d e v o n
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Xuebing Du
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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YOU ARE THE REASON
taylor price
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almost home
JBB: An Artblog!
Love Begins
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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Keni
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@vibebeast
can't believe i have to say this, but "headcanoning" a nonbinary character who canonically uses they/them exclusively as using she/they or he/they, and then making jokes about how estrogen/testosterone "could save them," is erasure??? you're doing exorsexism?????
please can we just let neutral nonbinary characters be neutral nonbinary thank you
a vicious cycle
People will see an underwritten woman or black character and act like it's the character's fault
dont think i can ever take the opinions of nonqueer people seriously especially on the subjects of gender and sexuality. like these are the people who think their entire future and personality is dictated by whether they were born with a dick or pussy and start having breakdowns if someone tells them thats not true. never let the opinions of a nonqueer person inform your queerness bc they dont know a goddamn thing about queerness regardless of how much of an "ally" they claim to be.
can i just
At present, the dominant strand of transfeminism does not promote unity and solidarity. Instead, it has fallen into relying upon toxic and often separationist politics- a crude distortion of the founding ideas of transfeminism. Emi Koyama, author of The Transfeminist Manifesto, was explicit in transfeminisms inclusion of all trans people in its movement. She wrote that transfeminism began primarily for trans women and that "it is also open to other queers, intersex people, trans men, non-trans women, non-trans men and others" (2). Her initial publication of The Transfeminist Manifesto was in the year 2001. Two years later, she revisited it and added the following in the postscript of the 2003 edition "I take full blame for the fact that this manifesto is heavily focused on issues male-to-female transsexual people face, while neglecting unique struggles that female-to-male trans people and other transgender and genderqueer people face" (3). Numerous other transfeminist publications recognise the need for greater solidarity between all trans people and for transfeminism to be explicitly inclusive of all transgender and nonbinary people. Talia Bettcher explained in 2017 that "since trans men are also vulnerable to sexism, transphobia, and the interblending thereof, trans feminism would be ill-advised to exclude them from its purview" (4). [Reference 2: Koyama, Emi. The Transfeminist Manifesto, 2001 & 2003 p. 1] [Reference 3: Koyama, Emi. The Transfeminist Manifesto, 2001 & 2003 p. 10] [Reference 4: Bettcher, Talia, Trans Feminism: Recent Philosophical Developments, 2017, p.2]
"Transandrophobia describes the transphobia primarily experienced by trans men. While trans men do experience an intersection of transphobia and misogyny, they also experience an intersection of transphobia and a hatred of men or masculinity. Arguably, much of what is called transmisogyny for the experiences of trans women is also partially an intersection of transphobia and a hatred of men or masculinity. The ideal word for the concept is sadly marred by disingenuous cis men, but to use 'misandry' here tentatively is not an endorsement of any kind of MRA-style politics, but a convenient shorthand for a kind of hatred of men or masculinity which has a significance in (and only in) the context of transphobia. As alluded to, the term transandrophobia is the most popular term presently for the transphobia primarily experienced by trans men. Earlier terms did include 'transmisandry', which, aside from one academic usage in the context of an intersection of transphobia and racism (5), has not enjoyed much usage due to knee-jerk rejection of the term's suffix. In short, 'misandry' in this solely trans context conveys the transphobia rooted in a hatred of men or masculinity." [Reference 5: Martino, Wayne, Omercajic, Kenan, A trans pedagogy of refusal: interrogating cisgenderism, the limits of antinormativity and trans necropolitics. Pedagogy, Culture & Society. 29, 2021, p.679–694.]
"All trans groups experience a mixture of misogyny, 'misandry' and misandrogyny- the levels of which vary from group to group. Trans women may experience misogyny (such as unwanted sexualisation for being female and trans), however, they may often experience 'misandry' (such as the vitriol some transphobes espouse which accuses trans women of being 'violent males) and misandrogyny (such as transphobic rhetoric which centers around a trans person's appearance being androgynous and thus not easily sortable into male or female categories . This may result in slurs like 'heshe' being used). Trans men, on the other hand, may experience 'misandry' (such as accusations they are going to transition into -'violent men'), misogyny (such as insinuations trans men are being led astray and that they are incapable of thinking for themselves) and a similar kind of misandrogyny trans women may face. Nonbinary people may experience misandrogyny (such as being forcibly put into a male or female category against their wishes, especially in a medical setting), misogyny (such as rhetoric which claims being nonbinary is a social contagion amongst those assigned female at birth) or 'misandry' (such as rhetoric that claims those assigned male at birth who are nonbinary are identifying as such in order to be predatory). In short, every kind of trans person experiences a mix of misogyny, 'misandry' and misandrogyny. It differs from group to group as well as from person to person."
