#radfem-101

[radfem-101]

radfem 101 is coming back

Hey everyone! I'm so sorry for the unannounced break and the nearly three year long silence. In that time, a lot of things happened (obviously) and I was extremely burnt out from radical feminist activism, from seeing the terrible things happening to women day after day and trying to bring attention to them, from the abuse on social media, from everything. I have been suffering with some health issues for a long time, and in the last few years they've got a lot worse. With all this combined, this tumblr was the last thing I had on my mind.

However, I did still write some stuff for it. It never reached what I wanted it to be when I started - I wanted a one-stop-shop for radical feminism beginners, and that included in depth explanations of radical feminist beliefs, which I never got around to. I would really like to finish that at the very least.

I truly believe that this little blog could be something useful and important to people, and I hope that it can reach its potential.

I have plans on adding in more pages that go further in depth about radical feminism, writing essays about pop culture etc. from a radical feminist point of view, and of course, reblogging as much stuff as possible that I believe needs to be seen. I still want to keep this place welcoming to newcomers and people who just want to find out what radical feminism is without joining. I still plan on making sure that this blog shows the truth about radical feminism without getting too complex and nitty-gritty. I still want to make this blog a great resource that radical feminists can use to find sources, citations, and community. I hope this can be something you can introduce your friends to, your sisters to, your mothers to - and show them that radical feminism is not how it's portrayed in the media and society at large.

I hope some of you are still willing to bare with me while I deal with all of this, and while I am inevitably going to need to take breaks again. I'm barely more healthy than I was before, and I still get deeply affected by seeing the things women are put through daily.

Thank you ever so much, everyone who has followed and reblogged and liked and replied to all the posts so far. It means so much to me. I had a lot of things I was going to add to this, but I really struggled to find the words to write. Just know that I'm proud of what we have made here so far, and I fully intend on making it better. There's two posts left in the queue that never got posted, so I'm going to post them now and then there'll be a bit more of a break until I can get new content and hear your suggestions.

If you have any suggestions of things you would like to see on this blog, any particular things you'd like explained or talked about, any content you'd like posted, any new features or additions, please let me know! I am actively seeking out what you want. Literally anything (within the bounds of this blog being a radical feminism explainer blog)

-- @resister-sister

[ex-foster]

Criticisms of Foster Parents

Financial Motivation:

Some critics argue that certain foster parents may be motivated more by the financial stipend provided by the state rather than a genuine desire to care for children. This can lead to neglectful or even abusive environments.

Inadequate Training:

Foster parents might not always receive adequate training to handle the complex emotional, psychological, and behavioral needs of foster children, particularly those who have experienced trauma.

Lack of Emotional Support:

Foster parents may not always provide the emotional support needed for a child to heal from past traumas. This lack of attachment and emotional warmth can lead to further emotional difficulties for the child.

Stigma and Discrimination:

Some foster parents may unintentionally or intentionally contribute to the stigma and discrimination foster children face. This can include viewing foster children as "problematic" or less deserving of care compared to biological children.

[binders-and-beanies]

Transmasc communities have a problem with radical feminism and it’s genuinely sad bc I feel like it comes from a place of being apologetic about abandoning the more pure and unproblematic gender which is,, a terrible way to feel but we have a responsibility to work through that instead of shaming other trans guys for being happy about being men

[faithisland]

oh no the Julia serano article completely misunderstanding all of gender and queer theory is out😭😭😭

[occultist-romantic]

bro what 😭😭😭 wait until your mom figures out those men are porn addicts sexualising her 😭😭😭

[worms-in-my-brain]

Seeing someone with “ex-radfem, still unlearning” in their bio and “tmra/transandrophobia truthers” in their DNI makes so much sense.

So you’ve unlearnt the “vitriolicly hate trans women” part. Have you unlearnt the “women are better than men and always more pure and safe and good and men are always the aggressors and women are always the victims” part?

Bc that part is also bad. Y’know. Bc it leads to abuse, it leads to putting women on pedestals (something which like, is like feminism 101 sexist), and it leads to people denying the importance of intersectionality (ex. radfems claiming that black men hold systemic power over white women bc of the man/woman axis while completely ignoring the entire racialised component).

