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To be clear, my statement regarding the fact that you are naive or insincere concerned specifically your claim that "feminism is feminism" and that you don't consider there to be divisions or different schools of thought within them. You may genuinely believe that, but it's so obvious that these divisions do exist (and that other feminists are very aware of them) that it just seems kind of silly to claim you are following the One True Feminism and everyone else is either also on the same team as youor they've got it wrong.
... Have you ever actually talked to a TERF?
They very much do believe that gender roles are social constructs. That is their primary objection to men claiming to be women! They consider sex to be a biological reality, and gender roles to be social constructs, and from their point of view, trans women willingly adopt, play act and reify gender roles while claiming that they are based on some innate property. It's trans women who claim that wearing a skirt makes you a woman, and being a woman makes you want to wear a skirt.
Even if this is true, while I'm perfectly willing to have the Rowling debate again, it's irrelevant to whether or not she's a feminist, unless you think being a bad person (according to your ethics) means someone can't be a feminist.
I just feel like if I said something along the lines of “I think you’re being obtuse/pedantic/ignorant/childish/naive about this topic” to someone on here I’d be justifiably moderated, so it’s tough to feel like I’m getting dealt a lot of “you’re a troll, you don’t really believe these things”. But, as I said, the moderation on this site is not for me. I don’t want to bring it up a lot.
I’d retort to Mr. TERF that if gender roles are social construct as we agree they are, then there’s nothing wrong with a Western socially-construct man decided he wants to be a Western socially-constructed woman, because it’s all arbitrary in the end. A trans woman wants to identify with the Western social constructs that define a woman, how is that different from a Hindu deciding to be a Muslim? I technically consider myself to be non-binary because I don’t believe in gender. But, I’m also very comfortable with the aspects that make me a Western socially-constructed woman so much that I’m okay calling myself one despite not really believing in it. I admit I might be sounding a little confusing. I struggle sometimes to find an appropriate way to explain my opinion on gender since I consider the whole thing arbitrary and think everyone is actually a non-binary meat computer with either titties or balls.
There's a difference between "I think you're being naive" (there are a lot of ways to say "You're wrong" and most of them are allowable) and "You're a troll" (which I just modded someone for saying!).
As @FCfromSSC said, framing is very important here. If you are upset at being called naive, well, noted, but no, I would not normally mod someone for calling another poster naive. To me, that does not register as an insult like "stupid" or "liar" or "troll."
Okay, are we having the trans debate again? What if Mr. TERF says gender roles are socially constructed, but penises, vaginas, upper body strength and size are not? And therefore people with penises should not compete against people with vaginas in competitive sports, or be housed with them in prison, and sex crimes committed by people with penises should not be statistically grouped with sex crimes committed by people with vaginas such that we see headlines like "Woman convicted of raping toddler" when the "woman" in question is a person with a penis? Because that is the TERF argument in a nutshell. Not "Men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses and call themselves she/her."
I'd agree with Mr. Terf that gender roles are socially constructed but the physical body is not. However, I don't think a person having a penis or vagina is a valid reason to stop them from competing against someone with a penis or vagina in competitive sports. I think what should stop them is weight classes, a principle I understand to already be understood in wrestling, and that has nothing to do with being a woman or man. I have met men the same weight class as myself or lower, and I have met woman with a weight class far above mine. I wouldn't want to compete with a clearly scrawny person or a clearly buff-as-all-hell person since the gap is so big the comparison in competition doesn't hold. And I don't think there's a problem housing them together for the same reason. Women beat the shit out of eachother in prison just as much as men do; house a buff woman with a scrawny man together and I'd see the same result if you reversed the weight class. If a prison houses two people who are clearly unequally matched in strength they're doing a pretty bad job with security and basic common sense.
I dunno, I see a whole lot more of "trans women are freaks in the head for being trans, trans women are clearly much uglier being trans and therefore must hate themselves, trans women are just horny men who want to peep at women pissing in the bathroom, trans women want to convince your kid they're trans to mutilate themselves because deep down they're insecure, xyz" than "trans women are unfairly advantaged in sports and trans women pose a safety threat to their fellow inmates".
Untrue. One data point: in the period 2001-18, 1,251 male prisoners were murdered in US prisons, while the equivalent figure for female prisoners was 7. Based on the size of the US prison population in 2022, that works out at 104.29 murders/100k population among male prisoners, 7.59 murders/100k population among female prisoners. A male American inmate is nearly 14 times more likely to be murdered in prison than a female inmate. This shouldn't come as a surprise given what proportion of the male prison population is serving time for violent offenses vs. what proportion of the female, or the obvious differences in aggression and propensity to violence between the sexes, or the obvious differences in physical strength between the sexes (which are only minimally explicable by differences in body mass).
