This kind of change is common in the history of words. It looks as if at least some users of the term don’t define it strictly as meaning ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, but use it with a more generic meaning like ‘transphobic person’. Another sign is the way it’s now used to describe people (e.g., men) who don’t fit the original specification, in that they aren’t radical feminists. That’s one sign it’s going the same way as ‘radar’, becoming a word which can be used without knowing what the letters of the original acronym stand for. I’ve been writing TERF in all caps, but these days you also see it written ‘Terf’ or ‘terf’. Also (a trivial but telling sign) no one now writes ‘radar’ in all caps. No one mentally expands the letters R-A-D-A-R into words no one imagines that ‘gaydar’ must be short for ‘gay detection and ranging’. Over time it’s become just an ordinary word, which is used without reference to its origins as an acronym. I’ve been using the word for 50-odd years without realising it meant ‘RAdio Detection And Ranging’-a feat made possible by the fact that ‘radio detection and ranging’ isn’t really what it means any longer. ![]() Do you know what all the letters stand for? I do, but only because I’ve just looked it up. To see what I’m getting at, consider an acronym from the 1940s: ‘radar’. Clearly it started out as one, but is it still behaving like one now? But in any case, there’s a question about the status of TERF as an acronym. I find that argument puzzling, since numerous terms which everyone agrees are slurs are abbreviated forms (examples include ‘Paki’, ‘Jap’, ‘paedo’ and ‘tranny’). Some people have suggested this means it can’t be a slur. As the Glamour spokeswoman said, it’s an abbreviated form of the phrase ‘Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist’ more specifically it’s an acronym, constructed from the initial letters of the words that make up the phrase. They raise a question which linguists and philosophers have found quite tricky to answer (and which they haven’t reached a consensus on): what makes a word a slur?īefore I consider that general question, let’s take a closer look at the meaning and history of TERF. Trans-exclusionary radical feminist is a description, and not a misogynistic slur.Īrguments about whether TERF is a neutral descriptive term or a derogatory slur have been rumbling on ever since. When some readers complained about the use of derogatory language, a spokeswoman for the magazine replied on Twitter that TERF is not derogatory: Last week, the British edition of Glamour magazine published a column in which Juno Dawson used the term ‘TERF’ to describe feminists (the example she named was Germaine Greer) who ‘steadfastly believe that me-and other trans women-are not women’. ![]() Content note: this post contains examples of offensive slur-terms.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |