TERF has come to stand for “Trans exclusionary rat fuckers” right? Because a lot of this stuff is just fucking bullshit. Like I get that there are actual older feminists who fought for women’s rights in the 70s and combine a desire for ciswomen’s equality with bigotry against people who are transgender (especially women who are transgender). Those people really exist.
But someone who says they are a single issue voter on anti-trans bigotry and will support a man who has committed dozens of sexual assaults because of it isn’t any kind of feminist.
This is powerful to me because I spent a good part of my life basically buying into the narrative that bigots are often well intentioned and misinformed. That’s the narrative that society sells people with the visible privileges.
I know better now, but it matters to me to read something like that and see that incitement was both intentional and dishonest. Ditum had to get riled up on purpose in order to write angry things, things that Ditum’s rational mind knew weren’t anything to be angry about.
The bigotry is genuine and still it’s dishonest. I feel like writers like this are in a pyramid scheme: like every bigot is hoping that a bigger bigot will come along to buy their bigotry, even when its emotional rather than financial as it was for Ditum. It’s the whole organizations of the culture of bigots who support one another.
That etymology is from James Murray, the original editor of the OED-- which might explain why it’s still around. The full etymology entry is long and replete with hedges. “No one knows, but we’d better try and grasp at these straws!”
Also from Oxford University Press.
Travesty, etymologically speaking, is far more straightforward, and comes from the theatre and masqued balls.
I hate this timeline…