#which terfs are a category of

[alyrch99]

I just want to say that if you devote your time, money, attention, and the resources of your social media platform to censoring and attacking trans women during an ongoing massive cultural reactionary movement with us in its crosshairs, not only are you part of the problem, but you are a heartless piece of shit to such a degree that you should not be able to look yourself in the eyes.

You are dragging a woman's protections away from her as an ongoing campaign works to tear her down. She said literally hours ago that she was posting about this to try and protect herself and her name from the false and highly politicized allegations against her, so you respond by having a hissy fit that people are asking what happened and replying by snap deleting all of her accounts??? Are you 6 years old? Have you no conception of right or wrong???

[coolauntlilith]

I do block blogs calling a canon bisexual character gay/lesbian. No I don't see it as a blanket term kind of way, yall have made sure of that.

[the-witchhunter]

Lord, give me strength to not reply to the transphobe on YouTube again

[kyliaquilor]

Really should probably get that Shinigami Eyes thing, shouldn't I?

[jingerpi]

people don't understand that "man" is fundamentally a concept that is made up to justify real world oppression. Manhood is not based on some innate biology, sex isn't even reflective of accurate understandings of our species, it is a social construct utilized as a cudgel to justify oppressing and exploiting women and anyone who they can push out of the category of "man". it's not that we hate the people under the label "man", we simply understand it as a problematic construct from the outset. this isn't somehow "terfy" it's not bioessentialism, it's a critique of our societal constructs based in real analysis which describes patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, etc... far better than any liberal understanding about men being "rude" or the terf idea of "male socialization"

[evidence-based-activism]

you’re still ignoring WHY the rates for men are so high, because women get underreported and don’t get taken seriously at all when they commit crimes. Women abuse children more and initiate 70% of domestic violence, yet men are still portrayed as the villains. You should read the comments or some of the reblogs under that post. Full of people who have been abused by women and have been safer when around only men,and never been taken seriously. You say it’s a strawman fallacy but no it’s not, radfems say this shit all the timesee. and are very gender essentialist themselves. Maybe you’re not saying it but a lot of popular radfems are, to mostly agreement from other radfems,so you can’t really blame people for seeing that and understanding it to be a popular TERF take.

Hi -

So, I'm going to answer this ask and the one that includes the bustle link that I expect was also sent by you? However, I'm not going to continue putting in this degree of effort (i.e., reading and researching the information you send) unless you start matching that effort. It will be difficult for you to do so in an ask (although I suppose you could try), so I suggest you reblog this post to further discuss.

So, on to the response:

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No, there is not a significant reporting gap (at least, not one caused by sex).

You said "women get underreported and don’t get taken seriously at all when they commit crimes", but there is no evidence that is the case. Let's take the crime data from two sources: the criminal victimization survey by the BJS [1] and the FBI crime data explorer [2]. These two sources are helpful for this discussion because the BJS attempts to determine total offenses including those not reported, while the FBI only looks at reported offenses.

For 2022 (rounding numbers) and looking at violent offenses (excluding homicide as the BJS report is interview based):

Male violent crime: 4,750,000 estimated by the BJS and 1,990,000 reported by the FBI for an overall 42% reporting rate

Female violent crime: 1,220,000 estimated by the BJS and 777,000 reported by the FBI for an overall 64% reporting rate

These numbers would suggest that more female offenders than male offenders are reported (i.e., a greater percent of female offenders, even though in absolute terms there are far fewer female offenders). However, there are some caveats to this data that makes me reluctant to state this conclusion:

The crime definitions between the BJS and FBI differ slightly. For example, I had to search through the "other crimes" for the FBI to find simple assault and several additional sexual assault categories to try and match the overall BJS "violent crime" statistic.

These stats are incident based not offender based. So, for example, if John commits 10 aggravated assaults and 5 of his victims report the assault to the police, 5 incidents are recorded in the system. Therefore, recidivism may or may not play a role in reporting rates.

I calculated the rate using the offender stats for individual offenders and "both male and female offender". Proportionally speaking a greater percent of female offenders are in the "both" category (23% vs 6%). Other statistics suggest more severe crimes are more likely to be reported to the police (e.g., 50% of aggravated assault is reported vs 37% of simple assault). If we make the assumption that violent crimes involving multiple offenders are more likely to be severe, then this could partially explain the disparity.

However, this point is essentially irrelevant, as the statistics previously discussed in the CDC report don't rely on reported crimes, they specifically interview representative samples in order to determine prevalence rates. (The difference between this data (and data in the BJS report) and the number of reported cases is how we know these crimes are under-reported.)

Just to drive the point home: the BJS study, which again, looks at both reported and unreported crime indicates:

Men take part in 84% of violent crimes and the only offender(s) in 79% of violent crimes (the stats for women are 21% and 17% respectively)

The offender-to-population ratio is 1.6 for men and 0.3 for women. That means the share of men in the "offender population" is 60% more than the share of men in the US population. The share of women offenders is 70% less than their share of the US population.

And before you send me another debunked myth: no men are not victimized more: the victim-to-offender population ratio for all violent crimes is 1.0 for both men and women.

I've also talked about how men don't under-report abuse (at least, not anymore than women do) in the past, so see this post for a couple more sources.

There's also no evidence that crimes committed by women get taken less seriously. However, it is true that when women do commit crimes, they tend to be less severe than the crimes committed by men (i.e., women commit more simple assault and aggravated assault). Given this, women's crimes may be taken "less seriously", but that's because the crimes are less serious, going by the accepted definitions of the crime. (And this is not my personal opinion! There is an actual "crime hierarchy" used in the American justice system that ranks crimes by degree of severity.)

In terms of legal consequences, women and men receive similar sentence lengths with one major caveat [3]. Caretakers of children, especially, young children, routinely received shorter sentences. Since women are more likely to be the primary caretaker of children, they'd be more likely to see this sentence reduction. However, this gap has been closing since the introduction of mandatory minimum sentencing. Some research suggests women may receive harsher sentences than men for "traditionally male crimes" [4].

Either way, crimes by women are clearly taken at least as "seriously" as crimes by men.

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No women do not abuse children more.

You said "Women abuse children more", but this is an oft-repeated statement from terribly misinterpreted data.

The misconception comes from data from the child maltreatment report from the HHS [5]. This report looks at reports of child abuse and neglect. In it they found that 52% of victims had a female perpetrator and 47% had a male perpetrator. At first glance, this looks like women abuse more children (hence the wide-spread misinterpretation), however this neglects to take several things into consideration.

First, since about 51% of the population is female, even if we considered nothing else, these values would suggest parity in maltreatment (abuse + neglect) rates. Of course, even this interpretation is deeply flawed, but I thought it merited pointing out.

