>>2728121The definition I use for a TERF would not apply to most of society. Most of society has a sort of background transphobia that melts on contact with an actual person, much like homophobia a little while ago, or indeed like most ambient racism. ("they're all like that, aren't they? well, obviously i don't mean
you")
TERFism is a much more active dislike than that, it is the kind of thing that would motivate you to be actually nasty. It is like active white nationalism against the generic prejudices i've just mentioned
Because TERFs have their own ideolect, it's even easy to define them by how they speak. "Tr*nny" is just a transphobic slur and could be said by any member of the public. Someone who says "gender critical", "transhumanist", "AGP", etc, is an extremely online TERF freak. Most of the British public may indulge the former, but not the latter.
It's a red line because it is the best divider between people of certain dispositions. If you are low openness and low agreeableness, you will hate trans people (not open to them breaking social convention, not agreeable enough to just stay quiet) and you will not get on with everyone else. The dispositional problem is a much bigger one than the political issue, because it means you can't handwave it away. The low agreeableness TERF will not control their power level, while the high-openness, high-agreeableness pro-trans person will not accept closed mindedness or violation of their expectation that people behave agreeably. These are not people who would get along even if god himself came down and solved the problem.
p.s. In practice, the wreckers are always TERFs. They are dispositionally suited to actual wrecking (e.g. not just starting drama on twitter) and they've got people who'll fund their wrecking campaigns. They wrecked the SNP, and they're currently trying to wreck the Greens. (They're suing the party because a TERF stall wasn't allowed at the last Green conference. If they win, perhaps they'll set a precedent that parties should have no say whatsoever on their policies and the oil industry should also be allowed a stall, due to their equality act protected belief that oil is ontologically wonderful…)
For all the whining of Twitter users, pro-trans people are regularly willing to compromise in practice. (of course they are, they're
agreeable)
Scotland is, as always, a good test case here: Most trans people in Scotland are tacitly hoping for a SNP government to win the next Scottish election, and will vote SNP in their constituency and Green on the party list knowing it will lead to that end, even though the SNP has quietly thrown them under the bus while overseeing a 200+ year waiting list for the glasgow gender clinic. Meanwhile, TERF nationalists will advocate voting for unionist parties alongside their TERF unionist allies because the SNP hasn't grovelled to them and become a TERF party itself.
The "trans rights" voter can be compromised down to "just don't say total transhumanist death", the "my equality act protected philosophical belief in total transhumanist death" voter is implacable.