stop giving her credit for views she does not hold

@gaditb TERFism is a subset of radical feminism, it's in the name?

radical feminism is concerned, at the very most fundamental level, with the power men have over women, as exemplified in the marriage contract

TERFism is transphobic because it views trans women as reinstating male dominance within lesbian and otherwise women-exclusive relationships and social structures; it's a descendant of political lesbianism and separatist lifestyle feminism seeking to create womens spaces outside of the reach of the patriarchy (a patriarchy which, again, is exemplified through heterosexual marriage)

TERFs (proper) want to maintain womens spaces as exclusive for “biological women” because of some fucked-up assumptions about biology and about women. but they do so in the interest of increasing womens agency and independence. they do so out of concern regarding men appropriating or extracting value from their communities and culture, should they be allowed to participate in them. (and their distrust for trans people is mirrored in their distrust for bi people, for the same reasons of straights appropriating lesbian culture [and their distrust for ace people…])

JK Rowling is not interested in increasing womens agency or independence. she wants to keep trans women out of womens spaces because she views women as weak, vulnerable, and easily taken advantage of, and she wants to “protect” them from people with “male bodies”. this is a horribly paternalistic, unfeminist, and misogynistic view of women. it's plain old-fashioned conservatism and transphobia and i don't see a reason to give it another name

@Lady It's worth giving another name because it's a recognizeable and self-recognizing group, with its own internal culture and dynamics and its own internal patterns of action and rhetoric.

JKR is a TERF -- or whatever name you want to give that group -- because she recognizes herself as one of them and they recognize her as one of them. (And I agree about that description of her beliefs -- I think it, and variations on it, are at the heart of the shared ideology of that group as a whole. That's why I described TERFism the way I did.)

The fact that the group grew out of radical feminism is relevant historical information and still does give some information about their current behavior, but doesn't restrain their actions -- e.g. working alongside the (clearly anti-feminist and in fact misogynistic) Heritage Foundation.

@Lady We can trace the growth and usage of this particular view of the threat that trans people existing poses. It picked up the name TERF at some point, and whatever is there currently still has continuity back to that point -- not necessarily continuity of the "feminism" part, but no clear chronological like of when to break it, either. It's reasonable to want a name that is more accurate to current reality, but even if we do update the term it's still extremely useful to have SOME term for a continuous group across time, and such a term will necessarily always be lagging with respect to the completely up-to-date manifestation.

@Lady Also, given the continued and unquestioned alliances and association between people accepted by TERFs as fellow TERFs and people and organizations -- WoLF, Posie Parker, etc. (both still accepted as TERFs by their fellows) -- in direct alliance with right-wing antifeminist activism, I don't think we can reasonably use "is feminist or not" as an actual functional dividing line. That's basically all of that movement in community there.

If we try to define "TERF" as necessarily feminist, the only thing we end up with is that there are barely any TERFs and even less of a TERF movement (like, MAYBE Julie Bindel? and she's on rocky relationship with her fellows).

I can sympathize with wanting a word that, you know, is actually accurate (like if someone wanted to only call it the "gender-critical" movement, I'd get that), but I think I'm okay with words slowly losing the purely-compositional nature of their meaning over time. (Which, even "gender-critical" has.)

@Lady (... also specific to the first post, I don't think "has a husband" displaces someone from radical feminism. Like, Dworkin had a husband, and it seems ridiculous to consider no-true-scottsmanning her out.)