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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33208 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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My understanding of the term TERF is Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Nothing about my observations of Rowling pattern matches with "Radical Feminist". She doesn't even seem like a normal feminist except when its useful for her ambitions or some other instrumental goal. On second thought maybe that is a description of a normal feminist.

"Radical feminism" is an old term, though, emerging in the 60s. It may not sound that radical to you, because it's been completely normalized in feminism. Basically any type of feminism that talks about patriarchy is radical feminism. Or, as I've heard someone say once, radical feminism means that it's the type of feminism in which they blame men for everything and/or think men are evil. I'd definitely say that from what I know about Rowling, she's frequently going on about how terrified she is of men, and how women need to be protected from men all the time. That sounds like radical feminism to me.

Radical Feminist believe that gender is a social construct, created by the patriarchy. From this article in the New Yorker, titled "What Is a Woman? The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism.":

Trans women say that they are women because they feel female—that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.”

In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman—and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position—the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement. All this enrages trans women and their allies, who point to the discrimination that trans people endure

The usage is misleading. It started as a term coined by radicals to distance themselves from other radicals and eventually became the descriptor for anything to the right of Laboria Cuboniks.

Basically nobody being called a TERF today is a radical feminist.

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