just glance at their url. a lot of them are very proud to be “real wombyn” or whatever the fuck so they make it obvious. urls often include references to genitalia, chromosomes, or biology. they also often have the word “rad”, “radical”, or “radfem” in their url, referencing radical feminism.
tumblr has a mechanic to filter out unwanted posts! block the tags “terfsafe” “gender critical” “trans activism” “radfem” and “radical feminism”. posts tagged with these terms won’t disappear from your dash, but will have a warning and a click through if you want to read them. blocking these terms makes it easier to spot terfs who don’t have obvious urls and to avoid posts that seem harmless out of context but are transmisogynistic.
when you’re looking to follow someone, make a cursory search of their tags. search a couple of the tags listed above and if something bad shows up, block them.
if nothing shows up in those tags, go ahead and search “trans women” or even just “trans” too, because it’s not enough to just not post hateful shit, they need to actively and regularly support trans women. if there’s no hint of their views on trans people on their blog, they could still be a terf. there are people, called cryptoterfs, who run seemingly harmless blogs but are secretly supportive of terf views. some people have search turned off, so if nothing shows up in your searches, try searching other words to see if search is just disabled!
pay attention to who they rb posts from! cryptoterfs won’t post outright transmisogynistic posts, but will often reveal themselves by following and reblogging innocuous posts from blatant terfs.
this is a hard one, but something i suggest doing if you have a popular lesbian/wlw blog. find a post popular with terfs, open the notes, and just go up the list blocking everyone.
and again, make use of @blockterfs masterlist and the tumblr batch block extension!
dog whistles/terms terfs use
terfs often refer to trans women as “TRAs” (trans rights activists), “TiMs” (trans-identified males), and “MtT” (male to trans). someone using any of those terms gets an instant block.
using the terms “male” and “female” in place of man and woman is a dog whistle used by terfs to spread transmisogynistic rhetoric that may seem harmless to others. (for example, “males are evil” could sound like normal man hating lesbianism, but if the op is called radwombyn that post obviously means something very different.)
any references to being “anti-cotton ceiling” is an instant block. the cotton ceiling is a term coined to describe how trans women are excluded from women’s and lgbt spaces. people who call themselves “anti-cotton ceiling” think that this doesn’t exist, or that trans women are predatory for talking about it
people who are very defensive about “genital preferences” are often cryptos, or at the very least they’re transmisogynistic.
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