Babes in TERFland: Part 4
I spent several weeks in trans-exclusionary radical feminist online spaces. Here's what I learned. This week: Discord
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 and third parts of this series before starting this one!
Discord
I discovered Discord at the beginning of the pandemic, when a group of friends I originally met on LiveJournal over a decade ago reconnected and created our own Discord server. Since then, I’ve joined servers for Substack newsletters I subscribe to (hi Garbage Day and Today in Tabs friends!), my law school cohort, and special interests (read: The Witcher and Assassin’s Creed, lol). My use of Discord corresponds with what Ryan Broderick wrote in a recent edition of Garbage Day, that “the pandemic accelerated a rise in what’s called “dark social,” or non-public social media use — Discord, group chats, DMs, email — and with that has come an internet made up of millions of smaller internets”.
Because of this increase in ‘dark social’ usage, I decided to include Discord servers in my TERF experiment. I’ve already written about other less public social media platforms such as Giggle and Spinster, but these Discord servers 1. skew way younger and 2. often have an additional layer of privacy (we’ll get to what I mean by this in a minute). So it didn’t seem possible to get a comprehensive picture of what radical feminist discourse was like online without including Discord servers used by younger radical feminists.
I found the servers referred to in this piece by searching for servers tagged with ‘radfem’ on Disboard, an online database where people can list public Discord servers and tag them with relevant interests so that people looking for servers to join can find them.
I joined (or attempted to join) a number of servers, including:
RadLeft Unity
Beyond the Veil
radfem hangout ╰(*´︶`*)╯♡
medusa’s wrath
Two of those servers, Beyond the Veil and medusa’s wrath, openly describe themselves as being for TERFs. medusa’s wrath has a ‘biological women only’ requirement, whereas radfem hangout has a ‘female only’ requirement but allows trans men to join. All of these servers all require potential members to complete application forms and pass some sort of verification before they can be admitted.
medusa’s wrath
This server’s description on Disboard reads, “A secure space for radical feminists to build community, learn, educate, and grow. Voice verification is required. Biological women only.”
At the time of writing, medusa’s wrath had 205 members, making it one of the bigger servers I looked at. However, 77 of those members are ‘processing’, meaning their applications to join are still being considered. This means that only two channels are visible to them: a newly-spawned channel where they can post, and an awaiting-approval channel with messages from admins, including a link to their verification form.
This verification form was an astonishing sight. In addition to requiring applicants to record themselves speaking (so as to confirm that they’re biologically female, I assume), the form requires applicants to answer nine ideological questions so admins can decide whether you agree sufficiently with their beliefs before permitting you to join. Questions include:
What do you think is the root/basis of misogyny?
How do you think gender dysphoria should be treated in young people?
What's something that "peaked" you?
And, naturally, would you consider yourself gender critical?
I’m being 100% serious when I say that applying for university required less effort than this. I genuinely cannot recall encountering anything like this, where people are so determined to keep people who disagree out of their space that they require them to answer a TERF pop quiz. Facebook groups can ask potential members to answer as many as three questions, but they’re usually along the lines of “do you agree to follow the rules”, not “do you agree that trans children should be denied gender affirming care”.
The voice verification also stood out to me, as someone with a less-than-ideally-feminine voice; how does verifying that someone is biologically female based on their voice work if the person simply has a deep voice? I’d imagine there’s a lot of room for error, much like there is with facial recognition software that seeks to identify biological females, knowing all we know about how terrible AI is when it comes to people of colour, particularly Black people.
I never made it into the server itself – perhaps my answers simply weren’t convincing enough. Some users were nice enough to give me a taste of the kind of discourse I was missing out on in the public channel, however.
Illuminating as ever. Onto the next!
RadLeft Unity
This was a relatively small server, having only 88 members when I joined, but it also required potential members to complete an application.
The server’s description on Disboard reads, “Welcome to RadLeft Unity. This is a space for radical and marxist feminists who are leftist and gender critical who wish to explore leftism with a gender critical lens. We take a different stance on gender and feminist issues, but wish to explore this from a leftist angle.
This is a woman focused space, male allies may join but you need to be pro-feminist and not just gender critical - our feminist chats are female exclusive for those who prefer this. No TRAs, liberals or reactionaries allowed. Verification is needed to enter.”
As a result of its ostensibly left-wing views, the application includes questions such as:
Do you support anti-racism?
What’s your view on Palestine and Israel?
Alongside more predictable radfem questions, such as:
In a short sentence, what is your opinion on prostitution?
Are you gender critical? What’s your opinion on gender identities?
