The Secret Internet of TERFs

The tone of the discussions in most of the circles is insular and defensive. Much of it is about the way Big Tech is censoring radical-feminist thought by driving “wombyn”—a deliberately exclusionary term that prizes women with female reproductive organs—off of their platforms, as well as the way the mainstream media has been taken over by a “tiny minority of men,” which is how Ovarit’s members refer to trans women. The plight of J. K. Rowling is revisited often.

In a practice carried over from Reddit, members are encouraged to share their conversion stories, which they confusingly call their “peak trans” moments. In a typical exchange, one woman explains that she came to Ovarit after dragging herself out of a trans-rights-oriented Tumblr community and falling down a YouTube rabbit hole; another replies that her story is extremely similar, right down to her discomfort with her previous social circle’s expectation that she be supportive of “men in lipstick.” (Many of these stories are told “with a sense of excitement, guilt, fear … it’s disturbing but thrilling,” Lavery, the UC Berkeley professor, told me. “All the usual stuff that people who get involved in extremist groups find.”) The users joke and bicker, like all political groups, and then they come back together—bonded by their shared experience of being unwelcome most anywhere else.

So far, the only major difference between Ovarit and r/GenderCritical is that here, nobody challenges the members. There are no outsider “trolls” butting into the conversation to tell them that they’re wrong. On Reddit, some women were uncomfortable being totally candid, Fain told me. But here, they can be themselves. “It was really hard to be on Reddit as a woman,” she said. “Now on Ovarit … It’s a big breath of fresh air.”

Yet more hand-wringing from the nomenklatura about dissent from their narrative.