Second, and perhaps most important, these stats are not looking at incidence or even prevalence rates. This isn't a rate at all. For example, you may be tempted to interpret these as "52% of children in a women's care are abused" or "52% of women abuse children". These are, and I must stress this, completely incorrect interpretations. These stats say only that of child maltreatment (abuse+neglect) victims identified by CPS, 52% of them were maltreated by a women.

Next, these stats fail to take into account the fact that many more women are the primary caretaker of children. According to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), mothers spend 80% more time caring for children than fathers. This disparity widens even further when you exclude the "entertainment" categories like playing or reading to children (130% increase, or more than double) [6]. This matters because it provides some insight into how rates of abuse would be different. You need to adjust for time spent with children to get a meaningful rate. Another way to look at this is that despite mothers spending almost twice the amount of time around children as fathers, they account for the same number of perpetrators. This alone should tell you that a child is more likely to be safe in the company of a randomly selected woman than a randomly selected man.

In case you still aren't convinced however, the report also clarifies that the perpetrator sex varied widely by maltreatment type. Women were the perpetrator in 58.5% of neglect cases (vs 41%) and 70.5% of medical neglect cases (vs 29%). But men were the perpetrator in 49.5% of physical abuse cases (vs 49%), 89% of sexual abuse cases (vs 8%), and 59% of emotional abuse cases (vs 41%). While no form of child maltreatment is ever acceptable, I hope I don't need to explain how abuse (which "requires an action") is different from neglect (which "occurs from an inaction") and requires different responses.

Speaking of neglect: there is much discourse on how much of the neglect (and medical neglect) registered by CPS is "true neglect" and how much is a result of poverty. This is particularly relevant considering single mothers are much more likely to live in poverty than married couples or single fathers. Examples of this may include: a mother doesn't have enough money to buy food and pay for rent so she and her child eat very little until her next paycheck, a single mother can't miss work without being fired so she sends her sick child to school, a single mother can't pay for child care so she has to choose between leaving her child home alone or having an unfit adult (her own abusive parent? an unsuitable boyfriend?) watch her child. In all of these situations, something absolutely needs to be done to help the child, but it likely isn't the same something as a child who's being beaten or sexually abused by his father.

Other notes on neglect: even the relatively higher proportion of female perpetrators for neglect and medical neglect in this sample are well below parity when adjusted for time spent with the child. It’s also likely that men’s rates of neglect are likely severely under-reported here. Why? Because a neglect case is rarely (if ever) opened for absentee ("deadbeat") dads; it's also unclear how many men with non-primary custody are listed as perpetrators of neglect. (I ask you: if mothers are considered neglectful for failing to intervene on behalf of their child in abusive/neglectful situations, why aren't fathers?)

Other studies on child abuse perpetration (sadly no national reports) show:

Evaluations of child fatalities in Missouri over a 8-year period showed men inflicted 71% of fatal injuries on young children [8]

Evaluations of fatal and nonfatal abusive head trauma over a 12-year period at the Children's Hospital of Denver found 69% of the perpetrators were male (including 74% of the perpetrators of fatal head traumas) [9]

Data from conviction rates and victimization surveys suggest that 4-5% of adult, child sex offenders (as in child sex offenders who are adults) are female, meaning that 95-96% are male [10]

Altogether, this indicates that men are more likely to abuse a child in their care than women. Unsurprisingly, it’s safer for children to be around women than around men.

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No, women do not initiate more domestic violence/commit the same amount of abuse.

You said "women ... initiate 70% of domestic violence". It took me a while to find a source for this statistic, but I eventually found out it comes from a poorly done study that unfortunately finds company with a number of other poorly done studies touted by MRAs and anti-feminists.

Before we address that study specifically: a brief history of the nonsense plaguing domestic violence research.

To be clear, this is not a new discussion, we (the general we) have been having this same discussion about whether there's gender parity in domestic violence for, oh, 50 years or so. It is, possibly not entirely, but certainly mostly the result of the "Conflict Tactics Scale" (CTS). Intended for use in family violence research, it has several methodological flaws which make its results ... let's go with unreliable.

I really thought I'd discussed the CTS before now ... but can't find anything on my blog. But there is this post which is a nice pictograph about this next topic, which I will loop into our discussion of the CTS.

So ... why is the CTS so unreliable? Because "domestic violence" is not a homogeneous phenomenon. If I asked someone to picture an abusive relationship they are almost certainly going to imagine an abusive man controlling his partner through intimidation, likely restricting her behavior, and possibly hitting or otherwise physically harming her. This "typical" dynamic is what we think of when we hear "domestic abuse/violence". (I'd argue that it's what we should think of when discussing domestic violence, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.)

Notably, what this doesn't include is the -- far more common -- case of situational violence. A "typical" example of situational violence is arguments that "gets out of hand" and end with one partner slapping/shoving/etc. the other (switching between perpetrator for different incidents) or two people who routinely get "nasty" (name calling, personal insults) to each other during arguments. There's no intimidation or controlling behavior and it doesn't escalate. It also is generally not associated with significant victim hardship (i.e., no/little increase in depression, anxiety, or PTSD; little fear or feeling unable to escape the relationship; no or few physical injuries; little or no economic hardship; etc.). It's also what's predominately being measured by the CTS.

This isn't to say that situational violence is "okay". It clearly isn't, no more than a bar fight or slapping a co-worker is okay. It is, however, far more comparable to these examples (bar fight, slapping a coworker, etc.) than it is to the standard conception of domestic violence (which itself is more comparable to being a prisoner of war [11]). Some people have tried to resolve this by renaming the standard conception to "intimate partner terrorism" or "domestic abuse with coercive control". I have ... mixed thoughts on this, so I'm going to leave it at this for now.

If you'd like to read more about this, Michael P. Johnson at PSU (who originally proposed this division back in the 1990s!) has written a book and also has numerous articles about the topic.

I have a lot of sources about the CTS/differences in violence perpetration rates, but this post is already very long and I plan to make a whole separate post about this at some point. So, I'm going to briefly summarize the points and give some references that would be particularly helpful.

So, the issues with CTS include:

Failure to include a full range of possible violent behaviors, including many that are almost always perpetrated by men, including: rape, murder, choking, and suffocation.

Failure to examine post-breakup/divorce time periods, despite post-separation being one of the most dangerous time periods for abused women (but, notably, not men).

Failure to examine context. This gets back at the paradigm I mentioned above: studies that do examine context have shown that the vast majority of coercive controlling violence (i.e., traditional abuse) is perpetrated by men and the vast majority of responsive violence (i.e., self-defense) is perpetrated by women.

Failure to examine the severity of the violence and/or violence impacts. Studies have also shown that women routinely receive the more severe injuries than men. That applies to both the injuries received from coercive controlling violence and from situational violence. Notably, men are rarely ever injured from responsive violence. Women also routinely report more severe psychological and social problems as a result of abuse.

