There’s a subset of TERFs that are lesbians, they’ve seen a lot of butch lesbians transition fairly recently (from what I’ve collected on the TERF forum I’m aware of) and they seem to point to that a lot. They seem to just consider transmen to be butch lesbians who “bought into gender ideology” and consider them to be quite delusional for doing so. I don’t get any sense of particularly “protecting butch lesbians from themselves” they seem to frame it more as those women are lost causes and the way to “protect them” is by not allowing them to be “infected” by trans identity, they definitely talk about them like they’re “asking for it” if anything bad does happen to them because they do believe they are women entering a world of evil men but have no way of physically preventing it.

I don’t consider myself a TERF, I do consider myself to be a fairly radical feminist (no we aren’t automatically trans exclusionary) so I do sometimes see them in rad fem spaces and was genuinely curious about the perspective but it seems fairly not cohesive there’s tons of conservative think in it, lots of “crunchy” women etc. TERFs honestly seem to care way more about the TE than the RF, they don’t seem to have any uniting ideology…