This next section exists because, quite frankly, it's fairly new and surprising information to me. You see, until very recently, I had thought of transness (as we understand it now) as a fairly recent phenomenon. Yes, other cultures around the world and throughout history have had third genders and beyond, but that's not quite the same as 20th & 21st century transness in the developed world, and I'm kinda wary about cultural appropriation, because I'm not very smart at it yet, so I'm not so sure what to do. I had known that there has been all manner of gender-fuckery throughout the Western world and that's also not the same as 20th & 21st century transness, and so it's a bit of a sticky wicket. I often feel like I'm caught in a Venn diagram between internalized transphobia in one circle and appropriative chicanery on the other, and because they overlap there's no position where I am safely out of both circles, so I don't know what's "right" here - this is not to dwell on my feelings, but rather to say that I'm still figuring this part out myself. So, without any further ado, let's get to the surprising part...
Trans Women in the Second Wave
Trans women and trans-affirming cis women including lesbians were actually a big part of second wave feminism. TERFs aren't holdouts who have gone from majority to minority in a couple decades - they were the lunatic fringe all along. I will occasionally read some TERF writing online 'cuz Know Thy Enemy, and the TERF narrative is that the second wave rejected transness, and the third wave's trans-inclusivity is both a betrayal of second-wavers and a Crime Against Womxnhood ("womxn" being "women without men" because UGH I don't even wanna fuckin' get into this now). This seemed plausible to me, so I took it at face value, but it's all lies. Well, it's not all lies, but there's a world of difference between the TERF narrative and reality. OK, maybe not an entire world, but at least, like, half a Pluto of difference. Look, it's definitely misleading, and a few examples will suffice before we move on:
- Sandy Stone was the sound engineer for the Olivia Records collective, a lesbian separatist organization, in the 1970s. When TERFs got wind of this they tried to out her. But the response was basically, "Duh, we already know, and nobody cares except you lot." This of course did not stop them going on about the "throbbing male energy" Stone allegedly exuded through her sound engineering, and she did eventually leave amid literal death threats.
- Beth Elliott helped organize the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, and TERFs demanded her exclusion. A vote was taken, and two thirds voted to allow Elliott to attend and perform - in light of the escalating controversy, Elliott decided to perform and then leave. While leaving the stage, Elliott was attacked by TERFs and cis lesbians stepped up to protect her, taking the beating in her stead. The next day, keynote speaker Robin Morgan blasted Elliott in her speech and originated the "trans woman as rapist" trope - but organizer Barbara McLean's notes on Morgan's speech state, "We do not, cannot relate to her as a man. We have not known her as a man."
- Even Andrea Dworkin, whose work is pretty strongly anti-porn and also frequently quotemined by TERFs, stated unequivocally in her book Woman Hating that "every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions." Woman Hating, if you can't tell by the outdated terminology, was published in 1974.
For a bit of further reading, many of the citations here were tracked down starting from two TransAdvocate articles by Cristan Williams (Are Misogynist, Homophobe, & TERF slurs? and TERF Academic Rewrites Herstory), as well as this Twitter thread by @rozietoz.
Second-Wave Radicals and the Fight Over Transness
Now, the thing is, TERFs weren't called TERFs back then, they were known as "political lesbians." Here is a lovely tumblr thread (which also makes use of Williams' other site, theterfs.com) explaining how political lesbians were more or less joyless shitbags who hated anything fun and repudiated All Things Man. Yeah, there's more to it, but the link ain't long so I'm moving on.
In the eyes of these political lesbians, straight trans women are just effeminate gay men who feel they have to change gender rather than defy gender roles, and gay trans women are just straight men who seek to "become women" (scare quotes theirs, we already are women) as The Ultimate Form of Oppression MUHAHA! Trans men, on the other hand, are all just women trying to get some of that Sweet Male Privilege for themselves. We will get back to this in a later installment.
But this rejection of trans folks' identities is how you get stuff like this:
For political lesbians, their experience of oppression (and the womanhood on which it is based) is rooted strongly in biology, and so the idea that "biology isn't destiny" is anathema to them. (I'm pretty sure I got this summary almost word-for-word from ContraPoints, and I think it's in this video, but I'm not worried about chasing it down right this second.) To them, biology is destiny, because their biology has in fact determined their destiny, as they see it. The short version of the answer is that using biology in that way still relies on a social construct, so they're saying basically that "this was used in fucked up ways for millennia and so we therefore can't change it now because it's Final Ultimate Reality." Which is a weird combination of Stockholm Syndrome and the Fallacy of the Sunken Cost (which should never be confused with the Phallus of the Shrunken... nevermind, that's redundant).
We're getting too far afield. Look, the political lesbians were a tiny, lunatic fringe who alienated everyone because they hate fun. Or at least they hate anything fun that's ever been touched by a man or anyone who's ever been called a man (in a non-insulting way). Everyone else - at least, everyone else in the circles of radical lesbians - was somewhere between thumbs-up and thumbs-sideways with respect to trans women. But then Janice fucking Raymond went and wheedled her way into being considered an academic authority on trans folks, and her hateful bullshit was taken as scientific fact and used to exclude trans care from pretty much all health insurance for decades. It took literal decades to undo that damage (though it went more or less hand-in-hand with rising visibility, so yeah) and get transness declassified as a disorder, but it finally happened (at least as far as the APA & WHO are concerned).
To bring this all to a galloping conclusion, trans acceptance would have probably proceeded hand-in-hand with gay acceptance ever since Stonewall (more on that later, too), except for the efforts of some extremely vocal transphobes who were influential beyond their numbers. Their efforts to paint feminism as inherently trans-exclusive were so successful with the mainstream, that nobody had any idea unless they ran in radical feminist circles, themselves. Then, in 2008, one feminist got sick of the political lesbians hijacking everything with their transphobia and decided some shorthand term was needed to separate them from the overwhelming majority of trans-accepting radfems, and she called them trans-exclusionary radfems, and thus the term TERF was born.
Thus concludes our introduction. Stay tuned!
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