The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, often referred to as MWMF or Michfest, was a lesbian feminist women's music festival held annually from 1976 to 2015 in Oceana County, Michigan, on privately owned woodland near Hart Township referred to as "The Land" by Michfest organizers and attendees. The event was built, staffed, run, and attended exclusively by women, with girls, young boys and toddlers permitted.
Transfeminism, or trans feminism, is a branch of feminism focused on transgender women and informed by transgender studies. Transfeminism focuses on the effects of transmisogyny and patriarchy on trans women. It is related to the broader field of queer theory. The term was popularized by Emi Koyama in The Transfeminist Manifesto.
Janice G. Raymond is an American lesbian radical feminist and professor emerita of women's studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is known for her work against violence, sexual exploitation, and medical abuse of women, and for her controversial work denouncing transsexuality.
Sheila Jeffreys is a former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, born in England. A lesbian feminist scholar, she analyses the history and politics of human sexuality.
Sally Haslanger is an American philosopher and the Ford Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Feminist views on transgender topics vary widely.
Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.
The Swedish Women's Lobby is a Swedish gender-critical organization that claims to work for "sex-based rights."
TERF is an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. First recorded in 2008, the term TERF was originally used to distinguish transgender-inclusive feminists from a group of radical feminists and social conservatives who reject the position that trans women are women, including trans women in women's spaces, and transgender rights legislation. Trans-inclusive feminists assert that these ideas and positions are transphobic and discriminatory towards transgender people. The use of the term TERF has since broadened to include reference to people with trans-exclusionary views who are not necessarily involved with radical feminism. In the 2020s, the term "trans-exclusionary radical feminism" is used synonymously with or overlaps with "gender-critical feminism".
Naomi Zack is a professor of philosophy at Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY), having formerly been a professor at the University of Albany and the University of Oregon. She has written thirteen books and three textbooks, and she has edited or co-edited five anthologies, in addition to publishing a large number of papers and book chapters, particularly in areas having to deal with race, feminism, and natural disasters. Zack has taken on a number of professional roles related to the representation of women and other under-represented groups in philosophy. Zack is also a member of the editorial boards of multiple journals, including Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, The Journal of Race and Policy, Ethnic Studies: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Culture, Race and Ethnicity, and the Radical Philosophical Review.
Transgender rights in the United Kingdom have varied significantly over time, with transgender Britons facing many issues not experienced by non-trans individuals. These include various laws and public attitudes in regards to identity documents, as well as anti-discrimination measures used by or pertaining to transgender people, in the areas of employment, education, housing and social services, amongst others.
The feminist philosophy journal Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis. The journal had published a peer-reviewed article by Tuvel in which she compared the situation of Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, to that of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black. When the article was criticized on social media, scholars associated with Hypatia joined in the criticism and urged the journal to retract it. The controversy exposed a rift within the journal's editorial team and more broadly within feminism and academic philosophy.
Meghan Emily Murphy is a Canadian writer, journalist, and founder of Feminist Current, a feminist website and podcast. Her writing, speeches, and talks have criticized third-wave feminism, male feminists, the sex industry, exploitation of women in mass media, censorship, and gender identity legislation. She is based in Vancouver.
Kathleen Mary Linn Stock is a British philosopher and writer. She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex until 2021. She has published academic work on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification, and sexual orientation.
Magdalen Berns was a British YouTuber, boxer, and software developer. Berns, a lesbian radical feminist, produced a series of YouTube vlogs in the late 2010s concerning topics such as women's rights and gender identity. Berns's vlogs attracted attention from transgender rights activists, some of whom characterized her as being transphobic and a TERF. Berns co-founded the non-profit organisation For Women Scotland, which campaigns against possible changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004, among other things.
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters is a 2020 book by Abigail Shrier, published by Regnery Publishing, which endorses the controversial concept of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). ROGD is not recognized as a medical diagnosis by any major professional institution nor is it backed by credible scientific evidence.
Helen Joyce is an Irish journalist and gender critical activist. She studied as a mathematician and worked in academia before becoming a journalist. Joyce began working for The Economist as education correspondent for its Britain section in 2005 and has since held several senior positions, including finance editor and international editor. She published her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality in 2021.
Gender-critical feminism, also known as trans-exclusionary radical feminism or TERFism, is an ideology or movement that opposes what it refers to as "gender ideology": the concept of gender identity and transgender rights, especially gender self-identification. Gender-critical feminists believe that sex is biological and immutable, while believing gender, including both gender identity and gender roles, to be inherently oppressive. They reject the concept of transgender identities.
Transgender genocide or trans genocide is a term used by some scholars and activists to describe an elevated level of systematic discrimination and violence against transgender people.
FiLiA is a British gender-critical feminist charity founded in 2015 that describes itself as part of the women's liberation movement. FiLiA organizes a conference, held first in 2008 as Feminism in London, in different cities, which it now describes as the "largest annual grassroots feminist conference in Europe". FiLiA is gender-critical, and states that it supports "sex-based rights" and opposes what they refer to as "gender ideology." It has lobbied against gender recognition reform and considers gender self-identification a threat to "women's protected rights." Critics describe it as anti-transgender and transphobic. FiLiA is critical of the sex industry and as a result, it considers pornography harmful. It has campaigned on behalf of women internationally, and as a result, it has held its campaigns in countries such as Iran, Cyprus, and Kenya. It has been described as one of "the most important 'gender critical' groups" alongside Women's Declaration International. FiLiA has faced protests and attempted cancellations, notably in 2023 when the venue Platform attempted to cancel the conference due to alleged transphobia. In 2024 FiLiA launched the book The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht, on what the authors describe as a campaign for "sex-based rights" by J.K. Rowling and others.