Do you support the rights of LGB people?
For those not familiar with Discord, you can select ‘roles’ that show up on your profile for each server. Certain roles change the colour of your username, others grant you access to certain role-specific channels, others are just… there. RadLeft Unity had a tonne of roles, including ones for the kind of feminist you are, the kind of leftist you are, your race, your sexuality, your religion, your location, ‘other’, and display name colour.
The most interesting roles for me were the location ones, and the ‘other’ ones.
An overwhelming number of users are based in North America and Europe, which isn’t surprising for an English-language based server.
The ‘other’ roles relate to a user’s relationship to trans identities: if you’ll recall from part 1, ‘detrans’ means someone who used to consider themselves trans and started medically transitioning but no longer considers themselves trans, whereas ‘desisted’ means someone who considered themselves trans but never medically transitioned and now no longer identifies as trans.
This server was a strange one, because the users had fairly standard left-wing views across the board, except for when it came to gender and sexuality. This is different to radical feminists, who (in my experience) focus almost exclusively on gender and sexuality, with very little analysis of class, race or western hegemony (which is reflective of the overwhelming number white middle class people from Anglophone countries who occupy these spaces).
Despite agreeing with them on so many issues, it would never be possible for me to remain in a space like that for long, because the way they talk about trans people is so hateful that it alienates anyone who hasn’t already been conditioned to find it acceptable. As an added bonus, RadLeft Unity makes use of a bot that automatically shares each new article posted by 4W.
Unfortunately, this was far from the worst I’d see on Discord.
Beyond the Veil
This is an even smaller community, with only 57 members at the time of writing, but it also requires verification: you have to verify your voice before your request to join is accepted and you can view all the channels.
The server’s description on Disboard reads, “A discussion and safe-haven for terfs/radfems, and really any woman that is interested in feminism. We have feminist-theory discussion, along with regular chill discussions. Join to view the Manifesto if interested in reading more about us.”
Did that make you want to view the manifesto? I’ve got you covered!
Is it just me or does number 2 basically say “women are stupid because of sexism”? “Less motivated to be sagacious”? “Not have the ability to innately know how to use the mental tools of learning”? It’s giving “women are stupid and I don’t respect them”. The misogyny is coming from inside the house.
Despite the use of highfalutin words like ‘sagacious’ in their manifesto, the quality of discourse in this server did not impress me much.
Case in point: making fun of the mental health of a trans person because mental illness is hilarious if it’s someone you don’t like, I guess.
It’s not TERFs who are murdering trans people or shouting abuse at them, except for when it is.
(Side note: when has a trans person ever said that misgendering someone is on par with murder? I guess it’s harder to make your opponents sound ridiculous if you rely on actual statements made rather than invented strawmen.)
It was in Beyond the Veil that I encountered blatant radfem racism for the first time, with the majority of it aimed at men from majority Muslim countries.
Inger Støjberg is a Danish politician who served as the minister for immigration from 2015 to 2019. Last year, she was given a two-month jail sentence for separating couples seeking asylum where the girl was under 18. She was also impeached and voted out of Danish parliament as a result.
Some of the most disturbing content I saw was a conversation about rape and murder fantasies.
This user shared their fantasies that included raping ‘moids’ (men, which to them includes non-binary AMABs and trans women), adding that women are too empathetic with men and shouldn’t feel bad when women murder men, adding in a reference to Aileen Wuornos, made famous by Charlize Theron in 2003’s Monster.
The founder of the server responds with, “fantasizing about raping a moid may temporarily alleviate some trauma/tension”, but ultimately concedes that it’s about as effective as self-harm or substance abuse.
This kind of talk is… way above my pay grade, and should probably be reserved for sessions with a therapist. But it was incredibly disturbing to see, particularly knowing that trans people are four times more likely than cis people to be victims of violent crime, including rape and sexual assault. Consider the young ages of some of the users of these servers, and then consider the statistic that 12 percent of trans youth have reported being sexually assaulted by peers or staff in K-12 settings. Suddenly, the violence they fantasise about becomes less of a fantasy and more of a reality, just like it is for cis women. Instead of using these shared experiences to build solidarity, however, TERFs just devolve into hateful speech and disturbing pronouncements.
radfem hangout ╰(*´︶`*)╯♡
Don’t be fooled by the cutesy emote — this was the most hateful server I spent time in, by far. The server’s description on Disboard reads, “welcome to radfem hangout ╰(´︶`)╯♡ we're a server aimed towards younger radical feminists, female only! transmen are welcome to join. see you there! <3”. The server has 131 members at the time of writing, and requires potential members to answer two questions before they can join:
Are you female? If no, go ahead and exit stage left, because this is a female-only server, sorry!
