In this video, we analyze the ideology behind the TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) movement. We discuss how TERFs emerged from an earlier generation of feminists who believed that gender differences were entirely socially constructed and conditioned. This "gender critical" ideology views gender as an oppressive social construct that should be abolished.
We explain why TERFs see transgender identities as offensive and threatening to their worldview. We also analyze the perspectives of lesbian TERFs. Overall, we argue that while TERFs are logically consistent within their own belief system, their ideology is contrary to scientific evidence on innate gender differences.
The TERF movement may represent the last gasp of an earlier form of feminism that did not adapt to new evidence. While influential for now in some circles, their ideology will likely not outlive the generation that spawned it.
Simone: [00:00:00] We'll just say curmudgeonly resistance to change.
Malcolm: Exactly. And who would be more curmudgeonly and resistant to change than 1970s feminists? These women were not known for their logic, everybody always knew that this early iteration of the feminist movement was like, fucking bonkers, and completely dislocated from reality..
You went out with a white male? I was a freshman. Fresh person. Please. Please. He's coming over here. Sisters, form a wall! No,
Malcolm: their entire ideology to begin with was stupid and reactionary. And, and, honestly, I think to a large extent used for them to gain access to sexual partners.
You know, they used to do this political lesbian thing to pressure straight women to sleep with them, and now they're getting the, well, not liking girl dick makes you a bigot
so let's talk about what political lesbianism is. If you don't believe gender is a thing, then sexual orientation isn't a thing either.
And so if men are the problem in society, then you can just choose to be gay. [00:01:00] And this is a very convenient ideology for a lot of women, who want to believe any woman they have a crush on is a valid target for them to try as hard as they want on.
Would you like to know more?
Simone: all right. So we were in the UK recently, and we were reminded while being there and talking to people about various political movements and conservative movements there, just how big like the turf movement in general is there, which we're not saying it's big, but it is influential, like a very small number of women.
Who identify as TERFs have had an outsized level of influence. One could argue.
Malcolm: I go further than that. I'd say if you talk among conservative circles in the UK there is a general belief among the political class that the aspect of the conservative movement that is having the most. cultural victory, you know, moving the Overton window the most is the turf portion of the movement in the U.
S. I think we think of turfs as being this rare small group that that is just like weirdo extremists in the U. K. They are a core aspect, [00:02:00] if not the current most successful aspect of the conservative political ideology of the country. Yeah. So, this brings us to a question. Who are TERFs? What do we think of TERFs?
And yeah, we'll, we'll just go into it because it's something I spend a lot of time on. So people might know this. We have a holiday called Lemon Day in our family where we have to engage with an ideology that offends us. And I spent a lot of time because I've always found TERFism to be fairly offensive and that might surprise people.
So I'll explain why really deeply in their communities, which are called gender critical communities from their perspective.
One of the core mistakes people make when they think about who the TERFs are, what they are, what they want, is they think that this is predominantly, and I even noticed this was in the UK to an extent, is they didn't seem to understand when they were talking about TERFs, the full ideology, that This was just an anti trans movement, and it is not.
It's not a trans skeptical movement, it's not an anti trans movement, it is so much more than that. It is [00:03:00] a complete world perspective on what it is to be human, what humans are, why humans are that way. It is a logically, internally consistent perspective, but it is a perspective that... Is incongruent with measurable evidence is the way I would put it which to me is interesting because it is such a logically internally consistent perspective that is also so insane.
So let's talk about it. And why people ended up holding it, because I think this is very interesting as well. First, I'll quickly describe what TERFs and the gender critical movement actually believe. So they believe that there is no difference between men and women. That's what they mean when they say gender critical.
They are critical of the very concept of gender. They think that men and women are different because we have been socialized differently. That is the core cause of male and female differences in the world.[00:04:00] And that And this is why they're so antagonistic to trans individuals, because they see their goal, right, is to get society to accept that all of the differences between men and women are actually created by society itself.
And that if we could just accept that gender is completely irrelevant, and nothing is gender. No traits are gendered, the female strength isn't gendered, nothing is gendered. Some will accept that like females have smaller bodies on average, but not all of them do. It's actually pretty interesting how like de lulu this movement is.
