Uproar over Oxford talk by Kathleen Stock: Gender-critical feminism and its criticisms

“We are supposed to care about women. It is a risk of a man saying he is a woman and going into a space and taking advantage of that,” she said.

Positions such as Stock’s are often seen as that of a TERF in social-media parlance.

Who is a TERF and is it a pejorative term?

TERF or “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” refers to feminists whose advocacy for women’s rights do not include the rights of transgender people, especially trans women. Even though the term gained currency in the early 2000s, it was born during the early 1970s feminist movement in the US, where a faction of feminists focused on the championing of the “female essence” or what historian Alice Echols called a “female standard of sexuality” in her article, “Cultural Feminism: Feminist Capitalism and the Anti-Pornography Movement (1983)”, to oppose patriarchal constructs of feminine traits.

The term entered popular consciousness when blogger Viv Smythe used it in a blog post in 2008 while criticising the feminist Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s exclusionary “womyn-born womyn” policy that denied admission to trans women. She termed TERFs as a minority faction of feminists who reject the acceptance of trans women within their fold and oppose their inclusion in women-exclusive spaces because it would lead to an erasure of their essential selves. (Incidentally, the term “womyn” was adopted by some feminists to avoid ending the word with -men. Considered discriminatory towards trans-people, the more inclusive womxn is now preferred by intersectional feminists.) Though originally not deemed to be pejorative, over the years, TERF has come to be considered a slur.

Last year, The Oxford English Dictionary added an entry for TERF (noun), defining it as “A feminist whose advocacy of women’s rights excludes (or is thought to exclude) the rights of transgender women. Also more generally: a person whose views on gender identity are (or are considered) hostile to transgender people, or who opposes social and political policies designed to be inclusive of transgender people.” It added that though “Originally used within the radical feminist movement… the term was intended as a neutral description, TERF is now typically regarded as derogatory.”

An acceptable term for this school of feminism and not limited to it now is gender-critical feminism.

The contentions of gender-critical feminists

In her 2022 book Gender-Critical Feminism (OUP), Holly Lawford-Smith explains gender-critical feminism as “both a continuation of radical feminism and distinct from it… Some think of it as a new name for an old position, while others see it as a new position. Many perceive it as being focused on a single issue, namely the social uptake of gender identity… Gender-critical feminism is a general feminist theory (albeit one that is still a work in progress).

The fact that it currently gives the bulk of its attention to a single issue is explained by the urgency of that issue, and not anything more fundamental to the theory of gender-critical feminism itself. It is about being critical of gender, and this has implications for a wide range of feminist issues, not just gender identity.”

The broad contention of LGBTQIA+ rights activists is that gender identity and biological sex are distinct from each other and should be recognised as such. However, for a section of feminists, broadly categorised as gender-critical feminists, this distinction negates the battle for the recognition of women’s rights in the face of centuries of patriarchal oppression. In disowning biological sex, they argue, the discrimination against women as a sex is perpetuated.

An example of this can be seen in the views of British writer and creator of the Harry Potter universe JK Rowling, who continues to espouse the idea of biological sex while expressing solidarity with the trans movement.

The criticism against gender-critical feminists

In the introduction to the Transgender Studies Quarterly Volume 9 Number 3, published by Duke University Press in August 2022, editors Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur write, “…gender critical thinking gets articulated, in some instances, as a classic conservative call to return to an imagined ‘golden age where everything was simpler and genders were what they looked like’ (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017b: 14) and, in others, as a timely piece of feminist militancy grounded on an essentialist story of womanhood as always already under threat: in danger, at risk, and in need of protection.”

This refusal of gender-critical feminists to recognise sex as a spectrum is a setback to the LGBTQIA+ movement in that it limits the understanding of sex to an inflexible biological binary set at birth. Activists argue that this conservative understanding of sex can easily be — and is — weaponised to disenfranchise the trans community of rights and access to critical policies, as well as increase chances of misogyny towards them.