Extremely poor phrasing of the questions. The CTS is unique in its false positive rate, as has been established by several other measures of violence. For example, simply adding the stem "Not including horseplay or joking around..." reduced the number of violent incidents reported and also showed higher rates of female victimization than male victimization.

Inconsistency with every other scale/measure used for determining prevalence rates of abuse! Hopefully it is obvious why this is an issue, but as an example: if I created a new measure for "depressive symptoms" and I found that it correlated very poorly with every other accepted measure of depressive symptoms then my new measure would be considered to have very poor "convergent validity". In non-politicized situations, my measure would likely never make it to the publishing stage, and would certainly fall out of use once this poor validity demonstrated by another study. Unfortunately, science is not immune to politics any more than the people conducting it are, as we can see with the survival of the CTS.

I gathered this information from a bunch of sources, but I've selected a few reviews (i.e., papers that "review" or condense many other papers into one) that would be helpful to you [12-16]. I recommend [12] in particular, although [13] touches on much of the same information and is much shorter. Ultimately, the CTS can, at most, be considered a measure of situational violence (and it's not even very good at that!).

---

So, finally, why is the 70% study [17] particularly bad?

All of the above problems with CTS apply, but in addition to all of that, they didn't just use the already flawed measure as it was ... no they, narrowed it down into 6 total questions. In total it asked about the respondent's perpetration of victimization of the following forms of violence: threatening with violence, pushing/shoving, throwing something, slapped, hit, kicked. They then "assessed" severity by asking a single question about injuries ("How often has partner had an injury, such as a sprain, bruise, or cut because of a fight with you?" and the corresponding victimization version.)

So, let's see ... failure to include predominately male forms of violence? Check. Further exclusion of even the existing items on the CTS that do examine this? Check! Failure to examine time past the relationship? Check. Failure to examine context? Check! Failure to examine severity of violence? Check. (Asking about a sprain or a bruise but not hospitalizations? broken bones? concussions?) Inconsistency with all other measures? Definitely!

Other problems with the study: they asked individuals to rate their perpetration and victimization, they did not examine their partners responses to such questions. This is a problem for a study like this, given that men tend to over-estimate their partners violence towards them and under-estimate their own violence towards their partner, and women do the opposite over-estimating their own violence and under-estimating their partners [12]. A note that a related problem has also shown up for the original CTS (i.e., if you asked both partners to complete the scale, their responses may agree on the "explaining a disagreement" item pair, but there was little if any agreement on the severe items like the "beating up" item pair).

To make a bad problem even worse: they condensed their multi-item (8-point) scales into binary (yes/no) categories and 3-item (low/medium/high) categories. This reduction in variance likely created artificially high rates for women and artificially low rates for men.

Hilariously (infuriatingly), they make it all the way through this data and then acknowledge that their study may not actually have examined domestic abuse at all! Instead it describes "common couple violence or situational violence", which, again, goes back to what the paradigm I introduced earlier. Of course, they don't revise their title or abstract to be less misleading ... that wouldn't be sensational enough.

Also, just to point this out: even this poorly designed, misleading study still showed "men were more likely to inflict an injury on a partner than ... women". So ... there you go. Even tipping the scales/design as far in favor of a "gender symmetry" result as they can possibly go, women still end up injured more than men.

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So, for the rest of your ask:

"yet men are still portrayed as the villains"

well when 1 in 3 men around the world openly admit to abusing women, and they are the perpetrator of 90+% of homicides, and 10-67% of men openly admit to believing non-defensive physical and sexual violence against women is at least sometimes okay it's pretty easy to see why women can see them as the villain/enemy.

"You should read the comments or some of the reblogs under that post. Full of people who have been abused by women and have been safer when around only men,and never been taken seriously."

This is one of those cases where critical thinking skills are pretty important! Let me start you off:

Do I think that a social media post will garner a representative sample from which to draw conclusions? Or is more likely that people who agree with the post will comment on and re-blog it, spreading it more people who are more likely to agree with it?

Can I see the re-blog I'm making comments about (i.e., evidence-based-activism's re-blog?). If not, (hint: it's not in the re-blog viewer :)) is it possible that there are other hidden replies that are disagreeing with this post?

Maybe most importantly: do I need female-on-male or female-on-female violence to be as common as male-on-female and male-on-male violence in order to show compassion to those who do experience it? (Hint: you shouldn't!! Something doesn't need to be common to deserve sympathy and rare =/= excusable.)

In addition, this is touching on a pretty common issue with discourse these days -- the prioritization of "feeling" over "being". Someone (male or female) may feel safer around men, but statistically speaking they are safer around women. It's reasonable to respond to and accommodate people's feelings on an individual basis, it's not reasonable to base an ideology or policy around them.

"You say it’s a strawman fallacy but no it’s not, radfems say this shit all the timesee. ... Maybe you’re not saying it but a lot of popular radfems are, to mostly agreement from other radfems,so you can’t really blame people for seeing that and understanding it to be a popular TERF take."

Similar to the last point ... views on social media are not representative of a population. Views that you, specifically, are seeing are not representative! If they were, then "well, I see more posts preemptively criticizing people for not including men than I see posts excluding men" (which is true, almost every post I read now-a-days includes caveats like "but men are abused too!! and women can be abusers!!") would have been a valid counter-argument to your ask. But see, I know that my experience on social media is not universal, and I should hope you can acknowledge the same of your own!

Also ... to be fair to all these unnamed "radfems", I'm guessing that you would consider my posts (like this response) to be an example of someone "saying this", which is very much not the case. I am acknowledging social trends and making reasonable generalizations to allow for communication about a complex topic (you know, the way people do for any and every topic ever), but I'm not claiming that no women is ever abusive or that no man has ever been abused. I'm guessing that these other posts are pretty similar (if less verbose).

side note, you also said: "radfems ... are very gender essentialist themselves".

Either you don't know what "gender essentialist" means or the people you are talking to/about are not radfems. I acknowledge that there are a number of people going around and saying they're radfems, but the nice thing about a political group like this is they have (at least some) defined beliefs.

So, for example, if someone went around saying they are a communist, but then when asked to describe their desired economic system, describes an economy based around the free market and decentralized production ... then they aren't a communist no matter what they call themselves. A command economy is a central tenant to communism, so much so that a desire to implement one/have one is intrinsic to being a communist.

In the same way, if someone is calling themselves a radfem, but supports the preservation of gender/gender roles or believes that femininity/masculinity is biologically innate ... then they aren't a radfem.

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TL;DR:

Violent crimes for women and men are reported at similar rates.

Women and men are punished similarly for violent crimes (i.e., people do take crimes by women seriously).

