Transgender people and gendernonconforming women are not a threat to the feminist movement and never have been. What is a real threat is this 50 year old war about who ‘belongs’ in women’s spaces and movements. 

A lot of people have pointed out that TERFs have a strong interest in keeping this war going and this is very true. Maintaining endless conversations about the supposed ‘privilege’ of transgender and gendernonconforming people is how TERFs devide and conquer, how they recruit and how they stop us from having conversations about the extreme violence and oppression that transgender and gendernonconforming people face. TERFs are the ones with most to gain from this war which is why they keep sparking it. 

But TERFs are a tiny group and I think they are only able to spark these conversations again and again because White Feminists and others who reject intersectional feminism also have a strong interest in keeping this war going. We are never going to agree on what kind of detailed privileges every single person on the spectrum of genderdiversity has, and while we keep having this conversation we’re having less conversations about the massive amounts of cisgender privilege, white privilege, abled privilege, middle class privilege, etc. that these feminists have or how their refusal to take an intersectional perspective to feminism is creating all of feminisms biggest failures and devides.