What is going on with the Feminist Library in London?

I've only managed to find a limited amount of stuff by trans men. I read one blood where he talked about experiencing sexism, street harassment, boys doing stuff at school same as anyone else and was a gender critical feminist basically.

The idea that trans men and boys are immediately accepted into all make circles no questions asked is laughable. Is this part of the idea that actually it's women who are the most violent group in society?

We want to be oppressed? Is that what that means?

I'm afraid anyone who says that what is being done to women and girls all over the world is because they like it, is a deeply vile person. Or maybe just incredibly stupid, or with zero idea about the world and what goes on. Maybe all 3.

And this is where the question comes up again, about how many of these ideas and attitudes are just bog standard old school misogyny.

Transmisogyny is only used for trans women, so a male who "identifies" as a woman.

And in any case the party line is the very second a female "identifies" as a man they experience all the glories of patriarchy, never experience any misogyny. It's all over. Even if they've come out to zero people, they now have "privilege" over all women and trans women and enjoy the treats of patriarchy and life is just peachy, no struggles.

Now it's been a while since I watched Boys Don't Cry but uh...

I’m an afab trans person, so I don’t experience transmisogyny

Even with your definitions that still doesn't make sense to me Fauch!

I also remember someone saying "dfabs wanna be oppressed so bad"

Right...

Ah i'm still fluent!! clears throat Transmisogyny is the word used for abuse towards trans women, afab means "assigned female at birth" or, my doc saw I had a vag when I was born. so I'm guessing this person is trying to say they don't experience what a trans woman faces. In really complex language which most of the world doesn't understand or use.

I'd agree - I don't know what its like to be a trans woman. Equally, a trans woman does not face what non-trans women face from birth until death but this fact is denied and ignored.

Women may have to endure crippling patriarchy, but it's just as bad for trans women because they had to join in on the leering and jeering and getting better schooling and snapping of bra straps and harassment, being told to join in with the sexism when deep down that's how they wanted to be treated! (Someone actually similar words.)

I’m an afab trans person, so I don’t experience transmisogyny

What does that sentence even mean?

If it's of any comfort I almost certainly fit the description of cis woman, and it doesn't really bother me, but that article mystified and irritated me too.

Maybe we should just call men women and women men. Let them have a go. See how they like it

It ends up meaning that penises become more female than vaginas. Since we "Vaginas" can't call our genitals female, only penises can be called female.

And no one sees anything wrong with that...

Hovis Valid questions. All I can come up with is that the language used is considered wrong. They're not female bodies because not everyone who identifies as a woman has a female body. But sex is a spectrum and anyway shuddup cis scum you're killing transwomen.

I think feminism can and should interact with trans issues, but it shouldn't centre them and shouldn't do all the work for them. The impact on women gets serious far too quickly. But trans people wanting to set up a Trans Library would get my support, frinstance. Providing they didn't expect women to do it for them.

Offload all you like, it's one of the very few and very precious spaces you can do so!

Wow. This thread has... well, it's made me think a lot.

"...this group does not support feminism that excludes or marginalises transwomen."

And they're deleting posts about the menopause. So they're saying that anything that discusses female bodies (menopause) is transphobic? In spite of the fact that the vast majority of women will, in fact, go through said menopause?

There is a difference between something not being relevant to everyone in a given group, and actively excluding the people to whom it's not relevant, right?

I'm not saying feminism is all about female bodies. But... a pretty large chunk of it is. Why does caring about and discussing those things preclude interaction with and concern for trans issues?

As an aside, Archery, you could consider the Glasgow Women's Library in your will instead...

whirlpool believe it or not when I first became a feminist, at 13 I was a rad fem and proud! Then about 16 I was like most teens, laughing about misogyny and saying "women can't drive" because I wanted to fit in I guess. Anyway a few years later I was very vocally into what I now call "tumblr feminism". Waging war against the white cis able anti-sex worker straight anti-fat......[redacted] capitalist supremacy... It was about who was most oppressed being the most correct, what they said HAD to go, if you found it empowering it was empowering, female celebs were the be all and end all of who can change this society, call outs and blah blah blah... Because we were all students and everyone felt the same? And it's very insular, you don't want to oppress anyone so you act careful and polite and make room again and again because you don't want to be problematic. To be problematic is a fate irredeemable. Once you're problematic you're ousted. If you socialise with problematics you're ousted. Unless you're a poor, "queer", black, fat trans woman sex worker. Then you are never wrong and everyone must flagellate themselves for having so much privilege. It doesn't matter if your menses caused eating disorders, self hate and overcoming that is a big feminist step. You might trigger someone with your disgusting vile period, so put a tw - as if you were discussing rape, abuse or paedophilia.

It's shockingly cultish. I could, for example, share advice for abuse survivors but if a "terf" wrote it, I'd be told to delete it else I was supporting the deaths of thousands of trans women. Other sins include listening to any pop music that isn't beyonce - the queen feminist, watching shows that aren't orange is the new black..
So as you can imagine it's not easy to think anything else. Until you start reading about facts and logic, not just the circular logic that you're forced to repeat and never question.

I don't really get out and about on the net that much, when I see what is going on out there I realise how good it is that we have this space here. What are other spaces that are more old school?

Fauchelevent out of interest, why did you used to believe those things? Genuinely interested I'm very glad that you have come round to the sensible way of thinking

Also on that library site, if talk of sex based oppression is banned, what the actual fuck are they going to do with what must be a massive proportion of their books? Chuck them out? Give them away? Destroy them?

