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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32403 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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What always strikes me about TERFs is that Trans people are far from the greatest targets of their ire. The 'radical feminist' part of the moniker is quite apt. It's a sect of feminism that has always at the very least been skeptical if not hostile to men as a class, where you see references to feminism as man haters this is the group that gained them that reputation. People broadly didn't and don't care that this group does pretty much all of the things they do to trans people to men in general. I understand the argument that trans people are particularly vulnerable to this kind of group's ire and men in general aren't but it's a bit of an experience to watch people that have been broadly nodding along to the kinds of thing this group has been saying for a long time, if not outright endorsing it, when it was targeted at me suddenly find the exact same rhetoric reprehensible when another group is subject to it.

For this reason I think the right aligned groups swinging behind her are finding themselves quite strange bedfellows indeed. I have a kind of admiration for TERFs in a way, in a world where I'm seeing people abandon principles like free speech the exact milisecond they become inconvenient there is something refreshing about a group that stands so rigidly by the principles, even if I oppose those principles.

For what it's worth, I have a couple of posts on my tumblr that collects nuanced social justice leftist positions making precisely the point you're making, here -- namely, that excessive hatred of men and hostility towards trans people are related, and should be rejected in tandem.

(explanations from me in square brackets)

Example #1:

I know misandry is fun and all but “men are born evil and women are pure and incapable of doing harm 😌🥰” gender essentialism still leads to transmisogyny ultimately even though you include trans men and women in it

It’s the kind of thinking that leads to the idea that afab [assigned female at birth] = safe and amab [assigned male at birth] = dangerous and one of the reasons why amab non binary people and trans women are still shunned within queer spaces because of perceived “maleness” being treated like a poison you can’t fully “cleanse” yourself of like essentialism is still bad when repackaged as inclusive of trans people and something that can be exploited to turn people who aren’t transfem against us lol

(The last time I posted this, someone thought the "I know misandry is fun and all" part was serious, so I'm just going to take a moment to point out the sarcasm for anyone not accustomed to the idiom, btw.)

Example #2:

saying this as a trans dude: I honestly think you really can’t be a good trans ally if you’re gonna treat cis dyadic men [dyadic = not intersex iirc] as inherently evil/worse than everyone else

like yes toxic masculinity and certain socialization and being unaware of privilege can lead to a higher incidence of shitty behavior, it’s not stupid to be wary of cis dyadic men, but that’s different than believing they are inherently worse than anyone else simply by the fact that they are cisgendered men

you can’t say you don’t discriminate based off of gender identity while also saying that people of a certain agab and gender identity are inherently bad full stop.

also it Will bleed over to trans people even if you don’t realize it. if you think being amab and male makes someone shitty you’re gonna apply that to amab trans people and transmascs regardless of agab [assigned gender at birth]. any amab person who doesn’t completely dissociate from masculinity and any person who embraces it is gonna be considered shittier than everyone else bc they’re closer to cis men, unless people just ignore the parts of peoples identity and presentation they don’t like which is still garbage

and also like. even if it didn’t affect trans people it’s still incredibly shitty to think that any gender identity/agab combo is inherently worse than others

They're not wrong! Nor are they unique. I can definitely recall similar arguments from other people that I can't immediately locate right now.

Do you identify as a radical feminist?

I do not, no. Nor do any of the people I'm quoting, if I were to guess.

Apologies for my delayed response, I've been grappling with where to even grab your previous post from in order to respond. The obvious angle to take it is continuing to contrast the feminist view of trans people with the feminist view of men, and I do think there is some interesting stuff there. But I find myself getting less and less value out of the term feminist at all. Except for a distant, unusually conservative, branch of my family tree I'd struggle to name a person who wouldn't self describe as feminist. And even that unusually conservative branch the difference between them and what seems to be considered modern feminism(the shocking belief that women are people, or less glibly that men and women are roughly equal to men in average talent and moral worth) is mostly word games and passionless religious incantations not reflected in the way they actually behave in the world.

So what even is a feminist perspective? It seems to me that the different branches of feminism as I sometimes hear them described are just manifestations of the how the more generic ideologies interact with women. radical/critical/marxist feminism is just marxist class analysis applied to women. Liberal feminism is just liberalism applied to women. Progressive/intersectional feminism is just madness about the place women take in the wider progressive stack of the movement.

