My daughter just told me I am a bad feminist.

[Duffmcstockings]

I am not intersectional enough.

I think this comes down to maths. A fundamental mis-understanding of the word 'intersection' by lots of people.

Intersection doesn't mean where two things meet. It means where two things overlap.

The intersection of the words 'BLUE' and 'RED' isn't 'BLUERED', it's 'E'

When so many people say 'intersectional feminism' what they then go onto describe is actually unional (??!?) feminism - penis OR female.

Intersection is AND - black AND female. They've got it completely wrong.

OP - so presumably your daughter would consider Germaine Greer to be a "bad feminist"?

She should write to Greer and tell her exactly where she is going wrong.

Ahhh I wish I was as clever as I was when I was a teenager! I knew everything then.

Priceless! I love Dick.

(You know what I mean..)

As already stated, any feminism that centres around the needs of - in the main - white heterosexual males - the least oppressed group in society - is not feminism.

Agreed - intersectionality includes the specific needs and oppression experienced by black women, Muslim women, women illiterate women, abused women etc. NOT men.

What other group other than women is predicated to campaign for the needs of people OUTSIDE the group.

Apparently Kimberlé Crenshaw views intersectionality as applying to trans people:

books.google.co.uk/books?id=CLlaDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA58&dq=%22intersectionality+is+an+analytic+sensibility%22+%22trans+women+within+feminist+movements%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwikpZaV9pnqAhUBShUIHd5sAmMQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=%22intersectionality%20is%20an%20analytic%20sensibility%22%20%22trans%20women%20within%20feminist%20movements%22&f=false

Never assume that someone who makes a living, even partially, off identity politics won't drink the Kool-Aid.

My DS15 is gay and gets teary about me saying anything supportive of JKR and that I hate transgender people. I challenged him to tell me exactly what she had said and he didn’t even know! I reassured him I don’t hate anyone as a group but am protective over women having a safe space. I said how I don’t want toilets gender neutral because I don’t want to share them with men men. He said ciswomen at one point and I said I identify as a woman my noun is woman. He quickly said I mean cis to distinguish between tw and w. I told him how much JKR had been abused and harassed and he was upset by that too. I said the majority of women had been molested and oppressed by the fact they are female at some point and he said tw might have and I said yes and males too and they all have their own experiences from different perspectives growing up in different bodies. I only bite back if he starts. He definitely comes from a place where everyone can be free to be who they want and it’s all fluffy and lovely. While he knows there are predators and he looks up to women who speak out about me too etc (celebrities mainly) he doesn’t really know/feel how many women feel about the threat of violence from men.

That's disappointing, Nauticant, but at least Crenshaw herself provides an articulate statement of her position (even if it starts from the faulty premise that transwomen actually are women) rather than the "oppression top trumps" so many people seem to misinterpret her position as.

I was thinking we could construct an analogy to her original case study - a firm which says "of course we support people who need maternity rights [the lowest paid workers in their organisation who don't cut into the bottom line much] and women's career development [points at board made up of 3 men, a transwoman and a Pips Bunce style part-timer on the "woman" front]."

@BaronessBrighterThanYou

Ahhh I wish I was as clever as I was when I was a teenager! I knew everything then.

Priceless! I love Dick.

(You know what I mean..)

So many excellent points on this thread
It will all come out in the wash OP.

Gaw, there's nothing worse than a woke young person who has no idea how rough it is other there for women and how unequal and unfairly society treats women.

Part of me thinks let your DD enjoy her rose-tinted view of the world while she can....part of me is seriously annoyed she is so condescending and should be put in her place....(but I am a known ranter)

If it helps, OP, my sister is a lot younger than me and has just graduated from a Very Woke University. Two years ago she was on the verge of never talking to me again over my "transphobic" views (I expressed concern at the possibility of teenaged male bodied people self identifying their way into my daughters hypothetical room in youth hostels when she is older.)

She has now graduated and suddenly seems to be well on her way to peaking. We had a chat about JK Rowling and she said she realises my concerns are not transphobic but are born out of genuine concern.

I think all teenagers go through a very "Woke" period (excuse the pun) - I remember being very for saving the animals.

Isn’t the woke feminist, intersectional perspective the equivalent of “All Lives Matter”?

