Astro-TERFed: the workshopping of a smear

As normies encounter trans madness in the wild, transactivists find themselves in a PR panic

(Part one)

In the early days of the transgender project, billionaires’ proxies in the NGOcracy undertook an industrial-scale effort to legislate their way into the people’s hearts.

Back then, lawmakers eagerly signed on to the progressive sounding trans cause without pausing to wonder what all the euphemisms meant. That’s how the right to self determination became a stand-in for men’s access to places where women and children get naked; conversion therapy overtook plain old psychotherapy; and bodily autonomy and gender-affirming care became sanitising props used to describe radial forearm free flap phalloplasty (don’t click if you’re squeamish).

But the consequences of what was agreed by the laptop class have since hit the streets, and to nobody’s surprise, they don’t translate well in the real world. As more and more regular people come face to face with our implausible new reality in the form of gender-neutral urinals and “people with a cervix”, the strategists employed by the world’s biggest philanthropic funders have had to storyboard the demonisation of the regular folk who don’t like what they see.

Welcome, normies. We’ve been expecting you.

A scramble to explain away resistance

First, a brief history of how resistance to wrongbodyism has been framed: there has been talk of “TERFs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists) since 2008 when it was used to refer to the women on the side of the feminist debate who insisted that men and women are two different things.

However, it started to be applied more widely as transgender mania picked up speed. Google trends registered a rise in interest in the word when JK Rowling terfed out on main in December 2019, but searches reached their peak in June 2020 when she explained the roots of her TERFery on her blog.

But it has become increasingly clear that the label TERF is inadequate. It doesn’t quite fit everyone who is opposed to gender madness — this was obvious when Kellie-Jay Keen enticed suburban women off Mumsnet and into public squares. Plenty of people who found themselves to be opposed to gender identity ideology had never considered themselves feminists, never mind radical (and just in case it doesn’t go without saying, the word “exclusionary” is nonsense).

Transactivists, for their part, seem to find TERF inadequate too. It’s not very menacing, for one. It’s too closely associated with bookish elderly lesbians in North Face fleeces, and its origins leave open the possibility that there are genuine concerns about misogynists' takeover of a movement meant for women. It suggests that some dykes simply just don’t like dicks. And it’s got the word feminist in it.

Also, inconveniently, TERF has been co-opted by many of the women it was supposed to insult. (I recently wore my TERF jumper on a 6-hour layover and I sashayed around that airport like I was at my own wedding reception.)

“Gender critical”, meanwhile, has broader applicability - but that, too, is very mild-mannered. Trans activists can’t fundraise off a non-existent enemy, but they also can’t fundraise off a reasonable-sounding enemy.

And crucially for transactivism, neither “TERF” nor “gender critical” is aligned with a wider, scarier movement. And while “Nazi” has increasingly been deployed as the go-to smear for anyone who speaks up about the encroachments of trans ideology in our lives, the NGOs seem to have recognised that there is a need to sophisticate this slander.

That’s because lawmakers can’t keep signing those bills and cheques unless you can email them a Big Words white paper explaining how their concerned constituents are, in fact, bigoted outliers. There has been a pressing need to contextualise anon Twitter dads, pissed off Grindr gays and incredulous lesbians in a way that makes them unsympathetic to the wider public. This has been an especially urgent task as the #NoDebate strategy has begun to show signs of strain.

Enter “the anti-gender movement”

The anti-gender movement is a very real thing; the term has been used for about a decade to describe groups of conservatives who oppose things like gay marriage, abortion, and feminism. It is described as global, though the US and Central and Eastern Europe are often singled out as its spiritual homes, and it includes evangelical (but not Islamic) Africa, South and Central America. It is propelled by monied institutions in the United States and, to a lesser degree, other parts of the anglosphere. It has a smattering of organised (often Catholic) adherents in continental Europe.

There have been many books and papers written about the anti-gender movement, focusing mostly on places like Poland, Hungary, Brazil and the Holy See. (Indeed, it was the Vatican that started to first talk of “gender” as some kind of demonic force - they coined the term “gender ideology” sometime in the 1990s).. 

They use “gender” to decry all that has gone wrong in the West in the past few decades. Indeed, some leaders in Europe’s Visegrad zone even insist that the word not be translated into their country’s own language — because leaving it in English makes it feel like an unwelcome imposition from the decadent West.

Even activist researchers have found it hard to claim that the recent grassroots uprising against puberty blockers and “transbians” belongs to the exact same traditionalist current as those mentioned above. But that won’t stop them.

Gender is “glue”

The whole thing is very confusing because many people vehemently declare themselves “anti-gender”, thinking it refers to the unwritten rule that builders can’t paint their nails or whatever. If we’re going by that definition, hell yeah, down with gender. But while one side is anti-gender because we don’t believe that a man who sits down to pee has a female soul, people like Jair Bolsonaro are anti-gender because they think “tolerating” twinks will bring on a swarm of locusts or other Biblical punishments.

