FFS Friday: The Carrot Cottage Rabbit Rescue

Aka TERF Bunnies

June 20, 2025

FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable.

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Typically, FFS Friday posts celebrate women who are speaking out for women’s sex-based rights using their real names. I occasionally make exceptions, and today I am making an exception for bunnies. (This post is a bit tongue in cheek; it’s meant to be a silly way to bring to a close a pretty rough week.)

The Carrot Cottage Rabbit Rescue is a registered UK charity, located in a place called Ystradynlais, Wales, which has a population of around 8000 people. They are here for the sole purpose of saving rabbits. They tweet a lot, about bunnies. However, they recently got into a bit of trouble for also supporting women and girls as a sex class.

The charity has a policy of following anyone who follows them. That’s it. They don’t police the politics of the accounts they follow on social media.

Apparently, some TERFs followed them, and they followed back. That was enough to raise the ire of people who really hate women, including an Irish man named Aidan Comerford. He went on a tweet storm tear to complain about the charity, and promptly went about trying to get its charity status revoked.

Magdalen is a reference to Magdalen Berns, an outstanding TERF YouTuber who died in 2019.

This went on for several days.

So the TERFs and our male allies did what we always do–we handled the matter with style and hilarity.

The Famous Artist Birdy Rose made some art and gave it to the charity to sell as merch and raise money for its bunny rescue operations. You can support them too, if you’d like.

Someone made an absolutely delightful film called TERF Bunny One. Please watch it. It’s only about two minutes long, and simply sublime.

The author John Boyne made a hilarious film about Hitler reacting to the news that Aidan Comerford was freaking out about transphobic rabbits.

Subsequently, unrelated to rabbits, a man named Stephen Fry (who narrated the Harry Potter audiobooks), turned on JK Rowling, and complained that she had been “radicalized by TERFs.”

Many of us decided to seize “radicalized by TERFs” as our new badge of honor, using the acronym RBT. We noted that, coincidentally, the acronym could also stand for rabbit.

So we called in the account of @moleatthedoor for reinforcements. That account used to go by “Mole at the counter,” but he’s changed it over the years and today, he goes by “Radicalsed rabbit at the counter.” He makes outstanding graphics, and for present purposes, he made this:

It’s perfect. RBT - Radicalised by TERFs. Bunnies. Suffrage colors.

If you don’t understand the “bunnies won’t wheesht” bit, it’s a reference to Scottish slang for “shut up.” The Scottish terven have been saying for years that they “won’t wheesht” (meaning they won’t shut up about women’s sex-based rights). The phrase was the inspiration for the 2024 book The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn. JK Rowling herself is a contributor.

This is the book’s description:

On the 25th anniversary of the Scottish Parliament, this book captures an important moment in contemporary history: how a grassroots women's movement, harking back to the suffragettes and second wave feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, took on the political establishment - and changed the course of history.

Through a collection of over thirty essays and photographs, some of the women involved tell the story of the five-year campaign to protect women's sex-based rights. Author J.K. Rowling explains why she used her global reach to stand up for women. Leading SNP MP Joanna Cherry writes of how she risked her political career for her beliefs. Survivors of male violence who MSPs refused to meet are given the voice they were denied at Holyrood. Ash Regan MSP recounts what it was like to become the first government minister to resign on a question of principle since the SNP came to power in 2007. Former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss charts how changes in prison policy in Scotland led to the controversy over Isla Bryson.

It is the story of women who risked their job, reputation, even the bonds of family and friendship, to make their voices heard, and ended up - unexpectedly - contributing to the downfall of Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's first woman first minister.

Above all, it is the story of the women who wouldn't wheesht.

So, even though I typically use these pages to celebrate women who are speaking out about women’s sex-based rights, today I’m using them to celebrate bunnies. Specifically, the Carrot Cottage Rabbit Rescue, in Wales. TERF bunnies, today’s FFS Friday is for you.