Can you fucking imagine?
Feminism can’t defend women if it’s forced to speak for those who do not share this experience.
Why are we being forced, or at least bullied and bullied and bullied, to speak for the people who don’t share our experience? What is that? I still can’t take in how it’s grown and then swallowed everything.
Well, that’s it for me – a brand new hero!! More strength to her arm. I may even have to become a twttiot to keep up with her
Eloquent and accurate at the same time. Well spoken.
Yes. To combat this kind of movement is exactly why feminism exists. Amen.
Andrew Sullivan on occasion has written something with which I can agree. He recently wrote about wokeness in the Biden administration and clearly articulated what my personal beef has been with transactivism. He argued that in the public sphere people improperly equate equality with equity. Equality is what (I believe) feminism has always been about – equality before the law, freedom from oppression, and equality of opportunity. The goal of quality is to level the playing field among groups NOT to eliminate the distinctions between groups.
Radical transactivism is about equity – the out and out redistribution of assets and elimination of group distinctions in order to create a false homogeneity. Which is bad enough but made worse by the fact that it’s an argument not based in sound theory.
The TRAs that want feminists to centre trans people are very often the same people that avoid explaining their position with the excuse that that would constitute ‘unpaid emotional labour’. It’s always a one way street with them.
Poisoned fruit from the misappropriation of the concept of intersectionality? My understanding (such as it is) is that it was introduced to help understand and untangle the conditions of those women living within multiple, overlapping axes of oppression, with racism, class, disability and other burdens piled onto the base, systemic sexism within which all women are embedded. Now “intersectionality” has been turned into a hierarchy of oppression, with the needs of women pushed to the bottom. I’ve seen so many mansplanations in arguments with feminists that feminism is about “equality for everyone” that it’s on the Bingo card. So now that women are being denied their own movement and even their own word, they are supposed to smile as they hold open the door for everyone else to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. What’s worse is the growing number of activists eager to turn women into the doormat on the threshold, to be trod upon in passing, and never let inside.
YNNB: Kimberle Crenshaw was somewhat explicit in her aim to bring Marxian analysis into the fields of race and feminism. Marx’s philosophy has only ever born poisoned fruit, so I find it difficult to call what we’re seeing misappropriation. It’s more like “exactly what one would have predicted”.