If you’ve ever delved into the depths of online trans discourse, you’d be surprised to see the types of people that anti-trans devotees will cite. It ranges anywhere from blatant misogynists to ardently pro-trans people, but the actual positions of the author needn’t matter: only the arguments they are making. I suspect this is because they have a paucity of actually coherent theorists who are adept enough at writing that they can get published in journals and publishing outlets, so they have to go (cherry)picking for arguments.

Misogynists, Reactionaries and Anti-Feminists

Leonard Sax

Unfortunately, too often are intersex people wielded as weapons in the ‘trans debate’. While their existence is important to the discussion of the ontology and metaphysics of sex, discourse about trans rights has too often erased the lived experiences of intersex people. Often people cite the figure that ‘intersex people are about 2% of the population’. This was first reported in Blackless et. al’s seminal study on the topic, demonstrating that around 2 in 100 individuals deviate from the “Platonic ideal” of sex by virtue of their sexed chromosomes, their gonadal structure, hormone levels or internal and external genitalia. In an article published two years later, Leonard Sax made his name in the “gender critical” community by providing a critique of Blackless et. al’s research. In it, he claims that Anne Fausto-Sterling (who is the main subject of the critique for the use of the Blackless et. al research in her book Sexing the Body) systematically overestimated the frequency of intersex people in the population to bolster her ideological commitment to … who knows, really? I don’t think it’s worth responding to his article in depth here since it’s so insultingly bad, but I’ve covered the basics on Twitter in the past.

Little do most anti-trans feminists know, but Sax is just as, if not more, ideologically committed to a particular worldview on sex and gender. He is described as a “conservative psychologist” and is infamous in feminist circles for insisting that sex differences are innate, inborn.

Let’s review his ‘accomplishments’:

The academic and social spheres he’s situated himself within aren’t exactly “feminist” ones either:

Ray Blanchard and co(ult)

One of the most common theories that TECFs latch onto as to the aetiology of trans people’s existence (besides the incoherent it’s just dislike of gender roles) is Blanchard’s “autogynephilia” thesis. I won’t go over the details here, but I’ve critiqued the theory at length (in fact, it’s why I started this blog!) here.

Unsurprisingly, along with the blantant lesbophobia of his actual work, the anti-feminist viewpoints necessary to endorse the ‘theory’ of autogynephilia, he’s also a blatant homophobe and misogynist in real life. In an interview he had with Vice, he stated that he would have promoted the long-critiqued homophobic and misogynistic paradigm of sexual intercourse such that only sex for reproduction is considered ‘normal’:

I would say if one could start from scratch, ignore all the history of removing homosexuality from the DSM, normal sexuality is whatever is related to reproduction.

He even believes that gay people are “abnormal”:

It has been 40 years since homosexuality was removed as a mental illness from the DSM. But given a clean slate, Blanchard said he would still classify homosexual sex as abnormal.

Even more, he promotes not-so-subtly lesbophobic and misogynistic opinions about lesbian couples:

I think there are some glaring differences between acceptance of transsexualism and acceptance of homosexuality. Let’s say that a friend comes to you and says she’s a lesbian, you aren’t seeing your friend performing cunnilingus on her girlfriend. All this requires is acceptance of what you don’t have to see.

Beyond that, Blanchard’s model of treatment for trans people is blatantly anti-feminist, misogynistic and reproduces the patriarchy. For instance, Blanchard promotes the view that gender is innate and built into people’s brains at birth. As such, his thesis is that ‘feminine homosexual men’ are sometimes born with ‘female brains‘ so that they ‘become transsexuals’ and feel the need to transition.

More recently, Holly Lawford-Smith cited Anne Lawrence’s profoundly non-scientific book on autogynephilia to attempt to demean particular types of trans women. (Hopefully) unbeknownst to Lawford-Smith, but Lawrence is a sexual predator who wouldn’t know how to form a scientific hypothesis if it hit her in the head. Her website and half-cobbled theories (a result of her education at a quack school) have caused material harm to numerous trans people.

