It started with this tweet:

“ My friend was JUST threatened by a drunk man as she was walking alone. She was going to tell him off but he had a knife in hand. He demanded to know if she was a man or woman. She showed him her vagina & got away.”

A (cis) woman was attacked by a drunk man with a knife who demanded of her to prove her gender. She managed to get rid of him by showing her vagina as proof. This is a pretty sad story, and shows some of the very real consequences of the relentless assault on trans people in the media in the UK lately. People are on the lookout for us, and won’t hesitate to harass or attack us if they think we’re not real women.

What makes this particular event special, is that it happened to a cis woman. A cis woman suffered directly from a transphobic attack. This isn’t the first time it happens, but in this case it went pretty far.

Trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) were very quick to react to this. The tweet very quickly got flooded with replies from self-identified “gender critical” people, who were doubting it actually happened.

The core belief system of TERFs is based around the idea that gender doesn’t exist, and only sex (of which they fail to give a definition that satisfies modern science) exists. Thus, trans women are not women, and must be barred from accessing women spaces and services, they claim.

They have been relentlessly assaulting trans people in the media, and doing everything they can to stop trans people from getting access to healthcare, or legal recognition in their identification papers. Their rhetoric usually revolves around the hypothetic danger of allowing trans people in women spaces. I will not go into the details of this here because it is not the point and other people than me have already done it.