I've been burned out for a long time. This probably is evident to many of you who have followed along for a while. I had hoped for a long time that once we met a milestone or something changed I would find more motivation to double down and do even more work required to expand and improve the site. But it's not happening. It's a lot of work just to maintain this site, let alone expand or improve it. It's often boring, difficult, draining, or stressful, and it's uncompensated. And it's very difficult to recruit people to do free work for a project that you're burned out on yourself.

I want to thank everyone who's put money, work, and effort into this project. I also want to thank everyone who participated in good faith, helped other women, and added a bit of value to other people's lives through contributing your posts and comments. Many of you have be a pleasure to serve, and I've learned so much from you and so much from doing this.

Hopefully this amount of time gives you all enough time to save your writing, archive anything you wish to, and network with people you'd like to keep in touch with.

All automatic payments will be cancelled when we close, and we'll be deleting the site database and most emails (threats or other concerns will be retained at my discretion).

This decision has been considered over a long period of time and is final. For the privacy and security of our users we will not be considering offers to buy or transfer the site.

If you have questions or concerns please let me know. Use modmail to contact the admins privately ('message the moderators' button in the o/Ovarit or o/Announcements circle sidebar).

Today is a big day for the Ovarit project: we are now accepting donations from our supporters.

This journey started for me in 2013. I had concerns about a political movement that redefined the word "woman" and rapidly shifted the Overton Window on allowable feminist opinions. Redefined terminology effectively wiped out entire realms of feminist analysis by making them impossible to understand. Feminism could no longer be discussed without social repercussions. I felt like I was losing my mind because everyone I knew in political circles suddenly flipped their views on feminism, what a woman is, and how we are oppressed in patriarchies. The only clear directive was that you weren't allowed to question the new dogma.

When I found r/GenderCritical I was relieved to find I wasn't alone. Other people noticed the same issues and had the same concerns. Over the years, we created many communities that rejected this redefinition of "woman" and defied a political movement that repeatedly derailed movements for women's rights and liberation.

When our communities were suddenly deplatformed we decided that would not be the end of them. We immediately got to work building Ovarit so we could host communities ourselves, without fear that the platform we used would change its policies without warning and ban us without notice again.

The people trying to prevent women from organizing against the roll-back of our rights are trying to isolate us from one another. They want to prevent us from finding each other. They want to silence us. They would erase our dissent from all records if they could. They know they can't win by debating us. They never even consider if it is wrong to suppress women instead of attempting to discuss the issues with us.

I’ve covered the costs of running Ovarit because it's of vital importance to me that these communities exist, that censorship doesn't stop us from speaking up and organizing, and that we're able to find each other and find out that we're not alone. It made the difference for me. I don't want any other woman to be left in isolation and confusion.

Now we can move into the next phase of this project and make Ovarit more financially sustainable.

Donations will go towards:

• Previous and future costs of running ovarit.com, including server expenses, deployment expenses, and security consultation

• Previous and future costs of maintaining Ovarit LLC, including business filings and consultation

If we can cover those costs, we would like to pay developers and other contractors for software features and other work.

When you donate to Ovarit, you help ensure alternatives to male-dominated communication platforms can exist and thrive. Thank you so much for your support.

If you have any questions please let us know.

Are Donations Anonymous? Is cardholder information available to view?

As far as I've been able to tell, it isn't normal for any payment processor to keep the name of the cardholder anonymous from the business owner. When I am on our payment processor's website, I'm able to see the payments and the cardholder associated with them. We are not collecting this information, but our payment processor does let us see it. We won't be saving this information or distributing it. We consider it confidential and sensitive.

That said, there may be ways for you to keep your personal information anonymous from payment processors. Your credit card may allow you to make a virtual card to use: I've never done this and I don't know if it allows you to use a pseudonym but it's worth checking. There are services such as https://www.abine.com/ and https://privacy.com/ which allow you to mask your payment information through them to keep it anonymous from other parties (feel free to recommend any you've used below). Prepaid credit cards are another option which let you use any pseudonym.

Can people who don't have Ovarit accounts donate?

Only users with Ovarit accounts can donate via our site, but anyone who doesn't have an account but wishes to donate can do so via a paid subscription to

.

I love the publicity we get about Ovarit. And I love getting to share that with all of you. It really brings us together, don’t you think? As well as more sisters and allies who think this whole “mess” is just that - a big mess.

Speaking of big messes, whew! Did you all get a chance to read Catherine Bouris’ panic attack substack about Ovarit? I certainly enjoyed seeing you chat about it.

Ms. Bouris, I know you’re reading this and this warning label is for you: The nature of this post is to highlight the absurd nature of your hyperbolic phobia of women-centered spaces that refuse to concede that humans can’t change sex and there’s nothing wrong with women saying so! If this post might upset you, please - turn off the router, turn off your computer, go outside and touch grass.

Those less delicate may continue.

TL;DR: Australian freelancer Catherine Bouris, who fancies herself a deep dive investigative journalist (the smarmy NPR type who condescend to audiences, treating them like out of touch boomer noobs receiving news primarily via radio and email fwds) dips the tippity-tops of her toes into the “TERF underground” so she can report back to those “not chronically online” what horrors lie beneath the “tip of the iceberg.” But after several weeks of diving below its ugly underbelly, Ms. Bouris resurfaces with mere seaweed. She resorts to copying the quivering outrage and distorted hypotheses originally contrived by Kaitlyn Tiffany for her Atlantic article about the “Secret” Internet of TERFs (Dec, 2020).