Another member of the tiny Blanchardian cult is James Cantor, who thinks that pedophilia is built into the brain and that we should add a “P” to LGBT;

Wow, this is disturbing as all hell. Transphobic sexologist is also a pedophile apologist, it would appear? Transphobes continually try to casually link trans people with pedophilia, yet here's one of the more prominent academic transphobes saying LGBT should include pedophiles! https://t.co/0vKr1G9vcy — CyberSloth (@CaseyExplosion) December 28, 2018

He even goes as far as to position his belief against that of “nonbinary feminism”

I'd be happy to answer your question when you start answering mine: Again, articulate your principles of nonbinary feminism & show how they disagree with my belief in adding P. (Since it was my tweet that started this, it's my and Snopes' use of LGBT that is relevant, not yours.) — Dr. James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) February 3, 2019

He believes that pedophilia is a ‘sexual orientation‘, and fascinatingly the profoundly non-feminist belief that gender dysphoria is biological. He even defends child sex dolls

Governor signs bill outlawing child-like sex dolls. However: “'If we surveyed victims of childhood sexual abuse, I wonder how many would say they WISHED their abusers had a sex doll who might have taken their place?', asked Dr. James Cantor." https://t.co/45uigG0CyA #sexdoll — Dr. James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) May 24, 2019

Child sex dolls could help reduce sex abuse of REAL children. Politicians move to ban them anyway: "'CREEPER Act' would ban lifelike child sex dolls in the United States" https://t.co/1kACQWEhwO — Dr. James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) January 4, 2018

And has used that as a way to move towards the legalization of child porn.

He has gotten acceptance among the so-called “gender critical feminists” because he’s willing to espouse anti-trans talking points. And it’s not a one-way street: he promotes anti-trans feminists too:

Transgender Trend Founder Shortlisted For John Maddox Prize https://t.co/iI1qHAlDAd — Dr. James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) November 19, 2018

Transgender Kids: Are We Doing More Harm Than Good? https://t.co/BcIXv6n0vX via @wordpressdotcom — Dr. James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) July 8, 2017

Believe it or not, but you don't speak for OUR community. Indeed, saying MY unchosen sexuality is okay but THEIR unchosen sexuality is not okay is merely to pass the torch of stigma down the line. It hypocritically defies the very principles that give OUR community OUR rights. — Dr. James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) April 1, 2019

But in another move, will criticize them for “tell[ing] … us what we can/can’t do with our bodies”;

Weird, the extreme right and radical left. They say they're different, but both try to tell rest of us what we can/can't do with our bodies. — Dr. James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) May 14, 2016

Radical Feminism often opposes bio males becoming women, women who choose sex work, and (anyone) in porn, for examples. — Dr. James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) May 15, 2016

He has even gotten into tangles with anti-trans feminists over what constitutes feminism and about specifics of feminist theory:

Feminism is about engagement, including with people you disagree with. It is not a weapon or shield for getting an upper hand in an argument. After "fuck off", I don't think you are a feminist at all. You just pull it out to get you something you want. — Dr. James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) January 4, 2019

I also personally suspect he is a pedophile himself;

So, meeting at office: Needed 2nd laptop for powerpoint. My personal one was handy. Only after clicking start, I wonder: "Any #porn on it?" — Dr. James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) July 7, 2013

Feminists

Feminist Scientists

Cordelia Fine

One of my favorite authors these days is Cordelia Fine. She has written devastating critiques of the idea of the ‘male’ and ‘female’ brain, the naturalization of gender roles and the myths surrounding testosterone. Strangely, ‘gender critical feminists’ (or more accurately TECFs) cite Cordelia Fine as if she supports their project. Obviously Cordelia Fine is a welcome antidote to the essentialism of conservatives, but the claim that her project somehow refutes trans people is quite strange.

The few times that Cordelia Fine talks about trans people in her research or in interviews, she is decidedly not antagonistic, and if anything, is affirming and supportive. In a discussion with the “Parenting Science Gang”, she states:

Cultural evolutionary scientists definitely regard the prestige or status of an individual as important, but also I think group identification. There are studies showing that even preschool kids already are more drawn to activities and objects modelled by children of the same gender (also the case for trans kids

In contrast, TECFs deny the existence of trans kids;

https://twitter.com/bettytastic/status/1115327800007954438

Even more, the few times that she talks about trans people in her books, she uses their existence to bolster her thesis. Chapter 1 of Delusions of Gender begins:

The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

-Jan Morris, a male-to-female transsexual describing her posttransition experiences in her autobiography, Conundrum (1987)

Chapter 5 starts with:

