Terfin’ Ain’t Easy
Why collective female judgement-feminist or not-must be the coup de grâce to gender ideology
Girl, Instinct Injured
When I was a little girl, I used to argue with my Dad about male and female athletes and their physical abilities. Having been raised in the era of Spice Girls flavored Girl Power, I was just absolutely beside myself when I heard him state that men are just naturally stronger and faster than women. 8 year old me was vastly offended and outright enraged! How could he state something so utterly frustration-inducing to me? Didn’t he know? That girls can be anything they want to be? That girls are just the same as boys? How dare he threaten my delusional and ignorant yet courageously optimistic girl-child worldview?! I was livid.
But (don’t tell 8 year old me!)-he was right. Men are stronger than women. Men are faster than women. Not only this but men are different than women in a million ways, in glaringly obvious and completely imperceptible ways alike, and this is generally a good thing. These differences create a reciprocal and symbiotic relationship in environments where life is behaving as it should. Where we get into the weeds is where the environment is gaining pallor and rotting-where the fracturing of healthy institutions and traditions is being encouraged by the over culture. And there is nothing more destabilizing to the reciprocal relationship between male and female, the foundational relationship of humanity (arguably in competition with mother-child), than the fracturing of the tradition and fact of physiological sex itself.
I first encountered men masquerading as women in 2013 when I was taking classes to become a RN. I, like what felt like the vast majority of my classmates, was a borderline alcoholic at the time and we all spent a decent amount of time bonding over beers and Jameson shots, often at the gay bars that inhabited the neighboring district in downtown St. Louis. One of the bars hosted a drag night, and as the drag queens came rolling in the door half done up with their makeup on but no wig yet, I remember feeling this sort of gutted sensation in my belly. Everyone seemed thrilled with these men, their photos were plastered all over the walls, my friends were delighted to see them arrive, even making comments on how beautiful they were. I, on the other hand, felt the galloping fight or flight response rise in my body. I ignored it, kept a smile on my face, and probably threw back another shot.
I had this response not so much in response to the individual men themselves, but to what they represented. They gave me the same uncanny feeling I always got when looking at the portfolios of theme park caricature artists sitting on easels on hot blacktop littered with rotting ice cream and syrupy soda spills when I was a child. The leering, over-exaggerated features communicated what broken-up components of the female body are worth mimicking while simultaneously expressing a sort of aggressive jealousy. The girls who made fun of me in middle school when I grew breasts and hips before they did and who made a game of chucking kickballs at those parts of my body and then cackling at me when they jiggled-the drag queens gave me the same feeling as they did. Middle-school-girl-bully energy is how I would describe it.
I felt this same instinct arise again a few years later, when I was working as a L&D nurse in a rural hospital. Smaller community hospitals often have to send their lab work to outside facilities to be processed, and this hospital was no different. The person who came to pick up our lab work, often in the middle of the night, was a trans-identified male. Cue the middle-school-girl-bully vibes. He wore fishnets and mini skirts and push-up bras. He graphically told us about all the “lesbian sex” he was having and how he couldn’t wait to marry the woman he was dating so he could be her “wife”-often with absolutely zero prompting or encouragement from neither me or any of the other nurses. Being a L&D unit, there were no male nurses and this meant this man had a captive audience of women only, and he very clearly enjoyed getting to indulge performing his “one of the girls” schtick with us. He had even fathered a child, and would speak of this child and their mother disparagingly to us. This man made me distinctly and severely uncomfortable but again, I was polite. I was polite because my instincts had been dismissed time and time again-to the point of injury.
Later in my career, I became a school nurse at a local middle school. There I witnessed the trans-ing of a handful of teenage girls, no more than 12 or 13 years old. If it wasn’t fishnets-man-lesbian from the previous story who would “peak” me, being asked to provide pain medication on a nearly daily basis to a child because her breast binder was causing her pain would. Hearing kids be called alternative names and pronouns that sometimes would switch back and forth on a whim, their parents not always aware, made me really delve into the theory and reasoning behind this phenomenon. Why did girls not want to be girls anymore? Who is selling this sick lie to them? I asked myself these questions in every such encounter but never dared to utter them out loud. The mending and healing of my injured instincts was only just beginning.
