TERFS TAKE BACK
December 5, 2021
On December 1, 2021, ten women stood outside the U.S. Supreme Court to take a stand for the right of women and girls to terminate pregnancies. The Court was hearing oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health – a case that could very likely spell the end of Roe v. Wade (and, perhaps eventually, earlier cases that upheld women’s right to birth control).
To be clear, if the Court overturns Roe v. Wade (which most commentators think it will do), abortion will not automatically be illegal throughout the U.S. Instead, it will be up to individual states to decide whether women and girls ought to have autonomy over our own bodies. Many states will likely answer that question in the negative. The threat that this will pose to women’s autonomy and liberty could not be more dire.
Predictably, the lines were largely drawn between liberals, who were there to fight for abortion rights, and conservatives, who were there to oppose them.
But one group stood out – TERFs (“Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” or, if you prefer, “Totally Excellent Radical Feminists” or “Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools”). The women who today are called “TERFs” (also known as second-wave feminists) have always been the only women who consistently prioritize women’s needs and interests. There are no other feminists.
The TERFs standing up for abortion rights at the Supreme Court on December 1 held signs that said things like this:
And this:
We chanted:
Who are we?
TERFs!
Who do we fight for?
Women and girls!
And:
WE ARE ADULT HUMAN FEMALES!
WE WANT OUR SEX-BASED RIGHTS!
We were all proud to stand up for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls.
We got the typical reaction from conservatives – they surrounded us with chants of “HEY HEY, HO HO, ROE v. WADE HAS GOT TO GO!” Because they had bigger and louder microphones, their chants drowned us out and we had to retreat. No matter, we knew that our main purpose in being there was making a point not only that Roe v. Wade must remain good law, but also that abortion is a right that only women and girls need.
Interestingly, there were also people chanting things like “TRANS RIGHTS START AT CONCEPTION!” and “PRO-TRANS, PRO-VEGAN, PRO-LIFE!” It appears that the “gender identity” proponents are colonizing the right as well as the left. There is nothing that the “gender identity” industry won’t consume.
So we stuck mainly to the liberal side (Court police had separated the two groups from each other – those in favor of abortion rights and those opposed). And the liberal side was where things got interesting anyway. When we chanted “ONLY WOMEN NEED ABORTIONS!” a group of liberals got right up in our faces and screamed “TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN!”
This is how far down the post-modernist rabbit hole the left has gone today: Even when standing before the Supreme Court to fight for abortion rights, they COMPLETELY jettisoned their commitment to abortion rights in order to cape for men. Their commitment to abortion rights went right out the window so they could spew the typical lie that some men are women if they say they are. They, even more than the conservatives, are the reason that women are losing today.
But many women thanked us for saying what we said. We have no way of knowing for certain, but it is highly likely that we peaked more than a few liberal women that day.
The TERFs standing up for abortion rights were exclusively women. It should be widely understood that only women ought to have a say in what we do with our bodies. This should be obvious, despite the fact that Roe v. Wade was decided by nine male justices. Women’s bodies do not exist to serve the interests of men.
We didn’t get as much news coverage as we had hoped, but we got some. For example, we appear in this PBS segment for about two seconds, at 22 seconds in.
The title of this post is “TERFs Take Back” because we called our group “TERFs Take Back Abortion Rights,” and we think that “TERFs Take Back” is good framing for other issues too. Because we are going to have to keep doing this – until liberals wake up to the horror that is the “gender identity” industry, until liberals stop peddling lies about the material reality of sex, until women stop ceding our ground to men who want to colonize our sex and seize our existence, it is only TERFs who will truly have the backs of women and girls.
At this moment in time, TERFs are the only true feminists.