Exclusion
No room for radical feminists in the feminist movement. Interesting. I wonder what they think feminism is, exactly.
(I don’t really wonder. I don’t think they think much at all, I think they just parrot the slogans they’re told to parrot.)
Supporting the rights of trans people really isn’t essential to protecting all women. It’s beside the point. The rights of trans people appear to be 1. the right to force everyone to agree that you are the sex you aren’t and 2. the right to punish and ostracize and vilify anyone who declines to do that. Those “rights” are inimical to women’s rights, and respecting them is certainly not essential to feminism. Rather the opposite.
Perhaps just a subsection of (1) or, 3. the right to access positions, services, awards, and spaces normally/formerly/legally/traditionally reserved for exclusive use, occupation, and enjoyment by members of the sex that you aren’t, on pain of 2.
What use is a feminist movement that can’t define “woman?”
No use at all, and isn’t that the point?
And where does that leave me if I come out and define myself as a giraffe? This has not been very well thought through at all.
That’s right both the people “assigned ‘male’ at birth” who think or feel in ways x,y,z regardless of physical traits, and the people “assigned ‘female’ at birth” who think or feel in ways x,y,z regardless of physical traits. Anyone who fails to think or feel in ways x,y,z regardless of physical traits is by definition not a “woman” and can therefore not be a victim of “misogyny”*, hence whatever problems they happen to face fall outside the scope of “feminism”. That’s how it’s always been, and the only reason anyone could possibly object to any of this is 100% pure, blind, visceral hate on their part.
What exactly are “ways x,y,z”, you say?
Shut up, you TERF!
*Or, if they do, it’s only as a side-effect of the real “misogyny”, because they are mistaken for people who think or feel in ways x,y,z. If these people would just make it clear to everyone that they don’t in fact think or feel in ways x,y,z, whatever oppression or exploitation they face for being “women” would cease in a instance.
As much as I sincerely hope I’m wrong, I can see no way this is getting better* in the foreseeable future. Too many people – from individuals to institutions to entire movements – have invested too much in this nonsense and burned all the bridges behind them. It reminds me, once again, of something I read in Jung Chang’s biography of Mao Zedong: Making people suffer was seen as desirable, not just for its effect on the victims (or those who were afraid of becoming such), but just as much for its effect on the perpetrators. I.e. everyone was supposed to deduce for themselves: “If the chairman goes down, I go down with him as one of his accomplices, therefore I have a stake in keeping him in power indefinitely”. Hence creating perpetrators was as least as important as creating victims. The same game-theoretical considerations apply to situations that don’t involve literal violence: Get people to actively engage in vicious bullying, public condemnations, slander, putting words into other people’s mouths, trying to get them fired from their jobs, pulling their name through the dirt all over the internet, destroying their lives in any way they can, and you own them for life.
* Of course, unless a miracle occurs, people will soon be too preoccupied with their immediate survival due to climate change to worry about pronouns, but I’m not sure that qualifies as “better”…
So if I wore a badge that said my pronouns are he/him/his, all the sexist crap I go through would immediately go away? Since if thinking X,Y,Z equates to what the trans seem to think, I would have to acknowledge that, by their definition, I am not in fact a woman. At most I could be NB. (But then, who isn’t, as encapsulated by Author’s lovely cartoon?)