Wangari Maathai

Thought dump

[hurupasyt]

The patriarchy is the most successful oppression movement, as evidenced by the sorry state of women's rights and lives in this fucked world. Non-gendered economic exploitation based on class hierarchies could be second because it rebrands every couple centuries like with feudalism and now capitalism but it is heavily opposed, so opposed that it has failed several times. Racism really burrowed itself deep, especially with slavery. Taking people from their home continent was their Big Thing, just what they needed to make it stick and it has stuck for so long. I wonder what's gonna happen now with all these technologies, so many opportunities for progress but it is best to stomp out that hope now. The people who own these technologies are the racist and patriarchal machines. We really are fucked. I can't believe that the only out is death, or delusional hope. The gods are having a laugh with us.

[thehairiestfeminist]

Let me describe to you what kind of world gender abolitionists actually dream about:

When a child would be born it’s biological sex, being an actual physical reality, would be noticed but not a single assumption regarding the child’s personality would be made based on it.

Growing up, children would be free to chose what toys and clothes they prefer. If they want to play with toy trucks or dolls, it would be fine either way. If they want to dress comfortably or in frilly colorful dresses, it would be fine.

Certain personality traits would not be encouraged in members of one sex and discouraged in the other. Females would be free to be strong, brave and assertive and males would not be shamed for being shy and soft spoken.

No female child would be called a tomboy and no male child would be called a sissy. No kid would ever be bullied for what we in our gendered world call “gender expression”.

When children would reach puberty they would still be free to dress how they want. Females would not be pressured to wear clothes that reveal their bodies and males would not be shamed if they chose to. Everybody would have a free choice of accessories, which would not be categorized as “men’s” or “women’s” but people could should whichever they liked. Or chose to not wear accessories at all if that’s what they are more comfortable with.

Females would not be pressured to keep their bodies slim, soft and hairless. Males would not be pressured to be athletic and muscular. Expectations of femininity and masculinity upon the body would not exist and affect negatively people’s relationship with their own body.

Everyone could choose a career without fearing stigmatization within that particular field because of their biological sex. The most important thing would be competence and not what someone has between their legs.

Domestic work would not be considered “women’s work” and would be shared equally between the sexes.

Biological sex would only be thought about when relevant. And everyone would be free to be themselves without ever having to worry about gender expectations. Nobody would feel the need to repress certain parts of their personality and exaggerate others in order to fit into some gender role that is being forced on them.

Gender abolitionism is not about restricting people’s choices but about giving them greater freedom.

- http://burningax.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/a-gender-free-world-boring/

[hurupasyt]

And if transracial surgery was a real thing and white people could become black, there would most definitely also experience racism if their surgeries and features passed enough for black people. And most probably those white people would claim that the racism they face is worse, maybe they would have a new word for it, because they would still be racist white people (because we all know that appropriating or minstreling is racist).

[drpepper-is-a-woman]

Once again for gender ideologues, segregation of the sexes is not comparable to racial segregation. Using this comparison is usually racist and unbelievably ignorant.

Racial segregation was put in place to alienate, disenfranchise, degrade, and control Black people in America. Any spaces that were accessible to Black people were usually put in inconvenient places and made with lesser quality. They could be jailed, beaten, or murdered for daring to use white facilities for ANY reason.

Black men and women have the same needs as White men and women. Segregating schools, restaurants, water fountains, and public areas was not for the protection of either class. It was meant to oppress. This is not the same as women fighting for their own protected spaces.

Sex segregated things like bathrooms, locker rooms, gyms and even schools emerged from the fact women were literally not allowed to be there in the first place. Feminists had to fight for a public bathroom, they had to fight for the right to an education. Even when women were legally allowed to have jobs and attend school they were subjected to mass amounts of sexual and physical violence.

Women created female only spaces for themselves. For their protection in public spaces that they have every right to occupy. Black women have the same need and right to safety from men that White women do.

Trans women are not being denied access to public spaces. They never have been. They can use public bathrooms, locker rooms, and gyms. They have never historically been banned from getting an education, having a job, being able to vote, getting an abortion, or owning property. They never had to use a 'trans only' water fountain, lest they be jailed or beaten.

