#bc even if I know the person isn’t a TERF my brain has started to make that association

[citizen-zero]

it drives me nuts how it feels like you can’t talk about certain feminist issues anymore without inevitably getting called a TERF even if you’re not one. like I hate TERFs and I think the pushback against them is fully justified but sometimes it feels as if, in our efforts to make bigots unwelcome, we’ve unintentionally ceded ground to them and made it so people think of TERFs when they think of feminists. which is the opposite of what we want.

your feminism has to be intersectional but like, that means acknowledging that not all women are going to have the same kinds of problems. gay women and straight women have lots of issues that will never overlap. same with women of color and white women. I don’t think it should be controversial to recognize that the same is true for trans women + AFAB people and cis women. I think it’s okay for some conversations to only focus on one or the other.

idk this is mostly a problem I see in left leaning spaces bc the conversation in broader society already mainly focuses on feminism in white cishet terms but the answer isn’t to do a whole 180 and shut down conversations about issues that primarily impact cis women and AFAB people and make people nervous about talking about those issues, the answer is to continually affirm that trans women are women regardless of AGAB.