In her book Scientists Anonymous, Patricia Fara describes how, around the turn of the nineteenth century, botanist Jeanne Baret and mathematician Sophie Germain were obliged to present themselves as men to carry out their research.1 Unlike Baret, today’s female biologists do not have to pretend to be men to carry out fieldwork. Nor do contemporary female mathematicians need to employ Germain’s subterfuge, studying by correspondence under cover of a male identity. Yet even today, the evidence suggests that it would be a shrewd career move for a woman to disguise herself as a man. People who have transformed their identity in this way-namely, female-to-male transsexuals-report decidedly beneficial consequences in the workplace. Ben Barres is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, and a femaleto-male transsexual. In an article in Nature he recalls that “[s]hortly after I changed sex, a faculty member was heard to say ‘Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.'” Similar stories cropped up in a recent interview study of twenty-nine female-to-male transsexuals. Kirsten Schilt, a Research Fellow at Houston’s Rice University, interviewed the men about their work experiences both before and after their transition from women to men. Her study reveals that many immediately enjoyed greater recognition and respect. Thomas, an attorney, related how a colleague praised the boss for getting rid of Susan, whom he regarded as incompetent. He then added that the “new guy,” Thomas, was “just delightful”-not realizing, of course, that Thomas and Susan were one and the same. Roger, in retail, found that now that he is a man people bypass his female boss and beeline straight to him with their questions. Paul, continuing his work in secondary education, suddenly found himself being continually called upon in meetings to offer his newly valuable opinions. And several blue-collar workers reported that work is a great deal easier since transition.

Rebecca Jordan-Young

Another member of the Neurogenderings network of feminist scholars that TECFs love to cite is Rebecca Jordan-Young and her 2010 book Brain Storm. She is, however, decidedly not a part of their academic milieu.

Jordan-Young talks sparingly about trans people in her aformentioned magnum opus; she focuses more on intersex individuals/individuals with diversities of sex development. As such, her discussion of trans biology is replete (?) of …

On page 38, she notes:

While cohort studies begin with information about exposures, casecontrol studies begin from the opposite direction, grouping people according to outcomes and then looking for information on exposures. (In epidemiology the outcome of interest is usually, but not always, a disease; increasingly one sees studies of “positive” conditions like resistance to disease.) For case-control studies, scientists must have fairly distinct groups to compare, and in brain organization research this means scientists begin with people they consider to be sexually different from the majority—including gay men, lesbians, and sometimes bisexuals, as well as transsexual or transgender people. Some investigators approach the difference among these various sexual minorities as a matter of degree, and others treat them as categorically distinct, but virtually all studies consider bisexuals, gay men or lesbians, and transgender people to have at least partial “cross-sex” psychosexual differentiation, a result that would presumably follow prenatal exposure to “cross-sex” hormones. (I don’t mean to endorse this notion. In Chapter 7 in particular, I’ll show that it is a troubled proposition that creates a lot of tension within brain organization studies. My point here is simply to explain that it is a core assumption of brain organization research.)

On page 90, she states:

Two small studies have suggested that left-handedness may be increased in individuals with CAH, but most studies (including all of the larger studies) have found no effect on handedness or other aspects of cognitive lateralization. Core gender identity is usually not affected by CAH. There are higher rates of both gender dissatisfaction and/or ambivalence, as well as transgender/transsexuality in genetic females with CAH, compared with the general population, but most women with CAH have typical gender identity.

On page 93, she notes:

This article was the first in a stream of investigations into a possible relationship between biochemical responses to hormone injections (the LH surge response or the positive estrogen feedback effect) and male and female homosexuality and transsexuality. These studies are variously referred to as testing “neuroendocrine function,” “LH surge,” “gonadostat,” or “response to estrogen challenge.” Unlike the “Pepsi Challenge” commercials that were made around the same time as these studies, featuring blinded taste tests between Coke and Pepsi, there were no clear winners in the “Estrogen Challenge” tests. They turned out to not differentiate very well between homosexual and heterosexual men, or conventionally gendered versus transsexual people.

