#I'm serious. Why do so many 'feminists' hate lesbians? Because one lesbian hurt their feelings at some point and they never got over it

[2024skin]

this is exactly why I'm supposed to be on tumblr sabbatical because half the women on here are normal intelligent people who dont post that much about feminism and the other half of women are raging misogynists who hate men but not as much as they hate that one woman in their life who they think causes all their problems. And then they project that anger towards one specific woman onto all other women

[a-room-of-my-own]

Have you read "An Apology to JK Rowling" by Petra Bueskens on Areo? I'm pathetically grateful to read something so clever and well articulated on the subject after the amount of abuse JK has been subjected to

It's a great piece so here it is, thank you anon!

 Rowling recently published an eminently reasonable, heartfelt treatise, outlining why it is important to preserve the category of woman. There’s only one thing wrong with it: it assumes a rational interlocutor. Rowling outlines why the biological and legal category of sex is important: in sports, in rape crisis shelters, in prisons, in toilets and changing rooms, for lesbians who want to sleep with natal women only and at the level of reality in general. Rowling marshals her experiences as an androgynous girl, as a domestic violence and sexual assault survivor and as someone familiar with the emotional perils of social media, in ways that have resonated with many women (and men). Her writing is clear, unpretentious, thoughtful, moving, vulnerable and honest. At no point does she use exclusionary or hostile language or say that trans women do not exist, have no right to exist or that she wants to rob them of their rights. Her position is that natal women exist and have a right to limit access to their political and personal spaces. Period.

Of course, to assume that her missive would be engaged with in the spirit in which it was intended, is to make the mistake of imagining that the identitarian left is broadly committed to secular, rational discourse. It is not. Its activist component has transmogrified into a religious movement, which brooks no opposition and no discussion. You must agree with every tenet or else you’re a racist, sexist, transphobic bigot, etc. Because its followers are fanatics, Rowling is being subjected to an extraordinary level of abuse. There seems to be no cognitive dissonance among those who accuse her of insensitivity and then proceed to call her a cunt, bitch or hag and insist that they want to assault and even kill her (see this compilation of tweets on Medium). She has been accused of ruining childhoods. Some even claim that the actor Daniel Radcliffe wrote the Harry Potter books—reality has become optional for some of these identitarians. Rowling’s age, menstrual status and vagina come in for particularly nasty attention and many trans women (or those masquerading as such) write of wanting to sexually assault her with lady cock, as a punishment for speaking out. I haven’t seen misogyny like this since Julia Gillard became our prime minister.

The Balkanisation of culture into silos of unreason means that the responses have not followed what might be loosely called the pre-digital rules of discourse. These rules assume that the purpose of public debate is to discern truth and that interlocutors on opposing sides—a reductionist bifurcation, because, in fact, there are many sides—engage in argument because they are interested in something higher than themselves: an ideal of truth, no matter how complicated, multifaceted and evolving. While in-group preferences and biases are inevitable, these exist within an overarching deliberative framework. This style of dialogue assumes the validity of a persuasive argument grounded in reason and evidence, even if—as Rowling does—it also utilises experience and feeling. By default, it assumes that civil conflict and opposition are essential devices in the pursuit of truth.

Three decades of postmodernism and ten years of Twitter have destroyed these conventions and, together with them, the shared norms by which we create and sustain social consensus. There is no grounding metanarrative, there are no binding norms of civil discourse in the digital age. Indeed, as Jaron Lanier shows with his bummer paradigm (Behaviours of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent) social media is destroying the fabric of our personal and political lives (although, with a different business model and more robust regulation, it need not do so). The algorithm searching for and recording your every click, like and share, your every purchase, search term, conversation, movement, facial expression, social connection and preference rewards engagement above all else—which means that your feed—an aptly infantile descriptor—will quickly become full of the things you and others like you are most likely to be motivated to click, like and share. Outrage is a more effective mechanism through which to foster engagement than almost anything else. In Lanier’s terms, this produces a “menagerie of wraiths”—a bunch of digitised dementors: fake and bad actors, paid troll armies and dyspeptic bots—designed to confect mob outrage.

The norms of civil discourse are being eroded, as we increasingly inhabit individualised media ecosystems, designed to addict, distract, absorb, outrage, manipulate and incite us. These internecine culture wars damage us all. As Lanier notes, social media is biased “not towards the left or right but downwards.” As a result, we are witnessing a catastrophic decline in the standards of our democratic institutions and discourse. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary culture wars around the trans question, where confected outrage is the norm.

