I meant normal as in, ordinary feminists who don't do as much posting/activism as some on this board but are potentially interested in doing so, as opposed to FWR regulars.
I`m pretty new to the FWR board, and I definitely want to read what is going on and what pressing issues other feminists are raising. Things have a way of sidling up to you sideways otherwise, the more sunlight the better.
As others have said, at the moment gender identify/sex is frequently discussed, but I cannot see how there could be a more important issue for feminists to discuss right now. This underpins the absolute core of womens` rights, without having that firm ground underfoot there can be no progress on any other issues. It is infuriating that it has effectively paused other efforts, but its something we must sort first.
I`m a surgeon, my speciality is repairing damage from sexual violence inflicted on women and girls by men, all of our specialist team are female as it would cause undue distress to our already severely traumatised patients if we were not.
About half of our patients are prostitutes (or rough sex/BDSM gone horribly wrong - seeing more and more of that) and the other half are rape/sexual assault victims. Usually the patients in the first category also fall into the second.
I would dearly love to be tackling the normalisation of rough sex, choking women, bdsm and many other "kinks" which are thinly veiled, (or blatant) abuse but we cannot do that until we can guarantee that we can provide a safe space to help the victims in, and we cannot do that while the gender identity et al issues are ongoing.
We need to be able to ensure that women have access to womens` services and spaces (and sports) first and foremost, and to do that we need to be able to be clear on what a woman is. Everything else is immaterial in comparison.