[femsinisms]

How Radical Is Your Feminism?

Are you curious to know what schools of thought your feminist beliefs and practices align with? This quiz may give you the answer you are seeking. It's officially been a year since this quiz was closed, and now it's back.

If you have any questions about this quiz, you can leave them in the feedback section: https://forms.gle/5j8gwGEjC37aZB1r8

Scoring Guide:

Radfem: 0-100

Marxfem and rad leaning: 101-300

Liberal fem: 300-700

Enemy of Progress: 700+

Women of all beliefs are welcome and encouraged to take this quiz. Please only take this quiz once.

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

it's worse than that though cuz some of you make it really obvious that you think the bad part about terfs/radfems is the (lip service to) "feminism" part

like some of you do claim to be feminists but you think it's really important that any feminist discussion center men's perspectives and priorities and you're calling trans women terfs for explaining basic feminism 101 shit like "patriarchy is designed to benefit men at the expense of women" and you're constantly saying transmisogynistic shit about how trans women are perverts or that they're all trying to pressure people into being trans and you literally sound like terfs yourselves half the time except you're a little more honest about the fact that you think feminism is unfair to men

like i really don't think it's the transmisogyny some of you dislike 🤔

[rhysofcourse]

this is radfeminism 101. this is terf rhetoric. man and woman are not moral genders. a man is not inherently evil. a woman is not inherently good. they are Not opposites. they can coexist and often do. i am a transmasc woman sometimes. i am genderfluid and i identify as transmasc. painting terf shit pink blue and white doesn’t stop it from being rancid, putrid, transphobic shit.

what anon said was completely right. by denying and mocking a group of people who are VERY MUCH a victim of terfs, radfems and fascists for making their own language, calling out unwarranted transphobic comments, threats, and harassment, you are leaving behind your community. it’s EMBARRASSING. terfs on this site are fucking watching us tear each other apart and taking advantage of the fact that their rhetoric is being popularized you stupid shits

trans women and transfems are still being marked down as porn and terminated for being transfem! trans men and transmascs are receiving unprecedented amounts of abuse for being related to masculinity! nonbinary people are STILL being denied access to femininity and masculinity while simultaneously only being seen as Man Lite and Woman Lite!

for fuck’s sake help your trans brothers, siblings, and sisters. stop fucking doing this

[radmalenia]

True. If it was the natural proper state it would just happen; and they wouldn't have to be violent sadistic scumbags towards women to enforce it.

There's a big reason humanity has been full of barbaric struggle and in total disarray ever since males flipped the natural order and decided to create a perverted hierarchy with them ontop; upheld through force and dehumanization. Humanity was never like that before they did so, but male ego was so sick and diseased that they'd rather choose a violent psychopathic state of humanity with them on top; rather than an ethical and happy state of humanity where they are not.

Like I've said quite a few times before; they literally choose ego and misogyny over peace and progress and happiness.

i think men are bad leaders because leadership just doesn’t come naturally to men. it’s easy to see leadership is a forced nature on men. if leadership was naturally part of men’s existence, they wouldn’t have to assert themselves so aggressively over women.

[woman-respecter]

My goal was to be off tumblr for a year but girl I just saw the most absolutely rancid take and needed to tell someone. I saw someone in a youtube comment section (I know, I know) genuinely argue that 4B is insufficiently intersectional because if men aren't having consensual sex, they'll go out and rape more, and since woc, queer women, disabled women, etc experience disproportionate rates of sexual violence, it'll be them getting raped probably, so going 4B is actually sentencing less privileged women to be raped. I genuinely think my brain is broken from that. "If you don't have sex with a man it's your fault if he rapes another woman" is one of the most insane things I've ever seen someone try to spin as leftist and that is fucking saying something. Like I could sit here and list all the reasons that's wrong but. Oh my god.

