Following on from the TERF thread...

that imo accounts for the popularity of pro porn , pro prostitution, pro gender essentialism pov's. It's much more accessible, much more applicable to the real world, the converse needs a deeper more theoretical analysis. not saying those povs are held by stupid people, of course not, i mean they are likely to be held by people who are not that deeply involved, ordinanary every day people, the wo/man on the street who doesn't wish ill on anyone.

its hard to have rl conversations on this if you come from a more radfem perspective.
look at kim's example about having f not m on her drivers license. a concrete everyday rl benefit compared to more abstract 'out-there' counter arguments

typing v bad but bfing (woman centred!) so please excuse

I think we are now in the fourth wave of feminism - the one where there is only radical feminism left as liberal feminism has been destroyed by a combination of third wavers, transgenderism, post-modernism, and liberal feminism's own liberalism.

Agree completely with this Beach. I still can't quite believe what has happened to mainstream feminism, and that there aren't more women who have a problem with its pro-porn, pro-prostitution, pro-gender-essentialist stance.

Liberal feminism has handed over the gold medal in the Oppression Olympics to men (many of them white).

It's surreal, isn't it? I suppose it is the logical outcome of the male-identified nature of liberal feminism, which has always defined women's liberation in terms of equality with men, implicitly conceding that women should strive to become more like men.

Catherine MacKinnon once wrote that liberal feminism is not feminism - it is liberalism applied to women. Well, liberalism only works for women to a very circumscribed extent. If you are talking about women claiming formal equality with men and the theoretical right to be a free agent, then liberalism applied to women is all that we need. If you want to uproot the ancient ideological and material structures of women's oppression, you need to go further, much further, than 'women and men should be equal'. You need to look at why we aren't equal, why almost every society that has ever existed has been built on male domination and female subordination.

The liberal subject is a fundamentally male subject: a free agent making his way in the world unencumbered by the threat of male violence or child-bearing - two controlling factors that have defined the lives of women in all societies throughout history. Women need a liberation movement that centres the female subject, which concedes that we do not become free just by saying that we all choose our choices, which recognises that our lives are fundamentally different from men's in several important respects, and that society needs to be reshaped according to those needs and interests. How can we do this if we concede that 'woman' is a meaningless concept that anyone can adopt?

No worries - I just was surprised because I don't see what would be deletable about it but you may be right. Too bad if it gets deleted.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be controversial. It was probably an unhelpful post for me to make.

Sorry almondcakes but you've lost me.

Which bits of my post are deletable? I haven't addressed anyone on here with pronouns they don't want or called anyone on here a man or talked about anyone on here's surgery. My comments about neovaginas are general. If it is against MN talk guidelines to express the opinion that cutting off healthy body parts is mutilating and that men are men then I guess someone better report my post so that said opinion can be censored.

Which would rather make my point.

Beachcomber, I would suggest that there are two reasons people use correct pronouns on here and talk about surgery in a neutral way - a. it is a matter of courtesy and b. comments that break these rules tend to get deleted. Given that your post of 13.10 had some really good points in it about the impact on feminism, it would be good if you could repost those parts should your post get deleted.

And this is why the TERF slur is important.

Radical feminists must be painted as ultra conservative/behind the times/non progressive/repressive/exclusionary of the oppressed/bigoted/discriminatory/politically incorrect.

It is a cunning slur designed to appeal to right on liberals in all that it implies of the non liberalism and the narrow mindedness of radicals.

You know, I used to pander to trans desires to be referred to by their chosen pronouns and sex designation. I did it out of kindness and a desire not to hurt. But I won't do it anymore because women's kindness is being exploited and manipulated. An inch given and miles taken. I refuse all of the delusion, every bit and I will no longer give in to any of it.

Supporting the notion that calling a man 'he' and 'misgendering' a person is a really oppressive and hateful thing to do is the first step down the trans cult rabbit hole. IMO it is a feminist act to not capitulate.

Transactivists who call women TERFs, fish, pussy, etc. can fuck right off with the idea that feminists referring to born men as a 'man' and 'he' are using oppressive slurs.

Oh and I wish they and their handmaidens would educate themselves as to what social oppression actually is.

In fact, here is his latest column, Not All Menz, in which he discusses Elliott Rodgers, how women don't mean all men when they talk about male violence and men do not need to remind women that some men aren't like that, and mentions how homophobia is a consequence of misogyny (third letter down).

www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=19896960

And many posters on here would agree with that. Many posters on here would disagree with his stance on prostitution, but hopefully think that given the huge impact of the It Gets Better Campaign, it would be massively counter productive to single him out for constant criticism, no platform him or write him off entirely given his continuing important contribution to gay rights.

Lovecat, Dan Savage is the creator of the It Gets Better Project, which he set up in response to the suicide of a gay teenage boy. He is also known for writing poignantly and sensitively about his adopted son and his and his partner's attempts to maintain a relationship and help the mother, a drug user with various problems. He also writes a sex advice column.

Pretty much anyone with any perspective on sex will sometimes disagree with his advice. When various women complained about one particular piece of advice about a teenage girl, he then wrote a follow on piece essentially retracting the advice and that was the end of the matter.

He once gave a piece of advice considered transphobic, which he apologised for. As a consequence has been glitter bombed twice, has had trans activists protest his public speaking about other topics and has been labelled a transphobe ever since. The whole thing got stirred up again recently when he defended a woman and an abortion provision campaign which used the word vagina in relation to abortion provision (apparently transphobic as mentioning body parts may trigger dysphoria in trans people).

Unlike the abortion campaign, he doesn't seem to get criticised for writing about sex and mentioning clitoris, vulva etc when talking about women having sex. As far as I know anyway...

Anything women demand, or even ask for is too bloody much for some men

Honestly.

