Hi! I am one of those evil TERFs you’ve been hearing about, although I don’t actually use that term to describe myself (no one does, it’s only used as invective against us.)
I find when I talk to people who are outside of the gender identity debate, they are often confused about

what “TERFs” believe. I’ve heard things like “they hate trans people” or “they want strict gender roles based on the sex assigned at birth” or “they deny that trans people exist.”
None of this is true. We’re not a monolith, and people oppose the ideology of gender for a variety

of reasons, but I spend a lot of time in this world and I have never met a gender-critical person who believes those things.
Here are some things I believe:
1. Trans people exist and face unique challenges. They should be protected from discrimination or violence.

2. Biological sex is a real thing. We didn’t invent it, evolution did. And we have to figure out how to grapple with the reality of that as a society.
3. Many of the traditional norms of gender are rooted in bad ideas and can be discarded. Even when there is potentially...

a biological basis for differences in behavior between sexes, the ONLY hard delineation between men and women is biological sex. No feeling or fashion or personality type is incompatible with either sex. For example, if we grant hypothetically that women are more empathetic...

on average than men, that doesn’t mean any individual man can’t be more empathetic than any individual woman. Men are on average taller than women; that doesn’t mean tall women are actually men.

This last point is important to me because of how often we’re accused of the exact opposite. We’re not “defining people only by their genitals,” we’re saying we don’t think sex should be a matter of anything BUT reproductive biology. We want it to matter less, not more.