[Excerpts from The Transunitist Manifesto, written by Luke B. 2023.]
This is a man loving blog btw. I know this is the man hating site and increasingly the trans man hating site but that shit stops at my borders
people on here throw such a fit about people openly and specifically including men and men's issues in their fight for liberation, insist that actually it is vital feminist praxis to only ever engage with other human beings through the lens of "are you the Innocent Victim Gender or the Evil Rapist Gender", and then you look at a Black liberation group and
"Love Black Men: Boldly, intentionally, and without condition. This love calls us to confront and dismantle systems of oppression, patriarchy, and anti-black racism that equally devalue Black men’s lives, criminalize their presence and deny their full humanity. To love Black men is to make space for their healing, joy, complexity and vulnerability—not as a counterpoint to safety, dignity, or gender justice, but as essential to it. We call on ourselves and our communities to choose to build systems grounded in care, accountability, liberation and create spaces where Black men can thrive in love and be loved in return."
crazy. isn't it.
I think if you want to understand bigotry against aromantics, I have a good case study. Let me talk a little about my dad's family.
My dad has 4 half siblings and two step siblings. They're all a decent bit younger than him. When I was a teenager, we went to a family reunion, and I realized something—my dad did not respect his siblings. He looked down on all of them. He saw them as fuck-ups and overgrown children. My dad had the American dream: well paying management job, suburban house, wife, and three kids. My aunt and uncles did not. Excluding my aunt, none of them were married or in serious relationships. They hadn't really settled into long term careers. Several of them were working the kind of jobs that get called "Unskilled labor." So he looked down on them because the youngest one was in his thirties (and several were much older), and yet none of them had "settled down" into what he saw as lifelong, permanent careers and relationships and lives. He was polite to their faces, sure, but I heard how he talked about them behind their backs, to my mother.
And then a few years ago, we visited his brothers again for Thanksgiving. And I realized something again--he respected them now. He saw them as equals. Why? Well. All of a sudden, every single one of them had serious, committed romantic partners. They didn't even need to still be with those partners—one of my uncle's fiance passed away from cancer before they could marry—just having had one showed that they matured into a real adult participating in society. In fact, at one point, my aunt was telling my mom about how one of my uncles was no longer living in an apartment she owned, but instead, after having a steady girlfriend for about a year, he moved in with her. And my mom literally said to my aunt, "wow. Look at that. He finally grew up."
One of the lines that frequently gets repeated about anti-aspec sentiment is "why would anyone hate asexuals/aromantics/etc? They aren't even doing anything." And that's exactly it. In the eyes of amatonormative culture, we aren't doing anything. Adults are supposed to do things. That's how you become a member of society.
I know that my father will never see me as a successful adult. He will never approve of my life. And I think most people would assume that that's because I'm trans. And don't get me wrong, he sure as shit doesn't like or respect that, but I do think if given enough time, he would get used to it. He would eventually realize that it isn't going away. And if I settled down with a spouse and a respectful job and a few kids, he could see me as a successful adult that he could be proud of anyway. But of course, that's not going to happen. Because I'm aromantic. So I'm never going to do that one thing that signifies that his job is complete, and I'm officially a full-fledged adult. I will perpetually be that fuck-up kid who won't settle down. In my personal case, that's okay. My dad is a conservative piece of shit, and if he doesn't approve of you, that just means you're doing something right. But on a societal level? This kind of attitude is a massive problem. Aromantics deserve to be treated like adults, and to feel like the accomplished adults that they are. We should feel like we belong in society.
just a pride month reminder:
if you are making something featuring multiple flags and you put in the asexual flag, you better put in the aromantic flag.
if you put in the aroace flag, you better put in the aroallo flag.
