SHONA Craven’s sympathetic portrayal of Canadian terfs (trans exclusionary reactionary feminists) is biased but nonetheless merits some response (The Trans Atlantic backlash", Herald Magazine, January 19).
A small minority of feminists have always struggled with the temptation to try to police the lives of women: in the early 1970s a small number of self-declared radicals told women who refused to give up their male partners and friends that they were, at best, highly suspect in the war against women, now it is trans women who are being told that they fail the terf test for “real women” and are part of the war against women.
One difference to 40 or more years ago is that terfs are now lining up with the likes of Tory MP David Davies, who facilitated their anti-trans session in Westminster, Transgenderism and the War on Women. Yes, David Davies (not Davis), who has opposed same-sex marriage as “madness” and has voted more than once to drastically reduce women’s access to abortion. Of course, even a small group of feminists making common cause with those virulently opposed to women’s rights and LGBT people’s rights retain the right to speak, and they exercise that right across the UK media while simultaneously telling us they have been silenced – fortunately, in Scotland at least, they and their fellow travellers have failed to convince people to submit to their diktats.
Brian Dempsey,
Lecturer, University of Dundee,
Scrymgeour Building, Park Place, Dundee.
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