Gender-critical feminism
Gender-critical feminism, also known as trans-exclusionary radical feminism or TERFism, is an ideology or movement that opposes what it refers to as "gender ideology". Gender-critical feminists believe that sex is biological, immutable, and binary, and consider the concepts of gender identity and gender self-identification to be inherently oppressive constructs tied to gender roles. They reject transgender and non-binary identities, and view trans women as men and trans men as women.
Originating as a fringe movement within radical feminism mainly in the United States, trans-exclusionary radical feminism has achieved prominence in the United Kingdom and South Korea, where it has been at the centre of high-profile controversies. It has been linked to promotion of disinformation and to the anti-gender movement. Anti-gender rhetoric has seen increasing circulation in gender-critical feminist discourse since 2016, including use of the term "gender ideology". In several countries, gender-critical feminist groups have formed alliances with right-wing, far-right, and anti-feminist organisations.
Gender-critical feminism has been described as transphobic by feminist and scholarly critics. It is opposed by many feminist, LGBTQ rights, and human rights organizations. The Council of Europe has condemned gender-critical ideology, among other ideologies, and linked it to "virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people" in Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and other countries. UN Women has described the gender-critical movement, among other movements, as extreme anti-rights movements that employ hate propaganda and disinformation.
Terminology
Trans-exclusionary radical feminism
Trans-inclusive radical feminist blogger Viv Smythe has been credited with popularizing the term "trans-exclusionary radical feminism" in 2008 as an online shorthand. It was used to describe a minority of feminists who espouse sentiments that other feminists consider transphobic, including the rejection of the mainstream feminist view that trans women are women, opposition to transgender rights, and the exclusion of trans women in women's spaces and organizations. Smythe has also been credited with having coined the acronym "TERF", due to a blog post she wrote reacting to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival's policy of denying admittance to trans women. Though it was created as a deliberately neutral descriptor, "TERF" is now often considered derogatory or dismissive, but may also be used as a self-description.Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur write that "the argument by trans-exclusionary radical feminists that the term TERF is a 'slur'— rather than a description of a particular approach to politics—leans on a 'politics of injury' that distances itself from the real and very harmful work trans-exclusionary radical feminism is doing in the world." Cristan Williams writes in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies that "the term has been rhetorically helpful in distinguishing TERF activism from the long-term radical feminist community members who are inclusive of trans women" and that the TERF label is useful, as terms like bigot are, in drawing a sharp distinction between core feminist views and exclusionary beliefs that many feminists find harmful.
Gender-critical feminism
Since the 2010s, there has been a shift among proponents from 'TERF' to 'gender critical feminism', which reflects a shift towards language that obscures their trans-exclusionary focus. Proponents have claimed that despite its neutral origin, the term in practice had been used to "denigrate women's ideas". Because advocates of gender-critical feminism advocate the exclusion of trans women from women's spaces, some academics have argued that this shift in language constitutes a problematic rebranding. This change in self-description was accompanied by other shifts in rhetoric, such as "anti-trans" becoming "pro-women" and "trans-exclusion" becoming the protection of "sex-based rights", aimed at cultivating mainstream support by creating a veneer of moderacy.Views
Sex and gender
Gender-critical feminists equate "women" with what they consider to be a "female sex class", and view historical and contemporary oppression of women as being rooted in their being female, while "gender" is a system of social norms which functions to oppress women on the basis of their sex. They believe sex is biological and cannot be changed, and that equity legislation protecting against discrimination based on sex should be interpreted as solely referring to biological sex. Furthermore, gender-critical beliefs emphasise the view that sex is binary, as opposed to a continuous spectrum, and that the two sexes have an objective, material basis as opposed to being socially constructed.Gender-critical feminists promote the idea that sex is important. In Material Girls, Kathleen Stock discusses four areas in which she expresses the view that sex-associated differences are important, regardless of gender: medicine, sport, sexual orientation, and the social effects of heterosexuality. Holly Lawford-Smith states: "Gender critical feminism is not 'about' trans. It is about sex." Lawford-Smith said of gender-critical feminism: "It is about being critical of gender, and this has implications for a wide range of feminist issues, not just gender identity." Writing of her view of a "gender-critical feminist utopia", she said: "While there will still be the same people who think of themselves as 'transmen', 'transwomen' or 'non-binary' today, they will not use those labels, because 'feminine' will be a way that males can be, 'masculine' will be a way that women can be, and 'androgynous' will be a way that anyone can be."