Wow. But, but mostly the mainstream position of the movement is just psychologically there is absolutely no difference between males and females. Hmm. If we can... Break society's gender concepts, then we can enter a world in which there is genuine equality between what we now call genders. So from their perspective, if they're taking this view, there are two reasons they have, like, [00:05:00] the trans community is their mortal enemy.
Problem number one is trans community is coming in and saying, actually men and women definitely are two different things. So much so that you can be born the wrong one. Like you couldn't be born the wrong one if they weren't different things. Right. So they are. And, and, and then on top of that, when the trans community from the perspective of the gender critical movement defines what men and women are in their mind.
And you can see this in like, Dylan Milvaney's, like, 100 Days of the Woman or something. You, like, watch the early ones, and they're very much like, I've just been crying all day! And, like, they are very much actually negative stereotypes, or what the gender critical movement would consider negative stereotypes about women.
Right. Right? You know, like emotional instability and stuff like that.
Day one of being a girl, and I have already cried three times. I wrote a scathing email that I did not send. I ordered dresses online that I couldn't afford. And then, uh, when someone asked me how I [00:06:00] was, I said, I'm fine, when I wasn't fine. Day 3 of being a girl and I've already become a bimbo with the queen herself. We are drinking martinis at 255 on a Monday on Sunset Boulevard and then we're going makeup shopping. We love it! Cheers! Chrissy?
Yeah. The bimbos are bimbo y. It's 100%. We need it. We shopped. It's been an amazing day as a bimbo. I think it's a good fit for me. What do you think ladies? Love you day four of being a girl and I am exhausted The hair, the makeup, the clothes, the high heels, it's a lot to keep up with,
If you have trouble understanding why this would be so offensive to somebody who didn't believe that there were any actual differences at all, between genders and all differences were the result of stereotypes. This would be like, if a person decided they were transracial, [00:07:00] but then on top of that, they just went around, acting out black stereotypes, like speaking in broken English and was like a watermelon in one hand and fried chicken.
In the other hand,
I want to thank you for teaching me about my roots. Before I came here, I thought Indian culture had to do with ethnic pride, respect for nature, and fighting for the return of rightful lands.
But I now know that being an Indian is about scalping, drinking, and gambling.
Malcolm: And that is fascinating. That is fascinating. So, obviously they're angry there. The second reason they're angry is, if there really aren't differences between men and women, in any way at a psychological level, then the core difference in women as like an oppressed class in our society is that they grew up feeling that oppression and exclusion.
anD through that, and TERFs mostly care about trans people, trans women, they mostly care about trans women, we'll get into this in a second, like why they mostly feel like, well, then you are just [00:08:00] identifying as a Thank you. Minority community, basically, from their perspective, because they have a view that is actually very common among progressive groups, if there actually is no difference between any ethnic group, if there actually is no difference between males and females, well then for the same reason it is twisted to pretend you are a different ethnicity than you were born, it would be twisted to pretend you are a different gender than you were born.
Yeah, that makes sense. So they see it as equally offensive to that. Now there's the final thing that really motivates a lot of TERFs. aNd the final thing is, and, and, and imagine you have this perspective and then something like something who you see as a man is women winning like woman of the year.
Right? You'd be like, wow, they have taken everything from us. Yeah. You know, because they don't believe that trans individuals are really the gender that they claim to be. And then the, the, the, the final thing that really motivates a lot of TERFs is the TERF lesbian movement. There's a lot of lesbian TERFs.
So, a lot of TERFs were political lesbians. To begin with or [00:09:00] I think some of them use political lesbianism to pressure straight women into sleeping with them. You could actually say, so let's talk about what political lesbianism is. If you don't believe gender is a thing, then sexual orientation isn't a thing either.
And so if men are the problem in society, then you can just choose to be gay. And this is a very convenient ideology for a lot of people who want to believe that any, a lot of women, who want to believe any woman they have a crush on is a valid target for them to try as hard as they want on. But I think that a lot of these people are actually, like, genuinely just...
Lesbians. And when people began to enter their communities that were causing these disgust reactions, that's what we've, we've just caused in our stuff on sexuality, our perception of sexuality, and I believe this very strongly, is that sexuality exists on a spectrum from arousal to disgust. It does not stop at zero.
It's not zero arousal to a hundred arousal, it's a hundred arousal to negative a hundred arousal. And as we point out, like what, what happens when you're aroused? Your eyes dilate, you look at [00:10:00] somebody more, you breathe in more, you want to be in the same room as them, disgust, eyes contract, you look away, you hold your nose, you want to get away from the person, they appear to be exactly the same system.
