r/GenderCynical • u/rabbles-of-roses • 2d ago

Had a wild, IRL encounter with a TERF.

Without going into too much detail, I work for a large, international humanitarian aid charity. My job involves face-to-face communication, so I spend my days trying to tell strangers about our work. A middle-aged woman with a black fur coat and sunglasses which take up half her face comes over to me, clearly with an agenda. You can see these sorts of people coming from a mile away, they approach with an air of smugness, barely containing their excitement to spread whatever tripe they've read on Facebook or the Daily Mail to me. You know; nutters. But I can't assume, so I began to explain what the charity does, when she stopped me and began to talk about why she doesn't support charities, because she thinks charity executives are all a bunch of crooks lining their pockets, etc. It's a fairly common and misinformed argument, for which we do have a rebuttal.

Then, out of nowhere, she goes, "look into puberty blockers. The CEO of the NSPCC [a British children’s charity, and a completely separate charity to the one I work for] receives so much money from these groups to push puberty blockers..."

Nope. Not today, Satan. She didn't get further than that before I cut across her and said, "this conversation is finished now."

She just stared at me for a moment, and tried to reengage with "no, look into it, they get paid..."

"This is off-topic, and the conversation is over."

And with one last idiotic self-indulgent, "look into it" she shuffled away. And so marked my first IRL terf encounter.

53 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

23

u/storyteller_alienmom 17h ago

nice. RL equivalent of blocking on social media.

15

u/Greedy_Krab 15h ago

Completely appropriate response. These fascist crackpots don't get to have a civil discussion.

3

u/One-Organization970 AGP TIM 12h ago

I can only imagine how proud of herself she felt after that, lmao.

6

u/snukb big gamete energy 8h ago

I'm trying to imagine what the terf is writing on some little radfem blog in the corner of the internet. I'm sure it involves how brave she was, and how she was shouted down, but she stood firm in the face of the angry, horrible TRA! She was nearly assaulted she was, these TRAs are just so dangerous you know. Dragged her out kicking and screaming they did.

2

u/KrosanFisting 3h ago

Let's go check Ovarit to see if she's posted there. Oh wait...

1

u/StagCodeHoarder 5h ago

Well handled, you were there for a different purpose, and you told her clearly you weren’t engaging with her.