In the June of this year I deleted my first Instagram account. I looked up the instructions to do so online. The last of the screenshots included in the article I used showed the final prompt I would encounter upon tapping on the 'Delete Account' button: my account would first be deactivated, and then in a month, it would be completely gone, alongside all of my saved posts and followers and chats. I could stop this at any time, the prompt read, by logging in to that account before the deadline of July 3rd. In case of second thoughts, it reassured me.
I knew then that I would encounter no such thoughts.
Accounts centre > Personal details > Account ownership and control > Deactivation or deletion > [ACCOUNT NAME] > Delete account > Continue. Are you sure? Are you sure? You'll lose everything. Your account will be gone in 30 days. I exited from the app, set down my phone, and a great and terrible weight fell off my shoulders.
Not once in those next 30 days did I think once about retrieving that account.
If you have not been living in a hole for the past decade or so, you'll have heard about TERFs (acronym; standing for 'Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist). You'll know their figurehead JK Rowling, author turned fascist sympathiser, and you'll have heard of their stranglehold on trans rights, mostly in the west. You'll have heard about their influence on the Supreme Court in the UK and the safety they took from trans women in that one fell swoop. All this in the name of 'protecting women and girls', or in some cases, 'preserving reason against the insanity of transgenderism'.
I was one of them, and I am not proud of it. There is a chance that you may have seen me on Instagram under my old account name, pointing out the supposed flaws I found within 'trans ideology', falling for conspiracy theories about the trans community's alleged power over most of the world's governments.
I do not write to seek forgiveness. People much smarter than myself, backed by years of research and experience, have already thoroughly torn this ideology to shreds. Rather, I would like to point out the slow, cult-like madness of this supposed feminist movement. The way this movement full of Nazi sympathisers, Zionists, and right-wingers erodes the compassion of the young women who become entrapped in it because they think this will somehow make them safer. The way it scapegoats minorities and drives them to snap at each other's throats. The insidious crawl of confirmation bias.
I write this as a warning, and a case study.
As many children born in the 21st century do, a large portion of my childhood was spent on the Internet. What my parents neglected to teach me I learned myself, and it was through the Internet that I first discovered the existence of LGBTQ+ people. There is a whole other story to be had here about my initial reaction of disgust and how that relates to the hatred instilled in me by the society around me, but passionate Tumblr posts about the injustice these people faced for merely daring to exist eventually inspired a fire within myself as well. This was not fair, and I was not going to accept this reality. But I was merely a child, and most of what I could do was save the posts that talked about LGBTQ+ issues, and when I got myself a Tumblr at the age of thirteen I'd start making my own posts.
This was mostly in respect to homosexual and bisexual people, however. I did not understand the 'T' part of the acronym. Some people were born in the wrong body, was the answer I got from the early 2010s Internet. I supposed I could relate, as a tomboyish girl who hated the expectations of obedience and unintelligence expected of me. Perhaps it was a stronger feeling for this people, not fitting anywhere but also having a sense for where they are 'supposed' to be. But I had a feeling that was not the case, or at least I was not getting the full picture. But they were there in the acronym alongside everyone else, why not fight for them as well?
My earliest memory of 'gender-critical' ideology comes from Pinterest.
'Gender-critical' is a bit of a misnomer. It implies a criticism of all systems of gender that oppress and keep people under tight control, but these 'feminists' only ever seemed to talk about the harms of 'transgender ideology'. That Tumblr post, taking up multiple screens as so many pins on Pinterest did, was talking about just that. I do not remember the specifics anymore. What I do remember, however, was the framing of these so-called feminists as reasonable, downtrodden, resilient people. The main narrative wanted people to accept transgenderism, and here were these brave women standing up to the misogynists trying to reduce womanhood to a pair of heels and a wig. To an extent, I agreed. Now that they mentioned it, a lot of the LGBTQ+ activists I saw did seem to conflate gender with clothes or appearance. Maybe that was why I felt so alienated; the activists I used to look up to would never consider me a 'real' girl, me with my hatred of heels and typically masculine interests. If they were wrong, then their opponents had to be right. It was black-and-white to this thirteen-year-old, and then I was on Tumblr, searching up the 'terf' tag.