fighting aromantic erasure starts with YOU 🫵
for reference:
^ the aromantic flag
^ the aroallo (aromantic allosexual) flag
& just btw, aromantic erasure is so bad that on pubmed, many of the very few studies that have looked into aspec people specifically, categorize us as a type of asexuality. from this study:
Our findings highlight that aromantic people wish for aromanticism not to be considered a part of asexuality—a practice that has dominated contemporary literature (Antonsen et al. 2020; Carvalho & Rodrigues, 2022; Clark & Zimmerman, 2022; Hall & Knox, 2022; Zheng & Su, 2018). Many participants clarified the distinction between their sexual identity and romantic identity and highlighted that though they may be connected for some, they should be considered independently as unique contributors to an individual’s identity and experience. This aligns with a previous aromantic community survey that showed 72% of the sample did not identify with asexual terminology (AUREA, 2021a). In combination with our findings, this suggests that a tendency to conflate and describe these identities as the same or linked may be to the disadvantage of a significant portion of the aromantic community.
this is why it is so important to include aromantic people as our own group and to specifically include non-asexual aromantics. i hope y'all can understand how frustrating it is to be erased through a group that is already erased.
asexual representation is sparse? all aromantic rep is asexual and most of the time people don't even bother to remember that "aromantic" is its own thing. i can't count how many times i've seen a character talk about not experiencing romantic attraction, only for people to go "wow asexual rep!" even though sexual attraction was never brought up.
asexual community & resources are sparse? when i try to look up groups for aromantics, i get resources on "ace & aro groups" that are literally all asexual-focused. at best asexual-focused with a mention of aromantic people. which isn't really helpful when you are aroallo and don't really want or need a group that is clearly meant for alloro asexuals and aroaces.
asexual history is sparse? i've literally never seen anything even trying to talk about aromantic history. the most impactful thing on aro history is that one tumblr post talking about a woman at a nursing home who heard the term and realized her best friend was likely aro. see above with the character situation as well.
my point here is not "aros have it worse than aces" because we are both aspec and both get fucked over by the same forces and in fact, a LOT of asexual aromantics are also very frustrated by aromantic erasure! i've even heard some people talk about not identifying as strongly as asexual, even though it fits them, because they feel their aro identity is more important to them but gets constantly erased by their asexuality.
my point is that it is so fucking disheartening to be aro even in queer spaces that are trying to be asexual-inclusive, even in supposedly aspec spaces, because it swiftly becomes apparent that people see your entire identity as just a footnote for asexuality. so many people never even realize they are aro because they aren't asexual and don't realize that you can be aro but not ace. i dealt with some really intense arophobia as a teen after realizing i was aro, feeling broken and alone. it hit much harder than any internalized homophobia or transphobia did for me at the time. i did not meet another person who identified as aromantic irl until this year. any resources and community that i had as a queer teen, as a trans teen, did not exist for me as an aro teen and does not exist for me as an aro adult, really.
and big problem is that, because people think of aromanticism as just a footnote of asexuality, they implicitly assume that more asexual rep, more asexual resources, more asexual visibility will automatically serve aromantics too. and when it doesn't work like that, aro people continue to suffer as a result.
things have improved over the years and i hope will continue to! but i really need every queer person to become more aware of aromanticism & arophobia & how the queer community contributes to it & hurts aro people. hence why i am so testy about when people will include the ace flag but not the aro one. YOU 🫵 will care about your aromantic siblings and consider us this pride month!!!!!
I spent about three years functionally enslaved by my ex, a white woman. I escaped her in January of 2019 only by months of planning, and when she finally found out I had gathered the means to get away from her and hid enough of my belongings with friends, one of the first things out of her fucking mouth was “how am I supposed to afford living here without you?” because even though we were no longer together, she had expected me to move in with her and her new boyfriend so that she could continue exploiting me economically.
In the past couple decades, I’ve met a couple dozen Black folks who have had a similar story happen to them with white people with varying timing/lengths. Some I’m still in contact with, some have disappeared, some I just ain’t kept ties with. No deed on us naming us their property legally, but thanks to the machinations of capitalism and white supremacy, property and slaves nonetheless—far beyond the average abusive relationship.
For a lot of y’all, slavery is something abolished a couple centuries ago and history is history, why should it affect you now? Why should there be reparations for Black people or countries? For slightly better-taught folks, when we think of modern slavery, we usually think of prison labor, human trafficking, undocumented and exploited labor, the exploitation of the global south, we think of systems. Don’t get me wrong that shit is still there and needs to be addressed, but some of y’all motherfuckers think the only slavery close to home for y’all is the white people calling themselves slaves on fetlife and that’s a problem to me.