Ms. Bouris’s main points appear to be:

• TERFs use slang and some of it disagrees with her worldview

• Ovarit looks like Reddit but has surprisingly restrictive rules about slurs

• TERFs are inappropriate about trans remembrance days

• TERFs try to persuade friends of theirs to come around to their way of thinking

The whole thing was a bit anticlimactic, I must say.

Having quit my job at the end of January, I’ve found myself with a lot of spare time on my hands, and there’s only so many hours you can play The Sims before you start to lose your grip on reality.

At first, I was excited to learn that Ms. Bouris's search for reality led her to Ovarit (publicly viewable without a login code)! Unfortunately, coverage of our “abhorrent” hellsite got bumped halfway down the piece, a common error known in journalism as “burying the lede.”

Instead of scintillating screenshots of threatening TERFdom, we are treated to stories about Ms. Bouris’s personal life, which worryingly seems to be circling the drain. Ms. Bouris hypothesizes about the demographics of various “TERF” haunts both mainstream and alternative, while failing to conduct any analyses or contact a research firm that does. After mentioning an odd obsession trawling JK Rowling’s Twitter mentions, she treats us to a fearful "vocabulary lesson" of terms such as “radical feminist” “moids” “peak trans” and others - many which are never again referenced.

I’ve previously written - in my rebuttal of the Atlantic piece - about what we think (see Part III - What Radical Feminists Really Believe) so I won’t rehash it here, but again it’s unfortunate how many so-called journalists are almost correct but nonetheless fail to grasp the essential tenets and terms of our movement.

Perhaps if she had interviewed -one- of the radical feminists running this site, she could have asked us to define our terms in our own words.

Perhaps if she had asked us anything, she would not have been "fucking confused, bro" when copying quotes from Ms. Tiffany’s Atlantic article about Ovarit’s open source software – technologies and businesses neither author appeared to grok well enough to write about.

We (admin) have many thoughts about content moderation, social media platforms, feminism, free speech and women's spaces. Those topics could have made more interesting conversation than yawn-inducing descriptions of the headers and footers, site stats (available monthly on /o/ovarit), or teaching reviews from rando man “Dejan” who took a class by Sheila Jeffreys.

Now we’re all digressing quite badly, thanks to this hot mess.

Let me help clear up some misinformation.

The “Radfem to Alt Right Pipeline”

Ms. Bouris claims inspiration for her series partly came from a Media Matters report that “proved that TikTok’s algorithm was leading users from radical feminist content to alt-right content.”

I read the Media Matters report, which doesn’t mention radical feminism once, name one radical feminist, nor vaguely hint that radical feminist content is a gateway in the alt-right algorithm. It does not feature one female content creator or commenter. The researchers noted most of the transphobic and homophobic content “began with repetitive “jokes” berating transgender and LGBTQ people, frequently involving a popular meme saying that these individuals are ‘fatherless.’ “

Does that sound like the radical feminists you know? Where are all the “fatherless” memes on /o/Radfemmery? Who do you think cares about people being “fatherless”?

This is significant because it’s what makes radical feminists and the alt-right diametrically opposed: they want patriarchy, we do not. They believe man has natural authority over women, children, and society. They want gender roles where men command as leader and women submit as follower. Radical feminists are well aware the alt-right is a threat to women’s liberation. Nonetheless, the dreaded “feminazi” caricature (invented by conservatives) is resurrected in the form of a “TERF”, repeated now by the petulant left.

Anybody who has glimpsed alt-right communities has seen the following oft-posted content: death threats; racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs; and sickening amounts of violence. Neonazis and fascists love to divide, deride, and demean. Their memes, gifs, slogans, and symbols advocate for death and destruction, targeting most often gay and trans people, black and Jewish people, foreigners and those they deem “unfit.” And women. They really hate women.

Ovarit Admin agrees that we do not host that content here. Every circle agrees to moderate per our sitewide rules and we encourage users to report liberally so it may be removed promptly. We would sooner ban MRAs, trolls, and neonazis than grow our site numbers just to impress some small fish freelancer who can’t tell the difference between hate speech and telling the truth.

Ms. Bouris, et. al: If you keep directing your aggression at leftist women passionately defending women's spaces and voices, you'll lose sight of the real wolves at your door, gnashing their teeth and dreaming of blood.

Mocking Trans Deaths

People like Ms. Bouris know the alt-right is addicted to offense, which is why, when Ms. Bouris floundered at finding threatening content on Ovarit, she took the bait from Kaitlyn Tiffany and fished up a year-old post about a satirical ‘TERF Day of Visibility’. I’m not going to rehash this argument either - it’s in Part IV under Radical feminists post hateful content.

I’d like to add on to what I wrote last year:

Women feel frustrated by the repetitive and misleading media reporting on "murder rates of transgender women" when over 2,500 women are killed in the US every year (not including unsolved cases and missing persons) with hardly a whisper.

Women’s whole lives, past, present, and future, are lost when events, activities, sports, awards, and historical days for women are co-opted by trans-identified males. This is a gut-punch loss on top of the worsening rates of femicide, domestic violence, and battery against women. Women in and from crisis zones like the Ukraine and Afghanistan are exploited by men eager to gain new brideslaves. Forcing someone to work on a farm is criminal but forcing someone to be raped for housing is not. Ovarit users have made hundreds of posts, thousands of comments on these subjects.

