Susan's Place Transgender Resources

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelsie-brynn-jones/transexclusionary-radical-terf_b_5632332.html?utm_hp_ref=transgender

Transexclusionary Radical feminism or TERF is a loosely organized collective with a message of hate and exclusion against trans women in particular

Not a pleasant group of people

Hi.

Try  being an intersexed female and see how you get on many hard line Lesbain women wont accept us and we are not trans in any way shape or form, ,i know i was with a group of said women and 3 gay men i was told i would never ever be accepted as a female  no matter what,

Now not all women are like that i do have many friends who are  gay and have no issues with myself and im counted as a friend i have gay friends as well .

My life revolves around women in the main and yes i have a few lovely men friends .

The reason many gay women dont like men is many reasons one of lack of trust  lied to and used and i understand that very well and abuse i know about that first hand , so you could say i dont like men because of how i have been treated so would i trust men after you and your Mother were abused to the point of being killed murdered and raped and more and you have to ... GET ...away to even stay alive, im a woman  a born female  just not your normal born female ,

so i know what its like you try and live a normal life with all that over your head see what its like,,,,, trust me its not how it should be though thats the way it is for many of us i can site of 2000 women who have been abused long term , and dont forget theres many trans people who have abused us as well so is it any wonder trans people are not accepted or transgender, again i know from the many i have talked to ,

Maybe not what you or others wont or need to hear this is only a little of what i know goes on  dig deeper and youll see where we females / women are coming from,

...noeleena...

My friend who is transgender showed me a video with one of the feminists talked about in this article speaking. As a woman who is cisgender I don't know how these radical feminists are fighting for women's rights by focussing on transgender people so much. I would consider myself a feminist but not that kind of feminist.

These type of people really make me laugh. I don't understand their need to belittle others. I'm guessing it's out of ignorance and fear. I can't get offended by someone like this, their opinions are simply fueled by ignorance and mean nothing to me. Nonetheless it's still wrong and disgusting that these people are doing this. They must be so weak-minded to blindly hate a group of people just because they lack the ability to comprehend anything that requires a decent amount of thought and openness. Pathetic, really. Their logic is flawed and clearly shows their lack of intelligence. They only see what's on the outside and don't have the capacity to look deep inside and they refuse to be educated.

Why can't people see each other just as humans (being rhetoric here obviously, something needs to happen for this to change)? Everyone is different and no one is superior. We're human because we're able to experience a whole different range of emotions on different levels (we're human for many things but this one stands out the most to me). I personally think difference is beautiful and it doesn't matter whether someone fits into a certain category or not as long as they're being themselves and are happy and aren't hurting anyone for a legit reason. I don't see the reason to put anyone down. I've said this before to many people in real life but if I were the only person that was different in this world then even then no one could change me or change my opinion. Maybe I'm just very stubborn but I'm stubborn out of logic and good reason.

As disgustingly abusive and detestably vile as such people often are, the focus of my personal fears isn't on such passionate radical feminists at present because I regard them as Disney villains. In my mind, unless somebody is already extremely biased then fundamental flaws in their thinking and their malice are immediately apparent. For instance, their consistent accusation that trans women are fetishists while trans men are trying to gain status can be, and often was or is, readily applied to sexuality. Using the same thinking as these radical feminists, lesbians can be reduced to women trying to acquire the status of men while gay men can be said to have appropriated the sexuality of an oppressed group for the sake of a fetish. For me, the fact that the vast majority of lesbian and gay people would reject this characterisation based on their self-understanding is as irrelevant in this scenario as the fact that most trans people would reject exclusionary radical feminist reliance on things like  ->-bleeped-<- due to its total incompatibility with their self-understanding.

My personal fears are focused on people that are far more insidious and many liberal feminists. In the case of the latter, they often seem to use trans people as nothing more than a weapon against all radical feminists or other political opponents and often seem to assume their typically shallow support of trans people makes them somehow superior. I've seen far too many of them speak for and over trans people then turn on us as ungrateful or inconvenient if anyone dares to question it.

In the case of the insidious individuals, I'm thinking of obvious transphobes that profess to actually accept trans rights and are obviously politically savvy enough to realise that expressing the true extent of their feelings would be politically self-destructive. In my personal view, many of the feminists writing for the Guardian or New Statesman are examples of that.

They can't say that 'trans women are men and trans men are women' without causing any progressive audience they have to instantly shut down. Flowing from that, they'll do things like write essays about straw-definitions of 'cis' so they can claim it's a slur, a misogynistic term, or somehow reinforces gender restrictions. They'll try to create myths of shared girlhood and boyhood to exclude trans people and leave it implied that we're incapable of understanding fellow members of our gender rather than stating it outright. They'll try to resort to biological essentialism by referring to trans people as 'male women' or 'female men,' terms that perform no function that the modifier 'trans' cannot beyond being a malicious reminder of things trans people often hate about themselves. They'll try to portray TERF as some kind of McCarthyite term, as if the trans community has significant power, and lecture the trans community on who our real allies are or what real transphobia is despite the fact they'd validly rip men apart that tried to do the same to feminists. They create straw-definitions of 'non-binary' identities so they can erase the unique harms endured by our siblings via claims that we're all non-binary since nobody totally complies with gender roles. They'll claim to care deeply about victims of sexual assault and use the idea of them as a homogeneous group as a weapon against trans people by insisting we should be excluded from shelters because we might trigger victims. Naturally, the implication is that it's acceptable to silently misgender us and that, as Natalie Reed has so perfectly encapsulated it, our right to actually be safe is subordinate to the rights of others to merely feel safe. They take events like Laverne Cox appearing on Time to subject trans women to scrutiny they hardly ever apply to cis women, women that consistently present as femme hypocritically insist the femininity of people like Laverne means trans women uphold patriarchy (of course, the fact Laverne is also black is completely coincidental to them targeting her *rolls eyes*). They ironically use their vast platforms and columns in major publications to claim the trans community, a teeny tiny minority of the population with no institutional powers, are censoring and silencing them thereby reversing the dynamics in the eyes of their audience. They use 'sex dysphoria' instead of 'gender dysphoria' so they instantly exclude the rights of anyone that isn't transsexual without stating it directly. There are so, so, so many things they do on a daily basis that I can't hope to list them all. I don't think they consciously contrive such things but I'm concerned with the outcome of their tactics rather than their origins.

Most tellingly, they often closely associate with exclusionary radical feminists despite knowing their history of attacks and the nature of their beliefs. They quietly absorb the vitriolic arguments of exclusionary radical feminists and repackage them for respectable mass consumption. They're the public relations agents of exclusionary radical feminists and that's why I fear them most. Just as oppressors have done across time, they use their respectability and compliance with social conventions to generate authority and portray opponents as uncouth or irrational.

the problem with this kind of talk is that like in the abortion rights issue, there are those individuals who make this as their legitimacy to physically attack and murder transgenders because now the warped logic for doing so has been created.