Babes in TERFland: Part 5
I spent several weeks in trans-exclusionary radical feminist online spaces. Here are my conclusion and final thoughts.
Note: This purpose of this series is to highlight the serious nature of radical feminist-aligned transphobia online, so there will inevitably be upsetting transphobic hate speech featured. If this is something that has the potential to upset you, please prioritise your mental health and scroll past, or avoid reading it entirely.
Please consider reading the first, second, third and fourth parts of this series before starting this one!
I have spent a lot of time over the past month thinking and writing about gender critical feminists. My initial reason for creating this series was to test my hypothesis — that the rhetoric I was seeing on Twitter was only the tip of the iceberg — but it’s evolved since then, and I’ve inevitably had to start wrestling with the question of how to define these groups: are they cults? How much do they have in common with the cults I’m familiar with? Or are they more like extremist hate groups? Is there a substantial difference between the two? What drives young women in particular to join these groups, and what can prompt them to leave?
And so began several days’ worth of research on cults, extremist and radical groups, cult deprogramming, and deradicalisation, in an attempt to come to some sort of conclusion about how to categorise these groups and how to combat their influence.
The use of language
“The first key element of cultish language? Creating an us-versus-them dichotomy. Totalitarian leaders can’t hope to gain or maintain power without using language to till a psychological schism between their followers and everyone else. “Father Divine said to always establish a ‘we/they’: an ‘us,’ and an enemy on the outside,” explained Laura Johnston Kohl, our Jonestown vet.
The goal is to make your people feel like they have all the answers, while the rest of the world is not just foolish, but inferior. When you convince someone that they’re above everyone else, it helps you both distance them from outsiders and also abuse them, because you can paint anything from physical assault to unpaid labor to verbal attacks as “special treatment” reserved only for them.”
I was reading Amanda Montell’s book on the language used by cults, Cultish, last week, and this paragraph jumped out at me; the establishment of an us-versus-them dichotomy, the use of language to create an other that it’s acceptable for you to view as inferior.
‘Cultish’ is the name Montell gives to the language of fanaticism used by cult leaders and their followers; people like Jim Jones, for example, but she also explores less terrifying examples like SoulCycle instructors.
Am I insinuating that gender critical feminists are totalitarian/have a totalitarian leader heading up their cult of hatred? No, but I don’t think the desire to create this dichotomy needs to only be felt and implemented by a single totalitarian leader in order to exist.
“Whether wicked or well-intentioned, language is a way to get members of a community on the same ideological page. To help them feel like they belong to something big. “Language provides a culture of shared understanding,” said Eileen Barker, a sociologist who studies new religious movements at the London School of Economics.”
If you’ll recall part one of this series, I included a glossary of terms because there were so many that were used in these spaces and almost nowhere else, it felt necessary to define them in order to assist with comprehension. Unlike in other political spaces, these aren’t terms that initially might confuse but that one can then learn from reading readily available theory; to learn what these terms mean, you have to spend a decent amount of time in these spaces.
“Though these special terms didn’t communicate anything that couldn’t be said in plain English, using them in the right way at the right time was like a key unlocking the group’s acceptance.”
Almost all of the terms commonly used by gender critical feminists are insulting terms for people that we already have words for: men, trans women, trans activists. But using them in these spaces serves as a way of proving to the others that you’re like them, ideologically speaking; you’re a fellow traveller.
Social spaces or friend groups having their own ‘language’ isn’t in and of itself cultlike - there’s a lot of language I would use as someone who spends a lot of time online that someone like my mum, for example, wouldn’t immediately understand. So while I found this book compelling in general, and slightly relevant to this series, I wanted to further explore the nature of cults to see if understanding them could help me understand TERFs.
Red flags
This book, written by cult specialist and founder of the Cult Education Institute, Rick Alan Ross, was a good introduction to the issue of ‘deprogramming’ cult members. The term itself is a highly charged one following the use of forced deprogramming on adults without their consent in the 70s and 80s, so practitioners now use terms like ‘exit counselling’, with Ross himself preferring ‘cult intervention specialist’.
In particular, his list of the ten most commonly cited behaviours that lead to suspicion about cult involvement stood out to me.
Growing obsessiveness regarding a group or leader, resulting in the exclusion of almost every practical consideration
The blurring of identities. The identity of the group, the leader, or some higher power increasingly ceases to be seen as distinct and separate. Instead identities become blurred and seemingly fused as involvement with the group continues and deepens.
Whenever critical questions arise about the group or leader, they are often dismissed and characterized as “persecution.”
