What’s driving the TERF war

I’ve been reminded by a conversation with a friend, and I probably don’t say this enough. I do hate research looking into what I call anti-trans “hate” movement, but I don’t think personal ideological “hatred” is really the driving force of the TERF movement or the conflict between the wider “anti-wokeness” movement and the allegedly “woke”. So I wanted to talk a bit about that.

My understanding for a while has been that the big drivers of TERFism as a media and social phenomenon are basically the collapse of institutional feminism and careerism on the part of institutional feminists.

Under austerity, the domestic and sexual violence sector is being defunded. It has been for over 10 years now. Specialist refuges have already been widely shut down, and general purpose ones are going to follow in their wake at this rate. Women are losing their careers. At the same time there’s a wide growing right wing movement to demonise LGBT groups, ethnic minorities and the left, which is happy to fund hundreds of thousands of pounds for cases which will attempt to roll back rights (often widely known as “anti-rights groups”).

Why wouldn’t unscrupulous straight cis middle class senior VAWG management figures facing a crunch on their position managing the decaying women’s services take up the best funded option available scapegoating trans people for their own misfortune? Why wouldn’t Guardian feminists in an ailing legacy media platform see the grass is greener on the other side and go work for platforms funded by wealthy conservatives and present anti-rights arguments as a women’s rights issue?

There’s a huge tendency to individualise this and not try and look at the bigger picture — the class interests of those involved, the fact that the problems facing trans people aren’t that one woman or another doesn’t like trans people personally. The problem for us is that we are one of those minorities urgently in need of the specialist GBV or homeless services that have been being gutted and scrapped, which we never really had substantial provision for in the first place, frankly.

We keep focusing on these celebrity transphobes, or on defending our own celebrity allies in big public bust ups. This often happens on a train of thought whose wheels are lubricated by a mixture of misogynist interest in scapegoating women who’ve picked that side, and a wider left that has either lost its direction in terms of actually building radical alternatives outside of the state, or is being suffocated by dominant doomed projects like the “Let’s all throw our energy behind Corbyn and the Labour party”, or long running powerful borderline cults like the SWP who function as an engine for wasting the energy and high hopes of young leftists on selling papers and maintaining the party itself. When that happens we’re collectively distracted from the things we are empowered to change.

Which is another way to say, all power to the local mutual aid activists, to local groups making connections between people and necessary support like African Rainbow, Queercare, No Borders. To the legal activists fighting to support people getting arrested for fighting back against the increasingly violent state. To the volunteers at GBV services where turnover is immense and unrelenting being put through the grinder, to the social media managers dealing with ceaseless abuse from people who claim to be about protecting women, to those people who are out there putting their spare time and energy behind their politics. We need more of this. We need solidarity with each other and better means of looking after each other going through collective cycles of trauma and burnout.

The state has failed us. Institutional left voices have abandoned us for their career interests. But recognising this can give us clarity and purpose. I’ll keep trying to do my bit too, and to keep my anti-hate work focused in the main on organisational and institutional threats rather than on personalised morality judgements. Solidarity forever.