This is excellent. I’m going to post it here for anyone who can’t or doesn’t want to click through to X:
Patriarchy is a system that is held in place by what we used to call, in old feminist money, gender.
Patriarchal gender is a set of norms propping up a system that prioritises men's needs and interests, and conditions women to place men's needs and interests before their own, to comply with men's needs, to defer to them, and also, to be fearful of punishment if they do not comply.
This is one of the main senses in which we say that trans ideology is patriarchal.
Because nobody would ever have entertained the idea that it was reasonable for women to be erased in law, unless there were male people who wanted something, and said they would be very disressed and unhappy if they didn't get it.
And nobody would now think it was reasonable to focus news coverage on extreme sympathy for the group of people who tried to take women's rights away, and threaten them for not complying, rather than on the women who struggled for many years, in very hostile circumstances, to prevent their rights being removed.
The fact that many many women have also absorbed the core structure of patriarchal gender, and think that men's needs matter more than women, and that we should sympathise with men for being denied women's legal existence, because women are so mean, is not evidence that this is not patriarchal.
It is, rather, evidence of exactly how patriarchal gender works.
Because if many women were not sucessfully conditioned to put men before themselves, and didn't often have to do a fuckton of consciousness raising in order to be able to centre and assert their own needs, the entire structure would fall apart.
Overnight.
Which is why the world goes out of its way to keep actual feminism in the wings, and will pay women who propagate faux-feminism that centres men's needs over women, in cartloads of diamonds.
(edit to fix bolding/italics)