How do the trans activists define gender? It turns out, they see things much the same way the authoritarians do.

Researchers studying the anti-gender movement have described gender as symbolic glue that is used by anti-democratic polemicists as a catchall term for all the progressive things they don’t like. As time has gone on, they have "glued” on any social cause that reorders the rules regarding sex, sexuality, reproduction and gender roles. So while their classic bugbears were abortion and gay marriage, transgenderism was seamlessly added to the pot around 2016.

But the philanthropy-driven NGOs do pretty much the same thing: they are increasingly using gender to glue together all that is good. They are twisting themselves in knots to glue all progressive causes to the trans cause, even if they have nothing whatsoever to do with gender, including racism, democracy, believing the holocaust happened, and funding the pimp lobby to decriminalise prostitution.

Dave Hewitt wrote about this in August 2022, summing it up thusly: “(T)hey have arrived at a strategy of forcing everyone to make as simplistic a moral choice as possible: do you agree with us, or the hate groups?”

Anti-Gender Conspiracism

Being lumped in with the fash is a powerful repellent to anyone left-of-centre-right — which, in my experience, describes the majority of the people I have encountered at Let Women Speak, WDI, and Filia events, as well as my peaked family, friends, co-workers, and neighbours. So it makes complete sense that the philanthropists’ field workers have decided to paint resistors as tools of Meloni, Museveni, and the megachurches.

This is a job for academics

The wordiest activist academics have thus been busy in the past two years to fold the increasingly visible and vocal opponents to transgender ideology into this global baddie brigade. Yes, they want you to believe that the women in parks with shaky voices and microphones are all anti-abortion, xenophobic, white supremacist, meat-headed, genocidal, Slavic totalitarians - or at least funded by them.

This task is now urgent, because more and more people find themselves forced to choose a side (because humans are just like that). And though the resistance rebrand seems to have begun in earnest sometime around early 2021, it has picked up speed since Kellie-Jay Keen was assaulted in New Zealand. People saw her tomato-drenched platinum bob in the news and they started to ask: what’s going on? And who are the bad guys?

Before 2021, there was very little talk of the anti-gender movement in anything but the religious/traditionalist sense. The worried and outraged women who were getting called TERFs on Twitter and in the town squares were a floating taxon in search of a categorical home. Vox, the scripture of septum-pierced office workers, said in 2019 that TERFs and gender-critical people “parrot” right-wing rhetoric by e.g. “mocking non-binary people.” Ditto from Vice, who did a long piece on the question of the TERFenomenon in June 2020, framing it as an issue within British feminism, suggesting these women were part of a worldwide movement along with (but not part of) right-wing groups trying to “exile” trans people from public life.

In Ireland, there had been some tryhard efforts to tie Irish TERFs to Catholicism - like this tweet thread by an Irish furry, along with many, many claims that Irish TERFism is just an imposition from Mother England. Others blamed the patriarchy, suggesting the ladiezzz have a hangover from patriarchal Olde Irelande: “The worries and fears driving these (TERF) responses are locating themselves in a patriarchal Ireland that did not listen to women and children in the past.” One of the authors of that paper (which was part-funded by the Tides Foundation) has been given cash by the very respectable European Research Council for a project called Beyond Opposition which will study the worries and concerns of people griping about trans issues and gender and try to figure out how to win them over. . 

The project researchers claim to be neutral, and yet a quick internet search reveals them all to be unforgivable John Money feminists. Just for context: the ERC is the research body that is responsible for the first ever photograph of a black hole, a beautiful moment for humanity. Devastating to see them tarnish their reputation by giving these idiots just under €2 million to produce propaganda.

A big attempt at TERF contextualisation came in August 2020 in the Sociological Review. The intro essay is almost apologetic for its use of a word that was commonly considered a slur at the time. And though the paper’s authors claimed that the backlash to trans rights had “international dimensions”, citing the bathroom bills in the US, they didn’t claim that it had anything to do with a wider international movement.

They mentioned how the term “gender ideology” (the Vatican’s coinage) seeped into TERF discourse when it appeared on 4th Wave Now blog all the way back in 2016 (nota bene: this demonstrates clearly that the use of the term “gender ideology” gives further fuel to the notion that the Vatican and Gen X ROGD moms are one and the same, so it’s probably wise to stop using it.)

A Wikiedia page history shows the battle to define the “anti-gender movement”

What that journal did was go really hard on the idea that resistance to trans metaphysics is racist; that it’s all a result of perceived white female fragility - perhaps inspired by Robin DiAngelo’s corporate training publicity pamphlet of the same name that had been released in 2018 and was all the rage among posh misogynists at the time.

At that point, think tanks and politicians hadn’t yet spotted the TERF menace or how to deal with it, either: for example, a reproductive rights body affiliated with the European Parliament published a report about the anti-gender movement in June 2021 and a Parliament committee published something similar in July 2021 - and neither mentioned resistance to transism beyond the known enemies. Interestingly, both reports point to money and propaganda coming from Russian troublemakers - but not a single TERF was temporalised. 