Yeah. So I expect that these are women who are having, and a lot of men feel this way where, where more men than women where they will feel an active disgust reaction to either males or females, depending on their gender of predominant attraction which isn't seen as much in women, but it is seen partially in women.
So these women are having this disgust reaction to individuals because they're not they, they one, don't conceptualize those individuals as the gender they're claiming to be. And, and, and maybe at like a biological level, they're not recognizing them at the gender that they're claiming to be. So these are the various beefs that the TERF community has with the trans community.
Hm. And I get it if you have their perspective. So let's talk about why their perspective can feel reasonable from a second. Like, like how they actually got these insane ideas. Yeah. So this actually comes from mainstream progressive ideology. One of the things about progressive ideology that changes very [00:11:00] frequently.
If you are out there campaigning for whatever you think. Transmedicalists think it's progressive ideology today, in the future people will say you are a horrible bigot, they will throw you under the bus, and they will beat you at protests, if you hold these ideas. Now of course you're supposed to update your ideas, if they update their ideas.
You know, as we point out, I believe we're just talking about transness, like transmedicalists used to be like the main kind of trans, that was the official trans. But before that it was terse. And transmedicalists, by the way, are the ones who believe that you need gender dysphoria to be trans instead of just saying that you're trans.
To be trans, or feeling, without gender dysphoria, being trans. Anyway, so, if you go back to the terfs, if you look at Skinnerism, so we're talking like 1920s psychology they actually believed in, like, the tabula rasa, in humans. They believed that all humans were a blank slate. Yeah, you
Simone: could condition a human to be into anything, to want anything, to do anything.
A hundred
Malcolm: percent based on how they're raised. Mm hmm. A hundred percent based on their experiences. And this was mainstream psychology out of the top universities for a period of like 15 years? And it [00:12:00] was mainstream psychology during a period where the current progressive ideology was developing itself, or communist ideology or whatever you want to call it, that all differences between all groups, men, women different cultures, et cetera, are primarily caused by discrimination and oppression and that they are, there, there's nothing that's actually different about anyone.
And so they're just holding to this ideology that they were taught was correct in college. They are, in many ways, like, the morally upstanding iteration. It's the slimy ones who changed their belief over time. Or you could say the ones who accepted new evidence. It depends on how you say it, but I, I, I, I do have a level of respect for them.
Because of logic,
Simone: logical consistency, at least. I mean, I'll, I'll admittedly based on a bad foundation, but,
Malcolm: Yeah. So they're, at least they're logically consistent and they're willing to fight for an ideology that gets them tarred and feathered by society. And I always have some level of respect, no matter how much I disagree with someone [00:13:00] about that.
Yeah. Now let's talk about why we think TERFs are so catastrophically stupid. Here
Simone: we go.
Malcolm: Well, this perspective is just wrong. There are differences between men and women. No. Like it's, it's, Obvious. I think it's obvious to any sane thinking person. You need to, to an extent, like, actually be in a cult to not see that men and women are different.
Yeah,
Simone: I mean, well, I mean, yeah, size behavior, brain scans, it's kind of hard to find a realm in which there are not, on average, Differences between men and women. And of course there are some men who are more womanly than some women and vice versa, but
Malcolm: on average, and they will argue, well, all these differences, even the brain differences are caused by socialization, like wouldn't socialization cause different brain structures.
And then you can read these terribly sad stories that you've told me about where like people will try to raise their kids as gender neutral. And the kids will be like, but I want to play with a [00:14:00] doll and they end up getting punished with their parents or their, I want to, I want to do this gendered parents
Simone: catch them cradling their truck and trying to comfort it.
Malcolm: Yeah, this was a little girl who this happened to. Is that not the saddest thing? Like trying to twist human nature to fit a political agenda.
Simone: Yeah. I mean, you know, the thing is though, like. I think we admit that there is nuance here and that like, there are some girls who don't want to play with dolls and you shouldn't try to force anyone to any particular thing because there is variation between people, between and among people.
But again, on average, you know, to deny the fact that there are differences is pretty insane. And yeah, try to force people into some kind of sameness is, is not going to help
Malcolm: stuff.
