Hundreds of activists protest a private talk by the Women's Liberation Front at the central branch of the Seattle Public Library in February 2020. (Lindsey Wasson for The Washington Post)
Perspective by Kelsy Burke Article Archive
In a new survey of more than 5,000 Americans, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that the vast majority of feminists support transgender rights.
A resounding 81 percent of self-identified feminist respondents, for example, opposed laws that prevent children from receiving medical care for a gender transition, compared with only 56 percent of Americans as a whole. While 1 in 3 Americans say it is never appropriate to teach that some people are transgender in K-12 public schools, only 1 in 10 feminists in the survey agreed.
These findings challenge the prominence of those who wrap their opposition to the transgender rights movement in the language of feminism. This group includes author J.K. Rowling and columnist Abigail Shrier of the Wall Street Journal, who has called advocacy for trans rights a “war on women.” Celebrities Bette Midler and Macy Gray also have attracted negative attention on Twitter for posting similar remarks.
Transgender people and their allies call such figures “TERFs,” or trans exclusionary radical feminists. The term has become a descriptor online for a brand of feminism used to justify opposition to transgender identity and equality.
Yet while social media is aflame with debates about TERFs, the empirical and historical evidence is clear: Most American feminists are far from trans-exclusionary and have long been among the most supportive groups of LGBTQ equality. Feminists have debated over time whether and how to support LGBTQ rights, but they have never as a whole — neither today, nor in the past — discriminated in large measure against trans people and their allies.
But one group of women has unequivocally and uniformly attacked fluid and nontraditional conceptions of gender and sexuality from the 1970s through the present day: conservative women.
At the height of the Cold War in the middle of the 20th century, American women of all political persuasions were exposed to messages that idealized a traditional White heterosexual family and its attendant gender roles of male breadwinner and full-time female homemaker. Religious leaders, elected officials and every aspect of the media hailed this model of family life (the traditional “nuclear” family, as it came to be known at the dawn of the arms race) as a marker of American superiority over the enemy Soviet Union, where men and women were thought to work alongside each other in state-run factories.
Many women, however, rejected this “American ideal,” and the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a vibrant resurgence of feminism, with several factions of activists. As opposed to feminist groups that primarily focused on changing laws, self-proclaimed “radical feminists” (the group referenced in the TERF acronym) focused on making “the personal political” by criticizing the institution of marriage, heterosexuality and normative notions of love, family and child-rearing.
To fully untangle themselves from the patriarchy, these radical feminists tended to promote a separatist politics that distanced them from men, which shaped some activists’ views on transgender inclusion. For example, some prominent radical feminists, such as Robin Morgan and Janice Raymond, insisted that trans women would forever be men and should thus be excluded from the feminist movement.
Yet as historian Cristan Williams has documented, figures such as Morgan and Raymond were consistently challenged by other feminists. Further, transgender women and men have long and fully participated in all factions of feminist activism. Despite pockets of resistance to their inclusion within certain groups, transgender activists were “the movers and shakers of — indeed integral to — even the most iconic feminisms of the 1970s,” as historian Finne Enke put it.
Unlike feminists, conservative activists — from the early 1970s through the present day — have taken a far clearer and unified stance against nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality. For them, God created men and women to fulfill distinct, complementary roles within the family and broader society, and therefore biological sex and gender are inextricably linked. These ideas compelled women to advocate the conservative politics of “family values” in the 1970s and early 1980s.
At what can be considered the height of feminist activism in the early 1970s, conservative women began publicly squaring off against feminists over the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. The amendment would have guaranteed men and women equality under the law. Congress overwhelmingly passed the ERA in 1972, but its momentum soon stopped as conservative women mobilized across the country to block its ratification in state legislatures (38, or three-fourths of the states, must approve of any amendment to the Constitution).
Activists, most notably conservative Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly, opposed the ERA because of what they claimed was the scientific, religious and common-sense fact that women were fundamentally different from men. Through deft discursive maneuvering, their strategy was to insist that they were the actual protectors of women’s rights, not feminists.
While feminists argued that the ERA would require federal laws that then only protected men to also include women, and vice versa, activists such as Schlafly insisted that the ERA would take rights away from women by not recognizing their distinct experiences as women. Schlafly and her allies claimed, for example, that the ERA would end homemakers’ right to stay at home and instead require all women to work outside the home to be equal to men. The ERA, according to Schlafly, would force women into “unisex restrooms” when they worked outside the home.
“[T]he fact of life — which no legislation or agitation can erase —[is] that women have babies and men don’t,” Schlafly asserted in one of her newsletters. She and her allies warned that ERA proponents wanted to take away laws and policies that provided maternity leave and child support to women — rather than grant those same rights to men, as feminists envisioned.
In other writings, Schlafly explicitly connected her opposition to the ERA to her opposition to the LGBT rights movement. One pamphlet produced by Schalfly’s Eagle Forum titled “The ERA-GAY-AIDS Connection” explained that the ERA would “give the homosexuals a constitutional weapon to impose their anti-family lifestyle on our society.” In other words, the ERA would decimate America’s legal system and societal norms that had been built upon a version of the family that was centered around a heterosexual marriage and traditional gender roles.
Ultimately, the campaign by Schlafly and her allies triumphed, and ratification of the ERA fell just three states short.
Fifty years later, we’re once again hearing the same arguments about biological difference and the supposed unique abilities and legal rights of cisgender women and girls that Schlafly and her allies wielded in the ERA fight. That’s not surprising, because social conservatives are leading the fight to keep transgender women and girls out of sex-segregated spaces, such as women’s sports and public restrooms. This year alone, nearly 50 anti-transgender bills have become law in at least 20 states.
While the self-proclaimed feminists who oppose trans rights generate headlines and online attention and scorn, they are far more the exception than the norm. Instead, it is the same White conservative Christians who have long battled feminism who are leading the charge in both activism and attitudes against transgender people.
National surveys consistently reveal that White evangelical Protestants have the highest levels of support for anti-transgender legislation limiting health care, bathroom and sports access. The new PRRI survey finds that 92 percent of White evangelicals believe there are only two genders, which makes them more than three times more likely to hold this view than self-identified feminists.
Feminist figures who promote skepticism and hostility toward transgender people can do harm, but a few loud voices do not represent the majority. Terms like TERF risk obscuring reality. As in the past, it is White Christian conservatives — not feminists — who are trying to ensure that the law reflects the idea that one’s biology at birth is inextricably linked to traditional gender roles.
