#trans exclusionary radical fauxminists

[magdolenelives]

Transphobia is so antithetical to genuine feminism it blows my mind there's such a wide overlap like you either believe in autonomy and self determination or you don't

[magdolenelives]

Tweet here. If you think transphobia isn’t recycled homophobia, a helpful thread of articles dating from the 1950s to the 2010s (seriously, take some time and scroll through them, there’s so many) fearing what gays and lesbians would do if allowed in a restroom with heterosexuals. Obviously, MASSIVE trigger/content warning for homophobia. But the rhetoric is literally the same that TERFs and other transphobes use.

[magdolenelives]

(via) Also relevant from the interview with legendary feminist Judith Butler:

[magdolenelives]

Tweet here, article here. Highly recommend reading the whole article, but just a few choice quotes: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen. -- AF: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would "throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman", potentially putting women at risk of violence. JB: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry. -- AF: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowling’s side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments? JB: Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time. We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people.  -- First, one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle. When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals?   I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms.   Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way. -- AF: Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these “anti-intellectual times” to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling? JB: I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable. -- It is painful to see that Trump’s position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge “gender” from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists' return to biological essentialism. It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society. -- My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency. We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual – and individualism – is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life. If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals. If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But feminism would surely survive as a coalitional practice and vision of solidarity.

[magdolenelives]

Not even the first time TERFs have embraced outright eugenics either.

I'm really gonna need y'all, specifically cis white goyische folk, to use your brains for a fucking millisecond and understand that TERFs aren't LITERALLY saying that trans people don't bathe.

It's a fucking goddamned Nazi dogwhistle and it isn't even subtle.

So to all the cis white goys who are like "apparently showering is a white supremacist concept now" please for the love of GOD stop being so fucking dense.

TERFs aren't LITERALLY referring to hygiene. They're implying that trans folks are so inhuman, so repulsive, that we should be treated as a totally different species from them, and that any association with trans people could "contaminate" the "purity" of cis folks.

It's horrifying. You should be horrified. And if you're not, I'm just gonna fucking assume you agree with them.

[magdolenelives]

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[magdolenelives]

GoFundMe here!

Hunny stan non-binary queen Jonathan Van Ness, not JK

[magdolenelives]

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[magdolenelives]

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[magdolenelives]

(source) TERFS AND OTHER TRANSPHOBES (including “devil’s advocates” and people “just asking questions”) DO NOT INTERACT WITH THIS POST.

[magdolenelives]

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[magdolenelives]

Tweet here, article here.

[magdolenelives]

When someone’s URL literally has “terf” in it and it’s not ironic/satire clearly from just a quick glance at their blog.... Do you really want to reblog that post about “feminism” from them? Do you?

[magdolenelives]

***CONTENT WARNING! TERFS, TRANSPHOBIA, MISGENDERING**** Why am I not surprised TERFs got a hold of this post? For those blessedly unaware, TERFs are transphobes that have appropriated feminist cant for their bullshit and unsurprisingly, appeal to conservatives and white supremacists, including using straight up Nazi rhetoric.

(As a feminist since I was at least fourteen, I will never understand how that isn’t the end of the argument right there.) Don’t give these people a platform. Don’t try debating them, just block them. All appreciation to those who do deradicalization work, but that’s not happening on this post. Few facts, though (and I’m naming names for clarity’s sake). catnana reblogged my post from me, who they are NOT following, meaning they were seeking out these posts, not that they keep seeing Eddie Izzard on their dash. TERFS LYING TO FURTHER THEIR BIGOTED POINTS WHAT ARE THE ODDS. Also, notyourbabysitter up there needs a refresher on what gender fluid means. BOTTOM LINE: Eddie Izzard being trans, specifically gender-fluid, and using she/her pronouns, is great for all the reasons the original Tweet listed. IF YOU ARE CIS, THIS IN NO WAY EFFECTS YOU. TERFs and other transphobes inserting themselves into spaces (and posts, ahem) to cry about how this “annoys” them and attempt to spread their bigoted trash and radicalize more people (especially young teenage girls, one of their favorite targets, especially on this site) is just par for the course, sadly. REMEMBER! DO NOT ENGAGE, JUST BLOCK! (OK to reblog.)

(via) In case you missed it, Eddie Izzard is genderfluid and recently requested she/her pronouns.