We want to organize actions but that becomes difficult when domestic violence and sexual assault movements are co-opted to “center trans women.” Statistics of male violence are distorted when male criminals are logged in databases as female. Hundreds of women have been sexually harassed, secretly recorded, raped, murdered and more by trans-identified males, many of them in places women deserve to have their dignity and privacy safeguarded: prisons, shelters, rape crisis centers, school bathrooms, locker rooms, shared hospital and care home rooms.

Why do you think Ovarit users want to talk about these subjects with their loved ones, Ms. Bouris?

When I was a baby feminist coasting on the gains fought for and won by my 2nd wave sisters (education, reproductive rights, banking and credit, better pay and jobs, to name a few), I never thought we’d have to fight to keep prisons from locking serial killer males in the same cells as mentally-disabled young female prisoners. I couldn’t have believed anyone would be vile enough to leave dead animals on the doorstep of a rape crisis shelter, that was harassed and defunded by Trans Identified Men for setting the boundary of “no males” as patrons or staff. I never imagined there would be exhibits at public libraries glorifying violence against women. I never thought hundreds of women crying #MeToo about their trans-identified male partners would be silenced en masse or that detransitioners would be so cruelly shunned by the community that changed them.

Radical feminists want to talk to their families and friends about subjects that impact them, without being threatened or attacked at the dinner table. We believe we have the right to lobby, organize, and speak on behalf of matters important to us, important to women.

These are our receipts. Trans rights activists and liberal feminists have made the work of radical feminists harder. They have hurt women, fractured families and friendships, and imploded meaningful activist causes, splintered by divisiveness and demands made in sacrifice to “trans rights.” Sacrifices of women’s rights, resources, spaces, and voices. We cannot do our work because you all keep getting in the way, sabotaging our movements, harassing and abusing feminists who are working to help women and girls, all of us impacted by patriarchy’s grip.

Shame on you, Ms. Bouris. How dare you publish this unintelligible yellow journalism, targeting women who think there’s something pretty borked about the idea that “men can become literally women” and we deserve a space on the internet to say so without being banned, harassed, or threatened.

How dare you manipulate your readers into thinking we’re as vile and abusive as the alt-right while producing none of the evidence from either us nor your source experts? How can you consider yourself a professional when you don’t even have the audacity to talk to any of people you’re writing about?

Since Ms. Bouris likes the style of writing diary entries that identify as thinkpiece exposés, let me bore my audience by ending with a story specifically for her (yes, I know you aren’t touching grass as advised. But you really really should.)

It all started after I got a job as a staff writer for a university weekly. I didn’t have a lot of spare time but I needed money and experience, so into the real world I went. Which is how I found myself attending an animal rights protest targeting a big name in the cooking industry who was visiting my town. Since I attended the protest and talked to a bunch of people there, and later read loads of awful stuff people had said about this horrible businesswoman, I thought that I knew everything. And I wrote every nasty thing everyone said about her in a very assertive tone.

But my editors refused to publish my piece. “Call her,” they said. “Get her side.”

I didn’t want to. I was terrified. Me, an 18 year old newbie journalist, call up a millionaire celebrity chef businesswoman and get her side? I was convinced I knew it already. After all, plenty of people had already told me everything. Hadn’t they?

But my piece wouldn’t be published otherwise. So, after a lot of procrastination and nailbiting and moaning to myself about how unfair it was, I picked up the phone and dialed her press office.

The office was polite and helpful, offering up statistics from their business and responses I could use in my article, including quotes from #GirlBoss herself on the subject of animal welfare, her beliefs and business practices. Everything I asked, they answered, and even offered a follow up interview if I needed more information later.

As easy as it was to do exactly what my editors requested, the responses from the PR team confounded me. Hearing a different point of view shook the existing structure of my piece, forcing me to be more thoughtful, and more honest, about how I presented both my argument and hers.

I too, did not think journalism should pretend to be impartial nor neutral in the face of injustice. But my editors were right, I needed to be courageous enough to ask questions of the scary “other side” and do due diligence researching and writing my piece. Which, in the end, strengthened the points I wanted to make, while bringing integrity to my work.

Ms. Bouris - talking to your opponents may not change your mind or your conclusion, but perhaps you will realize the boogeywomen you’re trying to conjure are just shadows on a cave wall … but I’ve told enough stories already and we don’t have time to get into all that.

If you ever want to chat with the admins of Ovarit, you know where to find us.

A rebuttal from the Ovarit Administration regarding The Atlantic’s article: The Secret Internet of TERFs

If Ovarit was a secret, we’re doing an awfully bad job keeping it under wraps. As of December 7, four months after launching the beta site, we’ve given invite codes to over 2,500 registered users. On an average day in early December we hosted over 7,000 unique visitors, almost 100 new posts and 1,200 comments. And thanks to The Atlantic’s recent article, The Secret Internet of TERFs, we’ve been inundated with new requests to join, experienced a significant bump in site traffic (our user base increased 10% over the past week), and conversations about Ovarit are circulating here and on other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LipstickAlley, Mumsnet, and Saidit.