If yes, do you have a feminist or political centric social media account? If so, leave your handle here so we can check it out. If not, explain why you want to join our server and why you don’t have an account we can look at.
When I joined, you had to provide your name, age, opinions (ie are you a radical feminist, marxist etc), social media accounts, and how you found the server.
I was worried the social media requirement would rule me out, since I only had a sockpuppet TikTok account that had no videos on it, but that appeared to be enough for them, perhaps thanks to the radfems who followed me back once they saw my username and profile picture (both references to Andrea Dworkin).
By ‘younger radical feminists’, the server primarily means teenagers; the owner is 17, based in North America, and a lesbian. Based on the roles, the majority of users are underage, but there were 38 adults in the server, with most underage users being 16 or 17.
46 members identified as lesbian, 16 as straight, and 38 as bisexual.
Again, the vast majority of members were based in North America and Europe.
21 members identified as dysphoric, while 27 identified as desisted.
The first thing that jumped out at me about this server was a ‘rate the moids’ channel where, you guessed it, users rate men, non binary AMABs and trans women based on looks. Some are people they know in real life, others are people they’ve encountered on dating apps. The commentary in this channel is not kind, and to protect the privacy and dignity of those who were ‘rated’, I will not be sharing any identifying images.
As we saw with Beyond the Veil, there is a disturbing normalisation of the kind of violent rhetoric usually associated with men who commit violent crimes, usually against women – speech that was once the sole purview of men in spaces like /pol/ and Kiwi Farms is clearly not entirely uncommon in radical feminist online spaces. (Remember, Spinster and Kiwi Farms are both part of the Fediverse.)
I found violent rhetoric elsewhere on the server, too, including a lengthy rant that starts with “I wish that TRAs would just die”. Take note the date: this same user, who is upset about rape and death threats being sent to TERFs, posted that same day about wanting to bash a trans woman’s skull in.
(‘Allowed’ is doing a lot of work here. You’re describing war crimes, which aren’t typically allowed, at least under the Geneva Conventions.)
See also: this conversation about whether users would snitch if someone they knew killed a man.
There was also a baffling exchange where one user said if they were a guy they would probably want to shoot up a school.
For more insight into the minds of these young radfems, let’s have a look at a conversation about what made them ‘peak’.
(‘Exclus’ and ‘inclus’ refer to one’s position on whether asexual and aromantic people are part of the LGBT community, they’re short for exclusionist/inclusionist.)
I’m including the following screenshot because it’s a fascinating example of cultish language used in these spaces, and that’s something I’m going to come back to in my conclusion. ‘Has TikTok gendie insanity rly made a bunch of gyns peak??’ Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
But actually, what it means is, has TikTok trans-inclusive feminism (‘gendie insanity’) really made a bunch of women (‘gyns’) abandon their support for trans rights (‘peak’)? Consider me your TERF translator.
As in Beyond the Veil, users had some questionable views on race and immigration, particularly towards Muslim refugees in European countries.
’Racism stems from men and their aggressive nature and tribalism’ lets (white) women off the hook completely for their role in upholding and enforcing racism and racist policies, as though white women haven’t been complicit in or active participants in racism for as long as it has existed. See: female slave owners, female Neo Nazis and KKK members, female concentration camp guards, Margaret Thatcher, Marine Le Pen, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin… this list is by no means exhaustive.
This idea that women are all sisters, that women are more enlightened where men are primitive and conservative, is fairly standard radfem rhetoric, but honestly does women the disservice of framing us as mere pawns of men and not human beings with autonomy and our own minds. Nothing that we do wrong is our fault, we’re just feeble-minded babies, I mean women. This is a feminist view, somehow.
Then there was this discussion about immigration, using Sweden as an example:
A quick Google brought me to Wikipedia, which I’m going to reference here since the source it quotes is in Swedish, I do not speak Swedish, and the Swedish Chef was not available to translate at such short notice.
“A 2005 study by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention found that people of foreign background were 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes than people with a Swedish background, including immigrants being four times more likely to be suspected of for lethal violence and robbery, five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes, and three times more likely to be investigated for violent assault.”
While looking for sources of this claim about rapes committed in Moscow, I found the exact statistic in a post made on Stormfront in 2016. You know Stormfront? The neo Nazi website described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as ‘the first major hate site on the internet’?