One of the things TERFs prided themselves on was their ability to reason. They were the calm, critical-thinking, intellectuals next to the rabid screaming trans activists who wanted to be let in women's bathrooms at any cost. See, we're further left than these hyper-individualistic liberals! We lean fully into collectivism, and we know that transgenderism can't be good for society at large. Just look at how that movement is structured! They're a cult, why do you think they don't want you to look at our posts?
Even for someone who was almost fully in the muck that is gender-critical feminism, that accusation seemed excessive. It's a heavy word, 'cult', and TERF blogs would justify their accusations by comparing the behaviour of online trans activists to the structure of the BITE model. The person who developed that system, Steven Hassan, had my respect for his work deconstructing cults, but that respect has been lost in recent times now that I know of his opinions on transgender people. These bloggers would highlight, neatly and meticulously, the parts of the model that they believed aligned with the trans activists' most common ideas. Encouraging children to cut off queerphobic family members became 'separation of families' under the Behaviour section; the raising of awareness regarding the reality of trans people being hurt and killed for existing in a way that society at large found unacceptable became 'instilling fear' under Emotional Control; directing people to the stories and experiences of actual trans people became 'encouraging only "good or proper" thoughts' under Thought Control, so on and so forth. It fits, almost all the way, according to the gathering of TERFs on Tumblr.
Queer activists of Tumblr struck back, saying that TERFs instead were the cult. This, to the TERFs, proved that trans activism was indeed a cult, since no one who was in a cult realised they were in one. In retrospect, it speaks volumes of the lack of awareness of these faux feminists that they thought the BITE model could never apply to them.
A common thread of thought was that gender identity was the religion of transgender people. And just like every other religion, gender identity was oppressive, taking root in outdated gender roles that put men and women into neat little boxes for the purpose of total control. Like gender-critical feminists I considered myself a 'gender atheist'. Imagine the utopia we could build, said post after post on TERF Tumblr, if the categories of 'man' and 'woman' were based on the sex binary instead of the systems of gender roles and identity. Since dysphoria was certainly socially enforced, people reacting to the roles forced upon them, if we were to eliminate the expectations based on our sex then society could be saved. In this narrative transgender people were victims who integrated into the very system that oppressed them; we were the rebels, the people who would rebuild our world anew when it inevitably collapsed in this gender madness.
It did feel good, being part of such a noble cause.
It has now been five years since JK Rowling's infamous tweets that revealed to the world at large her true views, and her essay that elaborated on her ideology. TERF Tumblr immediately rallied to her cause, reassuring her in what way they could that she was on the right side of history. We'd all received our fair share of threats from the barbaric trans activists, and JK Rowling receiving the same threats only deepened the feeling of kinship between her, the public figure with massive influence over the sphere of English children's literature, and us, the unknown freedom fighters sailing against currents of a rushing river. Finally, here was someone the mainstream public knew relatively well, fighting alongside us!
I was grateful for Rowling's involvement in our (supposedly) small, weakened campaign. Her essay seemed to me sympathetic, promising that she would march alongside trans people if they were discriminated against on basis of their identity. How could anyone call this woman transphobic when all she wanted was to protect herself against the reality of male violence?
Through all the praise, all the gratitude, all the support I was ready to provide one of my favourite childhood authors, however, a single stray thought tugged at the back of my mind.
Most people know by now Rowling's unexamined biases in regards to race and ethnicity. Jokes about the stereotypical names given to the singular Black or Irish character in the series, or that disaster of defending the enslavement of house elves in the fourth book. I am myself of Chinese descent, and the fact that the only East Asian character in the books was named Cho Chang had been bothering me for a while. I felt that while I was a girl, I was also Chinese, shouldn't my race play a role in my liberation as well? Shouldn't we fight to keep our other biases out of our activism?
