Excellent piece, and a handy reminder of rhetorical basics! Listening I can do, but I'm still searching for an effective way of engaging with older child-free TERFs (that's otherwise reasonable people whose “legitimate concerns” aren't answerable to actual evidence, not JKR-alikes lost in multiple interlocking rabbitholes). My own femini…
Excellent piece, and a handy reminder of rhetorical basics! Listening I can do, but I'm still searching for an effective way of engaging with older child-free TERFs (that's otherwise reasonable people whose “legitimate concerns” aren't answerable to actual evidence, not JKR-alikes lost in multiple interlocking rabbitholes). My own feminism was shaped in part by Dworkin and Daly back in the early 80s, but there are too many cis women from that generation who never found a path out of womb-centric gender-essentialism 😢
TERFs are radicalized. They view anyone supportive of trans rights as a lunatic.
That situation is ✨arhetorical✨. You cannot persuade them.
When a person has radicalized themselves to the point of joining a hate group--and TERFs are by definition (and are recognized by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center as being) a hate group, as they exist exclusively to harass trans people--the only way out for them is for them to decide, on their own, to deradicalize. Then, and only then, can you make a difference.
Excellent piece, and a handy reminder of rhetorical basics! Listening I can do, but I'm still searching for an effective way of engaging with older child-free TERFs (that's otherwise reasonable people whose “legitimate concerns” aren't answerable to actual evidence, not JKR-alikes lost in multiple interlocking rabbitholes). My own feminism was shaped in part by Dworkin and Daly back in the early 80s, but there are too many cis women from that generation who never found a path out of womb-centric gender-essentialism 😢
TERFs are radicalized. They view anyone supportive of trans rights as a lunatic.
That situation is ✨arhetorical✨. You cannot persuade them.
When a person has radicalized themselves to the point of joining a hate group--and TERFs are by definition (and are recognized by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center as being) a hate group, as they exist exclusively to harass trans people--the only way out for them is for them to decide, on their own, to deradicalize. Then, and only then, can you make a difference.