khalifaziz:

The strangest response I’ve seen to people stating that the backlash against self-Iding as queer is a TERF tactic is the claim that “queer was a slur before TERFs were a thing.”

I want to be super duper clear here. As long as there has been institutional misogyny and institutional transphobia, TERFs have been a thing. Always. Full stop. A TERF is not some special thing that was only invented a few years back. It’s a term used to denote people who weaponize their cis femininity against trans people and use feminism to justify that. The term TERF and Radfem do indeed have a definable point of origin, but the people that they describe have always existed and likely always will. So to argue that queer was a slur for longer than TERFs have existed paints two illogical scenarios. One being that trans people are new (which we know is bs, people we would classify as trans have always existed for as long as we’re able to discern gender in human culture), the other being that transphobia in women’s spaces is new and that trans people used to be 1000000000% accepted in women’s spaces.

Like, disagreeing that today’s queer-as-a-label backlash is a product of TERF efforts is a whole other debate. But the idea that queer existed as a slur before TERFs existed is so illogical it’s nearly laughable. Transphobic women using women’s liberation to justify their transphobia is NOT new.