Through an examination of the historical record of US radical feminist and TERF discourses, including first-hand accounts, this article considers how the ontological framework that inspires TERF rhetoric and behavior has functioned as a cycle of moral fulfillment, even as it necessitates the eradication of trans bodies. Taken together, these form a self-referential ideology that functions to protect an essentialist ontology, which reliably harms cisgender, transgender, and feminist communities. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) make use of an ethical, moralistic framework to support specific rhetoric and behavior. The results demonstrate how transgender politics and lives are constructed by a Eurocentric hegemonic gender order where boundary-making around essentialist notions of womanhood promote coercive, violent colonial constructs of gender and sex. This framework provides me with a way to unpack the constructed realities of transgender people in order to think critically about the origins of gender politics in the UK to reveal a legacy of colonialism which is present in the gender critical feminist discourse. Using a feminist critical discourse analysis methodology, I analyze 16 different texts from prominent gender critical voices in the UK to examine the question: how is our view of trans(gender) politics and people shaped by gender critical feminist discourse? In order to more completely understand the systems of oppression that construct our gendered reality in the Western world and how they shape transgender experiences and how we understand them, I take a decolonial feminist approach to discussing the results by examining them through the coloniality of gender. Despite great work by these scholars, no effort has been made to understand the importance of colonialism in maintaining domination of sex, gender, and intersubjectivity. Through an extensive literature review of scholarship on the discursive battles in feminism over the concepts of gender and sex, and transgender people’s place within the greater feminist movement, I discuss the implications of the gender critical feminist movement on transgender lives and rights.
Little is known outside of transgender activist circles and scholarship about the impact this movement is having on trans(gender) politics and transgender lives, and so this thesis project hopes to bring greater awareness to the subject within studies of European societies in sociology. The UK is currently experiencing a backlash against transgender rights coming from a group of people calling themselves gender critical feminists, who debate the existence of transgender people and what political and social rights they should be afforded.
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