Children are safer in the company of women than men. There is insufficient research to accurately describe perpetrator demographics of "minor" child abuse/neglect, but there is significant research indicating that men are the perpetrator of the the vast majority of severe injuries, fatal injuries, and sexual abuse.

Men commit the vast majority controlling domestic violence (the type of violence people think of when thinking about domestic violence); women's violence is predominately responsive. Women are also the recipients of the vast majority of injuries (minor and severe) and are the victim of almost all fatalities.

Social media posts are not representative studies.

Critical thinking skills are important!

And, everyone -- regardless of sex or any other demographic characteristic -- deserves compassion when harmed. It is still appropriate talk about trends and create policies that assist the majority of those harmed.

A reminder that I will expect a reasonable degree of engagement with this information if you plan to engage in further discussion! I'll answer the bustle link ask, but after that I'll simply delete asks that don't make a genuine attempt to think critically about this information. (Clarifying questions are okay to ask though :)).

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References below the cut:

Criminal Victimization, 2022 | Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimization-2022.

“National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Details Reported in the United States .” Federal Bureau of Investigation Crime Data Explorer, https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend.

Myrna S. Raeder Gender and Sentencing: Single Moms, Battered Women, and Other Sex-Based Anomalies in the Gender-Free World of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 20 Pepp. L. Rev. Iss. 3 (1993) Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/plr/vol20/iss3/1

https://web.archive.org/web/20240406064949/https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2019/jan/12/intimate-partner-violence-gender-gap-cyntoia-brown

Child Maltreatment 2022. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/report/child-maltreatment-2022.

“Average Hours per Day Parents Spent Caring for and Helping Household Children as Their Main Activity.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/activity-by-parent.htm.

Shrider, Emily A., Melissa Kollar, Frances Chen, and Jessica Semega, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-273, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2020, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Washington, DC, September 2021.

Schnitzer PG, Ewigman BG. Child deaths resulting from inflicted injuries: household risk factors and perpetrator characteristics. Pediatrics. 2005 Nov;116(5):e687-93. doi: 10.1542/peds.2005-0296. PMID: 16263983; PMCID: PMC1360186.

Starling SP, Holden JR, Jenny C. Abusive head trauma: the relationship of perpetrators to their victims. Pediatrics. 1995 Feb;95(2):259-62. PMID: 7838645.

McCartan, K. (Ed.). (2014). Responding to Sexual Offending. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137358134

Comparison Between Strategies Used on Prisoners of War and Battered Wives | Office of Justice Programs. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/comparison-between-strategies-used-prisoners-war-and-battered-wives.

Michael S. Kimmel. (2001). Male Victims of Domestic Violence: A Substantive and Methodological Research Review. The Equality Committee of the Department of Education and Science. https://vawnet.org/material/male-victims-domestic-violence-substantive-and-methodological-research-review

Flood, M. (1999, July 10). Claims About Husband Battering [Contribution to Newspaper, Magazine or Website]. Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre Newsletter; Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/215068/

Walter DeKeseredy & Martin Schwartz. (1998). Measuring the Extent of Woman Abuse in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships: A Critique of the Conflict Tactics Scales. VAWnet.Org. https://vawnet.org/material/measuring-extent-woman-abuse-intimate-heterosexual-relationships-critique-conflict-tactics

Shamita Das Dasgupta. (2001). Towards an Understanding of Women’s Use of Non-Lethal Violence in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships. VAWnet.Org. https://vawnet.org/material/towards-understanding-womens-use-non-lethal-violence-intimate-heterosexual-relationships

Shamita Das Dasgupta. (2001). Towards an Understanding of Women’s Use of Non-Lethal Violence in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships. VAWnet.Org. https://vawnet.org/material/towards-understanding-womens-use-non-lethal-violence-intimate-heterosexual-relationships

Whitaker, Daniel J., et al. “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 97, no. 5, May 2007, pp. 941–47. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020.

[genderkoolaid]

Hi. You always post a lot of info so I'm wondering if you might be able to help me. Is there a difference between radfems and TERFs? Are they both bad? If so, why are they bad? Are there any dog whistles to look out for when it comes to these groups? Please ignore this if it makes you uncomfortable. I've seen a lot of people pointing out that they're bad, but never really saying why. I want to make sure I follow intersectional feminism and not those groups.

Radical feminism is the name of a branch of feminism. It originally got its name because it advocated for extreme changes to society to address female oppression, but developed into a specific worldview which I (off the top of my head) would define by certain traits:

Oppositional sexism. Men and women (or "males" and "females") are fundamentally opposed. Oftentimes this is bioessentialist, arguing that this opposite comes from biology, but it may also be framed as a political necessity; a radfem might argue that gender and sex are fake BUT we need male vs female as political identities in order to identify our "allies" and "enemies". Regardless, males and females are physically distinct and political enemies. You can tell a man from a woman, either from their body or their behavior, the two categories cannot overlap, and no other gender/sex-labels are relevant.

Fatalistic perspectives on patriarchy. Not only are males and females opposed, but this cannot be changed. This may be bioessentialist (the opposition comes from something in our nature, which cannot change) or gender-essentialist (the opposition comes from socialization which occurs as a child due to outside pressure and/or internal gender identity, and cannot change.) Focus is not placed on an ideal future where men and women are equals and social partners. Instead, there is a sense that there is no way to truly have a society with men and women where males do not oppress females, or try to. Sometimes this is more implicit and other times you have people who explicitly believe in creating & enforcing female-only societies.

Misogyny as the source of all oppression, or at least the most important & the one people should identity themselves as before anything else. Those who call themselves intersectional generally only really care about other issues to the extent that they affect women in some way. Part of the downfall of the original radical feminists was the fact that the dominant groups were upper-class white women, who ignored racism and classism and silenced poor women & women of color, insisting that anti-racist and anti-classist action distracted from The Movement & that calling out other women's bigotry was anti-feminist.

A general suspicion of sexual desire and sex, often expressing itself as whorephobia (anti-sex work) and anti-kink attitudes, specifically under the argument that they are inherently misogynistic and abusive. Sex is associated with men and maleness, which again, are inherently the enemy. Sex WITH men, or with a person or object that could be construed as male, is especially bad.

The impetus to make your personal life As Feminist As Possible– "The personal is political." That isn't a bad slogan on its own (it's true), but with radical feminists it expresses itself as a high standard of Radfemmaxing. You should be celibate if you are attracted to men, or become a political lesbian, you shouldn't be masculine OR feminine (anti-butch & femme sentiment), you should reject makeup and shaving, you should cut off male relatives and even abort male fetuses– and you must identify with womanhood and femaleness, while rejecting any identity related to manhood and maleness. It's not just that you should examine your desires and choices and question why you feel the way you feel (again, this is a good thing). Radfems have the belief that they already know the correct answer to that Introspection, and if you come to any other conclusion than theirs (I like wearing makeup because it's fun, I want to be a man because it fits me), then it's taken as proof you are still brainwashed.

