There is no "good" or "valid" group of radfems, they're still TWEFs and SWEFs.
while I completely understand where you’re coming from, “radical feminist” as a kind of label for a set of politics isn’t always synonymous with the exclusion of trans women and sex workers, although it often means/signifies that on Tumblr
what is denoted by the label “radical feminism” is the aim of liberation for women through the absolute destruction of patriarchy and the systems that make it possible – this in itself isn’t the problem; the problem comes in the way this particular group of radical feminists, the ones U refer to as “TWEFs” and “SWEFs”, understands the content of “women”, “patriarchy”, and “systems” – i.e., incorrectly, and without reference to material reality
Do you know what material reality means? It’s based on things that actually exist on a material plane, that means, things you can see and touch, and measure, that exists objectively even if there is no meaning given to them. So understanding patriarchy as sex-based (this group of people are opressed for having vaginas) is very much based in material reality, since it refers to physical characteristics. You can agree with it or not, but understanding “women” as people who have vaginas/vulvas is a material understanding, in opposition to understanding the word woman as meaning anyone who feels like a woman - a concept very far from material reality, because it’s absolutely subjective. And that’s the whole point? Anyone can identify as whatever they want because gender is individual (subjective) and being a woman is not based on biology (not material).
this might be the longest post I’ve ever written – let’s hope it’s the longest post I’ll ever write; for the sake of readability, I’ve included subheadings and bold markers for major points, definitions, and examples – let me know if this is useful
I’ve gotten several asks from radical feminists asking me to explain how exactly it is that radical feminists do not or incorrectly refer to material reality, since radical feminists understand “sex” as something material in the same way U understand materiality here (as opposed to “gender”, which they hold is immaterial)
major point: yre right; I misspoke – it’s not that these radical feminists don’t [try to] reference material reality, it’s that they simultaneously (1) conflate what is purely objective, i.e., certain biological realities, with what is necessarily socially-constructed no matter how it references objective reality, i.e., sex, and (2) selectively reference material reality, i.e., only when it is convenient to do so
I’ll begin by correcting your definition of material reality: material reality does not merely consist in physical objects, i.e., “things U can see and touch”; material reality also consists in what happens, which is not necessarily something that can be seen or touched, but is something that has an objective existence, something that comes about as a result of objectively real/material objects, or as a result of interactions between objectively real/material objects – if something is happening, it is happening; if something has happened, it has happened – that “something” is real, and this vastly expands what can be considered material reality (for example, U wld want to be able to say that misogyny is materially real, i.e., something that happens) – this is essentially the Marxist understanding of materialism, too
by the way, being purely objectively real is not the only way for something to be real, and it certainly isn’t the only way for something to be true – for example, the president of the United States is a socially-constructed category itself, and would not exist without the particular kind of social arrangement and social understanding that makes it possible – but it’s true that Barack Obama is the president
major point: all of this having been said, patriarchy is completely unconcerned with objective reality – rather, it is concerned with trying to pass off the patriarchal and capitalist conceptualisation of the body and the person as something that is purely and objectively real; when radical feminists take on this definition of the body, of the person, of “sex” in an effort to subvert and destroy patriarchy, they accidentally become invested in maintaining these conceptualisations and thus accidentally become invested in maintaining patriarchy itself – this is what powers almost everything else that is wrong with this popular radical feminist movement
(1) SEX ISN’T REAL: here is a fantastic, thorough post about why “sex” is not objective fact; I’m going to paste the most relevant portion of it here for everyone’s convenience:
[A]t the end of the day, a zebra is materially different from a dog in the same way that, to get back to the original topic, a penis is materially different from a vagina (actually a bad analogy since homologous reproductive organs are much more similar to each other than taxa that have been separated for millions of years, but anyway). The biological differences and similarities themselves exist, but any attempt to categorise and quantify them will necessarily rely on socially constructed and frequently arbitrary models, definitions and assumptions. That’s basically what science is - a continuous (and frequently wildly inaccurate) attempt to try to make sense of reality. […] Essentially, we’re trying to find quantitative ways to represent things that are by nature qualitative, and that’s always going to be arbitrary to some extent. Obviously biological characteristics (whether genetic, sexual/reproductive, etc.) objectively exist and would continue to exist if humans and human culture were to suddenly disappear, and in that sense, things like sex, gender and taxonomic classification can be said to be based in biological reality. But human attempts to define or categorise these characteristics - for example species concepts, the binary model of sex, etc. - are not in themselves biological realities, and are subject to change based on new information. For example, evolutionarily speaking, “reptiles” (as we traditionally understand them) don’t exist. Obviously this doesn’t mean that lizards, tortoises, snakes, crocodiles, non-avian dinosaurs etc. don’t exist or never existed. It simply means that the socially constructed classification of animals into two distinct, mutually exclusive groups called “reptiles” and “birds” is completely arbitrary and not actually the result of any inherent biological reality (in fact the opposite).