Trans women just want access to female only spaces because it validates their identity. It doesn't offer them any real opportunities that they didnt have before. This is why its racist to compare the plight of Black women to Trans women. It completely ignores the aspect of sex based oppression. Trans women have the privilege of being born male. They have never had to experience sex based oppression and they never will.

Stop comparing Black women to men. Its racist.

[hurupasyt]

The comparison is especially sinister because sex segregation has already happened, and it was to discriminate against women. The female class was kept away from jobs and schools and rights. That's literally what we are trying to fight, by creating spaces for us to congregate and shed our woes. An accurate comparison would be transracials demanding access to whatever spaces we Black people have carved for ourselves, our schools, our churches, our communities, our rights, demanding centrestage in anti-racist movements.

[minouminouminou]

It's crazy how resistant the left, as a generalisation, is to acknowledging sexism. The richest, whitest, straightest, most able-bodied, most gender-conforming woman is still subject to sexism and I think a lot of leftist men would rather die than admit it.

[minouminouminou]

I think there is a real resentment simmering under the surface, this idea that women have been cynically exploiting claims of sexism and have become too privileged, that exists in a lot of leftist spaces that no one wants to admit to themselves. And I think a lot of women have really internalised that and will jump at the chance to push the bad women under the bus to soothe their own guilt and self-loathing. It's sad in younger women and fucking annoying in older ones.

[hurupasyt]

People really do think that men did nothing during this reclamation of our rights, that there was no resistance. Feminism has not developed in a void with men just letting us regain freedom; thinking so paints men in undeserving good light and also advances the patriarchal agenda of making sexism look like a thing of the past and diminishing the achievements of all feminists, making it look like they didn't even work too hard, like they didn't need to work that hard, like men never meant to hurt us, like in fact women overreacted and we need to stop for thinking that the oppression we've been given isn't what we deserve and asking for more hurts men so we should stop with this silly little game of feminism.

There is no system of oppression that goes down without fighting back, right now, there is racist propaganda everywhere. There is patriarchal propaganda everywhere, all the time. The fight has never been won. Women have never been free. Millions are trafficked, millions are mutilated, hundreds of millions are raped and beaten. These things are happening right now. I don't know any woman who has never experienced any sexism.

[hurupasyt]

I have been trying to understand if someone can be hyper fixated on someone else's genitals without it being a fetish and I think the answer is no. Because even with women who want larger boobs, they are still fetishizing women with full chests, they think that big breasts are inherently sexual and so they get them too. And genitals already have so much attached to them. It is no wonder trans men exist. If at 12, when I felt so much distress over my body and was just starting to realize that I am treated differently based on the body I have, if someone has come and told me that it could be better if my body was different, then I would have changed it.

It's basically the same logic with fatphobia, they treat fat people like shit and when they are in distress, they sell them ways of changing themselves so they are treated better. Instead of just combating oppression in the first place.

[djuvlipen]

i went to a leftist festival last month and there was a panel dedicated to prostitution, why abolition is the only road to go for leftists and how to help and support prostituted women exiting the trade, and i keep thinking about that union organizer who said, "we hear more and more that 'sex work is work', but if that were true, then there'd be professional trainings leading to a qualification for prostitution, then there'd be prostitution diplomas, then high schoolers could send applications to follow those trainings and become prostitutes. but we all know that all these things don't exist, and if they did exist we would all recognize them for what they are: a grooming business encouraging pedophilia and violence against women and girls." and what she said later; "trade unions that argue that 'sex work is work' never engage in legal battles against pimps or brothel owners. they don't even recognize that pimps are the bosses of the prostitution market. "sex workers' trade unions" don't fight pimps because sex workers' unions don't represent the alleged "workers" (prostituted women), they represent the bosses: pimps."

and that made me think of what Kajsa Ekis Ekman said about the trade unions that consider prostitution to be work and prostituted women to be workers: they offer trainings about condom use and spend millions of dollars funding "worker peer education" about "safe sex".