Uncharacteristically stilted and seemingly programmed repetitive verbiage and mannerisms that reflect a group mind-set or cloning of preferred group language and behavior
Growing dependence on the group or leader for problem solving and solutions, coupled with a corresponding decrease in individual analysis and reflection
Hyperactivity regarding the group or leader, which seems to inhibit or supersede previously held personal goals or individual interests
A dramatic loss of spontaneity and sense of humour
Increasing lack of communication and isolation from family and old friends unless they demonstrate an interest in the group or leader
Anything the group or leader says or does can be justified or rationalized, no matter how harsh or harmful it may appear.
Former group members are typically considered in a critical or negative light, and they are most often avoided. There seems to be no legitimate reason to leave the group. Those who leave are always wrong.
A lot of these — obsessiveness, the dismissal of critical questions, growing dependence on the group, lack of communication and isolation from family and old friends unless they share an interest in the group, rationalising anything group members or the leader say, former group members being viewed in a negative light — seemed to describe the way many gender critical feminists behave in these closed online spaces.
I saw (and have written about) several examples of people expressing confusion and concern over how to deal with friends who didn’t share their beliefs, and posts from people expressing the desire to try and ‘peak’ their friends into sharing their beliefs about trans activists and trans people.
The dismissal of criticism as persecution was another one; one just has to read the replies to any mildly critical tweet of JK Rowling to see how pervasive the idea is in gender critical circles.
Another warning sign Ross wrote about was that “the group promotes unreasonable fears about the outside world.” The gender critical obsession with trans women assaulting other women in changing rooms, bathrooms, and women’s prisons immediately came to mind; these fears aren’t based on statistical evidence or even anecdotal evidence most of the time; they’re based almost entirely on rhetoric and a select few examples; despite the impression they give, there is no epidemic of trans women committing violence against cis women and children, particularly in public spaces — cis men remain the single biggest threat to cis and trans women, children, and even other men.
In Cultish, Montell interviewed Steven Hassan, a mental health counsellor, cult expert, and author of The Cult of Trump, who said of groups that “tend toward the destructive” that they use three kinds of deception: omission of what you need to know, distortion to make whatever they’re saying more acceptable, and outright lies. I observed all three of these kinds of deception in online gender critical spaces; omission of anything that would make trans people seem like fully-rounded human beings rather than just terrifying spectres, distortion of statistics and information to make trans people seem like a bigger threat than they are, and outright lies about what the intent behind the majority of trans people’s activism is (hint: it’s not to eradicate lesbians or cis women or takeover women’s sports).
Totalist organisations
Another book I looked at was Terror, Love and Brainwashing by academic and former cult member Alexandra Stein. She makes use of the term ‘totalist organisation’ to describe cults, describing them as:
“The way a total eclipse utterly covers the light, so do totalist organizations attempt to block out any alternate relationships or beliefs, locking daylight out of the picture. The word “totalist” gives an appropriately oppressive sense, the suffix “-ist” conveying the active role required in creating this total environment, thus flagging the actions of the leader and the organization as the agent of their wishes. The suffix “-ism” denotes “a belief in or practice of,” and so “totalism” is the practice of a total worldview or a total ideology.”
Differentiating between members of totalist groups and others, she writes:
“Their belief system only forms a part of their life and their views. Their adherence to their perhaps odd belief or their faith and place of worship has an entirely different impact on their life than that experience by someone whose whole existence becomes bound up within one organization. The total ideology, the absolute belief system – whether religious, political, commercial or of any other type – is the reflection of the underlying totalist social structure.”
For me, it doesn’t feel like a particularly long bow to draw to say that someone who is a member of dedicated gender critical online spaces because other online spaces were too hostile to their beliefs has perhaps allowed their existence to become bound up within one organisation/ideology.
“The structure of such a belief system is total: closed and exclusive, allowing no other beliefs, no other truths, no other affiliations and no other interpretations, proposing to be true for all time and under all conditions.”
“Allowing no other beliefs, no other truths, no other affiliations and no other interpretations” made me think of all the surveys I had to complete to prove my beliefs aligned with those in the gender critical Discord servers, because heaven forbid one interact with someone who has a different opinion than you on how dysphoria in young people should be managed.
Relationship with the alt-right
A back-and-forth published by the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right on whether we should be worried about white men or not got me thinking: why just men?