Even if it was true, there's the obvious fact that female people cannot forcibly penetrate other female people, impregnate them and/or infect them with STDs: only male people (regardless of how they "identify") can do that. I would have thought this would have been an obvious point of concern for a self-identified feminist but apparently not.
Two thirds of your "obvious fact" is completely false. Female people may not be able to forcibly penetrate other female people with a penis, but can easily do so with other things--even restricting yourself to body parts their fingers, fists, feet, etc work just as well. Likewise a penis is not required to transmit STDs since oral transmission is a common infection vector.
The "with a penis" was implied.
Show me the relative rates of STD transmission by penetrative rape vs. other routes of transmission.
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Sorry, that's a non-starter. For example, look at this website. When I filter to look at only male people, the top of the list is John Haack, who weighs 192 lb and whose combined lift is 2,232 lb. When I filter to show only female people, the first person of approximately Haack's weight is Crystal Tate at 196 lb, and whose combined lift is 1,540 lb. There are no female people on this list who have lifted more than 2,000 lb, or indeed more than 1,800 lb.
If you think the differences in male and female strength, speed and stamina are entirely explicable by reference to weight class, I just... I'm sorry. You're wrong. I sincerely think I would have better luck arguing with a flat Earther than someone who seriously thinks that male and female people are just as strong and fast as each other. Maybe I could understand how you arrived at that erroneous conclusion if you were literally blind.
If we sorted athletes by weight class and ignored sex entirely, no female athlete would win a gold medal in the Olympics ever again, except maybe in gymnastics. Probably no female athletes would even qualify for the Olympics outside of gymnastic events either.
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https://boysvswomen.com/
Like, I'm sorry, if you want to insist men and women are exactly the same except for plumbing, I probably can't convince you otherwise, but the evidence is overwhelming that this is not the case. A man will almost always absolutely dominate a woman in the same weight class in every sport, if they have even remotely comparable levels of training.
For this I don't have a quick link to dispute the assertion, but I am extremely doubtful of this and wonder if you have any evidence besides that one episode of Orange is the New Black? I have read enough stories recently of convicted male sex offenders who conveniently announced their new gender identity and desire to be housed in a women's facility (frequently taking absolutely no steps to "transition" beyond maybe wearing a wig), as well as trans women who have assaulted female inmates in prison, that I think there are pretty good reasons not to incarcerate penis-havers with women, even if some of them might be sincere about their gender identification. I hate to use that word again, but you seem shockingly naive to just take at face value a convicted rapist's assertion that he's now a woman house him with women please?
You might be surprised just how much you'd have to skew that scenario to give the woman even odds. Like, yes, if he's a sickly 98-pound weakling who's never thrown a punch in his life up against 200-pound Berthilda the Gang-Banger, sure, she might be able to whup him. But otherwise? Not likely.
This is probably true, but the fact that many people are motivated primarily by disgust or moral condemnation does not make the very real physical concerns invalid.
I've never seen Orange is The New Black actually. I think it's unacceptable to house sexual convicts with non-sexual convicts regardless of gender. If a convicted rapist asserts that he's now a woman, then he's a woman. She still shouldn't be housed with anyone due to the nature of her crime, but if she's going to be, she's especially not going to be house with someone who is clearly physically unable to fight back against her.
Okay, but given the limited resources available to the prison service, in which it isn't practical to sequester all criminals convicted of sexual offenses away from the general population, where should a convicted rapist with an intact penis who claims to identify as a woman be housed? In the male prison, or the female prison?
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Well, I can't agree with any of this, but I believe you believe it.
Getting back to the original topic, do I understand you correctly that you consider anyone who does not believe this to be definitionally not a feminist?
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One of the ways I've survived so long here is to learn to frame statements like this as explicitly subjective.
Compare: "No one could possibly believe something as stupid as [X]"
"I don't understand how someone could possibly believe this. What's the chain of logic?"
Boiled down, these statements have roughly equivalent semantic content, but the connotation is entirely different, and the likely range of responses is very different. I'm not close to perfect, but I try not to depart from this model unless I'm fully prepared to bury my opposite in citations.
There is a way of writing that encourages real conversation, and there is a way of writing that discourages it. We are trying, very imperfectly, to encourage the former and discourage the latter.
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