So one again, it's prostituted women who are held responsible for the spreading and the prevention of STDs - not the johns, not the pimps. the prostituted women, many of them victims of sex trafficking. "As human trafficking expert Malka Marcovich has pointed out, this means a return to nineteenth-century ideals of hygiene, where the onus was “primarily on the women to take responsibility for the health of ‘the customer’, so diseases would not be spread to their families” (2007, p. 347)."

It's quite obvious to any trade union organizer that prostitution is not work and the sex trade can't be organized as a trade union. a few months ago, the biggest unions in my country (which included the traditional left-wing trade unions as well as students' unions) issued a paper condemning the 'sex work is work' narrative and the pimp lobbies got so mad about that because they know their strategy isn't working because leftists know what left-wing politics look like and they know women's liberation doesn't come from prostitution. Now it's interesting that the biggest voices of the "sex work is work" movement come from the USA, where the anticapitalist left doesn't exist. American liberals love to pass reactionary politics as revolutionary but not because they are stupid in their own country does it mean they should influence the actually left-wing labour movement in other countries, right?

[hurupasyt]

Most women are still such slaves to their programming, no matter how progressive they are. That's why so many women always have a man around, it may be their "progressive" boyfriend in their home, their gay friend in their social group, or the trans women in their activism. Women desperately want to believe that there exists a secret long-suffering type of man. It is one of the few ways they can reconcile their socialization with reality.

[hurupasyt]

The only thing this Paris Mwendwa discourse has taught me is that trans women really believe that they are synonymous with black women. Like they truly believe that white women are the default women and the rest of us are some type of woman, but not really women. The idea that racism and gender criticism are even close to being the same thing really proves to me that they don't know what oppression is. But we really can't expect much from people who think not being allowed to be feminine is the same level of harm as girls having their genitals cut off.

[lavendermenacing]

Given the gender identity movement’s own insistence that gender identity has nothing to do with material reality, that any person can be any gender regardless of sex, socialization, presentation, dysphoria or lack of, past identity, surgeries undergone and hormones taken, etc, I don’t see what the big deal is that radical feminists continue to use sex as the basis of class analysis. Gender activists demand that gender identity can mean nothing real or measurable (lest someone be excluded), which means that it can’t be used as a basis for any analysis about the dynamics of patriarchy, a material oppression. Clearly, there is an oppressor class and an oppressed class, one of whom benefits and the other of which is exploited. Clearly there are elements of patriarchy which directly target the female body; males simply are not subject to legislation regarding abortion rights, for example. You cannot talk about these realities without naming real, observable characteristics shared by women as a class.

To claim that patriarchy happens basically at random to a group of people who claim an “identity” with no discernible common characteristics, to the benefit of no one, is insane. It happens to women, with the intent of exploiting our reproductive potential, and this fact necessitates recognizing the importance of what women have in common.

There is no reason for this to be controversial, except that to name this reality makes certain men very angry. Men have always valued their own feelings and desires over the wellbeing and liberation of women, and they have always felt comfortable defining our experiences for us to their own benefit. Because being truly female is something they cannot actually attain, and the oppression of female people does not affect them, they feel comfortable demanding that femaleness now be defined by claiming it as one’s own on no basis of experience whatsoever, and that true female-specific concerns and experiences be silenced for their comfort.

Any movement which requires women’s denial of their own reality in this way is misogynistic; the fact that gender identity frameworks cannot explain or fight misogyny at its root is intentional and malicious.

[vegan-radfem-witch]

Like y'all need to understand that nobody was nonbinary, and then queer discourse on tumblr got popular, and then everyone was nonbinary

[downwithterf]

……..mkay, tell that to the many many non binary genders dating hundreds and thousands of years back on like……… every single populated continent

[vegan-radfem-witch]

You do realize that “nonbinary” genders in cultures outside of the modern west existed for either spiritual reasons or homophobia, right? Like you’re not wrong but you’re missing out on the context here.

EDIT: and even then, it wasn’t fashionable to be nonbinary, like it is now.

