Could someone genuinely please explain this to me...

Break the word TERF down. If you think feminism is the fight for the rights of natal women, you're a TERF. Is that such a bad thing? No, in my opinion. It's another smoke and mirrors job to claim that it is awful to want feminism to be for women.

Expressing common sense views will get you branded as such, yes. Welcome to the dark side.

DeaconBoo
"Gender dysphoria is a condition of some trans people, but by no means all, and to say someone needs to have gender dysphoria to be transgender is apparently transphobic - that was what the self-id GRA reformers were arguing.
If you don't want to get your posts removed for transphobia it's worth bearing in mind, as you shouldn't generalise."

Oops, many thanks for telling me !

I have often asked myself this question too OP - and here is an article by another woman who has too: standpointmag.co.uk/issues/november-2019/blackface-is-evil-why-isnt-drag/

Oh, just realised sophocles made the same point!

If you don't want to get your posts removed for transphobia it's worth bearing in mind, as you shouldn't generalise.

We aren't allowed to say. But google knows.

Google does know, but they'd prefer that you didn't, so searching for AGP requires a great deal of patience and tenacity before it turns up anything useful.

This article is a better place to start. medium.com/@sue.donym1984/the-elephant-in-the-room-dc822144a81b

It doesn’t make sense, dangly, that’s the maddening thing. There’s no coherence or logic. It’s absolutely not a medical condition, but it absolutely must be medically treated as a priority, wherever that is desired, even in children. It’s not in any way a mental health condition, but trans people are particularly vulnerable to suicide, self harm and mental ill health, so we have to be specially kind and understanding. A non binary person is trans, even though by declaring themselves non binary, they’re by definition not transitioning to or from anything, as they’re outside the binary.

All quite baffling.

It. just. seems. like. horseshit. What am I not seeing?

Probably just not the full depth of the horseshit.

We aren't allowed to say. But google knows.

Nobody mention AGP, either

Not according to Stonewall, Sith.

“ [trans is] An umbrella term to describe people whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth.
Trans people may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms, including (but not limited to) transgender, transsexual, gender-queer (GQ), gender-fluid, non-binary, gender-variant, crossdresser, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman,trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois”

Asserting that dysphoria is a fundamental part of being trans makes you transphobic, or truscum, if you are yourself dysphoric, according to Stonewall. Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.

The former ie the blacking up is done to poke fun at one category of ppl ie reducing a whole bunch of people to a few stereotypical exaggerated traits and the other is called gender dysphoria, it is a condition.

I've wondered this too. But hey, I can't actually become a black person. But a man can become a woman apparently.

Ooh I love it when you get to watch someone peak.
Welcome to the coven.

If you actually believe that being a woman is simply a costume that you can put on and wear (like in a play) then it all makes sense. Of course have to be a fucking idiot to believe this. Don't you?

Imo what makes the 'blacking up' of the past objectionable in retrospect, in contexts like Laurence of Arabia or Olivier's Moor, was that there presumably wasn't any attempt to find a great Arab or 'moorish' actor. The acting profession was massively white-dominated. Even if there were explicitly non-white European roles, they went to white Europeans. When I was growing up there was Sidney Poitier and... um... no, that's about it. It was perhaps not dissimilar to the theatre in Shakespeare's time, entirely male.

It's a healthy change that whereas a few decades ago, we had "a passage to India' - mostly white characters, with one of the main Indian roles again being taken by Guinness - now we have A Suitable Boy with brilliant Indian actors, with a few white people in appropriate big parts.

In serious theatre, nowadays it's pretty much de rigeur for there to be some sort of 'gender reversal' (if you see stage to screen productions the person introducing always mentions that in hilarious breathy 'ooh how exciting and radical' tones) - mostly this is fine, and can be interesting. And it's done fairly even-handedly. OTOH I wasn't greatly impressed by David Suchet squandering his talents playing Lady Bracknell - one of the relatively few classic parts for an older woman. Coming out lots of people were gushing 'oh, wasn't he maahvelous' ... well, no, he really wasn't, it was a caricature - it would have been much better played by any number of mature women actors.

Can people who say drag is directed towards gay men expand on that, please? I unstated that a lot of the "artists" are gay men, and that a lot of the followers are gay men, at least until it became more widespread on TV. It still just looks like gay men expressing withering scorn at women to me. I've always found it creepy and breathed a sigh of relief when others said it's sexist as hell because it made sense as to why I found it creepy. But I'm willing to learn.

Comedians dressing up as black people is still problematic because a) you can't disentangle it from the history of blackface and b) it's a white (often man) making jokes at the expense of black person - the power dynamic is that of punching down not a fair match, if that makes sense?

White actors and actresses playing black characters are problematic because why was a white actor/tress chosen instead of a black person to portray the role in the first place? Again, it's within the context of a pre')-existing power imbalance.

I wondered this when I read this article and posted a thread about it (but didn’t get many many responses so reposting here, sorry to jump on your thread!)

medium.com/@jessakrug/the-truth-and-the-anti-black-violence-of-my-lies-9a9621401f85

’Intention never matters more than impact. To say that I clearly have been battling some unaddressed mental health demons for my entire life, as both an adult and child, is obvious. Mental health issues likely explain why I assumed a false identity initially, as a youth, and why I continued and developed it for so long; the mental health professionals from whom I have been so belatedly seeking help assure me that this is a common response to some of the severe trauma that marked my early childhood and teen years.’

How does this apply to race but not biological sex? I know people don’t like to draw a comparison, my mind is struggling not to.

Drag mocks femininity, generally, although can be actually misogynistic. I think it's important not to conflate femininity and being a woman.

As far as drag mocking women, a lot does. But I've generally felt that really, it's a comedy or art form that is really very much directed to gay men, and needs to be understood as playing with or even subverting gender norms and changing their meaning, more than it's really talking about women as women.
Yes, thank you for saying this. I tried to say that drag traditionally isn't about women not so long ago on FWR and got dragged through the mud (maybe a slight exaggeration! I'm not bitter ) by women who told me I was being stupid for not agreeing that all drag is misognist mockery of women. I don't believe it is. I've seen a lot of drag acts in gay clubs and yes, a lot of them are terrible, but it's clear that it's most often directed towards gay men and isn't really about women. And yes, it's weird that it's been brought into the mainstream, because part of its inherent function is to be outside the norm. So if you make it 'normal' then it automatically becomes not-drag in the traditional sense. It is especially weird that kids are being introduced to drag as really it is outsider art for adults.