@Vgal:
But here’s the thing. An oft-stated TERF goal is “abolishing gender”. What does that mean, and why would we even want to do that?
During second-wave feminism, some of the radfem schools of thought gravitated around the idea that people don’t inherently have genders, just sexes, and aside from purely reproductive aspects the sexes are just as superficial as eye color. Gender is a set of attitudes, behaviors, and roles forced on people via socialization. There’s no such thing as male or female nature, we’re all just people.
Trans and nonbinary people had no place in this. It was common in those circles to believe that such people were dangerously delusional at best, and a weapon created by the patriarchy to enforce gender norms and discredit feminism at worst. The latter being ironic given how most anti-feminists considered trans people to be a weapon created by feminists to undermine gender norms. This is the origin of the term “TERF”. (These radfems didn’t actually create this term, it was an outsider label created by pro-trans feminists, though there was a relatively brief period when some of the younger TERFs embraced it proudly.)
They were the “gender abolitionists” of their day (mainly the late 1980s through the early 2000s, though the general idea dated back to at least the 1970s and some traces of it continued up until around 2010 or so), and their idea of “abolishing gender” meant abolishing gender roles and gendered socialization. Their common attitude of “trans isn’t real, you can just be gender non-conforming” was mostly sincere but misguided. But today, those people are virtually nonexistent. “TERF” hasn’t been an accurate description for most of the people commonly labeled as such by the time the general public became aware of that label, and there’s a reason why the less-used “GCF” (Gender-Critical Feminist) label dropped the F. The tiny number of present-day gender abolitionists come from a radically different and less problematic mindset, almost entirely unrelated to the TERF origins of the concept.
To the limited extent that present-day TERFs/GCs talk about “abolishing gender”, they’re actually talking about something entirely different: embracing bioessentialism. That we should abolish the idea that gender is a thing which exists separately from sex. That people’s “essential natures” are largely sex-based and that this should be embraced, but also that men’s essential natures are so dangerous to women that women need special protection, exclusion privileges being the most important. That this is *so* important, that everyone’s “essential natures” need to be clearly and easily identifiable to anyone else. That if there truly are exceptions (which some of them either don’t believe in or have doubts about), those exceptions need to be sacrificed for the greater good of protecting “true women”.
TL;DR some context about how/why TERFs/GCs got associated with “abolishing gender” and what they currently mean by it.