You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Radical Feminism’ category.
Acknowledging reality, is what this about. Prioritizing women’s struggle against gender or glorifying the concept that enslaves women in patriarchy. Women who dare to speak out against patriarchy, as always, are singled out and laid bare for threats and abuse. Thank you to the brave tenacious women who dare to soldier on with their ‘heretical’ messages and disagreements. Telling the emperor that he has no clothes, speaking truth to power, addressing the root problems of society – this is the wheelhouse of radical feminist politics and ideology.
This is an excerpt from The New Statesmen that describes the power of the ‘newspeak’ gender identity movement and how it is attempting to silence debate and discussion of gender politics and ideology.
“Another thing we are supposed to deny is the differences that now exist among self-identified trans women. The category has broadened over time to encompass more biologically male individuals who have not modified their bodies, and who in some cases do not live permanently as women, but alternate between male and female identities. Their status as women is based on a combination of performative declarations that they are women, and surface features of ‘gender presentation’ like the names they use and the clothes they wear. Nevertheless, they invoke the ‘trans women are women’ principle: if you identify as female then you are female, and should be treated as such by others. In some circles it is considered transphobic for women to question the presence of people with openly displayed male sexual organs in spaces like communal female changing rooms, or for lesbian women to refuse to recognise those people as potential sexual partners (a resistance sometimes referred to as ‘the cotton ceiling’, a phrase which smacks of misogyny and male entitlement). It isn’t just radical feminists who find this problematic: some trans women do too. Is that really just irrational bigotry?
During the debate on the Observer letter, a man who had finally grasped what the trans v TERF dispute was about tweeted (I paraphrase for his own protection): ‘So, you’re saying we have to pretend to believe lies to be nice. Like saying I think cats can fly’. To avoid giving offence to a minority group — or to avoid persecution by its most extreme and vocal members — it’s as if we have all agreed to live in a fantasy world where reality is whatever certain people say it is. My penis is female. It is exclusionary for feminists to talk about female bodies. Cats can fly. Ignorance is knowledge.
A TERF is not someone who disputes trans people’s right to exist. What s/he disputes is the right of a small subset of trans extremists to impose their definition of reality, and their political agenda, on everyone. A TERF is someone prepared to say that the Emperor has no clothes. Though I understand their fears, it troubles me that we have got to the point where people like Mary Beard and Peter Tatchell feel obliged to throw the TERFs to the wolves rather than stand up to the Emperor and his court. ”
Amen to the last two paragraphs.
:/
Woo! Let’s check out all the privilege “cis” women have.
Oh.
Women do not willingly identify with any of the above conditions. This is precisely why the term “cis” resides in the realm of fatuous, patriarchally-approved bullshit. If women (adult human females) actually had the choice to identify their way out of their oppression we wouldn’t have any women left on the planet. It’s almost like there is some sort of material reality that women’s oppression is largely based on.
JB is on the case:
{spoiler alert:biological sex.}
So many conversations start like this:
“If you think trans people are all rapists or degenerates, celebrate when trans people lose rights and get attacked, and deny the sexuality of people who accept trans people, you’re an oppressor and a bigot and nobody should take you seriously.”
radicurious answered:
I disagree with transgender ideology, yes, but that doesn’t mean that I hate transgender people or that I want them to be attacked, murdered at high rates, discriminated against and harassed on the street. I want all transgender people to be safe from violence and discrimination, so I definitely wouldn’t celebrate any kind of violence or discrimination towards them. Let’s take a much discussed example – the bathroom issue: I don’t think all transgender people are rapists or “degenerates” – I know that the vast, vast majority of transgender people are decent people just wanting to be accepted and allowed to express themselves and live their lives as they please. That being said, transgender women have the same crime rates as “cis” men – also when it comes to violent crime. This means that they, statistically, are just as likely to assault or rape a women as a “cisgender” male would be, and thus placing them in the same bathrooms, changing rooms and shelters as biological women would compromise the safety of the biological women using said restrooms, shelters and changing rooms. There’s no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of trans women simply want to pee without experiencing the risks and the dysphoria that going to the mens room might involve, but allowing a group which is statistically as violent and as sexually aggressive as “cis” men into women’s restrooms and changing rooms is a recipe for disaster. Just look at some the numerous cases of biological males claiming to be/dressing as women attacking and harassing biological women in women’s changing rooms and bathrooms. My worry about letting transgender women use the women’s bathrooms doesn’t come from irrational hatred of transgender women – it comes from statistics and recorded cases which prove that allowing transgender women in women’s bathrooms would pose a threat to biological women’s safety.