That has started to change.  

Things take a turn

In March 2021, an organisation called Global Philanthropy Project (GPP) held a four-month-long “convening” (they use the word “convening” because they are self-important clowns - it was literally just a bunch of Zooms) co-chaired by two Open Society Foundation reps. This series of meetings brought together anyone who is anyone in the LGBTQIA+ philanthropy world.

The event was called: “Shimmering Solidarity Gathering: the Global Rights Summit.

Global Philanthropy Project, which looks a bit like a professional trade association for mega-rich social justice funders, has 22 member organisations, and they’re all the usual LGBTQIA+ funders. Many of them are registered as “charities” (STILLTish calls them a “beard” for the gender industrial complex haha). 

GPP member organisations

If you’re interested in reading more about the charity statuses that prop up the American “culture machine”, read Mike Nayna’s short explainer.

GPP’s main mission seems to be about pushing back on the pushback against transgenderism, as well as quantifying the level of funding out there for their cause. You can see the latter in their most recent report that lists all the big funders and how much they have given away.

(The biggest funder, by the way, is the pharmaceutical corporation Gilead, not a charity nor any other kind of NGO — though it has bought its way into that world in multiple, massive ways. That’s a story for Jennifer Bilek’s blog that will be out shortly).

This online convening attracted at least 200 people from different grantmaking bodies. It was not open to grantees - unless they were invited as experts - it was intended for the cheque-writers. Check out GPP Director Matthew “Matty” Hart’s post that lists who they are, and notice how Hart’s claims the anti-gender movement “attacks all forms of self-determination, climate science, and democratic systems.”

The Shimmering event had more than 55 sessions, according to Hart, all of whose names were a variation of “fighting the anti-gender movement”. There was plenty of unstructured time for participants to chat and strategise. It’s important to note that some of the grantmakers present were recipients of funding from “the big 22” (OSF, Wellspring etc), but those smaller orgs also dole out their own grants to even smaller organisations..

So this was probably less about the billionaires getting their ducks in a row regarding their vision of the world (i.e. “fake it till you make it”), it was probably mostly a way of getting all of the recipients of core funding or operational grants singing from the same balance sheet.

Child safeguarding as a Trojan Horse

I like to imagine that at some point, somebody drew two big intersecting circles — one for TERFs/GCs and another for the classical “anti-gender movement” and then brainstormed what would go in the overlapping bit.

One thing that is a clear: protecting children is indeed a common refrain among both groups. In April 2021, GPP had already published an extremely dodgy document called “Manufacturing Moral Panic: Weaponizing Children to Undermine Gender Justice and Human Rights,” which was co-authored with an outfit called “Elevating Children’s Funders Group”. Its listed authors are a fresh-faced romance language scholar and a philosopher. So like, people who know nothing about keeping children safe.

STILLTish wrote about this report already, but here’s a basic primer: it calls child safeguarding a Trojan Horse, and suggests that some of the people or groups that make up the global anti-gender movement (which they have labelled “gender restrictive”) are sneakily posing as non-religious or even left-wing to roll back LGBTQIA+ and gender rights. And though the report was mostly about the movement in the classical wonky sense (its case studies were Bulgaria, Ghana and Peru), it folded in the new non-traditional actors like TERFs.

Side note: Elevate Children’s Funders has a disclaimer on its website that says some of its funders wish to remain anonymous. There might be very good and practical reasons why someone would want to keep it a secret that they are financially propping up an organisation that cares about children’s rights. And I’m sure I will think of one.

Mostly, GPP’s child-protection-Trojan-horse publication was focussed on money: namely, it produced recommendations for philanthropists on how to spend wisely in the face of the onslaught on our children’s right to nonce-friendly sex ed.

GATE’s disinformation campaign

Anyway, after the Shimmering Solidarity convening, GPP announced they were creating a task force to drum up a “robust, coordinated, and well-informed response to “anti-gender ideology” (AGI) forces. They said they would map the philanthropists who were “responding”, keep tabs on “the health of the funding ecosystem,” and “activate philanthropic leadership to fund bold and inventive responses”.

That task force is now up and running and it is chaired by two women: Pratchi Patankar (New York, Foundation for a Just Society) and Median Haeri (Geneva, the OAK Foundation).

It’s only speculation on my part (as usual!) that anything of significance was hashed out at this series of GPP events. But from what I have seen, there seems to be more coherence in the key messaging coming out of the comms departments of donors and donees, which started in the second half of 2021.

The recent uptick in the appearance of the phrase “anti-gender movement” in mainstream media reports suggests that the smearing of unaligned objectors to our bananas new reality is well and truly underway. Expect more like this below from GATE, who I’ll be writing more about in part two.

Part two coming soon.

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