[sangredesirena78463748-deactiva]

i’m just going to copy and paste some text heavy info i wrote while researching the nonbinary genders of other cultures. because it’s very clear trans activists have no idea what these other genders entail because if they knew, they’d stop using it as an argument because these nonbinary genders are often homophobic, misogynistic, and intersexist, so here we go: “-two spirit is mostly reserved for men. only men are allowed to identify outside their gender role.

 
-sekhet is for infertile and gay men. if you can’t make babies you’re an entirely different gender.

 
-ashtime is for men who are infertile who were forced to live as women.

 
-out of all the north and south american indigenous alternative genders (there are several) only the Ninauposkitzipxpe were women allowed to live as men

.
-hijra is for gay or infertile men or even fucking women who can’t bear young and they’re treated like DIRT.


-yinyang ren is for someone who doesn’t conform to either gender role or fluctuates between both. any woman who doesn’t shave or any man drawn to makeup can no longer be their sex, they are “others”


-köçek, oman, metis, acault, chuckchis, fa'afafine, Mukhannathun? all reserved for men. only men are allowed to go against their gender role, but even then they are denied their manhood and are treated as “others” despite their will most of the time.


-in afghanistan and pakistan, when a family doesn’t have a son, they raise their daughter as a bacha posh, or a male, until she’s of marrying age. because if she’s not a man, the only other thing she’s useful for is marriage

.
-burrnesha were women forced to live a life of celibacy and “manliness”


-femminello even means “little man woman” for trans woman. 

is that the kind of representation you want?
i’ve yet to meet a person who identifies as any of these but hundreds of people claiming that these identities exist as some sort of trump card. when i meet these people i will respect their pronouns and beliefs. but fucking forgive me for not supporting homophobia and misogyny and often times genital mutilation, even if poc cultures practice them.”

[menywod]

also two spirit isn’t necessarily for a man to identify as not a man it’s a way to state that he was sexually attracted to men which made him “unlike” real/other men

[dyke-bytes-back-deactivated2017]

I wish genderists– especially white genderists– would actually recognize the harm they put us girls/(young) women under. There was rarely anything positive from non-Western identities, it was mostly prescriptive just like Western identities.

[omnivore-odyssey]

Societies have always had ways of “managing” those who do not conform to gender norms. This doesn’t mean that this is a positive thing because most of that management meant that gender nonconforming people will be treated as second-class citizens in society, similar to the way women are already treated. Instead of trying to model our current gender discourse after other societies who still treat women and gnc men poorly, why can’t we look outside the box and create a society where people can act, look, And be whom they want; where gender doesn’t mean anything and people can simply exist as they are.

[appropriately-inappropriate]

Also, “Two Spirit” was coined at a conference in the 90s. It’s not some Traditional Ancient Idea — it was a couple of navel-gazers in a ballroom somewhere.

[overt-menstruation]

For a movement that claims to be racially and sexually progressive, western liberals sure do like to use brown people to justify misogyny and homophobia. They imagine that these cultures are somehow more enlightened than the rest of us and completely fulfill the “noble savage” trope; then they appropriate those narratives and/or prop them up as examples of tolerance and equality.

The truth is that alternate “genders” have been created by some of the most conservative and socially repressive societies. They hate LGB people and that’s why they put us in the “other” category.

[haggishlyhagging]

Female socialization is a process of psychologically constraining and breaking girls—otherwise known as "grooming"—to create a class of compliant victims. Across history, this breaking has including so-called "beauty practices" like female genital mutilation and foot binding, as well as the ever-popular child sexual abuse. Femininity is really just the traumatized psyche displaying acquiescence. In its essence, it is ritualized submission.

-Lierre Keith, "The Girls and the Grasses" in Female Erasure

[hurupasyt]

Trans women complaining that women don't wanna fuck them is such an insidious thing when you realize that they aren't even being denied their sexuality. Even if they are exclusively attracted to women, there are women other than lesbians in the world. They aren't lacking for partners. It defies all the rules of sexuality, you can't prescribe someone else's sexuality.