This is why the furore over Rowling’s blog post misses the point: whether we agree with her or not, the problem is the collapse of our capacity to disagree constructively. If you deal primarily in subjective experience and impulse-driven reaction, under the assumption that you occupy the undisputed moral high ground, and you’ve been incited by fake news and want to signal your allegiances to your social media friends, then you can’t engage in rational discussion with your opponent. Your stock in trade will be unsubstantiated accusations and social shaming.

In this discombobulating universe, sex-based rights are turned into insults against trans people. Gender-critical feminists are recast as immoral bigots, engaged in deliberately hurtful, even life-threatening, speech. Rowling is not who we thought she was, her ex-fans wail, her characters and plots conceal hidden reservoirs of homophobia and bigotry. A few grandstanders attempt to distinguish themselves by saying that they have always been able to smell a rat—no, not Scabbers—and therefore hated the books from the outset. Nowhere amid this morass of moral grandstanding and outrage is there any serious engagement with her ideas.

Those of us on the left—and left-wing feminists in particular—who find trans ideology fraught, for all the reasons Rowling outlines, are a very small group. While Rowling is clearly privileged, she has also become the figurehead of a rapidly dwindling and increasingly vilified group of feminists, pejoratively labelled terfs, who want to preserve women’s sex-based rights and spaces. Although our arguments align with centrist, conservative and common sense positions, ours is not the prevailing view in academia, public service or the media, arts and culture industries, where we are most likely to be located (when we are not at home with our children). In most of these workplaces, a sex-based rights position is defined a priori as bigoted, indeed as hate speech. It can get us fired, attacked, socially ostracised and even assaulted.

As leftist thinkers who believe in freedom of speech and thought, who find creeping ideological and bureaucratic control alarming, we are horrified by these increasingly vicious denunciations by the left. The centre right and libertarians—the neo-cons, post-liberals and the IDW—are invariably smug about how funny it is to watch the left eat itself. But it’s true: some progressive circles are now defined by a call out/cancel culture to rival that of the most repressive of totalitarian states. Historically, it was progressives who fought against limits on freedom of speech and action. But the digital–identitarian left split off from the old print-based left some time ago, and has become its own beast. A contingent of us are deeply critical of these new directions.

Only a few on the left have had the gumption to speak up for us. Few have even defended our right to express our opinions. Those who have spoken out include former media darlings Germaine Greer and Michael Leunig. Many reader comments on left-leaning news sites claim that Rowling is to blame for the ill treatment she is suffering. Rowling can bask in the consequences of her free speech, they claim, as if having a different opinion from the woke majority means that she is no longer entitled to respect, and that any and all abuse is warranted—or, at least, to be expected. Where is the outrage on her behalf? Where are the writers, film makers, actors and artists defending her right to speak her mind?

Of course, the actors from the Harry Potter films are under no obligation to agree with JK Rowling just because she made them famous. They don’t owe her their ideological fealty: but they owe her better forms of disagreement. When Daniel Radcliffe repeats the nonsensical chant trans women are women, he’s not developing an argument, he’s reciting a mantra. When he invokes experts, who supposedly know more about the subject than Rowling, he betrays his ignorance of how contested the topic of transgender medicine actually is: for example, within endocrinology, paediatrics, psychiatry, sociology, and psychology (the controversies within the latter discipline have been demonstrated by the numerous recent resignations from the prestigious Tavistock and Portman gender identity clinic). The experts are a long way from consensus in what remains a politically fraught field.

Trans women are women is not an engaged reply. It is a mere arrangement of words, which presupposes a faith that cannot be questioned. To question it, we are told, causes harm—an assertion that transforms discussion into a thought crime. If questioning this orthodoxy is tantamount to abuse, then feminists and other dissenters have been gaslit out of the discussion before they can even enter it. This is especially pernicious because feminists in the west have been fighting patriarchy for several hundred years and we do not intend our cause to be derailed at the eleventh hour by an infinitesimal number of natal males, who have decided that they are women. Now, we are told, trans women are women, but natal females are menstruators. I can’t imagine what the suffragists would have made of this patently absurd turn of events.

There has been a cacophony of apologies to the trans community for Rowling’s apparently tendentious and hate-filled words. But no one has paused to apologise to Rowling for the torrent of abuse she has suffered and for being mischaracterised so profoundly.

So, I’m sorry, JK Rowling. I’m sorry that you will not receive the respectful disagreement you deserve: disagreement with your ideas not your person, disagreement with your politics, rather than accusations of wrongspeak. I’m sorry that schools, publishing staff and fan clubs are now cancelling you. And I’m sorry that you will be punished—because cancel culture is all about punishment. I’m sorry that you are being burned at the digital stake for expressing an opinion that goes against the grain.