My attempts to discuss Rowling's subconscious racism were mostly met with indifference, and in some cases accusations of being a misogynist who hated an outspoken woman. Other women of colour that I knew were encountered the same problems, and we murmured amongst ourselves about the racism white TERFs were willing to overlook just to get a foothold. Most TERFs seemed to be white, I noticed around the same time, but I put that phenomenon down to the fact that the Internet I was accustomed to was western- and mostly American-centric.
TERFs call themselves gender abolitionists. As I mentioned before, they do wish to abolish gender, and base the categories of man and woman on one's biological sex instead of gender roles, which they accused trans activists of doing. Even in the depths of my entanglement with this ideology this seemed like something I would never see happen in my lifetime. How could one enforce this so-called abolition of gender roles, if we had to somehow supersede one's freedom to identify as whatever they wished, regardless of their birth sex? The first step to that, most seemed to agree, was the dismantling of laws that allowed self-ID: the first step to total liberation for women and girls.
We were underprivileged; powerless in contrast to the growing support for the freedom of trans people to live as their authentic selves. We were attacked at every turn, having accusations of 'transphobe' hurled our way. This was social ostracisation, and it was carried out by Big Trans. They were the privileged ones, having so much influence over governments and institutions. Never mind that being trans is a death sentence in most of the world, and even in places where they can get their official documents to reflect their chosen identity physical attacks and doxxing were still common. I looked away. I'd fight for my own rights first, rights that were being infringed on by the mere existence of trans people in public. Never mind that I had never met one in real life. I convinced myself that just like my fellow feminists, I'd freak out if there were someone with a penis in my bathrooms and changing rooms: they would be male, and males were dangerous degenerates.
But what of trans men? What of so-called females?
The victim narrative was twice as strong in regards to the existence of trans men. Among our numbers were many women who claimed to be 'ex-trans', formerly identifying as male to escape the trauma inflicted on their female bodies at a young age. I do not wish to discredit the experiences of these women, but their insistence that their situations applied to most other trans men on the planet seemed deeply infantilising even to me at that stage. People were individuals, and the only person who knew their own situation best would be themself. This part of my movement I chose to ignore, instead focusing my ire on trans women with their unflattering, obviously 'still male' selfies that got passed around in TERF circles.
I did meet one of the aforementioned detransitioners when I moved to Instagram, partially to escape the increasing harassment I was getting for my views but mostly to connect with other 'radical feminists' (radfems), as they liked to call themselves. I'll refer to this woman as B. B was one of the few radfems I knew who had experienced the pains of gender dysphoria, and thus remained sympathetic to trans people. Even then I felt that most of the people I hung out with tended to disregard the horror of never feeling at home in your own body. They'd lost the plot, I told myself, true radfems like B and myself would never let our distaste for the systems of gender identity translate into hatred of trans people.
It was one of the largest red flags at first, the fact that TERFs would sit in the comfort of their homes, ignorant to suffering that they themselves had not experienced, and spend their time calling people degenerates just for wishing to escape pain. It seems, despite their criticism of trans activists 'reducing women to stereotypes', they had no problem with painting every trans person they met online as a perverted, mentally unwell, woman-hating caricature.
I realised I might be bisexual at age fifteen. It did explain my fascination with other girls, and now that I was deep in puberty that attraction had become even more apparent. One of the first people I told was the group chat I had with several other radfems on Instagram, who told me congratulations and told me to be careful that my 'same-sex attraction' would become under threat once gender identity was recognised over sex. I believed them; how could I not? They were the only place where I felt safe anymore. Everyone else seemed to be against me no matter how much I tried to clarify my intentions. No matter; we were at the peak of a mountain, seeing further than everyone else. We would prevail.
Your average radfem Instagram account will post at least one image of a clocky trans woman, or a screenshot of a trans woman talking about her fetishes on a private Twitter account, or rarely trans boys obsessing over graphic smut of their favourite fictional characters. All this to prove one point: the accusations of sexual degeneracy hurled at us by conservatives actually only applied to one part of the acronym. They were dragging us down, these pervert transgenders, them with their fetishes and weird sexualities. We had to separate them out. LGB without the T.