Well, they just keep trying. There's been a number of instances, and I'm gonna
see if I can find a picture of this, where they have tried to raise kids as gender neutrally as possible. And it just doesn't work. Now, to give them credit, To give them credit, when I say work, it [00:15:00] messes the kids up. Like, a lot.
Like, it causes major psychological issues. Which, in a way does defend the trans idea that we are, to an extent, born with a gender, and that if you try to raise the person as the wrong gender, that's gonna cause problems. But I will give them credit and say that, like, you can look at studies, and even at five months, people do treat...
If it's differently based on their gender. Yeah. You know, like people will be much more likely to call girl inference, like, pretty
Simone: compliment to call boy infants strong, et
Malcolm: cetera. Yeah. And so does this affect them? No, fucking obviously it doesn't affect them.
They are infants, they don't understand what you're saying. And anyone who has been a parent can tell you that infants show their gender by like, really strongly within like the first few months. It's really, really obvious. But anyway, sorry, I, I, it's always like, oh, here's some kernel of thing where they have a point.
But like, are you [00:16:00] fucking kidding me? Like, obviously men and women are different. Obviously! This is a dumb hill to die on, and it's a dumb ideology to die with. Now So then
Simone: why do you think TERFs have, at least a small group of TERFs, have managed to gain so much outsized influence in the United Kingdom specifically?
What happened
Malcolm: there? Yeah. So, conservative ideology in the United Kingdom is not like conservative ideology in the US. In the United States, conservative ideology, like when I talk to conservatives, I'm like, what do you want? They talk from the perspective of their cultural group. I, as a, you know, recent Nigerian immigrant want this.
I, as a traditional Catholic want this. I, as a Muslim want this. Right. Where conservative ideas are motivated by culture. and faith. Okay? Like a unique, distinct culture. In the UK, there is a belief, this is not true. Conservatism is very [00:17:00] rarely motivated by religious ideology in the UK because there just isn't enough of it.
It is too secular a culture to have a persistent conservative base that is motivated by religious ideology. Yeah. So instead, their conservative base is motivated by, um, what I call like small C conservatism. Like let's go back to the way things used to
Simone: be. We'll just say curmudgeonly resistance to change.
Can we say that?
Malcolm: Exactly. Curmudgeonly resistant to change. And who would be more curmudgeonly and resistant to change than 1970s feminists? These women were not known for their logic, these women, historically, look at videos
like PCU or something like that. Everybody always knew that this early iteration of the feminist movement was like, fucking bonkers, and completely dislocated from reality..
Hey, Sam, isn't that the guy that you used to, uh...
You went out with a white male? I was a freshman. Fresh person. Please. Please. . He's coming [00:18:00] over here. Sisters, form a wall! No, you don't , is Sam in there? In there? What's that supposed to mean? Yeah, cock man, oppressor.
Malcolm: And that... Of course, as they aged, they didn't adopt new science. Of course, as they aged, because their entire ideology to begin with was stupid and reactionary. And, and, honestly, I think to a large extent used for them to gain access to sexual partners. To, to bully sexual partners. I'm sorry, I'm just saying.
And so of course, they now... Are some of the people who want things to change the least in society. They want progressivism to go back to an older iteration of progressivism, but they are, and to be clear, not fighting for any real conservative value set. They are temporary not even temporary
Simone: allies.
They're reactionaries, right? I mean, I think it's more about defending something that they feel is under threat. It's not about proactively creating something that they want.
Malcolm: Yeah no, I will say, [00:19:00] and I had mentioned this earlier, so when I'm talking about, like, where a lot of them, like, have it at peak, is they then have this forced on them.
You know, they used to do this political lesbian thing to force straight women to sleep with them and pressure straight women to sleep with them, and now they're getting the, well, not liking girl dick makes you a bigot, and they don't like the tables being turned on them and of course it feels horrible to them.
Of course it feels horrible to them, because it does feel horrible to be To have a person use their politics to pressure you into a sexual relationship. But
Simone: also to build what you think are safe spaces for yourself, only to have them invaded by kind of exactly the people that you want to have out of your treehouse.
Malcolm: Yeah, well, I mean, and to be clear, I don't think that these spaces were really safe. I think that these were spaces that they ruled. It reminds me of our kids. We caught Octavian giving his younger brother, Toasty, a bad deal at one point. With toys. And we turned around in the car and we said, Hey, stop it, Octavian.