We know that white women perpetuate and enforce white supremacy, including white supremacist ideas about gender. There are countless examples throughout history (one that immediately comes to mind is the role of white women as slave owners in the American South as detailed by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers in They Were Her Property), and after spending so much time observing radical feminist spaces, I came away with a strong impression of TERFs continuing to rely on traditional ideas of womanhood and femininity in order to demonise trans women and occasionally, even other cis women who disagree with them. For example, one of the Discord users I wrote about last week called me a ‘moid’ (their term for men, which they also use for trans women), as though my being critical of them somehow strips me of my womanhood.
A more common example of this is the way TERFs talk about trans women being ‘obviously male’ by virtue of their broad shoulders or large feet. As a cis woman with both of those things, this kind of rhetoric has the potential to amplify existing feelings of alienation, as well as existing feelings of one’s failure at being a woman (fortunately for me, I stopped caring about what strangers thought of my appearance a long time ago).
TERFs inevitably uphold and appeal to conservative ideas of womanhood that wouldn’t be out of place at the Republican National Convention. Similarly, their rhetoric about needing to protect ‘women and girls’ from trans people and men has echoes of the white supremacist rhetoric around protecting white women from men of colour, particularly Black men.
Their focus on crimes committed by trans women, and their invocation of these as proof trans women aren’t women, because women don’t commit violent crimes, as well as their failure to acknowledge when women do commit violent crimes, enforce white supremacist ideas of (white) women being the weaker and more fragile sex in need of protection. Even their arguments around excluding trans women from women’s sports that rely upon the assumption that women are inherently physically inferior to men play into this idea.
Furthermore, rhetoric around the extinction of lesbians as a result of trans men ‘identifying out’ of lesbianism, or as a result of trans women coercing lesbians to have sex with them, thereby making them no longer lesbians because they have touched a penis, mirrors rhetoric around the extinction of white people as a result of Jewish conspiracies, immigration, mixed race marriages, etc. Both of these play into people’s fears about becoming minorities and inevitably being treated the way they currently treat minorities themselves.
The anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric I observed on Discord, as well as seeing radfems on TikTok celebrate machinations by Republicans to prevent trans people from using the bathroom or trans teenagers from accessing medical care, only confirmed for me the existence of links between gender critical feminism and the alt-right.
These links were actually a point of frustration for the creator of RadLeft Unity, the explicitly left-wing radical feminist Discord server I joined. In her server, Caso wrote:
“I think one of the avenues the right is poaching gender critical feminists is going through the woke propaganda route they do for centrists. After feminists peak, they become disillusioned with the mainstream TRA left, conservatives give them a word ‘woke’ and associate it with stereotypes of annoying middle class liberals and their annoying detached way of doing leftism. They mix in some truths with some bullshit.”
Caso actually messaged me after last week’s post blew up in the radfem Discord servers, and I asked her about the links between gender critical feminism and the right, and whether those links concerned her as a leftist. On right-wing radical feminists, she said, “Usually then right leaning ones co-opt the term and read no theory or have interest in feminism, they use it as a smokescreen because they want to pretend their trans critical views are intellectually founded.”
She continued, echoing the sentiments she expressed on the server:
“The term gender critical has been co opted by conservatives and centrists who are not politically aligned the reason for this is because radical feminism is less mainstream and often rejected from mainstream discourse for not being pro gender or liberal friendly, they seek allies and platforming.
And a lot of gender critical organisers are of the philosophy that the ends justify the means, if they can get exposure they'll ally with fox news or that conservative network. It's really an act of desperation. So for exposure, they sacrifice the group’s purity.
The logic around it is that conservatives, at least on a superficial level agree on some things radfems do even if it's not for the same reason (ie: anti liberalism, anti prostitution, anti gender ideology). So they're willing to work with an enemy to to take down another. Problem is that conservatives are more organised and influential than radfems so they get more out of the deal.”
This piece by Jude Ellison S. Doyle does a good job of explaining how the far-right is turning feminists into fascists; in it, Doyle argues that the American right is using TERFs to further their agendas. Even in Australia, Liberal Senator Claire Chandler has been celebrated by TERFs for her stance against trans women in women’s sport, despite the Liberal Party being the furthest thing possible from feminist.
Doyle cites a 2020 article from Radix Journal, a far-right publication founded by Richard Spencer (The Man Who Got Punched), which outlines a strategy for attracting TERFs to the alt-right, titled “The TERF to Dissident Right Pipeline”. The author notes that their insistence on biological sex as an immutable binary, in which all “men” depraved and violent, all “women” fragile victims, “may make it easier to convince them of other biological hierarchies. Their insistence on seeing trans women as “violent men,” in particular, can be weaponized against men of colour and turned into overt white supremacy.”
