Thread by @London_AFA

It's high time we did a thread introducing people to the deep ideological, financial, and practical links between TERFs and the American far right.

Essentially there is a wide array of evidence showing that anti trans rhetoric is being used to further the far right cause

Here's a classic case study: the bathroom access debate in the USA.

It's a known tactic of segregationists: deny the target group access to bathrooms and you deny them access to public life. That's why they used it against black people in the 60s

pinknews.co.uk/2017/02/08/rad…

The same thing also turns up in the UK, in relation to a pond in hampstead heath: a group of segregationists decided to target women who wanted to use the womens-only swimming pond. It then became a major news item.

Most of the articles in major publications were not pro trans

The NYT subsequently did a major piece on this phenomenon: Britain has become a world leader in anti trans public campaigning.

As this article notes there is a huge "split between the American and British centre-left on this issue"

nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opi…

Also noted in the NYT piece is the dogwhistle campaign based on stoking fears about trans women in women's prisons. In reality trans women do not pose a threat out of the statistical norm to the other inmates. Nevertheless the far right & TERFs depict them as potential rapists

TERFs have also seized on a recent case of a transgender woman sexually assaulting someone in prison. But what actually was the defining feature of the case? That the person in question was known to have a history of abuse, not that she just assaulted someone due to being trans.

The case the TERFs wanted to make to the media with that particular incident was that the person in question did what she did * because she was trans*.

But in reality the trans prison population is actually one of the most vulnerable groups in Britain's jails.

What was the government solution? To pass the buck, dodge a scandal, & segregate all trans women within 1 of their prisons. Never mind the fact that the women in question had wildly different case histories & that the policy was inherently transphobic

bbc.com/news/uk-474347…

That's a pattern of shared tactics: focus on segregating public spaces based on a smear campaign depicting trans people as inherently sexually threatening

This has 2 similarities to far right campaigns: it's similar to Jim Crow era segregation policies & the anti-choice movement

It's also eerily similar to antisemitic blood-libel in some ways.

Both have a mythos based around an invading inherently evil force, which is sexually dangerous & threatening to traditonal gender roles, posing a risk to children & women that are seen as society's property

Funnily enough, though TERFs accuse trans people of violating women's bodily autonomy just by existing, they don't care much when abortion comes into the picture. In fact there's a history of TERFS taking money and help from the anti-choice lobby

Thread:

https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/1002211818335588353

Where does this come from? Well as @CaseyExplosion points out in her wonderful thread, it's about the Christian far right in the USA targeting the LGBT community in revenge for losing the battle over marriage equality.

splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017…

To pull that off they've made alliances with the right wing of the feminist movement and have attempted to split the LGBT+ movement.

And the TERFS fell for it. And now they do the far rights work for them

There's also strong indications of financial ties. In Ireland the #repealThe8th campaign soon discovered signs their opponents, who wanted to maintain the ban against abortion, were getting money from a variety of big international donors, amongst them, the US evangelical right

Anyway, it then turned out that there's pretty good evidence that similar groups have been funnelling cash into the UK TERF movement via a series of anonymised "crowdfunding" campaigns.

A lot of the donations were suspiciously large numbers

Thread:

https://twitter.com/caseyexplosion/status/1048237057779404800?lang=en

What does that mean? It means someone is trying to funnel money into the TERF & anti choice movement via a method that cant easily be traced, & that looks superficially like a grassroots crowdfund.

But lets get serious: it's not a real crowdfund. It's a coordinated funding drive

The whole point of this campaign is to set up and police ever tighter and tighter boundaries of what counts as a "real woman".

Their idea of a "real women" eventually reaches logical absurdities, and is boiled down to being "white fertile feminine child bearer".

IT'S MYSOGYNY.

The TERF program is ultimately directed against anyone who cant fit that definition.

Anyone involved in anti trans rhetoric is complicit- even if they dont consciously agree with that definition, their actions still end up upholding it!

Look at the results: political campaigns against members of oppressed minorities, star athletes like Caster Semenya being expelled from events for not being blonde and white enough, infighting in major UK political parties over whether or not trans women count as people...

If you read those threads and the articles linked it should become clear that the TERF agenda has nothing to do with defending women.

It's purpose is its effect: weakening the LGBT+ movement, attacking feminism and women, and attacking bodily autonomy and reproductive rights