I have no control over how others use a word that came about simply to save typing a phrase out over and over again
Recently my colleagues discovered that I happen to have a peculiarly niche level of internet notoriety because I used to blog a lot. It was a critique of a strong strand of transphobia in British media referencing a trans-ally piece I wrote a decade ago that clued them in. Due to a short series of blogposts from 2008, I have retrospectively been credited as the coiner of the acronym “Terf” (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists). I suspect I’m merely the first person who wrote it on a website that still exists – I wonder how many Elizabethans already used words now attributed to Shakespeare long before he (or the Jacobean actors whose annotated Folio transcripts are the earliest extant versions) incorporated them in a play?
It was passionate trans women activists online whose strong advocacy of their right to exist as women in the world showed me just how dehumanising the trans-hostile rhetoric is from some radfems about them. Yet as a cis-het woman with a mainly digital activism history, I have been credited while contributions of dedicated trans inclusion advocates such as Lisa Harney to those discussions have been overlooked. The pseudonyms common back then do complicate attributions, but it’s also an ongoing problem in this feminist discussion – it’s rarely been trans women who are handed the microphone to voice their own experiences, although social media has meant they they could build their own platforms, have their concerns heard, and some at least addressed.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PawXrj
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