But remember this, JK—however counterintuitive this may seem to progressives, whose natural home is on the fringe—most people are looking on incredulously at the disconnect between culture and reality. Despite raucous protestations to the contrary, you are on the right side of history—not just because of the points you make, but because of how you make them.

[terfetuloa]

I recently 'peaked' and started doing feel how you do about libfeminism too. I still struggle with this fear that I'm buying into some kinda fascist rhetoric (even though there's no evidence for that) but it makes me happy that there's a community on here of women, many lesbians and woc, who are speaking their mind freely

Hey anon! Beforehand, lemme apologize for replying to you this late, the past days were a bit hectic for me. I sincerely hope for this reply to reach you somehow. 

I'm glad you peaked! It's a hard and confusing process, mixed with disappointment over lots of stuff you've done before 'waking up' and towards people and discourses around you that consider your new opinions as something too extreme, hateful, or even devoid of serious analysis (as if you're just an irrational hateful person who can't think straight). When I first started to question my beliefs regarding gender ideology and trans rhetoric my immediate response to my doubts was to tell myself that I wasn’t a bad person. 

When you're systematically conditioned to hate the evil terfs and to shudder at the mention of radical feminism and terms alike, it's hard to get rid of this impression once you start to realize you're probably one of the evil terves. I had feelings along the lines of "I'm probably leaning towards radfem, but I'm not like them, I can be gender-critical and be a good person". See the problem? Lots of women full of doubts will never approach radical feminism and gender-critical concepts because it's rooted on their very core that said ideas are essentially evil, regressive, even fascist. 

I understand your fears, but after months interacting with radfems and TRAs I can assure you I never saw any radical feminist advocating for trans people to lose civil rights (like healthcare, housing, a job) or sending them rape and death threats, orchestrating campaigns for them to lose their jobs and to boycott their business... While all of this was already done by TRAs against women. As I said in my pinned post, I believe that there are trans people minding their own business, trying to live their best lives without claiming rights at the expense of female sex-based rights. But trans ideology on its political aspect is harmful. Harmful to women as their politics deny them their female-only spaces (like shelters, bathrooms, sports), erase language concerning female reality (by saying "people who menstruate", "people with wombs", "people with vulvas"), by hurting children, especially gender non-conforming young girls (by reinforcing the idea they have to get hysterectomies/mastectomies, puberty blockers that will ruin their physical development, testosterone with its everlasting effects)... 

I see trans ideology as a selfish liberal agenda that only reinforces the ties within which patriarchy holds women submissive. Try to ask a trans activist about what's a woman and be ready to listen 1) circular definitions (a woman is a woman), 2) stereotypical aspects of femininity as equivalent to womanhood (women are fragile, delicate, they like pink and makeup), 3) the "lady brain" argument (neurosexism), 4) the transcendental argument (a woman is a feeling)... And we know that's not why we're women. We're women because we're adult human females. The material reality of my body explains why I was socialized a certain way, why I'm the target of some specific forms of violence. Yes, across cultures gender roles change and the perceptions of what "looks like" a woman or a man too. But the material reality of what is a woman and a man doesn't change.

What makes me a woman is the same thing that defines what's a woman in Sri Lanka, Ghana, Austria, or even in an isolated indigenous tribe in the middle of Bolivia. You know this, everybody knows this, even those too delusional to raise the trans flag know this. If they didn't they wouldn't be so eager to crucify women daring to say the truth, desperately trying to change the meaning or words, and coercively trying to change reality. To call out a woman for stating facts about her material reality accusing her of being a bigot, someone equivalent to a nazi is PURE MISOGYNY. Most of the time you don't even have to say "trans women are men" to receive your Evil Terf badge. You just have to say "women menstruate" or anything related to your experiences as a female. And the backlash is HUGE. So, who are the fascists here? Not the women raising their voices against a male-centered movement trying to pass as an oppressed minority whose tormentors are "privileged cis" women. 

So don't feel afraid, you're not aligning yourself with a fascist movement. It's hard to act based upon what we feel in a world where critical women are haunted down like witches (side note: curious how "oppressed queer people" have such power under capitalism, right?), but you can try to see if you're lucky enough to have any of your irl friends agreeing with you, you can go anonymous and ask questions, you can create a side blog and make new friends... There are lots of smart women here to listen to your questions and share their experiences. Eventually, your fear will pass and you'll find yourself. Be safe, anon.