Also whirlpool don't you know that those with cunts are uterus-havers and those with penises are penis-havers. These terms are much better than male and female because they aren't biology obsessed or focus on anatomy. Penis-haver is also definitely not upsetting for a dysphoric trans person. Nope. Also uterus bearer is better than female, since it doesn't exclude women who've had hysterectomies (which is such a rad fem thing to do!!). Also the clit and the penis are anatomically identical, so if you havent been pissing from your clit, see a doctor - although medics and rad fems have such bad understanding of biology!

I used to be "that" kind of feminist. I fell over myself to use gender accommodating language and was appalled if someone associated vaginas with women because don't you know its important we centre penises over vagina??!! Also the wider world centres penises over vagina. Everyone must centre around penis. But thanks to Mumsnet, a gender critical trans woman and a few other rad fems I'm seeing sense. I just wanna say thanks.

I had never actually heard of the feminist library but I'm gutted it has gone the same way as so many other spaces. It's horrendously McCarthyist. You can't even associate with anyone who has been condemned.

My biggest issue is the dictation on how OTHERS see their own fucking body. Everyone MUST "identify" as a gender, even if this is completely meaningless to you! I don't "identify as" a fucking woman! I just am one! I have a body and a personality. My vagina and sex characteristics determine how people treat me, not some vague personality traits and things I've been socialised into liking.

I'm sorry to offload here. I honestly can't speak about these things without "violating safe space rules" and getting kicked out of feminist groups and losing friends.

Apparently wanting to acknowledge that I don't "identify as" anything, that i was socialised into liking dresses and make up and that same socialisation has been the cause of abuse, anorexia, depression, and horrible interpersonal relations... Apparently acknowledging my sex and sex based oppression is entirely based on biology, accepting other people may feel different but refusing to let others take that away from ME and other women is "violent".

Oh Whirlpool, everyone knows you can just identify your way out of oppression! Gender identity does not equal gender expression. Why are you so interested in the contents of other people's pants anyway?! Misogyny is totes not as bad as transmisogyny.

OK, so I'm pissing my own self off now

Annie, get an email like [email protected] and mail them asking about books on the menopause, see what happens.

The other thing that is confusing is that apparently I am not a woman, nor am I female. I am also not a man, nor am I male.

It is other people who have told me this, I was quite happy ticking the boxes saying "F" on forms and being referred to as a pregnant woman for example. This was because I was under the impression that my being in possession of a female reproductive system & etc put me in those categories.

Now it turns out, these descriptors should not be used by me. That feels kind of, not right? It really feels like a lot of my history has been removed. I was never a little girl, or a woman who got catcalled, or a female who got blank looks when she wanted to watch sci-fi films, or whatever.

Does anyone know what I am supposed to be now?

And what does that mean for the fact that everyone I meet perceives me and therefore treats me as 100% female and they always have done, and all the shit that goes with that.

Someone on the facebook said that we are oppressed as women not because of what's between our legs. OK. I'm not a woman. So why did all these things happen to me?

Is it a kind of victim blaming thing, I must have done something to invite this stuff? Or what? Because apparently it didn't happen because of my body / features.

What happens in these arguments if a "Terf" points out she is not cis???

We (now we're trans) can call her a TERF anyway, since the TERF-caller is the infallible expert on cis people's gender identity or lack of it. Or if they're trans, they're then tru-scum. Marvellous, isn't it? It's almost like it was designed to shut down discussion and silence detractors.

FWIW, my story is similar to yours Whirlpool, and both my parents brought me up in a relatively gender-neutral if not outright feminist way. My mum uterus-bearing parent read me the Feminist Fairy Tales (still trying to track down a copy - wonder if the Feminist Library has one?) and I played with Lego back when it was just blocks, not all these ridiculously gendered totally appropriate kits. When I was 7, I went out of my way not to like pink and made yellow my favourite colour (see how early I was genderqueer?!).

I'm now going to grow my PCOS beard, stick on a sparkly dress and be so non-binary it fucking hurts. That'll sort the world out!

Well one of the reasons.

The other being that as I grew older I watched the news and read the papers and experienced street harassment and so on and so forth and say how badly women and girls are treated all the time everywhere.

But before that, I didn't fit in my box, at all. I didn't understand why the box was even there. Many many girls and women report the same.

Of course there are women and girls who do have an internal self identity of female, they can be feminists and so forth. Just for me, this is what happened, and it's interesting.

What happens in these arguments if a "Terf" points out she is not cis???

The interesting thing for me is that, that thread highlighted why I have always been a feminist. I noticed that boys and girls / men and women were treated differently, and I didn't like it. I didn't understand it. I didn't like the way I was treated. I saw that I was expected to fit in a box called "pretty little girl" and externally I fitted very well which may have exacerbated things because I couldn't give a fuck about the things people wanted me to give a fuck about and so on.

So OK sure it does look like I have no internal gender. I have no idea what it means when people talk about it, I don't have any feelings whatsoever inside that link to male / female / masculine / feminine. I literally, just don't get it.

Ironically, this is why I said "yes that's me" when I first even heard what a feminist was, as a young teen, and again when I was introduced to the RadFem ideas, I thought, well most of that chimes with how I feel

So the fact that I am not cis is what led me to radical feminism (at least I think that's what I am, I haven't done a quiz to check or anything ).

So you're right. Where next?

Isabelle

I wonder if there is any pressure on gay men to sleep with transmen. I doubt there is.

There was a rather illuminating Twitter exchange a while back where, IIRC, a radfem asked Owen Jones (after he told women [oops! I mean bibbles] we were doing feminism wrong) whether he'd sleep with a transman. His utter, utter spluttering outrage was fucking hilarious.

Totally. All radfems and other gender-critical women and women who've never even thought about it (and men, I presume) are actually trans by trans rules (or genderqueer or wheteverthefuck).

Now what?