The Good Guys

A guest post by Victoria Smith

(Note: here’s the background to Victoria’s piece from a disgracefully biased source. Note how in the first paragraph the author decides Helen’s remarks were ‘offensive’.)

---

Imagine the problem: you’re a nice, progressive bloke with a passion for gaming, only there’s this one woman who pisses you off. You can’t say what it is about her – it’s kind of that Hillary Clinton vibe, that clever girl shit, the way people treat her like she knows more than you – but anyhow, you can’t stand the sound of her voice. 

It’s nothing to do with the fact she’s a woman. Hell, no. You’re not some Gamergate saddo. Nobody is a greater feminist than you. You would like nothing better than the gaming community to be packed to the virtual rafters with witty, intelligent women with wildly successful careers in journalism and feminist writing. Just not this one. 

Other men – stupid, sexist men – have made it hard for you to speak out without being associated with them. You wouldn’t want anyone to think you’re just attacking a woman far brighter and infinitely more successful than you’ll ever be because she makes you feel small. You wouldn’t want to look like some misogynistic dick who wants to keep gaming a flesh-and-blood woman-free zone. So what can you do? 

You can call her a terf. 

It doesn’t matter if all she’s written to merit this accusation includes stuff such as “a man can’t just say he has turned into a woman” or “what the government proposes is a radical rewriting of our understanding of identity: Now it’s a question of an internal essence—a soul, if you will”. Nor does it matter if other stuff she has written includes statements such as “trans women are women, and trans men are men”. If she’s expressed the slightest concern about female rape victims or prisoners losing access to single-sex spaces, you’re good to go. 

Of course, the ideal thing would be if she had a history of joking about suicidal trans women or making “dead tranny” jokes – that if, if she were an actual transphobe. Alas, actual transphobia seems to be the province of nice, progressive blokes such as yourself, your Damian Barrs, your Frankie Boyles (pro tip: delete those tweets from 2012! Or don’t – since you’re male, too, it’s not as though anyone gives a shit). You are, it turns out, very unlikely to find any evidence of transphobia in the back catalogues of women who annoy you (while you were joking about murdering trans women, we were busy ploughing through Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl and writing tentative blog posts about how we might have the odd misgiving about the word ‘cis’ but were totally cool with treating everyone with respect). 

Anyhow, the point is, a woman doesn’t need to be a transphobe for you to call her a terf. Once you’ve set the ball rolling, all bets are off. 

Example: you raise concerns about her terfy views with the company who’s currently using her voice on one of their gaming podcasts. Don’t worry about compiling a detailed case against her. Just drop in a few quotes and insinuate that they mean something else. The company will panic, drop her and issue a statement regretting “any hurt caused” to men like you for having to listen to this woman’s voice (and to trans people, possibly. But who cares? The real victim is you). In reports on the incident the woman will be called a “controversial host“, as though she’s Katie Hopkins or Rush Limbaugh, not one of the best feminist writers of her generation. Her male co-host may tweet in her defence, but don’t panic - that’s when the real fun starts. 

Suddenly an army of like-minded chaps – men like you, who are not Gamergate arseholes but pure, progressive, righteous souls – will enter the fray, making ludicrous declarations based on absolutely sod all (but all justified by the fact that, as you have now convinced yourself, this bitch deserves everything she gets). “Would you be happy to share a platform with someone saying we should round up and shoot all the centrist journalists?” asks one. “There is no "debate" over someone’s right to exist” proclaims another. “Why,” asks another, “is it some people think the basic rights of trans people need to be up for debate?” And so on and so forth. What, you may ask, do any of these tweets have to do with what bitch-woman originally wrote? The answer is “fuck all“. That’s the beauty of this. There is no link between what this woman wrote and what you and your friends are now saying. There doesn’t have to be. 

A woman doesn’t have to be condemned by anything she’s actually said or done. Just as Trump and his supporters found by chanting “lock her up!”, you bring the crime into being via the proposed punishment. Your “terf” chants are the nice, progressive version of “lock her up!” Then again, Trump’s a loser and a baddie. You’re not, are you? There are no similarities whatsoever.

You don’t think about the distress you have caused to this real-life woman, the fear, the disorientation caused by not being able to grapple with accusations which are based on nothing at all. You don’t care that she, as an intelligent woman in the public eye, has had to deal with endless shit, year in, year out, from men who bristle at the sight of women taking space that belongs to them. You don’t care because you don’t think you’re one of them. You think you’re different, that this time, right is on your side. 

It might look like a bunch of saddo misogynist gamer men piling in on a woman who makes the painfully conscious of their own inadequacies. It might look like it, but it’s not, because the terf accusation works like magic. 

 It’s just a pity that so many women turn out to be terfs in the end.