Through the Looking Glass

a confessional study on TERF radicalization and deradicalization

Not too long ago, I stumbled onto J.K. Rowling's Twitter profile, looking to hunt down whatever comment had sparked the discourse of the moment, and I paused to stare at her pinned tweet instead. It read like this:

Men defining what a woman is, what women should and shouldn’t fear, what women should and shouldn’t say, what rights women should be fine with giving up and, of course, what constitutes ‘real’ misogyny: get a bloody mirror. That’s real misogyny, looking right back at you. (J.K. Rowling, 25 January 2023)

It’s often a surreal experience for me to come across gender critical rhetoric at this point, particularly the type so emotional, you can sense the pent up rage coming off of it in waves. On one hand, these words are little more than nonsense to me now, but at the same time, it’s the sort of statement I myself might have made several years ago. It’s as if I remember the fervor behind it, but the meaning I once attributed to it is just gibberish to me now. Was it really misogyny I was angry at? Maybe in a misdirected sense, but the idea of finding it misogynistic for trans women to consider themselves women seems so utterly ridiculous to me now, I have to puzzle apart why I ever thought that in the first place. What is said about TERFs and unreliable narration is not lost on me.

I radicalized almost exactly three years ago. In some ways it ended almost as quickly, since I never moved deeper into the ideology than where I started; in other ways, it has been so harmful, I’ve only been able to appreciate the extent of it with time. I’ve written about my experiences as a former TERF before—at the time, I tried to remove myself from my own story as much as I could. I wasn’t interested in putting myself under the microscope more than necessary; I simply wanted to state in unequivocal terms why I had come to reject gender critical views. And I was very proud. I knew that GCs would pore over that type of essay and lament about how much more lucid I had been when I was with them, so I threw everything I had into the argumentation. It was a very frightening thing to do, and a very definitive step to take, and I am glad that I did it, since it was in some ways a paradigm shift for me. It helped me get a cleaner break from everything that had come before than I’d previously managed. But it wasn’t particularly vulnerable, very much by design. There is no good way to talk about any of this, and whenever I tried, I’d feel like I was engaging in apologia by existing and get trapped in a web of obsessive compulsive constraints so totalizing, I’d end up breaking down over the state of my mental health instead. That problem has improved enough now that this is a topic I’m capable of addressing.

Even now, I’m somewhat hesitant to share this, as it strikes me as the sort of thing you only write once, but my first one was less an ex-GC essay than a political declaration. This is different. It is about radicalization and deradicalization, and how you can end up violently cissexist without even noticing it. It’s also about cult dynamics. Some of it will apply more broadly, some of it won’t, as I think I was very typical in some ways and atypical in others. I believe I’ve reached the point where I can be both true to the TERF self-understanding of what they believe, while more deeply critical of the real reasons behind these beliefs, which is a combination that some might find of interest. My thinking has been influenced by certain strands of transfeminist thought, though there is much that is said on this topic that still doesn’t resonate with me very much. Finally, I expect that this will give some context on why I have become such an anti-essentialist, as I was once the exact opposite, and it ended nowhere good.

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One major realization I’ve come to over time is that there are actually multiple sets of underlying motivations present for GC women and TERFs, reinforcing each other in a way that makes it exponentially more difficult to convince them of anything. They believe that their beliefs are purely a reaction to misogyny, and their response is to embrace a type of feminist theory that involves enough leaps in logic and resorts to questionable symbolic reasoning that they can make the type of statement like the J.K. Rowling tweet above and genuinely believe that they’re saying something coherent. In contrast, many others seem to think that everything they say or claim to care about is just post-hoc justification for transphobia. In reality, I think the problem is more complicated than that—it’s located in the interplay between transphobia, unexamined intuitions about how gender works, and their own experience of misogyny. The result can be difficult to untangle again.

