Who Gets To Know Their Body?

TERFs train their sights on “spoonies,” and reveal that bigotry against trans and disabled people is inextricably linked.

It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a… well, you know. Photo by Dstudio Bcn on Unsplash

No-one is more fully committed to the art and practice of the self-own than “gender critical feminists.” Self-styled inheritors of the second wave, devoted to unmasking the lies of patriarchal gender and smashing the binary, they seem to spend every week reinventing one or more of the core tenets of Victorian-era sexism. Now, from the hit factory that brought you “motherhood is what defines a woman” and “men are natural predators,” we have “female hysteria, but with spoons.”

The source (well, one of them) is a post on the Substack of anti-woke culture warrior Bari Weiss, written by one Suzy Weiss, which takes aim at “the spoonies,” online communities of mostly young women with chronic illnesses. Their conditions typically “affect women more frequently,” Weiss 2.0 notes ominously, before going in: These young women “find community in having complicated conditions that are often hard to identify and difficult to treat” and “fit into a long history of women having amorphous, hard-to-diagnose conditions.”

Weiss II paints a portrait of chronic illness patients as neurotic, weak, hysterical girls, prone to inventing or exaggerating ailments for…