I grew up in a country ruled by the iron fist of religion. I was no stranger to being called a pervert for wanting to be happy the same way a straight person did. I fell for respectability politics hook line and sinker. If we were less openly sexual, less freakish-looking, if we followed the framework of a heterosexual nuclear family the best that we could then my government would start thinking of me as a normal person. I'm not like those western degenerates on TV. I swear we're not like that. I swear we're safe to be around.
The fact that 'T' was added to the rest of the community in the nineties was a fact that TERFs drilled into themselves and their fellows. LGBs in the nineties made a mistake by accepting them, for what did they share apart from ostracisation? We were the ones who wished to live normally, and the 'T' wanted to reshape society according to their self-centred agendas. They couldn't be like us. We didn't take up space. We were well-behaved, and we could prove it. These others? These are pervert heterosexuals mutilating their bodies to grant themselves victim status. They appropriate our oppression by choosing to identify as the nebulous, all-inclusive 'queer'.
I saw out of the corner of my eye a headline on my news app, talking about a transgender woman from my country who had escaped southward to Australia. The government did not wish for her to exist here, a threat to the ideology of religion slowly constricting itself around the throat of an initially secular system.
I looked away and tried not to think about it too much.
This was around 2023, and I was discovering a very disturbing pattern. It seemed that for every radfem who was genuinely critical of the patriarchy and its systems of gender, there was another 'radfem' who would casually talk about eliminating every trans person. Clicking on their profile would tell you that this person leaned right, usually Christian, anti-gay and anti-abortion. I complained about these people to my closer circle, including B, saying that they're bringing down our image. We're leftists, and these conservative 'radfems' only agreed with us on one aspect of our liberation. How could we work with people who opposed our fundamental human rights? Some shared my outrage, but others simply shrugged it off. We have very few numbers, and we need their support, an older American woman told me. We could deal with them later once we dealt with the problem at hand.
2023 also marked the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. And then the facade broke.
After the initial outrage at October 7th, I was firmly for a free Palestine, and most importantly the right of colonised peoples to resist colonisation through whatever means necessary. For the most part, my circle agreed: some even joined me in raising awareness for the horrific situations Palestinians were facing. We'd expected pushback, but having it come from other 'radfems', who discussed gender and feminism with us, who now fell for Israel's framing of itself as a progressive feminist nation, felt like a personal betrayal.
I blocked those people, criticised them openly, and chalked it up to a few bad apples. Anti-colonisation was a core part of our feminism, of course.
I still used Pinterest religiously at this point in my life. Either Pinterest itself, or the mass reports of queer activists on the app, had purged most of the TERF accounts I followed on there. Accompanying this purge was the increase of pro-trans posts on my dash, which I usually blocked quickly without reading through. However, I was a fast reader, and my eyes would usually scan past the first paragraph or so, taking from it the main message of the post anyway.
WoLF, a major North American feminist organisation that championed gender-critical causes, were partnering with homophobic, religious right wing organisations.
There was the feeling of betrayal, then bargaining. They had no choice, they need the manpower of right-wingers in order to combat the support trans people were getting. But no matter how much I repeated that last point to myself, one anecdote rose above the raging ocean of my thoughts:
If there are ten Nazis at a table, and you go and sit with them, then there are eleven Nazis at that table.
This was the point where my faith in 'mainstream' gender-critical activism was shattered. Cowards, the lot of them, throwing me and other lesbian and bisexual radfems under the bus for their own benefit. I stopped using Instagram for a while to avoid the right-wingers that inevitably snaked their way into the comment sections of the accounts I followed. Back onto Tumblr, where most radfems still stuck to their principles, where they actually cared about LGB people.
I think, if not for my belief that my nonchalance towards my own gender identity was the best case scenario for everyone, and that gender-critical feminism was the path to achieving that, I would have left and never looked back a full year earlier.