in essence, and in addition: “sex” itself is not objective fact, but rather an attempt at interpreting our perception of what is objective fact; that’s two layers of abstraction (i.e., perceiving, and then interpreting); we also add a third layer of abstraction, i.e., referencing the interpretation of our perception – by abstraction, I mean moving further away from the objective nature of [biological] reality, and toward the subjective nature of ideas – there are lots of other layers/methods of abstraction (e.g., judgment, valuation)
this is to say that there isn’t actually something out there that is actually “female” or “male” – those are concepts that are used to describe things we perceive/interpret about bodies in particular ways, in order to make reference to them and make judgments about those perceptions, interpretations, descriptions, and references; but this process of perceiving, describing, referencing, judging, and so on is coloured by the way we are taught to think about things, and fundamentally inaccurate because of the nature of subjectivity [and subsequently, of abstraction] (some anti-realism for U)
major point: why is this important? because our current definition of sex, even at the level of what is “male” and what is “female”, is inextricably rooted in patriarchy – biological/evolutionary science itself is informed by the structures, systems and processes that surround and contextualise it; have a look at the history of the Western conceptualisation of sex for evidence of that – it is patriarchy that has caused the conceptualisation of the human body, and by extension people themselves, to be primarily defined by reproductive capability
this isn’t how bodies “really” are [because we can’t know how bodies really are], or what they “really are for” [since this is a kind of value judgment, and thus a kind of abstraction as I explained earlier] – rather, it’s the way of understanding bodies that is most useful to patriarchy – no one’s body really fits into this definition, and there are all kinds of bodies that really complicate this system of categorisation, e.g., bodies with different chromosomal configurations, bodies deemed or understood as intersex, and more
this is all to provide background for what U are claiming here: that patriarchy targets people whose bodies are biologically-arranged in particular ways, i.e., bodies capable of reproduction, particularly bodies that produce ova, have uteri, and so on – and U know what? U’re not wrong; under patriarchy and capitalism, gender functions as a signification system based on the patriarchal conception of sex, forcing people into one of two categories and coercing them into behaving and presenting themselves in particular ways in order to (1) easily identify them as having particular reproductive capabilities – “[under patriarchy,] gender presentation is genital representation”, says Talia Mae Bettcher; and (2) to best exploit those reproductive capabilities and binaried categorisation of those capabilities for the purposes of maintaining and (re)producing patriarchy and capitalism
the particular radical feminist understanding of patriarchy, systemic maintenance of patriarchy, and womanhood (i.e., gender) in question stops here – stops short of here, actually, considering that U take the patriarchal understanding of sex to be objective fact
major point: here’s the problem, both with the patriarchal understanding of gender and sex, and with the subsequent “radfem” understanding of the same categories: people are not their reproductive capabilities, even though patriarchy insists that they are – people are self-determining, complex and multi-dimensional subjective beings who think about themselves, each other, and their relationship with the world around them in complicated ways – patriarchy tries to limit all of this in favour of the maintenance of capitalism and thus attempts to constrict and oversimplify our understanding of ourselves to a primarily patriarchal understanding, a primarily binarily-gendered and binarily-sexed understanding… an understanding into which nobody really fits, but is coerced into accepting
major point: this patriarchal understanding necessarily cannot fit all of that complexity, all of that subjectivity, all of those ways of thinking – it is designed to limit and destroy them; however, these categories are really the only ways we have been taught to and allowed to conceptualise ourselves, and so it is not only logical but necessary that people reimagine, repurpose, expand them – what U take issue with, i.e., the expansion of the category “woman” past its patriarchal understanding to include people who understand themselves as women, is not the fault of these women themselves – it is the fault of patriarchy and capitalism for limiting the ways we are allowed to understand ourselves and our relations to each other and the world; that U choose to punish and denigrate trans women for their identities indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the way patriarchy functions and of the category of “womanhood” on your part and on the part of these radical feminists
major point: trans women are women, and it is true because they say so
(2) SELECTIVE UNDERSTANDING OF MATERIALITY: these radical feminists often do not believe transmisogyny is real, completely ignoring the material reality in which trans women face specific kinds of marginalization, dehumanisation and violence on the primary basis of their being trans women – they refuse to name transmisogyny as a specific kind of oppressive process/system, and try to account for it by defining it in terms of other oppressive processes, namely homophobia – not only is this a wholly insufficient account (which isn’t to say that homophobia doesn’t play a part), it is a reality-denying one – transmisogyny is something that has happened and is happening, and is objectively real