When I first named myself Anonsee, it was as a SW mononym the year I got free from my enslaver, in part because of the version of Anansi played by Orlando Jones for American Gods despite never seeing the full show. In particular, there are two monologues I used to be able to recite perfectly from memory.
The first, Coming to America/Story of Black People, is a story Anansi tells to captured Africans on a slave ship who prayed to him for help. So, he tells them a story. He tells them how they don’t even know how fucked they are yet.
How over three centuries later, even after we “got free”, we would still be getting fucked economically, socially, physically, emotionally, mentally, every damn which way while the professional descendants of slave catchers still enslave us and kill us in the streets, in our homes, our schools, our jobs, anywhere they fucking please.
“You shed tears for Compe Anansi, and here he is, telling you…there isn’t one goddamn reason you shouldn’t go up there right now and slit the throats of every one of these Dutch motherfuckers, and set fire to this ship.”
One hesitant man speaks up, saying that if the ship burns, everyone on it will die.
To which Anansi retorts “You’re already dead, asshole. At least die a sacrifice for something worthwhile. Let. The motherfucker. Burn. Let it all burn.”
The second monologue has him meeting with other African gods in a funeral home, who ask him why he’s so full of rage when they wish to choose peace, to choose complacency, to simply accept how things are.
Anansi says “I am not a god, in the sense that I can tolerate exploitation, oppression, and repression, my worshippers KNOW freedom ain’t free and that the most potent weapon of control for the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed; they know slavery is not a condition, slavery is a cult. Human trafficking is a cult. Slavery got a rebrand like mothafuckin ‘The Alt-Right’ and snatched, another one gone.”
How every 30 seconds, another Black girl fucking disappears, and the new plantation owners built a pipeline to take us from school to prison while we live as a suppressed, oppressed people within the imperial core, living as spectacle, tool, or to be disappeared—no AMBER alert. Snatched, 30 seconds, another one gone.
“The world assumes white people are naturally good, so when something bad happens, it’s a good person doing a bad thing. They assume Black people are naturally bad, so when something good happens, it’s only a matter of time before that animal’s true nature rears its ugly head.”
I run into people regularly who think Abolitionism is too far. Shit, some of them are even Black and think that if we simply reform modes of slavery everything will be ok—that if we just make sure its just the bad ones who experience slavery, surely we can keep the same systems in place. Hell, California even majority voted against abolishing slavery couple years ago. For economic reasons, you understand, right?”
If you are not at bare minimum an Abolitionist, you do not have an actually liberatory politic. If you say “slavery is generally bad but-“ you are not anti-Slavery. If you don’t see a world where every. single. individual. has baseline inalienable right to their life and freedom with no “but” or “except” tacked on at the end, you are a whole lot closer to being a pro-slavery motherfucker than I’m comfortable knowing, to being one of the motherfuckers that helped keep me enslaved to her for years.
Why is it that when racism occurs in fandom spaces, in independent media, that y’all keep calling people weird for reacting strongly to it? Y’all really think you’re doing something when you pull that dingy “there’s real world problems to deal with” excuse out your ass just to shut up people rightfully wanting justice and feeling comfortable with their media.
It was real when y’all dressed up in cosplays, and made fan art, and went to conventions, and got to interact with your faves through their social platforms…but suddenly when bigotry is involved, it’s not that big of a deal.
Let me rephrase what y’all are trying to say: POC don’t get to have fandom. We don’t get to have media. That part of the real world is something we’re not allowed to touch. It’s the one space that discrimination and prejudice will always thrive, because you refuse to acknowledge the layers of racism for what they are.
