abolish gender and radfem-gossip 2k18

~Side blog, I can't follow back~ 21, rad or radical-leaning or whatever, female-exclusive bisexual (aka febfem). I don't really tag anything, as this is mostly a frustration-dump blog, although messages (in good faith) are welcome. I'm nice if you're nice. Hi!

[ziggyplayedd]

hi! i saw your post about men being exhausting and like yes? but not all men. I'm male and i like to help out at local shelters, the community garden, im an advocate and supporter for the lgbt community. im a feminist and against people who think trump is doing good things, and much more. dont let men set a precedent for what masculinity is. there are good guys out there, i promise. im sorry if this was rude in any way, i didn't intend for it to be like that.

so. i think there’s a good chance this was a joke. i lost my mind laughing when i first got it. but also? this is exactly how men talk, so i’m gonna break it down seriously. 

i made that post after dinner with my friend’s family. his dad, let’s call him john, was belittling his wife so she wasn’t talking much and he’d made a few jabs about his son’s painted nails so his son was kind of wilting. john’s a nice guy, smart guy, really likes me & thinks i’m smart. i was pretty much carrying all the emotional labor at that dinner–trying to make my friend and his mom feel comfortable while also engaging with john. we were making conversation about lots of things, it wasn’t a particularly controversial or heated discussion at really any point in time. again, john’s a cool guy–he’s liberal and progressive and knows that i’m a lesbian and all sorts of nice things. he works for a bigggg banking company–i don’t wanna say which one, but you’d know the name. we were talking about #metoo and he starts talking about how sexual harassment isn’t really an issue where he works. 

three hours before he said this, a man in times square had grabbed my boob. at a restaurant i worked at, a rapist who worked there got my number off the scheduling app and would text me vile things while we were both working to make me uncomfortable. he’d also touch my ass every shift but always managed to pretend like it was an accident. it wasn’t. my best friend, who was also at dinner with us, worked at her moms law firm when she was 17, and the man across from her had a countdown on his whiteboard to the day she turned 18 and every day he would look at her as he changed the number. i’ve been sexually assaulted multiple times outside of these instances, and so has she. 

but other men don’t see these things. 

and this man looks at me, and tells me sexual harassment doesn’t happen, because he doesn’t see it. and here’s the thing: that’s not why i’m mad. i’m not mad because he didn’t know. 

i’m mad because i know this man. he is my friend’s father, he is my father, he is my uncles, he is my professors, he is my cousins, and my bosses, and my colleagues. i know how you have to talk to these men. it’s a game. and you have to play along whether you want to or not, because they won’t hear a word you say if you don’t. 

here’s how the game works: john talks about everything like he’s the authority on the matter, because he can’t get it through his brain that someone, especially someone who is not a man, could possibly know something he doesn’t. so john starts talking about things very confidently. and because nobody knows everything, he gets a lot of things wrong. things that i refuse to let him be wrong about. so if i want to change john’s mind, if i want him to hear my point of view, i have to speak to him in the only way he will listen. i have to be, above all, pleasant. john has been taught for years to laugh at a woman’s anger, so if any hint of indignation sneaks into my voice, he won’t take me seriously any more and i’ll lose him entirely.  i have to smile and laugh a little and be charming. but i also have to be articulate. i have to make sure i sound intelligent or else he’ll dismiss me as a stupid teenage girl who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. but i also can’t sound too intelligent because if he starts feeling threatened by my intelligence he’ll get defensive. (sidenote! he has a tiny dick.) so it’s quite a complicated game but i’m good at it. in fact, i’m one of the best. so here i am, carefully navigating the best way to hold this man’s hand and babysit him as i give him a kindergarten level course on sexual assault in the workplace, while also not letting him realize that i’m having to condescend to him because his brain is as tiny as his dick, and can only handful little bits of new information spoonfed to him like applesauce. i have to make it sound like i think he is not only smart, but smarter than me. i have to scatter in little phrases like, “in my experience” or “i could be wrong” and constantly undermine myself, even when speaking on a topic i am incredibly well-versed in, because i have to suggest that i think he is smarter than me or else he won’t deem me worthy of his attention. 