We launched Ovarit with a handful of familiar circles - some of the banned subreddits such as r/GenderCritical, r/TERFisaslur, r/ActualWomen and r/ThisNeverHappens - and a few new ones such as o/WomensLiberation, o/WomensHistory and o/FeministEvents! In the four months since our launch, we’ve added circles to reflect our member’s interests and willingness to help grow their communities, such as: o/STEM, o/Fitness, o/FeministBooks, o/Games, and o/ArtsAndYarns, all growing in subscribers and content. o/SaveWomensSports, created December 8th, already has over 400 subscribers.

And all of the circles, posts, comments, and gut-shakingly, spit-out-your-tea funny memes are publicly visible, with or without an invite code. It’s no secret. You can check it out and read what we’re saying for yourself.

We wanted to respond to The Atlantic article to share our side of the story. Fortunately, we’ve been down this road before with media misrepresentation and knew to keep receipts of our discussions with the reporters. We encourage you to read the article, our rebuttal (below), the original interviews, and check out our site to learn more about what women are really saying on Ovarit.

TL;DR

We take issue with The Atlantic’s decision to publish this article as is, considering its frequent use of manipulation and rhetorical fallacy in an attempt to smear us as similar to the alt-right; the poorly chosen embedded links which did not uphold the argument of this piece; the complete and utter lack of evidence that we are a hate group or engage in hate speech on Ovarit or any other site; and the lack of representation of the Ovarit administrators, which gave readers a false impression that the site is run by someone who worked on the software before the site launched.

This is intellectually dishonest, biased reporting that any common person could see through with a quick glance at our site. We resent that in 2020, the centennial year after women gained the right to vote in the United States, our voices, experiences, and liberties are still so poorly represented in civic society.

Media misrepresentation of radical feminist women?

We’re Ovarit.

Part I - What Makes a Hate Group?

The current title of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Atlantic article is a second attempt. Initially it was titled: “Reddit’s Banned Hate Groups Are Still Here.” Although numerous rightwing and Christian organizations have gained the Southern Poverty Law Center’s attention on their list of anti-lgbt hate groups, not one of them is a radical feminist organization. None of them are even feminist organizations. If we’re such a significant hate group, why aren’t the experts in hate groups paying attention to us?

Ms. Tiffany is familiar with the Southern Poverty Law Center, as she wrote about the SPLC’s “detailed report on r/The_Donald” in her June article about r/The_Donald being banned from Reddit. Both SPLC’s 2018 report and Ms. Tiffany’s article are laden with evidence: quotes, screenshots, memes, and comments from the subreddit, expressing support for genocide, white supremacy, ethnic cleansing, and dehumanization. Actual hate groups don’t hide their hatred.

These details are conspicuously absent in her piece on ‘TERFs.’ Lacking evidence that ‘TERFs’ are a hate group (or anti-trans) in any published journals or by any established authority, Ms. Tiffany relies on a poorly-cited undergraduate student’s unpublished thesis on “TERF trackers,” a 3-page LipstickAlley thread from 2016, a tongue-in-cheek article about “unsavoury” sexual material on Mumsnet, a number of articles and research about the alt-right, and a random Redditor’s comment… to establish credibility.

Do you need evidence to call people a hate group? We think so.

Part II - How Stories are Told - Media Manipulation

The media is responsible for telling stories fairly and accurately, without bias. This piece failed dramatically - from the URL text to the imagery accompanying the article to the embedded links and suggested articles - this article conspires to tell the story that gender critical women are as much of a threat to transgender individuals as the alt right is to marginalized communities. The outcome of the decision to tell the story from a one-sided, hyperbolic perspective is that a critical voice in the political debate has been silenced.

Radical feminists oppose many of the legal aims being pushed by trans rights activists, such as allowing male individuals to play women’s sports, giving children and teenagers untested, unproven medical treatments, forcing women to be examined by male medical professionals, and eliminating women’s rights to single-sex spaces such as bathrooms, prisons, and rape shelters. We have the right to resist legislation that negatively impacts women and girls. We are opposed to media reporting that biases readers against radical feminists, misrepresents our goals and perspectives, and fails to fairly represent the controversies it purports to cover.

Association Fallacy - The Abusive Alt Right

Throughout the article, gender critical feminists are juxtaposed against a backdrop of alt-right racism and violence. This is known as an Association Fallacy and can be found throughout the article: in the headline, embedded links, suggested articles, graphic imagery, and website link.

This type of side-by-side manipulation creates the impression that we are the same as another group the author previously profiled.

Some examples:

• The word “toxic” is used six times in the text, both directly and indirectly referring to the gender critical community. No examples of gender critical feminists’ alleged toxicity are provided, however examples of alt-right toxicity are.

• The author attempts to associate us with pedophiles and sociopaths as she discusses the software options we considered using for Ovarit. This is as relevant as accusing someone of being a right-winger because right-wingers use WordPress or Microsoft Word. It’s a bad argument, and isn’t particularly interesting.

• The author attempts to draw similarities between the banning of r/GenderCritical and the banning of r/The_Donald. We maintain the only thing the two subs had in common were being removed on the same day.

• The author changes up the terminology she uses from “TERF” to “gender critical feminist” to “anti-trans feminist” to “anti-trans activists.” This allows her to - when convenient - document hateful or violent actions done by the alt-right and subtly influence the reader to believe it was done by radical feminists. By following the links embedded within the article it becomes clear that the vast majority of “hate” originate from the alt-right.

