Love this thread. So good to see so many women thinking along the same/similar lines as me in a world that otherwise seems to have gone completely batshit.
I’ve always identified as a feminist but after being quite active in my younger days kind of stepped back from it all, and had no idea this schism was developing. I don’t think I ever rightly understood what radfem meant, probably made the same false assumption as many others that “radical” meant extreme rather than from the root.
Found MN as a very late in life mother, and one day about two or three years ago came across a trans thread in AIBU. Literally couldn’t believe what I was reading; went off and googled everything and found out it was all true. There is indeed a law that allows people to be issued with a new birth certificate with a big fat lie on it. The cotton ceiling. Transing of kids. The fact that most TIMs don’t have “bottom surgery” and the concept of the “female penis”; the erosion of sex segregated spaces (including Kimberly Nixon’s war of attrition against Vancouver Rape Relief).
And eventually I realised the word “woman” has been hijacked to mean... absolutely nothing at all, any more; and there is no longer a single, unifying word that denotes all those born female, and only those. And it was like the world I thought I knew disappeared overnight and I really didn’t like the new one I was confronted with.
It was just a gigantic multiple peak trans all at once. I never bought into any of it at all, although I have seriously reflected on the issues raised and tried to see if I can find anything that rings true in TRA ideology, just in the interests of not being closed minded. (Answer: no)
I was definitely gender critical from then on but I wasn’t sure if I identified as radfem exactly. Then one day recently I was thinking about how whatever women do to stand up for our rights, men/men under patriarchy find a new way to beat us back down, and of course transactivism is just the latest instalment in a very long history of that. It really became obvious that the problem is a fundamental view of women as other/lesser that is SO ingrained and part of our collective unconscious that most people don’t even realise it’s there, most of the time. And that unless that is addressed, patriarchy is just going to find new ways to oppress women, and we’re still going to be in the shit however many years hence.
So I realised that I must be a radfem after all.
Wrt to how we actually implement this change/tackle misogyny at its root, I think we have to address the unconscious aspect of it as that’s where so much of the problem is. All these brocialists, they honestly don’t realise that they see women as lesser, or by how much, I don’t think. And the catch 22 is that their unconscious miosgyny prevents them from hearing from us that they are part of the problem as of course we don’t merit listening to. But it needs to start with us, with a return to consciousness raising, for us, and with the way we raise the next generation, the awareness we give them, girls and boys.
Women getting together and talking, sharing experiences, learning from each other. Like we do on here; and in RL. Women writing, using all available spaces and outlets to spread our ideas around. That’s the first step. And in that respect I agree with others that transactivism actually has the potential to rejuvenate feminism, in the way it’s made so many of us see so clearly just HOW misogynist the world still is, and made us so determined to fight that.