TERFs AND THE KKK COMPARISONS.
Today, I saw trans exclusionary radical feminists on twitter arguing that Owen Jones was ridiculous for making some comparisons between the KKK and TERFs, but let’s break them down a little.
The KKK were, and still are, bunches of white supremacists who meet wearing white hoods and white gowns. Of all the hypocritical acts I saw with an Australian minority branch of the KKK, on a current affairs show, they had several nooses slung over the bull bar of a Toyota HiAce! A white supremacist organization with a Japanese vehicle!
Owen Jones made the point that one of the KKK’s motives was to “protect women”. The KKK was anything but a feminist organization, and some white supremacists fetishize over Asian women not because they make charitable exemptions, but because they follow the trope that Asian women are subservient and submissive, as they believe a woman should be. Their motivation was to try and stop WHITE women from mixing with black or Asian men!
Some of the arguments from TERFs against transwomen are nonsensical, in some cases around sport. I remember, when my brother had his soccer team end of season break-up, the coach presented each of the team members with a trophy. My brother started playing when he was six, so that the kid across the street could have a team, as they were short a few members. After that year’s break-up, my mother asked him if he wanted to play under 7s or under 8s the following year, and he picked under 7s. There was a boy in the team, who was only five, and the coach told him, when he presented him with his trophy, “What I want you to do next year, is stay down in under 7s.” He meant that because he was younger than the other boys, he wanted him to have an extra year to learn some more and to develop some maturity as a player. I highly doubt that there would be a coach alive who would say to a boy who couldn’t make the team, “What I want you to do is, get your mum to take you to the doctor and get you some puberty blockers, and then play as a girl.” I remember, when I went to a school camp in Year Six, the boys went for a run one morning and the girls did some exercises. Some of the slower boys, and that included me, were stopped by the PE Teacher and asked if we wanted to join the girls for their exercises or go and do something else. We chose to join the girls. We were not viewed as the patriarchy, nor were we competing against them.
During the Gold Rushes in the Australian colonies, the language used by the whites regarding the women who mixed with Chinese miners (one of the things that caused consternation amongst the whites was the number of unaccompanied Chinese males) was on par with the KKK. While it was true that SOME of the Chinese men, who were sojourners, had a wife back in China and cohabited with Western women in Australia, the women were accused of being immoral, yet some of them went to Chinese men to escape violence at the hands of white men.
There is a world of difference between wishing to preserve racial purity, which was what the KKK was doing, and ensuring women’s safety, but the truth is, the vast majority of ciswomen have little to fear from the vast majority of transwomen. Adam Graham/Isla Brydon and a few others are a tiny minority.