On page 101:

Other traits studied in sexual minorities do not follow these same patterns. For example, consider digit-length ratios, which have now been extensively examined in both men and women. The relative length of the second to the fourth fingers (known as the 2D:4D ratio) tends to be roughly equal in women, but lower in men, reflecting a longer “ring” finger than index finger. There have been seven studies comparing 2D:4D in gay and straight men, and the findings are all over the map. Three studies find higher (feminized) ratios in gay men (McFadden 2002; Lippa 2003; Collaer, Reimers, and Manning 2007), but two other studies found gay men to have lower (hypermasculinized) ratios (Robinson and Manning 2000; Rahman and Wilson 2003) and two found no difference in digit ratios between gay and straight men (Williams et al. 2000; Voracek, Manning, and Ponocny 2005). Among women, two studies found lesbians to have “masculinized” digit ratios (Rahman and Wilson 2003; and Williams et al. 2000), but one small study (Anders and Hampson 2005) and the two largest studies (Lippa 2003; Collaer, Reimers, and Manning 2007) found no difference compared with heterosexual women. Only one study has reported a link between 2D:4D and gender identity, and this found a “feminized” pattern in male-to-female transsexuals, but no difference between female-to-male transsexuals and other genetic females (Schneider, Pickel, and Stalla 2006). In sum, if there is any link between digit ratio and sexual orientation or gender identity, it appears to be very small, and to be limited to (genetic) men. The evidence is similarly mixed for other indicators.

On page 104:

Though no studies have examined the brains of lesbians, one study has

now looked at the brains of male-to-female transsexuals (Zhou et al. 1995; Kruijver et al. 2000). The study, by Dick Swaab’s lab at the Netherlands Brain Institute and conducted in conjunction with Louis Gooren, a renowned clinician-researcher who works with transsexuals, concerns yet another portion of the hypothalamus, the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc). In an initial report, Jiang-Ning Zhou and colleagues simultaneously reported a difference in the volume of the BSTc between nontranssexual men and women, and between transsexual and nontranssexual men. The study is particularly interesting because the scientists had sought to identify “a brain structure that was sexually dimorphic but was not influenced by sexual orientation, as male-to-female transsexuals may be ‘oriented’ to either sex with respect to sexual behavior” (Zhou et al. 1995, 68). (Most other brain organization researchers, especially in the early years, have missed this point about the variability of sexual orientation among transsexuals.) When Zhou and colleagues found that the six transsexuals they studied had, on average, a smaller BSTc volume than other genetic males, they concluded that they had found “a female brain structure in genetically male transsexuals,” which they said supported “the hypothesis that gender identity develops as a result of an interaction between the developing brain and sex hormones” (68). Swaab’s team later refined the analysis, determining that the volume differences they observed reflect a difference in cell number (Kruijver et al. 2000). They also ruled out a relationship between cell number and (male) sexual orientation, because nontranssexual men, regardless of sexual orientation, had almost twice as many of a specific kind of neuron (somatostatin neurons) as women in this brain area, and the number in male-tofemale transsexuals was similar to that of the women.13 (It’s worth emphasizing that the second paper is an elaboration, rather than a new study, because 26 of the 34 subjects in the main analysis were the same as those studied by Zhou et al. (1995). Thus, the finding of a relationship between the BSTc and gender identity has been extended but not replicated.)

On page 261:

Here is the promised return to Hausman’s reflections on the David Reimer story. Though Hausman raises the issue of the natural attitude about gender, she didn’t quite draw the conclusion that the reason David Reimer’s sex reassignment didn’t “take” was that it was recognized as “not the real thing.” Yet all accounts point to a myriad of ways that the natural attitude was ruptured in this case: no one actually believed that the child “was” a girl—they believed (or rather, hoped) that he might be made into a girl. In fact, they believed that, as unlikely as it might be, it was his

only chance of survival. In Colapinto’s fuller account (2001), it is obvious that parents, the broader family, clinicians, and teachers—among whom the child’s original male sex was an open secret—colluded in the heavyhanded enforcement of femininity. The fact that Money recruited transsexual women to try to convince the child to have vaginal construction may well have underscored for Reimer that what was under way was, in fact, a reconstruction of gender, a replacement rather than “the original.”