Whether subtle or overt, we object to and resent being grouped with alt-right, incel, and men’s rights groups. We are regularly targeted by these groups for harassment and abuse, ranging from vulgar memes to violent threats.

The Inferno

The image accompanying the article is a gif of flickering flames appearing at the end of seven browsers layered within each other. This appears to be a subtle reference to Dante’s Inferno and the 7th level of hell: violence. This level is associated with murderers, thugs, suicide victims, blasphemers and “sodomites” - i.e. gay people today. For centuries, women have been depicted as witches, heretics, blasphemers, and worse, particularly when we fight for our rights. Lesbians and gay men have been denigrated, abused, murdered, tortured and discriminated against. This image reinforces the idea that women who express their opinions on sex and gender are committing a hell-worthy offense.

Multiple inferences can be made here. While it may be an attempt to draw a parallel with the religious right, the more likely explanation is that radical feminist views on gender are being twisted as “faith-based” beliefs rather than factual ones. Ms. Tiffany reinforces the notion that gender critical feminists are dogmatic or fanatic by using words like “devoted,” framing popular threads where women share their stories as ritual practice, and emphasizing “guilt” felt by people who no longer adhere to gender ideology.

Our philosophy is not religious, nor fanatic. It is valid feminist analysis and scholarship based on material reality. As Sarah Ditum quipped in response to this article, “if your idea of a dangerously extreme belief is ‘humans have a sex and can't change it’, you might be the out-of-touch one.”

Suggested Stories

[Read: Reddit is done pretending The Donald Is Fine.]

[Read: Reddit is finally facing its legacy of racism.]

[Read: Reddit quashed QAnon by accident.]

The stories suggested alongside this article reinforce the intended narrative of this piece. In Ms. Tiffany’s conception, Reddit’s character undergoes a redemption arc - from free speech proponents with a dirtied legacy to “social justice warrior” cracking down on conspiracy and hate speech. This not only promotes the idea that radical feminist groups also fall into the same ideologies, but that Reddit did the right thing by banning us from the platform.

Link Dropping

Adding a lot of links can be a way to imply to the reader there is far more evidence to support a claim than proven by direct example.

Some of the odder examples include:

• “Warped online discourse” links to a journalism guide by GLAAD, the transgender advocacy organzation. This link includes no documentation of radical feminists, feminists, ‘TERFs’, or gender critical individuals. It instructs the media how to report on transgender legal issues so their demands are more likely to be met.

• “Mumsnet” links to a smirking ‘expose’ of Mumsnet women for daring to have sex with men and talk about it on a popular women’s website. There is absolutely no mention of feminists, radical feminists, ‘TERFs’, or gender critical people. We recommend the author read beyond sensationalist headlines next time.

• “Pistol” links to a piece from 2016 about conservative leader Anita Staver who reports carrying a gun with her in public bathrooms as an expression of her 2nd amendment rights. Staver is not a radical feminist nor representative of one.

It’s shocking The Atlantic allowed all these “sources” to be linked, considering they fail to support the assertions made by the author.

“Us versus Them”

Kaitlyn Tiffany writes about how an “us versus them” attitude cultivates a sense of belonging and has been used to assess toxicity within communities. She then proceeds to craft an entire article using language designed to trigger leftists into grouping radical feminists in with the alt-right and religious right - the “known” enemies of the left.

“If you spent hours a day on this site, it would be easy to forget what that broader world is really like. It would be easy to forget what other people are really like, too, and to lose any curiosity about what they experience.”

If you spend all your time online, in avatar form, you may forget humans are sexually dimorphic, that women experience the world differently than men, and that the world has been developed with men’s and the male body’s needs prioritized.

We’re not off in our own world. We’re in the world, living, working, breathing (hopefully at a distance) right next to everyone else. We wish Ms. Tiffany had demonstrated more curiosity about the women of Ovarit rather than falsely painting us as insular ideologues dealing in hateful rhetoric and company.

Part III - What Radical Feminists Really Believe

‘TERF’ is a slur

Many radical feminists believe ‘TERF’ is a slur. Feminist linguist Deborah Cameron notes, the word ‘TERF’ shares clear similarities with the kind of hate speech directed at other groups.

An author of one of the thought pieces linked in the article agrees radical feminists consider ‘TERF’ to be a slur and acknowledges “all bywords for bigots are intended to be defamatory.”

The term ‘TERF’ is levied as an allegation against all sorts of people who disagree with proponents of transgender ideology, regardless of whether or not they actually “exclude trans people” and regardless of whether or not they are radical feminists. By calling us ‘TERFs’ instead of calling us gender critical feminists or radical feminists, the author is able to associate us with anyone who has ever been called a ‘TERF,’ even if we have nothing else in common with them.

We recognize the patriarchy, but feminism is for women

We take issue with framing radical feminism as “focused on the roots and prevalence of male violence.” Feminism is a movement for women. It is not about men. Radical feminism is defined by its focus on the root or origin of women’s oppression.

As feminist writer Carol Anne Douglas explains, “The word ‘radical’ means going to the root of things. Political radicals believe there is oppression in society and try to look in radically new ways to understand this oppression, its causes and ways of ending it.”