They started off their insane essay with this: "I heard a good point, and someone described this as taking a toy from a petulant child. (The toy being seggs, not women). If the child isn’t made to understand why the toy was taken away, they will continue to keep saying how unfair you’re being. And they might just steal a new toy from someone else if they don’t get their way." I LOVE how predatory men are children that have to be handled gently and delicately and have it explained to them with a little Blue's Clues song why they aren't getting laid, and if you don't do that you're responsible for their actions. Men are adults! Men CHOOSE to rape women! Why are we blaming women for men's actions! Why are we doing that and CALLING IT FEMINIST??? Like I thought we agreed that men don't rape due to a lack of consensual sex, they rape because they like having and exerting power over people? I thought that was like, one of the basic things we talked about in rape culture 101?

Jesus fucking Christ. I know that person sat back after writing their dissertation so satisfied with themselves for being One Of The Good Feminists, intersectional and socially aware and apologetic of their privilege, not one of those evil radfems who think men should be held responsible for their actions.

Anyways sorry for subjecting you to this but it actually broke my brain in half and I needed someone else to suffer with me.

omg first of all hey girl its been a while! good to hear from you even if it’s in this shitty scenario!

and yeah, what a rancid, yet not unexpected take. blaming women for men’s actions is like. classic misogyny. like i am a certified misandrist but even i don’t believe that the majority of men will go out and rape random women just because they’re constantly rejected. and even if they would it is NOT the duty of any woman to give a man sex that she doesn’t want to give, just to protect hypothetical other women. that’s such a shitty guilt trip. in that situation it would be a category 5 KAM moment, if giving in to sex was the only thing we could do to prevent rape.

[kintatsujo]

I'm against terfy and radfem rhetoric yes because I care about my trans sisters and brothers and yes because I care about the actual good men in my life

but also because in Psych 101 I found out they did a study on a bunch of young parents once and found a tendency by their own mothers to be rougher with male newborns and I've been angry about that for the last uh, 20 years

[molsno]

there's a troubling tendency in feminist spaces to rehabilitate radical feminist theory. this isn't surprising coming from actual radfems, most notably terfs, but this tendency exists even among trans people - most often tme (transmisogyny-exempt) trans people, but also occasionally among tma (transmisogyny-affected) trans people as well.

I fail to see the need to use feminist thought put forth by, for example, adrienne rich or andrea dworkin, as the foundation for further theory. both of these authors, while very influential, both contributed to or supported janice raymond's book, "the transsexual empire", in which she infamously asserted, without exaggeration, that trans women's passive existence constitutes an act of rape.

as a disclaimer, I have not directly read any of the three authors that I named above, as the research I've done about them indicates that reading their extended works would be psychologically harmful to me as a trans woman. I have tried to learn as much as I can about their beliefs and worldviews, but I admit it is possible that I may be misrepresenting them at some points. regardless, this post is not specifically about them anyway. unless I name them, this post is about general trends I've noticed in feminist circles.

now, whether or not a given radical feminist author claims to be trans-inclusive is ultimately meaningless, as radical feminism inherently relies on biological essentialism as its explanation for the oppression of women by men. if simply being born with a penis means that one is biologically predisposed to perpetrate acts of gendered violence, including rape, then what does it mean to be "trans-inclusive" with this worldview? most often, the answer that I find to this question among radical feminists is that they only support people on the transmasculine spectrum, while still essentializing them as women who transition to escape the oppressive forces of misogyny.

I dislike this perspective for many reasons. most obviously, I believe it's blatantly transphobic to reduce transmasculine people to their assigned gender at birth, even while paying them lip service by using the correct pronouns for them. but moreover, I find that it's predicated on largely white and tme perspectives on femininity.

perhaps femininity may seem innately traumatizing for white people who were afab. after all, it's essentially forced upon them from the moment of birth. but this experience is not universal. women of color, most especially black women, are routinely and systematically denied femininity in a violent act of degendering that seeks to protect the gender binary, which itself is a white supremacist, colonialist invention. however, for the aforementioned women of color, reclaiming the femininity they've been denied and making it something all their own can be highly empowering.