i’m good at it. i play the little fucking game and before i know it, i’ve got john here nodding along and acting like he agreed with what i’m saying all along, acting like he came up with it, acting like he DIDN’T totally contradict what i just told him minutes before. but since he didn’t come up with it, he’ll likely interrupt me before i even get to the end of my point and say something totally misinformed and now i’m trying to educate him on both of the things he got wrong but before i can even do that he’s interrupting me again and now there’s THREE things i’ve gotta teach this guy without him catching on to the fact that i’m teaching him. 

now. here’s the best part about the game. it’s soul-shatteringly dehumanizing. to disregard your own trauma, your own emotion, your own incredibly valid anger that you have fought and fought and fought to believe you have a right to feel, to tone down your beliefs in order to make them more palatable to someone who is this deeply ignorant, to force yourself to giggle and be charming as you discuss the thing that has ripped you into shreds, to ignore how triggering it is to even breach this topic in conversation, to be complicit in making yourself small in order to get your point across, to look into the eyes of a man who has, unwittingly, because of his ignorance, enabled other men to engage in this same behavior–it turns a dinner conversation into a thing that is traumatizing in it’s own right. 

and i feel obligated to put myself through this because of my privilege, because as an attractive, white twenty year old, i can hold this man’s attention better than a massive portion of the population, who he likely wouldn’t give the time of  day to. i refuse to let him live his life unchallenged, so i do what i have to do to make myself heard. 

and i feel the repercussions of this so strongly i dissociate more viciously than i have in weeks and lose all memory of a solid 3 hours of my life after this conversation. 

and i come on here, and post: men are useless and exhausting. because i am angry at what men have done to me. at what they continue to do to me. at what i must do to myself in order to force them to wake up and realize what other men are doing to me and to please, for the love of god, MAKE IT STOP. 

and i get this message from you, a dumbass who’s got his head shoved so far up his own asshole that it’s about to come back up through his esophagus, assuming you know what i’m talking about. assuming you know more than me about men and about my experiences with them, about why i made this post. assuming that because you’re not the scum of the fucking earth and because you do three good things, it somehow balances out the treatment i have received for years from men, and makes my anger towards them, and my hatred of them: unjust. and my post wasn’t even me being angry! it was me being exhausted!!!!! if i’m tired of men, why the fuck would you, “a male” deem it at all appropriate to come near me, to send me a message, to engage with me at all? leave me alone! you know nothing! 

and as much as i thought this was a joke at first, the more i read the message the more i’m convinced that it was written by a man, because even a girl pretending to be a man as a joke wouldn’t manage to sound this fucking stupid. i have dozens of stories exactly like this over the course of at least 10 years of my life. i know more than you. and this isn’t FUCKING about you. if you weren’t useless and exhausting, you would have happily scrolled by and went on with your night. but by sending me this message you proved yourself to be IMPRESSIVELY: useless and exhausting. shut the fuck up for about 3-4 years. you might learn something. also, read men explain things to me by rebecca solnit. she says all this better than i do. 

[keiraknightleyperiodpiece]

Save My Seoul

[anthonybourdainpartsunknown]

corrective action

[vague-humanoid]

be the change you want to see in the world

[girlsreign-deactivated20180824]

There’s hope for the world

[antilla-dean]

A 6-year-old girl and a male fetus were killed in a car crash. The compensation for the fetus was much higher.

Women and people of color get less compensation than white men in similar personal injury cases.

The 4-year-old’s case is a rare public look at one corner of the American legal system that explicitly uses race and gender to determine how much victims or their families should receive in compensation when they are seriously injured or killed.

As a result, white and male victims often receive larger awards than people of color and women in similar cases, according to more than two dozen lawyers and forensic economists, the experts who make the calculations. These differences largely derive from projections of  how much more money individuals would have earned over their lifetimes had they not been injured – projections that take into account average earnings and employment levels by race and gender.

In one case, when a 6-year-old girl and a male fetus were killed in the same car crash, the settlement for the fetus was calculated to be up to 84 percent higher than the girl’s, according to court records.

For real, it is ACTUAL BULLSHIT to say that sex and gender are the same thing.  It is misogyny.  It is sexist.  It is bullshit.   That male fetus was not “appraised” as having a life worth 84% more than that living, breathing, girl with experiences and memories and laughter because the fetus “identified” as a boychild.  He was appraised as having more worth because he was male.  Before he was fucking BORN.   Feminism is about the fact that women are not considered to be whole human beings.  It is about doing the work of having our humanity represented.  The reason–the ENTIRE reason–we are not considered human is because of our bodies.  Our sex.  We cannot fight for our freedom without recognizing the basis for our oppression. Gender is not sex. Sex is not a performance.

