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Comment by SamoyedFurFluff | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if this article is describing this phenomenon accurately, as the first paragraph contains an obvious falsehood: “ A flyer with an image of a gun and text reading “shut the fuck up, terf” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a slur) was circulating. ”.

TERF isn’t a slur. No one has successfully beaten and killed a woman while calling her a TERF and then got away with it in court like the gay panic defense and the trans panic defense has. No one was lynched for being a TERF like black people have been. This is a gross talking point trying to claim victim positioning and is inaccurate journalism. The whole article is suspect to be sympathetic to anti-trans politics as a result.

I do want to talk about how much gender has invaded the academic life in a way that gets in the way of education. Obviously, I don’t want even more gender politicking from the other “side”!

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A slur is an insult, no one has to have died for something to be a slur, not sure where you got that idea from.

Right, but "slur" by itself is used as shorthand for "offensive slur" - typically racially-offensive slurs or homophobic slurs, and so on - I'm not aware of normal public discourse referring to everyday insults as "slurs" - whatever the original definition slur had it now has a connotation of insulting the target by way of comparing the target to an intentionally hurtful stereotype. (I could enumerate examples but nothing good can come from that, methinks...)

Whereas "TERF" is an acronym - it isn't appealing to anyone's emotional opinions about what a "TERF" represents - that is if anyone is even clued-up enough to know what it actually means.

Maybe the people complaining are assuming that TERF is an offensive slur without doing their research first? I'll admit it does have that feel to it, the way it sharply rolls off the tongue...

TERF both manages to connote something that should be stepped upon and is used to box in a person's opinions to a caricature so that a label can be applied (a stereotype, in other words), rather than listening to what they say. I'd say that between that, karen, anti-vaxxer, and anti-masker, a number of niche slurs have been popularized recently.

A slur is an allegation that is likely to insult them or damage their reputation. That's clearly why terf was used in this context.

I've noticed leftist communities frequently attempting to redefine incendiary words (such as 'racism') as a political tactic, to a lot of success.

1a : an insulting or disparaging remark or innuendo

b : a shaming or degrading effect

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slur

It’s not shaming to say someone is against trans people nor is it disparaging unless someone is bringing politics and moralism into it. Like I said I don’t want even more gender politics from the other “side” as some kind of “backlash” journalistic piece. It’s all a wash of nonsense.

It's a disparaging remark to make it clear that the other person's opinions are wrong and that they as a person is of lesser value and should be ignored or attacked. It's used as a conversation stopper and to polarize the discussion, i.e. rally support from like minded and suppress the other party.

It's also not used merely to say that someone is against trans people, like you suggest. It's used by a toxic community that are immune to nuance and opposed to debate other than to force their own view on everyone else. Very few people are against trans people, but maybe some doesn't buy all of the identity politics. Saying that women menstruate is enough to be labeled a terf by the online mob. There's also rarely any radical feminism expressed by the people being labeled as terfs.

I would suggest that it is a slur because it is used as a term of disparagement that often doesn't even accurately describe the target. The label gets thrown at women who are not RF, and sometimes women who, for whatever reason (for example, a religion they adhere to) would be reluctant to even call themselves F. At that point, I don't see how the word is any different than people e.g. referring to any Arabs as "camel jockeys".

Well, you could consider counter-examples from terfisaslur.com. You probably even know that such a thing exists, but you failed to bring it up.

An experiment you can perform at home: do an exact search on Google for the phrase "punch a terf" and wonder if this is meant to suggest violence.

> TERF isn’t a slur.

I think the economist's usage was OK, as it appears in the supplied context to have been used as a slur (I'm not adequately connected on the topic to know what the "normal" usage would be).

> The whole article is suspect to be sympathetic to anti-trans politics as a result.

Clearly, given what I said above, I don't agree with this diagnosis. In particular I think a few articles like this are a good antidote to the "the universities are insane and have been taken over by crazy extremists" narrative.

Perhaps if this commend page doesn't descend into vitriol, more contextual discussion could lead me or you to modulate our opinion. As I said I don't follow this topic particularly closely, so my interpretation could be naïve.

There’s a difference between saying it’s used as a way to disparage someone and as a slur here. I’ve generally associated the term slur with a significant history of using it against a demographic, such as fggot, nggr, ch*nk, etc. saying that TERF is on the same level as those terms struck me as politicking and not journalism, which made me suspect the rest of the piece as political nonsense from the right.

Language is dynamic. Use something as a slur often enough, and it becomes a slur. And here it's clearly being used as a slur. That doesn't make it always a slur (yet), but here it clearly is.

> TERF isn’t a slur. No one has successfully beaten and killed a woman while calling her a TERF and then got away with it in court

That’s hardly the defining characteristic of a slur.

I’ve associated the term slur in the common understanding with an actual history of marginalization, and I think the claim is totally unnecessary politicking in the reporting.

A slur is any term that’s “a disparaging remark or slight” according to dictionary.com. It’s hard to argue they’re not using the term TERF as disparaging.

The problem is that you are saying "TERF" is a slur by using a wide definition but then using the narrow definition to claim it's a travisty to be called a "TERF". The point is that "TERF" is not on the same level as the n-word, f-word or the t-word which you are likening it to when you insist it's a slur. It's simply not harmful to call someone a "TERF" like it is to use slurs against the groups that TERFs are marginalizing.

You’re putting words in my mouth. All I’m saying is that it was silly to insist that it isn’t a slur.

Ok, but do you understand why it's incorrect to consider it a slur in this context?

No. Like I said, it’s silly to insist that it isn’t a slur. The whole argument is rather silly, frankly.

Wikipedia writes about that thought in their two opening paragraphs and concludes:

> In academic discourse, there is no consensus on whether or not TERF constitutes a slur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERF

Sure, if someone uses it in their paper on, for example, history of feminist thought I wouldn't assume it to be offensive. On the other hand I don't think that the intention behind a sentence like “shut the fuck up, terf” is very unclear.

It seems like the critical thing at stake in this thread is what 'slur' means. Like you, I think of slurs as being only the words associated with minority violence, maybe curse-words+, the sort of thing that would make me feel uncomfortably speaking aloud due to the associations. Evidently other people feel that it means something more like 'insult'. I can't say what this means in the broader context, but it might be a good signal to re-evaluate how you interpreted its use-age in the article.

> No one has successfully beaten and killed a woman while calling her a TERF and then got away with it in court like the gay panic defense and the trans panic defense has. No one was lynched for being a TERF like black people have been.

That is a bizarre standard for what constitutes a slur, and would exclude the vast majority of slurs. This reads more like an attempt to inject an emotional appeal to deny a point you personally disagree with.

TERF is a phrase pretty much always used to attack its target. Coupling it with "shut the fuck up" makes the intention pretty clear.

I don’t actually care about the term itself, I care that a supposed journalism piece is actually inserting it’s own politics so blatantly.

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