The main thing that radicalized me was that I believed sex was immutable. This was not a belief motivated by an express desire to be transphobic, though it’d certainly end there. I’d never had a problem with the notion of trans women in women’s spaces before, but the idea that they were women in any sort of ontological sense struck me as so much nonsense. I’ve said in the past that it was the misogynistic response to J.K. Rowling’s 2020 comments that caught my attention and made me spiral into TERFism myself, but in retrospect, this was not quite what happened. I had no experience with gender critical rhetoric, I knew nothing of transphobia except in its most obvious forms, and gender critical metaphysics of sex just seemed intuitively correct to me, so I was automatically inclined to take her words at face value and sympathize with her. I also disdained liberal feminism at the time, probably much more than I do now, so even the most measured responses to her, I interpreted as dismissiveness of misogyny. I don’t believe I would’ve outright radicalized if this hadn’t taken place during a pandemic, since the key really was heightened mental instability, but there was a certain unexamined affinity there that would have probably left me vulnerable to radicalization in the future regardless.

My fixation on sex as an immutable category and ontological reality is very interesting in retrospect, since there were layers to it. The first layer is that I have some training in metaphysics—my first intuition upon stumbling across this debate was that sex was a natural kind. I was also shocked and irritated to see complex metaphysical questions transformed into culture war, and naturally blamed the side I was less inclined to agree with. I was in a philosophically antagonistic mood and to the extent that I searched for alternative views, it was only to poke holes in them. A second, worse layer to what happened was a sudden sense of being displaced in my own gender category—I was very aware of women’s secondary role in every other area of life, every other movement, and it felt like being shoved aside within feminism too. This was reactionary nonsense, of course. The power differentials aren’t remotely the same as elsewhere, but there’s a certain degree of glee in the way some people like to hint that they might be. One vapid “step aside, ladies, you don’t get to be the sole arbiters on good fashion anymore” article, or something of the sort, and I lost my mind. And I don’t even like fashion, or makeup, or whatever it was, but it was the symbolism that mattered. It’s always the symbolism that matters with TERFs. The fact that the only thing being symbolized is a pointless squabble over the trappings of subordination never seems to register.

My approach to gender categories was very backwards. I was (and remain) fixated on reproductive exploitation, but at the time, I had convinced myself that the point of the exercise was to delineate between experiences of gender, not to examine the social relations that create it in the first place. If there were meaningful differences between trans womanhood and cis womanhood as social realities, I thought, then they couldn’t logically be the same thing. It didn’t occur to me that nobody was saying they were completely identical, but then again, I hadn’t bothered to talk to anyone yet. And once I did begin to discuss it, the format was always adversarial, which meant that my focus was always on proving my own view, not on trying to understand the layout of trans discourse. In some ways, I think what I was really doing was exploring my own intuitions about how sex as a physical phenomenon affects cis women’s psychology, centered on the way I personally experience it as a burden. Where I went wrong was in using this to try to construct a discrete definition of “womanhood” rather than viewing it as itself a product of how patriarchy structures the way we conceptualize sex. I was more focused on justifying than deconstructing my own bio-essentialistic assumptions about how this functioned, and I became firmly cissexist in the process.

What is interesting about this period is that what may have begun as an abstract, relatively harmless belief about biological sex quickly spiraled into something much uglier—I’d become a robust essentialist, and I disliked any facts or possibilities that cast doubts on the universality of my theorizing. I was never opposed to medical transition, but I do believe that part of my early discomfort with transition for minors was that it would significantly challenge the way I was using socialization theory to defend my approach. After all, if trans girls could experience the same social conditions as cis girls from a very young age, then one of my arguments for stressing difference instead ceased to work. I did adjust my framework as necessary to fit reality, eventually to the point that the whole house of cards came down, but there was something grudging about it in the beginning. This is why I now believe that gender critical ideology is never just an expression of a sincerely held belief. It is at best ambivalence, at worst open hostility, towards anything that challenges that belief. Nobody joins a social group or movement over a neutral belief; you join when that belief becomes a commitment of sorts.