Perhaps I'm looking it at backwards, maybe debates about feminist have been such a throughline of my internet argue dude career for so long, back to the very beginning, that I actually view much of the culture war through some warped reverse feminist lens. My views on Marxism/liberalism/progressivism are so married to their implication on the eternal gender war that the word feminism just becomes redundant, easily pulled out of the ideological parenthesis like a 4 in (4x+4).

But your quotes just seem like liberals confused by progressivism with no real relevance to the disagreement at hand. Maybe this was actually a fitting response to what I originally wrote though. I think maybe how these things fit together is that I've been worried about there other groups, including their feminist incarnations, for a while now and it seems like for the most part liberalism has turned a blind eye to them because the movement in general just assumed all feminists were on their side. If a sect of feminism was angry at the men then they were probably in the right and we shouldn't really bother to look that deeply at it. And even these quotes you bring up only seem to half care about the fact that this has been going on forever because of the implication it has on trans people. Like seriously? It took the implication that demonizing people like me would imply demonizing another group for you to think maybe it's a shitty tactic? And we're keeping toxic masculinity still huh?

And I know you, and people like you, are out there. And I appreciate you. But I'm losing hope that anyone is learning anything from things like this. I think whether ultimate the trans things turns out to be a wrong or right turn when everything settles we're still going to go right back to pathologize masculine excellence and demonize masculine weaknesses. Because as much as we, in at least some spaces, acknowledge the existence of the women are wonderful effect and the real differences between girls and boys we are still going to blame male patriarchy in all the areas men excel and pathologize all the areas men fail at and end up trying to fit boy shaped pegs into girl shaped holes the kind of roles that women find most comfortable for them to be in. I've given up hope that there really is some force of truth that is going to shock us out of this comfortable groove.

In the tumblr context, I read these people as closer to "intersectional feminist" than anything else. Specifically, I read them as "intersectional" because they are not just narrowly interested in male/female as the single axis of oppression. They're trying to take other complications into account. As such, this critique of yours is honestly pretty fair:

And even these quotes you bring up only seem to half care about the fact that this has been going on forever because of the implication it has on trans people. Like seriously? It took the implication that demonizing people like me would imply demonizing another group for you to think maybe it's a shitty tactic?

There's a whole category of semi-nuanced intersectional thinking that falls into this category. Intersectionality forces people to see that societal oppression is complicated and takes place across multiple axes that interfere with each other in weird and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Follow that thought sincerely enough and open-mindedly enough for long enough and you'll eventually see places where the thing you're critiquing is a side effect of a central unjustified criticism of a group that you didn't think was oppressed at all. Which is better than not seeing those things, but is still going to come across as half-baked at best to someone who was worried about the central unjustified criticism to begin with, yeah.

I think the support for TERFs from the right is mostly an own the libs thing. Rowling is perfect for this because as OP states Harry Potter is the closest thing to a Bible progressive white women have. The fact that the writer isn’t 100% down with the progressive agenda is great snark for the right.

The great irony of JK Rowling is that a decade ago she was seen as being laughably, annoyingly left-wing on most issues. She's literally in alignment with woke thought on everything but the Trans issue, and her insistence on being vocal about her thoughts (Which was generally met with applause and cheering till she commented on Trans individuals) is what's led to this situation.

Most equivalent pop culture figures just don't vocalize their opinions.

I think the right aligned groups swinging behind her are finding themselves quite strange bedfellows indeed

In isolation, rolling coal is an act of lunacy. But knowing that it makes the libs seethe makes it a past time for certain people on the right.

Rowling is not on the right at all. But she seriously triggers some progressives, so some rightoids like her now.

The right swinging behind TERFs is because they largely understand TERFs to be an unpopular fargroup that will have no choice but to accept whatever hand they're dealt in a hypothetical rightwinger/TERF coalition. And sure, there's an element of wishful thinking, but it's true and correct that TERFs are an unpopular group that's too unlikable to expect to be the dominant partner in some sort of broad coalition.

Yes, and also the right has a history of aligning with radical feminists on some issues, such as on pornography.

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