In gender-critical discourse, the terms man and woman are used as sex-terms, assigned no more meaning than adult human male and adult human female respectively, in contrast to feminist theorists who argue these terms embody a social category distinct from matters of biology. The phrase adult human female has become a slogan in gender-critical politics, and has been described as transphobic.
"Sex-based rights"
Gender critical feminists advocate what they call "sex-based rights", arguing that "women's human rights are based upon sex" and that "these rights are being eroded by the promotion of 'gender identity. They commonly position "sex-based rights" as under attack and something that needs defense, arguing that allowing trans women to use women's spaces is a threat to cisgender women.Human rights scholar Sandra Duffy described the concept of "sex-based rights" as "a fiction with the pretense of legality", noting that the word "sex" in international human rights law does not share the implications of the word "sex" in gender-critical discourse and is widely agreed to also refer to gender. She describes the conflation of "women's rights" with "sex-based rights" as a "linguistic trick" and a move that has "no backing in actual law". Catharine A. MacKinnon noted that "the recognition does not, contrary to allegations of anti-trans self-identified feminists, endanger women or feminism". Both Duffy and MacKinnon argue that there are no positive or affirmative "sex-based rights" that women possess, but rather negative rights against discrimination.
Inna Michaeli of the NGO Association for Women's Rights in Development argues that 'sex-based rights' are an attempt to construct a patriarchal idea of what a woman is. The term has been adopted by Donald Trump and was used in an executive order titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government", which seeks to erase official recognition of transgender people and roll back their protections.
Inclusive language
Scholars Lucy Jones and Rodrigo Borba have published work stating that gender-critical actors often resist the adoption of inclusive and nonbinary language, particularly in relation to pronouns and the recognition of transgender and nonbinary identities. In her 2023 review of literature on language, gender, and sexuality, Jones says that gender-critical feminists frequently reject linguistic practices that affirm trans and nonbinary identities, often citing the preservation of "sex-based rights" as justification. She says that this resistance is typically framed by a binary and essentialist ideology that defines "woman" exclusively as someone assigned female at birth. Drawing on this scholarship, Jones characterizes gender-critical resistance to inclusive language as part of a broader "cisnormative preoccupation with trans people's bodies" and a form of linguistic policing aimed at denying the legitimacy of trans and nonbinary identities. Jones situates these discursive patterns within a wider political context by citing Borba, who states that there has been an emergence of an "anti-gender register" used in trans-exclusionary discourse, including gender-critical feminism. Borba argues that this register, which draws on essentialist ideas about sex and gender, has gained traction through a process of enregisterment, a way of making certain ideological positions appear natural or commonsensical. He further suggests that this has been achieved in part by appropriating the language of feminist and LGBTQ+ antidiscrimination activism, reframing it to emphasize threats to the rights of cisgender women and children.Some gender-critical feminists such as Holly Lawford-Smith defend misgendering, arguing that rather than being harmful, it is "accurately referring to sex". An essay published by Fair Play For Women compares pronouns to rohypnol, a date rape drug, arguing that using the pronouns preferred by trans people "alters your attention, your speed of processing".
Socialisation and gender nonconformity
Gender critical feminists generally see gender as a system in which women are oppressed for reasons intrinsically related to their sex, and emphasize male violence against women, particularly involving institutions such as the sex industry, as central to women's oppression. Holders of such views often contend that trans women cannot fully be women because they were assigned male at birth and have experienced some degree of male privilege. Germaine Greer has said that it "wasn't fair" that "a man who has lived for 40 years as a man and had children with a woman and enjoyed the services—the unpaid services of a wife, which most women will never know…then decides that the whole time he's been a woman".These ideas have been met with criticism from believers in other branches of feminism. Sociologist Patricia Elliot argues that the view that one's socialization as a girl or woman defines "women's experience" assumes that cis women's experiences are homogeneous and discounts the possibility that trans and cis women may share the experience of being disparaged for their perceived femininity. Others argue that expectations of one's assigned sex are something enforced upon them, beginning at early socialization, and transgender youth, especially gender-nonconforming children, often experience different, worse treatment involving reprisals for their deviation therefrom.
Transfeminist Julia Serano has referred to implying that trans women may experience some degree of male privilege pre-transition as "denying the closet", and has compared it to saying that a cisgender gay person experienced straight privilege before coming out. She has also compared it to if a cisgender girl was raised as a boy against her will, and how the two scenarios tend to be viewed differently by a cisgender audience, despite being ostensibly similar experiences from a transfeminine perspective.