I’m going to be honest, the fact that the vast majority of people in queer and feminist Tumblr - ALL of queer and feminist Tumblr, including ‘transandrophobia’ Tumblr and ‘transfeminist’/‘TRF’ Tumblr - have barely read any feminist scholarship at all drives me up the wall.
So-called TRFs like to act like Julia Serano is Girl Jesus but the vast majority of them have never read more than a few out of context quotes (if that) and are repeating badly-understood arguments that they have encountered on stage six of a poorly conceived game of text post telephone. I don’t much like Whipping Girl, I think it’s full of pseudoscience and it is fundamentally stunted by a profound lack of understanding of how sexism works for anyone who isn’t a binary trans woman. But even so, the insistence, even by people who tout Serano as the savior of all feminism, that the argument she makes are so simplistic and obvious that they can be understood through a half dozen 100 word post formulated in the style of an Epic Takedown of Le TMEs is extremely dismissive of this accomplished female scholar’s intelligence. It is, quite frankly, sexist.
And over here on ‘transandrophobia Tumblr’ (or whatever you want to call it) it’s not much better. I believe the people writing text posts sharing their experiences and thoughts are well meaning and they often form coherent arguments regardless of any readings they may or may not have done. But there is this underlying sentiment that the works of feminist scholarship that have been written in the half-decade plus that it’s been since the beginning of the mainstream feminist movement (not to mention all the writing by people suffering under patriarchy in the entirety of human history including from outside the global North) are at best full of outdated truisms that we enlightened Modern People already perfectly understand and at worst noxious tripe written by the bad people with the bad ideas that we should blacklist out of history.
It’s not my intention to be aggressive or accusatory or confrontational so forgive my fervent tone, I write like this because it’s an issue I’m very passionate about. But I will not mince words: this refusal to read the words of people who came before us, who analyzed gender and sexuality issues and what being oppressed for gender/sex/sexuality does to a person’s mind and soul and material reality and how these issues interact with other axes of oppression and much more besides, is stunting our advancement, as individuals, as a (trans) community, and as a (anti-misogyny, anti-transphobia, anti-intersexism, pro-bodily autonomy, etc.) movement. It is stopping all of us from being intellectually richer and increase our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world and other people.
Read more feminism. Read proto-feminism, read Marxist feminism, read liberal feminism, read Black feminism, read radical feminism, read postcolonial feminism, read materialist feminism, read ecofeminism, read Indigenous feminism, read transfeminism, read post-structural feminism, read transhumanism, read queer theory, read African feminism, read Chicana feminism, read feminisms I can’t even think of or have never even heard about.
Read it, underline it, annotate it, find new insights in it, disagree with it, hate it, throw it at the wall, reflect on it, recommend it to friends, discuss it, argue about it, compare one type to another, measure it out in your mind, be puzzled by it, be confused by it, be surprised by it, be moved by it, be bored by it, tear off the pages and eat them when you’re done for all I care. But please, PLEASE: read more feminism.