I share ‘Radcurious”s assessment of the situation. And it comes down to this, which is a of a higher priority – the feelings of men or the physical safety of women? And if it is ‘transphobic’ to prioritize the safety of females, so be it, because it is the right call in this situation. Women are under constant male threat and surveillance in our society and should have spaces where the panopticon of male dominance cannot reach.
That being said, I am also in full favour of having 3 washrooms available in public spaces, and that space should be taken from existing male facilities when new ones cannot be constructed to accommodate the variable gender constituency of our populations.
[Source]
Well it is most comforting to watch someone take a stand against the doublespeak that seems to permeate most of transactivst rhetoric.
Transactivist: Aint nothing radical about your “movement”…. you’re reactionary. You’re all bigoted and transmisogynistic. Step ya pussy game up.
RF: ok
RF: do u even know what “radical” means lol, it means “getting to the root”, as in getting to the root of women’s oppression which is male desire to control women’s reproductive capacity
TA: Trans women are women too….. if you wanted to get to the root of the problem you would include trans women as well…
RF:the root of the problem, and by problem we obviously mean misogyny and female oppression, is sexism and sex-based oppression (sex-selective abortion, forced pregnancy, female genital mutilation, stigma against periods, lack of reproductive rights, etc) and guess what transwomen face literally N O N E of those things because they have penises so i don’t know what benefit would it bring to include them when they aren’t even affected negatively by the same things we are? why don’t transwomen just create their own separate movement to address their own separate struggles instead of trying to hijack the women’s rights movement?
RF: It’s like the transgender advocates are out in the middle of a lake in a canoe with only one paddle. They’re trying so hard to figure out how to get to shore, but they won’t pick up the other paddle, which is actually lying in the bottom of the canoe. They won’t touch it, and so they keep spinning around and around, far from shore … making the same leaky arguments that get them nowhere.
RF: I used to think if they grasped the fact that feminism is the political movement for the liberation of women they would then realize what women are fighting to be liberated from.
Sadly, no.
Hint: As to what women are fighting to be liberated from, it starts with a ‘P’. :/
Yet more evidence that identity politics is bad for women.
“Pregnant woman” is not an identity. It is a social reality. A pregnant woman’s ever-contracting rights – whether she can choose to end this pregnancy, whether she will risk imprisonment for drinking too much, whether she will lose her job, whether she will be murdered by her partner – can only be seen through the filter of her inferior social status: that of woman. She neither chooses nor identifies with this status and it matters that the restrictions it places on her and others be fully acknowledged. Hundreds of women died today because of the way in which pregnancy intersects with their political and social status as women. The term “pregnant people” denies them the specificity of their deaths and masks the cause.
What gender-neutral pregnancy campaigning has achieved is wholly negative, making it impossible to articulate why there exists a class of people who are not granted full sovereignty over what lies beneath their own skin. It has located the abortion debate (which should not be a debate at all) back where conservatives want it: on the status of the foetus, not that of the woman. It has allowed the misogynist left to consolidate their definition of woman as “passive fantasy girl with tits” as opposed to “person with independent physical functions, emotions and needs.” Above all, it has created the illusion of an opt-out to being placed in the inferior sex class. Well, there isn’t, at least not until you can be bothered to challenge the fundamental idea that half the human race is inferior (oh, but that’s so much harder than messing about with words!).”
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…