Everyone more or less knows what LGBTQ stands for. Anything after Q is a different matter. I put a plus sign generally. Also I don’t quite know what Q adds when you already have L and G. There it is, my insights into the sexual-revolutionary world in which we now live is limited. However, I am a little ahead of the game I think when it comes to the term, and true acronym, TERF.
I asked several of my friends whether they knew what TERF stands for. None did. A new one on me, was the common reply. And this is surprisingly because, according to Wikipedia, the term goes all the way back to 2008. I even asked the young woman manning (or is that ‘personning’) the front desk at my club’s gym and a young woman who had stopped to talk to her. Neither knew. But I know what it stands for. Very recently, for example, I saw a news clip of transgender people slinging off at TERFs. I think one said that they should be punched in the face. Hmm?
Anyway, I have invented a new acronym to complement TERF. It is TERM. This stands for trans-exclusionary radical masculinist. Why the need for such an acronym, you might ask. It comes down to this. I don’t want ‘pretend men’ with vaginas invading the male dressing room at my gym when I’m in a state of undress. I had a recent experience in hospital of showering with tubes coming out of my arms and nose accompanied by a young (biological for the avoidance of doubt) female nurse. Not to put too fine a point on it, I didn’t look my best and suffered, in the aftermath, a mild case of PTSD; which, for those not in the know, means post-traumatic stress disorder.
I should make it clear. I haven’t so far found any transgender men; which, in case you don’t know, are people with cervixes and wombs and other female bodily parts, entering my gym, at least while I have been there; or, if they did so enter, they must have been covered up.
Incidentally, I’m not transphobic. That is to say, in the sense of disliking people who have decided to comport themselves as the sex opposite to their biological sex. Live and let live, I say. However, I am transphobic when it comes to any invasion of my dressing room by those of the opposite sex, in whatever guise, in the sense that it brings back my PTSD.
How women feel about ‘pretend women’ with male appendages entering their dressing rooms, I can’t say first hand. Not a woman. But I guess they might find it discomforting and disconcerting, not to say intimidating and alarming. Hence the rise of TERFs. I’m not absolutely sure that TERFs and TERMs would share a lot in common. But strict segregation of dressing rooms would be a shared cause. Though as for sports, I tend to doubt that TERMs would object to transgender men competing against them in the same way that TERFs object to transgender women. There’s an asymmetry in that respect. An asymmetry too because so far as I know transgender men (to wit, people with vaginas, in case you’ve forgotten) have thus far not forced their way into men’s sports; and insisted on competing. Strange that. Cos they are men, aren’t they?
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