According to the author, “It doesn’t take any thinking woman long to see exactly which men are committing violent crime and the majority of partner violence, and race realism is a natural next step.”
Doyle also examines the work of Jennifer Bilek, a well-known TERF who, according to her LinkedIn, is an “Investigative Journalist covering the gender identity industry, portrait painter and owner of premium haircut house-call business serving the Manhattan and Daytona Beach Florida areas.”
Bilek is known for her use of antisemitic tropes and language to further her transphobic agenda; she has argued that rich white men, many of whom are Jewish, are “institutionalizing transgender ideology”, whatever that means. Yes, George Soros was on the list. He’s a busy guy!
In blog posts, Bilek builds on this conspiracy, claiming Martine Rothblatt and Jennifer Pritzker (two rich trans women who are also Jewish) are behind a “transhumanist” movement that:
“…has infiltrated the gay community and taken over the “medical industrial complex,” creating a predatory gender industry that convinces cis people they need to transition, with the ultimate goal of normalizing “body dissociation” and extreme body modifications, putting Google chips in our heads and (I swear to God) enslaving the human race by merging man with machine.”
Doyle spoke to Talia Lavin, hate researcher and author of Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy (which is a very good book, btw). Lavin outlines the historical connection between Nazi conspiracy theories and trans people, explaining, “One thing that it’s crucial to understand about the far right, the extreme right, the Nazi guys, is the way that they obsessively see absolutely fucking everything as a Jewish plot. And the existence of trans people is a huge one.”
“Lavin cites the 1933 burning of Magnus Hirschfeld’s archives: Hirschfeld, a German Jewish doctor, was a groundbreaking and remarkably sympathetic researcher of transgender identity; his was the first clinic in the world to provide gender-affirming surgery. Then the Nazis burned his work, leaving a hole in history. To trans people, this looks like proof of erasure. But to a Nazi, Lavin says, it means something different: the presence of a Jewish doctor indicates that “[the] existence of trans people was invented by people like Hirschfeld in order to undermine white masculinity and destroy the white family.””
Ultimately, Doyle concludes,
“The longer I look at this, the more I concur with gender theorist Judith Butler that trans people might not be the point of anti-trans fascism at all; we are simply the most popular means by which fascists “concoct a world of multiple imminent threats to make the case for authoritarian rule and censorship.””
Whether or not they’re the point of it, trans people are obviously feeling the repercussions of it, and time and time again, gender critical feminists can be found celebrating that fact.
So… are TERFs part of a cult or not?
A Google search for TERFs and cults led me to the Blood and TERF podcast, a podcast about the “ideology of TERFs and fascism, cults, pseudoscience, and other reactionary political phenomena”, and the hosts were kind enough to humour my 101-level questions about TERFs and cults.
I asked if my description of gender critical feminist groups as hate groups with cult-like attributes (at this point, I was hesitant to use the ‘cult’ label without qualifiers) aligned with their view, and they said yes, with one caveat:
“It depends on *which bit of the movement you mean* when one makes the link to cultic behaviour. Some bits are much worse than others in short. There's certainly broad trends but it's not homogenous: some political transphobes are fully delusional in their beliefs, and in-group toxic as a full devotee of the Qanon cult or similar, whilst others are more akin to a UKIP voting casual racist circa 2014.
I would say that the "true" terf contingent tend to trend more in the direction of being a coherent cultic grouping than other bots of the transphobic movement, and are also one of the more conspiracy theory minded bits of the wider movement, but not the *most* conspiracy theory minded bit: I would say the most tinfoil hatted bit is the full blown blood-purity fascists and the committed antivaxxer and Qanon crossover bits rather than the classic radfems, but as ever, the line blurs quite a lot.”
Around the same time, a kind soul linked me to Caelan Conrad’s series called Inside A Cult: Gender Critical. It’s an incredibly comprehensive three-part YouTube series based on months of research they conducted while undercover in several gender critical Facebook groups aimed at parents.
When I first spoke to Conrad, I wasn’t convinced that ‘cult’ was the right label - I kept getting hung up on the lack of a defined and charismatic leader, someone like Jim Jones who could issue instructions to group members as they saw fit.
For Conrad, the parent groups served to convince them that gender critical people were part of a cult. They told me, “The coerced isolation of them from everyone who disagreed, the sheer terror of everyone outside the group, the indoctrination of their children, cutting off access to non group information…”
This belief is reflected in their series, and as it goes on, it becomes more and more obvious why they came to that conclusion.