TERFS are trans-exclusive radfems. They believe that being trans is not real, or at least not healthy or an acceptable feminist stance. TERFs tend to use the language of "sex" and "males vs females." Many use the term "gender critical," meaning they see gender as fake and damaging, while sex is real and the proper platform for feminist analysis. I once saw a TERF define her stance as "it's not degrading because its feminine, its feminine because its degrading." They believe in things like autogynophilia and rapid onset gender dysphoria, and attribute transgender identity with sexual trauma, internalized homophobia and internalized misogyny.

TIRFs are trans inclusive. They believe that transgender feelings are natural and should be listened to and followed, and that feminism should take gender identity into account. However, they still have a "male vs female" worldview. They may argue that transgender men's internal gender feelings led them to internalize male socialization, while trans women internalized female socialization, meaning that all trans people's experiences with gender and misogyny align most with cis people who share their gender identity.

In both cases, anti-nonbinary exorsexism and intersexism are unavoidable. TERFs will label intersex people as "males/females with a disorder" and attribute nonbinary identity either to internalized misogyny (FTX) or to avoid being held accountable for male privilege (MTX). TIRFs similarly fail to acknowledge how someone's socialization can be affected by intersexism. MTX people are either trans women in denial or flamboyant cis men; FTX people are either trans men avoiding their privilege, or cis women avoiding their privilege*.

Not everyone who uses radical feminist arguments or shares the general perspective openly identified as radfem. There are many "cryptos" who purposefully obscure their political identity to spread radfem ideas in queer & feminist spaces. Other people adopt the general ideas of radical feminism without consciously identifying as one, because of cryptos and how pop feminism often adopts their flashier ideas. So it's important to understand these qualities as on a scale, with some versions being more subtle while others are explicit.

Radical feminism always reduces trans experiences (& experiences in general) to a simple, uncrossable binary, based either in gender or sex. Nuance and cros- or non-binary gender experiences are seen as anti-feminist and aligned with the patriarchy, if not part of a targeted plan to hurt feminist movements.

*the idea of "AFAB privilege" is. a thing in some people's analysis of transmisogyny.

[shamebats]

Transphobes either don't acknowledge the existence of fully cispassing trans men at all or only selectively and there's a reason for that.

Mostly, they have to pretend that trans men cannot have traits like full beards, masculine flat chests, an adam's apple, wide shoulders, deep voices, and especially not a "real" penis. Because that would be evidence that one can exit (what they consider to be) the rigid category of woman to that extent and it's very important for them to push the narrative that this is impossible.

Radfems will frequently talk about how if you try to transition, you will only end up looking like an ugly masculine woman. They share pictures of early top & bottom surgery results that are still healing to show how it's impossible to someone to surgically replicate a masculine chest or a functional, natural-looking penis. They mock early transition and non-T trans mascs for being delusional in thinking that anyone could ever see us as men. All so they can teach trans youths, their parents and questioning adults that it's best if they never even try.

Hell, even other trans people will sometimes claim that it's easier for us to detransition and re-closet ourselves for safety when necessary. Because of course T doesn't make you look like a man for real. You can just stop taking it, put on a dress and everyone will see you as a woman - that includes institutions that check your ID, which of course doesn't have your chosen name and certainly not your actual gender. No trans masc would change their gender in a country where there is a draft or a higher retirement age for men, because we just want to be called men without any of the downsides and we all certainly still want to revert our transitions and gain access to women's spaces. We love to do that actually. Being forced to detransition doesn't really hurt us all that badly, not like it'd hurt real trans people, because at least we can always just "fall back" on being women!

This makes it easy to erase us. Non-passing trans mascs can be dismissed as just women lite and those far into medical transition who look exactly like average cis men are...well, we don't talk about them...(unless we are "trans activists & allies" who want to scare cis women that transphobic laws will force scary men with beards and muscles into their bathrooms and dressing rooms and into women's sports, or TERFs trying to blame someone for putting the ridiculous idea into their children's heads that it's actually possible to for a trans man to ever truly be seen as a man).

[dressed2k1ll]

I’m giving up on men because

1. The fact that they all assume they’re experts in everything

2. The fact that they all assume they’re smarter than me immediately

3. The fact that they allow and use slurs to divide women like Karen, Pick Me, Terf, The Main Character, SWERF, prude, slut bitch

4. The only slur they have is incel which relies on the premise that they’re entitled to sex

5. Moms are expected to be perfect and if she makes a mistake she’s a bad mom. Dads are considered perfect despite their mistakes and even being a poor parent

6. They think sex is a service

7. They cannot have a magic sexual moral barrier that divides children from teens from women. I refuse to believe it. And the media sexualizes kids and infantilizes female sexuality… so what now?

8. That porn is so normalized and teen is a category and yet we can’t check a man’s porn viewing history before allowing them to coach, treat, or be alone with vulnerable people.

9. That some will and can and do have sex with corpses. That deadness is sexualized in fashion photography as arousing

10. That choking has become normalized in porn

11. That we know porn becomes increasingly more extreme through algorithm and capitalism

12. That they hide behind plausible deniability and think we are too stupid to see it - like the devils advocate position

13. That they convince themselves their plausible deniability is a moral standard

14. That even the normal married ones with little girls for kids are shitty

15. That they think their pleasure overrides the civil rights of a person

16. That they believe consent magically changes abuse into kink

17. That they don’t even know what misogyny is

18. That they think misandry is somehow comparable

19. That they think my hurting their feelings or making them feel uncomfortable is a violent act. That pointing out violence makes me the violent one.

20. That they defend Johnny Depp

21. That they’re afraid of false accusations

22. That they defend the reputations of men they haven’t met more than the reality of the women who report them lmao

23. They don’t take care of themselves physically

24. They can choose to be civilized but use animal evo psychology to defend subhuman actions

25. They believe that women’s sexuality is an economy for them

26. They created religion to usurp creative power from women

27. They convinced other men that humans came from a man’s rib, from a patriarchal god, when literally no man has NOT come through and from a woman.