On page 265:

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual people (those with minority sexual orientations) are mostly not transgender (people who don’t identify with their “birth sex” or the gender in which they were reared), but LGBT communities overlap and have entangled histories. It is tempting to think that the distinction between gender and sexuality has influenced the history and politics of LGBT people, but the influence has been at least as strong in the other direction: political aspirations and intragroup struggles have shaped the very contours of gender and sexuality as these categories became conceptually distinct in the twentieth century. Anthropologist David Valentine (2007) has documented how gay and lesbian activists actively distinguished themselves from “gender deviants” (transsexuals, transvestites, and even such nondiagnosed but socially disdained groups as “fairies” and “bulldaggers”) in order to win social respectability and escape from the stigma of mental illness. This was not simply a cynical political strategy, of course, but fit well with some gay men’s and lesbians’ fundamental sense of being typical men or women in terms of gender.

By now, the copious number of tangential quotes should make the point clear by now: Jordan-Young is far from clearly antagonistic towards trans people. She is amenable to using trans-affirming language, cites a trans-affirming ethnography and refers to trans people as their actual gender where relevant.

Even more, her underlying schema of sex, gender and sexuality that she outlines in chapters 1, 6, 7, 9 is a delightful turn away from the typical TECF analysis. I recommend reading her book in full here.

Daphna Joel

The thorny issue of “brain sex” has centered an empirical conflict within the “transgender debate”; where some (bad) transfeminists promote the idea that our brains have ‘sexes’ that legitimizes trans existence, in contrast to some (also bad in other ways) ‘gender critical’ feminists who insist that brains are not ‘sexed’. To support this assertion, TECFs will cite Daphna Joel’s pioneering word on the brain mosaic, However, they tend to forget anything about her other work: namely the work she does on transgender people. Let’s review.

The first paper that she published on the topic was her 2014 paper Queering gender: studying gender identity in ‘normative’ individuals. In it, she and her colleagues study the formation of gender identity in ‘normative’ (or cis) individuals: specifically how the typical ideas we have about the demarcation between ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ don’t hold up. This article and her later work has become the basis for my article ‘Daphna Joel and the Limits of the Cis-Trans Binary’. In contrast to anti-trans feminists, Joel doesn’t demean or degrade trans lives by prima facie rejecting gender identity, she problematizes the notions we have about the relationality between cis and trans people.

She extends upon these foundations in her 2018 article An Exploration of the Relations Between Self-Reported Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation in an Online Sample of Cisgender Individuals and her 2019 article Self-Reported Gender Identity and Sexuality in an Online Sample of Cisgender, Transgender, and Gender-Diverse Individuals: An Exploratory Study. She then uses this body of research in the synthesis article from a set of feminist scientists ‘The Future of Sex and Gender in Psychology: Five Challenges to the Gender Binary‘, where she presents her research (both in neuroscience and in gender identity) as a challenge to the gender binary.

‘Second Wave’ Feminists

Margaret Atwood

If you’ve ever tried to explain why supporting trans people is not inherently anti-feminist (or is in fact a pro-feminist position), then you’re bound to have seen the pejorative “handmaiden” thrown around. Cis women allies of trans people & cis feminists are accused of being “handmaidens” to the patriarchy because they support trans people, which purportedly reproduces gender roles, or something. The term “handmaiden” has been in use in feminist circles for quite a while, but it was reinvigorated and popularized by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which described a ‘dystopian society‘ where women are organized hierarchically based on their reproductive ability (sound familiar?). The book and its themes are often used as a weapon against trans advocates:

What it boils down to is this: if the handmaid’s tale scenario came to pass- you’d quickly rub off that lipstick and resume your life as a man while the rest of us REAL women would as usual get the shit end of the stick.

You’re not brave. You’re tiresome. — One horse shy (@charlottepil1) May 31, 2019

Despite the fact that Margaret Atwood is explicitly supportive of trans people:

I am not prepared to tell trans women they are less valid | Gaby Hinsliff https://t.co/cZBEAFfwDz — Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) February 9, 2018

In a January 2018 interview with The Guardian, she responded to the question of her status as a feminist with:

It is always – ‘What do you mean by the word?’ For instance, some feminists have historically been against lipstick and letting transgender women into women’s washrooms. Those are not positions I have agreed with.

Later in March that year, she distinguished herself from TECFs by saying:

Tell me what you mean. I don’t sign blank cheques. Do you mean that I’m a 1972 feminist who felt that women were betraying their gender to have sex with men? I’m not that kind of feminist. And I’m not the kind that thinks that trans women are not women. So you tell me what you mean and I’ll tell you if I am one.

