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A friend from @Aces_NRW requested that I share a post from our Facebook page about TERFs, political lesbianism and their divisive tactics. I am only too happy to do so! My comments on the original post are long,but I'll share the Tumblr blogs & try to summarise my own commentary.
Okay, so, whew, that's a lot to read, and there's a lot more coming now. But I strongly urge anyone who wants to truly understand the divisions in our community, and why exclusionists believe & say as they do, to get educated on this topic. It's worth it & it will all make sense
This journey, for me, began when I realised there was a consistent block of people who held very extreme, exclusionary views, and how they'd always be very hostile towards the word queer, how people would call them TERFs and they'd get really defensive about that.
I'd seen a lot of people on Tumblr refer to how 'TERF rhetoric' had begun to infiltrate Tumblr around 2013/14, and how exclusionists were repeating a lot of this, but exclusionsts would angrily reject the comparison & I wanted to know what was up with that.
What I discovered is that, they were right. 'Queer is a slur' did begin on Tumblr ~2014. Within a few months of 'Cis is a slur' and 'TERF is a slur'. I managed to find a way to 'search tags by date' and traced the very first post tagged 'queer is a slur' to December 2013.
The first person to tag a post that way was heavily engaged in anti-ace discourse. Even more interestingly, it was someone who had previously ID'd as queer,had used it in his Tumblr name & had commented that gay was a slur once. Later he became an aphobe & suddenly 'q is a slur'
The second person to use 'queer is a slur' as a tag was someone who seemed at worst neutral about aces being LGBTQ, and had positively used queer. They later read Sheila Jeffreys book, met her, became very radfem, became an aphobe, and - again- started to parrot 'queer is a slur'
I now became obsessed with discovering the truth. I began (with some degree of discomfort) to read through historical radfem forum posts and the like. I found strong disgust and hatred for not just the trans identity, but also the queer identity.
I soon discovered Sheila Jeffrey's book "Unpacking Queer Politics," written in 2002, before Tumblr was even created, and long, long before the discourse. Long before 'queer is a slur' had started up. And boy, was I finally beginning to make sense of all this.
You see, TERF doesn't just mean 'someone who calls themselves a feminist, who has extreme views & hates transphobes'. That is the modern meaning it has taken on. But originally, it meant an adherent of 'radical feminism', a specific ideology/set of beliefs.
Radical lesbian feminism was a 1970s era form of feminism, what we call second-wave feminism today. There are a lot of inter-related ideas that are connected with it. But the main idea is that to destroy patriarchy and male domination, women must sever all ties with men.
Men were the cause of all problems. Women could not be liberated unless they cut all ties with them. Lesbian separatism preached the idea of forming lesbian-only communities, with no men - and no women who're in relationships with men and thus 'benefiting from heterosexuality'
It was around this time that the bisexual identity emerged. Until this time all 'women who loved women' were called lesbians. It was something you did. As the bisexual woman identity emerged, lesbian feminists cut their ties with them - and they went their separate ways.
Sheila Jeffreys contribution to all this was to write 'Political Lesbianism: The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism' in 1981, arguing that lesbianism was a 'political choice' that women could - and should - make, to reject men.
They viewed sexuality as a choice. You could be heterosexual (and thus dominated by men and tied to heterosexuality, which perpetuates patriarchy.) Or you could break free & be a lesbian-by rejecting men. To be a lesbian was to be 'a woman-born woman who does not f*ck men'.
Other beliefs of second-wave radfems are that sex work is inherently abusive and oppressive of women, that sex is determined by your biology and gender is fake actually. Females(=women) are oppressed by males(=men). This is where the transphobia comes in.
It also explains the biphobia, because they viewed women who had relationships with men as 'betraying' their lesbian sisters, through 'choosing heterosexuality and it's benefits' at the expense of the feminist struggle against patriarchy.
Now let's skip forward to 1990. Where we see Queer Nation and ACT UP enter the picture. Queer reclamation. Intersectional feminism. We're now entering the Third Wave of Feminism. Queer theory was to be a major part of this new feminist wave.
Third Wave Feminism represented - to radfems like Jeffreys - a direct attack upon radical lesbian feminist ideology. It linked cis women with gay men, bi ppl, and trans folk - under a common singular political identity of queer. They did not view this at all positively.
Queer theory, and queer identity, and intersectionality, meant acknowledging black women working with black men to defeat racism ('intolerable! men are the enemy!'); being kink-positive ('BDSM is abusive!'), being sex-worker positive ('sex work is evil'), trans inclusive (what!?)
Radical feminism thus rejected the Third Wave almost in it's entirety. Radical feminists have a binary-essentialist view of sex, giving us transphobia (TERFs). They reject bi women as traitors (giving us biphobia), reject sex workers (giving us SWERFs), and they hate queer too.
Now, their views didn't find much traction in the mainstream real world queer community. But they decided they could turn the tide by targeting the next generation with their ideas.... This is where Tumblr comes in.
Having largely lost the battle of ideas to queer identity & theory in the 1990s, they emerged on Tumblr in an effort to indoctrinate young queer teens, with no knowledge at all of queer history - no understanding of TERFs or what they believe or represent.
And now we come to the present. They have bombarded the youth with exclusionary rhetoric such as 'butch and femme are lesbian only terms & the bi women are appropriating it from us!' and 'queer is a slur and it erases lesbians', and a whole lot of other nonsense, 24/7
To radfems, all other identities are a threat to lesbians. The bisexuals, the queers, the trans folk, all of us, and their rhetoric feeds a narrative that pits lesbians against everyone else, and then they tell gay women how the community is out to get them.
But not every Tumblr blog or Tweet is stamped with 'radfem' or is openly transphobic. Many radfems had 'sideblogs' where they post a more moderated message. Perhaps some biphobia & queerphobia, but they keep the trans stuff on the shelf, to let the other ideas gain traction.
A lot of the aphobia is basically TERF biphobia and transphobia recycled for a new target. ('Aces are cishet invaders in our safe spaces' is lifted from 'trans women are male invaders in our safe spaces' for instance).
So that, in a nutshell, is a where a lot of the biphobia, transphobia, queerphobia, and aphobia has historically originated from. Radfems have been creating and fostering divisions for decades now, and have formed an alliance of sorts with separatist cis gay men, who will...
...parrot a lot of their rhetoric because they too feel like the focus is moving away from themselves, and they don't like that. So when people say that 'queer is a slur' is a radfem strategy & that aphobia is reheated TERF biphobic & transphobic rhetoric, this is what they mean.