Gender is a bunch of bullshit rules invented to explain why the female sex should be treated as inferior to the male sex.

This is real.  It happens.  Sex affects how we see ourselves and our lives.  It literally affects our WORTH (monetarily speaking).  Do not let gender make you unable to effect any change for women and girls. Think and rise.

[parttimepup]

But the judicial system favors women and girls!

[90905791]

I’m still in fucking shock that a non-sentient fetus is considered more than a woman on such a large scale that this headline had to exist.

[sespursongles-deactivated201906]

The trans movement is really getting more chilling by the day, as mainstream organisations, media outlets and politicians not only give it more and more support, but feel more and more comfortable backing its lies and science denial while blatantly silencing and censoring any remotely critical views. 

The UK government is planning the legal replacement of biological sex with gender identity this autumn, thus erasing women’s legal protections (x) and

the politician in charge of implementing this threatened to walk out when asked any questions about how it will impact women (x) and

a woman started a petition asking the UK government to give this issue further consideration (see 1st link), and the website removed the petition within 24 hours because it “discriminates against trans women”, thus ironically answering the question of how this legal change will impact women - the website has already implemented this change, stating that they “reserve the right to remove any petition that discriminates on the basis of gender, ethnicity…” Sex has been replaced with gender as a protected category, so women have no recourse. Trying to protect their sex-based rights discriminates against men’s gender-based rights.

also chilling is this Teen Vogue article from last week in which a “trans expert” working for a government-funded LGBT health centre states “in over a decade working with the community, I have never met someone who regretted transition or who wanted to de-transition” (They loved this quote so much they put it in the article’s headline…) (x)

from this same article, which also contains the words “It doesn’t matter why someone is transgender, or how old they are”, Dr Olson-Kennedy, the medical director of the largest trans youth clinic in the US, answers the question “Wouldn’t it be better to wait until [children] were an age when they could decide for themselves what they really are?” with “we don’t wait until they are a certain age to address the distress” - keep in mind that she is the doctor who once bragged that 100% of the kids she’s put on puberty blockers went on to be sterilised by cross-sex hormones, has gone to court several times to force reluctant parents to let her give their children puberty blockers, and wants to perform genital surgery on underage trans kids (x)

also very chilling is this UK association for trans kids, who blocks former trans kids who detransitioned because their existence is inconvenient, and who advises schools and trains teachers on how to deal with kids (as young as three or four) who question their gender, now publicly recruiting kids (especially “vulnerable teens with no parental support”) by promising them sweets and puppies. Can you imagine adult gay people doing this?? Let alone a prominent gay organisation? Adults luring children with candy is usually understood as the creepiest thing ever but for some reason trans is the magic word that makes everything we would normally frown upon - you know, like corrective rape, conversion therapy, child sterilisation - suddenly benign and laudable.

There’s no point to this post, I just think trans activists are beyond creepy and morally bankrupt, that their eagerness to recruit as many kids as possible, dismantle women’s legal protections and demonise and suppress all dissenting voices with no regard to the enormous harm they are causing is sociopathic, and that their increasing conviction that they can get away with anything, boosted by the increasing government and media support for their bare-faced lies and woman-hating, gay-hating agenda, is honestly terrifying.

[sespursongles-deactivated201906]

Update, 2 weeks later:

the European Lesbian Conference, to be held in October, has a session called “Defining, Deconstructing and Fighting Lesbophobia” which is 100% devoted to making life easier for straight men who call themselves lesbians, with no mention of any specific struggles faced by actual lesbians. It mentions “materials for transgender people“, “definition of transmisogyny“, “feminist discourses about trans women, with emphasis on the question of inclusion into women’s spaces”, “microaggressions trans women and our partners face in queer and WLT* (Women, Lesbian, Trans*) spaces”, and “suggestions for active solidarity and ways to combat transmisogyny in our own social and political spaces". (x)

the World Health Organisation deleted their “Sex and Gender” page which defined sex as biological characteristics and gender as socially constructed roles that oppress women, and replaced it with a “Gender” page conflating sex and gender and highlighting the importance of recognising “identities that do not fit into the male and female sex categories” (x) The Times columnist Janice Turner commented, “I wrote a column today because when bodies as powerful as WHO, Planned Parenthood & the British Medical Association can’t say “women menstruate”, we are entering insanity.”