28. They have sexualized every aspect of women’s existence including pain and crying

29. They’ve convinced women that empowerment is a feeling and not a change in power position

30. They blame their antisocial loneliness epidemic on us

31. The tried to use the Love Languages on us

32. They created psychiatry as a way to at least in part control women just as they created medicine to control and destroy midwives

33. They place the locus of responsibility outside themselves which makes them perpetual victims

34. They created purity culture

35. They created porn culture

36. They buy and use and masturbate to trafficked and vulnerable women and it doesn’t matter to them

37. They corner me in the workplace

38. They are always looking at us - I want to not be perceived sexually at all

39. They use women for all of their emotional dumping and we aren’t certified to handle it

40. They resent our happiness (shaming it)

41. We had to create laws to keep them from marrying and having sex with kids. Like, everywhere. We haven’t even succeeded globally

42. They hold women in power to an entirely separate standard than men

43. They’re lazy

44. They can solve complex problems and be incentive and self-improving at work, but are seemingly really incapable of doing this for relationships

45. They won’t see something unless it directly impacts them personally

46. They are emotionally unintelligent

47. They are violent

48. They are wilfully ignorant of the constant threat of sexual violence women face

49. They are making and using technology to get past consent

50. They believe women have a use value

51. They’re lying when they say they can’t show emotions : art, culture, music, etc belie this. And this is aside from the fact that we acknowledge their pride, nationalism, anger, boorishness, sulkishness, entitlement, jealousy, etc. these are emotions too.

52. They use power to get or pressure or coerce sex

53. They don’t mentor women professionally unless they’re sexually attracted to them physically

54. They’re bad and aggressive drivers

55. They’re predatory and some don’t know it ???????

56. They play dumb

57. They owe us reparations and refuse to even consider this - we were left out of Das Kapital

58. They try to turn their wives into their mothers

59. They moderate men and women differently in social media spaces

60. We can’t trust them as soldiers or peace corps

61. We can’t trust them alone with kids period - who do we tell kids to go to if they’re lost?!!

62. That they’ve turned violence into sex “body count” “fuck the shit out of you”

63. We can’t be honest with them - we have to tiptoe around them

64. I’m pissed more men aren’t speaking out about the obvious loss of civil rights of women globally - what the hell! It makes me believe that they kinda want it to happen (plausible deniability of course) because like it’s not gonna hurt them right?

65. At any given time I could pull up incidents where instead of intervening while a woman is being assaulted, the assault is filmed by other men. The reverse simply doesn’t happen.

66. They love borrowed authority

67. I hate them because when they ask “what do you want me to do about it?” And you say the most slacktivist thing, they won’t even do that. They’ll do NOTHING.

68. Because the most unsafe place for a woman in the world is the home

69. Because a woman is killed by an intimate partner globally every 11 minutes

70. Because the number one cause of death for pregnant women in the states is murder

71. Because they believe their morals are their best intentions. It’s like they all think they’re brave but he’s anyone done anything brave ?

72. They use weaponized incompetence to control people and be lazy

73. They believe sexism is benevolence

74. Because someone taught them that it’s the thought that counts and it almost never is the thought that counts

75. That gang rape is a thing

76. Because only a handful of men have most of the global wealth

77. They move goalposts: you can say what your experience is but they’ll discount it as one. You can say it’s others that have experienced the same thing and they’ll discount it as over represented.

78. There’s no acceptable way to be really angry with them, and express that, as a woman

79. They feel comfortable making comments about women’s physical appearance, touching us without our consent and bank on us not rocking the boat.

80. They refuse to believe in the wage gap

81. We could have child care as being mandated but because women are primary childcare givers, we don’t have this.

82. Medicine was only tested on both genders recently because it was too difficult to do apparently

83. Our medical issues aren’t taken seriously

84. Mass shooters are almost exclusively men

85. Because they moan about suicide rates and forget to mention all the women and kids and sometimes strangers that suicidal men take with them

86. They believe they’re entitled to sex - through payment guilt or force

87. They rarely care about what girls think unless they have a daughter

88. Cultures abort girl babies and before they just exposed them to the elements. As a result there’s India and China and the Middle East Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan Vietnam etc there are more men than women

89. They don’t stop female genital mutilation. And they could if they wanted to.

90. More than 100 million women are missing - the shortfall of the number of women in the world we would expect in the absence of sex discrimination

91. They desire us to be dependent on them. Independence terrifies them.

92. They let women leave the workforce during the pandemic.

93. They see male history, male writing, male law as standard and they aren’t. They’d freak out if the USA had 9 woman Supreme Court justices

94. They are more sexist than even racist

95. Male over female Domination is the first and most primal form of oppression

96. Prostitution is the first form of trafficking not the worlds oldest profession

97. They can compartmentalize the pain of others - especially if it doesn’t impact them or their family (their own private kingdom)

98. Every man assumes he’s the king and grows up taught that they deserve to own things, people and property

99. They see women as girls all as potential sexual objects. Especially if they’re mad.

100. They treat sex workers as a different class

101. Women don’t keep men as sex slaves

102. They’ve made the law such that women cannot logistically perform murder in self defence

103. They say porn is free speech and that it’s not real when it’s convenient

104. Despite all of this: all of the proof and every experience logged and litigated… that they don’t believe that women still are being oppressed under male supremacy.

105. Because someone has said it’s okay for drag queens to use “bitch serving cunt” as an expression of femininity- and claim it’s not misogynistic

106. Because of the so-called “husband stitch”

#misandry #misogyny #feminism #feminist

[communistkenobi]

went on a terf blocking spree and they were sharing this tweet around

and like obviously this is factually wrong - “homosexual rights” happens primarily through de-pathologising homosexuality, quite literally an effort to redefine sexuality and sexual activity, which was commonly followed by a legal redefinition of marriage in many states as not only being between a man and a woman, and parenthood as not being strictly done by a mother & father - that’s redefining gender categories! Gender doesn’t exist as a repressive force independent of political & legal institutions. Universal paternity leave is a redefinition of gendered reproductive labour through employment and labour policy, it is a structural economic benefit that incentivises fathers to participate in child rearing. This is a (limited, partial) redefinition of what it “means” to be a man, just as gay marriage is a redefinition of what it means to be a husband or wife, just as allowing gays to adopt is a redefinition of motherhood and fatherhood. 

And this denial of being in an “ideological cult” is also intentionally downplaying the massive homophobic outcry that gays were/are in fact trying to destroy the meaning of family and marriage - that gay marriage would let you marry your dog, that gay parents are all pedophiles, that even expanding the definition of the nuclear family to include cis gays would threaten to destroy all categories of familial and civic life. Denying that gay rights are not viewed as an “ideological cult” of their own is laughably homophobic.

Taking this argument to its natural conclusion - that cis gays just want to be “left alone,” they aren’t here to “redefine” anything unlike the transsexuals - means a comprehensive denial of the law as an institution that produces patriarchal and gendered violence, that societal conceptions of gender (and the oppression produced by those conceptions) are unaffected by legal redefinitions of family and marriage. An absurd claim! This argument denies patriarchy as a social force, assigning it instead to this mystical abstract force that exists “out there” in nature, unable to be punctured or altered by any social response. Like tbh if you believe that why even fight for gay marriage at all? Just accept your lot in life as broken men and women with a mental disorder that makes you incapable of raising a family.

