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This is a passage from Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating.
Essentially what happened was that Mary Daly and Janice Raymond realized that they’d get a lot more attention if they teamed up with conservatives. Mary Daly was a weird theologian who wrote woowoo “divine feminine” goddess shit. Raymond was especially vicious and nasty, and closed down places that were doing GRS in the 70’s.
There seems to be a pattern here - I’d connect Raymond’s action to the “backlash” era of the 80’s. When feminism seems to be getting powerful enough, bad faith actors swoop in to distract by trying to hijack the movement into transphobia.
It’s always been a front. It’s amazing how many TERFs claim they love Dworkin, but are unaware of this passage.
I'm referring precisely to figures like Joyce and Rowling when I talk about the "terf-feminist divorce". I agree that the modern "gender critical" individuals have little to do with feminists, and they themselves are moving away from the classic moniker too. But as a movement, I'm aiming for just the contrary, underlining the "feminist" in terf. remembering that terf stems from feminism points a finger at the failures of white, straight, upper-middle class feminism. I think it leads to much more useful discussion than trying to restrict a movement to its foundational authors and texts.
I guess - what I see now is that TERFism isn’t really a consistent ideology. Theory is meaningless without praxis, but the TERFs are all praxis and no theory. It really does seem to boil down to “I don’t like trans people, and can justify using slurs and bullying people because I’m a ✨feminist✨” It’s a purely reactionary movement.
Getting them to read the authors that they claim back them up would help fix a lot of this. Reading Daly will disabuse anyone of the notion that she had much of value to say; Raymond was a bully, whose masterwork involved outing individual trans women and trying to get them fired from their workplace (eg, Sandy Stone).
And Dworkin - she clearly saw the parallels between the oppression of transgender people and of women. This would be extremely beneficial to a modern trans inclusive radical feminism, if they understood this.