#feminism look away

[title]

Is that all you have to say to me?

Notorious (1946), directed by Alfred Hitchcock

[xmimikyuusx]

The conversation of whether a trans man has male privilege should not be apart of the conversation of our oppression as much as it should not be when talking about if a trans woman experiences male privilege. If you bring it up like it's some important "well, if you experience male privilege you're evil/not oppressed so you dont matter" you need to put down the radfem juice pretty please

[strawberry-halla]

me: oh i heard modders got frosty to work with veilguard! i'm going to go see what kinds of mods there are so far- nexus: *drops a heavy cinder block of yassification mods for the veilguard companions that whitewash, de-age, and/or alter their appearances in ways that destroy their identity*

me: oh.

[miiilowo]

coming out of this page covered in blood

[brokenanxiety]

im sorry but looking directly to camera?! mathew michael paul barzal. don't look at me like that. im already in love with you.

mat in the 2nd pic has no thoughts in his pretty little head

[spiderfreedom]

not gonna effortpost about this today because I gotta get work done but real short

I notice this argument being used all the time: "you can't make a definition of 'woman' that does not exclude some people that we call women. therefore, the only good definition for 'women' that includes all people we call woman is 'people who identify as woman.'"

and the thing is, philosophically, "you can't make a definition of {thing} that does not exclude some examples we also call {thing}" is something that applies to almost every category! it's literally a whole philosophical problem of "what is the definition of a chair?" didn't we have a whole meme about how nobody can even agree on what a sandwich is?

it's not something unique to women, tables, horses, sandwiches, salads, or anything else. it is a problem of language itself.

you can apply the exact same argument to other categories: "how do you define 'blackness' without excluding some people we call 'black'?" if you're american, maybe you will use the one-drop rule, in which case halsey is black and anyone who had a single black ancestor four generations ago. but is that actually how we use the word black? does that capture something meaningful about being black in america? how about being black in the world?

let's go further: "how do you define 'transgender' without excluding some people we call 'transgender'?" within the transgender community, there is no real agreement on what it means to be transgender! beyond a vague sense of "identifying as the gender society assigned to you", but even that can be challenged. if a cis (female) woman takes testosterone, starts hanging around trans women, calling herself a trans woman, is confused for a trans woman by the people that she talks to, experiences oppression on the basis of being perceived as a trans woman... can she be considered a trans woman, despite being female?

ultimately "how do you define things" is a philosophy of language question more than anything else. perfect definitions that encapsulate sets neatly do not exist, because the terms we use are socially contingent. when people came up with the word 'table', they didn't also create a logically rigorous definition for it. they just said 'well, this thing here is a table.' and then people argue about the edge cases. because also, nobody actually agrees on the members of sets of every single word!! just like how we all have different ideas of what is and isn't a sandwich!

that's the other thing, people already disagree about what words refer to. someone who has the 5ARD intersex condition has testes but may be raised and socialized as girl because their parents think their genitals kinda look like a vulva. is this person a 'girl/woman'? people are not sure... which makes sense... because it is an edge case. is a stool a chair? is a hotdog a sandwich? is an open sandwich a sandwich? the further you get from the 'prototype', the more people are going to be disagree.

so the entire question 'what is a woman' is just an exercise in confusing philosophy of language framed as saying something very meaningful about the social category of woman. it is not! it is a problem of language that we cannot define 'woman' or 'chair' or 'salad' or 'horse' or 'gamer' in a rigorous way. it is nothing inherent to women, chairs, salads, horses, or gamers.

(but what about science?) good question, what about science? science tries to operate differently from the way laypeople talk about things. scientists take common words, like 'energy', and give them different, more rigorous definitions in order to try to figure something out about the world. for laypeople, 'energy' is something vague and diffuse. for physicists, 'energy' is the force that causes things to move, and its behavior is described by certain mathematical models.

similarly, laypeople may take 'woman' to mean 'a person with breasts and vulva/vagina', but a biologist may have a more rigorous definition of 'female': 'producing large gametes.' this is useful because it helps us see commonalities between creatures that may look really different, like flowers, bedbugs, asparaguses, cats, and humans - all very different creatures where sex looks different, but still have a distinction between 'producing large gametes' and 'producing small gametes' - there's no intermediate gamete. biologists have a different word for what people/animals look like, and that is 'phenotype.' when a parent looks at a child with 5ARD condition, they see the child has no visible penis and thus 'looks 'looks female.' a biologist would say that the child's sex is male (because they have the reproductive equipment to produce sperm, and none of the reproductive equipment to produce ova) but that their phenotype is ambiguous. sex is a binary variable, but human development is a long process where are a lot can happen, and so sexual phenotypes are not variable.

