Preface to a Twenty-Volume Dave Chappelle Review, Part the Third

Chappelle Joins Team TERF

Times of rapid cultural change alter the connotations and meanings of words in ways that can be illuminating to trace. Back in 2014, Michelle Goldberg, writing in the New Yorker, described the sectarian split within the feminist movement pitting those resistant to the inclusion of transgender women within female-only spaces against an aggressive coalition of transgender activists who sought to use protest and deplatforming tactics to shut the former down. She characterized the term used to the refer to the former group — “terf” — in a parenthetical aside , written with due circumspection:

"(terf stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” The term can be useful for making a distinction with radical feminists who do not share the same position, but those at whom it is directed consider it a slur.)"

She went on to describe the sort of rhetoric to which terfs are routinely subjected by transgender activists:

"Abusive posts proliferated on Twitter and, especially, Tumblr. One read, “/kill/terfs 2K14.” Another suggested, “how about ‘slowly and horrendously murder terfs in saw-like torture machines and contraptions’ 2K14.” A young blogger holding a knife posted a selfie with the caption “Fetch me a terf.”

The inclusion of these details, sympathetic to the figures then in the process of being expelled from a progressive consensus of which they had once been an important part, were all in keeping with the expected qualities of nonfiction American writing that still obtained at the time: a willingness to credit both sides of an impassioned controversy with a right to their position; a more than token effort to portray how it looked like from both sides of the conflict, a certain lightness of touch that signaled impartial curiosity. (There is also the suggestion here, perhaps — but I won’t endanger her by making a positive claim — that Goldberg isn’t entirely unpersuaded by all aspects of the terf argument.) This is the normative culture of truth-seeking that was the only one most of the readers drawn to this Substack knew prior to its replacement throughout the Western world. We are here to chronicle its disappearance.

Goldberg was surveying what was then still understood to be a matter of curiosity regarding a rather arcane internecine quarrel between two different varieties of counter-cultural activist. The attitude already strikes the contemporary reader as one belonging to the Before Times. Today we know what Goldberg couldn’t quite see as recently as 2014, that the exacerbated frenzies endemic to the progressive activist counter-culture would subsume the wider culture.

She goes on to refer a key lexical distinction that simply isn’t done anymore. “The very word “transgender,” she writes, “which first came into wide use in the nineteen-nineties, encompasses far more people than the term “transsexual” did.”

Already the observation eschews the reifying dynamic to which we have all since been subject on a ever-widening swathe of subjects — the insistence that today’s ideological directives or newly manufactured identity categories have always existed and always existed in the precisely the form we specify at any given moment. To admit of drastic changes in the authorized understanding, to refer to the contingent conditions that gave rise to them — which all of us observed over the past few years — is to deprive them of the monopoly on truth and decency that they now claim.

Goldberg goes on:

“It includes not just the small number of people who seek gender-reassignment surgery—according to frequently cited estimates, about one in thirty thousand men and one in a hundred thousand women—but also those who take hormones, or who simply identify with the opposite gender, or, in some cases, with both or with neither. (According to the National Center survey, most trans women have taken female hormones, but only about a quarter of them have had genital surgery.) The elasticity of the term “transgender” has forced a rethinking of what sex and gender mean; at least in progressive circles, what’s determinative isn’t people’s chromosomes or their genitals or the way that they were brought up but how they see themselves. “

Goldberg doesn’t venture a criticism of “rethinking of what sex and gender mean” or quite cast a cocked eyebrow at the elevation of “how they see themselves” over chromosomal and morphological fact. But her forthright statement of the premise takes us much of the way there. Plainly stated without the buttonholing rhetoric in which the subject is now invariably presented, the propositions seem open to question, subject to interrogation, things we can deliberate over rather than merely listen and learn and defer and genuflect. Some disagreeable souls might even be willing to venture that they are not true.

In 2019, USA Today, the national daily newspaper founded in the 1980's to address the American masses through simple language and colorful illustrations, published an explainer describing the online controversy incited by a series of tweets posted by the author J.K. Rowling, the world's wealthiest author, and Britain's only female billionaire. The definition was both peremptory in tone and classically question-begging in its structure:

"TERF is an acronym that stands for trans exclusionary radical feminists. The term describes feminists who are transphobic."

The definition is question-begging in that it assumes the thing that needs to be demonstrated — that feminists who want to maintain sex-segregated spaces and sustain a distinction between those who were born as women and those who would later come to “identify” as women are motivated by a form of bigotry called “transphobia.” The term is itself a recently-circulated neologism deployed as a weapon against dissenters, one that seems all the more charged with anathematizing power for being newly minted — perhaps, one suspects, because of that very novelty. For the thing that would not ordinarily survive on its own power will require top-down repressive power to sustain it — and all the more repression will be required in proportion to the resistance it is likely to encounter, being at a minimum, starkly at odds with popular intuitions.

The enormous power of the term rests both in its dual valence as a form of personal dislike or misunderstanding for a category of person, which surely exists, but also in its impersonal, structural dimension. Who can after all deny that we live in a world made by and for the “cisgendered,” a term coined in the 2000’s to name the newly manufactured oppressor class encompassed 99.5 percent of humanity, or that virtually everything that exists is therefore shot through with the “violence and oppression” that must by necessity attend such a world?