Crimes Against Female-Kind
As you can see-I wasn’t always a TERF. I always had had a “live and let live” attitude. Having been a person who lived a lifestyle many look down upon as a IV drug addict in my late teens and very early twenties, I knew about the disapproving gaze of strangers. I knew about the feeling of having my humanity stripped away via assumptions and biases. You don’t experience things like begging to be sold insulin needles to shoot up with at Walmart and then turning around to see your high school science teacher waiting in line behind you with a look of utter disappointment and disgust on their face and forget how that feels. Yet-in this experience of being sharply and frequently judged and living to tell the tale on the other side-I now see that that judgment serves a purpose. That judgement has the ability to keep society in a place of plenty. A place where human beings are thriving and well and are in a place to help one another. This judgment tells us what we are collectively willing to accept as the environments in which we live and raise our children.
The current popular narrative of “inclusion at all costs” wants us to lack this quality because good judgement is inherently exclusive.
The Oxford dictionary defines judgement as "the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions." To have discernment means to "have the ability to judge well". The current popular narrative of “inclusion at all costs” wants us to lack this quality because good judgement is inherently exclusive. I feel that many women are in a state of constant over-riding of their natural good judgment in many different areas-but nothing really illustrates this fact the way women who go to bat for gender ideologues do. The subversion of the natural instincts of woman is a canary in the coal mine of modern society. If women can be manipulated into mistrusting themselves in such a base way-their Earthly foundation is cracked. Everything in them that exists to protect and honor themselves and their young is shattered. The mending of this foundational damage is imperative to the well being of all women and children.
Transgenderism, its proponents and its propaganda, its entire premise-is an affront to the female experience. There are two main ways gender ideology is an insult to humanity:
•The trans-ing of children
•The insinuation that males can somehow comprehend what it means to be woman
Gender ideology-in both of these manifestations- is glaringly hostile to true human thriving. Both of these positions take direct aim at women and the work that we do in this world. One creates a threat to our safety and actively mocks us while simultaneously being loaded with venomous and potentially dangerous jealously, the other creates a very real threat to the innocence and purity of our children and their precious childhoods.
I think mothers are especially capable of possessing this clear view of the current state of things because they have the most intimate perspective of how the denial of material reality in favor of ideology affects children. More so-female physiology, and the experiences that come with it-ties us to the truth. From seeing blood drip from your body for the first time and knowing in your bones everything is different now, to feeling the gravity of a positive pregnancy test all the way to the moment of birthing an entire new little soul into the world, women know the Earth’s truths in a special way.
You are either in alignment with these truths as a woman or you are in denial. Denial is most often related to the way we have been socialized-the conditioning to value *mind over body* or the conditioning to be kind at the cost of our own safety- among other things. This denial is one of something so basic. Whatever the source, know it isn't serving women and children. To deny is to allow. Stop allowing. Listen to what your body is telling you and trust in its hard-won lessons and wisdom. Your female instincts are whip-smart and attuned to the entire universe. Use them.
An ideological premise that forces you to question and doubt your most fundamental, deepest understanding of the environment you inhabit is not a premise that exists to provide and nourish you and your children-it is one that wants to weaken you and your children-yield to no such entity. It’s a premise which exists to plant seeds of mistrust.
I feel that this “premise” is a branch of a much larger entity. The same entity that makes women believe they can't give birth or feed their babies is the same one that teaches children that they were born in the wrong body. The same entity that convinces women that breastfeeding isn’t worth trying for and persevering through is the same one that is teaching women and girls that it is "kind" to allow men into our spaces, never mind our own safety. See the commonalities here? The suggestion is that we as women are inherently flawed and need help and that that help can only be accessed via self abandonment and manufactured insecurity. We have to reject these suggestions, turn them on their heads, and take up an attitude of self preservation and assurance.
Rejection is Protection
When men say they are women, they are by default discrediting every woman who existed so that they could stand here today spewing nonsense. They are simultaneously denying original, true womanhood and girlhood and the fact that the nature of true womanhood and girlhood creates certain undeniable needs and demands certain protections. They are assuming their own wants and desires over our needs and rights. I will say it over and over-women's bodies are unique, women's bodies are special, women's bodies are valuable, and therefore-easily commodified. We are vulnerable due to our biology. Whether it be forced wet nursing or surrogacy or prostitution or child marriage or so many other things-female physiology is the gift that comes with inherent risk. This is why women must dissent. Time to get terfy.
