Babes in TERFland: Part 3
I spent several weeks in trans-exclusionary radical feminist online spaces. Here's what I learned. This week: Tiktok and Twitter
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 and second parts of this series before this one!
As I mentioned in the first instalment of this series, I was partly inspired to create this series after watching Gothamshitty’s videos on TikTok about her time as a TERF on Tumblr. I appreciated her transparency in how TERFs made their flavour of feminism appeal to her, as well as her transparency around realising she was part of a hate movement and needed to get out.
It’s now 2022, and Tumblr isn’t the epicentre of online teen culture the way it was a decade ago – I didn’t even include Tumblr in this series for that reason, although I did see TERFs talk about it, and there does seem to be remnants of a radical feminist community on there. Instead, it’s all TikTok all the time, so I started by creating an account on there and following a few radical feminists/gender critical feminists/TERFs and seeing where the algorithm would take me.
On my mind throughout this exercise was a Media Matters report from last year which found that transphobic content on TikTok acted as a gateway to far-right content. The report defines transphobic content as videos that “degrade trans people, insist that there are “only two genders,” or mock the trans experience”; while it doesn’t explicitly mention radical feminist content, there is inevitably a lot of overlap considering how much radical feminists focus on trans people.
With that context, let’s crack on.
TikTok
In order to find radical feminist accounts, I searched for videos about radical feminism and gender critical feminism, and from there just followed a few accounts that were recommended to me each time I followed someone new. I ended up following roughly 30 accounts, the most popular being a.swags, who has 5472 followers. Other accounts I followed included hannahberrelli22, tiktokhatesterfs, realitykilledtheradio, and terfcunt. A few things that stood out to me about these accounts was that of the users who posted videos showing their faces, all were relatively young, all were white (or white passing), all were either American, Canadian, British, or Irish, and all identified as lesbians.
As a queer person, I’m very familiar with the discourse surrounding the topic of which LGBTQ+ identities are responsible the most transphobia, so I’m not interested in suggesting lesbians are primarily responsible for online transphobia. JK Rowling, perhaps one of the most well known commentators in this arena, is, after all, a cisgender, heterosexual billionaire. But the unfortunate truth is that lesbians do get used, both by other lesbians and non-lesbians alike, to attack trans people, whether it’s by suggesting trans women are forcing lesbians to have sex with them, or that the ~trans industrial complex~ is turning lesbians into trans men, or suggesting trans people are somehow responsible for the death of lesbian bars. There are TERFs who are not lesbians who are incredibly invested in perpetuating these narratives; on TikTok, I just happened to find a group made up primarily of lesbians who are also invested in perpetuating these narratives.
The majority of these creators post about very little besides trans people/gender, although some also post about sex work, sexuality, and radical feminism more broadly. Many of the comments on their videos are from people who’ve obviously mistakenly stumbled upon their videos and are confused as to why someone who is so brazenly transphobic would appear on their for you pages.
I saw videos talking about women’s sports, women’s bathrooms, women’s change rooms, lesbians being forced to date trans women, and non-binary identities not being real. I saw them praising plans to legislate which bathrooms trans people can and can’t use, and I saw them praising Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to order child welfare officials to investigate parents who were allowing their children to receive gender-affirming care.
Basically, I saw almost all of the standard TERF talking points I’ve seen time and time again. The only real difference on TikTok was the use of slang primarily associated with zoomers and the use of popular TikTok sounds, like “wait, is this fucking play about us?” from Euphoria (which felt ironic considering one of the stars of the show is trans).
Sidenote: of the users who didn’t show their faces, almost all posted things like k-pop fancams with their opinions written on top, or cutesy images from various anime shows accompanied by phrases like ‘drag is sexist’ or ‘lesbians don’t have dicks’, obviously taken from their ~aesthetic Instagrams.
The second video screenshotted above stood out to me because the user seems so close to getting it, and yet so far. Yes, it is strange that despite claiming you’re a feminist, evangelical Christians and reactionary conservatives share many of your views when it comes to sex work and trans people, isn’t it? And their complete failure to see how their own stance on sex work is also an attempt to exert control over women, by imposing their own values and morals on sex workers, is fairly ironic.
To better understand how young feminists in particular might be radicalised by what they see online, I spoke to Gothamshitty, AKA Lauren, who has spoken at length about the TERF pipeline (and how to counter it) and how she become a TERF on Tumblr, as well as how she got out.
We started out by discussing the backlash against sex positivity that I’ve noticed on TikTok, not just from radical feminists, who have their own reasons for disagreeing with sex positivity as it currently exists in mainstream feminism, but other young women as well. On this, Lauren said, “I recently read a good article on how Gen Z seems to be replicating the discourse from the 80s sex wars, on the side of the radfems. I think this has a lot to do with Gen Z’s experience with modern porn and dating apps, and how those have affected them/their peers. And they want to critique those things (rightfully so), but radfem seems to be the only ideology there to hand them the vocabulary they need.”
After liking approximately 50 videos by the creators I was following and giving TikTok an idea of what I was interested in, the algorithm started showing me:
pro-Russia content
pro-life content
conservative content
pro-anorexia content
pro-weight loss content
As I continued interacting, the algorithm showed me considerably more left-wing videos, including:
pro sex work content
pro kink content
trans friendly content
content by survivors of sexual assault
Safe to say, the algorithm evidently wasn’t getting a clear read on what I was interested in. I continued to only engage with radical feminist videos, ignoring videos radical feminists would ignore like those that were pro sex work or pro kink, and the algorithm kept showing me increasingly misogynistic content, as well as more extreme weight loss content. I never saw any of the accounts I was following post this kind of content, except for one pro-Russia TERF account that I had a few mutuals with, so this direction surprised me, particularly the extreme weight loss content.
