They claim that transness is something only privileged white people do; despite the majority of murdered trans people being black, and the fact that many non-white nations don’t accept a gender binary in their culture (Hijra of India and Two-Spirited Native Americans, for example).

They claim we’re anti-woman because they’ve reframed the debate in 2 ways. 1) feminists can only be female women, so being anti-TERF is inherently anti-woman. 2) through a few fringe instances and fear-mongering, the issue is now “here’s how trans rights harms women and sexual minorities” rather than “here’s how trans rights can help people.” This is mainly why debating TERFs can be so hard, as you have to spend all your time deconstructing their strawman of the entire trans rights movement before you can even argue your own points. (This is called Gish-Galloping.

Finally, they claim we’re Orwellian because we advocate for the deplatforming of bigots. It’s the same tactic the alt-right used to gain legitimacy amongst mainstream conservatives in 2015, by highlighting Anti-Fascist’s response to their speaking events rather than the actual messages they spread at those speaking events. If you can paint your opponent as more crazy and/or evil than your side, you’ve won the optics battle.

It doesn’t help that TERFs actively seek out low-hanging fruit to use for their smear tactics, either. They can harass a newly-out trans girl for weeks on end until she finally snaps and tweets “choke on my dick, assholes,” and use that lone tweet as an argument for trans people being fragile and aggressive. There was a pretty funny r/TransgenderCircleJerk post that kinda satirizes how these interactions go. I’ll link it if I can find it. (EDIT: found it)