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Comment by millzlane | Hacker News Reader

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

But if we want to be accommodating to those who take offense with the term, we can use the term Gender Critical.

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

All you have to do is look at how the term is used in the wild to determine if its a slur. Anyone who can claim it isn't is being disingenuous.

> All you have to do is look at how the term is used

By that logic, is "white supremacist" (or racist) a slur? I see it used in just about the same way.

It's tricky. They are certainly used in slur-like ways these days. I would say the difference is that white supremacist and racist are pre-existing terms that are widely considered to be neutral descriptive terms. You can use neutral terms in non-neutral ways and over time they may start to take on the slur connotation. But I don't think we are there yet with the established terms.

Is there a way to express distaste for racists that doesn't use the word like a slur?

I'm wondering to what extent statements like "racist is a slur" is equivalent to "people frequently express distaste for racists"

You can certainly be explicit about the negative evaluation, e.g. "racism sucks", "being a racist is not cool". The issue with language is that context imbues words with meaning. So when you use a term in such a way that the dynamics between the term and the context leads to associating the negative connotation of the context to the word itself, further usages of the word then carries that negative connotation with it. In the case of slurs, they no longer (or never did) carry any neutral meaning. So the difference between expressing distaste and using a slur is how the negative connotation is expressed.

Citation?

“Trans-exclusionary radical feminist” sounds pretty pejorative, most especially the “radical” part.

"Radical Feminist" is the only part of the term that everyone agrees is not pejorative.

It is a real branch inside feminism, which lots of women identify with, and it doesn't mean what most people think it does.

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism

For some reason I cannot recall, a friend of mine had me read a bunch of proper radfem terf blogs back in like, 2010. I remember being impressed with the coherence of their worldview, even if it, uh, was not flattering.

Men were all inherently bad, penis-in-vagina sex was inherently rape, lesbians were good, trans-women were infiltrators and trans-men deserters.

"Radical feminism" is a branch of feminism. It is not used as a pejorative in the acronym.

You can say "gender essentialist" if you feel that TERF is too loaded, but it boils down to the same thing; it's a position that denies identity rather than accepting it.

It's only pejorative in the sense that it attempts to accurately describe the motives of a set of individuals who aren't comfortable with the way those motives are widely regarded. In that sense it's about as pejorative as "racist".

That is the danger of interpreting technical jargon without having the technical background. It will get you in trouble when you are talking about software just the same as when talking about science.

It might be loaded with denotation outside of the scientific community, but the word “radical” has some various scientific meanings, as other commenters have noted.

I think "trans-exclusionary conservative feminist" would be way more pejorative to the feminists in question.

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