And in an April interview with TeenVogue the year before, she explained how trans people were actually built in to the TV/cinema adaptation of her book:

TeenVogue: There’s a foreshadowing scene early on where Ofglen asks Offred if she’d mind walking along the river on the way back home from their errands. Ofglen wants to see the Wall, where the authorities display those who have been executed. When they arrive at the Wall, Ofglen is drawn to the hanging corpse of someone who was LGBTQ. Can you talk about that scene and how you think it fits in with current events and contemporary culture? MA: Absolutely. Gender treachery. That’s what they’re getting Ofglen for in the TV series. And there are people writing this stuff, now! Now they’re doing it! It’s about transgender people mostly, and they don’t exactly call it treachery, but they’re having none of it. You saw what the Trump administration did [to repeal trans people’s protections]. And if you want a take on why people get so popped up about it, it’s because it challenges their roles. So if there’s somebody who can change from being a man to a woman or a woman to a man, what does that make them? From whence derives their authority? When things are so wobbly, it makes them very insecure.

And indeed, the way that TECF discourse functions ends up reproducing the hierarchy and social network aspects of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Remember, a TERF-like-Christian fundamentalist alliance was the background for the world of The Handmaid's Tale — Bob N. (@BobN10495683) May 31, 2018

Slippery Slope: One day @FDRLST publishes Walt Heyer and TERF's, next they're saying Handmaid's Tale is reasonable. https://t.co/hRGJSKgySz — Julie Rei Goldstein (@JulieRei) May 4, 2017

Judith Butler

I know this is a strange choice to include on a list of theorists/people that ‘gender critical’ and trans-antagonistic feminists would cite, but it’s sadly become (or rather became) a part of reality. Back before Judith Butler started doing interviews on how she supports trans people, she was occasionally cited by anti-trans feminists who believed that the observation that gender is a construct somehow inherently leads to the conclusion that trans people are invalid.

Because the internet was not preserved very well and is nearly impossible to search, we don’t have good records of when anti-trans feminists used to do this besides some attestations. For example, Cristan Williams wrote:

I suspect TERFs began to truly hate me when I published this article. Until this article, it wasn’t uncommon for TERFs to use Butler’s Gender Trouble to support their animus.

in reference to Butler’s interview with Williams.

Another trans individual said:

Maybe I greatly overestimate the proportion of TERFs who rely on a perversion of postmodern theories of gender, but I have had multiple TERFs quote Butler at me in a social constructionist context. My impression is that some of them interpret the theory of performative gender in such a shallow way as to suggest that when trans women are feminine, they are deliberately “putting on a performance” to trick cis women into accepting them into women’s spaces and that this reading of performativity exhibits trans women’s artificiality and intrinsic deceitfulness. Edit: Oh! And I remember what gave me the strongest impression. When that ex-TERF did an AMA a few months ago, she and I talked briefly via PM about our mutual love for Butler in particular, and she mentioned that most of her friends while she was a TERF considered postmodern philosophers to be On Their Side, as it were.

There have been several other references to trans antagonistic feminists citing Butler in their anti-trans fury from veterans in the ‘debate’, but this has long since passed because of the aforementioned interviews.

We should note that despite the fact that these interpretations happened before Butler came out and cleared them up, they are very literally gross misinterpretations of even Butler’s original book Gender Trouble. Her theory of performativity does not entail any commitment to an anti-trans theory of gender and several other aspects of the theory directly contradict anti-trans views such as:

Butler’s claim that the sex/gender distinction isn’t very coherent since sex is gendered and ends up being discursively constructed as well.

Butler’s claim that we cannot abolish gender norms; instead we ought to destabilize and denaturalize them to emphasize that they are inherently artifactual.

Martha Nussbaum

Strangely, in the anti-trans feminist’s quest to find theorists to devalidate trans people, after realizing Judith Butler isn’t a transphobe, they turn right to another one of their arch-nemeses: Martha Nussbaum. Martha Nussbaum wrote a polemic of Judith Butler’s research in 1999 called The Professor of Parody, which has quickly become a favorite among anyone who derives pleasure from attributing any pro-trans views to “postmodernism” or “queer theory”, including and especially TECFs. Despite the fact that this article is a caricature of Butler’s views that was written when Butler was only a nascent philosopher, it has become a classic against anyone unwilling to read the original text and judge for themselves.

