#TERFisaslur, eh? I began encountering the “TERF is a slur” slogan in 2013, around a year after the political Right experienced a measure of success with its 2012 “homophobe is a slur” campaign.

In 2012, the Right said that when news covered anti-queer hate, the term “homophobia” shouldn't be used to describe the very specific type of anti-queer hate and oppression faced by LGBTQIA people because the term was a slur. https://vimeo.com/37433153 

By the end of 2012, the @AP banned the term “homophobe” from its news coverage and right-wing religious groups were working to ban the term in anti-bullying school materials because, they claimed, “homophobe” was a “made-up” term that promotes “hate and contempt for Christians.”

After “homophobe” and “homophobia” were deemed by a heteronormative culture to be too toxic to use, the queer community’s languaging of the hate it faced each day disappeared from most mainstream media use.

Sometime in 2013, sex essentialists who self-identify as “radical feminists” began pushing the slogans, “TERF is a slur” and “Cis is a slur” on social media and blog posts.

Around this time, TERFs began pushing the false history that “TERF” was coined by trans people as a slur. Note how this rhetoric closely mimics the 2012 right-wing rhetoric that “homophobe” was a “made-up” term that promotes “hate and contempt for Christians.”

In a 2014 New Yorker article subtitled, "The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism", @michelleinbklyn brought the idea that “TERF” was a slur into the mainstream.

While @JuliaSerano was interviewed by @michelleinbklyn for the story and took pains to explain the politics behind the “TERF is a slur” slogan, Goldberg chose to quash that information in her article. Writing for the Advocate, Serano addressed this bias: https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/08/05/op-ed-open-letter-new-yorker

In a follow-up piece on her own blog, @JuliaSerano described the personal effect of @michelleinbklyn’s bias:

http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/08/final-thoughts-on-that-michelle.html

By 2015, the “cis is a slur” campaign was dealt a critical blow when the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added the term to its dictionary. Since then, the “cis is a slur” campaign has largely evaporated while activity around the “TERF is a slur” campaign redoubled in 2016:

Since 2013, I’ve most often encountered the “TERF is a slur” slogan used in conjunction with a screenshot of a social media post such as:

certainly, violent statements calling for death is wrong. While such violent rhetoric should be condemned, does the existence of such rhetoric validate the “TERF is a slur” slogan? Let’s review how other feminist terms are used in social media discourse:

Since some people on Twitter post that racists and homophobes should be killed, does that mean that these terms are also slurs? Or, does it merely mean that these (and numerous other) terms can be used as slurs by some people sometimes?

What about when an anti-gay media reports that anti-gay activists (referred to as “street preachers” in homophobic media sources) were called “homophobes” and beaten by “NOH8” activists?

In thinking about the nexus of GamerGate & the alt-right, how are feminists portrayed? Practically any user of social media will know the answer. Are misogynists correct when they assert that “misogynist is a slur”? From the now-banned r/GenderCrittical:

But do TERFs apply the same linguistic standards they use for themselves on pro-trans equality movements?

This is how is “TERF” is portrayed by sites run by TERFs:

"Hate Speech" - which is ironic coming from Meghan Murphy, who just lost her lawsuit trying to force Twitter to host her actual hate speech: https://twitter.com/transadvocate/status/1362133409632411650

In a @splcenter HateWatch report, they remarked on a disturbing trend they’ve observed among right-wing hate groups: a tendency to recruit sex essentialist LGB and self-identified feminists to spread alt-right anti-trans ideology:

During a recent right-wing convention, the executive director of Concerned Parents and Educators of Fairfax County, Meg Kilgannon described how the political right is recruiting feminists and LGB people:

And @SPLC continues:

And remember the name Kaeley Triller Haver.

Here's some really ironic background on Kaeley Triller Haver: https://twitter.com/transadvocate/status/912913214509330433

Miriam Ben-Shalom, a TERF, was invited to speak at the Heritage Foundation with Kaeley Triller Haver:

Miriam Ben-Shalom, co-founder of the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition appeared with the Communications Director for the Just Want Privacy Campaign in Washington State, Kaeley Triller Haver.

Also on the Heritage Foundation’s panel were board members of (as the Heritage Foundation asserts) “the Women’s Liberation Front (WOLF), the radical feminist organization that filed a lawsuit against the Obama Administration to restore Title IX rights to women and girls.”

WoLF works with the notoriously "feminist" Proud Boys, is funded by anti-abortion groups, collaborates with anti-LBGT lawsuits, has protested against Women's rights, and RAISES FUNDS FOR RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM

If like “homophobe” and “homophobia,” make-it-a-slur campaigns continue to remove queer and feminist language from the lexicon available to us, our ability to language our experience will be confined to the parameters anti-equality activists set for us. Is that acceptable?

The TERF academic, Janice Raymond asserted that “the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence” and that people like me have a “deeply decaying self” that wasn’t human in the way she herself was.

JR said that people like me were merely a “synthetic product.” She went on to produce 1/3 of the work that led to the revocation of trans care for both public and private insurance. How much suffering is attributable to Raymond’s attempt to mandate transness out of existence?

You can find the answer in this peer-reviewed paper:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038026120938292

From the above paper on where TERF actually came from:

There is a truth about whether “TERF is a slur.”

Does removing TERF in the same way Homophobia was removed harm our ability to name a particular type of hate?

How many hours, days, weeks, months, and years are wasted in TERF's decades-long war against trans people and non-TERF feminist communities? #TERFlogic

So, hopefully, we can better understand why American evangelical religious nationalists are funding TERFs in America and the UK:

JK Rowling's "transphobic attacks" are damaging LGBT+ rights in UK, warns report. https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/02/17/ilga-europe-jk-rowling-anti-trans-rhetoric-annual-review-transphobia-uk/