One final thing that bears commenting on is my sudden fixation on the notion of women’s spaces. This wasn’t something I’d ever seen as a problem before, but I’d never paid real attention to the underlying issues, so reading J.K. Rowling’s essay immediately trained me to think in the same fashion—potential complications in policy were not simply something to resolve; they became a sign that there was something deeply problematic about the way trans issues were being conceptualized, and anyone unable to respond to my obsessive prodding about anything that could possibly go wrong was being dismissive and probably a misogynist. It was not about looking for solutions to any conflict, real or perceived; it was about looking for problems, because I felt like I was being gaslighted over the issue of sex categories. This is incredibly common in GC spaces: they will construct often bizarre scenarios of every little thing that could potentially go amiss with trans inclusion in women’s spaces, because they need to demonstrate that, in their words, “sex matters.” I was more moderate about this than most, but there was still a feedback loop at play: my essentialistic theory and my ambivalence over spaces were mutually reinforcing, and nothing was going to talk me out of them. It wasn’t until I was forced to distance myself emotionally from gender critical spaces because I couldn’t handle the constant transphobic abuse that I was able to even begin to unpick my own thinking.

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It’s surreal to look back at what was going through my mind at the very beginning, because it confirms to me that I was in fact a TERF. Sometimes I’m not actually sure, since so much of what goes on in those circles has always been so alien to me. I may have had a taste for the witch aesthetic, but I always disliked outright cruelty, and when I read passages from some of the GC propagandists, I could see the graphically transphobic language for what it was. In retrospect, there were any number of warning signs right from the beginning, but I was too enthralled to the ideology at first for this to register as a deep problem. There was always a certain tension there, though—my thought patterns may have been transphobic, but I didn’t actively wish to be transphobic. And I don’t mean merely that I didn’t wish to be seen as transphobic; to the extent that I was capable, I was processing information on what transphobia was in order to avoid it. Unlike many in these circles, I never fully decided that I personally was the final arbiter of what qualified as “real” transphobia and that anyone who challenged this simply hated women. I did reevaluate whenever someone I trusted pointed out that something was actually harmful. I think that this is what ultimately separated me from those who radicalize fully.

The thing is, TERFism isn’t the sort of position you choose just once, at least if you have any sort of moral compass at all. You have to choose it over and over again. You have to constantly commit to prioritizing abstract fears or concerns over another group’s concrete human needs. You need to learn how to truly dehumanize. For me, this was easier when it was some theoretical debate with no faces attached—I wasn’t cruel, but I could be callous at first. For a couple very typical examples, I could say “no” to trans women in women’s prisons and then awkwardly shrug off the issue of high rates of rape in men’s prisons as terrible and requiring a solution, but not cis women’s problem per se. This changed as soon as I started talking to someone who had ended up in prison at one point, specifically due to false charges by an abusive boyfriend. Suddenly I wasn’t able to simply ignore whatever was inconvenient about the type of policy I favored anymore. Something similar occurred in the debate over minors transitioning—when it was just an abstract question, I was able to focus exclusively on the ability to consent, but when faced with someone who was directly affected, that too became much more difficult. I will specify that neither incident was genuinely antagonistic or even confrontational; if they had been, I would have likely shut down instead.

Unfortunately, GCs and TERFs have a response to this. They will tell you that you’re being manipulated, that you’re being too nice, that you’re falling afoul of your female socialization, that the same consideration wouldn’t be returned. Now, I would still argue that prioritizing others is a gendered value, that women are conditioned to at least believe that they should embody it, and that this is a way to extract domestic labor, both in heterosexual relationships and in communities at large, but GC radical feminists weaponize this reality in order to argue that anything more than token compassion for a marginalized social group is a sign that you haven’t overcome your own internalized oppression. It is a carte blanche to dehumanize. This is part of how gender critical ideology leads to further radicalization—any lingering instinct to treat trans people as human and not an obstacle to your own “feminist” self-realization has to get burned away. And if it doesn’t, the rhetoric picks up speed and gets that much harsher. They will tell you that you’re weak, that you’re throwing them under the bus for “men’s” feelings, that you’re not a real feminist after all, that you lost your mind due to social pressure, that there’s no point and you’ll be hated anyway, that you’re a dickpandering handmaiden, that you’re merely virtue signaling to avoid the full brunt of social censure tied to involvement in radical feminism, that you’re presumptuous to sweep in and decide you know everything better than they do, that you’re a traitor to women who needs to be brought low. By the end, it becomes indistinguishable from supremacist rhetoric. Because that is at heart what it is.