I think people should be just as critical of fandom spaces and their bigotry as they would the real world. You should treat these scandals of people saying slurs, of outright refusing to hire POC for certain roles, and whatever the fuck else these companies decide to facilitate and be complicit in as hate crimes, as segregation, as RACISM. You should see these behaviors and patterns of behavior as indicative of something in the real world, because we all exist in the real world, and these things don’t leave us just because we put on a quirky username.
you guys need to be kinder to people you don’t find attractive. it’s getting ridiculous.
i’m fat, intersex, and disabled. so many times if i hung out with someone, their outfit gets complimented but not mine (even if i that person literally picked out my outfit so its not a matter of me just not having a good fashion taste). so many times have people treated other people around me kind but their attitude changes immediately if they have the misfortune to interact with me. i don’t do anything to warant this besides looking different. i get treated like i’m not there or not human. it sucks.
i know this affects more than just fat intersex disabled people. trans people, people of color, women in general, but especially those who have any of these traits or even just don’t wear makeup. dehumanization can be subtle. but we notice❤️
That one quote from T/R/F is a real head scratcher... "Radical feminism also is responsible for repudiating bioessentialistic notions of gender with theories that place it as a firmly social phenomenon". If I understand it right, isn't that totally contradictory...? How is it bioessentialist to say gender is social? I really wonder what the hell she means by this.
I think she means that radical feminism theorized gender as a social phenomenon in resistance to bioessentialism, which is actually true (although nuanced).
Radical feminists did challenge the idea that gender objective and innate, arguing that much of, if not all, gender in society was socially constructed for the sake of oppressing women. Many radical feminists wanted a society where gender was completely abolished (although only after women as a class could unite and defeat patriarchy). Andrea Dworkin, a very popular theorist amongst radical feminists and anti-sex-work advocate, wrote in favor of sex reassignment surgery (and actually said it should be community funded).
However, many radical feminists (such as Janice Raymond) came to view trans women and men as supporting gender-the-social-construct. Trans women and trans men were seen as adhering to the idea that stereotypes around gender were real and innate. Radical feminists fixate on biological sex as an extension of seeing gender as socially constructed; the argument is that "womanhood" is a tool of the patriarchy used to oppress females, who are bonded together by their shared biological and social reality as a sex and oppressed group. Trans women seemed, to them, to promote the idea that the identity of women was reducible down to dresses and makeup and breasts (thus threatening a sex-based class uprising), and trans men seemed to promote to women that they could escape the burden of female oppression by rejecting the sisterhood believed to be necessary to defeat patriarchy, and attempting to join it.
Even Andrea Dworkin's trans-supportive statements reflect a belief that the categories of "female" and "male" are still real, and also that under an ideal, androgynous society, transsexuals will not be affirmed in their gender identities but rather transsexuality will stop meaningfully existing:
The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. The discovery is inescapable: We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete. [...] I have made this distinction . . . in order to enable me to say something very simple: that while the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. It is not true that there are two sexes which are discrete and opposite, which are polar, which unite naturally and self-evidently into a harmonious whole. It is not true that the male embodies both positive and neutral human qualities and potentialities in contrast to the female who is female, according to Aristotle and all of male culture, “by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.” And once we do not accept the notion that men are positive and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all. In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely real; but the model itself is not true. [...] There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency . . . as a transsexual. There are three crucial points here. One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means that every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition. Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing, and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised. Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.
Ultimately, radical feminism shifted increasingly towards bioessentialism often as a result of frustration and exhaustion with the fight against patriarchy, and constantly raising awareness of the violence done by males to females. Many radical feminists were socialists and involved in other radical movements, and were dealing with misogyny in those spaces, leading to a general sense that women had to place their own oppression above all others in order to ever achieve justice. Their major contribution to feminism, "the personal is political," also meant seeing society in general as having a "male culture" where women were constantly suppressed, and that women needed to develop their own culture as a class - and their own spaces, free of men.
And when that is your focus, no matter how much theory you write or read about gender being a construct and males and females being equal and the abolition of gender... you need to be able to divide males from females. When you are still forming a sociocultural identity around sexual characteristics and what you feel symbolically represents those characteristics, you are just doing gender again. And I hope its easy to see how, especially amongst white middle class cis women, especially with a focus on porn and sexual violence and the Penis Of It All, how this critique of gender as a social construct failed to escape bioessentialism.
I honestly don't really quibble with her claim that transfeminism owes a lot of theoretical groundwork to radical feminism. Radical feminism did genuinely contribute a lot to feminism overall, bad and good, and no one should ignore that. But I think transfeminism, properly done, is radical in and of itself, having moved on from the place we were in the 70s. Me personally, my goal for a post-patriarchal world is not necessarily that gender will be abolished, but that social constructs in general will not be reified (treated and believed to be objectively real) like they are now. I hope that, with the material and ideological structures that keep us oppressed removed and new ones focused on justice implemented, we can have our little human games with symbols and feelings and enjoy them without believing they control our lives and are weaponized against each other out of greed.