For example, Conrad observed of the parents in these groups that, “as long as what they were reading confirmed their beliefs, it went undisputed nearly 100% of the time”. I found this to be the case in the spaces I observed as well; rarely did people ask for additional sources or information before reacting to deliberately provocative statements or posts.
One of the most compelling arguments Conrad makes in their video can be found about half an hour in:
“In the past, people expected personal access to cult leaders, which by necessity limited the size of most cults… Social media, however, has given the layperson with an internet connection previously impossible access: the ability to reach out across the world and share their message, their teachings, and gain true notoriety from it. And in the modern age of parasocial attachment, stans and politics, communities frequently form around their idols rather than being formed by their idols. A world where idols have immeasurable influence and absolutely no accountability for the actions of their followers.”
I have absolutely seen stans engage in cultlike behaviour without needing to be instructed or led by the celebrities they worship, so it didn’t feel like a leap to suggest that gender critical feminists be doing the same thing.
Recruitment through fear
Conrad also highlighted the recruitment tactics used by parents in these groups, and how they mirrored those used by cults: they relied on fear and preyed on people’s concerns in order to draw them in.
Members of these groups paint trans adults as predators and trans youth as mentally ill and coerced into identifying as trans; Conrad explains how both techniques are intended to elicit feelings of fear and disgust.
In her book, Stein argues that totalist groups form relationships rooted in the creation of trauma, writing:
“This is a relationship that is rooted in the creation of, and experience of, trauma. A helpful way to understand this relationship is by using attachment theory and trauma theory. Attachment researchers who study both child and adult relationships call this type of relationship one of “disorganized attachment.”
Similarly, Ross writes:
“Former cult members I have spoken with frequently recount a particularly vulnerable time in their lives when someone first approached and recruited them. It may have been a coworker, a family member, or an old friend; it was someone they trusted. In that moment they didn’t recognize what was happening, and they were in distress. What they initially felt was a sense of relief; that is, they had found someone to address their needs.”
In the case of gender critical parenting groups, parents are already feeling vulnerable and stressed, potentially after their child has come out to them and trans, and this enables TERFs to step in and attempt to ‘address their needs’ by explaining how it’s not their fault their child is trans, society is brainwashing children, Big Pharma is trying to make money by selling hormones to teens, the LGBTs are conspiring against normal families, etc.
In the case of younger gender critical feminists in spaces like TikTok and Discord, many of them have dealt with feelings of gender dysphoria or have dealt with misogyny or homophobia, and ended up finding gender critical spaces that appeared to be supportive of their concerns and fears. Others have felt alienated or disgusted by mainstream feminism and turned to alternatives to address their concerns around issues like male violence or homophobia or women’s rights, only to find gender critical feminists waiting in the wings.
These negative feelings of fear, disgust and alienation are only heightened once they’ve joined these groups, to the point that members become convinced of conspiracies to invade bathrooms, eradicate lesbians or turn every teenager trans. Ross writes of the “us vs them” mindset present in cults that, “This mind-set can produce seemingly arrogant feelings of superiority or spiritual elitism along with unreasonable fears, which often include exaggerated fears about “persecution” or annihilation or both.” Groups like the UK’s LGB Alliance exist almost entirely because of feelings of persecution felt by gender critical lesbian, gay and bisexual people at the hands of larger organisations like Stonewall.
Of the conspiracy theories often peddled by cults, former cult member turned deprogrammer Diane Benscoter told NPR:
It establishes this camaraderie and this feeling of righteousness and this cause for your life, and that feels very invigorating and almost addictive. You feel like you are fighting the battle for goodness, and all of a sudden, you feel like you are the hero.
Online echo chambers
According to former cult member Daniella Mestyanek Young, in traditional (read: offline) cults, “the walls keep the world out, keep you in because isolation is such a big part of programming. Now we have isolation on the internet. “A.I. is the new commune wall. It keeps you in with your like-minded people.”
For our purposes, we can see this AI at work in the case of the TikTok algorithm, but other virtual commune walls exist too: application forms to join servers, Ovarit requiring an invite code to join, or Spinster manually approving every member request. Applications serve as a way to vet potential members and filter out ones who don’t agree with server leaders ideologically; invite codes ensure that only those who already know existing members can join.
People often joke about social media platforms like Twitter serving as echo chambers, but comparatively speaking, Twitter is an open forum: if you have a public account, anyone can see your tweets and reply to you. Closed spaces with these commune walls do not have that same capability; they are only open to those in ideological agreement with the gatekeepers.