The irony is that it’s the abuse that has helped me to deradicalize to the extent that I have. My trajectory was very strange: I snapped all at once, spent a month privately radicalizing myself, and then immersed myself in gender critical spaces, where the intensity and transphobic incoherence of what was actually going on quickly began to shock me. I was often viewed as too soft and subtly encouraged to radicalize further, and the terrible thing is that I had trained myself to think along similar lines in a way that left me adjacent to them for quite some time—it remained an open possibility to me that I was simply too weak and conforming to gender conditioning. Long after I stopped identifying as gender critical, I’d sometimes let them practically abuse me with this type of reasoning, since it was important to me that they knew how seriously I took radical feminist socialization theory. I now suspect that there were more gentle attempts at re-radicalization also, and I don’t know how to process that, since I still believe it came from a place of genuine concern. But I also know that relationships in these spaces are codependent by their very nature—people come to them to seek reassurance that they are actually in the right, and this includes trying to persuade everyone else, ostensibly for their own good. I cannot judge anyone for it because I was not any different, and I know I’d have likely become a propagandist for my own peace of mind if I’d stayed. If anything, I regret that I went to a group like this for moral support when I needed it, since I can’t fully shake the feeling that realizing (much less openly admitting) I was wrong is the deepest betrayal of that trust possible. But I also know that I’m meant to feel like this, because the only “favor” they expect in return is continued complicity.

People like to joke about how TERFism is a cult, but I don’t think most quite grasp what this actually means. I’ve joked about it for a long time myself, but it was only relatively recently that I started to understand how much of my own behavior even after ceasing to identify as gender critical was tied to struggling with the lingering cult dynamics. One of the things I’ve felt the most shame over was the fact that I continued to associate with them extensively even after leaving the ideology behind, but in retrospect I think this was because the deeply tribalistic mentality was one of the things that took the longest time to begin to fade. Being gender critical involves high levels of both isolation and group reinforcement; abandoning it, at least for me, meant maintaining that sense of alienation while cutting yourself off from that source of support. It also took me months and a lot of theoretical reading to start to work out exactly what was wrong with gender critical ideology—in the meantime, I just put up mental blocks and played at being some sort of centrist. I continued to consume transphobia, continued to believe that there was something like virtue in being able to empathize with them for the sake of “female solidarity.” Sometimes I would even endorse the casual transphobia and then wonder why I had done so after the fact; in retrospect, I think it was because I had not truly detoxed yet and did like to signal to them that perhaps I was not so different after all.

Eventually that changed. It finally had to—the transphobic abuse that you’re exposed to in these spaces is extreme, and the one thing you’re not permitted to do is call it out for what it is. As soon as I did, on behalf of a trans friend of mine they’d sent hate mail to for being interested in radical feminism, my more moderate views were no longer tolerable to them. I was polluting their space by associating with people they did not approve of. I decided to finally leave TERF spaces for real, but this was of course not good enough for them. We ignored each other for months until the next time I told them that they were behaving abusively, and then I found out that they’d spent all that time fixating on the fact that I hadn’t backed them up. Things steadily became worse and worse—over and over again, they’d frame themselves as my “true” sisters. They’d try to shame me for not taking their side in all matters, for talking to people they didn’t approve of. In some ways, this was almost constructive, because their tactics were based in transmisogyny and aimed at reinforcing cis privilege and solidarity, all concepts I’d previously scoffed at and now had to reevaluate. I was supposed to scramble to appease them before they revoked my status and saw me as tainted in some sense by the people I’d sometimes defend to them, less legitimate as a woman than I’d previously been. This treatment is functionally the same as what they level at dedicated trans allies, though in my case, it has been more a price to be paid for having ever gotten involved with them in the first place.