It was around this time that I started reading more into the history of the LGBTQ+ community. Despite the claims of TERFs that kink was not part of our community, that we are simply normal everyday people, I found more and more evidence pointing to the fact that these kinksters, these degenerates fought for us as well. I shelved that thought for later, ignoring the growing sense of dissonance within the ideology that I regarded as part of my identity for so long.
As a budding writer myself, I dove headfirst into the history of art and censorship. I knew roughly how the censorship of LGBTQ+ art in my country worked, which was sinisterly similar to the Hays Code of mid-twentieth century U.S.A. There was a standard of 'artistic merit' that all art had to reach, and falling short of that line would result in that art being considered 'degenerate'. Of course, any hint of queerness in art would automatically get that work shoved in a closet. But they were just protecting children, the Code claimed, so that they won't be influenced by degeneracy.
It seemed to me that the criterion for degeneracy was extremely subjective.
If it lost a corporation money, if the government didn't like it, it was degenerate. In a way it was similar to what I had faced for my bisexuality: the metric of proper morality does not stop shifting its goalposts. We give them an inch to censor 'inappropriate' content, they'll take a mile and shove everything they dislike under the 'inappropriate' label.
No matter how well-behaved I was, as an artist and as a bisexual person, it was my existence and the fact that I was making art at all that was the problem to those in power.
Sitting on the floor of my bedroom, phone in hand, I came to this conclusion. What's with the pointless infighting over who was more or less oppressed when we needed to band together now more than ever?
And didn't this apply to trans people as well?
I had to fight down the wave of revulsion at the thought. To think that these people could even be related to in the first place...
When had I given myself over to hatred?
The realisation came with a terrible, aching guilt. I thought I'd hated the sin, not the sinner; these people were victims of gender roles just as I was. Nothing in the ideology I'd consumed explicitly encouraged hatred of them for wanting a way out. Three years, and the hint of sympathy in JK Rowling's essay I still clung to. Then why did I feel this way towards these people, whom I have never met, who had never hurt me in any way?
I don't hate trans people. Radfems don't hate trans people.
But they do.
A trans person is never a person; they are an autogynephile wanting to prey on women. They are a gay fetishiser, transitioning just to be creepy with gay men while being born female. They are a pervert, bringing down the stability of women's rights and spaces just for self-gratification. At best a confused autistic girl being manipulated by other older, predatory trans men. Never the individual.
This did not mean that TERFs had no trans friends. Like me, most others would hide their views in fandom spaces, but in our group chats they'd complain endlessly about trans headcanons, writings about the trans experience, picking apart these heartfelt stories to prove that they were indeed upholding an oppressive system.
I had trans friends in fandom spaces. I could not do that to them. Sure, they were drinking the gender Kool-Aid, but they were lovely, creative people that cheered on my writings and made art that I resonated with. And when it came down to injustice against other marginalised groups they would fight, raising thousands for Palestine, all the while having enough backbone to stand up with the Neo-Nazis trying to co-opt anti-Israel movements. These were people I liked and respected, and they cared so, so much for others.
This care I no longer felt whenever I logged on to Instagram, ready to fulfill my self-imposed quota of talking in the radfem group chat at least once a day.
I'd rather stand with these trans people, I decided, when it came to the worst. These people understood compassion in a way that my radfem friends could never.
Imane Khelif was the last straw for me.
An honest Algerian athlete, she came under fire for potentially being transgender MtF when she won too effortlessly, according to her white opponent. This woman was too masculine-looking, just look at the shape of her face! She was obviously a man, radfems all over the Internet surmised, JKR's infamous now-deleted tweet reflecting the views of the gender-critical movement.
I went to do my own research. Khelif had always been a girl, and she had been subjected to multiple tests confirming her gender. With the exception of a corrupt Russian boxing organisation, all the tests agreed that she was female, though possibly intersex. You people are being too hasty, I told the radfems I knew; you are potentially excluding a woman with a disorder in her sexual development. We all agreed that such a person was still a woman, yes?