When I asked Lauren for her thoughts on the algorithm, she said, “It definitely helps radicalization. Seemingly innocuous radfem accounts will post those anti porn/hookup culture takes young feminists are looking for. But those accounts are also following/interacting with other radfems accounts that are posting the more transphobic stuff. So once you end up liking that original anti porn post/following that person, the algorithm will show you who that person is interacting with and push you further into the radfem community, until you’re confronted with TERFism. That’s why I call it a pipeline.”
I came back to her a while later after noticing the change in content I was seeing to include more and more weight loss content, and asked if she’s noticed any overlap between radical feminists and pro-ana communities. She said, “Yes, I have noticed an overlap between radfems and ED. However, this observance came after I left the community; during my time in tumblr TERF spaces, I didn't see any ED content. I think this is because ED spaces are predominantly occupied by younger teens. Back "in my day", most radfems/TERFs were 18+. Now, more and more middle/high schoolers are becoming radfems. So I think this reflects how the ideology is now more popular among younger girls. ED spaces operate like fan clubs, and so do young radfem spaces. That's also why you see a lot of overlap between radfem and Kpop for example.”
Not having much experience with eating disorder communities, I appreciated this insight, and the explanation of them, as well as radfem spaces, operating like fan spaces explained a lot.
I was somewhat disappointed I wasn’t able to replicate the results of the Media Matters survey, but these results were interesting in and of themselves — the fact that the algorithm saw me interacting with anti-trans content and assumed I’d be interested in other kinds of misogyny.
Another phenomenon I found on TikTok and nowhere else was the fairly common requests that “lesbians DNI” with certain videos, DNI meaning “do not interact”. I’m not sure how these kinds of instructions can be enforced on social media where anyone can claim to be anything, but it was interesting to see nonetheless - an attempt to create virtual versions of the lesbian-only spaces many TERFs blame trans women for destroying.
Perhaps most interestingly, four of the accounts I followed were suspended for violating TikTok’s community guidelines during my time on radical feminist TikTok. In addition, terfcunt, one of those who saw their accounts suspended, made no secret of the fact that she has had eight TikTok accounts and counting as a result of repeated bans.
TikTok’s terms of service prohibit users from posting:
any material which is defamatory of any person, obscene, offensive, pornographic, hateful or inflammatory
any material that is deliberately designed to provoke or antagonise people, especially trolling and bullying, or is intended to harass, harm, hurt, scare, distress, embarrass or upset people
any material that is racist or discriminatory, including discrimination on the basis of someone’s race, religion, age, gender, disability or sexuality
One account, run by someone who says they’re 17 and as of the time of writing is still up, made repeated references to telling people to kill themselves, in clear violation of the terms of service.
The day before I started writing this post, the user posted about receiving a warning from TikTok for telling people to kill themselves, and posted a video of Zoe Kravitz crying that said “my account is too big to get away with telling people to kts now”.
I primarily used Twitter as a secondary source, following people I’d found on TikTok and Discord on there, as well as popular accounts they interacted with.
Prior to this, I largely associated Twitter TERFs with the women who camp out in JK Rowling’s mentions, waiting for her to tweet so they can breathlessly tell her how perfect and flawless she is. A few years ago, they would have been doing the same with Graham Linehan, but his being permanently suspended meant they had to find a new hero to worship.
Following users from TikTok and Discord on Twitter, however, meant that I was exposed to a younger group of TERFs, which is where I picked up a bunch of slang I hadn’t seen widely used elsewhere.
As for the quality of the discourse on radfem Twitter, it was more of the same.
Individual trans people were held up as evidence that all trans people were “men with paraphilias” or “boundary-less, sex-obsessed cretins”. Using this logic, all TERFs are out of touch billionaires who wrote mediocre children’s fiction about a school for wizards.
During the time I was on radfem Twitter, I also noticed that a few users seemingly had a preoccupation with Hunter Schafer, star of Euphoria, who is a trans woman. These tweets followed the resurfacing of an old Instagram post’s of Schafer’s, made when she was 17 and since deleted, where she shares a mind map full of thoughts about her gender and sexuality, dysphoria, what it means to be trans, and why she wanted to transition.
It is unclear how making fun of an individual trans woman’s appearance advances the cause of women’s sex-based rights.
I was somewhat taken aback by the amount of vitriol publicly visible on radfem TikTok and Twitter, although there were some signs that the social media platforms were attempting to respond to concerns about content that violated community guidelines. Ultimately, even if these users are driven off the more mainstream social media apps, we know that they’ll just be able to join more exclusive forums like Ovarit and Spinster, driving them further into toxic echo chambers where they can learn from more seasoned TERFs and never encounter anyone who disagrees with them ever again. So I’m not entirely sure what the solution is, although I hope to have a better idea by the time I write the conclusion to this series. Stay tuned!
My fourth post next week will look at radical feminist communities on Discord, many of which are closed communities that require hopeful members to fill out membership applications — one even requires users to submit a vocal recording, so they can be confirmed female.
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, particularly as I’m publishing this on Trans Day of Visibility. Australians should consider donating to this fund for incarcerated trans and gender diverse people.