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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.
When those ideas were injected into the movement so early in its history, was it coopted by bad actors or actively shaped by them?
It's true that Dworkin wasn't anti-trans, even if the transphobic ideas of her time seep into her work, as we see in the paternalistic attitude present in this passage. However, we have a few years, a decade at best, of radical feminism being trans-ambivalent before terfism became a prominent part of the movement. And that's gone on for almost five decades. Even with the current terf-feminist divorce of the last decade, prominent contemporary authors that identify as radfem, such as Amelia Valcárcel, are quite transphobic.
Compare that to intersectional feminism. Even if Hooks' foundational Feminist Theory contains questionable elements in her argumentation (like saying, or at least implying that gays and lesbians don't suffer systemic oppression), she herself revised those ideas in later works and later trans feminist authors got grandmothered into the current.
Does Amelia Valcárcel identify as radfem? That doesn’t seem to be on her wiki article.
What about thinkers like Catherine MacKinnon?
I guess, a lot of the bigger name TERF authors seem to have no roots in academic scholarship. Helen Joyce was a fucking mathematician before she decided to start her deranged crusade.
TERFs don’t seem to be doing much actual feminism either. You get little stunts like Rowling donating some change to Afghan refugees, which really seems to be done more for show. Little activism on abortion or equal pay. Domestic violence only comes up when it’s time to freak out about the possibility of a trans women in a shelter.
Really, I want to take the word feminist from the vast majority of TERFs. They aren’t feminists in any meaningful sense. They’re just transphobes who think the word “feminism” permits them to go on a holy crusade, gives them acceptable targets to bully and hate.
I think by definition radical feminism is aiming for that project of eliminating sex. Dworkin’s androgynous society. Transgender people help this project, by showing that the boundaries are permeable.
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.