users praising plans to legislate which bathrooms trans people can and can’t use, and I saw people 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.
I observed spaces on online platforms Twitter, TikTok, Giggle, Spinster, Ovarit and Discord. Twitter, TikTok and Discord are mainstream platforms you’re probably familiar with. 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 subreddits, which saw r/GenderCritical and any associated subreddits removed from the site for violating its rules against promoting hate.
The “girls only” app, Giggle, was launched by Australian Sall Grover in 2019, and made headlines in 2020 because of its verification process: you’re required to submit a selfie so that the app can determine that you’re female. Last month, a complaint was filed against Giggle with the Australian Human Rights Commission in regards to their ban on transgender women.
Spinster, billed as a radical feminist-friendly alternative to Twitter, was created by MK Fain in 2019. Popular users of Spinster include Graham Linehan and Meghan Murphy, both of whom have been banned from Twitter for violating the platform’s rules against posting hateful speech. (The UK-based Linehan posted in support of Deves on his Substack over the weekend, encouraging his readers to engage with her critics on Twitter).
It was on Discord, an instant-messaging app initially made popular by gamers, that I encountered the most hateful content: users rating transgender women’s profiles on dating apps and sharing fantasies about raping and murdering men and transgender people. I also encountered racist and anti-immigration rhetoric, particularly against Muslims, whom they see as particularly patriarchal and harmful to the cause of women’s rights.
I found that the quality of discourse on more visible platforms such as Twitter and TikTok was worse than I’d previously thought. Rather than censor themselves entirely, users had instead 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 making use of “Algospeak“, or by using obscure lingo that moderators with little knowledge of the radical feminist community would have scant hope of parsing, such as “TIM” for “trans-identified male” (in other words, transgender women), TRA for “trans rights activist”, or the train and knee emojis paired together to represent a common transphobic slur.
This is the environment that Deves would have found herself in when she was active on Twitter. As a cofounder of Save Women’s Sport Australasia who claims to have worked with Senator Claire Chandler on legislation that would see trans women excluded from women’s sports, Deves is precisely the kind of online culture warrior I encountered time and time again.
If the number of tweets about trans people that have been unearthed from Deves’ now-defunct Twitter account seems high, it shouldn’t; the one thing that stood out to me was that the more time people spent in these spaces, the more they focused on trans people while other causes fell to the wayside. Indeed, for many so-called feminists who would typically consider themselves centrist or left-wing, transphobia served as a good enough reason to celebrate the work of conservatives like Chandler or Deves, or like Texas’ Greg Abbott.
Cam Wilson pointed out that Deves’ biography on the Liberal Party website mentioned her work as a “women’s advocate”, but “if there’s another aspect of her work in this area it’s certainly not public, nor has she advertised it”. Women like Deves believe that arguing against the inclusion of transgender people in public life is enough to be the sum total of their activism; concerns like reproductive health or the wage gap are consistently ignored while they engage in their tenth conversation that day about a hypothetical trans person using the changing room at their local pool.
‘I recently spent several weeks observing the multiple online spaces for women who don’t believe trans women are women’
That’s precisely because they are not women….they are ‘trans women’. That’s why we are having this conversation…
They are women.
Please define your version of woman.
If transwomen are women, then surely logically it follows that women are transwomen?
Welcome to the future… where theres no such thing as male and female and its wrong to have to thought the human species was dimorphic. Now we all get to choose what sex we want to be, and fluctuate back and forth as desired. Then if you get a bit tired with all that to and fro-ing…theres the option to be non binary. As in neither male or female but a sexless nether region of existential genderless nothingness.
Poor old Pearl seems genuinely consumed by existential terror. Some TS woman is bound to fool her, sooner or later.
Whereas smirking Morrison could not give a rats, he is just dog whistling to the anti-gay Christian voters in in western Sydney.
No woman would ever mistake a trans for a woman, even at a distance, never mind up close.
Call it woman’s intuition, call it body language, call it behavioural or whatever.
Primarily, it is olfactory – pheromones, as anyone who has experience with mammals, especially domestic or farm animals, knows.
very confusing article
so how is Deves a radical feminist?
Perhaps the correct description is “extremist”, there are lot’s of them around, holding all sorts of opinions about just about anything, – extremely, – usually not much value in talking to them though.
Yeah, that’s the way “…not much value in talking…”.
Just shout binary B/S but whatever you do, don’t listen to plain,common sense.
The next step is for the writer of this piece to spend time in online spaces occupied by trans-identifying men, and to speak to transwidows and desisters.
Looking forward to that piece. But not holding my breath.
With all this hoop-la It would be useful to ask some basic questions of these ant-trans types. For instance, what is SRY? What does it do? And when? If they haven’t a clue, it means they are ignorant of one of the most basic, and certainly the most well-known, of the hundreds of elements that contribute to the complexity of determination of sex in humans. And if they do not know even the most basic fact, they have no right to express any opinion whatsoever. Still, ignorance has never stopped the haters before.
there is no complexity in what contributes to humans being a dimorphic species. There are males who secrete the small gametes known as sperm. There are females who are born with the large gametes known as ovum. Male and female. No gender spectrum. Humans have been a dimorphic reproducing species from the beginning of time.
Then there are the babies born with both male and female reproductive parts and a percentage born with non-distinct genitals (intersex) with a frequency estimated to be 1 in every 2000 to one in every 4500. Many of these in the past have been surgically turned into ‘girls’.
From the beginning of time, huh. You appear to misunderstand what sexual dimorphism is.
Pearl, you neatly illustrate my point (btw what is SRY?), so please inform yourself of the biology — sex determination is not one simple flip-flop switch as you imagine, rather it is a highly complex process involving numerous switches in parallel and in series, some of which are essentially flip-flop, others are more like a rheostat. These are linked together with feedback and feedforward loops. These come into action across a wide time horizon from early embryo to at least puberty, spread across a wide array if bodily tissues and cells – and not just the ones you’d think of as sex-related. And as with any other biological process, there is a probability of variation at every step of the way. The outcome is that there are two major peaks of frequency of outcome, one we term male and other female, but with a substantial number and diverse range of individuals that are not contained within these peaks.
If you think sex is hard to measure objectively, just wait till you see gender identity
Way past the number offered by Heinz – the sky is not the limit as it is already off planet.