By: Donna M

In reply to L..

I think it’s important to distinguish between the term ‘TERF’ actually means. It doesn’t mean any old cis person who makes an ignorant comment. It means people like Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys, whose advocacy has resulted in more barriers to employment, health care and exclusion from women’s shelters and rape crisis centres. They make trans women more vulnerable to violence. Trans women are STILL banned from the rape crisis centre in my home town. TERFs did that. It’s cruel, unjustifiable, and tramples the human rights of women who need that service. I understand that biological essentialism occurred in a specific historical context, and was advanced by women who sincerely believed they were protecting themselves, but the consequences have proven to be devastating for trans women. Trans women are also vulnerable to sex-based violence, regardless of what you call their ‘material reality’. They experience disproportionate rates of sexual violence. This is why it’s especially distressing to see their continued exclusion from rape crisis centres.

L, I would also ask you to consider the ways in which excluding trans women from ‘women’s only spaces’ essentially mirrors the way cis lesbians were treated a generation ago and are still treated in some places today. I am a cis woman, and yet because I am a lesbian, I have been asked to leave change rooms for ‘making other women feel unsafe’, not because of anything I did, but because of my very identity and the fact that I look different. This really isn’t so different from the experience of trans women. In such spaces, I relate more to trans women than the cis women who ask me to leave. And yet lesbians are accepted in many feminist spaces by TERFs who acknowledge that being attracted to women doesn’t make us predatory. But we can’t have it both ways. Either you have a women’s only space designed for cis and heterosexual women only, or you acknowledge that NO LGBTQ women are threatening based on body type or sexual desire. To imply that letting trans women into these institutions threatens their capacity to help cis women is tantamount to saying that letting me into a women’s health collective will prevent it from focusing on birth control access because I don’t use it.