Jennifer Dowling Liles is the worst TERF of all! Stay far away from her!
History of the term
According to Tracey at The TERFs (an anti-TERF site) and Cristan Williams at The Transadvocate, the term TERF was first used in writing by Viv Smythe/tigtog of Hoyden About Town in August 2008. tigtog said in the interview with Cristan Williams that she believes that she and Lauredhel coined it some time prior as a chat shorthand.
Active trans eliminationism in mainstream feminism
For example, Janice Raymond, a TERF, was singlehandedly responsible for decades of denial of health care directed at impoverished trans people in the United States. Raymond (a women's studies professor at U/Mass Amherst) wrote a position paper in 1980 -- "Technology on the Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery" (content warning: transmisogyny) -- that strongly influenced the US federal government's decision to exclude medically necessary care for trans people from Medicaid coverage for the next three decades.
More recently, Cathy "Bug" Brennan -- an American attorney whose day job is as a partner at a law firm that primarily focuses on defending predatory lenders -- has used the Internet to coordinate a campaign to doxx and harass any trans woman who expresses feminist opinions online. She has also harassed a few trans men (including outing a minor as trans to his school administrators). Brennan, despite identifying as a lesbian, has also collaborated with right-wing fundamentalist, homophobic organizations in order to prevent trans high school students from being treated fairly.[1] Brennan's coordinated harassment campaigns against trans people share qualities with misogynists' use of 4chan and Reddit for coordinating harassment campaigns against both cis and trans women. Even though she is a hatemonger herself, the Southern Poverty Law Center, among other organizations, has lent Brennan mainstream credibility by quoting her as a putative expert on hate groups.
Further reading
- ↑ "It's Time to End the Long History of Transgender Exclusion from Feminism", Tina Vasquez writing for Bitch magazine