The term “terf”, of course, stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”. I see a lot of discourse over the word and whether or not the people it is assigned to are real feminists or not and while I understand radical feminism and it’s adherents absolutely have taken this on and have pioneered the dissent on this topic-I also feel this term has taken on a whole new meaning. It really just means person (typically women, although certain men like
fit the bill) who is not eager to bend to the gender-as-religion extremists. To be a terf is to have common sense-that’s it really. Simple, old fashioned reason and caution. You don’t have to identify with feminism to participate in these necessary measures.Now-a moment of harshness for all the women standing up for these men, those talking crazy about how all bodies lactate and how "it doesn't erase women for trans women to breastfeed or call themselves mothers". The women feeding their tomboy daughters testosterone and buying breast binders for them. The women who are taking their children to drag queen story hour and lying to their kids when they ask common sense questions. The women who have been so tampered with that they defend the shifting legislation that allows male predators into female prison with their sisters. The women who put their pronouns in their bio and say “pregnant people” and “chestfeeders”. The women who cattily parrot things like “you’re so insecure in your femininity that you can’t be accepting of trans women” to women like myself (to which I say-it is impossible to be insecure about physiological facts).
To all of these women-take some time to be in nature. True time in nature-time that isn’t just warm and enjoyable but which is challenging. Walk barefoot on hot rocks. Swim in freezing cold spring water. Make fire, get burned a little. Remember who and what you are-you are every bit as harsh and dirty and beautiful and vital as the nature that surrounds you and THAT NATURE ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NEVER EVER EVER DENIES REALITY. Allow these vital truths to come to you:
Mothers are female, mothers are female
Only females bleed
Only females drip milk
Only females grow life
Only females are the vessel
All children are born perfect
All children deserve true acceptance
All children deserve a life without physiological manipulation
Women and girls deserve special protection because women and girls are vulnerable by design
Our vulnerability is not trivial, and yet it is also not a handicap
Please honor the truth of your body, please quit affirming men who hate you.
When we smile politely when really we want to glare, when we nod our heads in agreement when we want to be shaking them no, when we keep our mouths pursed shut holding in the words of our discontent-we are choosing to surrender our weapon. The weapon is good judgement, and it is the most precious resource we have as women. Yes, I am judging the non-judgment of other women-and this judgment is a matter of respect for us all collectively. This judgement is a matter of sacred fortification of the feminine and of the innocent. Women, women, full of grace-please use your merciful nature and rightful judgment to strike this ideology down. A feminine coup de grâce against a sick and wounded society, carried out via non-compliance and non-cooperation-ever questioning, ever steadfast.
A quick and dirty resource list for the TERF-curious:
- who writes “The Word is Woman” here-documenting in real time the nonsense of female erasure in the media and academia
Isabella Malbin, host of the “Whose Body Is It” pod-required listening for context, history, and personal stories on this topic (as well as a multitude of other topics that deeply impact women and girls).
- -with brilliant editors and Anna Slatz (https://reduxx.info/author/anna/) 🔗is “your unapologetically pro-woman, pro-child safeguarding source of news and commentary”
“Gender, A Wider Lens” pod-I found this episode with
to be particularly illuminating:
K. Lang (aka "The Deprogrammer XX" of stopfemaleerasure.com, always extremely well researched, always articulate and nuanced all at once.
This article from
if you have not read it yet, about youth gender clinic whistle blower Jamie Reed (I have to add here-this particular gender clinic is the one I received doctor’s notes from as a school nurse, so it hits home even more so).
*There are many other people and publications investigating and thinking critically on this topic, these are just the ones I personally have resonated with the most.*
You're words are so inspiring, affirming, and needed! Thank you for saying what I don't hear anywhere else. Thank you for writing words I can't wait to share with my 4 daughters. I used to think natural birth, extended breastfeeding, cosleeping, attached parenting, alternative medicine, homeschooling/unschooling would protect my kids from this insanity. But I watch the families who we parented early on with, who were so like minded, totally fall prey to gender ideology. Not just one or two of them, but the majority of these families endorse Trans ideology and have a least one kid, usually female, who has come out as something they are not in reality.
It's made me realize I had to do more to counteract it. My oldest is almost 21, married, with an almost 2 yr old ( gah! breeder!) I have watched motherhood hone in her priorities, mature her as a woman, and give her the gift of not being able to ignore biological reality the way her college going friends pretend to do.
And for her younger sisters, 15, 12, 9, they see the context of their sister's life, being lived in juxtaposition to what's clamoring for their attention and it fortifies their desire to be content as they were made. They may want to make different choices than their older sister but not in opposition to their biology.
So thank you for the reminder to protect them by teaching them to judge threats, to keep women's space for women only.
“The subversion of the natural instincts of woman is a canary in the coal mine of modern society. If women can be manipulated into mistrusting themselves in such a base way-their Earthly foundation is cracked.” 😮💨 Well said.
The movement away from the “live and let live” creed of modernity will be shattered by women who embrace their instincts, I hope. Great post.