I usually stay out of drama when it occurs in radical feminist and wider gender critical spheres for the sake of my sanity. Usually, it’s not something worth my time anyway - petty infighting or a larger issue, I’m glad to be part of a community which calls out those who do or say messed up things regardless. However, I’ve chosen to cover this particular incident, now a couple of weeks old, because I believe it’s a symptom of a larger issue, one which we might not give nearly enough thought but is extraordinarily important in any feminist’s fight against not just transgender ideology, but patriarchy as a whole.
This situation unfolded on 5th December, when Corinna Cohn, a man who calls himself a transsexual, made an Twitter/X post that is as follows:
I’m a transsexual and a vocal critic of gender ideology/queer theory. In 2014, to distinguish my viewpoint from radical feminism I began calling it “gender critical.” The term was first acknowledged by trans activists who claimed that it was an attempt to “whitewash” the term TERF.
I began documenting TRA uses of the term TERF on Tumblr (http://terfisaslur.tumblr.com) and created the hashtag #terfisaslur. From 2014 to 2015 I used the account @GenerCrit to popularize my criticism of gender ideology. In 2015, under threat of doxxing, I outed myself in an article written by Michelle Goldberg called “The transwomen who say transwomen aren’t women.” This is al [sic] verifiable history.
Gender Critical from the beginning has been an opposition to the conflation of sex and gender identity in law and policy. Gender critical has a limited scope. It’s not anti-trans, it’s not pro-LGB; however, ensuring that biological sex classes are acknowledged and protected can only help those two groups.
If you call yourself “gender critical” then you have merged yourself into a trend created by a transsexual. Congratulations! If you believe the same things I do, I embrace you, at least as far as this issue is concerned. If you feel moral disgust or revulsion now that you realize what you’ve gotten yourself into, then bye-bye! Don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.
As you can see, Cohn seems to insinuate that he came up with the term “gender critical”, and alleges that he created a hashtag and blog to archive examples of transactivists using TERF in a manner akin to a slur. In his final paragraph, he says that the trend of “gender critical” was the work of a transsexual - more specifically, himself. It seems as though he was already trying to set up the inevitable backlash as pure “moral outrage”, as though everyone who would be rightfully upset at such an outrageous claim was just some trans-hater.
Cohn’s claims of running a Tumblr blog dedicated to cataloguing transactivist misogyny are unsubstantiated. The blog in question, terfisaslur.tumblr.com (not to be confused with terfisaslur.com, which Cohn makes no mention of) has been active since January 2014, which roughly lines up with Cohn’s timeline of events. However, the blog has been inactive for the last nine years, with no way to get in touch with its owner and verify that this actually was Cohn’s work. His Twitter thread offers no evidence that this was him, and the same goes for his purported creation of the #terfisaslur hashtag.
As for the Michelle Goldberg article which Cohn mentions, this does exist, and the writer says that he created one of the first gender critical trans blogs in 2012, though this is contradicted by Cohn himself, who says that he created the gender critical trend in 2014.
Three days after this initial post, Cohn doubled down while on the Heterodorx podcast, run by himself and Nina Paley. The episode, which discussed everything from Crohn’s Disease jokes to admitted autogynephile Phil Illy donning a dress at the Genspect conference, was also were Cohn spoke a little more on his supposed creation of the gender critical movement. Here’s what he said in response to Paley claiming that those wary of Illy are not gender critical:
And they also hate the term. They disavow it, and will not use it, and will say that they absolutely are not gender critical because gender doesn’t exist. And then when some tr*nny [censoring is mine] comes along and says ‘Hey, I helped create this movement’, then they get all upset about it, Nina.
Here, Cohn is the “some tr*nny” whom he speaks of. His Twitter post and statement on the podcast make it pretty clear that he believes that he kickstarted gender criticism as a trend, and from what it looks like, he may also be alleging that he coined the term “gender critical” itself.
As Cohn has said, this supposedly happened in 2014. Now, anyone with a mere portion of knowledge about the history of gender criticism is well aware of the now-banned Reddit community r/gendercritical, the earliest archive of which is from 29th September 2013. At that point, it had been around for nine days, being created on the 20th. This is several months before Cohn’s first post to what he says was his Tumblr blog. In addition, r/gendercritical was a thriving radical feminist community, and even before the subreddit existed, gender criticism itself was intertwined with radical feminism, which is directly contradictory to Cohn’s claim that he used the term to distinguish his viewpoint from radical feminism.