I find it ironic that adrienne rich, for example, is cited in feminist circles that uphold (whether knowingly or not) this radical feminist belief, as she was quite vocal about how her perspectives were taken more seriously than her black counterparts due to her white privilege. yet, the feminists today who parrot the beliefs of her and her white contemporaries largely ignore the perspectives of nonwhite, and especially tma feminists.

my previous paragraph about femininity is not new information; it has been written about extensively by feminists of color - tme and tma alike. and yet, there is very little discussion of these works in white- and tme-dominated feminist spaces. yes, we've all heard praises of leslie feinberg's "stone butch blues", but where are the quoted passages from, for example, "women, race, & class" by angela davis, or "decolonizing trans/gender 101" by b. binaohan?

in case I haven't made it clear, I, as a white trans woman, am more than happy to read works written by tme feminists. however, far too often, I find that the writings of tme feminists that are most widely circulated represent a very narrow understanding of feminism, mostly feminism put forth by white radical feminists and their allies in the 20th century. these perspectives very frequently leave behind, and often outright exclude, people of color and transfeminine people, whose struggles are inherently linked. not only are many people of color transfeminine and vice versa, even the mechanisms which are used to deny tme women of color femininity are also used against trans women - julia serano, a white trans feminist, says this in her book, "whipping girl"!

attempting to rehabilitate radical feminist thought, even the kind put forth by feminists who claimed to be allies of people of color and colonized peoples, seems futile to me when those same feminists gave janice raymond their full support in writing one of the most violently transmisogynistic works in the feminist sphere. personally, I have no faith in people who find transmisogyny anything other than absolutely abhorrent to say anything meaningful about women's liberation. the fact is, when the only feminism that receives widespread discussion is the kind written by these people, then women of color, trans women, and ESPECIALLY trans women of color will continue to suffer under a white supremacist, transmisogynistic, colonial regime.

[shoppinghauer]

My main issues with online feminism, which includes hispanic instagram (LatAm and Spain) and tumblr anglosphere (think Europe + USA sometimes Australia) are:

They think of non single women (married or with a bf) as the primary pick me in society. I dont doubt a lot of them priorize their man but also, the way feminist depict them as "brainwashed" is just childish. My main problem is that obscures the fact that you can priorize men even if you're not in a romantic relationship with them. Boymoms, male relatives such as brothers or fathers are constantly excused or justified just as much as romantic partners. Yet Ive barely see criticism against this. Whats more is that mothers are excused as if the pressure of maternity excuses throwing under the bus your own daughter (why is never the other way around?? Fucking over your son bc of your daughter). Even women have justified horrendous actions made by their male friends (trans or gay) in cases where there is no attraction involved. Just social leveraging.

Speaking of attraction. The way they talk about assault as being a result lf violent sexual desire aka pretth privilege doesnt exist because hot women are more attacked. This is by far the most imbecile of all takes. Assault and sexual violence are a result of control and domination, not attraction. The more vulnerable a woman is, the likelier she will be assaulted. This includes older women, girls, runaways, homeless, sick, disabled, immigrants, addicts and poor women. This has nothing to do with how you look and everything to do with how much will men get away with assaulting you. The fact ive read "are you saying elderly or poor women arent attractive" when talking about assault is proof that even among so called feminists, the idea that sexual violence stems from attraction is still ingrained. Stop it for the sake of god.

I know fish can't see water but american feminists really really ignore how much of their culture affects misogyny worldwide. The impact of the american worldview on misogyny is not little stuff. The consumerist, hollywoodesque point of view is native to the USA. American feminists call this "liberal feminism" to distance themselves from what is just plain american misogyny. This shitshow of "eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man" is a product of the american perspective of making everything a marketing campaing. This goes back to Max Revlon, Edward Bernays and other PR gurus who knew that the best way to make profit was to market everything. American feminists are limiting their analysis by thinking this is a matter of contradictory branches of feminism (lib vs rad) and not a matter of americanized misogyny. Lets remember radfem stems from marxism, the actual one not the tumblr version.