Part of Conrad’s conclusion about the closed spaces of gender critical parenting Facebook groups is that:
“This is why echo chambers are dangerous; not just because they don’t hear other people’s opinions from the source, but because the constant propaganda reinforces bias so strongly that cult opinion becomes common sense, which allows every belief outside of cult opinion to be entirely disregarded.”
In these online spaces, much like in traditional cult settings, information that does not agree with the prevailing orthodoxy is downvoted or dismissed, while information that confirms their existing beliefs is circulated widely.
Is that a yes?
Ultimately, my conclusion is that my initial description was an accurate one; these groups can most accurately be described as hate groups with cult-like attributes. Having said that, I’m not convinced that assigning a label is the most important thing here.
I asked Lauren for her thoughts, and had some useful insights as someone with experience in these spaces. Like Conrad, she references the recruitment tactics of gender critical feminists, and the way they operate online in a similar fashion to stans:
“I wouldn't describe it as a cult because there is no central object or figure that these people are concerned with. Although JK Rowling is very much celebrated by UK GCs, this only started recently; the ideology existed long before. The term I use to describe GC/TERFism is "hate group", which I think is more accurate. It highlights the hatred that is central to their politics; everything they believe comes back to hating, or at least maintaining willful ignorance towards, trans women.
I would definitely say GC/TERFism uses "cult-like" tactics, though. Online circles prep you for backlash against your beliefs by creating bonds and friendships mean to substitute those you will lose with non-TERF friends who don't want to tolerate your hate. This happened to me - once my online friends found out I was "trans critical", they dumped me. TERFism made me feel better because it told me that these people were just ignorant, unwilling to face "the truth" that is "trans ideology". On a related note, GC/TERFism also encourages members to recruit others via "peaking" and "going crypto", which I'm sure you've heard of.
And finally, GC/TERFism operates online much like a fandom or clique. This way, members of the ideology have stronger ties to the group and an incentive to maintain their views/ignore opposing views. Keeping those friendships/bonds with other TERFs encourages members to stay in the group.”
Instead of getting bogged down in labels, I think that focusing on how best to combat the influence of these groups, as well as potentially assisting members who want to leave them, is a better approach. Whether they are cults in the traditional sense or not, they evidently have cult-like characteristics, and so I still believe that studying how deprogrammers and counsellors have worked with former cult members could serve as a guide for those looking to help someone out of gender critical feminism.
Deprogramming and deradicalisation
Naturally, Ross’ book proved useful once more. He cites authors Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, who wrote Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change in 1978 about religious conversion. In Snapping, they described the deprogramming process as:
“… a genuinely broadening, expanding personal change, it would seem to bear closer resemblance to a true moment of enlightenment, to the natural process of personal growth and newfound awareness and understanding, than to the narrowing changes brought about by cult rituals and artificially induced group ordeals.”
Ross also cited psychologist Margaret Singer, who has interviewed many former cult members and observed cult intervention work since its inception. To her, deprogramming means “providing members with information about the cult and showing them how their own decision-making power had been taken away from them.”
As for Ross himself, he described the ‘essential building blocks’ of deprogramming as:
Learning about the inherent dynamics and authoritarian structure of destructive cults
Reviewing the systematic persuasion, influence, and control techniques evident in such groups
Sharing historical information about the particular group or leader
Understanding the family concerns that led to the intervention.
While this background information on deprogramming is useful, I was more convinced by the argument made in this piece that for deprogramming to stick, it has to primarily be self-directed. In that sense, I was reminded of Lauren, who has been very open about the two years she spent as a TERF.
Speaking about what led to her abandoning gender critical feminism, Lauren explained that the suicide of a young trans girl whose final note went viral on Tumblr served as a wake up call. I wasn’t on Tumblr that often by that time (late 2014), but I remember the post, as I’m sure many of you do — her name was Leelah Alcorn, and she was 17 at the time of her death, the same age as many of the young radical feminists found on Tumblr, TikTok, Twitter, and Discord.
While the majority of site users were mourning the preventable death of a trans girl their own age, users in Lauren’s radical feminist circles complained about the amount of attention she was receiving, arguing that as a “male oppressor, she didn’t deserve to be mourned”.
These comments caused Lauren, who was around Leelah’s age at the time, to realise she was part of a hate group, and to begin looking for alternatives, initially looking for trans inclusive radical feminism and when that failed, learning more about marxist feminism.
I also found this Reddit post from someone who used to be a TERF, and their openness about what led to them realising they were part of a hate group was illuminating.