Karwomannghia

I love your name! One of my mates had a battered old karmann ghia when we were teenagers in the 90s. We thought we knew it all and were as cool as fuck (making this comment tangentially relevant to this thread 😂)

I like that name too (now that you've explained it to slow me).

My DH only tried TWAW with me once until I snapped back ‘so you’d have sex with one, would you?’ when he suddenly decided perhaps they weren’t women after all.

Ask your DD if she would sleep with a trans man, does she think her heterosexual male friends would be happy to sleep with a transwoman?

Ask her to spend some time working with vulnerable people, perhaps volunteering with a charity, and see if she still thinks the most vulnerable women and children should be asked to share changing and sleeping areas with any man who feels like a woman?

Isn’t the woke feminist, intersectional perspective the equivalent of “All Lives Matter”?
I hadn't thought about that, but I think you have a point!

I have hope that although very few of them will come out and say it public yet, for fear of upsetting their friends or getting piled on, more young people are seeing through the trans ideology.

DD (17) is bi, hangs out with an arty, social-justice-focused crowd with multi-coloured hair and interesting piercings, and a large proportion of her friends are somewhere on the LGBTQ+ whatever spectrum, including several who identify as trans/non-binary. You would expect her to be totally "TWAW, mum is a terf", right?

But she read the JKR piece and agreed with her, and has been having undercover chats with several of her gay/trans friends over the past few months, who also broadly agree that sex is a real thing and a lot of people currently identifying as trans/non-binary are caught up in a fashion. Her gay friends don't dare say it in front of their trans friends, for example, but even teenage gay guys are absolutely not interested in trans men. A gay friend of hers said this week how glad he was that his parents did not hear about 'trans kids' when he was little, and was starting to show his interest in 'feminine' things. He is very happy being a gay man with a fully functioning penis, rather than spending years on puberty blockers.

Within the last few weeks at least two girls she knows who have identified as boys for two or three years have decided they are actually girls after all (another friend was only trans for about a year, aged 14).

And DD can clearly see how Tumblr and youtube have worked to convince girls who don't fit in with female stereotypes that they are actually boys.

I would take it as a compliment to be honest. A 'good feminist' appears to be one who centres the needs and wants of male people. The only way to be a 'real' feminist these days, is to make sure wmen are bottom of the pile, sort out everyone elses issues first before getting to women. Afterall 'feminism is about eqauality so why shouldn't feminists advocate for mens rights too'?

I have a few lovely friends who are a good few years younger than me. One said something a while ago about how feminism is all about equality and looked really surprised when I said, no it's not. It's about female emancipation from patriarchal structures. Equality or equity or opportunity is a fine aspiration, but it's not the same thing.
Many young people I think, regard it as a simple tweak to a few rules and bam, you have equality and have not yet got to the bit about structural inequality. I think the current interest in BLM is an excellent opportunity to see that in action.

My step daughter has stopped speaking to me and flounced off when I defended JK Rowling. She's swallowed the TWAW and denounces anyone that disagrees as a bigot. It's very tiresome. She's 20.

DD, 19, on the other hand, is absolutely gender critical. She's come to feminist events with me and is aghast at the TRAs.

I'm following this with great hope as my very woke DD2(16) and I simply cannot discuss this calmly. I'm hoping she grows out of it, there's a lot of flouncing here too.

They are still in the ‘be kind’ mode which in my opinion is very naive and shows a degree of manipulation.

Stuff that - they will find themselves on the wrong end of this nonsense and grow up eventually. But then there are some people who are just hell bent if following any ideology to the bitter end (the woman that springs to mind is the one who ended up in Syria with her child as a terrorist and ended up being killed - and her child).

She seemed to have a string of causes and extreme behavioural in her past that led her to Syria.

My DdS are 30 and 16and still very much ‘twaW. My Ds is 25 and the same. I have to hide to look at Mumsnet when they are about. The trouble is that I now feel so strongly about the issue that I get overly Emotional and choke. Better to say nothing. I think they find my refusal to engage very frustrating. I am seriously scared that I would become estranged from them rather than concede, so I don’t go there.

I think that for many young women, a state of denial is easier.

Feminism is a fight that will never end, because sex has unavoidable consequences, women will always need different rights and services, and it will always be difficult and awkward to fight for them.