One is not born but rather becomes a non man

The Greens again. “Non-men” again. The Independent:

Feminists including leading activist Caroline Criado-Perez have attacked an invitation to “non-men” by the young women’s arm of the Green Party.

“Women/non-men who are Young Greens can find and join our Facebook group ‘Young Greens Women’”, they tweeted on 26March.

But on Friday Ms Criado-Perez, who led the campaign to keep a woman on English banknotes and co-founded feminist media website The Women’s Room, called the tweet “the most anti-woman anti-feminist ignorant bullshit I have seen in some time”.

“Women are not “non-men”, she tweeted, urging the Greens to “sort your shit out”. “You do not include people by establishing men as default human,” she added.

Ms Criado-Perez later took to rephrasing well-known feminist texts.

Rewriting Simone de Beauvoir’s famous sentence, she tweeted “one is not born but rather becomes a non man”.

“For most of history, anonymous was a non man”, she added, recasting Virginia Woolf.

Under the hashtag  #greenpartyfeminism, other Twitter users joined in, substituting “non-man” for “woman”, “girl” and “mother” in famous song lyrics.

There’s a lot of good mockery and rage on that hashtag.

Scarlett Brown, PhD gender reseacher at King’s College London, told The Independent: “You can interpret the tweet in two ways. Firstly, that they are emphasising, without even realising it, that we live in a society that defines by not being a man. That’s been a big feminist critique for a long time.”

“It depends on what you determine the slash [between women and non-men] to mean. If you think women and non-men are the same thing, that’s not on. That’s what most of the criticism is about.

“But if you read it as ‘the people we want in our group are women and non-men’, then what they’ve done is include a non-binary category. If that’s the case, that’s an important thing and I fully support that. It’s just they’ve done it clunkily and haphazardly.”

Wait. Why? Why is it an important thing, why does she fully support that? Why are women – and women only – expected to “include” people who say they’re not women? Why are women, and women only, expected to keep redefining themselves every five minutes? Why are women, and women only, under constant relentless pressure to stop organizing as women?

Scarlett Brown doesn’t say.

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