And, ultimately, if anyone can make trans radical feminism work in a way that meaningfully fixes its problems especially with gender polarity, I do not think it is Talia "calls other trans women straggots" Bhatt. In my opinion, the kind of "trans radical feminism" we need is one which places intersex and nonbinary people at the heart, not in terms of "being the most oppressed" but rather because the next thing feminism needs to fundamentally reckon with on the gender level is letting go on the "gender polarity" and the need to base feminism around a woman- or female-identity and intrinsic nature, which can also then open feminism up far more to cis men and lead the way for a multi-gender resistance to kyriarchy.
I highly recommend Ellen Willis' essay "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicals" (accessible on JSTOR). She herself was a radical feminist at one point and goes over the history of the ideology in detail, and how it ended up driving away so many feminists who otherwise identified strongly with the "radical" part.
I also recommend Sophie Lewis' Enemy Feminisms which is a great book that explores anti-liberatory feminism and includes a chapter on radical feminists. Its also a lot more transfeminist (and Lewis is genuinely inclusive of trans men and critical of misandristic tendencies).
can i ask what specific characteristics differentiate radical feminism and other varieties of feminism?
I would say radical feminism is defined by (and note that all of these are generalizations about branches of feminist theory, there's a lot of diversity in each of these):
The oppression of women being the most fundamental, oldest, and pervasive form of oppression, and resistance to this oppression must be placed before all else
The root of women's oppression is the patriarchal system itself, particularly rigid sex roles, the nuclear family, and biological division of labor
Men, the dominant political class, maintain power over women not just for material and economic gain, but "psychological ego satisfaction"; men gain something psychologically from oppressing women, and it is in fact this male ego need that leads to the material exploitation, not the other way around
Use of "consciousness-raising" to communally connect personal experiences to political structures (the personal is political)
Rather than seeking legal rights within current system, the ultimate goal of feminist is to abolish sex roles and dismantle patriarchy entirely on an institutional and social level
Liberal feminism is defined by seeking equal status for women within the capitalist imperialist system, especially through achieving legal rights (this is not to say other forms of feminism do not see legal rights as important/helpful, but liberal feminism sees liberation as stopping there). This is the dominant form of feminism in the world today as it was adopted by many "progressive" capitalist nations. I would argue that liberal feminism is partially to blame for much of the backlash to feminism we have seen over the past few years, as it is ultimately pretty toothless to capitalist white supremacist patriarchy due to its need to "play by the rules" and avoid anything too fundamentally challenging to society.
Marxist / socialist feminism is class-centric and sees patriarchy as an extension of working class exploitation. Women's oppression is seen through the lens of labor exploitation, particularly domestic and reproductive labor, and the idea that women can meaningfully experience liberation under capitalism is rejected, as working-class women having equal status with working-class men will still be oppressed. Importantly, many Marxists / socialists have historically seen women's liberation as coming directly from establishing communism, which many have criticized rightly as failing to challenge patriarchal attitudes in leftist spaces and seeing feminism as a "distraction" from the "real issue" of class.
Black & intersectional feminism emphasizes understanding women's oppression, specifically that of Black women, as multifaceted and resulting from intersecting identities & forms of oppression. The Combahee River Collective was a direct response to the whiteness of radical feminism, as well as the bourgeois attitude of a major Black feminist organization, challenging the idea that class and racial and gender oppression can ever be meaningfully separated and demanding that Black working class women (particularly lesbians, who historically were excluded from much major feminist movements) be centered as the most vulnerable rather than placed on the periphery.
A lot of people have distinguished "radical feminism" from "cultural feminism," which is more of the "wombyn divine feminine blood and soil" kind of radical feminism I think people often think of, as opposed to the earlier radical feminist theorists who were more explicitly critical of gender as a construct and called for its abolition. Cultural feminism placed the gender abolitionist goals on the backburner and heavily emphasized bioessentialism and the idea that there are innate values and traits belonging to women and men, and that feminism should be about viewing "women's values" as superior to "men's values" and even separating socially from men entirely.
