The Secret Internet of TERFs

Updated at 1:56 p.m. ET on Dec. 8, 2020.

Mary Kate Fain, a 27-year-old engineer and writer living in Houston, has always considered herself a feminist. Growing up, she told me, she had a pretty standard set of progressive values—her primary focus was animal rights, and her feminism was reflexive, mainstream. In college, however, her ideas about feminism shifted. After volunteering at a domestic-violence shelter and experiencing an abusive relationship herself, she committed to some of the radical feminist ideology most often affiliated with the second-wave icon Andrea Dworkin, which is focused on the roots and prevalence of male violence. Eventually, her beliefs radicalized further: She became convinced that trans women are men and trans-rights activism is just another weapon of the patriarchy.*

Like many, Fain’s political transformation was helped along by the internet. Though she’d never had much use for social media before, on Reddit she found a forum—or “subreddit”—where tens of thousands of members, predominantly women, were devoted to the insistence that trans women are not women. “I first found the community while I was still looking for answers,” Fain said. These women were asking the same questions that she was, going through the same uncomfortable situations with their friends, feeling the same moment of disenchantment. They had experienced the same guilt over breaking with their communities, and now they had one another.

Among other online feminists, the common name for this group Fain found is “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or TERFs. The name the community has chosen for itself is the somewhat more palatable “gender critical,” though, as other feminists often point out, that name means nothing; all feminism is critical of gender. TERFs constitute “a minority of a minority of feminists,” says Grace Lavery, and writer. Nevertheless, this tiny group has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the past several years, in large part thanks to social-media platforms. Anti-trans feminists have a presence in many mainstream online spaces, including , “radfem” Tumblr, the Black women’s beauty forum , and the British parenting forum .