Long Live TERF Island! An homage.

Keeping calm and TERFing on while the world loses its effing mind

Sometimes a little distance helps bring a subject into focus. It’s a good thing, too, because The Subject we’re engaged with is, weirdly, visible only to journalists on distant shores. We’ve all internalized this fact, but let’s not lose sight of how stunningly malevolent is our North American media’s studied blindness to the raging fire that’s been spreading under their noses for years, ever hotter and more deadly, yet still imperceptible to this special strain of bloodhounds.

If my goal is to describe the story and scope of ‘trans’ mania with any thoroughness (it is), then I’ve spent too little time thinking of England up to now. I aim to correct that imbalance today.

‘TERF Island’ is a nickname for the U.K. that was probably meant as a slur, as was ‘TERF’ [trans-exclusionary radical feminist] itself. But with their characteristic terfy swagger, British feminists embraced the name and planted a giant rhetorical TERF flag on what is now indisputably the island of sanity: England, birthplace of Keira Bell, the Cass Review, and the official halting of medical ‘gender’ experiments on kids. None of which has been deemed newsworthy to those legacy-media outlets that spell ‘honor’ without the letter ‘u’ but have little use for the word anyhow.

The people we have to thank for most of the wins we’ve seen to date are an Honour Guard of British feminists who saw through the con from the beginning and spoke up accordingly. To many readers, they are already household names. For the benefit of the rest and for the integrity of this project, I’ll list my favorites at the end of this post, noting their contributions; and I’ll add to the list as I’m reminded in the comments of those I’ve overlooked in this first draft round.

Here’s the funny thing: I just wanted to write about President Biden’s decimation of Title IX this week, but I was quickly reminded that even this entirely domestic story can hardly be researched without foreign reporting assistance. Lisa Selin Davis noticed it too:

“…the Biden team incorporated gender identity into Title IX, essentially subjugating biological sex. I polled some local ladies in my neighborhood, eager to find out what they thought. None of them knew it had happened, or what it would mean.”

How do you describe a situation that’s textbook ‘Orwellian’ without using the word ‘Orwellian’ because it’s used so widely …because situations that are textbook ‘Orwellian’ occur all the time? We won’t solve that problem today, but we can locate in-depth commentary on this major American news event by clicking on over to George Orwell’s birthplace: TERF Island.

Here’s an item that got my attention — most of it copied here in hopes that’s legal:

Transgender ideology will lose Biden the election

By Emily Jashinsky in The Telegraph, 4/26/24

Biden’s Education Department has lit a fuse under schools across the country, drawing attention to the unpopular gender issue

The culture critic Camille Paglia once said Barack Obama’s 2016 Title IX policy doomed Hillary Clinton. “There’s the election, right there,” Paglia remembered thinking.

Yet in the middle of both an election year and a cultural reckoning, Biden’s Education Department is now reaffirming the Obama-era policy that reads gender identity into the definition of sex, forcing schools around the country to comply with dangerous and unpopular policies. In some cases, the new rule will spark high-profile legal battles sure to keep the topic in the news for months to come. 

Biden’s policy says “instances where transgender students are subjected to a ‘hostile environment’ through bullying or harassment, or face unequal treatment and exclusion in programs or facilities based on their gender identity, could trigger an investigation by the [Education Department’s] Office for Civil Rights,” as the New York Times reported. 

Officials, according to the Times, “stressed that while, writ large, exclusion based on gender identity violated Title IX, the new regulations did not extend to single-sex living facilities or sports teams.” Experts on both the Left and Right note that while Biden dodged the question directly, making explicit that sex includes gender identity will be a challenge for schools seeking to protect single-sex spaces and teams. 

His administration is working on a separate rule intended to deal directly with that question, likely in an effort to dodge backlash while also mollifying transgender special interests. Those interests are rarely satisfied, though, even if the policy effectively achieves their desired outcome as it winds through the court system. 