Ironically, the author of the very text, Martha Nussbaum, has written in favor of some very non-‘gender-critical-anti-trans-radical-feminist’ points of view: namely her academic defense of sex work. Because “radical feminism” has become almost synonymous with anti-porn and anti-“prostitution” feminism, it would be hard to present a defense of Nussbaum as a radical feminist professor rather than an unwilling ally against the devil of “Kweer Theory”. She is best-known as a ‘liberal feminist’ (or fun feminist in the TECF vocabulary) and as one of the main feminist critics of feminist philosophy as a distinct entity.

Beyond her detailed defense of ‘taking money for bodily services‘ that would incense anti-trans feminists, she has also come out in favor of trans rights, at least subliminally. In her recent book ‘Monarchy of Fear‘, she said:

“African-Americans were being lynched in the south. Communists were losing their jobs. Women were just barely beginning to enter prestigious universities and the work force … sexual harassment was a ubiquitous offense … Jews could not win partnerships in major law firms. Gays and lesbians, criminals under law, were almost always in the closet. People with disabilities had no rights to public space and public education. Transgender was a category that had … no name.”

In a 2017 response, she noted:

I do agree strongly that an active citizenry is crucial, and that women’s solidarity is also very important as one part of active citizenship. However, I think that consumer movements are often more important than protest marches, and that they are one tool that concerned women and men can use and have used in the US to good effect. The baneful anti-transgender law in North Carolina was derailed largely through industrial boycotts spurred on by consumers, and there are many other similar examples. We need to be active on many fronts, not disdaining the market!

And in a 2017 interview, she stated:

Another example is bullying and harassment of gay, lesbian, and transgender children in schools. Their emotional life is warped in a very fundamental way when their peers and teachers do not show respect for them. Schools have improved a lot, but there is still a huge amount of work to be done. Disability is a similar issue: individuals are emotionally crushed by insult and stigma. So let’s get rid of that behavior. I do not think that it is too intrusive to ask all public school teachers to treat all their students with respect and to enforce norms of respect in the classroom. I realize some Americans think this is intrusive, but then they used to think that racial integration was too intrusive. In short: law protects our equal dignity and emotional health in many fundamental ways, and it should do this job better.

In sum, anti-trans feminists have made strange bedfellows in their attempt to construct a programme of critiques against the myriad of pro-trans writers.

Andrea Dworkin

Among the lengthy list of radical feminists that TECFs have appropriated is the most prominent of them all: Andrea Dworkin.

She has been cited as “the radical, visionary feminist we need in our terrible times” by Julie Bindel, cited to bolster anti-trans arguments, called a ‘hero’ by anti-trans feminists, and is cited in about just every way.

Despite this, she is less-known as being supportive of trans people, to the extent where people are surprised when it quotes from her are presented.

Have you tried reading Dworkin? She literally wrote about this. Anything that's not up to snuff w.r.t. contemporary trans theory is due to lack of theorizing, not because she held any TERFy position such as the one you outline. She suggested unconditional support for trans people pic.twitter.com/wOJgUw0dpa — Waldorf (@waldorfww) June 15, 2019

Her partner John Stoltenberg wrote an article (originally titled “Andrea Dworkin on Living Beyond Gender”) about how Andrea Dworkin was, in fact, inclusive of trans people. As noted in my article on radical feminism, she (and a number of other ‘second wave’ feminists) had an alternative conceptualization of the relation of sex (class[es]) and gender that demonstrated their incoherence.

Conclusion

Anti-trans feminists have an unpopular position: they try to position themself on the left while simultaneously taking reactionary positions. As such, they have cobbled together an incoherent set of positions from varying authors: those who agree with them on a select number of issues, but broadly disagree elsewhere. Whether it is feminists who are not anti-trans or right-wing anti-feminists, the contradiction of their citations echoes loudly to anyone educated in their sources. Beyond people like Andrea Dworkin and Leonard Sax, they have cited numerous other figures like Kimberle Crenshaw, Angela Davis, and others who disagree with their positions. It’s difficult to fit all of these into a single article, so I leave with a single conclusion: once we remove the reactionaries and pro-trans feminists from the list, there isn’t an academic basis for the anti-trans feminist point of view. There’s, of course, a right-wing anti-feminist position they can take (and that we’ve slowly started to see appeals to), but it is a contradiction to consider oneself ‘on the left’ and simultaneously oppose trans rights.