“There has been little acknowledgement of the way in which trans politics demands far more of women than it does of men, perhaps because this would require an acknowledgement of the fact that male/female remains as much, if not more, of a dominant axis of oppression as trans/cis. Why aren’t we claiming that “men” needs to become a more inclusive category? If men can get pregnant too, why aren’t men’s rights activists campaigning for abortion rights? Why does pregnancy become a de-politicised “people’s” issue while testicular cancer remains a men’s issue? If sex is irrelevant, why are female people always the ones expected to cede linguistic and physical ground?
Pregnant with my third child, I faced more than one self-righteous male informing me that “biological sex is a construct.” The arrogance of this is staggering. Every single human being on this planet exists because of the reproductive labour of female bodies. Around 830 women die every day due to preventable pregnancy complications. The world is missing an estimated 90 to 100 million women due to the extermination of female – not feminine – infants. In such a situation, to boldly declare that you “see no sex difference” reveals both ignorance and privilege. We’re back to the idea that female people cannot be credible witnesses to their own lives.
If men were genuinely invested in supporting trans women, there’s an obvious thing they could do: stop pretending it is inevitable for “masculine” men to respond with violence to the idea that those who wish to socially transition to womanhood remain biologically male. As feminists have been arguing for decades, maleness and femininity can coexist. If the thought of that makes some men violent, then the problem lies with how men see maleness, not with feminists refusing to treat womanhood as a catch-all category for anything men don’t want to be.
Andrea Dworkin suggested when it comes to justifying misogyny, the right has religion while the left has nature. Trans politics has offered up a suitably postmodern amalgam of both. Are we dealing with scientifically verifiable proof of the “gendered” brain? Or with some mystic, soul-like essence known as “gender identity”? In many ways, it doesn’t matter which, as long as both are reinforcing a male view of how masculinity and femininity work.
I am tired of men posing as more open-minded than feminists, when in fact they’re behaving in the exact same way men have always behaved towards women. If you’re a male person telling a female person to be silent about her experiences of gender and power, you’re not only doing feminism wrong, you’re exemplifying the very values you claim to undermine.”
This is a long post that starts with a woman discovering that the third wave liberal feminism (male pleasing) we have today is shit, and moving toward the tenets of radical feminism (female liberation from patriarchy). Cue the dudes that react in horror to the truth ignis-divine-eleison is telling. The grist of the post happens when Cordintal71 and altlibgay enter the conversation making bold pronouncements on feminism (thanks dudes) and how it should work. I’ve been in these conversations and truth be told – it sucks – dealing with people who are this far removed from reality is never pleasant. Lion of Exarchia comes to the scene, also male, but at least one that has a fucking clue and dismantles the MRA bullshit as quickly as it spews forth.
More men, on a vast scale, need to be like Lion of Exarchia. ( You heard it here first. :) )
http://tehbewilderness.tumblr.com/post/162756314964/why-i-became-a-feminist
Amazing what goes on and more importantly get accepted and published in the field of gender studies these days. Let’s take a peek at the abstract.
The text reads:
“As we stated, absolutely no academic journal should have published our paper. One did. The one that did is not a vanity journal (see above). It qualifies for faculty reimbursement at many university libraries, and it possessed at least one specialist reviewer whose knowledge of the field of gender studies evidently exceeds ours. This reviewer employed relevant academic terminology with obvious confidence (“capturs [sic] the issue of hypermasculinity through a multi-dimensional and nonlinear process”) and read the paper carefully enough to remark on absence of a tool of analysis (poststructuralist discourse analysis is mentioned in the abstract but it is used nowhere in the manuscript, which the reviewer caught). On these facts alone, it reaches too far to suggest that nothing can be inferred about gender studies from the success of our satire.
At the same time, the “Conceptual Penis” paper is a parody whose target is easily recognizable and unmistakable. The paper is ridiculous, certainly, but it is also immediately identifiable with the field it lampoons. The power of satirical parody lies entirely in its being recognizable for what it mocks. This lends credibility to our abiding suspicion that there is a problem in gender studies and, by extension, other fields of postmodernist studies, and with the moral architecture on the academic Left that enables them.”
Wow. The roast continues…
“It is only possible to entertain this criticism with any seriousness by ignoring the surrounding mountains of evidence that postmodernist vanity studies fields have built up over decades, which they term “scholarship.” Within the corpus of literature in those fields, there is a voluminous, extant catalog of academically vapid papers that employ certain moral lenses and are written in impenetrable pseudo-analytical prose. That body of literature preceded and motivated our hoax while providing a basis for its style. For those who got the joke, our paper is funny because it’s accurate. That is, it is not so very different from many real papers that are published in gender studies and related fields.
This is the real evidence justifying our initial suspicion about gender studies, and it is bolstered by the current fashionable madness taking over many college campuses. This collective insanity virtually always emanates from ideological complaints rooted in identity politics, aspects of postmodernism, and uses or abuses of “critical theory”. This has been used to indoctrinate a generation of students and faculty who are now taking illiberal, authoritarian actions.”
The moral of the story? One should be quite skeptical of any field that has its head this far up its own ass.
“Clear language – lucid, rational language – to a man at war with both truth and reason, is an existential threat. Clear language to such a man is a direct assault on his obfuscations, contradictions and lies. To him, it is the voice of the enemy. To him, it is fake news. Because he knows, if only intuitively, what we know to our cost: that without clear language, there is no standard of truth.”
-John Le Carré
I’m pretty sure this is not the libretto we want, but the one we deserve. :)
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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