If that’s not enough, writing using the term “gender critical feminists” was published the day before r/gendercritical was created, and this article mentioning gender criticism was published on 2nd August 2013. Google Trends data also shows that “gender critical” has been a term searched up since 2004, which is as far back as their data collection goes. Spikes of the term being searched increase around 2015-16, but this can be attributed to a multitude of factors, such as I Am Jazz being published in September 2014, or Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner coming out as transgender in April 2015 (and subsequently winning Woman of the Year). Simply put, increasing frequency of these online searches is very likely a result of the general public growing more aware of transgenderism, as well as the backlash to it.
Not far back enough? Oxford English Dictionary states that the first known usage of the term can be traced back to the writings of an F. Barber in 1988. Google’s Book Ngram viewer confirms that it’s been around since the 80s, experiencing spikes of popularity in the 1990s and 2000s before skyrocketing in the last decade. Wikipedia estimates that “gender critical” goes back to the 1970s, which aligns with the peak of second-wave feminism.
It’s very easy to debunk Cohn’s claim that he created the “gender critical trend”. Perhaps he was a somewhat prominent figure in 2014, but he was far from the only one, and being one somewhat prominent figure does not equate to starting a movement. As far as his supposed coining of the term “gender critical” goes, this is blatantly false. Even if he just so happened to come up with that term on his own in 2014, it had already existed for decades prior to that point, and Cohn, with nearly ten years of experience on this topic under his belt, should know that by now.
If Corinna Cohn’s claims of creating the gender critical movement sound familiar, that’s because this is not the first time a man has tried to take credit for the work of feminists, and women in general. Earlier this year, The Daily Wire posted a video clip promoting Matt Walsh’s film What Is A Woman? to Twitter, purporting that said film had started “a movement to protect women and children from radical gender ideology”. What Is A Woman? was released about a year and a half ago, by which time radical feminists and gender critics as a whole were already at the forefront of the fight against transgenderism, and had been for decades. (Don’t take my word for it; radical feminist Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire in 1979!)
Matt Walsh in particular has done this before, too. Kellie-Jay Keen, one of the most prominent figures of the wider trans-critical movement, has shirts in her online store with the dictionary definition of the word woman across them. These are a clear nod to her 2018 campaign which saw the definition plastered on billboards - in fact, in the linked video, she’s even wearing the shirt on the interview. Similar t-shirts would appear in a shop connected to The Daily Wire not long after What Is A Woman? was released, something which has not gone unnoticed by Kellie-Jay Keen herself.
Men have a track record of claiming women’s achievements which goes back centuries and is not just applicable to the modern day fight against transgenderism. If you’ve ever seen paintings of wide-eyed children, you’d likely be able to attribute them to Margaret Keane, but in the 1950s and 60s, you would have believed wholeheartedly that they were the work of her then-husband, Walter. He attributed her work to himself and showed it off under his name, confining Margaret to a room where she would paint for most of the day.
It could be argued that even the oft-repeated MRA myth of “man the hunter” is an example of men taking credit for some of women’s achievements. An argument which posits men as the hunters of game in prehistoric societies, and claims that women foraged and stayed home with children, it’s a fantasy which is usually slung around at feminists, despite increasing evidence that women contributed to hunting just as much as men did.
Simply put, what Corinna Cohn is doing by taking credit for the gender critical movement is nothing new, and is in fact something which men have been doing for years uncountable. He is just the next man to do this, one in a long line of men who have attributed women’s work to themselves out of greed, desire for fame, or no reason other than misogyny. However, he needs to be the last in this line - this centuries-old trend needs to die, and fast.
When the fight against transgenderism is won, what will likely happen is that conservative men, and a handful of men who claim to fight alongside us such as Corinna Cohn, will either take credit for or be credited with its downfall. Feminists on the front lines will not necessarily be erased from history, our activism having been documented all over the internet at this point, but they will be erased from discourse. Men such as Matt Walsh like to say that we feminists are somehow responsible for transgenderism, in an attempt to turn both his followers and fence-sitters against us, despite there being much evidence of us taking the brunt of on and offline transactivist abuse. This is just practice for that discourse.
When men like this claim to be responsible for what we have started, the thing to do is to scream as loud as we possibly can:
NO.
Unfortunately, not enough of us are shouting this. While Cohn was criticized in a couple of Ovarit posts, as well as some of the comments on his own post, there are an equal amount of comments praising him for this very fluffed-up achievement. When someone makes claims as fantastical as Cohn has, we should not take it at face value until we have evidence confirming these claims. So far, Cohn has provided us with very little.
In the coming years, the tide will certainly turn further and we need to push back against narratives such as these much harder than we currently are. Our place in history needs to be rightfully cemented; why not start here?
I listened to the show long before Jersh made his (very surprising) appearance in my podcast feed. Found it through Benjamin Boyce.