Things I really want TRAs to get through their fucking skulls.
B*tch, c*nt, and wh*re are misogynistic slurs. This isnât something I am ever going to debate. These are derogatory terms used specifically against women and using them against women doesnât make them less of a slur. Using them because âin some places c*nt isnât a slurâ doesnât make them less of a slur. Also, Iâm literally fucking British and have lived in Scotland for some years now so before you start with the whole âbut in some places itâs completely normalised and used commonlyâ: itâs not. I have heard some men use it to insult their friends, but itâs not thrown around constantly and is still typically used to degrade women.
R*tard is an ableist slur which should also never be used. (And, to be honest, lots of radfems need to learn this one too.)
We donât want trans people dead. We donât want them to struggle and be without help. We just disagree on the help that they should get. You think the only way to help them is to validate their gender and help them to change their entire body in the hope that might make them feel better. We think that mental health support designed to help them cope with their body issues is a much more effective form of support. No situation involves killing them or letting them all commit suicide. We want those who are genuinely struggling to get help.
Slight caveat to the point above: the males who fetishise womanhood and being a lesbian and who arenât struggling with their body and their identity but just get off to being in a dress and want lesbians to fuck them? They donât deserve help. Theyâre pornsick men. But the ones who really are struggling and just trying to get by do need help.
Your community is homophobic as shit. Saying that itâs just a âsmall minorityâ who support genital preferences and say rejecting trans people is transphobic and call lesbians TERFs for not liking dick does not fix the problem and only serves to diminish what those who have been at the receiving end of this hateful and homophobic rhetoric have been through. You need to start speaking up against this rhetoric and telling people that itâs not fucking okay. You need to start taking a stand anytime someone says lesbians need to learn to like (girl)dick or to have a sexless relationship with a trans woman to be inclusive or uses the term genital preference (certainly if theyâre saying itâs wrong/that people can learn to get over a âpreferenceâ; but even saying that itâs okay is homophobic because an inherent sexuality is not a preference).
Your community is misogynistic. Even ignoring the fact that the idea that trans women are women and that they know exactly what womanhood is like is misogynistic in and of itself, trans ideology is deeply misogynistic. Itâs not okay to use misogynistic slurs, even against women you donât like. Itâs not okay to send rape threats to women, even ones you donât like. Itâs deeply misogynistic to blame all transphobia on TERFs when itâs men who are typically in charge of laws being changed and men who are the ones going around assaulting and mustering trans women. And itâs deeply misogynistic to tell women to get the fuck over themselves and learn to deal with having trans women in their spaces. Women built female spaces for a reason and you are completely ignoring our sex-based oppression which is deeply misogynistic.
Oh, and trans inclusive language? Thatâs misogynistic to. Forcing women to refer to themselves by their organs and functions especially when women have been seen as little more than their organs/reproductive abilities; making this language completely inaccessible to many women, especially those who speak English as a second language; forcing this language almost exclusively on women while men are still called men (or sometimes just cis men to be a little more specific); and telling any woman who has a problem with it, regardless of their reasoning, to get over themselves? Thatâs all deeply misogynistic.
Self-ID will be dangerous. I donât care what stupid reasoning you come up with it not being dangerous because it will be. Men have and will continue to pretend to be women to access those spaces and creep on women because self-ID means that all they have to do is claim that theyâre a woman and suddenly itâs transphobic for them to not be allowed to enter. There is no âyou can tell the differenceâ because it doesnât matter what your personal opinion of that person is: if they say that they are a woman, they have to be allowed into womenâs spaces and creepy men will abuse that. (And, no, you canât argue that trans women âhave always used womenâs spaces and itâs been fineâ because we both know that we live in a different time now. Itâs no long a very, very small number of trans people who genuinely tried their hardest to pass as the opposite sex. So unless youâre happy to exclude non-transitioning and non-passing trans people from the spaces which match their âgenderâ, these are the only options.)
Keeping spaces sex-segregated is the only viable alternative to self-ID for most public spaces. Iâm happy to hear any ideas of how youâre going to make sure that only trans women can access womenâs spaces and that cis men will never be able abuse self-ID to get in, but I donât think such a solution exists. Therefore, I will continue to defend these spaces being sex-segregated because thatâs the best way to ensure that the women in these spaces are safe from the abuses of males.
Continuing to scream that weâre so worried about sharing spaces with trans women ignores what youâre actually asking for in regards to self-ID. As above, literally any person will be able to say âIâm a womanâ and access these spaces so while you may focus on the âgenuineâ trans women who just want to use the bathroom and be more comfortable than they would be in the male spaces, we worried about every single male abusing the existence of self-ID in order to abuse women. Remember what self-ID is: anyone can identify as any gender at any time just by claiming that they are that gender.
