Finn Mackay in Guardian today

Funny how they're all progressive until they're asked to confront their unexamined mother-issues and to treat older women as individuals, and not as a giant cardiganed monolith.

I second the recommendation of bell hooks feminist theory: from margin to center.

Regarding the actual topic of the OP, I am bored of the valorising of the yoof, in sentences like [y]ounger people today are much more fluent in their understandings of sex, gender and sexuality and I get to say that, being a decade younger than Dr Mackay.

My feminist praxis has benefited hugely from joining mumsnet at 21, and listening to older women who had been there, done that. I didn't know it all at 21, I just thought I did, and the same goes for today's current crop of earnest 21 year olds.

Maybe we'd be achieving more if all the time and energy wasn't sapped by people playing silly buggers with 'identities'.

You are joking, right? You missed the Holbeck red light district protests? Getting coercive control added to the DV bill? Getting strangulation made a specific offence?

I think she's great. She's got a point about the creativity and action of 70s radfems, today it's just sniping on the internet for the most part, like this thread!

Oh dear. I just went to this person's twitter feed. It's worse than I thought. I can't take this crap.

What the fuck is a queermale? And why would I take lessons in feminism from someone who hates being female?

''They were among the first to study why masculinity is defined through violence, and how it might be changed. Far from promoting a war of the sexes, radical feminists had an even more radical message: women and men, all of us, however we define, are all human beings, and together are capable of growth and humanity.''

My understanding of radical feminism is that it's non violent, and Finns statement about multiple sex shops being burned down doesn't square with anything I've heard, or Finns previous statement (in bold), or feminist involvement at Greenham and other peace camps.
That claim makes it sound like a hit piece to me.

www.amazon.co.uk/Masters-Tools-Dismantle-Penguin-Modern/dp/0241339723?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

Yawn. Lots of words in order to say absolutely nothing. And when did being white become a bad thing? I must have missed that memo.

Every time I read her I keep hearing Germaine Greer's words: 'Women fail to understand how much men hate them.'

This whole gender ideology movement has come as a massive reminder of that. Finn doesn't see it at all.

I’d also suggest some of the classics like Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch; and Adrienne Rich’s essays.

A good place to start - and she’s extremely readable - is bell hooks, feminist theory from margin to center (1984). There’s an online full text at:

funceji.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/bell_hooks_feminist_theory_from_margin_to_centebookzz-org_.pdf

hooks was writing within second wave/radical feminism and engaging with other radical feminists in this text, but also providing a much needed perspective on how black American feminists could add to and change the movement. So she herself is a radical feminist but is also critiquing radical feminism. It’s very readable and passionate - it’s not “theoretical” or jargony at all, but very down to earth - and also shows you just how wrong it is for current “intersectional” feminists to suggest that radical feminism was primarily white - it wasn’t at all (women like hooks and Angela Davis were hugely influential in the movement). Second wave radical feminism was heterogenous and diverse and genuinely engaged with real women’s lives. I really recommend reading a few chapters of the hooks as a good way in!

Exactly @CharlieParley - radical feminism (which was strongly materialist and Marxist), is not about “identity” at all - in fact undermines the whole idea of “identity”. It’s highly disingenuous to pretend that it is or that it can somehow be folded back in to an identity politics that it rightly critiques.

feminism, a movement led by the experiences of one identity

I'm struggling to view anyone who sees the female sex as an identity as a positive voice for women. Especially in an article that tries to obfuscate what radical feminism is about - the liberation of female people from the patriarchy - by listing some of its more extreme positions as if they were mainstream ones back then.

The entire first paragraph gives us a framing of feminism that betrays FM's allegiance to the doctrine of gender identity as paramount:

Feminism is often portrayed as a dinosaur rudely dying right in the way of progressive change. Younger people today are much more fluent in their understandings of sex, gender and sexuality. There are more terms available than ever before to describe identity categories (Facebook has more than 50 different choices for gender alone). Indeed, research has found pupils in UK secondary schools using more than 23 different labels for gender identity. In this climate, feminism, a movement led by the experiences of one identity, has become seen as backward, trapped in the past. Added to this are misconceptions that radical feminism in particular is uniquely transphobic, with the label of “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, applied to anyone expressing trans exclusionary views, regardless of their politics or whether they are even a feminist at all.