Nobody listened. They'd point to the same Russian organisation's 'evidence' to try and prove that Khelif was born male, and she was taking away the place of a 'real woman'. But mostly they talked about her appearance. She looked like a man. No woman could look like that, with a square jaw and tall stature.
I knew women who looked like that. My aunts, my cousins, hell, even my neighbours that I regularly interacted with. What happened to you, I wondered, what happened to the gender abolitionist radfems I knew? What happened to 'reducing women to their perceived femininity'? What of their supposed support of gender non-conforming women as they continued to attack these women in bathrooms and in public spaces?
I logged off Instagram, and that was the beginning of a one-month hiatus.
'TRAs can't define a woman.' You'll hear TERFs throw this line around as some sort of gotcha, as if language itself is suited to clear-cut definitions in a world that we do not completely understand yet.
It's completely clear, they say, and you have to be delusional not to get it. A woman is someone with a vagina. What about intersex women? A woman is someone with XX chromosomes. We're excluding women with chromosomal disorders? No worries, a woman is someone who produces the large gamete. But some women are infertile, so for those women, it's those whose biology is structured to produce the large gamete, if their development were normal.
At some point, you have to wonder why you even care. Fine-tuning and cherry-picking a definition all for the sake of excluding trans people, of which there weren't even that many anyway. Why did I care if there were more women? We could do with the numbers in our fight for liberation, especially when these people suffered under misogyny in a lot of the same ways as I did for my birth sex.
There was plenty of room for more in womanhood.
End-2024, I started cutting off radfem contacts. First I left my Instagram account, where I mostly operated at that time, untouched for months before finally deleting it almost one year later. My Tumblr had been private anyway, and I could keep it as a monument to the depths of my ignorance and hate. Some subreddits dedicated to the 'trans debate' had been deleted anyway, and for that I say good riddance.
Finally, I left the Discord servers.
Most of them had been inactive for months, even years. There was one in particular that I found hard to leave; there were people there that I came to knew as friends, who'd share details of their personal lives and laugh at the stupid memes I sent. But if they continued to associate with a group that constantly contradicted what it preached, ultimately upholding the very same systems of oppression that hurt us in the first place, then I could not in good faith continue to associate with them.
For the first time in years I crawled out from the darkness of a well, and marvelled at the light that I found in solidarity with the rest of my community.
I write this in the midst of a wave of censorship carried out by payment processors, forcing online storefronts to delist NSFW games. Spearheading this censorship was an Australian 'feminist' group called Collective Shout, who celebrated the removal of those games, including narratives that talked about queer experiences and the horror of abuse, saying that they had achieved a 'huge win for women and girls'.
That set off alarm bells. How many times had I heard that mantra in the past couple years? A quick glance at the pages of Collective Shout's founders betrayed their true views regarding 'degeneracy' and transness: lo and behold, it was the same rhetoric I'd been hearing when I was stuck in the sludge of trans-exclusionary feminism. Transness was the cause, and symptom of most of society's problems. Trans people were perverts. Their art was inherently misogynistic.
Collective Shout claims to 'represent women and girls'. As someone who still identifies with the label of 'woman', I have never felt less represented.
I am a woman. I am also queer. I know what happens to art that talks about the less savoury aspects of our experiences whenever those in power are given the ability to remove that art from the public eye. I live the consequences of that censorship, people not knowing that queer people exist at best or falling for the worst, most counter-factual conspiracy theories about queer people at worst. I will never live to see queer rights take root in my country because of the removal of our most honest narratives.
TERFs on Tumblr defend Collective Shout. They think it righteous that art is censored, if they themselves are protected. When transgender journalist Ana Valens called it what it was, rightfully, TERFs dug into her Twitter and found her talking about explicit sexual fantasies, using that as proof that she was a gross pervert not worth listening to.
At this point in time, I would rather stand with the gross perverts than the fascists who pulled the same bullshit as my right-wing government.
Glory to the degenerates. Glory to perversion.
We will not be erased so quietly.