A “feminist” all these years

In a word: no.

Join a man who is roleplaying a woman for a discussion of the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the US Constitution to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex, in other words to remove women from second-class status. There are plenty of women who can discuss the rights of women, there is no need to turn to men who are roleplaying women instead of actual women. There is no need to do that, and it’s spitting in the faces of women to do that.

That’s all the more true since back when “Charlotte” Clymer was Charles Clymer he was pretty notorious as a male feminist who bullied women.

So who is Charles Clymer? Clymer, who self-identifies as a Feminist Leader, has a Women for Equality Facebook page (which now seems mostly defunct) where he’s been alleged to verbally attack women as well as accused of deleting women’s comments who disagree with him. In an article for the Huffington Post last year, Darlena Cunha reported that a former moderator of his page, Zoe Katherine, disagreed with him and then was threatened with being kicked out of the group. “If we did it privately we were guilt-tripped, or simply ignored,” Katherine explained.

One commenter on the page, Stephanie Kay, described her exchange with Clymer to be equally as dismissive, but explained that she got this cake-topper of a response from Clymer:

“Stephanie, I’m going to let you in on a little secret that, apparently, no one has had the guts to tell you up to this point in your life: having a vagina does not grant you magical powers of perception and nuance anymore than my penis magically blinds me from the horrors of the world.”

Ah you can see the embryonic trans woman right there, clear as day – a better woman than you mere vagina-having women will ever be.

 Clymer desperately wants to be in the feminist spotlight. Read through his Twitter feed and you’ll find what seems like a lovely person, an “army vet and feminist” who tweets about all of the right topics: Ferguson, making research count for women, about rape threat investigations. His Twitter profile is a black-and-white of a young Gloria Steinem and her cat. He is expressing to you, he is demanding that you understand: Charles Clymer is dedicated to the cause of feminism and you and your magical vagina are going to believe him, like it or not.

That was 2014. How things change.

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