An otherwise reputable publication

A NOTHER one. This time, jarringly, in or at The Atlantic, where it stands out like a sore thumb gender marker.

So I opened it up so that I could start banging my head against the wall too.

So. Let’s get to it.

The Atlantic has it filed under Technology, and the subhead is:

After they were banned from Reddit, trans-exclusionary radical feminists became the latest of many toxic communities to simply build their own platform.

But it’s not really about the technology.

Kaitlyn Tiffany (yes that’s really her byline) starts by explaining the feminism of MK Fain as if it were an exotic plant.

After volunteering at a domestic-violence shelter and experiencing an abusive relationship herself, she committed to some of the radical feminist ideology most often affiliated with the second-wave icon Andrea Dworkin, which is focused on the roots and prevalence of male violence. Eventually, her beliefs radicalized further: She became convinced that gender is fixed, trans women are men, and trans-rights activism is just another weapon of the patriarchy.

Yes, it’s so terrifyingly radical to think that men are not women.

Then Fain found gender critical Reddit.

Among other online feminists, the common name for this group Fain found is “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or TERFs. The name the community has chosen for itself is the somewhat more palatable “gender critical,” though, as other feminists often point out, that name means nothing; all feminism is critical of gender.

All genuine feminism is, yes, but the kind of feminism that puts men who identify as women front and center loves gender and wants to have its babies.

TERFs constitute “a minority of a minority of feminists,” says Grace Lavery, a UC Berkeley literature professor and writer.

Kaitlyn Tiffany (KT henceforth; I can’t call her “Tiffany”) neglects to mention that “Grace” Lavery is a man who identifies as a woman. He doesn’t get to rule on who is a proper feminist.

Nevertheless, this tiny group has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the past several years, in large part thanks to social-media platforms. Anti-trans feminists have a presence in many mainstream online spaces, including Twitter, “radfem” Tumblr, the Black women’s beauty forum Lipstick Alley, and the British parenting forum Mumsnet.

One – trans people are tiny group, and they get a ludicrous amount of attention, and of rewards and favors and prizes. Two, we’re not “anti-trans” – we’re critical of the fatuous ideology behind it.

On these sites and others, they use many of the same trolling tactics as other internet-based fringe political movements to disrupt conversation, skew reality, and make the internet another dangerous place for trans women through doxing and harassment

Oh yes? Paid any attention to the way trans women talk about us ever? The threats, the images of dripping axes and female corpses and burning witches?

There’s more of this kind of drivel, and then a triumphant boast that Reddit got rid of the gender critical subreddit. I suspect the attention of most Atlantic readers is long gone by now.

Fain framed the ban flatly as persecution. “They use the label hate speech to silence speech they don’t want,” she told me.

Hello, KT, saying “they silence speech” is not the same as saying “this is persecution.”

After that it’s just ever-more-boring sludge about internet groups.

I gotta re-paper that wall now.

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