The user wrote about what led to them changing their mind that:
“I just started noticing how bitter everyone was and I started noticing similarities to the way the Islamic community was stereotyped in 9/11. I was in the Army for six years and when I joined I was pretty anti-Islam myself, but in service I fought alongside many Muslim soldiers and realized what the people back home had to say about them was so backwards.
When I got back from deployment I started correcting anti-Islam sentiment everywhere I saw it. It took me personally befriending someone on the other side to get past my narrow prejudices.
Same with my experience as a TERF. Every trans person I know in real life is nothing like the picture TERFS paint them as. My niece came out as trans a few years ago (mtf) and I asked her about a month ago if she was certain that she wasn’t just a gay man since it would be easier on her to be that. She said that she has pretended to be something she’s not her whole life and she doesn’t have the strength to do that anymore. She said she doesn’t want what is easy she wants what is true to herself. That really started my journey into self reflection.”
She explained that as someone who had experienced male violence, the emphasis in radical feminist spaces on addressing that appealed to her. She eventually realised, however, that the focus on trans people did not reflect her reality, writing, “As a terf my biggest concern was sexual assault, because terf communities paint MTF Trans people as predators. You know what is funny though is every single person who ever abused me was a straight cis male, not trans. So why be afraid of a community that has never victimized me once? It’s thought exercises like this that helped me exit the dark.”
Christian Picciolini, a former Neo Nazi and founder of the group Life After Hate, had a similar experience. While beating up a young Black man, he locked eyes with his victim, and felt a surprising empathy. This served as a turning point that caused him to leave the Neo Nazi movement and found the group, through which he’s now helped over 100 people disengage from the Neo Nazi movement.
That isn’t to say that everyone should just sit around and wait for someone to come to their senses (particularly while inflicting violence on another person), however. A Nantes University study found that 58 percent of former cult members reported some social intervention (a conversation with a friend or loved one) that helped set them on the path to leaving.
The Inverse article I referred to previously contains useful advice for how to approach these conversations.
“It’s more productive to soft-pedal your concerns and take an open, exploratory stance. “The single most powerful technique is asking a question,” Hassan says. Some great questions to ask include: Where was the person in life when they first heard about the group? Did they always think the leader was supreme, or were they initially skeptical?
Social encounters with people who've left cults can be equally transformative since they show wavering cult devotees that it’s possible to lead a productive, moral life after leaving the group. A day or a weekend outside the bubble — say, a camping trip to somewhere that has no cell or Internet access — can also help people get back in touch with aspects of their pre-cult selves.”
Lauren herself also believes that deradicalisation needs to be performed by friends and loved ones — in her words, you’re “not going to convince a TERF to change their mind if they’re a stranger on the internet”. Similarly with holding people accountable for causing harm, it’s most effective when done by people the person has an existing relationship with, and presumably some degree of respect for.
The University of Cambridge’s Women’s Campaign has published some useful advice specifically on how to deal with TERFs:
“Because of the veiled nature of terf ideology, well-intentioned feminists can be tricked into buying into terf arguments. If you notice terf beliefs arising among people in your communities, try and help them understand the contradictions inherent in these beliefs and the harm that they do (and forward them our reading list!).
Terf ideology can be defeated in a fair debate - but committed terfs don’t fight fair. Very often (especially online) the best thing to do is disengage. Explain to your aunt why trans women should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms, but don’t debate SuperRadFemXX on Twitter about the colonial nature of the sex binary - save that energy and put it towards building stronger positive, trans-inclusive feminist and activist communities.”
For Picciolini, founder of Life After Hate, “what it came down to was receiving compassion from the people that I least deserved it [from], when I least deserved it.”
“In fact, I had never in my life engaged in a meaningful dialogue with the people that I thought I hated, and it was these folks who showed me empathy when I least deserved it, and they were the ones that I least deserved it from. I started to recognize that I had more in common with them than the people I had surrounded myself for eight years with — that these people, that I thought I hated, took it upon themselves to see something inside of me that I didn't even see myself, and it was because of that connection that I was able to humanize them and that destroyed the demonization and the prejudice that was happening inside of me.”
Similarly, Lauren had had minimal exposure to trans people before becoming a TERF.
The former TERF who posted on Reddit was asked for her thoughts on how to help people come back from gender critical ideology, and she wrote:
“This is actually really important. When ever you go to a suffering minority and ask to hear their side (at least on Twitter, and a few instances in this thread) you get hostility. “It’s not our job to educate you.” “You need to do your own research.” “You are asking for emotional labor”.