But of course they don’t actually really believe this, they know what side their bread is buttered on. Cis gays got themselves removed from the ICD and DSM, got gay marriage legalised in a bunch of countries (the tweet’s exclusive use of past tense when talking about gay rights implies the fight for gay equality is finished, an obviously self-centred western & homophobic argument) and said fuck you got mine! The king granted us entrance into his castle unlike you freaks, all we ever wanted was a seat at his table. Liberation is not the goal, cis gays just want to be permitted equal access to the power of cisheterosexual society. This tweet is arguing that gender is not a relevant mechanism in the oppression of homosexuals, that their oppression is altogether something else, unrelated to ideas of what it means to be a woman or man, because they want access to the violence those categories produce. Destroying these categories makes this goal unattainable for them, and so now cis gays are continuing to pivot to reactionary opposition to trans rights. But don’t take my word for it - I’m just repeating what this guy’s saying!

[olderthannetfic]

How do we feel about the "Um just so you know the person you reblogged this from is an [insert undesirables category here]"? When it's some random meme or otherwise uncontroversial post, and not some elaborate political opinion post with a bunch of dogwhistles in it.

Because I just got it from a fandom acquaintance/friend and it felt really fucking unsettling.

Aside from the mutuals that I know from fandom and interact with, most of the other content I interact with on Tumblr is more about what it says than about who said it for me. I don't ever pay attention to who wrote what or which other Tumblr users they had beef with or whatever, I just read the post itself and decide if I like what it says or not. If someone posts something I REALLY dislike, I block them and move on, more in the hopes of seeing less of that sort of thing than with the intention of somehow eliminating that specific person. I never pay attention to who my mutuals are reblogging from and if I note that one of them reblogged something featuring a poster who's famously unhinged, I just assume they don't know and move on because I know my mutuals are reasonable people generally speaking. I like the anonymity of Tumblr and the focus on the content of the posts and not on specific people. It's why I hang out here and not on one of the platforms that are all about influencers and the like.

So today I was going through the blogs of a couple of people I don't follow to find a specific post and in the process I saw a fairly uncontroversial post I liked, reblogged it, and moved on. Then less than an hour later I was met with a wall of text in my DMs accusing that poster of having questionable political opinions and describing the beef they had with another person where they threatened them etc. etc.

TBH I felt incredibly uncomfortable with the level of scrutiny implied in paying attention to who I reblog random shit from, as well as the level of presumption in coming to my DMs and lecture me about it. I know nothing about the blogger they were talking about, have never interacted with him, and will probably never even have the opportunity or the desire to interact with him. He wasn't even the AUTHOR of the post, it was just on his profile. It makes me want to never post anything ever again.

I just... don't see the point of this sort of behaviour in general? "You shouldn't be giving [bad people] a platform" - look, I genuinely don't think that reblogging a pretty landscape from someone who turns out to be a TERF or whatever is platforming those beliefs in any way. I'm sorry, but I just don't see how my behaviour leads to any material harm to anyone. Even if I follow the person, the moment they start talking about TERF-y shit I'm gonna unfollow and/or block. The probability of me throwing all my well-developed political opinions down the drain and getting radicalized through the slippery slope of reblogging "CATS ARE SO CUTE WHEN THEY SWAT AT THINGS" from someone with a dogshit take about Palestine is literally zero. If it's the content of the post that's wrong, just explain why to me, or point out the dogwhistles or whatever. I'm open to being wrong in my opinions. I'm not open to my online friends acting like the fucking Stasi.

Maybe I'm just too old for these newfangled social politics but it just feels like either pointless catty high school drama or an attempt at social control that I can't help but interpret in a hostile manner. Even if it's followed by - as it was in my case - something along the lines of "obviously I'm not accusing YOU of anything!! I'm sorry it came off that way!!" when I pushed back against it. It feels like 1950s conservative housewives making sure you're not even greeting any of the town Undesirables at the grocery store, because you wouldn't want to be Morally Tainted by saying Hello to a divorcee!

It's kind of similar to the whole issue about people still writing HP fic. Am I interested in HP fic? TBH not at all - the author had soured it for me with her behaviour even before it was obvious how much she hated trans people. Do I think the people doing it are somehow harming anyone or putting money in JKR's pocket? I honestly can't see how, and so far none of the people adamantly against it have managed to explain it to me in a satisfying way, so I'm just gonna let it slide off me as another random internet hobby I don't get or care about.

--

My reaction is "Do you understand how Tumblr works? Do you?"

We have enough trouble with people reblogging barely-hidden anti-kink or homophobic shit. Who has time for cootie-based problems?

[velvetvexations]

The push against gender neutrality by Radfems/TERFS is very intentional and deliberate to cut trans guys/mascs/men out of these spaces and resources. Whether it's tampon labeling, access to spaces to discuss gendered marginalization or medical care (such as abortion, pregnancy, cervical cancer, endometriosis etc). They want us to suffer as punishment for transition or be forced into detransition.

The deflection towards trans women serves the purpose of both inflicting transmisogyny and changing to topic away from transmasculine issues. This constantly happens and means that trans people and allies are (rightfully) pushing back against transmisogyny but the discussion has been completely redirected. Transmisogynistic radfems generally don't want to be seen as attacking people that they have (transphobically obvs) categorized as female/born female/assigned female and I think this contributes to the way these attacks tend to be more covert.

I also think the hyper-visibility, erasure and the dynamic between them is very much systematic and plays out across society and in queer and trans spaces. I think it's telling the way some people do react negatively transmasculine people being more visible in a few niche spaces. Like, I do think conversations about addressing intracommunity visibility require sensitivity; because I don't want any trans person to feel like they are "taking up too much space" and try to shrink themselves as a response. I want us (the whole trans community) to be better at "holding space" for and supporting each other but I don't want any of us to feel obligated to preform that role in a transmasculine/transfeminine/transneutral debt kinda way.

// I've kinda had these thoughts mulling around and I guess I have a lot of the same points as the earlier anon but imma send it anyways

It reminds me of the thing about how like, England didn't pass a law against lesbianism because it would let people know lesbianism was even an option. Oppression of trans people relies on the patriarchy hyper-focusing on their own traitors while conveniently scrubbing away trans men who they just put in the same category as a lesbian or butch woman. TERFs, on the other hand, must erase trans men so as to not reveal the ways in which they're so possessive of AFAB people and actually quite against them having choices and bodily autonomy when it breaks from the Cult of the Sacred Wymbynly Vulva.

[remus-poopin]

There's this underlying theme of motherhood being under-looked in Harry Potter - Voldemort underestimates Lily, Molly is seen as this frumpy housewife, etc... and JKR thinks she's blowing everyone out of the water by then making motherhood the single most important thing i the story!