[pronounrespecter]

not to shill my ideas, but y'all REALLY need to start seeing this from a narcissistic personality disorder angle. i would quite literally call it organized narcissism.

[exgynocraticgrrl-archive-deacti]

There’s more to Radical Feminism than being against pornography and prostitution (e.g.: sex trade abolitionism).

There’s more to Radical Feminism than being against pornography and prostitution (e.g.: sex trade abolitionism).

Radical Feminism has politics on ending capitalism, analyzing and criticizing surrogacy, criticizing [heterosexual] marriage and marriage as an institution, examining patrilineage and challenging it, challenging [patriarchal] religion(s), advocating for and developing a [womon’s] spirituality, criticizing and ending [compulsory] heterosexuality (e.g.: challenging and ending heterosexism and ending heteropatriarchy), examining sexuality and sexual relations (e.g.: sex critical, sex negative, PIV-critical and anti-PIV, political celibacy, heterosexual celibacy, kink critical, anti-BDSM), being against gender (e.g.: being gender critical, supporting gender abolitionism, advocating against gendered socialization also known as sex-role socialization or sex-based socialization, being against queer theory), supporting female solidarity, sisterhood, and feminist consciousness-raising (e.g.: female-only safe spaces like womon’s crisis centres and shelters, female-only CR-groups and events, remembering and promoting the fact that Radical Feminism is strictly a female-centered/gynocentric, female-focused, male-exclusionary Feminism, ending girl-hate/womon-hate and internalized misogyny, decentering maleness in our lives, language, and in praxis), fighting for reproductive rights and reproductive justice (e.g.: access to safe, legal, abortions and voluntary sterilization while being against forced abortions and forced sterilizations), politicizing and examining mothering and child-bearing and child-rearing (e.g.: “the cult of motherhood”, childfree politics, midwifery), politicizing female domesticity (e.g.: “the cult of domesticity”, or “the cult of true womanhood”), criticizing and ending [compulsory] femininity, examining the role of the beauty industries in upholding gendered and racialized oppressions just as we already do with the sex industries/sex trade, incorporating, at least aspects or elements of: Disability Feminism, Womanism, Lesbian Feminism, etc – integrating an understanding of double oppressions (or double jeopardy), triple oppressions (triple jeopardy), multiple oppressions, and intersectionality as it initially relates with the systems of racism and sexism oppressing the lives of women of color, particularly black womon.

Radical Feminism has a lengthy, complicated, contentious and intellectually enlightening and inspiring herstory and also has a very resourceful range of political critiques that provides insights about the world in which we womon are oppressed in. You don’t have to agree with everything you research related to Radical Feminism, most don’t and certain areas of our politics require critique and clarification so that we can gain more grounds for unity as womon wanting to liberate societies from male supremacy and female oppression/sex-based oppression/gendered oppression, white supremacy and racism, heterosexism and homophobia, class oppression and the ending of capitalism and [neo-]colonialism, and other systems, structures, and institutions of oppression.

There’s a lot more to being a Radical Feminist than being a sex industries abolitionist.

Avoiding other areas of Radical Feminist politics can result in a sort of confusion in which womon will claim to be Radical Feminist while rejecting key values and core tenets, such as supporting womon’s access to legal abortions.

Radical Feminism is not conservatism and although one or two RadFem stances may appeal to some conservative womon, it is their misunderstanding of what it means to be a RadFem that makes them misappropriate the politics, which further confuses others as to what our intentions and politics really are.

And there’s a lot to learn and realize and this is not even all of it.