âYou shouldnât be scared of public bathrooms because the bathroom in your home is gender neutralâ is the stupidest fucking argument. Like, Iâm sorry, but how fucking idiotic do you have to be to think that comparing a private and public space is not only a good idea but will also support your point? You share a bathroom in your house with people you choose to live with and invite over; you share a public bathroom with strangers. Do you not understand that people can be comfortable sharing a space with family and friends, but uncomfortable sharing with literal fucking strangers who donât always have the best intentions???
Saying women are adult human females or that they have vaginas does not reduce women down to their organs and you are ignorant as shit is you continue to repeat this lie. Reducing someone to their organs (or any other feature) means that you think the only important/significant thing about them, that you view them as being only of value because of this feature. You know like conservatives saying that women are only valuable/useful for sex and giving birth to children? Thatâs what reducing women to their organs really means. Stating the common characteristic shared by a certain group does not mean you view the whole group as being valued for that one thing. Itâs why no one says that lesbians are female homosexuals reduces lesbians to their sexuality: because, in this case, we recognise that we are stating the shared characteristic that lesbians have.
Radfems donât believe in gender as a concept. If youâre talking about how radfems believe sex = gender then your argument is already flawed. If youâre talking about radfems believing in gender in any way then your argument is already flawed. We believe in the existence of biological sex and recognise its impact on people in current society, fighting for rights of women who are discriminated against on the basis of their sex. We use the words women and girls which describe people of the female sex based upon their age: adults are women and minors are girls. Men and boys work similarly. These terms are therefore sex-based, not gendered/gender-based. We believe that, functionally, gender is a set of misogynistic stereotypes which tells people (though especially women) how they are supposed to act and serves no purpose in society other than to make people continually question themselves and force people into little boxes. We believe that TRAs and conservatives have gone two different ways with gender and both are harmful: conservatives telling people that they must follow gender roles based on their biological sex and TRAs telling people to identify with a gender based upon what gender roles they like/take up.
Define woman. Please. All we want is a coherent definition of woman which doesnât rely on stereotypes, debunked brain sex, circular reasoning, or calling it âa feelingâ. No one has ever been able to give us a coherent definition.
You cannot argue that the definition of woman is not important when you fight tooth and nail to recognise trans women as women. You believe trans women are women so strongly that you think we need to fundamentally redefine what it is to be a woman within our society and adapt all our laws accordingly, so if you canât even define what it means to be a woman then why are you fighting so hard for the definition of woman to change? This is exactly why radfems focus on this argument so much: how can you convince us to recognise trans women as women, when you canât tell us what is actually means to be a woman without using circular reasoning, misogynistic stereotypes, calling it âa feelingâ, or debunked brain sex? When you are calling for womenâs spaces to include trans women on the basis that theyâre women, you lost the right to say that what it means to be a woman is not important.
Yeah, brain sex has been debunked after some fucking massive studies into it. Turns out, it was always rooted in misogyny and most of the previous studies were basically just confirmation bias to âproveâ that men and women are âwired differentlyâ to give a scientific foundation to all the misogynistic stereotypes surrounding women. Once you account for brain size, weâre really not all that different after all. So no, a trans woman cannot just be born with a female brain; a trans man cannot just be born with a male brain. No such thing exists.
Which argument do you want: there is absolutely no difference between cis and trans people and therefore many people have probably had crushes on trans people without knowing it OR trans people are in danger of being abused/raped/murdered specifically because theyâre trans? Because the first argument would suggest that trans people could never be targeted for being trans because people will always see them as their chosen gender and the only people who would know that theyâre trans is people that theyâve told but the latter point means trans people are targeted because people can see that theyâre trans and therefore many/most trans people donât pass and so itâs unlikely that people have had all these crushes on trans people because itâs fairly obvious that theyâre trans? Because Iâm willing to admit that some trans people really do pass and I would not know that theyâre trans unless directly told, but the percentage who pass that well is minuscule and hardly representative of all trans people.
Your community is racist. Stop leaning on the whole âblack women had their womanhood denied from them like trans women areâ. Black women werenât seen as women because they were seen as less than human; they were still viewed as female which is why they were raped and forced through pregnancies. Stop saying that attributes we say are more likely to be found in men are more commonly found in black women therefore we see black women as men. Thatâs an argument used in bad faith and you know it. Like please learn the difference between âmore commonly foundâ and âexclusively foundâ.