Feminists recognize patriarchy (male power and control over civic, economic, and social domains) as a root of oppression for women as a class. We work on myriad efforts related to liberating women from this oppression - ranging from advocacy around reproductive health and sovereignty, to abolition of rape and violence, to economic and criminal justice, to expanding women’s fair access to, and representation in, education, government, media and other spheres of public and private life.

Sex is fixed and gender should be abolished

Lavery claims ‘TERFs’ are “a minority of a minority of feminists,” while presenting hyperbolic statements about a “TERF industrial complex.” We agree radical feminists are likely a minority political group, but the mainstream view held by most scholars on sex and gender, as well as the majority of the population, is that humans cannot change sex. Only recently has this been a controversial point of view. Conversations about ‘gender’ are confused because people use different definitions for the same terms.

Proponents of transgender ideology believe that people have intrinsic psychological states of ‘gender’ and define gender as a person’s internal and external expression of “feeling” like a man, woman, or “neither/both/other.” They refer to their feelings (“I woke up today feeling like a boy”), appearance (“I’m wearing a dress and makeup”), interests and hobbies (“I like playing with dolls like girls do”), and behaviors (“I talk like a man”) as evidence of their internal ‘gender’, i.e. whether the individual is a man, woman, or some other variation.

Radical feminists use the term gender to talk about roles and statuses prescribed to individuals based on their sex. This means girls are raised to become a culturally-specific kind of domestic servant, care giver, sex object, and/or mother, in many cases receiving little to nothing in return but food and shelter. We recognize this as a form of oppression. We define sex as the biological categories of male and female.

People who do not believe there are internal gender states and that people cannot change their sex are called gender critical. This may include people who are not feminists or not leftists. Often this position is held by radical feminists. We don’t buy into the premise that “not liking girl things” or “not feeling like a girl” means not being a girl. We want to live in a world where girls can grow up to be all kinds of women - no transition required.

We do not exclude trans people

Use of the word ‘TERF’ implies radical feminists are “excluding” trans people from the feminist movement. Radical feminists fight for the liberation of all female people, regardless of how they identify. This may include women and girls who identify as “trans men,” “non-binary,” or any other gender identity. Many radical feminists also fight for the rights of trans people to be free of employment and housing discrimination, and to live free from the restraints of gender.

As Andrea Dworkin wrote:

“Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are. They all have the same vulnerability to rape, to battery, as children to incest. Poorer women have more vulnerability to prostitution, which is basically a form of sexual exploitation that is intolerable in an egalitarian society, which is the society we are fighting for.”

We’re leftists, but we don’t always agree with the left

Some assume that because radical feminists have conflict with other leftists that we must be on the right. Radical feminists disagree with leftist efforts that exploit women - including pornography, prostitution, and surrogacy. While leftists may appear to be a monolith on some policies, notable leftist scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt also support radical feminist perspectives.

We Aren’t Wombyn

We were perplexed by the claim in this piece that we embrace the word “wombyn”, so we conducted a sitewide search of the number of times the word was used on Ovarit prior to the publishing of this piece and came up with a whopping six(!) mentions from 2 users who used the term, one repeatedly as a matter of personal preference and the other once as satire (the usage of this word went up greatly after the Atlantic article due to discussions about it).

Women want to call ourselves women. We’re not trying to call ourselves “wombyn” any more than we’re trying to call ourselves “uterus bearers” “menstruators” or “people with front holes” - terms we’ve all seen used to recategorize “women” so that males who call themselves “women” don’t feel excluded from the term.

Part IV - Assertions Made

We are ‘lawless’

Ms. Tiffany states that if gender critical feminists are banned from mainstream social media sites, we will go to more “lawless” parts of the web. This is reinforced by “internet researcher Luc Cousineau'' who claims we are not “hemmed in'' by dissenting voices or platform rules. Why is Luc quoted as if he is an expert on feminist internet spaces when he describes himself as a researcher of “masculinity, power, and men's rights in leisure time on Reddit”?

The underlying suggestion here is that gender critical feminists don’t have to follow the rules of civilized society while on Ovarit. For anyone who thinks Ovarit is a free-for-all, we encourage them to read our sitewide rules and guidelines which have been in place since the site launched. We explicitly refuse to host abusive, hateful, and pornographic content - which is more restrictive than Reddit. We expect all our users to follow the rules of Ovarit as well as the circle-specific rules they are commenting or posting in. Moderators are quick to remove rule-breaking content and discuss grey area concerns as a collective group. Ovarit is not and never has been a free-for-all for hate speech.

‘TERFs’ dox people

Ms. Tiffany shares an anecdote from trans-identified male Katelyn Burns who claims “members of r/GenderCritical [dug] up and mock[ed] pictures taken of her with her children before her transition.”

When these claims were initially made, r/GenderCritical moderators spent a long, sleepless night pouring through hundreds of posts and comments to try to find the offending material. It was never found. On the other hand, Burns has a history of making up claims about being harassed.

Sharing personal information that could be private (doxing) is banned on Ovarit.

Radical feminists harass trans people

This piece did not provide any verified examples of radical feminists harassing people, although it supplied plenty of links indicating that transgender people experience harassment and that the alt-right engages in violent rhetoric and abuse. Radical feminists are familiar with structures of oppression and do not support violence or harassment against anyone.

