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I like the pull quote from the article, but the much of what Happonen asserts is quite contentious. Read the full article on The Feminist Current. This is sort of my hope for the New Year – not the abandoment of psychology persay – but women coming together and organizing against the structures in society that oppress them. The first step, as in any revolution, is to meet and talk with people who share your oppression and realize that you are not alone in the struggle against it.
“Ironically, it is often a mental block that hinders so many young women from being effective feminists. But that block is not anxiety, depression, or stress — rather, it is the idea that our emotions and problems are personal, and to be overcome on our own. We have to let go of the idea that the wrong is with us, and not with the world. We have to reach out and organize in real life, help each other, be supportive and understanding, listening and empathetic, tolerant and kind, but also firm and truthful. We must understand that we are all hurt, frustrated, and angry — and that this is not something we have to deal with alone.
I urge young feminists who feel powerless and frustrated to meet each other in real life. Look for established feminist groups in your city or area to join, women’s shelters to volunteer in, reading circles, book clubs, self-defence classes — and if you can’t find any, start your own group. Be each other’s support network and strength, show up to rallies and demonstrations in groups; make signs, slogans, stickers, and pamphlets to distribute together; organize activities and protests. I strongly encourage having ties to older women, in order to learn from their experience and knowledge, though it is equally important to act independently as a new generation of feminists and form our own networks. I was able to find friends and eventually form a feminist organization, aimed at facilitating women-separatist spaces, through radical feminist forums on Facebook and blogs on Tumblr. Dare to take the next step and meet up in real life. Join the organizations and groups you’ve been eyeing forever. Push yourself to go out and meet new women.
Our goals should not be self-empowerment or self-improvement, but the liberation of womankind.”
I saw this posted on social media and decided after reading that it was too good not to share. It demonstrates what the actual Radical Feminist position on the trans-narrative is, as opposed to the hyperbolic stew of lies that we’re usually exposed to . Also, highlighted is the radical feminist notion that one must be able to name the problem to be able to properly address, and hopefully correct it.
Problems with the piece? I challenge people who reside on the other side of the spectrum to argue against the points being made, however if your argument is simply name calling (this is transphobic!!!) or some sort of rights based objection ( I have the right to determine how you should think about my deeply personal subjective gender delusion), know you won’t get very far. Discussing the trans narrative isn’t violence, but then again females are never supposed to question what males say and males often react violently when challenged on their bullshit, no matter what guise they happen to be in at the time (see the men dressed as women use violence against ‘uppity females’ at hyde park in the UK, or see our violent transactivists in action here in Vancouver, Canada).
“Thought experiment: a transwoman, a very effeminate gay man and a drag queen walk down a road at night, perhaps a minute or two apart. Their presentation is similar; they are noticeably male but dressed in very feminine ways.
A group of hyper-masculine young men are gathered drinking on a street corner. They attack one of the three, shouting insults like ‘fag’ and ‘tranny’, and batter him badly.
1) Which one do they pick?
2) Why?The answer to 1) is: anyone’s guess. Which one provokes their ire probably depends on what they look like, what the young men are talking about at the time, what levels of aggression are going on in their group. In other words,it’s random.
The answer to 2) is that a feminine-presenting male threatens their view of what men are allowed to be, of what is appropriate for men. They are enforcing male gender, because seeing femininity in men threatens something in them, perhaps feminine or homo-erotic impulses they have never allowed to surface. Is it homophobia? Is it transphobia? Is it drag-queen-phobia? Do any of those terms make sense?
They make sense, sort of, when we try to define hate crimes against a marginalised group. But they don’t tell us very much about the true problem, the true cause of the atrocity, which is toxic masculinity and male violence. (And perhaps if we named crimes by the perpetrator’s state of mind instead of – or at least as well as – the group the victim belongs to, we would get a much clearer and more frightening insight into the real driver of crime and violence in this world.)
Certainly it’s not really that informative to call it transphobia if the transwoman is targeted, and homophobia if the gay male is targeted, when the perpetrator’s motive is identical: violent enforcement of male gender roles. Not if we want to address the real problem, anyway. Does it make sense to separate the terms, apart from statistical tracking?
What we can say with some certainty is that how the transwoman identifies is pretty much irrelevant to the crime. If their gender presentation is feminine, they will be a target, whereas if it’s masculine, they probably won’t be. It is how they are read externally by violent males that puts a target on their backs.
This is not to suggest in any way that the transwoman is responsible, simply to point out that an internal identity is invisible to the attacker.
Contrast this to race crimes or misogynist crimes, where the victim visibly belongs to a marginalised group; they are black, or female. The crime is still almost always male violence, but the trigger may be objectively different.
(It’s interesting and frightening to note that our society colludes, by using the passive voice in most reporting and by making perpetrator data hard to obtain, in concealing the real common factor: male violence. Because if we truly named the problem and its scale, society would collapse.)
Analogously, although not criminally, women demanding sex-segregated facilities such as toilets, changing rooms, shelters and prisons are not transphobic. We’re male-phobic, and with very good reason. Radical feminists are routinely accused by transactivists and leftist men, in very lofty tones, of reducing women to their vaginas; but a vagina is usually the site of a rape. And rapes are perpetrated with penises, not gender identities, as I’ve said before. Women are not defined by our reproductive systems, but we are certainly oppressed on the basis of them, and our vulnerability in spaces like toilets and changing rooms is physical and material, not psychological.
Telling us that we shouldn’t be ‘genital fundamentalists’ (as I was accused of being on a comment thread the other day) is in fact high misogyny. When men do so much harm to us physically, sexually and reproductively, to then turn round and tell us to focus on higher things than our bodies is to demand that we obliterate the history of violence they have perpetrated against us, and that we are bigots not to do so. Rape, battery, forced pregnancy and birth, sexual assault, sexual harassment; voyeurism, murder: these are all crimes against our bodies.
So our position is that from across the chasm of biological sex, men and transwomen don’t look that different, and they don’t behave that differently. Certainly the violence and bullying that comes from the trans community is pretty much indistinguishable from that of the MRA community, or for that matter of the lefty dudebro community.
Even friendly and pro-woman transwomen often betray unconscious male bias and male thinking, clearly without being aware of it. I saw someone explaining on a thread the other day that the differences between male and female were becoming blurrier all the time because they might be able to get a womb implant in the not-too-distant future. That that womb would mean that a woman had given up either her life or her fertility didn’t occur to this person; that it would have to come from a woman’s body, probably a poor woman exploited by organ traffickers, wasn’t on their radar. I would stand with the woman in the third world whose womb was being harvested for money, against the transwoman who starts out with a fertile male body, wanting an unnecessary implant to prop up an inner mental state. Does that make me transphobic? I think it makes me a feminist. We are women, not a mix-and-match assortment of body parts.
So transwomen, we can understand that retrieving the feminine, finding a feminine identity, perhaps even identifying as a woman may be important to you in your struggles against the gender police. But you’re demanding that we pretend that your inner state of mind makes you more like us than like a man, and that we put our safety, our privacy and all the tiny gains of feminism at risk to do so.
Sorry. We can’t do that. Quacks like a drake…”\
I’ve highlighted some bits that were not emphasized in the original text.
Your opinions…