so already we're pretty far from the lay definition, because laypeople don't have the same idea of what sex is as scientists do, and don't distinguish between someone's sex and their appearance - for them, the sex is the appearance. who is right? it depends on what you want to do. scientists want to discover meaningful things about nature, and their definitions are far more useful than the layperson's for that purpose. which definitions are useful is also socially determined - we may feel sympathy for the child with 5ARD, told they were a girl their whole life, but who learns that they have testes. should we continue to treat this child as a girl/woman, or should we encourage them to view themselves as a boy/man? that is a social, cultural, legal argument, not a scientific one. the biological truth is the same regardless of the social, cultural, legal arguments, but there may be a compelling case to act differently. that's on us as humans to decide!

so yeah I'm just tired of hearing the same damn arguments over and over again. "what is a woman? is someone with CAIS a woman? is someone with 5ARD? what if we take a young non-intersex male and give them female hormones?" like this will never take us to where we want to go because it's a philosophy of language question disguised as a scientific one. the real question is, what are we talking about and which definitions will help us in that? if you believe that female people are exploited on the basis of their female bodily functions, then obviously you want to bring attention to that by using the word 'female'! if you want to focus on feminine socialization, then it may be useful to bring up cases of people who may not technically be female but were still raised as them, like Erika/Erik Schinegger, a male (possibly with 5ARD) who was raised as a girl and believed he was a girl for most of his youth.

trying to make a single catchy response to a question of what is 'x' is never going to satisfy everyone, because it cannot, because language is imperfect and real life is messy. scientists try to cut nature at the joints, but their cuts may not look like laypeople's! (and don't get me started on scientists disagreeing on what is a joint and what is not, metaphorically.)

and at its worst, when chasing an ironclad definition, you get bizarre answers that seem detached from reality, like saying 'people with CAIS condition are genotypically male and have underdeveloped testes, so we should treat them as males'. they may be reproductive males, but they have a female phenotype, and are raised as girls, and are literally unreceptive to testosterone - to treat them as 'men' on the basis of developmental or reproductive sex certainly seems to be missing something very important from the picture! see below: a person with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS):

does it really make sense to say this person is a man due to her having testes, which technically makes her reproductively male? is that capturing reality? or are you trying to force reality to fit into your definition because you're afraid that if you cannot create a perfect definition of 'woman', that we will never be able to talk about biology and female oppression?

tl;dr: questions like 'what is a woman' are designed to be time-wasters because they are not actually answerable because language sucks. argue for your operative definition, your context, and move on. and don't be afraid to change definitions based on the context... sometimes reproductive sex is relevant, sometimes phenotype is more important, sometimes socialization is more relevant. this is not weakness, it's recognizing that reality is not so rigid and sometimes you must use a different model to get the understanding you want.

[widevibratobitch]

doing my sillygoofy research and accidentally coming across a mention of wolfgang mozart's capital M Misogyny that i have never heard of before like what do you MEAN my 18th century specialest white boy wasn't exactly a raging feminist 😭��

[byrdstrolls]

I’m not good at making good dads and I’m not good at making bad dads I’m good at making morally grey dads.

Dads who tried their best and failed. Dads who really care deeply and just struggle to show it. Dads who want to break the cycle and did in some ways but in other ways failed to realize how much of the cycle they had internalized. Dads who second guess themselves. Dads who were teed up to fail by circumstance. Dads who made the wrong choice out of genuine love and care but it was still the wrong choice.

[comraderaccoon]

OH MY GOD AHASKJASHSL!!

[reflectionsofgalaxies]

thinking about how i need more tattoos

[oscargender]

to knowis to be loved and to be known is to b eloved. I want transgender friends who will know me and love me in a way that cis people usually do not

[cirillafionaelenriannon]

the plotline w melanie lynskey (i love u melanie btw) kind of bugging me bc it feels like neil druckmann trying to be like see women can be evil too and it kind of Does what tlou 2 does where its like rEvEngE is bAD and NobOdy WiNs like we all fucking knew that neil stop trying to create foreshadowing 4 ur garbage second game and let me fucking enjoy the first one without inserting some bullshit story about two sides wherein both are morally grey and it ends badly for EVERYONE 

[dxnger-dxys]

AND YOU’LL BE HUNGOVER ALL DAY.

[pennyserenade]

growing up in a matriarch of sorts is fun until it’s 8pm on a tuesday and you’re wondering if you’re capable of love

[betagrove]

To be clear when I started playing Bayonetta 2 for the first time I was majorly put off in the first cutscene because the face model on Cereza looked like just a completely different woman to me. It is that serious to me forever

[multifandomsimagine]

andrew garfield

— kc 🩷

send me your celebrity crush and i’ll rate them

i don’t see the appeal not my type they’re okay i see the appeal but i’m different™ cute but on alternating wednesdays they have a kind face and that’s good enough pretty gorgeous i— i love? we don’t deserve them

You have no idea how much I love this man