Grace Lavery, a trans-identified male who believes humans can literally change sex, claimed to be targeted by ‘TERFs.’ Following the source link for this claim reveals Lavery’s joke about burning a book about girl children transitioning:

So-called free speech activists have spent the last week trying to get me fired from UC Berkeley for a joke they didn’t like. The joke was a sort of B+ punchline to a solid A- set-up, but to give the punchline first, it was simply this: “I encourage my followers to steal copies of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage and burn them on a pyre.”

Lavery admits that “looks pretty bad...if you take it out of context. But the set up changes things.”

Ready for the set-up?

So, the initial joke was: “what we could do is find copies of Abigail Shrier’s book IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE in our local libraries, rip out the interiors without consent, and install the texts of our own propaganda before sewing the jacket back up. stop this rubbish from reproducing itself.” Perhaps a bit grim, but I think it’s kind of funny:

Lavery has made other offensive comments about the book, although he admits he has only read the cover. There is something ironic and horrifying about an associate professor of English calling for book burning, theft, and vandalism to library books, using grossly derisive language about women’s bodies and non-consent as a backdrop (“rip out the interiors without consent”).

Lavery was not “targeted by anti-trans activists,” there was criticism of offensive speech and a professor encouraging criminal activity. As an academic, he should be familiar with having his public ideas challenged. We give him an E for effort.

Additional links supplied in The Atlantic piece often revealed a different story than the narrative:

• Andrea Long Chu’s piece (“trolling tactics”) explains that the “true battles rage on Tumblr, in the form of comments, memes, and doxing.” One might expect him to explain how trans people are being doxed - instead he discusses how gender critical women are put on lists for the purpose of being blocked or harassed.

• s.e. smith’s piece (“doxing and harassment”) describes ‘TERFs’ as abusers who organize mass mobs to get trans people suspended from social media platforms. smith notes that the suspended users were tweeting “jokes” such as:

“If any TERFs like or retweet this, I’m shoving my foot up your ass.”

“It’s German for ‘the terf the.” [Die TERF die]

“give terfs some punch”

“mix up the punch that you made for the terf real good and give them straws to make sure they do not choke.”

“The amount of bullshit TERFs spew is amazing. I think we should punch more of them.”

• “anti-trans activists target and terrorize trans women” links to a piece about a pregnant trans man whose image was spread across social media sites with harmful lies. There is no evidence in the piece that radical feminists were perpetrating acts against trans women, nor that they played a hand in bullying Trystan Reese.

• “Dangerous place” links to a BBC article about harassment against trans people. There is no indication nor evidence that these acts were perpetrated by radical feminists.

• Christina Lu’s ‘TERF tracker’ is intended to silence and suppress gender critical voices

Radical feminists post hateful content

One of the few examples Ms. Tiffany mentions to support her assertions of a toxic community is a meme reposted on Ovarit with the headline “They’re self-aware lmao.” Rather than include the image or link to it, Ms. Tiffany tells readers it is “a playful meme ostensibly made by a trans woman about the transition experience.” The meme, intro scenes from Cartoon Network’s Powerpuff Girls, depicts ingredients being dropped into a cooking pot (each ingredient labeled “thigh highs” “cat ears” “skirts” “Give E[strogen pills]”). In the final frame: “cat girl.” We find the belief that men can become cat girls an absurd premise and feel no shame at having laughed at it.

The other example provided was a thread of women complaining about the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Ms. Tiffany claims “at least 40” trans people have been killed by “anti-trans violence” this year, while linking to the Human Rights Campaign, which counts both transgender and gender nonconforming people who die in any act of violence, which includes robberies, intimate partner violence, and violence at the hands of other trans people. Many of these incidents do not meet the criteria for hate crimes.

Women feel frustrated by the repetitive and misleading media reporting on murder rates of transgender women when over 2,500 women are killed in the US every year (not including unsolved cases and missing persons) with hardly a whisper.

MK Fain and girl_undone were asked by Kaitlyn Tiffany if they were worried about threads that had “a tone more of mocking or anger towards trans women.” MK responded:

I think humor and anger are both very common ways for people to deal with pain and oppression on a huge range of issues. Women (especially black women) are often criticized for being "too angry" when they speak unapologetically in defense of their rights or against systems that oppress them. I personally find more civil dialogue to be very helpful when approaching the issue publicly, but I will never hold it against a woman to nonviolently express anger, resentment, or humor when she is discussing the patriarchy.

Ovarit admin girl_undone adds:

Women are held to an unhealthy standard when it comes to being “kind,” and it’s not one men are held to. It’s certainly not a standard that the opponents of feminists are held to. There is nothing wrong with anger, it’s an emotion that motivates us to assert our boundaries, and I’m convinced that the pressure on women to repress our anger stops us from enforcing our boundaries. Women should be angry and women should be able to mock ridiculous propaganda that is being used to justify destroying women’s rights.

No other content from Ovarit was cited to support the author’s claim of “hateful” or “toxic” speech.

Part V - We're Ovarit

The Reddit Ban

Kevin Roose of The New York Times describes Reddit as “a site that for years was considered one of the internet’s dirtiest sludge pits” as a result of its willingness to host “free speech” of any kind. Reddit attracted negative attention for hosting racist, misogynistic, and illegal content, leading to multiple major policy changes. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, interviewed by Roose, explained that r/The_Donald contained rule-breaking content that was “harassing or violence or bullying” and that Reddit admins had tried to “get that community to come in line,” including changing moderators and making “technical changes” in recent months, all to no avail.

