Accelerationist TERF War Strategy
Accelerationist TERF War Strategy
The card they dare not play
Every day for the past week around 10 AM Eastern Standard Time, the word “TERFs” trends on Twitter. That’s right around teatime in the UK, home of JK Rowling, and around 7 AM on the United States Progressive Coast. The TERF Wars seem to have overtaken even guns in the mind of the modern social media egregores, so for a culture war agnostic commentator publication like HWFO, it seems reasonable to pick these apart and discuss a current development, prognosticate how it may play forward, and talk about the elephant in the room. The TERFs could win in a year by going accelerationist and simply force feeding the woke what they claim to actually want.
Nutshell Summary
Woke ideology states that “marginalized” classes according to the Kimberle Crenshaw Intersectionality Matrix should be granted more social virtue than “privileged” classes, to compensate for the damage society does to them by marginalizing them. They also state that anyone can identify as a marginalized class, unless that class is “race,” in which case you get Dolezalled. Since identifying as black is now off the table, the most common self-identification for woke practitioners to increase their social value is “queer,” and the woke grant the most virtue of all to transgender people since transgenders are so far out on the margins socially.
Now trans self-identification is skyrocketing, and questioning the ideology that gender is a social construct and may instead be related to biology is blasphemy within woke culture. “Trans women are women” is the slogan that defines the war. The battle lines of this culture war front range from sex segregated school bathrooms to sex segregated sports to Supreme Court nominations, where even a future member of the high court is not permitted to say what a “woman” is without a PhD in human biology.
The group acting against this corner of woke dogma are known as “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists,” or TERFs. This was originally a derogatory term developed by the woke to shame people who push back against transgender ideology, but in 2022 as the pendulum has begun to swing back, the TERFs are starting to adopt this moniker with pride and rebrand it.
And because conflict theorists push culture war into every front available, using any tool available, it hit the United States Department of Agriculture on May 5th of this year.
TERF Wars Hit the USDA
In a very confusingly worded Press Release 0100.22, the USDA stated that they are going to blend Title IX, SNAP, and the Supreme Court decision Bostock v Clayton County, into an action intended to influence how local school systems approach this culture war battleground. This is either good or bad depending on your stance within the TERF Wars, and we will highlight portions of the press release here for interpretation.
WASHINGTON, May 5, 2022 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) announced today that it will interpret the prohibition on discrimination based on sex found in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and in the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008, as amended, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the Food Stamp Program (7 USC § 2011 et seq.), to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Under the leadership of the Biden-Harris Administration, USDA and FNS are issuing this interpretation to help ensure its programs are open, accessible and help promote food and nutrition security, regardless of demographics.
[…]
As a result, state and local agencies, program operators and sponsors that receive funds from FNS must investigate allegations of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Those organizations must also update their non-discrimination policies and signage to include prohibitions against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
This policy change could be interpreted and implemented in several different ways. It could mean that any school receiving SNAP funds to feed poor children must investigate instances where gay kids got bullied. Most Americans probably agree with that. But it could also mean that the USDA could demand signage promoting woke transgender ideology in kindergartens, which is far less popular and against the law in several states. It could further mean that any school who refuses to allow students to switch bathrooms based on their current “gender identity” is in violation of the new USDA protocol, which is one of the issues that flipped Virginia red in the most recent election. It could also mean that any school who prohibits biological males from participating on girls sports teams is similarly in violation of their interpretation of Title IX.
Further, the only enforcement mechanism the USDA has with this policy is to withhold SNAP funds. There’s no guarantee things slide this far, but the policy does seem to have enough teeth to it that the USDA could say “let this biological male play on the girl’s soccer team or we will starve the poor kids in your high school.” They may also be able to say “the state of Florida no longer receives SNAP funds.”
The devil will be in the implementation and subsequent interpretations of the bureaucratic rule. I can’t predict it will go that far. It may not. But certain dogmatic elements of the woke left would certainly like to see it go that far. Whether those elements have captured the USDA bureaucracy enough to push it to that limit is questionable, but that possibility has spurred several Republican attorneys general to sue the USDA over it on legal interpretation grounds.
Scorched Earth on the Soccer Pitch
The woke need to be very thankful the TERFs aren’t playing hardball. All they’d need to do to topple the entire house of cards of modern woke thought is give the woke what they say they want. Here’s what that looks like.
Approximately 10% of girls play outdoor soccer in the USA, a rate that remains consistent across most age brackets.
