Hey folks, let's talk about Catholic nuns, Reagan and the stripping of healthcare from trans people during the 80's, and how TERFs were always aligned to the right, arming them with arguments and rhetoric to better discriminate against trans people.

Now, it shouldn't be any news to people that the Reagan administration did an incredible amount of harm to LGBT folks, but it wasn't just the AIDS crisis. Up until the 80's, trans people could access health insurance.

Then Reagan happened.

Federal health insurance was stripped away and private healthcare companies took this as precedent to strip coverage of trans people themselves, it had a tremendously damaging knock-on effect.

This meant that if you accessed any trans-related healthcare, you couldn't be insured.

The precursor to this was a report that was written for the Reagan administration called "Technology on the Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery" which outright called for the elimination of transsexualism. This was the basis for what Reagan did to trans people.

The person who wrote that report was not a medical doctor with any experience in treating trans people, but rather a former Catholic nun and author of "The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male" Janice Raymond.

Read more about this here: http://transadvocate.com/fact-checking-janice-raymond-the-nchct-report_n_14554.htm

Raymond's Transsexual Empire is perhaps the most foundational work in establishing trans exclusionary radical feminism as a distinct ideology, and along with Catholic theologian Mary Daly, she helped to foment this particular strain of 'lockstep with conservatism' feminism.

Now I keep mentioning religion, because this is the key to understanding TERF ideology. Raymond being a former Catholic nun belonging to the Sisters of Mercy sect, and Daly's education being from Catholic church run university CUA, University of Fribourg, and St. Mary's.

It is through a Catholic lens you need to view TERF ideology. Both Janice Raymond and Mary Daly were lesbian feminists, but their brand of feminism was just accepting enough that they didn't hate themselves for their attraction to women, while retaining a Catholic outlook.

This is why we see TERFs who are all but conservative Christians in that they are anti-sex work, anti-pornography, and prize chasteness and celibacy, except for being accepting of lesbianism. It is an ideology informed by its Catholic roots.

When I say they prize celibacy, I'm refering to what they call "political lesbianism" which does not actually involve lesbian sexuality in any meaningful sense, but rather the lack of sexual contact with men. It is to refrain from sexual intercourse with men for political reasons

It's a reductive, patriarchal view of lesbian sexuality in the sense that it views heterosexual intercourse as sex, but paints lesbian intercourse as "not sex" and co-opts lesbianism as a political identity, not a sexuality. To be "politically lesbian" is to be celibate.

We see this mirrored in the TERF definition of rape, the belief that only men can rape women, only "PIV" sex (literally "Penis In Vagina") counts because only that intercourse can result in a child, and therefore women cannot rape women and men cannot rape men; it's not "PIV"

From this point of view, it follows that "PIV" is the only real sexual intercourse, and a view of lesbian sexuality has been built up as a lack of sex. In this sense it is a Catholic view of sexuality that has been internalised by the ideology.

Which brings us to chastity.

When I say that TERFs value chastity, what I'm refering to is the obsession with "Gold Star" lesbians, that is women who have never had sexual contact with men. In this light lesbian sexuality is viewed as a lack of something, rather than an orientation or attraction.

This ordering of lesbians into "gold star" or not categories shows us the inherited Catholic guilt at the core of TERF ideology. "Gold star" lesbians are untainted in this framework, prized as virginal in a sense, because lesbian sexuality doesn't count as "real" (PIV) sex.

So it is in this light that we need to understand TERFism, as a strain of "feminism" that has its roots in patriarchal, Catholic theology, and has an extremely reductive, patriarchal view of sexuality. That this is why it aligns consistently with the right wing.

It is in this light how we can understand how a misogynistic bigot like Greer is considered a feminist, all the while she chides the Me Too movement for whingeing, and assigning blame to women for opening their legs in the first place.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/23/germaine-greer-criticises-whingeing-metoo-movement

None of what Greer has said is out of place if you have such a reductive and patriarchal view of sex, and view women's sexuality as something to be kept chaste. "It's your fault for spreading your legs" is exactly what your average conservative Christian would say.

Anyway, if you like what I write, and feel like giving me a little tip, I have a Ko-fi page where you can support me. I'll probably spend it on more furry art. :3 http://ko-fi.com/caseyexplosion 

As an addendum, this is also why we see TERFs act so flippantly towards issues such as access to reproductive healthcare, like so: https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/970735815096717314?s=19

I'm tacking this on here. TERFs upholding Catholic power structures with demands that the church be ignored. "Stop talking about it" https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/972829126783578114?s=19