@PCar20
What did you love about it? Sorry, this is a genuine question. I often don’t understand the posts on the feminism board and am trying to learn
For anyone who is still in the dark about what all this means, as there are clearly quite a few posters who’ve come in from Active and are new to the Feminism board...
There is currently an ideological civil war raging in the western world.
One side (Trans Rights Activists) maintains that whether you're a woman or a man has nothing whatsoever to do with biological sex and is wholly dependent on your inner “gender identity”. Thus a visibly biologically male person, intact in all respects, must be acknowledged as a woman and treated as a woman (ie referred to as if female and allowed access to all women only spaces and services) if that person claims to have the inner gender identity of a woman.
(But no one has been able to provide a coherent definition of what this woman gender identity actually is, or how to measure it or evaluate it.)
This ideology seeks to completely erase the distinction between so-called “cis women” (ie women) and “trans women” (ie biologically male people who identify as women), saying both are equally “women”: “Trans Women Are Women” is one of their slogans.
The other side, Gender Critical Feminists, says that whether you are a woman or a man is contingent purely on your biological sex.We say (I’m GC, obvs, although as others have said, it’s a broad church and we don’t all agree on everything) that the terms woman and man don’t specify or proscribe any type of personality traits or preferences: they don’t tell us who you are as a person, just which sex you are. Neutral, objective, terms rooted in observable material reality. Hence using the dictionary definition of the word woman - adult human female - as a slogan.
And we say it’s important to know this as people of the female sex are relatively vulnerable compared to people of the male sex, in that we have less physical strength of the brute force kind, we can be impregnated, and despite the recent gains of feminism in some parts of the world, women are still routinely discriminated against on the basis of their sex in many other places, and even here we are still fighting back against the huge historical disadvantage that has built up over countless generations of male dominance.
These are the two factions. TRAs have got the upper hand at the moment as they started assembling their forces on the quiet and built up a lot of support over a couple of decades - in the government, all the major political parties, the NHS, the police, the media, the CPS, schools, universities, the corporate world etc etc - long before most people had a clue what was going on.
But there is a growing resistance, led in the UK mainly by left leaning feminists, and some conservative feminists too, who see this as an attack on women’s and girls’ rights, on the safeguarding of children, on free speech, and on the fundamentals of a rational society. There are currently quite a few legal battles being fought, all crowdfunded, and what campaigning groups there are are grassroots feminist/LGB/child protection groups set up and run by volunteers.
The numerous TRA orgs OTOH are well established now and receive a fair bit of taxpayer funding, and are paid to go into schools and workplaces all over the UK to promote their ideology. It’s all rather David and Goliath.
I think of it as being like the forces of the Empire vs the Rebel Alliance in the Star Wars films. Only the TRAs say that we are the bad guys and they are the goodies. Women risk losing their jobs for speaking out against transgenderist ideology; we have been and are threatened with violence, with prosecution, with social ostracism as “hateful bigots” for our position, and have had to meet up in secret and in an atmosphere of huge fear in order to make connections and start to fight back. Women are routinely banned from Twitter and FB for saying that a biologically male person is a man; MN is one of the very few places this can even be discussed (TRAs have tried to block any debate around it: literally, with the hashtag #NoDebate), and even on here there are strict guidelines around what can and cannot be said.
Hence why it’s such a big deal to come across another woman you don’t know wearing an AHF t-shirt or carrying an AHF bag in public. It’s a sign of being on the same side, a marginalised minority that is fighting back against a really sinister and covert form of male oppression. Also an act of courage, in the current climate - you never know if you’ll come across a TRA who will actually punch you just for wearing/carrying it, as they so often threaten to do on Twitter.
This is why it’s a glorious moment of solidarity to unexpectedly come across a kindred spirit.
HTH.