What first made you realize?
Graham Linehan asked a question.
It was this, on a post about women and abortion rights.
Yes, if you’re going to talk about abortion rights please keep in mind that not all women are women and not all men are not-women.
Glinner goes on:
Ah, yes, I remember that photo kerfluffle.
Mine was in the fallout over a question on FTB: Yes or No? I think the questionee might be named something like…oh…Ophelia?
There was also the moment Caitlin Jenner became “woman” of the year. These things weren’t quite simultaneous, but pretty close.
Mine was reading the post about TWAW Dana posted to prove her virtue at That Time. She had a series of photos of a transwoman removing wig and makeup, each labelled “Still a woman”. The last photo showed an unambiguously male person. I’m pretty sure there was an audible cracking sound as my fourth wall broke and the terfiness started trickling in.
Mine was being asked to go along with the logical impossibility of a person being a trans woman and also being entirely female; while also being asked to deny certain facts of biology.
Like iknklast, The Unpleasantness and other roughly simultaneous events were what caused me to flip my attitude from “who am I to say they’re not women?” to “who are they to say they are?”
To me it was watching the content of my Twitter-feed change from predominantly critical of MRAs and other misogynists to predominantly anti-feminist, realizing that the diabolical “TERFs” I kept hearing about (supposedly at least as bad as the MRAs sending death and rape threats to Caroline Criado-Perez) included at least half of the feminists I was following, and noticing the Trump-like dishonesty of the accusations leveled against them.
For me, the FTB Yes-or-No question made the problem clear. TWAW is outside the realm of definitions and explanations, and FTB going nuclear reminded me of Carl von Clausewitz — “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”
Yes. The phrasing of that question absolutely did make me bristle like an electric porcupine. The combination of “do you believe” and “yes or no” – red rag to a bull.
CatieCat’s ridiculous comment was a year before that. Odd how long it took.
I don’t know when I realised it. It was a process where I found myself more and more at odds with what a number of people were writing.
There was the blog post of Greta Christine titled: My feminism will be intersectional or it will be not, or something similar where the subject wasn’t the inclusion of colored women or labour class women but the inclusion of male bodied persons. I felt she just left a lot of questions unanswered.
There was the blog post of Lousy Canouk, where in the comments it seemed expected of lesbians that they should consider sex with man that identified as woman.
There was the contribution of Lousy Canouk where he thought he could support his position with mathematics, using Venn diagrams. But when I objected to his arguments seemed unable to grasp what my objections were.
And there was off course the whole episode on FtB just Ophelia moved back to here. I was just gobsmacked how fast people who were supportive first could turn hostile so fast.