In contrast, Reddit admins had not been in contact with us when the subreddit was banned. Aware of the growing controversy around our subreddit (as well as the persistent threat of being trolled), r/GenderCritical moderators used automated tools to screen for inappropriate content, “fastidiously enforced all the rules that existed, as well as rules [Reddit administration] told us to enforce that weren’t documented on the site,” and recruited moderators all over the globe to ensure there would always be someone available around the clock.

Early in the morning of June 29th, dozens of posts from r/GenderCritical’s front page - possibly all of them - were reported as “suggestive content involving minors” aka child porn. The subreddit vanished hours later as mods were working to clean up the mess. We had no notice or warning, but we suspected what happened.

A few weeks earlier, author J.K. Rowling made public comments on Twitter calling out an organization for using the term “people who menstruate” rather than “women.” Rowling explained her opinion in more detail on her blog, but the trans rights mob bombarded her feed with abuse and harassment.

r/GenderCritical’s subscriber count swelled as people joined to discuss the controversy without threats or silencing. When other subreddits shut down the discussion due to “bigotry” and “transphobia,” more and more people started coming to r/GenderCritical to ask why. Many people, agreeing with Rowling, hadn’t realized their viewpoints were controversial and struggled to understand what the bans were about. When Reddit updated their content policy to take down r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse, r/GenderCritical was taken down too.

While other subreddits received information about the rules they broke when they were removed, Reddit was silent about r/GenderCritical. Requests from r/GenderCritical moderators and members to provide more information or clarity on which rules were broken went unanswered.

We want to ask - if Reddit cares so much about hate speech or how violent online rhetoric results in real world violence, why does Reddit still host pornographic content that eroticizes abuse, incest, slavery and trafficking, as well as violent rapes of both women and girls? Are these not serious problems with real world consequences? Does Reddit host this content to prevent lawlessness elsewhere?

We’re Ovarit

There are interesting seeds of discussion about online bubbles, the purpose of moderation, power and control of internet platforms, and the existence of reactionary hate movements. Unfortunately, lacking data or expert opinion on ‘TERFs,’ this piece failed to cultivate that discussion.

We remain concerned about the author’s suggestion that authoritarian-style censorship or tracking is the right action for social media sites to take. We asked our circle moderators what they thought and they shared the following:

• “Stopping people from having a different ideology is not a goal of moderation at all - its a goal of people who think that they have some right to control other people's minds. It's creepy.”

• “People will always be able to carry their ideas elsewhere, and as a moderator of one place you can neither forbid your members from going anywhere else, nor can you monitor everywhere else, and you shouldn't do either anyway. Our job is to make sure the space they talk in is as peaceful as possible, not to mandate or contain any opinions.”

• “My understanding/belief is that moderation of an online space is about making sure that respectful discussion, interaction, expression of emotions and disagreement can occur easily in that space. It is not about policing people's thoughts. It is not about passing judgment on which thoughts are worth more. My own personal opinions and viewpoints, as a mod, are largely irrelevant..... even if I personally disagree with someone, it would be wrong for me to take away their ability to speak, or make them feel as if they would be socially punished for speaking. the two major exceptions to this, for me, would be 1) if a person is advocating for actual physical harm against another person, or a group of people, & 2) if a person is speaking about another person or group of people in a dehumanizing way.”

• “It's not our place to dictate what people should or shouldn't think.”

• “I do not trust when people advocate for authoritarian control over other people's thoughts and words (and behavior.....), and frame it as a good thing, or the morally correct thing. I do not trust that. It is not respectful of the subjectivity of other humans and the outcome is never good....abuse of power comes as no surprise! If someone genuinely believes they have the right to define what is morally correct for others to think and believe, and occupies a position which gives them some measure of power/control over others ability to express themselves freely......that power will be abused. Abuse of power and authoritarianism isn't somehow better or excusable when it comes from the Left.”

Women’s speech is limited anywhere that we are put on tracking lists, banned and deleted from view, doxed and harassed with abusive messaging and media. These actions often occur when women claim authority on our own bodies and lived experiences. But we’re not fixated on persecution, we’re fixated on crafting a better world where women can live free of oppression, discrimination, sex role expectations, and violence. The beauty of Ovarit is that we’ve been able to create a space where women can communicate with each other about our lives, health, history, and interests free of aggressive male interruptions, abusive content, slurs, and dick pics.

In closing -

Kaitlyn Tiffany asked Mary Kate Fain, the only woman representing gender critical feminists quoted in the piece, “Would you agree that women in this community feel persecuted by Big Tech, and by the mainstream media?” Ms. Tiffany then published a blatantly biased piece accusing us at Ovarit of promoting hate and violence, failed to support her assertions, and didn’t give us any chance to disagree with allegations and misrepresentations made about us.

We believe women deserve better than that. Let women speak!

- Ruby & the rest of the Ovarit Admins

A special thank you to our sisters in chat for your hard work

P.S.: M.K. Fain

Hey M.K.! We love you <3

M.K. Fain has been a huge support to us here at Ovarit and we appreciate her unrelenting advocacy and bravery. However, we regret that this piece unfairly targeted her while failing to include any of the discussions with two Ovarit admins who were interviewed (multiple times via email and voice chat). It is unclear why an article on Ovarit would focus on a volunteer whose help - although vital to the project - was short-term, while the other admins have been the backbone of the community for many years.

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