Like, Toasty, that's, you don't need to do what he says. And he goes [00:20:00] Mama, Dada, do not talk to the little ones. Because he had worked out this little system that gave him a huge advantage within this little social sphere that he had created that he was using to systemically abuse another person. And I don't think that all of them are doing this in the same way that I don't think that all Trans women in lesbian communities are there to abuse women.
But I think a minority, like, does it happen? Do people who are, like, not passing at all go in and say, if you do not sleep with me, then you are a bigot and you are a transphobe? And they use this to get lesbians who have been in these communities for a long time kicked out of communities that they really identified with, that were a core part of their identity?
Yeah, this happens. This actually does happen. Right? Like, and I can understand why one of these women would then be like, okay, fatwa on you, you know, I, I dedicate my life to destroying you and everything you care about because you destroyed my sense of identity because these are often people without kids, you know, they're, they're people who [00:21:00] all they had was their community and their identity as good people, which they believed came from their belief that there are no differences between any humans.
Okay. But I
Simone: would say this is more, you've implied that it's sort of about getting sexual partners. I really think it's more about power than it is about sex.
Malcolm: Okay, yeah, I'd agree with that as well. Yeah, they wanted power within these communities that they had isolated access to.
Simone: Yeah, and I mean, I think when it comes to, To trans stuff in general, there's a lot of frustration among, um, groups more inclined to favor women or want to protect women or give them a special place to be really frustrated when men or formerly men enter women's spaces because men still often come in with huge advantages, physically, mentally, et cetera.
I remember when we were at an event at one point and someone said that they were going to go and cover a trans man competing in a women's chess tournament and I was like, wow, so I mean, you [00:22:00] know, how are you going to cover the fact that like, she's coming in with a systemic advantage.
Like, you know, men historically have out competed women quite significantly in chess and you know, many other fields.
Malcolm: And the reporter who was trans had never heard of this.
Simone: Yeah. It was like, Oh no, no, no. That's just because, you know, in, you know, women in chess face, you know, significant discrimination.
Yeah. But there was, there was no acknowledgement of any sort of male advantage that may exist, like male, male brain advantage that exists in the game of chess. anD I don't know, I think that's interesting in that, like the view actually that this, this one journalist expressed was sort of turf ish blank slate.
Malcolm: Yeah, it's very interesting that I recently, and I have seen this, and this is, dumb progressives do this often, where they will argue TERF positions without thinking through the consequences of what they're arguing.
Gosh, if only incels could figure out that the real red pill is realizing that gender is a social construct and that chaos is the general order of the universe.
It's about learning to [00:23:00] stop living your life for the binaries of old and start exploring yourself as a whole intersectional being.
Malcolm: And that one is one I hear very frequently, is I'll see progressives who are like young and don't really understand, like, the core philosophy that is mainstream in the progressive party right now, and they will make arguments like, men and women are not different at all, how dare you claim that, how dare you claim there's any psychological differences between men and women.
And when I point out to them, I go, you know that's a. Turf position, right? Like this is not something other progressives believe. They're like, nah, nah, I hate turfs because they've been told to hate turfs and they just haven't really updated themselves on the new iteration of progressive philosophy. And I think that that's what we were seeing was that individual.
There's a lot of people who are just sort of their, their world perspectives are not based on any sort of cohesive logic. They are just based on like the last marching orders they were given. And the fight in the progressive space is who gets to give these marching orders. And I, and I also want to point out, you know, when we were talking about, like, the power structures in these lesbian communities before the, the trans women came into [00:24:00] them and people might be like, you are really reaching to say that these communities are abusive.
No, seriously, look at the rates of abuse in these communities. They were wildly high when contrasted with heterosexual relationships or gay male relationships. They were abusive communities before, that were controlled by an abusive sort of elite class of, of, or not elite class, an abusive dominant class of women.
when I was editing this video, I was looking for a chart to put here and I am shocked by these numbers. 44% of lesbian women have experienced abuse from their partner. Now what's really interesting is the one category of women that has a higher rate of abuse than lesbian women.
He's bisexual woman with 61%. This would make sense if our theory about a class of mostly straight women in lesbian communities being gas lit by this concept of political lesbian ism and then abused into staying was in these communities was accurate
Malcolm: And you often see this. [00:25:00] Even in, in, in stereotypes of these movements. This is why when you look at like the old school feminist movement, like, the women and women first skits from Portlandia you see these people engaging in so much like gaslighting and abusive behavior,
You want this vagina pillow?
