Babes in TERFland: Part 2
I spent several weeks in trans-exclusionary radical feminist online spaces. Here's what I learned. This week: Giggle, 4W and Spinster
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.
If you haven’t read the first post in this series, consider reading it before diving into this one!
This week I’ll be looking at Giggle and 4W/Spinster. Giggle is a women’s-only app created by Australian Sall Grover in 2019. 4W is a publication founded by American MK Fain in 2019, and Spinster is the Twitter alternative also founded by Fain in 2019 (no, I don’t know what was in the water in 2019, but if anyone has any ideas, please comment below).
Giggle
The ‘girls only’ app, Giggle, was launched by Sall Grover in 2019, and made headlines in 2020 because of its strange verification process: you’re required to submit a selfie so that the app can determine that you’re female and thus allowed to use it. (ETA: There was also a bit of drama later in 2020 when it was discovered that Giggle had been accidentally revealing user’s phone numbers, photos and locations.)
All submitted selfies are sent to Kairos, which, according to Giggle, is “a leading face recognition AI company with an ethical approach to verification, that reflects our globally diverse communities. Through computer vision and deep learning, they recognise females in videos, photos, and the real world.” In less than a second, the image is analysed, and the AI has determined whether you’re male or female.
Interestingly, their website used to state, “Due to the gender-verification software that giggle uses, trans-girls will experience trouble with being verified”, where it now doesn’t mention trans women at all (meanwhile, Grover’s Twitter feed features many tweets about “men who claim to be women”). Also interestingly, the founder of Kairos, Brian Brackeen, describes himself as an “AI bias expert”, despite his software being used to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender.
All of that aside, let’s look at the app itself. The first thing you notice about it is how visually unappealing it is, and how user friendly it isn’t. The app has multiple sections, including ‘Giggle Talk’ where anyone can post to a universal feed, and a networking space which is kind of like Tinder or Bumble BFF, where you can swipe left or right on people and create groups of up to 6 people to have private conversations with.
There are ads at the top of the landing page that take up half the visible space, and you’re required to create new profiles for every topic you want to meet likeminded members to discuss, both of which add to the user unfriendliness.
Based on my time on the app, both swiping and monitoring the Giggle Talk feed, the user base skews slightly older than TikTok and Discord, with many members appearing to be in their 20s and older, with some edging into Mumsnet’s age range at 50 and up. This might be because the app requires you to be 16 to use it, but I also suspect that younger, more tech savvy people are less likely to use such a clunky app, as well as an entirely separate app, just to discuss radical feminism.
Grover herself posts to the Giggle Talk feed fairly often, but she isn’t the only one; another user, who goes by the name MardiShakti, posts on there several times a day, seemingly using it as her own personal Twitter feed. Users can share anything to this feed, but trans issues tend to dominate, as they do on Ovarit. Detrans Awareness Day was a big topic on there, as is the topic of detransitioning in general, as well as feminism and trans issues more broadly. Most of the posts made to the feed receive a handful of replies; Grover’s post revealing the sex of her unborn child received 26. While it’s not the most perfect way of measuring how popular the app is, it gives us an impression
Don’t let anybody tell you radical feminists don’t have a sense of humour: check out this hilarious meme!
Giggle’s terms do not allow for speech that is “illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, intimidating, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive”, and I didn’t see much out-and-out hate speech beyond misgendering trans people and things like the above meme (so basically, not many slurs). But the repeated emphasis on women’s “sex-based rights”, including by Grover herself, make it obvious who the women on Giggle are interested in fighting for, and the focus on detransitioners and occasional transphobic remark or joke just confirm it.
This post from user Rosa touched on the issue of non-radfem friends disagreeing with the poster, much like the “Normal People” post on Ovarit that I looked at earlier did. It’s certainly interesting to see radfems struggle to maintain a balance between their increasingly zealous radical feminism and their normal friendships and relationships; it feels reminiscent of what you hear from people who’ve been indoctrinated into cults or other extremist groups. If your views are so abhorrent that they start alienating those around you, maybe it’s time for some self-reflection?
