TERF Island Comes to America: Buried Histories of the Feminism of Cisness

Today, it is often self-described feminists who publish transphobic articles in the world’s biggest publications. From Newsweek to the New York Times, they condemn the scourge of “gender ideology” in the name of women’s rights. The world’s richest author, J.K. Rowling, is an obsessive advocate for protecting cis women from trans ones by keeping spaces like bathrooms and sports lockers cissexual at all costs. The British-imported crusade to make gender-segregated spaces cissexual encompasses American prisons, reproductive health centers, sports, bathrooms, schools, beauty parlors, locker rooms, and dyke nights. We know these feminists as TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, though they reject the term, considering it a misogynistic slur. An “anti- gender” alliance unites these self-styled “gender-critical” feminists with the international far right, the Vatican, and conservative evangelicals. Leading “GC”s have enjoyed fawning receptions from media personalities like Tucker Carlson, received funding from right-wing think tanks like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation, and even protested trans health care shoulder to shoulder with open white supremacists like the Proud Boys—all the while collaborating with MAGA nationalists in picketing trans-affirming institutions including spas and LGBTQ-friendly public libraries. While this coalition is strange, it’s not unprecedented—we can see its roots in the collaboration between white feminists and right-wing Christians in the 1970s and ’80s who tried to criminalize pornography and sex work. Lots of people on the left dismiss these women as fake feminists. Can they really be feminists in any meaningful sense if they organize against trans women? Can’t feminism just drum them out of its ranks? In this lecture, Sophie Lewis will argue that there are strands of thought that are both authentically feminist and irredeemable—even fascist. Anti-trans feminism, she shows, first gained traction as the counter-insurgent retort to utopian feminism in the early 1970s, countering a sex-radical, gender-abolitionist efflorescence that was generally welcoming to trans women.

This is an endowed lecture under the Philosopher’s Holiday Lecture secure and is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Vassar Dean of the Faculty.