I find TERFs to be quite tragic, if I'm honest. As much as I rage against them, I feel a lot of sympathy for them, because their hate often comes from a place of suffering from patriarchal violence and feeling so powerless against that that transphobia is gives them a sense of false empowerment.

I remember back when the "Gender Critical" subreddit was a thing, and still relatively small, I checked it out, because I had heard a bunch about it, and was curious; it wasn't initially clear to me that "Gender Critical" basically just meant "transphobia but we pretend to be feminists". I remember feeling such sorrow when I read through their semi-regular "just no trans" threads, in which people would tell the story of how they became "gender critical" — what their "just no trans" moment was. It was almost comical how many of the stories there took the form of "I was abused by a cis man, and when I tried to get justice for this, I was revictimised by the same patriarchal systems that enable this kind of misogyny in the first place. Anyway, that's why I hate trans women".

There were a lot of people with real trauma there, and it hurt so much to realise that for many of them, transphobia effectively serves as a maladaptive coping measure for that trauma. Not only are they hurting other women (and people who aren't women but are affected by patriarchal oppression — trans men still require reproductive healthcare, for instance), both trans and cis (For instance, I am a cis woman who has experienced bio-essentialist misogyny from cis men, and also transphobia violence from TERFS), they're also hurting themselves too.

It reminds me a bit of Jean Paul Sartre's thing about anti-Semitism being the socialism of fools — transphobia is the feminism of fools. They're just making things worse for everyone, and I hate them for that. However, their underlying oppression is real, and I weep for the fact that they're unwittingly being party to their own continued oppression. Their hate wouldn't be justified even if transphobia was a genuine solution to their problems, but I find it extra tragic that the hate is as toxic to the ones who hold it as the ones who are the recipient of it.

I know that, for my part, being in community with trans people has made me feel much more secure and happy in my own individual sense of womanhood, and in terms of the systemic battle, I feel much more confident as a feminist who understands the necessity of an intersectional solidarity. None of us are free until all of us are free, and that includes TERFs. I don't know how to help them when they're so insistent on being their own jailers though.