The way how no one actually read books but everyone wants to say something smart. From "capitalism of words" to "you can escape from labor exploitation by being a tradwife " everyone loves to post half assed essays who say stupid shit or not saying anything at all. Ive been accused of being a russian psyop, an spanish white woman with guilt, or even wishing rape on another woman just for stating sociology 101 points. Basic knowledge of marxism is a must if you call yourself a feminist. Im sorry but how else are you gonna understand women's oppression today (in a capitalist system) if you think tankies are psyops. Gimme a break, some of you are worse than breadtubers.

The lack of interest in women's news around the world. Basically if it isnt a major tragedy in Europe or USA or a fucked story about the Middle East (which for the majority, those countries are interchangeable, see: "if she's from Algeria why isnt she in a hijab" even tho Algeria is in Africa but whatever), no one cares about women. The North American continent got its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and everybody in here was busy whining about a stupid pop princess poll bc a nobody TIM got the upperhand. Cmon. Spanish feminist were more preoccupied about a fat woman announcing New Year's Eve than the historical election of a woman in a hispanic country. And that is just the most egregious example.

If i think of anything else Ill add it but this is my experience as someone who has been on feminist circles for a decade.

[olderthannetfic]

i'm actually really, really tired of reading posts about how women need to pretend that male privilege doesn't exist in patriarchal societies just because it doesn't apply perfectly to every man in every situation (newsflash: no form of privilege works this way. but you have to deny objective realities like "men make more money than women who are otherwise in the same marginalization situation they are" - as in, white men make more than white women, black men make more than black women - and "men don't have to take precautions against strangers of the opposite sex potentially assaulting them whereas women learn to do this from an early age" to argue male privilege doesn't exist). especially aimed at straight cis men, not even marginalized men? i'm not going to pretend that straight cis men don't have it better in our society than trans lesbians because one gay trans man thinks it hurts his feelings to say so. if it's not about you, it's not about you. systematic issues like privilege are very rarely about individual people. a LOT of male privilege doesn't apply to trans men (especially those who don't pass), because cissexist society doesn't acknowledge them as men. it doesn't change that that exists for men as a WHOLE. (and it's not "radfem" ideology to say this. this is basic, liberal feminism 101.)



--

[starryroe]

sorry if this is a stupid question, i'm asking in good faith, but do you consider the entire argument of "a lot of people right now are being misogynistic towards trans men bc trans men are an acceptable target for misogyny rn" to be transmisogynistic or only when its talking abt trans women? i realize the way i phrased that kinda sounds like a gotcha, i'm not intending that but i'm also not sure how to rephrase it to not sound that way. i'm asking genuinely bc i do feel like a lot of what i face from progressives is people gleefully realizing they can get away with being misogynistic to me bc im a man, but thats not exclusive to transfems, in fact its mostly cis women who do it. so i feel like thats worth talking about. but for that reason also i do know it would be transmisogynistic to blame it all on trans women since theyre not the main culprits, but im unsure if thats why u didnt like that post or not bc i always interpreted the term "trans radfems" to mean "any trans person who spouts radfem rhetoric, not just transfems" so that post calling out "these trans radfems" doesnt immediately strike me as specifically targeting transfems, which is why im unsure. i guess what im asking here is, is there some context im missing that makes that post specifically about transfems, or is there some problem with pointing out that a lot of people are misogynistic towards trans men bc they can get away with it? (sometimes including trans women but not at a rate higher than any of the other groups doing it)

the problem of the post is that it states that the misogyny that is thrown at trans men is simply redirected misogyny that would have been thrown at cis women if it was acceptable, and if someone is misogynistic they're gonna be misogynistic, it's not that the misogyny towards trans men is simply redirected cis woman misogyny. like that's the whole point of the term transandrophobia, it's a specific type of misogyny targeted towards certain things someone sees in another

plus my commentary didn't exclude that "trans radfems" (which is a term I am starting to hate but that's besides the point) could mean everyone, just that saying that the trans women, who are included in the term, would he doing that, is in fact terf rethoric 101

plus plus, using 4chan and then trans radfem together is like. listen I'm sure there's trans guys who fit the bill but that's such a dogwhistle

plus plus plus, it was reblogged and shared by a trans woman with an insane amount of internalized transmisogyny who has reblogged before and even made own posts saying that it's mainly trans women's fault for trans men's suffering