It starts with a non sequitur, and then posits feminism as being about gender identity (which presupposes that a) gender identity exists as a universal human trait, something hotly contested among feminists and others, b) that feminism is a movement centred not on fighting for one sex but something else, here identity, it c) does all of that firmly from the point of view of trans rights activists campaigning for self-id (feminism has many critics, but few describe it as a dinosaur standing in the way of progress - that is a uniquely pro-self-id take) and d) presents uncritically the idea that we express trans-exclusionary ideas when we oppose self-id when in actual fact we oppose it because we seek to exclude males regardless of whether they identify as trans or not.

And that sets the stage for this article. What follows after that first paragraph are merely arguments employed to support these premises in my view. Steeped in queer and critical theories, with the now customary (if oblique) nod towards the struggle sessions so beloved by its proponents - we must attack our own movements, analyse our privilege and create what? A place where we all think the same?

Just as activists look outwards towards fighting inequality and oppression in society, they also need to look inwards at the forms of oppression within their own movements.

Oppression has a distinct meaning that simply does not apply here. But of course if you subscribe to an ideology that sees women as oppressors of men claiming womanhood, that makes perfect sense.

And how anyone can do justice to radical feminism without mentioning the patriarchy or patriarchal systems even once is beyond me.

It completely misses the point that being gender critical is not the same, and has never been radical feminism.

Bits felt rather like forced teaming to me.

The radical feminists of the 1970s were some of the first to take seriously the gender and sexuality debates currently raging through our society. Many of them looked forward to a gender-fluid world of polyamorous and pansexual relationships, where social roles were no longer defined by people’s sexed characteristics at birth. Their work helped to secure structural equality for women, more expansive definitions of the family and greater freedom of expression for gender and sexual identities that cut against the grain of heterosexuality.

The whole article seems to be twisting things and looking back on history with a modern gender ideology eye. The paragraph I have quoted is a clever mix of truth and half-truth and ignoring the way gender is seen by gender ideology people as opposed to radfems.

It seems rather like it is trying to gaslight feminists into "radical feminism in the 70s is what TRAs believe now" when the two things are very different despite have common words (but not common meaning).

Radical feminism is a revolutionary social justice movement, working for the world as it could be, and for the liberation of women and society

It all sounds terribly well written and reasonable and authoritative, when actually to my eyes it is twisting things hugely.

MacKay can sit on the fence getting splinters for as long as she likes but she's certainly not going to "help end the gender wars".

It's rarely:

Dear men,

Please stop rape and violence towards others in daily life. As part of this, you can share spaces like public lavatories with your fellow men, no matter how they dress or present. Let loos be loos and just a space for necessary functions and not the putative thunderdome that they seem to be from all the demands that women's facilities should be used as a universal safe haven.

Yours - women

MacKay believes that women should compromise and that they should allow men to use women's lavatories but not "therapeutic spaces" but then MacKay contradicts herself by saying "I think there should be choice for somebody fleeing – they should be able to go somewhere they feel comfortable.”

MacKay dances around the question of whether or not a human can change sex, too.

So it's a "no" from me. MacKay can sit on the fence getting splinters for as long as she likes but she's certainly not going to "help end the gender wars".

(Wish I'd done 1984 now, though didn't get the choice. And Animal Farm is at least half the number of pages so probably was a good thing I got that option at the time!)

I think the history and critique of 'butch' as a concept is fairly specific to lesbians, and the overlap with trans is very much the end of it that is internalized homophobia and internalized misogyny. As a butch woman myself, I won't shy away from confronting those aspects because, I think they're important issues to grapple with.
But I should think most women who choose to present as I do have had the question 'Do you want to be/think you're a man?' and it's only now that Trans is a thing with considerable power that this question isn't acknowledged as rude and sexist/homophobic, and is actually encouraged in the form of 'what are your pronouns?'.

I'm still a little 'huh?' about the article, though. If it had been written in the DM or the Mirror, I'd understand the framing of 'I know you think feminists are just nasty women who want to hold everyone back from fun, but let me say why some of their ideas are good'.

But this is The Guardian. An article like this looks like an acknowledgement that this paper hasn't been pro-women's rights for quite some time, and the readership needs the introduction to feminism as an idea.

I mean, I don't disagree, but, wow.

How can she understand biology if she is referring to herself as a queermale?!

I'll let George Orwell answer:

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it....that was the ultimate subtlety"