So what/if/TERF is a slur
| Irrelevant Comment: “"TERF" is a slur.” |
Claim
- "TERF is an abusive term, it's meant as an insult to denigrate and silence women." [...] "It was coined to purposefully insult and discredit Radical Feminists so they could be excluded & silenced." — FeministRoar@Twitter, 2013-04-23 (archive.org)
- "[Samantha] Allen materially misrepresents the positions taken by the women she references in her article. Allen actually calls for more people to recognize radical feminists as a hate group and then pointedly adopts the term Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) to refer to them throughout the article. Make no mistake, this is a slur. TERF is not meant to be explanatory, but insulting. These characterizations are hyperbolic, misleading, and ultimately defamatory. They do nothing but escalate the vitriol and fail to advance the conversation in any way." — Elizabeth Hungerford, 2013-08-02, via
Reality
TERF is an acronym which stands for "trans-exclusionary radical feminist", i.e. people who both identify as radical feminists and argue that trans women are not women. Its coinage is credited to radical feminist Viv Smythe as a way of distinguishing radfems who were accepting of transness from those who were hostile towards it.
Opponents of the term claim that those who use it are misrepresenting the views of its target, but as it is only ever applied to those (whether self-identified as feminists or not) who wish to exclude trans women from womanhood, it remains primarily a descriptive term (not unnecessary) and one from which there is an escape (by renouncing either radical feminism or trans-exclusionism, or both); it thus fails both of the tests for "slur".
Caveat
The only sense in which it is derogatory is in that it refers to a harmful and inaccurate set of beliefs, from which any compassionate person would want to distance themselves. Calling someone a TERF is an insult in much the same way that calling someone a polluter or a fascist is an insult.
If one holds this definition of "slur", then it's unclear why this would be a problem; giving labels to specific types of toxic behavior is part of how a healthy society contains and limits it, and is thus not just acceptable but socially beneficial. We would not want to ban terms like "Nazi" or "racist" just because they have highly negative connotations and can be used as put-downs; indeed, their power to shame is part of their value.