Dealing With A TERF Infestation

~ Cheryl

As some of you may know, Bristol University recently suffered an attack of TERFs. Some of those terribly persistent Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists decided to try to make trans students at the University feel unwelcome and unsafe there. This all blew up earlier in the week and I’ve been a bit busy, so I didn’t manage to do much other than tweet while it was happening. However, there were some great articles in various papers:

Nothing in The Guardian, you will notice, but equally nothing from the New Statesman about how important it is to keep The Menz, meaning trans women, out of female spaces.

Anyway, today I got caught up, and have done an article for Bristol 24/7 on the subject. You can find it here.

Thanks are due to Jamie Cross of LGBT+ Bristol, the student group responsible for the original poster campaign that the TERFs were attempting to parody. He’s dealt with the whole thing really well. Also thanks to Alice Phillips, the Students’ Union Equalities Officer, who has been right on the ball sorting this out.

Of course the TERFs are only concerned with trans women using the women’s toilets. They think we are going there with a view to raping them, rather than with a view to having a pee, which is a rather more likely explanation. The possibility of trans men using men’s toilets doesn’t occur to them, because they don’t think that such people exist. It is rather a shame that bathroom panic concentrates so much on trans women, because trans guys have a real issue with bathrooms. They are much more likely to get beaten up, or worse, if read because they are going into a very male space. If people were really worried about bathroom safety, that’s the first thing I would look at.

3 thoughts on “Dealing With A TERF Infestation”

  1. And men’s bathrooms often have urinals rather than stalls, so they’re far less “private” than women’s bathrooms. And men who choose to pee in stalls may be looked askance at. And men are statistically more likely to express discomfort with or disapproval of someone by lashing out physically than women are anyway (not saying most men are violent, but it’s more common for men to beat strangers up than it is for women to).

    I completely agree that this is far more of a problem for trans men than the reverse is likely to be for trans women.

    And good God, these women who are mislabeling themselves as feminists need to get a life, seriously. They’re entitled to their opinions (as much as I disagree with them about this), but aren’t there a thousand other women’s issues that are far more pressing?

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