Nothing is ever enough, as Dr. Hilary Cass learned recently. No amount of data and research will change the minds of hardcore gender ideologues. The Cass report simply found what a growing chorus of Americans suspected: [their] capacity for tolerance was preyed upon by radicals in academia, business, and media who foisted an experiment on children en masse. 

Paglia’s instincts were prescient on two levels, first that opening up Title IX protections to men would engender populist backlash and second that Joe Biden once had his finger more firmly on the pulse of American populism. Now, though, even as the media is forced to report on growing opposition,* Biden’s party is staffed by people who’ve spent the better part of the last decade insisting any discomfort with the conflation of gender identity and sex is bigotry.

That’s not easy to walk back, even for the most cynical political operators. They risked more on the gambit than they realised.

*American media may be ‘forced’ to do some incremental reporting where they used to do none, but as this article demonstrates with its quotes from the New York Times, that new, forced reporting seems lifted straight from the Administration’s press release. Most of the writer’s sharp analysis is completely anathema to the Times.

If her instincts are right, those who oppose Biden should be encouraged. The only problem: not many Americans read British newspapers. How, then, will they even know their President took a big risk on a gambit they emphatically reject?

---

There’s more to say about the assault on Title IX, but I’ll save it for next week since it’s a good fit for my liberal’s-lament series, ‘This Party Sucks.’

Which it well and truly does: and you read it here, not the Times.

---

Now for my Terf Island Fantasy All-Star Team, draft round #1:

Stephanie Davies-Arai: founder of Transgender Trend in 2015, she was one of the first to stick her neck out by challenging the creep of gender indoctrination in schools. Fittingly, in 2022 she was honored for services to children with a British Empire Medal bestowed by Queen Elizabeth.

Maya Forstater: a researcher who was fired from a think tank for tweeting that ‘transgender women’ couldn’t change sex fought back in court and won new legal protections for personal speech.

Kathleen Stock: author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. A lesbian professor of philosophy, she was relentlessly harrassed by students for her ‘anti-LGBT+ views’ (i.e., teaching of philosophy) and went undefended by her employer until she ultimately resigned from teaching altogether.

Helen Joyce: author of Trans: Where Identity Meets Reality, and eloquent defender of facts

Jo Phoenix: a professor at Open University who fought back after 368 of her colleagues signed an open letter wrongly implying that the academic network she’d organized to defend speech was ‘transphobic.’ Her win in court elevated and strengthened speech protections in the law beyond what had been recognized before.

Hannah Barnes: journalist and bestselling author of Time to Think: the Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, which hastened the GIDS closure.

JK Rowling: the most famous, globally admired woman in the world — and maybe the only famous woman in the world? — to risk her popularity and standing by speaking out forcefully and continuously on behalf of women and girls and against gender ideology.

Graham Linehan has done this too. As an American, I know him first as a defender of women, children and objective truth, but having read his book (Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy) I know he risked everything, and lost most of it, to do the right thing and preserve his integrity.

Keira Bell: the first detransitioner to bring judicial review upon the NHS, publicly challenging its practice of pediatric ‘gender-medicine’ for the first time, in 2020

Dr. Hilary Cass: the pediatrician whose systematic evidence review is hailed as definitive, comprehensive, and focused on the wellbeing of child patients. Her efforts will save unknowable numbers of children from irreversible medical harm.

Kemi Badenoch, a very young-looking Member of Parliament and Minister for Women and Equalities who’s demonstrated toughness and courage

Stella O’Malley: co-host of the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast, and the force behind Genspect, the ‘Ministry of Regular Walks’ that gets right up in WPATH’s face and challenges it as no one had done before.

Additional nominations welcome! Required: nominee must speak with TERF-Island accent of some variety.

---

Finally, your reward for reading to the end: from the ‘Queens Speech’ Podcast #88, The Kingdom of Butthurt, an apt comment on the resignation of the second SNP (Scottish National Party) Leader to be forced out within a year due to the public’s insistence that sex is real (and transactivism might be career suicide):

---

Cheerio, Luv!