Congratulations wonderful women, I wish I had been strong enough to be there!
Like fucking everything, the baseline of all of this is bullshit patriarchal hatred of women. Being angry at lesbians and calling them anti-trans does nothing but reinforce the societal headline that women are bad, men are good. If a woman says something, its wrong, but if a man says something, its right. Look at them, those BAD women. Not good, like those GOOD women. Transwomen are REAL WOMEN. Lesbians are BAD WOMEN. They don't want GOOD women to be WOMEN. THEY'RE the ones hurting women, by not being GOOD. By acting like they can change the world. By pretending that they're not second class citizens. That the law applies to them.
So much of this thread is the same old thing: You've just MISUNDERSTOOD transwomen! Give them the benefit of the doubt, they're not TRYING to hurt people! Why do you HATE men? (Which transwomen AREN'T, by the way, but you still HATE them because you're too STUPID to see that they're more women than YOU, you gross dykes). Why are you listening to what people have SAID? Surely you know that in their HEARTS they are women. No one would ever lie about that sort of thing, because being a woman is bad! Why would someone CHOOSE to be a woman if they could be a man?
ARGH. Is it time for a breakfast wine?
Sex is a fact, but factual labels should have no value judgement put on them. It's not bad to be a woman. It's not bad to be a man. I swear we got so close to actually maybe getting this across in society when I was growing up. People were starting to get the message that saying "girls can't do x" was bad! Girls could do ANYTHING! Boys could do ANYTHING! Sure, boys were significantly better at succeeding at doing anything, succeeding in traditionally female spaces, but surely the girls were going to be tech CEOs, formula 1 drivers, jockeys, leader of the labour party, eventually. All of this progress is good progress!
But now its 2018 and I saw headlines that a woman has become head of a 100 year old fashion house for the first time, there's another female prime minister, but she's a Tory and believes that men are like THIS and women are like THIS, the implication being that she can lead her country but not her household, lesbians are the bad guys and hold immense power somehow while also being fat ugly losers no one wants to fuck, ew. Penises can be female and everyone cares about how people refer to them when they're not around? Women are getting beaten in the street around the world, murdered by their partners, raped every single minute of every day, there are public figures defending cultural misogyny that ends in women's deaths and mutilation and I'm like...what the fuck happened??
Radical feminists and the trans movement should be allies, if things were logical. Our common enemy is the patriarchy that tells us that what we like and how we act are wrong, by some nebulous rule they made up, that punishes us for not playing by what those rules say. Be a macho man. Be a submissive handmaiden. Do what we say and excuse what we do. You exist at our whim, we can destroy you when we want and then claim you made us do it.
Both sides believe that our sex doesn't and shouldn't define who we are as people.
The difference is fundamental though: Radical feminists believe that personality is independent of sex - but we know sex still is there. we know from experience that you can't opt out of persecution based on your sex. You can't deny what biology manifested in you as you developed - if you've got female primary and secondary sexual characteristics, you'll be treated differently by society than someone with male ones. The deck is stacked against you in a society that fetishises vulnerability and puts maleness and its strengths on top, and femaleness and its strengths on the bottom.
The radical feminist solution is to change society to stop thinking women are lesser, inferior, bad. To liberate women from the patriarchy. This will also have the side effect of liberating men from the patriarchy, but it's not the goal. The goal is to save women from being underestimated, undermined, murdered, raped, gaslit, abused, underpaid, exploited - because they are women. That your sex should be inconsequential. It's not biological essentialism, it's biological realism. It's not saying 'you have a penis, therefore you should be like this, I have a vagina, therefore I should be like this'. It's saying 'you have a penis, I have a vagina. If we have sex we might make a baby. But everything else is optional.'
The trans line is that society isn't wrong and even if it is, you can't change society, you can only change what you have individual power over. Yourself. Your immediate surroundings. Change yourself, play the game, and society will do the rest. It'll reward you, by telling you you made the right choice. That it was right, you were never a man. You were never really a woman. You were broken, but you're fixed now. You can be a martyr for the cause.
One side wants to bring the system down. The other wants the system to give them what it promised.
(definitely time for breakfast wine)