Prolific user Mardi (who features in promotional material for the app) came through with my favourite comment, however. Aliens built the pyramids! Also English people are more Egyptian than Egyptians! What.
Remember, these are the people who claim to oppose ‘gender ideology’ because it isn’t rooted in scientific fact.
Update: Patrick Lenton alerted me to the fact that yesterday, news broke that a complaint had been filed against Giggle with the Australian Human Rights Commission by a trans woman. According to the Daily Telegraph, “The AHRC told her [Sall Grover] if she allowed Ms Tickle to join the app and “all other people that identify as female”, and undergo “education” about sex, gender and gender identity the complaint will be dropped. Otherwise the case could be taken to the Federal Court.”
Naturally, as ever concerned with balance, the Telegraph interviewed Grover herself and Liberal Senator Claire Chandler, who just last month introduced a ‘Save Women’s Sports’ bill, that “would clarify that the operation of single-sex sport on the basis of biological sex was not discrimination.” I won’t bother reproducing what either of them had to say on the matter here.
Since we can fairly safely assume that Grover will not allow the complainant, or any trans woman, to join the app, I recommend interested parties keep an eye on this space to see what happens next! Maybe I can make use of my half a law degree.
Spinster
The last case study for today is Spinster, the ‘Twitter alternative’ created by Mary Kate Fain, who you might remember from The Atlantic article mentioned earlier. Spinster was created in 2019 in order to serve as “a woman-centric website created to provide a platform for feminist dialogue.”
Fain created it alongside 4W, an online radical feminist publication. Both were created after Fain was fired from her job as a software engineer for writing an article titled, “Non-Binary Is the New “Not Like Other Girls”. Fain also claims to have experienced colleagues at an animal rights charity telling her, “You can’t say eggs came from female chickens, or milk comes from female cows: that’s transphobic.”
4W is not a huge publication by any means. Donate buttons and links to their Patreon are prominent on the sidebar, and the site’s 251 patrons support 4W to the tune of just under AUD$3000 a month. It has 8000 followers on Twitter and just under 2000 followers on Instagram.
It markets itself as covering “issues affecting women today”, and the site’s verticals are: news, opinion, gender identity, transgender, male violence, feminism and crime. It features a column from Phyllis Chesler, a second wave feminist and professor emerita of psychology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island, who is known partly for her critiques of Islam, including calling for the burqa to be banned in western countries, and her condemnation of multicultural relativism that allows immigrants to avoid assimilating and ‘westernizing’. One of her weirder pieces, published in the far-right New English Review, compares anti-Zionism to being pro-trans; in it, she writes:
Those who are pro-trans, who believe that identity trumps sex; that a man can be a woman if he says so, and that a woman can be a man—if she says so; who favor the descriptor “queer” over lesbian or homosexual; who are earnestly trying to expand what they see as the limitations of both sex and gender—these are also the kind of people who believe that a country that has never existed—that would be Palestine—is nevertheless the most important, the most persecuted, and the most heroic country in the whole world.
4W also frequently collaborates with Plebity, a platform for “long form critical thinking” co-founded by Sasha White, better known online as @IAmGrushenka, an assistant agent fired by the Tobias Literary Agency in 2020 after it was revealed that she was tweeting anti-trans screeds from her pseudonymous account.
With that context in mind, let’s look at Spinster. Unlike Ovarit, which doesn’t require you to register to read anything shared on there, you have to register to read anything on Spinster, and your registration has to be approved by staff before you can login.
Spinster is part of the ‘Fediverse’, a series of interconnected servers that are independently hosted but can communicate with each other. Mastodon and Gab are other examples of Fediverse servers - as Fain explains, the Fediverse has become a place for “social media refugees on both the right and left”. On Spinster’s own About page, Fain laments, “Most servers are hostile to women/feminism, and will ban people who defend women's sex-based rights.”
