hi

1. Education - teaching people about the scary thing so it isn’t scary. A lot of fear is “fear of the unknown.”

2. Exposure - things like “representation in media,” Pride, and higher numbers of trans people being “out” in public increase the visibility of the trans community. This is an older-fashioned approach, a sort of “educational cartoon from the 1990s” one. It remains tremendously useful for children, or new topics.

3. Common ground - education and exposure help find common ground, which is VERY effective for reducing fear. “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re just like you,” is an example of the LGBT movement’s push for civil rights through an appeal to shared humanity. Common ground is actually one of the most effective ways of reducing hate and fear, because it shows that hate and fear are deliberate choices.

4. Celebrating difference, diversity and change - a more recent approach. “things are different - so what?” This is more resilient than things like “representation.” Rather than bothering with justifying how/why people might be different, it points out that populations are diverse, that there are material benefits in diverse populations, and material harms in pretending that populations aren’t diverse, and therefore that it is stupid to try to stop populations from being diverse. “You might be afraid of snakes, but they’re necessary for the ecosystem, so your fear isn’t relevant” is an example of this.

So that’s 4 things that are normally done to address fear-based politics.

As a direct response, in the examples of TERFs, their movement includes the following:

1. Resistance to education. As you can see in chatbot responses, TERFs simply decide that they know everything, and they don’t need to learn or engage with anything - they just repeat sentences regardless of whether they’re relevant. They also teach each other that education is unnecessary, suspicious, and only worth bothering with if you are a weak-minded queer person. Slogans and fear are sufficient replacement, and this is part of the attraction, as well as an inbuilt mechanism that prevents losing people. people won’t leave if they just refuse to hear reasons why they should leave.

2. Attacking exposure - they do this in two ways to discourage trans people and movements from becoming acceptable or powerful. The most obvious one is subjecting trans people to scrutiny, bullying, and attack, keeping them quiet and in the closet. Other targets include “pride merchandise,” etc.

3. Denying shared humanity - this is the one that I would call overtly hateful ideology, and why TERF ideology is genuinely bad for people. This is literally the foundation of evil.

4. Denying the material benefits of difference - they don’t do this as much at the moment, because they don’t have much experience with argument 4, but they’ll almost certainly just do what they do for 2. An even easier thing is to just try to get rid of operational diversity. Examples include the UK Supreme Court ruling and the US government dismantling DEI.

All of which is why I personally like to do a lot of argument 5:

5. Behave better.

You really never see a TERF behaving very well. They don’t show good judgment, good manners, or even make good jokes. They aren’t brave, polite, charming, or even conversationally complicated. Their manners are very bad, and they don’t give the impression of people who CARE about manners.

The TERF framework rarely contributes new content, novel ideas, or interesting insights. They kind of just do four things - repeat sentences, bully targets, attack policy, resist change - in the same way. Talking to one TERF is necessarily just like talking to another TERF - that’s the point, they all want to be the same kind of chatbot. (By contrast, when you talk to me, my responses might be weird or wrong or annoying, but by GOD it’s at least different. At least it’s a human generating responses based on their own experience, evidence, personality, and connections. At least I make jokes.)

They aren’t pleasant. They aren’t attractive. They don’t seem happy. They are rude and mean.

They don’t make jokes or have funny clever things to say - and when they try, they’re mean and not funny to anyone else.

A lot of the time, you don’t HAVE to do anything. You just have to provide a contrast.

Eventually, if played hard and cleverly enough, it’ll erode support for TERFs because their ideology has no way to resist. They don’t create things or interact nicely or learn stuff, therefore they have nothing to offer the instant it isn’t a bullying interaction.

It isn’t everything, but they have no defence and it’s funny