[radfemblack]

✊🏾

[1hwyl]

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyper-consumerist, hyper-individualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction? (via vacantkind)

[itamedgojira-deactivated2019021]

Pick a random person. That person doesn’t say how they identify. And I ask you. Is a lesbian capable of being attracted to this person? What would you use to answer this question? Since using primary and secondary characteristics is “flawed”. Ok another scenario. I have a cis man and a pre operation trans woman. They are wearing the same thing. You don’t know who identifies as what. How do you choose who the lesbian would be attracted to? When y'all say dick can be different based on who it’s attached to. How does that actually work? I’ve asked, non binary people, trans people, pansexuals how are people attracted to gender. No one has answered my question. I’ve asked them if we can’t tell what someone identify as based on looking, then that means that people’s sexuality is constantly changing, and dependent on everyone else BUT themselves. We would be stupid to claim that people don’t lie, OR even constantly change their own gender identity. So if I’m a straight woman, I’m dating someone I assumed was a man, totally attracted to him, even love him, he comes out as a transwoman does that make me bisexual now? Or was my attraction invalid? If I’m bisexual and Transwomen are just like cis women, will I now be attracted to cis women too? Was I always attracted to cis women? How does it work? I’ve seen y'all say “it’s ok to have genital preferences, but you should still date without having sex” why? Why should anyone not have a fulfilling relationship? Why do y'all want people to date people they aren’t COMPLETELY attracted to? When I heard “genital preference” for lesbians I thought of labia size, color, shaved or not. Not vagina or penis…no one has answered me. The conclusion I get is that sexuality doesn’t exist. So being gay is choice. Being straight is a choice. Is that what we are really advocating for ?

[for-southendgirls]

[moonlesbianlady]

[loving-women-is-rad]

When transwomen say they get periods because of the effects of oestrogen on smooth muslce giving them cramps etc please remind them of this, which we all learnt in school:

Oestrogen is lowest during the menstrual period in women so I still don’t know what the fuck these people are talking about.

[thesinisterspinster]

Know your body so that men cant pretend to be you.

[lesbian-lizards]

And menstrual cramps come from our uteruses which they don’t possess so

[sunnyharley]

‪don’t understand how folks think we don’t need feminism?? lol okay I’m sorry but where are all the ex girlfriends walking into schools shooting up the place? where are all the women kidnapping men and boys and forcing them into prostitution? chaining them to their beds, forcing them on drugs?‬ where are all the women throwing acid on men? where are all the women drugging men’s drinks at college to gang rape them? and I don’t mean the random one or two cases I mean hundreds of cases a month, thousands of cases a year? who’s the evil gender again? systematically speaking, who is causing the most harm?

[radfemarchive-deactivated202304]

Men having access to women’s sexuality through money is the polar opposite of women owning it

[wethrowaway111111world-deactiva]

[artemiswasamerf]

The common representation of transwomen being this hyper feminine, painted, shaved, tiny waist, big breasted, tight clothes, long haired image really should say a lot about two things.

1) What men think women should look like

2) What men think being a woman is

[wethrowaway111111world-deactiva]

[lookataleaf3000]

“it wasn’t until a few years ago that carmakers began regularly testing female crash dummies in drivers’ seats. For 30 years, it was just assumed that using male crash test dummies would suffice, even though women are typically smaller than men and the smaller a person is the less force they can tolerate in a crash. That cars were not tested to be safe for female bodies helps to explain why women are killed and injured in car accidents at disproportionately higher rates than men. It’s because women were not included in the analysis—at all.”

—

Good Girls Revolt Gets Canceled With No Women at the Table - The Atlantic (via gaymilesedgeworth)

this is the same reason women disproportionately die or have serious side effects from medication 

[b082014-deactivated20190807]

“In particular I have learned so much about what we’re allowed to say— the ideas we’re allowed to have about gender— and the ones that we’re not allowed to say— the things we will be punished for stating out loud or for even thinking. So in that presentation {‘The End of Gender: Revolution, Not Reform’} I tried to get across two main ideas, and I’ve come to discover that these two ideas amount to an Orwellian-style thoughtcrime in the current political climate around gender. And I think that indicates to me why we need to say them publicly, as loudly as we can, every opportunity we get.” — Rachel Ivy (2014)

[reina-rubia]

“Many feminists have emphasized the role of rape in controlling women’s behavior through fear. … Like all terrorism … rape has two targets: the direct victims, who are seen as expendable, and the broader population to whom a message is sent, and who can then be manipulated by fear into complying with demands they would otherwise reject.”

— Rebecca Whisnant (via lovefreedompowerlove)

[parttimepup]

Rape is terrorism.