Like 4W, Spinster also asks for donations; a box on the side of my homepage informed me that they’ve raised $716 of their $1000 funding goal for the month. And in case anyone was wondering, they accept crypto donations! Six different kinds, to be exact.
Like Giggle, Spinster is not particularly user friendly. There’s no app, so you have to access the site via mobile web or a computer, which feels incredibly retro. Inevitably, much like Twitter for Web, this means the site is slow to load. You can follow people and only see their posts, but there’s also a universal feed where you can see all posts on Spinster; the latter is what I spent the most time on.
As for how many users the site has, I looked at Similarweb stats, as well as follower counts for Fain’s account and the official Spinster account to try and get an idea. According to Similarweb, the site received 356,000 visits in January, with the majority coming from North America. The site is ranked 58th in the LGBTQ category in the US.
On her personal account, founder @mk has 5700 followers and follows 18,000 people; meanwhile, the official Spinster account has 7800 followers and is following 16,600 people. Both accounts followed me as soon as I joined. This suggests to me that the number of accounts created since the site’s inception in August 2019 is around 18,000, but that the number of active users is far less. Esteemed members of Spinster include Glinner and Meghan Murphy, both of whom have been banned from Twitter; Fain, for all of her posturing about big tech censorship, still has her Twitter account.
One of Spinster’s rules is no hate speech, but it’s noted that “Moderators will use their discretion.” Based on the posts I saw, what I would consider hate speech against trans people does not meet the moderators’ definition of hate speech.
The Ovarit post this person links to is allegedly from a University of Western Australia student who says they were ‘cancelled’ after telling people they had been assaulted in the bathroom by a trans woman and requesting that there be “swipe card toilets where XX women can swipe into their respective bathroom, to ensure security, to prevent this sort of incident happening ever again”.
Nina Paley is an admin on the site, and hosts the Heterodorx podcast. The podcast is hosted by Paley, a cis woman, and Corinna Cohn, a trans woman who has written for esteemed outlets such as Quillette and presumably supports the platform outlined on the page: that sex is immutable, men can wear dresses, trans women are men. The podcast’s site even features a page where you can buy a pin celebrating the ‘TERF-Tr*nny Alliance’ (censorship my own).
Searches bring up innumerable posts using terms like ‘TIM’ and ‘TRA’, as well as more blatant slurs like tr*nny. Searches for these terms also bring up posts from other Fediverse servers, including one for Kiwi Farms, which. was described by Intelligencer in 2016 as the “web’s biggest community of stalkers”.
The discourse on Spinster was so bad that the app was removed from the Google Play Store and F-Droid. You can still read the request calling for Spinster to be removed from F-Droid here – it provides a few examples of transphobic hate speech found on Spinster, as well as posts from co-founder (and Fain’s partner) Alex Gleason praising Gab, the site beloved by neo-Nazis and QAnoners. When the poster reported the offensive posts, they were told that “abuse of the "report" button may be considered spam.” They noted that they didn’t find any personal threats, but still felt the site was a “propaganda machine and echo chamber".
“Propaganda machine and echo chamber” fairly accurately describes platforms like Ovarit, Giggle, and Spinster: platforms created solely for the purpose of gathering with likeminded feminists away from the prying eyes of polite society.
People often describe social media platforms in general as echo chambers, particularly Twitter, where you can curate your feed and only follow people you agree with. But anyone has the ability to interact with your tweets and tell you when they disagree with you, assuming your account is public. On Ovarit, Giggle, and Spinster, there’s none of that; there’s only people who agree with each other reinforcing their own views and patting each other on the back for successfully fighting the Trans Menace for another day, and moderators who evidently don’t care very deeply about enforcing their own rules against hate speech.
My next posts will look at radical feminist communities on Twitter, TikTok, and Discord. 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.