At ages six through around eight, many girls and boys play on co-ed teams because the physical differences between them have not begun to manifest in their growth and development. By around age ten on, soccer is segregated by biological sex to give boys and girls comparatively equal opportunities. And the difference in soccer skill between boys and girls is tremendously stark.
I played soccer in high school. I was mostly a junior varsity player, barely cracked the varsity team, but was sufferable. Our girls team had one girl superstar on it. All state center midfielder, scored six or more goals a game, went on to play on a collegiate scholarship. She could not have made the JV boys team in anything other than a bench capacity, although she did play with us sometimes in practice and would certainly have seen the field on JV boys. Our high school girls team would scrimmage against the middle school boys team.
In 2017 the US Women’s World Cup squad played a scrimmage against the FC Dallas under-15 boys squad and fell to the boys 5-2. That’s a very lopsided result versus a boys team which surely has talent but has no members over the age of fourteen. Here’s a photo from after the game, of fourteen year old boy Tanner Tessman posing with members of the US Women’s World Cup team for selfies.
That boy who couldn’t even drive a car at the time would run roughshod over all of Women’s FIFA if allowed to do so, and it’s easy to see why in the photos alone. But woke dogma insists that gender differences are all in the mind, and socially constructed, so it insists that were Tanner to identify as a woman he should be allowed to play on the women’s team.
All the TERFs need to do is scorch the earth in soccer and give the woke what they want. One very talented private high school boys team all identifies as transgender in unison, tries out for the Women’s World Cup team, and wipes the floor with them. Megan Rapinoe loses her job, and cannot complain about it because she heavily advocates for this. They all lose their jobs, and the resulting Trans Women’s team demolishes all FIFA competition by double digits. Other countries who wish to remain competitive follow suit, and soon most or all women are wiped out of FIFA entirely, with two defacto divisions: Men’s, and Transwomen’s.
When challenged about their gender, this high school boys team brings flash cards to answer any questions with common woke ideological responses. “Trans women are women.” “Do not question my lived experience.” “Punch TERFs.” And since the woke are not allowed to question whether someone is “actually trans” or not, they cannot challenge this. They must accept it.
Then the boys apply for girls collegiate soccer scholarships, and sue any school who refuses to accept them based on Title IX. They get free college and can go back to identifying as men after they earn their degree. They can even claim to be “transgender women lesbians” to continue to have sexual relationships with women while in college. All of this is clear, on the table, and currently supported by the woke. I’ve been told some lesbians are currently fleeing dating apps because they make so many connections with pre-op transwomen that they have more penis in their dating feed than they do vagina.
The chief TERF position is that men are using transgender ideology to invade women’s protected spaces. The main problem they have in the culture war, is they don’t have a large scale test case proving their position. All they need to do is throw the gloves off and sacrifice women’s soccer on the woke altar to have the test case they need to prove their position.
Will they do this? Doubtful. They would be giving up a tremendous amount of culture war ground in a space they wish to defend, and several years worth of girls youth soccer players would be harmed in the process. But it would win them the war, as scorched earth tactics often do.
And as a side benefit, women’s soccer might finally be worth watching because they could switch fields properly and play to space better.
"... questioning the ideology that gender is a social construct and may instead be related to biology is blasphemy within woke culture. ... even a future member of the high court is not permitted to say what a “woman” is without a PhD in human biology."
The fundamentally self-contradictory nature of these two positions amazes me. I can't believe no one called this erstwhile judge out on this point. Specifically: she said in effect "I can't say who is a woman, because I'm not a biologist". This means that she believes a biologist - that is a SCIENTIST - would be able to make such a distinction.
If she believes that the distinction is a matter of biological science, as she seems to be saying, she's not supporting the woke position; she's the worst traitor to their cause. Suggesting that a woman is defined by biology! The woke should be castigating her and bemoaning that she is so right-wing and reactionary to suggest such a heresy!
If the judge had been smart, she would have said, "I'm not a psychologist" or something far squishier that suggested the answer lies in someone's mind-state, rather than their biology.
Great idea for taking the wokeist position that "trans women are women" to its reductio ad abrsurdum extreme. And it's a two-for-one, because it would also demolish Megan Rapinoe's BS "gender pay gap" argument, because it would show that, no, she is not doing work equal to the men, as she is nowhere near their level of play, so she does not deserve their level of pay. Great article!