No one does.
Especially for the little one. The little one does not need a vagina pillow. He doesn't need one. Bob, we don't want to know that... The gender of the baby. We don't want to know the sex, and you know that. I don't know your gender. I don't know Candace's. I don't know mine. You don't know my gender? I don't. Do I look like a woman?
I don't know what a woman looks like. Do you? I just feel like I'm good at recognizing a woman when I see one. What are you? You're, you're a detective? A gender detective? No, I just... Lifting up skirts and pulling down pants and just getting in there with your magnifying glass? I've never done that. I didn't even consider your gender.
I know, you still don't. I didn't, didn't con... I've accepted it now. I accept you're a man. Thank you have a penis. That doesn't mean it's gonna stay that way. Excuse me. I raised you right. Do you remember? I do. [00:26:00] I definitely kept it fuzzy when it came to what gender you are. Not raising you by any kind of binary gender code. Do you remember I'd dress you up in a ballerina costume one day, and the next one a sailor outfit, and...
So confusing. I'm proud of you. You know that, right? Even though you're a man.
Malcolm: Because that's just really common.
Simone: More just like female style behavior. I mean, I think there, and I would say that, I don't know how this works. Like we have, you know, for example, our company is, is. The vast majority female and it is not even remotely toxic, right? Like it's actually a great company. This, these are like no nonsense, extremely professional women that we work with.
But then you also hear about these other companies that are just extremely toxic women run companies.
Malcolm: Because you didn't hire them to be a woman run company. The other companies where I've seen them get really toxic. They're like, let's only hire women. You primarily
Simone: toxic and like specifically preferential treatment toward women or like women, women first culture.
Yes, yes. interesting.
Malcolm: weLl because I think, [00:27:00] and I hate to say this, I think it's the women who are motivated to create those cultures. We're the type of the most toxic so they will often be like, Oh, all of these women I brought in were terrible. And it's like, why did you bring these women in over other women's?
Why, when my wife is creating a basically all women and gay male company, we have almost no toxicity in our company. But when they are bringing in women, they create this level of toxicity. It's because they brought in women who they wanted to be able to control. anD that's part of why they didn't want men because they, the techniques that they were using to control people, they couldn't exercise on men as easily.
We had a follow up theory to this. It couldn't be that almost all of the women we hire in our company are mothers. And that when women become mothers, the way that they interact with it, their women changes systemically. You know, uh, as we often say in different stages of an individual's life, you're going to have different emotional impulses.
And when women are younger, it makes sense to have class status fights with other women. , in order to secure a mate, but once you [00:28:00] have secured a mate and you start having kids. It makes more sense to cooperate with other women as much as possible
Simone: Another thing I wanted to ask you is, is don't you think that actually the TERF view is the predominating view fundamentally in progressive culture and that hereditarian views, that is to say any sort of view where people inherit genetic traits and genders are, you know, inherit. actual differences is, is actually considered quite controversial and questionable.
Whereas like mainstream culture is much more comfortable with just accepting that everyone starts at a blank as a blank slate. And it is society's fault. If anything is
Malcolm: different. I can see why it's appealing. The problem is, is that if you take a perspective that there are no differences between men and women, it is really hard to argue that transness is like a meaningful thing.
Like the TERF perspective, if you take that perspective, there are no differences at all between men and women. Yeah. It's the correct [00:29:00] perspective. It is the logically consistent perspective. I, I can think of no logically consistent way if men and women actually were exactly the same, and all the differences we perceive between men and women are due to social conditioning, that you could argue that we are making society a better place by affirming These, these gendered, what the TERFs would see as gendered stereotypes in trans individuals.
Hmm. I mean, can you? Maybe I'm missing some like logical pathway here.
Simone: Well, more what I was saying is like, isn't that the mainstream view in the end in progressive society? No, it's not. How is the mainstream view
Malcolm: different? Well, so the new mainstream perspective in progressive society is men and women are different.
Is that the view? Well, so it's interesting that you say this. I think it's okay. Well, I'll word it differently. The people who control the progressive narratives, the academics who write on this stuff, it's their view. It's not the view of the average progressive, which is why turfs [00:30:00] are having such an easy time winning mind share in places like the UK because progressives haven't updated the rank and files answer to this question, and they've just never had it pointed out to them.