Like I can say that I only sleep with gay women, because I want to sleep with someone attracted to me. Sleeping with literally any other demographic would be rape, because why am I fucking someone who isn't attracted to me, who doesn't want to sleep with me. I wouldn't ask straight women or gay men to sleep with me because I know they aren't attracted to me. And while I have never been attracted to a straight woman, I would turn off any intention to pursue her the minute I learnt that she was straight. And I think that is a logical response. I have done this with some bisexual women too. Like I want my partner to be so enthusiastic about me, whether the relationship is romantic or sexual.

No part of my activism involves me advocating that gay men and straight women should be more open to having sex with gay women, because that's rapey as fuck.

[biac-091299]

Being a radfem is like being atheist in a theocracy

[quinntheestallion]

Does it annoy you at times when feminists only speak in the trans issue and nothing else? Especially the western feminists?

Not really. Honestly, there's no way forward for global feminism if we can't get people to acknowledge the truth about sex and gender, and legally protect that truth. Western feminists being obsessed with this issue is highly appropriate. Women in the rest of the world are counting on white, western feminists to stamp this issue into the ground and prevent the rot of sex denial from leaking into the rest of the world. I'm not mad at their obsession because it's their duty. Privileged white women not being protected based on sex in law means less privileged women are going to be subject to catastrophic policies from the international organisations that have influence on the lives of women in developing countries. This is not just about trans, the implications of sex denial policies are enormous and will spiral. If sex denial goes unchallenged, all global feminist advocacy is in peril.

[hurupasyt]

This is so accurate. People never grasp the damage gender ideology has on policy and women's safety. In my country, there is a lot of sex -segregated schools, especially once you get to high school. Over ten thousand of them are divided by sex, I went to one. These school are usually side by side. There are brother and sister schools separated by fences. And even before the gender ideology became mainstream in the west, there were instances of men disguising themselves as women and sneaking into dorms to rape women. This has happened multiple times across the country, and that's just one country. These have been both minors and adult men.

And I think people also don't understand how much more severe sex based oppression is around the world. They think the patriarchy is men being mean to men. That the only spaces we have are bathrooms, that that's radical. But trans activists have already destroyed rape shelters because they weren't allowed to work there. I can't imagine what they would do to FGM shelters. Would they insist they become nurses and leaders at these female-only schools, where tweens and teen girls need guidance on very specific female issues?

Gender ideology derives its power from white supremacy, capitalism and xenophobia. If it continues, aided by imperialism, the only patriarchy that will exist will be the colonizer one and the only feminism that will exist will be the liberal one. Little girls who are groomed for be wives will grow up and escape those communities only to have to share their spaces with the men they were being groomed and mutilated for.

[hurupasyt]

And why is gender dysphoria always a moving goalpost? Coz every time detransitioners ask to be heard, they are told they weren't real trans people. And they say they were, they describe dysphoria and then are told that that wasn't dysphoria. They didn't experience it the same way a true trans person does. But the word dysphoria means something, we know what it means. No one would tell a recovering anorexic that what they felt wasn't actual dysphoria, that's why they had surgery to alter their body and then chose to love themselves as they are and are now recovering.

Like why isn't the end goal to have people love themselves in their bodies? It is not healthy to be that fixated on your body, especially your genitals which have such heavy bigoted ideals attached to them, this is why we find it strange for White People to change their skin. It is no wonder that the society that normalises obsessive gym behavior and diets and cosmetic surgery is the same one allowing for rhetoric and acts that propagate anything other than deep concern and unease at the idea of someone wishing to change their body to that degree.

And detransitioners will tell you this, that they were deeply unhealthy, mentally, and they needed help. But gods forbid women are heard.

[hurupasyt]

Why do people keep saying that masculine presenting women and black women and infertile women will suffer if radical feminists ( who don't even have any oppressive power) don't include them in our feminism? Like that's not even factual at all. Most cultures around the world have enforced multiple versions of femininity and motherhood for ages. For actual millennia. And non- conformity was always punished. Even if we all accept trans ideology, gender non-conforming people will still exist. Women will still be shamed for not giving birth. Gay people will still be harmed. Why are people writing fiction about oppression?