TERF Takes

OK, trans community – it’s truth time. One of the biggest differences between the way women are treated and the way that y’all are treated is that y’all are allowed to have safe spaces. You’re allowed to have subreddits that are trans-only, places and events that are just for you. We’re not.

When I tried to start a subreddit for female humans, for example (including the ones who identify as men) so that we had a place to talk about female things, it lasted less than a week, and the admins performed a delicate little dance before banning us for “hate.” They temp-banned me and all my mods, then banned the whole community because we weren’t able to take down the anti-trans posts that were clearly against our rules - and that didn’t appear until after we were tempbanned. Hmm.

Women get nothing: not subreddits, not dating apps, not even an app for women in general. No bathrooms, no changing rooms, no sports of our own; hell, we can’t even get away from y’all in prison! Any female-only event y’all get to hearing about is targeted by protesters, often violent ones, invariably carrying signs threatening harm or encouraging suicide — lovely behavior from people who constantly quote trans suicide statistics as if it’s the biggest crisis on the planet, btw.

Any women’s shelter or rape crisis center that is female-only is also targeted: the sole remaining women’s rape crisis center in all of Canada has been repeatedly vandalized with threatening graffiti, and even had a dead rat nailed to its door. This, in a city with 6 other rape counseling centers available, all of them trans-friendly. It’s not about being denied access to services — it’s sick, twisted, furious hatred at even the idea of women having anything of our own.

You have taken it all: our spaces, our sports, and our safety. You’ve taken our privacy, our dignity, our right to single-sex incarceration, and our right to single-sex intimate care. You’ve taken our identities, and the words we use to name ourselves.

You want us to agree that being female means nothing, is nothing, deserves nothing - no recognition, no separate existence — not even a name. We are “uterus-havers,” “menstruators,” “bleeders,” and “people with cervixes.” “Women” belongs to you now, and you’re even coming for “female.”

You’re taking everything we are, piece by piece — and what do we get in return, for the theft of the names you took from us? “C*s” — a prefix that sidelines us in our own demographic, and which privately, the trans community uses as a slur.

What good little colonizers you’ve turned out to be.