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The terrible thing about this whole experience, at least for me, is that radicalization and deradicalization aren’t equal and opposite processes. The former is like a switch: if you’re unfamiliar with the issues but have some affinity for the way TERFs argue, you can be nudged into identical thought patterns extremely quickly. Unlearning it all after the fact is much more difficult, since the ideology is more than simply a post-hoc justification; you do believe it. My worst moment was when I was still intellectually convinced that the ideology was correct but realizing the extent to which the spaces themselves were structured to produce transphobia. For the sake of my own sanity, I needed to break away from the tribalism and start talking to the other “side.” I was able to do so, fortunately, and my politics were no longer gender critical enough at this point to cause real problems, but I didn’t expect to ever abandon the metaphysics and was concerned at first about what would happen once this became clear. This wasn’t a problem in the long run—anyone willing to talk to me in the first place didn’t particularly care as long as I wasn’t a political enemy. I’m sure some gender critical people assume I was pressured to give up GC metaphysics, and while larger social pressure has been an unpleasant factor to deal with, nobody has ever tried to wield it against me in this fashion.

So how did I finally give up the metaphysics also? The first thing to understand is that I have a fair amount of philosophical training, particularly in the realm of intellectual history. It was not difficult for me to recognize that some of the underlying conflict flowed from competing ontological frameworks, that what’s at play here is a debate over nominalism applied to sexual biology, and that due to its very nature, this type of philosophical question is never going to be resolved. I became a pluralist—I decided that it was actually gender critical people who were imposing their own ideology onto larger society and that trans women did in fact have the right to consider themselves women without qualification, even if I personally didn’t accept a framework whereby this would be a true statement. This is probably just a more philosophically combative version of something that seems fairly typical of ex-GCs: you start to realize that your way of looking at things is perhaps not the only way of doing so and that you do not have all the answers. I became increasingly interested in radical feminist criticism of metaphysics, and grew more and more aware of the fact that my intuitions about “reality” could not be separated from the way patriarchal way society was structured. Where I had once seen sex as immutable, I now saw anything material as ultimately mutable, and my own difficulty with this concept as a product of existing in a society that is deeply gendered.

This shift was subtle and slow, though, and somewhat hampered by the fact that I was uncomfortable openly arguing for a position I wasn’t sure I truly believed. I’d spent so much time defending the GC view, so even after I lost interest in it, I was too afraid of being wrong about what I really thought, of simply being a TERF in denial, to actually commit to not being one. I don’t think I could have really re-radicalized, given how terrible it had ended up being the first time, but it remained an unsettling possibility until I came to better understand why it had happened at all. I don’t know if this is a “normal” part of deradicalizing or just the bad luck of having to deconstruct your own thinking when you already struggle with moral OCD. In any case, the more removed I am from TERF spaces and rhetoric, the clearer it becomes to me that the paranoia and intense fixation on anything that could possibly be considered problematic in trans discourse is not simply the product of a radical feminist consciousness—it’s a product of spending so much time consuming propaganda that you become incapable of charitable interpretation. This is not to say that I do not think there are problems, but I was highly reactionary about it when I was gender critical, and that did not disappear immediately. Perhaps it still hasn’t fully; I suppose time will tell.

It has taken me a long time to be capable of writing something like this, in large part because I’ve had to reprocess everything I thought and felt through a framework that wasn’t cissexist by design. Often it has felt like there is no point, like aligning with radical feminism more broadly means either being under permanent suspicion no matter what I say or think or being placed upon a pedestal as one of the “good” ones and then knocked off at the first hint of disagreement. I’ve also often felt like I was never truly “meant” to deradicalize, that people largely prefer to place TERFism in the realm of inexplicable character flaws, that I possessed forbidden knowledge of a sort and was more of an inconvenience for having left it behind than when I was a part of it. Sometimes it has played out like this; more often, however, this has just been the tribalism and paranoia that was cultivated in me when I first radicalized. Long before I more publicly switched sides, I used to joke that if I ever wrote an ex-GC essay, it’d likely end up being the last thing I did before deleting my account, and even while writing the original one, I felt like I was burning my bridges while standing on them. I’ve never felt like any sort of genuine ally, and I’ve often felt out of place commenting on transphobia at all, as if I don’t have the right, as if I’m advertising a moral purity I know I cannot claim. I’ve done it anyway, at least sometimes, and people have largely been very good to me, and if I have gotten better at any of this, it is because I wish to be worthy of that compassion.