The incongruity of. Of trans rights and trans people not actually existing and, and, and being phonies from the turf perspective. And so they just have never really had to combine these two ideas in their head. So they, they, they they're able to hold both perspectives simultaneously. And so I think that you're right.
You are right. And that the rank and file progressive foot soldier actually believes there are no differences between men and women. Which is what makes them so susceptible to these arguments.
Simone: Okay.
Malcolm: Which is interesting, and it's also you know, why we have so much grief. Now, I will point out, as a, as a final hint here, there are people who call themselves TERFs now that don't have this ideology.
They're more just what we call, like, trans skeptical people. And I'm like, they're like, yeah, but this TERF has, like, bigger reaction from people and a bigger movement. So it's what I'm going to [00:31:00] call myself. Oh. But they're not actually TERFs. TERFs are gender critical feminists. Like, that is what it means historically.
Interesting.
Simone: Oh. I I find it quite interesting. I, I wonder how long it's going to last. I don't think long. Yeah. You think it, is it going to die with the generation that? It's
Malcolm: going to die with the generation it comes from. There are very few young TERFs. It's just, even, even young people who call themselves TERFs, they don't even know that TERFism is like associated with this gender critical ideology because I've talked to them about it.
Like when we were in the UK, I was like, you know what you're actually saying if you call yourself a TERF. And they're like, no, I didn't know that it was connected to gender critical ideology. I do believe that men and women are different. Because it's, it's a very hard thing to teach now. It's a very hard thing to argue now.
It was never an idea that was that long for this world. I think.
Simone: Interesting. So that there's sort of this like short lived generation, small group of highly influential women who were able to [00:32:00] speak. Sort of just through dumb luck to the curmudgeonly hatred of change of the people of the UK who lean in a conservative direction.
Yeah. It has granted them outsized influence, which will not last for very long, but that's what's going on. Yeah.
Malcolm: Yeah. Yeah. Because if you talk to conservatives in the U S you're like, why aren't conservatives in the U S tariffs? Because they're mostly religious and they believe that men and women are different and they're like, obviously men and women are different.
We have different roles. What are you talking about? Whereas even at conservative conferences in the UK, I got like chastised for saying that. Oh, did you?
Simone: Yeah. I mean, conservatives in the UK are very strange. It was, it was an interesting experience. The conservatives in the US are much more colorful, much more proactive and much more sovereign.
And by sovereign, I mean, Like, they're like, this is my conservative group over here, and we're doing our thing, and we're really excited about it. Whereas in the UK, I think it was much more like, okay, I and all the [00:33:00] other UK conservatives are just kind of unhappy about what's going on. Then it wasn't like, oh, like, you know, I, this, like, you know, really, the TradCath, like, we're building weird stuff.
It was more just like, hmm, I don't know about this. Very interesting.
Malcolm: And I'd also recommend, if you guys want to see if you have TERFs, if you... Look in their college years. You can find pictures of them in their college years. You will see people who today we would see as extremist progressives.
Almost all of them started as extremist progressives. And this is the fate of everyone today who actually believes the progressive message instead of understanding that it's going to constantly change because it doesn't care about truth. It cares about trends. It cares about status hierarchies. And that if you stick with the message that's popular today, you will be treated the same way we treat church.
That example here that I almost know people are going to get eviscerated for in the future. It's people who have had a systemic advantage over other people being born smarter than other people, pretending that IQ is [00:34:00] in no way an inborn or hereditary thing it, it, it, it just, it sounds so unethical when you hear it.
Like it's like a wealthy person saying, well, dead, nothing to do is my success. Everyone can be as successful as me. And this is an ethical position. It's like, no, that's not an ethical position that is sociopathic and insane. And it's very obvious to me that the progressive movement is going to move away from this.
And everyone today who is out there arguing against IQ being hereditary is going to have a lot of egg on their face in the near
Simone: future. Right. Now, as you say, it's the, it's going to be the new, I don't see race.
Malcolm: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Pretending you do not see a systemic advantage you have over other people is not moral.
anD I should point out when she's saying that, we're not saying that IQ is in any way tied to ethnic groups. What we are saying is that both statements are just denying your own privilege and pretending that that is a moral position. It is not, and you will be treated... Harshly if you continue to hold this position.
Yeah, [00:35:00]
Simone: I love you. I love you, too
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