Putting my law student hat on for a moment, I want to point out that these all refer to immigrants being suspected or investigated by police. The very nature of crime rates (being that they reflect crime reported to and investigated by the police, rather than all crime) means that they only give you a piece of the puzzle: they tell you where police direct resources and officers, and which groups police focus their attention on. Surprisingly, in a country like Sweden (or any European country, or the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand), police are likely to be racist, particularly towards immigrants (of colour - I doubt I would experience any anti-Australian racism if I moved there) and Black people. So it comes as no surprise to me that people born in countries other than Sweden are more likely to be suspected of crimes than locals, but I doubt the server member has thought about crime rates in this way.
“The thing is with ethno crime, that you can’t talk about it freely. like,,, you’d get called racist or anything like that etc.” Being called racist when you’re using the same rhetoric, down to the same statistics, as actual neo Nazis? Unthinkable!
Users adopt a paternalistic approach to talking about women and children from the Middle East seeking asylum in Europe, and denigrate the men who do so. Of course, if the men in question took their families with them when seeking asylum and their journey involved something they consider risky like a boat, they would be criticised for endangering their families, so really, they can’t win. And it’s not as though western countries are particularly kind to refugee families who do seek asylum together.
I asked Lauren (gothamshitty) if she’d encountered anti-Muslim sentiment during her time on radfem Tumblr, and she said, “Yes to the anti-muslim sentiment. Although I've seen radfems condemn religion altogether, they seem to view Islam as uniquely oppressive/"backwards". I remember seeing tumblr TERFs talk about their fears of Syrian refugees entering Europe and promoting the false (alt right) narrative that more refugees meant more violence against European women. I've also seen them avoid pro-Palestinian stances because of "the way middle eastern men treat their women.”
Discord was, by far, the most depressing part of my experiment. Seeing so many young women use such hateful and violent rhetoric, egging each other on and coaxing one another further into radicalisation, made me profoundly sad. The naive optimist in me hopes that some of this hatefulness will soften with age, but in the meantime, the trans people in their lives and the trans people they encounter online will experience very real harm at their hands.
Discord gave me a glimpse at what radical feminism looks like outside the Anglosphere; while all of the servers were dominated by users from the US, Canada, and Europe, there were several vocal members from countries like Germany and Russia as well as Morocco and Malaysia.
Many of these young Discord radfems came (or are coming) of age in a time of increased LGBT visibility and acceptance, including for trans people, and accompanying LGBT discourse and discussions on social media. In addition, vaguely sex positive liberal feminism is likely the only kind of feminism they would have been exposed to until discovering radical feminism online; the mainstream centrist girlboss flavour of feminism favoured by corporate America and the Democratic Party.
It’s my opinion that these two things, increasing LGBT visibility and the accessibility of discourse, and exposure to lacklustre mainstream liberal feminism, combined to create a perfect storm of alienation and frustration for these young TERFs. They feel ignored by the LGBT community, which they feel focuses too much on trans people, and they feel ignored by liberal feminism, which fails to address systemic concerns and (to them) emphasises sex positivity without adequately addressing the way male sexuality has been used to harm women.
In steps radical feminism, whether it’s on TikTok, Twitter, Tumblr, or elsewhere, and it feels like a godsend. Here is a feminism that addresses the root of all of my problems as a teenage girl: the patriarchy. Here is a feminism that doesn’t require me to be a Boss or to be Beautiful but one that lets me express my rage as a woman in a sexist society. Here is a feminism that talks about my experiences as a woman who is not interested in dating men. Here is a feminism that doesn’t focus on individual empowerment but on systemic justice for women as a class.
Like other TERFS, those on Discord largely turned to radical feminism after feeling alienated by liberal feminism; unlike other TERFs, they’re incredibly young to have already cycled through various flavours of feminism and landed at the extremist end of radical feminism.
Two of my biggest questions when writing this series were, "How do we intercept these young women before they enter the TERF pipeline?” and “How can we show them that radical feminism, particularly trans exclusionary radical feminism, isn’t the only alternative to liberal feminism?” I asked Lauren for her thoughts, and she said, “It really has to be preventative instead of reactive, because once these young teens make friends with radfems and TERFs, that personal connection and identity will keep them there. I think that showing alternatives to libfeminism helps, and showcasing the connections between radfems/TERFs/conservatives.” Her videos do that, and I hope that in this series, I have managed to highlight how hateful, reactionary, and frankly regressive many TERFs are. My fifth and final post will be a conclusion with more of my thoughts on the ‘cultish’ language used by radfems and the similarities to other forms of political extremism.
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.