Your community is intersexist. Intersex people are not pawns to be used in your argument. Like 0.1% of the population having a condition which genuinely makes their biological sex more complicated than male or female does not disprove the sex binary and, if anything, the fact that these people struggle with many health problems and are typically infertile goes to show that the sex binary does exist. Moreover, if gender is completely different from sex then conditions which make your biological sex complicated/mixed should say nothing about gender. (And yes, I said 0.1% of the population even though intersex conditions occur at a higher rate than that because most intersex conditions donât make your sex more complicated than male or female so only a small percentage of intersex conditions overall make peopleâs biological sex complicated.)
Shut the fuck about PCOS. My condition is not to be used in your arguments. Radfems have never used my condition against me or called me less of a woman for it, so you donât get to say Iâm less female for it either or tell me that you somehow know that radfems see PCOS sufferers that way. Youâre the one who abused the existence of my condition and implies that Iâm not fully female to make some backwards arguments. Youâre the ones abusing the existence of my condition.
Going one step further than PCOS, shut up about women without a uterus or ovaries or post-menopausal women. We know theyâre fucking women, dipshits. Theyâre still adult human females, just ones who are older, went through some trauma which resulted in surgical removal of their sex organs, or had a developmental issue in utero which resulted in them not developing certain organs. (See that I said developmental issue? Because you know what we call people who didnât grow a uterus but thatâs not a problem/issue at all? Men.)
A lot of your views of gender are based on stereotypes. A lot more than youâre willing to admit. You can try to pretend that youâre above all the stereotypes and Iâm certain that you genuinely believe that you are, but no one has been able to define woman without referring to brain sex (which is normally just down to stereotypes and debunked anyway) or just straight up stereotypes. And so many people list various stereotypes as one of the reasons they knew that they were trans or non-binary. Even when people say that they donât âfeel connected to womanhoodâ or whatever as a reason why theyâre NB, itâs often because theyâre androgynous or not completely feminine 100% of the time. They wonât ever admit that as being the reason, but you can see from how they speak about womanhood and their disconnect to it that itâs true.
Not everything is a fucking dog whistle! A dogwhistle is an inconspicuous term/phrase/symbol which a group uses and only those who are within the group recognise. Like how 88 is a white supremacist number because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet so itâs HH which is Heil Hitler or how âI just want the trains to run on timeâ is a fascist phrase because it refers to people saying that Mussolini was bad but at least he got the trains to run on time. The only thing that might be considered a radfem dog whistle is TIM/TIF, not because it has a secret double meaning that only we recognise, but because itâs a term which radfems typically use and often isnât understood outside of radfem circles. It stands for Trans Identified Male/Female and we mean exactly that. We donât have things that secretly mean that trans people should die. We say exactly what we mean but you just choose to believe the secret meaning you made up over what we are directly telling you, probably because âI hate all trans people and I want them to all dieâ isnât something we say.
Saying that we only care about what genitals we have is a simplification of our views which is basically incorrect and used to ignore all our actual issues while making us out to look like creeps. Do you also not understand the homophobic history behind it? Being used against gay people to ask why they were so obsessed with what genitals someone had and why they couldnât be with the opposite sex? (Iâll answer that: of course you donât give a shit because you donât care about homophobia or using homophobic rhetoric which supports your ideology.) We donât actually care about if someone has a dick or vagina. We care about the fact that the dick havers were raised with male socialisation and that means that they experience life differently from us. We care about the fact that the penis owners are much more likely to abuse women and that far too many will do whatever it takes to be around vulnerable women so that they can abuse them. We care about the fact that we have faced specific issues because we have vaginas both directly (eg: menstruation and childbirth) and indirectly (eg: period stigma, medical misogyny, catcalling, and other forms of discrimination) and we want spaces away from the very people who uphold this misogynistic system to be able to discuss our issues openly. But you constantly ignore all of these issues and make it out to be just about genitals because you ignore our arguments and want to make it out like weâre fucking idiots.