While many early radical feminists disagreed with cultural feminism, its important to understand that cultural feminism came about because of how radical feminism went about critiquing gender. I would argue radical feminism tried to critique gender's construction but, without doing so from a trans and intersex perspective, meant they remained trapped in cissexism and intersexism and fixated on biology and the idea of objective sex, which allowed for the cultural feminist idea of "women's culture" to become so dominant. Shulamith Firestone, a radical feminist writer, directly stated that women's oppression was based in the biology of reproduction.
Radical feminism also was built up by middle class white cis women, and so a fundamental part of their theory was organizing all women (or nearly all women) along the lines of sex, assuming that all women had basically the same experiences and often heavily downplaying the role of race and class. That + their belief that you can simply replace gender with sex and escape the social construction, that you can say womanhood is made up but that femaleness is real and the basis of "true" feminist identity, directly paved the way for cultural feminism, even as there were radical feminists who disliked how their theory was being used.
This is why I feel that transfeminism, while certainly built on the shoulders of radical feminism, does not need to "return" to its ideas, especially when we just end up recreating the exact same problems that led to radical feminism's failures in the first place. I think the critique of gender and sex born from transfeminism, as well as the critique of capitalism from socialist feminism, and the critique of white and middle-upper class and imperial core feminism from intersectionality, combined can provide so much more useful and timely guidance than reheating Janice Raymond's nachos but with trans women included and trans men... still seen as class traitors loyal to the patriarchy who fundamentally seek privilege at the expense of women
I think the only thing we should considering returning to is consciousness-raising practices, especially in this "its not that deep" "fake woke" anti-intellectual age, although I think there also needs to be caution with individualizing political analysis and consciousness-raising simply being used as a way to vent and be comforted in our emotions politically rather than mobilize people towards material resistance and encourage self-critique. bell hooks talks about this in Feminism Is For Everybody.
actually pigs shouldn't be at pride even outside of uniform. fuck those guys
if you decide to become a police officer then that outweighs any other marginalised identity you can rustle up like. not sorry, who asked you to willingly become a pig
I have heard of black people warning their kids that the race of a police officer is cop and you should not expect solidarity from them. The same applies to other types of minorities.
The sexuality of a police officer is cop.
The gender of a police officer is cop.
When you become the enforcer and protector of capital, you are making the deal to be slightly favored by the system over others like you, in exchange for being its servant. Your solidarity is with the system that you serve, even if it hates you.
If you want solidarity with those the system hates, you cannot be the system's servant and defender.
begging everyone to remember exorsexism is a term and we can’t divide everything into transfem transmisogyny and transmasc transandrophobia. Saw an attack helicopter joke called just transandrophobia. What are we doing here chat
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i need people to get so serious about the fact that exorsexism has always been the biggest red flag for reactionary bullshit in the trans community. exorsexism is how the trans bar becomes the transmed bar becomes the log cabin republican bar if you catch my drift. exorsexism is literally always at the scene of the crime and NO ONE ever fucking talks about it and then you have major voices like Jules Gill-Peterson & so many others who insist on this narrative that nonbinary & genderqueer people are this bourgeois secret society sneering down at the poor binary trans people and calling them boring and regressive and throwing tomatoes at their HRT (which we never take).
sorry saw red a little bit there. my point is that nonbinary & genderqueer people are not and have never been peripheral to the trans community or trans activism & i need everyone to start taking misandrogyny and exorsexism so deathly serious or we are fucked.
there's this specific grief that comes with being trans and hearing another trans person has died. because no matter how far away they were, it never feels distant, it feels communal. cellular. like someone reached into the wiring of your own body and cut a thread. trans people learn early on in their journey - often even before they begin transitioning - that survival is treated like a political statement. joy is political. transition is political. getting to exist long enough to become boring is political.
and now mourning is political, too.
i'm so sorry, murry foust. i keep thinking about how tired you must have been. how tired all of us are. how humiliating it is that even when we die alone, people still laugh and debate whether we deserved to live a happy, dignified life at all.
there are trans kids online right now learning your name – and the names of juniper blessing, lucas redbeard knapp, aleanna belcher, and davonta curtis – through grief. through fear. through that horrible, familiar ache of "that could've been me." and i hate that this is part of our inheritance from one another. not just chosen family and resilience and beauty – but memorials. vigils. apology letters to ghosts.
you deserved better. you deserved to grow old and live a happy, fulfilled life. all of us do. i promise we will keep fighting for our community to have a better future and we'll carry our lost siblings the whole way through.
