Beyond TERF Island: gender identity worldwide

October 22, 2025

First, journalist Lisa Selin Davis has an excellent post up on her Substack, Broadview, urging readers to use the phrase “institutional enforcement” instead of “social contagion” when referring to the complete takeover of society by “gender identity.” I quite like the characterization. I assured her that I would start using “institutional enforcement” and giving her credit for creating it.

The title of this post is the title of a panel that was held during the Battle of Ideas festival this past weekend. I was quite honored to be asked to speak on it. The Academy of Ideas, which hosts the festival, encourages brief opening statements and lively audience interaction. My brief opening statement during the panel follows.

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I want to start by noting that I recently announced a forthcoming book titled “TERFLandia: How the Global Terven Will Win the Gender Wars.” It will contain a Preface and an Afterword by me, as well as a chapter on the American TERFs by me, and chapters authored by contributors from all over the world. I’m thrilled that Sally Wainwright and Julia Long will be working together to write the chapter on TERF Island.

The book defines the word TERF to mean a leftist feminist who understands what a woman is and isn’t afraid to say it out loud. That’s the definition I have been using since 2022. However, a lot of people take issue with it because they consider themselves to be TERFs who are neither leftists nor feminists. Maybe we could have a conversation about that.

Focusing on the US, I’ll do my best to explain where we are, focusing on our three branches of government: Congress, the presidential administration, and the judiciary.

In Congress, the so-called Equality Act has been around since 2015. The US Equality Act is different from the UK Equality Act, where sex is a discrete category and thanks to the UK Supreme Court, we know that it means biology. In contrast, the US Equality Act would completely define the word sex out of existence by redefining it to include “gender identity” for all purposes under US civil rights law. It would mean the complete end of female-only spaces all over the country. Happily, it has never been enacted and is not US law at this time.

There is a lot I could say about this pernicious bill. All I’ll say for now is that in the fall of 2020, candidate Biden promised to get it passed within 100 days of taking office. The House of Representatives passed it in February of 2021 and US feminists panicked because Democrats held the majority in both chambers of Congress. We thought Biden was going to win. US feminists worked extremely hard in early 2021 to fight it, and we seem to have won. Biden failed to get it passed within 100 days of taking office. Then he failed to get it passed within a year of taking office. Then he failed to get it passed at all during his entire term in office. We think feminists had a lot to do with that, and we’re taking the win.

And then, in 2025, Republicans introduced the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. This was a very simple straightforward bill that would define the word sex to mean biology for purposes of sports in educational institutions and keep men and boys out of sports intended for women and girls. It passed in the House of Representatives, with two Democrats voting for it, but not a single Senate Democrat voted for it, and it died a very sad death.

So that’s Congress.

Much ado has been made about the Trump executive orders, and rightly so. On the first day of taking office, Trump signed an executive order establishing that it was the policy of the administration that there are only two sexes: male and female. Later, he signed orders protecting women’s sports and prisons, and protecting kids from harmful hormones and surgeries. That’s all very good.

However, it is important to understand the limited nature of these orders. They’re a form of law, but without enforcement, they’re just pieces of paper. They need to be enforced. States like California and Maine, and some local school districts, are just openly defying them. Our Departments of Justice and Education are doing their best to enforce the executive orders, but these things take time and in the meantime, women and girls are suffering in places where the orders are being openly defied.

In addition, the orders are limited to the presidential administration. They haven’t been enshrined in the US code by Congress. They can all be undone by a future administration. So all isn’t as great as it might seem.

Finally, as for the judiciary, there are countless cases making their way through the US courts. Here, I’ll focus on four.

In 2020, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case called Bostock. In my view, that was a terrible ruling because it said that “transgender status” is a protected category in the context of employment discrimination, without bothering to tell anyone what the phrase “transgender status” means.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that states may enact laws that ban harmful hormones and surgeries for minors. That’s really good, and I celebrated the ruling. However, the opinion explaining the ruling did not go nearly as far as I wanted it to. I wanted it to explain that the word “transgender” is not sufficiently coherent to be enshrined as a protected category in the law. It didn’t do that. It had a chance to clean up the mess it made in the 2020 Bostock decision, and it didn’t take the opportunity. We still have no idea what the Supreme Court meant by “transgender status” in 2020.

Now, the Supreme Court is considering two cases that involve women’s sports. In both cases, states enacted laws that said that women’s and girls’ sports are only for women and girls. In both, male athletes challenged the laws, asserting that the laws violated their constitutional rights. They both won in the appellate courts and the states asked the Supreme Court to get involved. I represented the group Women’s Declaration International USA in encouraging the Court to do so, and it agreed to get involved this year. WDI USA filed another brief in the cases, encouraging the Supreme Court to rule once and for all that sex is real and immutable, and that “transgender” is not a sufficiently coherent category to be enshrined in law. We’ll soon see if it has the guts to do so.