What would TERFs do if there weren't such a thing as being transgender? Who would be their target?
11.06.2025 02:11
This was a prevailing narrative in feminist circles in the 70s and 80s, and the wave of sex-positive feminism post-1980s was in a lot of ways a reaction against the sex-negative, sex-work-negative “feminism” of people like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. (There’s an element of “women should be free to choose whatever they want, as long as they choose what we think they should choose” that was incredibly common in 1970s feminism, especially about sex, and it eventually got up people’s noses.)
Easy question, easy answer: sex workers.
Trans-exclusionary “feminists” today still retain that anti-sex, anti-sex-work streak. They’re largely the same people—not completely so, Catharine MacKinnon has supported trans rights, despite her sex-negative and rabid anti-sex-worker views—and you’ll find a lot of sex-workers-negative thought amongst anti-trans activists.
Radical feminists have a long, ignoble, sordid history of going after sex workers. The classic narrative is: Women don’t like sex, at least not with men. No woman anywhere would ever, ever voluntarily choose sex work. All sex workers are coerced, invariably by men. Any woman who says she does sex work voluntarily is a liar or so brainwashed by the patriarchy she’s effectively incapable of making a rational decision. All sex workers are victims, and the one who don’t acknowledge their victim hood are part of the problem.