Yet! Not a single working mother! In the entire series! "The struggles of motherhood" is JKR's favourite card to invalidate trans women's experiences, and yet she seems to have an (unsurprisingly) narrow mind when it comes to what motherhood can look like.

Here's an example that comes to mind: in the context of the second war, with Remus being a man persecuted by both the Ministry and Death Eaters for his condition and position in the Order, there was no reason for him to marry Tonks. I'm not talking about "building a family" or "being together", I'm talking about signing wedding papers.

Personally, I think JKR places a weird amount of value on traditional marriage, and upholds the ideal of a nuclear family above all things. She could not have Tonks giving birth a baby without being married to a man first.

YEP!

For the Tonks/Lupin issue you can’t even blame this fully on the fact it’s being written in a children’s book because JKR’s description of their relationship later on pottermore falls into the same traditional (and honestly puritanical) traps. And like you mentioned, this doesn’t even make sense for their story/relationship. (there’s an implication that they were only just friends until that confrontation in HBP and were never actually together or even hooking up. Most remadora shippers, like myself, tend to not like this version of events because it makes their whole marriage/relationship look a bit ridiculous. Tonks’ behavior in HBP comes off a lot different if they never had any romantic interactions at that point. It also seems odd that they would get married in less than a month of being together if they were strictly platonic up until that point)

And yes her view of motherhood is incredibly limiting and a bit revealing. In general it’s used as a tool which to measure her female characters by: The non maternal/improperly maternal women are clearly marked as villains (Rita Skeeter, Umbridge, Petunia, Bellatrix, Marge), the maternal ones are seen as demonstrating proper femininity and are therefore good (Lily, Molly, Tonks), women who were looked down upon previously get a redemption arc focusing around this (Narcissa) (Fleur can also fit into this category as she takes on a Molly like role in DH) and the women who don’t have kids but are still supposed to be seen positively look after kids to some capacity (McGonagall)

Her use of motherhood in the terf rhetoric she spreads is stemming from a similar idea. Gender essentialists tend to highlight female suffering as their primary justification for their exclusionary behavior, whether this suffering be biological or societal. Suffering and pain is used to define femininity itself. Suffering, female suffering, is noble, divine, inherent, and honorable. Motherhood, like you mentioned, is one of the biological sufferings they reference for their argument. The pain of giving birth and the sacrifice of your body and the rest of your life is noble, divine, inherent, and honorable.

In the books motherhood is suffering and motherhood is sacrifice. A woman who accepts this role of pain achieves righteousness. A woman who rejects it is selfish and wicked.

[anti-terf-posts]

so one of my special interests is cults right, so im pretty familiar with what's known as the BITE (Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control) model

its basically a method of identifying how much of a cult a group is and was made by a former cult member so u know it's pretty legit. The higher the group scores, the more likely it is that it's a cult

well, there's about 37 points in total (counting each criterion as 1 point and adding all four categories together) and, since everybody mentions how much of a cult terfs seem to be, I decided to run their methods and behavior through the BITE model

terfs scored a 21/37, which is a 56.76/100 in percentage terms, which isn't that high. it skirts culty, but it can rest as is. right?

all im saying is that, if what ur preaching is meant to be the absolute truth of reality and the rest of us are delusional, maybe ur cult score should be *significantly* less than over half, y'know?

anyways, just thought i should pop in and throw that out here. can totally reblog with/drop the images i used to score terfs on here if u want (as in, both the highlighted versions that detail all the criterion terfs hit, as well as non-highlighted images for people to score other weird hate groups for fun in the middle of the night too) (also feel like you'd find this funny: the category terfs scored the highest on (8/9) was information control)

yeah this is insane (not at you, this is directed at terfs)

Literally wild that people just write them off as some dumb people who don't know what they're talking about ?? when they're literally a cult ??

well obviously given your research they're not 100% a cult, but tbh a score that high is still ridiculous

[ipso-faculty]

Is saying "intersex and/or mesosex" the same way of saying "trans and/or nonbinary"? Sorry I'm trying to (un)learn, I don't want to be seen as insensitive

No, mesosex should be thought of as a subset of intersex. I'd just say intersex. 👍️

I'm gonna give you a wall of text of context so upfront a TLDR: 😅

TLDR: positioning mesosex as in between perisex and intersex is like positioning bisexual as in between queer and not-queer. Intersex people are organizing for inclusive views of intersex and trying to create a middle ground between intersex & perisex plays into conservative efforts to divide and conquer us. 🧑‍🏫

So a big difference between being intersex and being trans/nonbinary comes from the role of medicine being far, far more powerful in its control and oppression of intersex people. In a lot of ways intersex is more like disability than like other queer identities. So much of intersex identity is gatekept by doctors. Intersex people are often told they're intersex by a doctor in a context of telling them they are disordered and broken. Fostering community amongst intersex people is hard because so many of us have been conditioned by doctors to think of themselves as rare freaks.

Right now we in the intersex community are fighting a kind of desperate battle for people to understand that it is intersex people who decide who is and isn't intersex, as opposed to it being up to doctors. And the intersex community consistently says that people with PCOS, Poland Syndrome, or even no diagnosis, who feel that their experiences line up with being intersex are intersex.

Meanwhile TERFs and other conservatives are pushing real hard to keep the definition of intersex as narrow as possible. They don't want intersex people to be common or for us to find community. They're invested in a narrative that intersex people are rare, and are disorderd men/women.

Right now, the track record of treating mesosex as not intersex has unfortunately been that it reinforces those conservative narratives. It's gotten used to imply that people with PCOS aren't really intersex, that they are mesosex instead. Same for undiagnosed intersex people. 😭

Even though this is not what I intended for the term, seeing what's happened with it in the wild it's been honestly scary and upsetting seeing this term get weaponized against an inclusive view of what intersex means. (And more experienced intersex folks raised concern about this well in advance 😨.)

Intersex being an umbrella category I think there is value in having microlabels within the umbrella category, which is why I updated my definition of mesosex rather than abandon the term altogether.

But yeah I would definitely steer far away from treating mesosex as though it's in between intersex and perisex - it's really not at all analogous to being nonbinary. I'd say a better analogy is that treating mesosex as if it is between intersex and perisex is like treating bisexual as being in between queer and non-queer.

The stakes are political inclusion and organizing - politically speaking, any effort to create a group between queer and non-queer generally serves to weaken the collective organizing of queer people. Same deal with intersex. Hope that clarifies things. 💜

[joan-deactivated20230204]

so much of what is frustrating about the way tme people on here will talk about trans women is that you can tell they only think of trans women as this aesthetic category, an abstract identity collected through memes and porn posts and the vague knowledge that when you say "fuck terfs" it involves trans women somehow. its a culture which will pat itself on the back for how trans-inclusive it is while at the same time parroting transmisogynistic lines that drive tgirl circles to become increasingly isolated.