âHereâs six women. One of them is a trans woman. Guess whoâ Isnât the argument that you think it is. Firstly, literally no one is saying that trans people cannot pass at all. No one. Of course we understand that SOME trans people do pass really well and we would never be able to differentiate them from actual women. Secondly, just because they appear like women doesnât make them women. They are still biologically male and hence a man. It really doesnât matter how feminine or well passing they are; theyâre men. Thirdly, it is not representative of all trans people. Yes, some people pass well but the photos you show are almost exclusively of rich models who are wearing heavy makeup and whoâve had extensive work done which isnât accessible to most trans people and youâre basically telling them that if they canât pass so well then they must not be women. Isnât that wrong by your own ideology? Fourthly, you really going to do that and then accuse us of saying that women must be feminine? Really? And finally, this is almost always used as a trap against us, hence why we often refuse to respond, but youâre not proving anything. Youâre not fighting against any of our arguments; you just think youâre fighting against the whole sexual dimorphism and generally being able to tell women and men apart but being able to generally do something doesnât mean that there arenât exceptions? Exceptions donât make the rule.
Iâm not here to argue about what I would believe in some theoretical utopia. Iâm here to argue about what is happening in reality. Iâve heard the line âbut would sex be important if we lived in a society which didnât discriminate against people by their sex/gender aside from when medically necessary?â way too much. And the answer is no, but we donât live in that world and that world is not going to exist within my lifetime at the very least, probably not for centuries. We live in a world where women are treated differently because of their sex. We live in a world where period stigma and medical misogyny and catcalling and rape and domestic violence and devaluation of womenâs labour all exist, among other deeply misogynistic issues. So me fighting to get people to recognise that sex is an important characteristic and defending itâs legal protections is not because I deeply believe that it shouldnât be an important thing (outside recognising medical and physiological differences), but because the way in which women are treated by society, particularly at the hands of men, shows that we have built a world in which someoneâs sex is an important characteristic and which will affect many aspect of our lives and hence we need to recognise the reality of the world in which we live in. If the end goal is to build a world in which sex is irrelevant outside of medicine then we first need to recognise why itâs not a reality now and work to fix that rather than pretending that everyoneâs going to go along with us and misogyny will completely disappear overnight or arguing the what-ifs of this purely theoretical world that we will not live to see.
Radical feminism is about freeing women from their sex-based oppression and fighting for sex-based rights. As a result, males of all genders all inherently excluded from our feminism. To say that we exclude trans people completely is ignoring the fact that trans men and AFAB non-binary people are included in our fight for womenâs rights because, regardless of how they identify, they have and will continue to be oppressed on the basis of their sex and they deserve rights to protect them from that discrimination. Your unhappiness that weâre only including people on the basis of their sex is not my fucking problem. Your unhappiness over trans women specifically not being included is not my fucking problem. Movements which seek to free people from their oppression donât owe it to you to include everyone, they only have to include the oppressed people that they are fighting for. Your inability to understand that is not my fucking problem and only goes to show your entitlement.
If you donât argue with me in good faith, donât expect me to argue in good faith either. If youâre going to twist my words, ignore what I say, tell me my sources are wrong with no evidence (or tell me that itâs not a source you like/trust enough), and refuse to respond to many of my points then donât expect me to do the same. I have tried way too many times to argue in good faith only to end up having my points ignored, my sources dismissed, my words twisted if not just straight up having words put into my mouth. If you are not going to be open minded when you talk to me, donât expect me to put the time in to explain things to you. If you are rude or dismissive or ignoring me or not asking questions, Iâm not going to put in all the mental and emotional labour to explain concepts to you and you have not âwonâ the argument if I have enough and stop responding. You are not owed our time and effort and you should never expect it just because you claim that you âreally want to learnâ.
Please learn some critical thinking skills. I know radfems say this all the time, but I really mean it. If not to understand radfems more, but to be critical of literally all the information that you absorb. I am tired of explaining to people that just because you donât like or trust the source (like the Daily Mail) doesnât mean that the actual story itself is untrue. Newspapers like this are incredibly bias and will publish stories which feed into their specific narrative, but it doesnât mean that what they publish is actually false? Unless you can actually find a source which can tell me that whatever story Iâm showing you never happened/was objectively false, Iâm going to keep using it. A story which goes against your beliefs doesnât make it a fake. Biases in newspapers come from the stories which they choose to publish (or not publish), the details they focus on, and the wording they use. My favourite example of this is a few years back when every newspaper was publishing articles about how the Labour and Tory proposed budgets were never going to work/actually balance because the assumptions they used werenât right. The Daily Mail, however, published only that Labourâs proposed budget wasnât going to work. Was the story correct? Yes. Did they purposefully leave out information which therefore gave a bias perspective of the two budgets? Absolutely. If you throw everything out which has any biases (which was a thing a TRA I argued with claimed you should do and said that was what they were taught to do), you would have to throw out literally everything ever written. Instead, itâs significantly better to be critical of what you read and understand what biases are in place and why.