BUT when you go to the OTHER side people will happily tell you all the things they think are wrong and give detailed anecdotes and share articles, everything.
For example, if I go to Ovarit (which is a TERF Reddit copycat) and say “Tell me why you think transgenderism is a fetish”, I will get hundreds of replies and people will offer up all the “education” one could ask for.
If I go on here and ask the same question it’s likely I’ll get a few genuinely helpful answers but also be met with a great deal of hostility and be told it’s not their job to educate me.
I’m not victim blaming, I understand where that hostility comes from. But it does create a sort of imbalance in the information and (needed) friendships required for growth. So you end up in an echo chamber because naturally you want to be around the people nicer to you. That’s just human.”
She concludes:
“I think two things need to happen to change minds. People like me need to speak up in TERF spaces and explain why we changed. And trans people need to be more welcoming to those who are questioning trans identity. Is that fair to trans people? Fuck no. But it has to be done. The quickest and easiest way to change someone’s heart is through friendship. It’s not right, but I do believe it is necessary.”
This echoes the tactics used by all of the deradicalisation groups I looked at, including Life After Hate and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which has a program that focuses on using peer-to-peer messaging to engage potential recruits of radical groups in conversation in an attempt to dissuade them.
What to do
In my opinion, deradicalisation of gender critical feminists should borrow techniques used by deradicalisation and deprogramming experts, and rely on the insights of former TERFs like Lauren and Ky Schevers, who inevitably have unique insights into these spaces, as well as trans people themselves.
I think the bulk of this work should be done by allies and former TERFs, although if trans people feel up to it they should feel free to do so. Considering this is a largely cis-created problem, however, it feels like work that should be done by other cis people — plus, the unfortunate reality is that TERFs are less likely to engage in genuine conversations with trans people.
“It’s not my job to educate you” is an incredibly common refrain in online political spaces, and I think this pessimistic attitude is one that needs to be abandoned. Dismissing people who are genuinely seeking more information (as opposed to sealioning), in addition to being unnecessarily combative and hostile, will lead them to friendlier sources like radical feminists, as described by the former TERF on Reddit. Of course gender critical feminists are friendlier to those asking questions — they are actively trying to recruit. Instead of dismissing people, have resources ready, open your DMs, and be willing to listen and field questions.
Allies should try to engage with TERFs — ones they know in real life, not strangers online, but people they have an existing and genuine connection with — but if the person shuts down, don’t push. Instead, continue doing your own thing on social media (posting things in support of trans people, for example) and wait for them to approach you with concerns or doubts; keep lines of communication or the option for reconciliation open; show them what life outside these groups is like, what activism can be like, that feminism doesn’t have to be based in fear, and that womanhood doesn’t have to be solely defined by misery and oppression.
Many people are drawn to radical feminism because of fear — particularly a fear of men and of male violence that they extend to a fear of trans people, particularly trans women. Discussions with radical feminists should seek to allay these fears; highlight how violence against women is being dealt with in your community, or highlight how few trans women are proponents of violence, but are instead victims of it.
In addition, preemptive strategies are also needed, such as improved visibility of alternatives to liberal feminism — those with platforms highlighting leftist feminist voices and discussing material critiques of the patriarchy that don’t devolve into transphobia is one technique, as demonstrated by Lauren’s own videos.
It’s messy, unpleasant, and time-consuming work, and I’m not saying you should do this for every gender critical person on your friends list. But for people you genuinely care about, people you think have a chance to abandon the hateful ideology they’ve adopted? I think it can be worth it. Particularly for young women who are (hopefully) less set in their views and more likely to grow and mature with time, I think that these techniques can prove beneficial.
I realise that to some, these suggestions might be unpopular; please understand that I’m coming at this from an abolitionist perspective, so I don’t believe in locking people up and throwing away the key, either literally or figuratively. I’m aware that this is at odds with prevailing orthodoxy around how to deal with those who have committed crimes or serious harms, but I’m not at all convinced that our current approach to dealing with harm caused is doing anything to prevent future harm or assist those who’ve been hurt. For more on this topic, I recommend reading about transformative justice.
Fin
And that’s the end of the series. Thank you immensely to everyone who read it and shared it, and particularly those who chatted with me or provided resources or feedback. While this series is done, I expect this won’t be the last thing I’ll write about gender critical online spaces, so please subscribe if that’s something that interests you.
As always, if the content in this post has left you feeling outraged, consider donating to a trans person’s GoFundMe, or to an organisation that advocates for trans people in your area.