Oh, thank you Beach :o

Yes, Crotch, it seems all-pervasive. I feel we are halfway down a very slippery slope here.

Lovecat, that is exactly my problem. This wave of Feminism and feminist discourse is being shaped by trans issues. It's "What about the tranz?". No wonder coherence has been lost and people won't identify as feminists, or feel they have no "home".

It's why I'm all about women's liberation.

Lovecat, Right-Wing Women is available as a PDF.

radfem.org/dworkin/

WhentheRed wrote - "comments from those on twitter and other places who mock women for being "obsessed" trans*women's genitals."

Let's not forget the women who are mocked on Twitter for not being obsessed with trans women's genitals.

Sorry in advance for an epic post. This is a fascinating thread with some brilliant links. I'm definitely getting a copy of Right Wing Women to read!

I find that although some very vocal transactivists behave like entitled arseholes have said terrible things about women who disagree with them, I am seeing a rising number of self-identified feminists online who are also bending over backwards to accommodate them and parrot their dubious lines about the female penis, lesbian transphobia and cis-privilege. They seem to be in a competition over who can be the most right-on, and in their desperation not to offend the very delicate sensitivities of the trans community (the vocal ones, at any rate) they are themselves silencing and dismissing anyone who even questions these views.

Just yesterday two feminist facebook groups that I follow posted things that made me go 'wtaf'?

1. An interesting link was posted up about pop culture and the depiction of female presidents in film, which contained the line "pop culture has not been kind to commanders-in-chief with two X chromosomes."

THE VERY FIRST COMMENT on the post (from a female poster) was "What's all this about chromosomes?"

To which the page admin instantly replied "You're right, not all females have two X chromosomes." God forbid they should inadvertently post a link that doesn't explicitly include transpeople as women...

2. Another page posted a link with the trigger warning "Transphobia" and then linked to this: feminspire.com/a-letter-to-activist-dan-savage-who-continues-to-bully-my-trans-sibling/ which sounded awful going by the title (I have no idea who Dan Savage is, btw), but on reading, it appeared that the sibling of the author had objected to Dan Savage using the T-word in a discussion about how language evolves and some words are no longer acceptable/are reclaimed by those they once insulted. He wasn't calling anyone a tranny, he wasn't directly insulting transexuals/transgendered people, he was talking about how words that were once used as description are no longer acceptable and how some words that were once insults - queer, for example - could be reclaimed. But apparently just saying the word itself is so hateful and bigoted that it caused the person in question to feel 'unsafe'.

And everyone piled in on the comments saying what a hateful biphobic piece of shit/a troll/privileged white guy he is, in what felt like a more "righter-on than thou" pile-on.

It's reading this stuff on my FB feed day in day out that makes me feel that any discussion is being silenced, shouted down, that people are having to censor their speech and phrase themselves very carefully to avoid being tarred with the transphobe brush or pulled up for the tiniest slip in their language, anything to dismiss the serious points that people are trying to discuss. It's not that I go looking for this stuff (to go back to Kim's assertion that feminists are obsessed with trans), it's constantly being shoved in my face.

Somebody upthread (sorry, silly device won't allow me to scroll back so excuse me if I paraphrase) said that it feels like transpeople are on a mission to put themselves in the front of the 'most oppressed' queue and consequently I think many women are feeling that they have to be nice and tolerant and defend transpeople to the hilt, ahead of their own needs, so as not to be seen as intolerant bigots.

Christ, it's just another version of women being socialised to be people-pleasers and care-givers, isn't it?

I am surprised at how much responses the trans threads get compared to the actual amount of trans people out there and the small number - about 1 -2000 per year who have surgery. I wish other issues on here got people so excited.

Why do you and others know so much about trans people, surgery, blogs, outcomes? Why does such a small minority take up so much posts on here?

This is disingenuous in the extreme. You cannot be unaware, Kim, of the prominence of trans issues within contemporary feminism and the aggressive way trans activists have attempted to impose a new discourse on top of feminism which makes the reality of biological sex unspeakable, reifies gender as natural and renders 'female' a metaphysical identity which anyone can claim, both legally and socially.

To say you are 'surprised' that feminists might have a problem with this, and to imply it is all down to women having a prurient interest in people who get SRS, suggests that you are not engaging in good faith on these issues, quite frankly.

You have been participating in these threads, in spite of how upset you say they make you, and you cannot have missed women articulating their concerns with the current trans political agenda. What I don't see is any evidence that you have for a moment taken any of those concerns seriously. You want - indeed demand - empathy for the way gender has impacted on you, but you do not return that empathy in kind to female posters here. Instead, you pretend you don't even understand what we are talking about.

Ah - even if she wasn't a raging misogynist, she's a hypocritical asshole and all-round loose cannon on all sorts of non-trans issues, too. I wonder that the LibDems allowed her to represent them for so long. (But then, they are having trouble ditching Mike Hancock, so perhaps I shouldn't expect too much.)

I went and googled, and the DykeMarch twitter account says they "won't tolerate" heckling. So, what does that mean in practice? They can't stop people voicing their disapproval in a public place, however much they huff and puff.

I think Basil is talking about Sarah Brown.

You know, when an outright misogynist who has told lesbians to suck his balls because they disagree with him, is a star speaker at Dyke March, then I think feminists need to address the trans issue, however reluctantly.

...wait, what? AskBasil, really? Who?

You know, when an outright misogynist who has told lesbians to suck his balls because they disagree with him, is a star speaker at Dyke March, then I think feminists need to address the trans issue, however reluctantly.

I'm pretty sure anti racists wouldn't be rushing to invite people who have used racist insults to their anti racist rallies. And telling people who didn't want them there, that they were bigoted haterz and Klanphobic or some other such nonsense.